The Big Influence of Small States Revisited

Abstract

power overwhelmingly favored the United States. In Cooperation Among Democracies: The European Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy, Thomas Risse-Kappen challenges this structural realist account, arguing that the West Europeans repeatedly demonstrated the big influence of small (Keohane 1971) even on matters of strategic importance to the United States. Risse-Kappen also questions whether traditional realist bargaining theories offer adequate explanations for U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. Instead, he argues that liberal theories that link domestic political structures systematically to the foreign policy of and institutionalist arguments emphasizing the role of norms and communicative action (p. 4) better account for the actual level of influence exerted by the U.S.'s NATO allies. Risse-Kappen outlines his theoretical framework and methodological approach in chapters 1 and 2. His null hypothesis is the structural realist argument that small states will not have an impact on great power decisions in alliances under conditions of bipolarity. From traditional realism and related strands of hegemonic stability and bargaining theory, he concludes that under certain conditions small allies can exert influence on a great power. But the principal alternative to the null hypothesis is found in liberal theories as they relate to Kantian pacific federations among democratic states (Deutsch's [1957] pluralistic security communities) and the common identities, values, norms, and decision-making procedures that are institutionalized in such alliances and reflect the liberal character of the domestic political structures of the member (p. 12). Given these norms, domestic politics (Putnam's [1988] two-level games) and transnational and transgovernmental coalition-building provide the tools by which democratic allies are likely to influence each other (p. 12). Risse-Kappen uses four case studies (the Korean War, the 1956 Suez crisis, the 1958-1963 negotiations on the test ban treaty, and the Cuban missile crisis) to demonstrate that the Europeans influenced U.S. policy in significant ways and that liberal theories better account for this phenomena than either structural realism or its traditional variants. Based on evidence from both primary and secondary sources, including now declassified U.S. government documents, the conclusion is clearest in the Korean, test-ban, and Cuban cases. In the Suez crisis, however, the United States did exert its prerogatives over the objections of Britain and France. Risse-Kappen notes that this outcome confirms realist expectations but is more the exception than the rule. He also argues that the process of the allied confrontation over Suez can only be understood in a liberal and institutional context.