Beyond Anarchy: The Importance of Security Institutions

Abstract

Beyond Anarchy Security institutions are central to patterns of conict and cooperation within the international system.1 Although bipolarity would undoubtedly have brought the United States and the Soviet Union into competition anyway, the depth and length of the Cold War were exacerbated by the security institutions created after 1945. The Soviet Union’s informal empire in Eastern Europe threatened the West because it secured Moscow’s control over the region; a looser alliance in which each state could choose its own foreign policy and form of internal rule would have been far more fractious and diffuse than the solid bloc that emerged. The East-West conict evaporated in turn when this informal empire collapsed in 1989. Likewise, the ability of the United States to Žght the 1991 Persian Gulf War depended crucially on the protectorate it established over the Gulf states, wherein they gave up their independent foreign policies and followed Washington’s lead in the crisis, and on the multilateral coalition it created to bind its own hands. Neither the Cold War nor U.S. hegemony in the Persian Gulf would have taken the form it did without the particular security institutions that lay at their core and eventually came to be among their most prominent characteristics. The search for how and to what extent international institutions “matter” has largely played out in the realm of international political economy.2 To the extent that scholars look for institutional effects, it is mostly at the level of universal or at least broad-based multilateral institutions in the areas of trade,