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The New Sovereignty: Compliance with International Regulatory Agreements. By Abram Chayes and Antonia Handler Chayes. Cambridge MA, London: Harvard University Press, 1995. Pp. xii, 404. $49.95.
This impressive volume crowns the life's work of two of America's leading international lawyers and international legal process theorists, Harvard Law School Professor Abram Chayes, formerly legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State, and Antonia Handler Chayes, president of the Consensus Building Institute and former undersecretary of the U.S. Air Force. The book grows out of the Chayeses' vast practical experience, as well as their extensive teaching and writing about the architecture of international regimes and treaty compliance in the arms control and environmental fields. Their book seeks to describe how international regulation is accomplished through "treaty regimes," and to prescribe how those regimes may be better managed to promote greater compliance with treaty norms.
The opening chapter, "A Theory of Compliance," posits that three factors-efficiency, national interest and regime norms-foster a general propensity for nation-states to comply with treaty rules. Why, then, do nations deviate from those rules? The Chayeses explain noncompliance as stemming from the ambiguity and indeterminacy of treaty language, limitations on the capacity of parties to carry out their treaty undertakings, and time lags between a state's undertaking and its performance. Given these pressures toward noncompliance, how can deviance be contained within acceptable levels? In parts 1 and 2, the authors derive and contrast two strategies for promoting treaty compliance. Part 1 develops an "enforcement" model, and after reviewing the various available coercive devices-treaty-based military and economic sanctions, membership, and unilateral sanctionsfinds this approach largely doomed to failure. Sanctioning authority, the authors argue, "is rarely granted by treaty, rarely used when granted, and likely to be ineffective when used" (pp. 32-33). Repeated use of sanctions entails high costs to the sanctioner and generally requires great-power leadership, which can only rarely be mustered. Consequently, sanctions are applied sporadically and unevenly, creating serious problems of legitimacy.
After discrediting the coercive model, part 2 offers in its stead a "management" model, whereby national actors seek to induce compliance not through coercive strategies, but through a cooperative, managerial approach whose centerpiece is an interactive process of justification, discourse. and persuasion. The Chayeses describe a regime not as a...