International Cooperation Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

International cooperation refers to the collaborative interactions among different actors across international borders to address common issues or problems. Such cooperation involves both governmental organizations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and may take an array of forms. Among governments, international cooperation may be bilateral, such as between the United States and Canada, or multilateral, such as among Japan, China, and Russia. Countries may also pursue collaborative actions within intergovernmental organizations (IGOs; e.g., within a global IGO such as the United Nations or within a regional IGO such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO]), or nations may take shared actions within a particular supranational organization such as within the European Union. At the nongovernmental level, individuals and groups across nations may engage in international cooperation. NGOs are numerous and deal with social, economic, and political cooperation among individuals. Many are humanitarian or social groups, such as the International Red Cross or Amnesty International; others are economic units, often multinational or transnational businesses such as Exxon or Unilever; and still others are political organizations such as the Socialist International or the Committee on Disarmament. The important characteristic of these groups is that they are outside the control of any particular government or even groups of governments.

Goals

Just as there are numerous forms of international collaboration among governments, groups, and individuals, these different actors pursue a variety of goals through cooperative activities. One important aim focuses on pursuing greater security or resolving conflicts among states or groups. Some nations enhance their security by forming alliances. In the post–World War II years, the United States joined a number of multilateral regional organizations, such as NATO in Western Europe, the Rio Pact in Latin America, and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization in Southeast Asia, and formed bilateral alliances with Japan, the Republic of China, and South Korea to protect the members from the threat of international communism.

Other times, alliances are expanded to enhance the degree of security. NATO has been enlarged from its original membership of sixteen nations in the early 1990s to twenty-eight today as a way to provide greater security in central Europe for the nations that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire. In Asia, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was founded in 2001 among China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to enhance security, trade, and cooperation among these member states. Other nations form temporary cooperative arrangements, something less than a formal alliance, to address a particular security issue, to mediate an issue, or to address an emerging problem. During the past decade, the six-party talks among China, Russia, Japan, the United States, South Korea, and North Korea represent a cooperative effort among these parties to persuade North Korea to abandon its development of nuclear weapons. Similarly, Britain, France, Germany, and the European Union joined together to try to dissuade Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons. IGOs may elicit cooperative actions among states to promote international security. The members of the United Nations may impose international sanctions or invoke collective actions against aggressor states, such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or against regions or countries in turmoil, such as the Darfur region in Sudan. Nongovernmental actors may also be asked to assist in seeking to facilitate cooperation among states in disputes. For example, the Vatican served as an intermediary between Argentina and Chile to resolve a boundary dispute.

Igos And Trade

International cooperation may also focus on economic and environmental activities among states, IGOs, and NGOs. Bilateral and regional free-trade agreements are now prominent features of the international system. These agreements seek to reduce or eliminate tariffs among states or regions as a way to promote greater prosperity for the signatory countries. The creation and expansion of the European Union is the premier example of this degree of cooperation and integration among states, and that supranational organization has grown over the decades from 6 original members to more than 2 dozen today. The areas of cooperation within the European Union have expanded into numerous sectors and now into a single market. Other regions have followed this example and have created such organizations as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. The World Trade Organization, the principal IGO to promote greater global trade, now has more than 150 member nations. Sometimes selected groups of nations hold periodic meetings to foster economic cooperation. The 7 leading industrial democracies—the G7, and later the G8 with Russia added—have held yearly meetings since the mid-1970s in an effort to coordinate policy on political, economic, and environmental issues. Since 1999, the G20, composed of the finance ministers and central bankers from 19 developed and developing nations and the European Union, meet periodically to evaluate the stability of the international financial system. Finally, the United Nations may hold periodic international meetings to address a pressing issue. In December 2009, 193 nations gathered in Copenhagen, Denmark, to seek a cooperative agreement to combat global climate change. All of these kinds of cooperative efforts also serve as important venues for fostering technological innovation and collaboration.

Ngos And Foreign Aid

The number of both nations and IGOs has increased dramatically during the past several decades, but these actors have been surpassed by the meteoric rise in the number and activities of NGOs. By some estimates, the number of NGOs totaled only four hundred a century ago, but recent totals range from about six thousand to twenty-five thousand and to even more than one hundred thousand such organizations. These NGOs provide a vast network of interdependencies among the people of the world and often serve to knit the global community together. Such organizations include the traditional political, economic, and social organizations that are often immediately identified, but the array also includes educational, religious, media, fraternal, environmental, and humanitarian ones, among others.

Important to note, these NGOs play an integral role in facilitating international cooperation in many policy areas. Much of the world’s foreign assistance is actually distributed by NGOs or private voluntary organizations. Catholic Relief Services, Church World Service, Oxfam, Bread for the World, the International Red Cross, and CARE routinely address the issue of global poverty, foster international development, and respond to natural disasters such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The new modes of communication have only accelerated the rise of more and more NGOs. The growth of satellite and cable television, the cell phone, and the Internet serve as the principal means for enhancing international information exchange across all areas of the world and foster instantaneous sharing of information.

Research

Important remaining questions are why international cooperation occurs among these state and nonstate actors and how these international institutions facilitate or support such cooperation. Scholars such as Robert Axelrod, Robert Keohane, Stephen Krasner, and Arthur Stein began to unravel these two puzzles in the 1980s, and their insights remain useful to this day. Moral and ethical imperatives and common interests may motivate some participants to cooperate and use these international organizations. Such arguments, however, appear less persuasive in explaining cooperation among states. After all, states have long been characterized as rational actors operating in an anarchic international system in which they are primarily driven by power and interest considerations. Yet as some of these scholars note, states still may cooperate with one another if their rational, self-interested choices yield less than Pareto-optimal outcomes. Consider the security dilemma faced by states, often represented by the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, as illustrative of when mutual cooperation would aid states. In a stylized game of an arms race between two nations, the rational and dominant strategy for the two participants is for each to continue to increase its armaments rather than to show any constraint and trust the other state to restrain its arms spending. Yet such a strategy is both economically costly for a state and potentially dangerous for peace and security in the international system. In a situation of a “dilemma of common interests,” as Arthur Stein (1982) calls it, there is an imperative for states to abandon independent decision making and collaborate with one another to achieve a better outcome for both parties. The resulting regime may consist of an arms control agreement between the two that specifies the rules, norms, and procedures that each must follow regarding this issue. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union is one tangible illustration of this kind of international cooperation. The dilemma of common interests, of course, applies to a variety of security, economic, and social issues for states in international relations and thus, in part, accounts for the emergence of numerous international organizations such as the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and the World Trade Organization. Moreover, the existence of these international institutions has the effect of perpetuating and perhaps even expanding the degree of international cooperation.

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