SERAPIO, Stephanie A.

June 1, 2016
11318988 Weekly Review Essay # 2

BLACK AND WHITE: There is power in cooperation

The condition of man is a condition of war, says Thomas Hobbes. This is because humans act
based on the pursuit of their selfish interests. In the international setting, selfish interests, power and
anarchy are the perfect recipe for exploitation and perhaps, disaster. How can we foster cooperation
between states? For powerful states, is there a need to cooperate and why? What are the factors that
influence them to join and stay in an organization or regime? These are just some of the questions
answered by Robert Keohane, John Ikenberry, Thomas Hale, and David Held, among others.

According to Kenneth Waltz, there is no harmony in anarchy. Yet, we are all familiar of states
converging together for what they call a ‘’greater purpose’’. This cooperation is made possible through
the creation of international organizations and regimes. International regimes are defined as "sets of
implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors'
expectations converge in a given area of international relations’’. (Keohane, 1984, p.57) There is a
demand for the creation of such regimes for they serve the following purposes: enforcement of legal
liability, lowering down transaction costs and managing expectations by providing information about the
actors. One might ask, what do these regimes can offer to the more powerful states? For realists, states
will only cooperate if it will serve their interests which are not limited to economic terms. States in the
international setting set high regard on the concept of balance of powers and these regimes and
institutions are a subtle way of keeping an eye for other actors. In the contemporary times, we have five
core states in the United Nations Security Council in which two of the superpowers namely China and
United States are both part of. For John Ikenberry (2001), leading states establish regimes in order to
maintain political control. (p. 5). Weaker states have more incentives to join these regimes but may face
the problem of self-interdependence that leads to Gridlock. Gridlock, a term coined by Thomas Hale and
his colleagues, refers to the deterioration of cooperation when it needed the most. This is due to several
factors namely, growing multipolarity, institutional inertia, harder problems and institutional
fragmentation. (2013, p.4) These blockages can only be countered if we learn how to cooperate across
borders and barriers.

The benefits for cooperation are greater than the costs. From a period wherein power can be
expressed through military and territorial prowess, we now have an era wherein global governance and
cooperation between rational, self-interested states is possible, even in a state of anarchy. However, the
term regime is still subjective and may result to exclusion of other states. Another concern might be the
ignorance vis-à-vis the willingness of states to submit themselves into agreements that may have
underlying motives behind them. Also, cooperation through regimes may result to gridlock in which we
can respond to by learning how to cooperate beyond borders especially on issues that matter the most like
global warming and human rights. As that famous saying goes, ‘’individually we are a drop, together we
are an ocean.’’ As a state suffering from the effects of global warming, the Philippines can only do so
much in order to prevent things from getting out of hand. We need to cooperate within our own region,
those who belong to regimes like United Nations and Association of Southeast Asian Nations but also we
need the cooperation of those who are deemed ineligible to join these regimes.

References:
Keohane, Robert. 1984. After Hegemony.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chapters 1, 4, 6.
Ikenberry, G. John. 2001. After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chapters 1-3.
Held, David, Thomas Hale, and Kevin Young. 2013. “Gridlock: From Self- Reinforcing Interdependence
to Second-Order Cooperation Problems.” Global Policy 4(3): 223–35.