Compliance, consensus and counter‐dependence: Foreign policy in Ecuador

Abstract

Most scholarly work on the foreign policy of dependent states works within the compliance model. Compliance anticipates that dependent states, vulnerable to the core's ability and willingness to punish them, will follow the foreign policy guidance of the core. Bruce Moon has demonstrated that foreign policy alignment between core and periphery often develops not through a coercive process, such as that described by compliance, but through a cooperative procedure. Moon's consensus model anticipates that ideological agreement among elites in periphery and core will lead to foreign policy concordance. Compliance and consensus both expect dependent states to follow the core's foreign policy wishes. Few researchers have attempted to explain the conditions under which foreign policymakers in dependent states defy core preferences. This paper identifies a third dependent foreign policy model to account for this outcome, counterdependence. After introducing the three dependent foreign policy types, the paper exam...