ABSTRACT
This chapter links the rise of interdependence theory to the falling fortunes of integration theory, discusses the meanings and types of interdependence, spells out the intellectual and situational background of Interdependence Theory and then introduces Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye’s views on interdependence in terms of their focus on ‘new issues’ (international political economy from international security), ‘new actors’ (transnational actors from states), ‘new forms of interaction’ (transnational and transgovernmental relations from interstate relations), ‘new outcomes’ (international cooperation contrasted with international conflict), and ‘new structures’ (international institutions instead of ‘pure’ anarchy). Of their three main books, Transnational Relations and World Politics launches ‘state preferences, driven by globalization’ as the basic variable; Power and Interdependence floats a new view of flowing from asymmetric interdependence as the primary variable; and After Hegemony foregrounds the concept of international regimes to explain how bargains are preserved via their institutionalization. The chapter also shows how Keohane and Nye admitted that the early phase of the Internet-age with its ‘dramatic cheapening of information transmission’ has changed three important features of the ‘complex interdependence’ they first described in Power and Interdependence, and how three years later, while adapting their flexible model to advanced globalization, they pondered on how the realist influence on information revolution would be further eroded by the growth of networks aided by the fax machine and the Internet and by ‘institutional arrangements that incorporate these networks into decision making’.
