ABSTRACT
An integrative perspective has come increasingly to dominate contemporary theorizing on diplomacy and international bargaining. The role of international and domestic factors in the mutual and simultaneous determination of the outcomes of international negotiations has now been widely recognized. While deals reached at the international level change the character of domestic politics, the dynamics of domestic constraints may open up or retard new possibilities for international accords. The framework put forward in Robert Putnam’s 1988 article provided a conceptual springboard for just such an integrative approach to international bargaining. My limited sample of three cases of extended territorial sovereignty dispute negotiation, plus a briefer treatment of a claim that may give rise to sovereignty talks some time in the future, cannot have rigorously tested the propositions generated by Putnam’s two-level game theory, propositions that should have wide-ranging implications for existing theories of international and domestic politics. However, by contrasting the recurrent failure to begin sovereignty talks on the East China Sea islands with the success in settling the Sino-Russian territorial dispute, along with China’s border dispute with India somewhere in between, and the involvement of transnational and subnational groups in the South China Sea islands dispute, I believe I have managed to explore and refine this bargaining theory of diplomacy, and used these recurring territorial controversies to discover more about its strengths and limitations than were apparent.
