Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Power in Concert: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance , Jennifer Mitzen (Chicago : The University of Chicago Press , 2013), 280 pp., $90 cloth, $32.50 paper.
Reviews
According to many scholars of international relations, international politics is necessarily based on mutual distrust. Due to the anarchic nature of the international system, bad behavior will often go unpunished and no commitment can be trusted. Cooperation among states cannot be taken for granted and will always be precarious. To be sure, such cooperation can be observed to take place in practice. Some international relations scholars--notably the so-called realists--tend to discount its importance. Others--such as the so-called liberal institutionalists--are prepared to concede that cooperation among states matters, yet are careful not to be caught ascribing it to anything but self-interested motives, lest they be suspected of naivety. More recently, constructivists have emphasized that the behavior of states depends in part on states' own perception of who they are.
As Jennifer Mitzen points out in her new book, all these approaches explain cooperative behavior at the level of the individual actors--that is, states. But Mitzen contends that when states publicly commit to joint action in pursuit of a common goal, this fact will exert an influence on their behavior that is not captured by the conventional focus on their self-interest, or even their self-perception. "The idea behind collective intentionality," she writes, "is that some group actions are neither reducible to the intentions of individual members nor necessarily collected into a unitary corporate agent" (p. 5).
Mitzen devotes an excellent chapter to detailing the theory of collective intentionality. For her, the concept of commitment is important in accounting for both individual and collective behavior. Intentions imply commitment--to the self in the case of an individual, to each other in the case of a group of actors. They create an expectation that "simply because we have committed we ought to follow through," independently of whichever beliefs or desires originally caused that commitment--and even if those beliefs or desires, or circumstances, change (p. 35).
A joint commitment creates an expectation of mutual accountability, but this will work only if actors can expect to...