ABSTRACT
All cooperation requires a minimum of agreement among the cooperating parties. What kind of agreement is required, however, how broad and how deep it should, how purely instrumental it may, or how principled it must be, depends on the instance of cooperation as well as on the viewpoint of its observer. It seems commonsensical that at the very least all cooperating parties must see some value in doing so, even as their reasons may differ. While Realist approaches to questions of world politics emphasize the difficulty of identifying, constructing, and maintaining agreement of any kind, the more constructive question what sort of agreement any form of cooperation requires is tackled in a variety of ways by the other theories of world politics. Liberalism has evolved to form a very broad spectrum of approaches. At one extreme Neoliberal thinkers have established much common ground with Realists and part company with them essentially only by expanding the time horizon of actors’ self-interest calculations and dampening the element of paranoia which sometimes has Realist strategy interfere with rational utility maximization. These moves allow them to somewhat better explain the real-world occurence of (at least) instrumental agreement and cooperation. At the other extreme, Kant’s insistence on the reality of a harmony of interest among reasonable human beings is echoed by all manner of Neo-idealist scholars, including (not a little paradoxically) the more hopeful factions of the various strands of Critical and Constructivist theory. Normbased cooperation is the home turf of these approaches, while its failure can pose analytical difficulties.
