Three-time CASBS fellow and social science titan Robert Keohane chats with 2022-23 CASBS fellows Henry Farrell and Rebecca Slayton on applying aspects of his classic works in international relations theory to the comparative politics of climate change policy; projects that failed or went unrecognized; the genesis of the famous methods book coauthored with King and Verba, and more.
Robert Keohane bios: CASBS | Princeton | Wikipedia
Comparative Politics of Climate Change Policy workshops at CASBS
After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy
2016 Balzan Prize | prize speech
Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research
Keohane & Ostrom, Local Commons and Global Interdependence
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Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
Today on Human Centered, a conversation with three-time distinguished CASBS fellow Robert Keohane, legendary professor of international affairs emeritus at Princeton University. As an influential international relations theorist, Keohane has been one of social science's deepest thinkers for more than half a century, during which he was a professor first at Swarthmore College, then at Stanford, Brandeis, Harvard, Duke and Princeton universities. He's a recipient of nearly every honor and award his profession confers, including in 2005 the Johan Schutta Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Political Scientists.
He's the author or co-author of works that are required reading for international relations graduate students, including Power and Interdependence, After Hegemony and Power and Governance in a Partially Globalized World. Over the past 15 years, Keohane has focused on the comparative politics of climate change policy. In 2016, he won the prestigious Balsen Prize, which came with a significant cash award.
He dedicated a portion of this prize money to convening a series of winter workshops at CASBS from 2018 to 2022, aimed at galvanizing scholarship and creating networks among the next generation of political and social scientists studying climate change policy. This influential series of CASBS workshops has directly inspired or spun off new initiatives based at Harvard and Brown universities. In this episode, we'll hear Professor Keohane in conversation with Henry Farrell and Rebecca Slayton, both 2022 to 2023 CASBS fellows.
Henry Farrell is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, and Rebecca Slayton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. In this conversation, Farrell and Slayton engaged Keohane on a variety of topics, including how his theoretical frameworks apply in today's climate change policy landscape, how and why his 87-88 CASBS project failed, and how his CASBS classmate and future Nobel Prize winner Douglas North became involved, his project with another future Nobel Prize winner Eleanor Ostrom, what he sees as an overlooked question in need of greater attention, and the origins of his famous 1994 methods book, Designing Social Inquiry, co-authored with Gary King and Sydney Verba. Let's listen in.
Rebecca Slayton: All right. Well, thank you so much for spending the time to talk with us. I spent a lot of my first few months here at CASBS returning to your work with Joseph Nye on vulnerability and power and interdependence. And I'm wondering if you can say a little bit about how you distinguished between sensitivity and vulnerability interdependence and how those concepts are important, to which you've been studying in the area of climate change.
Robert Keohane: Thanks, Rebecca, for coming and Henry for coming and for this opportunity. In the 1970s, Joe and I were thinking about interdependence, which was being discussed as economic interdependence. And we were trying to figure out what the political implications of interdependence were.
And we made the distinction between sensitivity and vulnerability to draw the political applications. That is, sensitivity means that one party, one state, for example, or one multinational corporation, it has to react to changes in the environment which affect its welfare and its interests. But those changes may be fairly superficial and it may be possible to deal with them by responding.
“Vulnerability implies that you can't change the framework, that something is going to happen to you which you can't adapt to easily. So the example we had in mind was the financial crisis, the US exchange rate crisis of 1971, when the US was forced to adjust its interest rate policy because of exchange rate issues and the dollar's weakness. But then Nixon simply broke the rules and he had a lot more freedom of action.”
So we concluded that the US was sensitive within a certain framework to these interest rate issues, but wasn't vulnerable because it was able to act itself. And the contrast was the oil crisis of 1973 when the US was vulnerable in our view. That is, it wasn't able quickly to respond to this in a way that dealt with the problem and maintained its own interests.
Rebecca Slayton: Ok. So in the context, how would you think about that in the context of climate change? How does that apply to your current work on climate change?
Robert Keohane: Well, I think it's clear that the United States is sensitive, and the US and every other country is sensitive to climate change, but it's also clear we're vulnerable to it because there's no simple response. If it were, consider, suppose that adaptation were very effective and there were three simple things that any government could do to adapt to climate change, then we'd be sensitive to it but not vulnerable. We'd just do those things. There'd be certain costs to it. It wouldn't necessarily be trivial, but it wouldn't lead to a fundamental problem.
But we're very vulnerable to climate change. We don't have those magic bullets. So it's clearly a matter of vulnerability and, in a sense, more serious vulnerability than was the case in the 70s on money and oil. When US power was sufficient to restructure the situation at some considerable cost. It’s not so clear with climate change that we have those options.
Rebecca Slayton: Right. I was hoping you would use that word adaptation because, of course, that's how the IPCC defines vulnerability and includes adaptation as part of that definition. Just moving forward a little bit, in the 1980s you made a distinction between cooperation and harmony. And I love this phrase that cooperation grows not from harmony but from discord. So can you say a little bit about what that distinction is and why it's important?
Robert Keohane: Well, first, it illustrates why it's important for scholars to go give talks. That came out of a talk I gave in Washington about 1981. Fred Berkson was there, the former policy economist, and he's the one who said, well, what do you mean? What's cooperation and harmony? How are they linked? So he's the one who raised that issue.
And so, first lesson is go out there and talk to people about your ill-conceived ideas because you may get good ideas from it. So cooperation, in my revised view, comes out of discord. Harmony is driving on the right-hand side of the road in an English-speaking country, or almost except Japan and Sweden for a while. You normally do it. There's no cost in it, and there's no conflict of interest. Nobody wants to drive on the left. Air traffic control, everyone speaks English, the controllers and the pilots. It's not pure harmony. Some people would probably rather speak French. But there's a very strong incentive to do the same thing.
Cooperation involves discord. I would rather not pay for something that I'm receiving, a public good, for example, and you would rather have me pay for it. So there's a clear conflict of interest there, and therefore, cooperation is much more politicized, and much more interesting politically than harmony.
Henry Ferrell: So it's wonderful for me too to have the opportunity to talk to you today. One of the things that I've been spending a lot of time with Abraham Newman doing over the last several months is finishing a book which is really about interdependence and how interdependence has changed over the last few years. But one of the questions that I think is interesting to me is how back in the 1980s, you, as I see it in a certain sense, were responding to a world and to a set of arguments about how it is that sovereign states shape the world in a situation of anarchy, and you came up with a different theory of how institutions might work and might serve functional purposes even in a somewhat anarchical world.
So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about where that theory came from and what that theory does.
Robert Keohane: Thank you. Well, the big question, the big puzzle was why we have institutions at all. We have anarchy, so to speak, there's no common government. States have the predominance of power. Why should they form international institutions? What's the point Are they simply symbolic or window dressing?
And I was interested here. I was reading work in economics, especially organizational economics, and ironically enough, some of the work by the founders of neoliberalism, Ronald Coase. So Ronald Coase had a theorem which said, you don't need institutions. If you have property rights guaranteed, you have no information cost and you have no uncertainty.
And so I said, well, bingo, international politics has all of those features. It has information costs that are very high, has no binding legal structure. So we can turn the Coase theory upside down, which is what I did. So I took this neoliberal theory and turned it upside down.
I said, well, suppose that none of the conditions for the Coase theory is correct. What then follows? And it then follows, it seemed to me to follow, that these institutions must provide some sort of informational function. They must provide information which wasn't available otherwise, because they weren't deciding the issues, they weren't ruling over states. And they were doing something which states valued, otherwise states wouldn't have constructed them. So that was the puzzle and the opening to it was the Coase Theorem. And also an article called The Market for Lemons, which showed that you could have a market failure. That is, there could be a potential deal, which both sides wanted, in his case, a used car deal. And it wasn't made, and it wasn't made because there was no credible information.
That is, the seller of the used car, absent the used car dealer, couldn't guarantee the credibility of his or her promises about the car. And therefore, the buyer wouldn't pay the real price of the car, the buyer would discount the price too much. The seller, knowing it was a good car, wouldn't sell it for that price. That was a market failure.
And it seemed to me we had a series of market failures, would have had a series of market failures in making cooperative deals. If one didn't have institutions which provided that kind of information, and it led to a concern with reputation. Because somehow the guarantee of this deal of one's promise had to be, that one's reputation would be damaged if the promise were shown to be false.
Henry Ferrell: So I heard Coase talking at the first meeting of the International Society of the New Institutional Economics, and he suggested there more or less that the reading of his theorem should be precisely what you did. That is, that rather than treating this as an argument that transaction costs didn't exist, it's a kind of an ideal state that forces you to start thinking about how do we actually deal with a world in which transaction costs are quite important. And obviously the Akerlof argument fits very well into that.
But I would like to juxtapose this with a talk that you gave in honor of Joe Nye, I think back in 2016, where you said, and I'm here shortening greatly, those of us who have celebrated as well as analyzed globalization share some responsibility for the rise of populism and then after a long discussion of why this is so, you say, we did not pay enough attention as global capitalism hijacked complex interdependence. And it seems to me that one way of getting at why you thought that, is thinking about what are both the strengths and the weaknesses of a theory of institutions which focuses primarily on their functional characteristics; that is, on the broad benefits that they provide. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how that change of perspective came about and what you think today, five or six years after having given that talk.
Robert Keohane: That’s a great question. At the time of writing my work, both the book with Nighy and the later book on institutions, I made the point that the theory didn't take into account domestic politics. It was a deliberate omission, I just couldn't handle that degree of complexity in trying to create a parsimonious theory. It's very explicit in both works. And clearly, this is the gap here, which led to your question.
Because in the absence of domestic politics, you don't have populism. Populism is a sense and a movement that the people unmediated by institutions should have a large say in what is happening in policy. And it's clearly an anti-institutional view. And this was fostered by the effects of globalization. I think I didn't anticipate properly as much. Many people didn't. How much globalization would hollow out manufacturing sectors? How profound the effects would be?
The effects of the interdependence before China joined WTO were much more moderate, were much less because the competitors were not quite as wealthy as the US, but fairly similar. The exchanges of products were more symmetrical.
When China joined WTO, and there was a massive shift of manufacturing in China, you had the hollowing out of much of American industry, and there was no sufficient preparation for it. That was a great policy flaw, it was a great policy flaw of both parties. It was policy flaw of Clinton, of the second Bush, would have been the first Bush too, and of Obama.
And there was no proper response to it. When the crisis of 2008-2009 came, famously the Obama administration bailed out the banks, but didn't do anything for the workers. So it's not surprising that you wound up with, in retrospect, at least, we didn't see it coming, not surprising you wound up with a Trump type populism.
Henry Ferrell: And maybe building on this and bringing this together a little bit with the earlier question of climate change. So you mentioned China here in particular. So what kind of space, and this is asking you to think on your feet as it were, so how does this leave us with respect to a world of climate change where a lot of the important manufacturing is really happening outside of the United States and United States control? And maybe this returns a little bit to the questions about vulnerability and sensitivity in a slightly different way.
Robert Keohane: Well, let's go back to climate change. One thing we haven't talked about yet in climate change is it's clearly a very serious issue. The only thing that's really quite encouraging in response to it is technological change.
That is, we're seeing rapid technological change, lots of innovation on issues related to climate. And we're seeing things that we, from battery technology to electric vehicles, we're seeing massive changes that we didn't expect to happen as fast as they're happening. I was looking back at some of the expectations I had in 2016. EVs don't play a role, and in the work done at that time, people were saying, electric vehicles are far away. We only have to focus on the grid and what's happening in the grid.
So there's a lot of technological change, and that's the positive aspect.
But it's also the case that climate change is happening faster than we expected. The damage is faster than we expected. There's more damage currently. Ten years ago, there was much more sense, well, this is in the future. It was a big debate. But well, how do you get people to take seriously a set of negative consequences that are going to happen in 30 or 40 years? They discount the future. It's not the future anymore. It's happening right now.
So we have both the compression of time with the technology and the compression of time with the damage. So we're more vulnerable than we thought we were. And we have to adapt faster.
Rebecca Slayton: And bring this back around to institutions. When we're talking about technological change, the institutionalization of technology can also be seen as a problem in so far as, China is still building coal. And these power plants and these infrastructures that we use for our energy have very long lifetimes and it's very difficult to change them, right?
So we just bought an EV actually in December 31st. And the infrastructure is not all there, right? So getting an infrastructure to change when it's deeply institutionalized in a different kind of way can be very challenging.
Do you think your theory of institutions addresses that challenge of, I mean, you certainly talked about regime change and things like that as well. But how would you think about that in the context of climate change and really needing to change the institutional basis for the technologies that we use for contemporary societies and industries?
Robert Keohane: I’m not sure my theory does much for this, but I have thought about this issue. I think the, well, the economist solution to climate change was pricing, carbon price. It didn't fly politically anywhere to speak of a little bit in Europe, almost nowhere, a little bit in British Columbia, almost nowhere else. And it doesn't really address the magnitude of the problem anyway.
It's incremental. In a sense, the political scientists' response as it was developed, Leah Stokes was probably the leader in this, but others as well, was infrastructural investment. And it admitted that this was not a first-best policy. The economists can show this is not as efficient, you're going to waste a lot of resources, some of it's going to be green pork barrel. But if you want to avoid this lock-in, you want to have the infrastructure there when the cars are being built. And if you want to make it politically viable, this is a much, much preferred course of action. Because people are much more, voters are much more likely to respond positively to subsidies and to jobs than to taxes, which is kind of elemental to a political science.
So the political science response is the one that prevailed in both the first infrastructure bill and then in the one that was passed only with partisan support, the IRA, so called, and I think that's the right course to take. It's better when it's bipartisan, because you want to lock it in and you want to get a general commit to it. The key for the IRA success is going to be whether it is distributed widely to red and blue, as well as blue states, and whether red governors, as in Georgia, but not as in Virginia, embrace it. And then it gets locked in.
And I'm hopeful that if there's enough money flowing to red communities, it'll be hard to reverse it. But I think it's the infrastructure response which makes a lot of sense and is heartening to me, because pork barrel is popular. And green pork barrel is at least as popular as brown pork barrel.
Henry Ferrell: So one of the questions, obviously, when you're thinking about climate change, as you said, you want to think about this in terms of time horizons. And you want to think about this in terms of broader and longer trajectories, which is something that I think that political scientists have sometimes not been 100% wonderful at. And I know that two of the people who have influenced you and whose friendship you have enjoyed, who are also associated with CASBS, are the late Doug North and Josh Ober, both of whom are people who think in different ways about long trajectories of development.
Doug was somebody, of course, who thought about this over periods of hundreds and thousands of years as an economist and a Nobel Prize winner for his work on institutional change and long term trajectories. And Josh is somebody who has thought about this in terms of Athens during the period of Athenian supremacy and indeed beyond. So I'm wondering, what kinds of things can we learn from economists like North and from classicists like Josh Ober that might help us better as political scientists to understand these really structural questions that, as you say, are very important to us right now?
Robert Keohane: That’s a great question. And first, an anecdote for the Center, I brought Doug North and Steve Krasner to a special project at the Center in 87, 88, which I was a former fellow. I wanted to come back.
I couldn't come back on just as a regular fellow. I had to have a special project. I had to tell the Center who Doug North was. I had to vouch for Doug North. That was before he got the Nobel Prize about six or seven years before. That may tell you how sometimes when not everybody is always clear on the concept at the time.
The issue, a core issue there, Henry, is lock-in and what the impact of a policy is on subsequent politics. I had thought about that before that you were here with Doug somewhat. One has to ask about climate change, are the policies that are being put into effect, policies that would generate support and lock themselves in because they create jobs, profits, in other ways make it hard for politicians to reverse them?
Or are they short-term policies that are simply temporary? I think that's the key question to ask about the IRA. You don't want a lot of little short-term projects that may do something in the short run.
You want to have a set of projects that embed themselves in the political economy in such a way that politicians do not want to pull them out, even if those politicians wouldn't have supported them before. Now, an example, of course, is the health care bill. It's locked in now.
It passed with narrow partisan support. The Trump administration tried to reverse it, famously, thumbs down by John McCain. But now, Trump is saying, we're not going to try to touch this.
We know this has become the new third rail. You want this to become so embedded in the political economy that it's not worthwhile for any politician, no matter how reactionary their orientation, to try to reverse it.
Rebecca Slayton: So if we can talk a little bit more about time frame, we've mostly been thinking about scales in terms of scales of human institutions. But of course, I think part of what we struggle with is thinking about the scales on which natural systems and physical systems, geological systems change. So I think a lot of people have this idea that, well, once we get to carbon zero, we're done. But in fact, the carbon is going to stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, and it's not easy to undo.
So how do we think about institutions in the context of that? I mean, another area where this has seen a lot of discussion, of course, is things like nuclear waste management, where the timeframes for these wastes to last are longer than, in some cases, the human species.
And we have no idea what institutions will be in place to manage these things in the future. And this comes up also in the context of things like geoengineering. So, for example, if we were to start a program with solar radiation management where you put aerosols in the atmosphere in order to reflect some sunlight and cool down the planet, you'd need to keep that going in perpetuity or else you would have a sudden reversal of effect, right?
And so there's this linkage between the human social political institutions and the ecological system, the planet that we're living on, that it seems like it's very hard for us as individuals and societies to come to terms with, and I'm wondering if you have thoughts on that.
Robert Keohane: That’s a good question. Well, it comes to the question of credibility in a way so that you can think about how to design institutions that would generate incentives to maintain, for example, measures to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere, even if this were no longer seen as a crisis.
The problem is, how can you guarantee that they won't be reversed by a new generation with different priorities? And it's a very difficult question. I think one tries to set up a situation where there's something locked in which has become established.
So take the Alaska oil revenue fund. Now, it pays out every year. It's very hard to reverse it. So suppose one sets up a regular pattern, a fairly invisible or taken for granted tax, which necessarily goes to climate change work. We've had since the Eisenhower administration such a tax on gasoline, which pays for highways. People don't realize that they're paying every time they buy a gallon of gas. There's a considerable federal tax here, which goes to highways.
If you built in to that sort of tax, a trust fund that was hard to change, and institutional arrangements that made it hard to reverse, you could perhaps set up a taken for granted fund, which would provide money for, for example, carbon renewal technology or developing that technology. And, and the time to do it would be when there's a sense that it's important, and you want to lock it in, so it's relatively invisible and institutionalized.
Rebecca Slayton: I think just ask a, push a little bit more on the, these are great suggestions. Thinking about it in the international, transnational perspective, where incentives are very different in different countries, most of what we've been talking about in terms of establishing incentives have been sort of domestic incentives. So, I mean, how do we, if we, given how much trouble we have even within the United States, getting agreement among red states and blue states on what the incentives should be and how policy should be designed.
I mean, how do we think about this in the context of an international arena where some nations, generally the poorest and least powerful ones, are going to suffer the effects of climate change the most, but the most powerful ones may have less of an incentive to change, but also have the most power to make a difference?
Robert Keohane: Well, I'm going to first attack part of that question, which is the question of how you generalize a set of policies. So even for the United States, it would be very costly to enact a serious set of carbon policies, which was simply national, because it would increase the cost for American manufacturers. If you didn't change anything else, you would drain jobs, and then you would have tremendous political resistance, which would be impossible to resist.
So somehow you have to generalize this. And the big proposal now on the table, it's on the table in Europe, it will be on the table in the US, is some sort of carbon border adjustment tax. And this gets right into the conflict between the two loves of my intellectual life, interdependence and climate change.
Because what you're doing in this tax is you're saying, if other countries don't also implement effectively some sort of price on carbon, one way or another, infrastructure measures, pricing measures, or something else, we will impose that tax on you. Now, clearly, that can't work unless it's agreed to by the dominant powers. It can't work against China, it has to work with China.
And it has ethical implications also, as opposed to the US and China and the European Union agree on such a policy. They could probably enforce it on others. There would be a long rolling effect, small countries would have to go along.
And probably at some point, it would be impossible for anybody to not go along. And that means they're being coerced into a set of policies which they didn't determine, so that has its own ethical implications. But it could be necessary if you're going to have a global carbon policy. So that's so called CBAM. It's going to be on the agenda, I think, for much of the next 10, 20 years.
Henry Ferrell: So one thing I'd like to build up on that, and I hope we're going to have a chance later to talk about how fiction can expand the horizons of social scientists. But Kim Stanley Robinson, who's somebody else who is broadly associated with CASBS, he's been at many meetings here, has a science fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future.
Robert Keohane: I’ve read it.
Henry Ferrell: Yeah. And so the bit where he describes how the Indian government in frustration starts to release aerosols into the upper atmosphere because nobody else is doing anything about it and because it has gone through a catastrophic wet bulb temperature event, which is described in very visceral terms in the first chapter of the book. And so we're now in a world where plausibly there are going to be some significant efforts at geoengineering, which are going to be possible for states to undertake unilaterally.
And I'm wondering to what extent does that possibly intersect with the kinds of more collective hegemonic actions that you're talking about, which are really about larger states, great powers coming together and setting rules for the collective benefit. Are we possibly going to see a world in which that intersects with efforts, whether cumulative or not cumulative, by individual states to try and shape the climate in ways that were down to their particular benefit?
Robert Keohane: I didn't find that scenario very plausible. I find the threat of doing so much more plausible than the actuality of doing it. After all, you're also providing a collective good or bad, so you have the same issue of collective goods you have in providing something that is good for people.
You would make yourself, India makes yourself a target of hostile action. I think the threat of doing so is much more plausible than the actual eventuality of doing it. If I think of myself as an Indian policymaker, you think of 15 reasons why this was not a good idea, even though threatening it might be a good idea.
I think that what we're seeing with India is actually quite striking. India five years ago was saying, it's not our problem. We didn't cause the climate issue. You guys solve it. They are now actually doing a lot about climate.
It seems to me the key about climate policy is going to make it industrial policy. If climate policy becomes necessary for the next industrial revolution, which I think it will be, then being a leader on climate policy will be positive economically and not negative for any, maybe not for very small countries, but for any aspiring major industrial power.
So, Modi is not stupid, he'd be crazy now to be a foot-draggers if you're running India on climate. What you're doing is saying, we're going to make sure we're not at the forefront of the next industrial revolution. We're going to make sure we stay poor. Yeah, we're all for that. It makes no sense. And he realizes that.
So I think once that corner has been turned, I think now we realize that the next industrial revolution, which will be dramatic, will be a move away from the internal combustion engine, electrification and electrification on the basis of mostly solar but also wind power. And the countries that do this best, that develop the most efficient means of harnessing the power of the sun, that build out their grids best, can do terrifically well.
And furthermore, it has the great advantage, back to Rebecca's question, that it leapfrogs industrialization. So what if you were no good at building cars? It doesn't matter anymore because cars are different entities than they were then. You don't have to know how to build a complicated internal combustion engine. It's much simpler to build the electric car that you build, that you bought, than to build a kind of Audi or Mercedes.
So I think we're going to see a real opportunity in some cases, and in some cases, after all, who has the most sun? It's the tropical countries, not the wealthy ones, who are almost all non-tropical. So I think we're going to see a lot of opportunity here in climate change. I'm actually quite optimistic about the intersection of climate change with development or more equal development.
Henry Ferrell: If I could just ask a follow up question on that. So if you think about how this intersects with international institutions, I could see roughly three arguments that one might have made 10 or 15 years ago. One would have been something like the ozone layer argument, which is that we really want to build this up through multilateral agreements, which have some form of binding impact. So this is going back to your work on functional institutions in some ways in the 1980s.
Then there's the David Victor type argument, which I see as being much more we don't want to have so much in the way of binding agreements and monitoring means to make sure that those agreements are lived up to. We probably want to have something which is messier and which is more about giving states and other actors a room, a place where they can experiment, a place where they can figure out policies and figure out what solutions might be.
And a final argument is the one that has been made by two former students of yours, Jessica Green and Jeff Colgan, both political scientists, where they have effectively said that in order to understand what is going to happen over the next decade or two decades, we really need to pay attention not just to distributional politics, but to what they call existential politics, to the fact that we are being driven by existential threats, different communities have different interests, and so this is almost a dog-eat-dog environment in which in order to solve problems for some communities, other communities are going to have to be pushed aside. So I'm wondering, how do you see these different layers, these different understandings of how institutional politics work? How do you see them work today, given what you've just said?
Robert Keohane: Well, I think that the first framework, framing the collective benefits, the ozone example framing, is still very important, and it's not the whole story, because there's a lot of, as Colkin and Hale and Green, three of them, say, they're also distributional issues. But I interpret their work a little differently than you do. I interpret it as saying there are major distributional issues, but they take place within the context of a general set of benefits and necessity of acting.
So I don't see it quite as a dog-eat-dog response. It seems to me there's a lot of synergy here, and maybe I'm interpreting them in my way. But I see a distributional conflict, yes, but within the context of a lot of common interests and synergy.
Now, it's going to be, to take David Victor's work, I think the agreements are going to be heavily sectoral, and we're seeing a lot more move toward sectoral discussions because the ways to deal with climate change are going to vary a lot by sector. So aluminum and cement and oil and gas are going to have somewhat different responses to it. And if you take an infrastructural response and you're not imposing an economy-wide tax, you're going to have to have differentiated policies by sector, and I think we're going to see that.
And David has been a leader, I think, in developing it, as well as my colleagues Pekala and Sokolow with their famous article in 2007 or 2008 on the wedges.
Rebecca Slayton: So if I can pick up on some of your comments about how different nations that really invest in these future technologies, the technologies that need to be the way of the future, will do very well. I'm wondering if you can say a little bit about sort of the raw geographic physical constraints the particular regions might experience and the ways in which that might require interdependence and cooperation. So, for example, there have been some analyses suggesting that Europe is not capable of producing enough energy to meet its needs without either doing nuclear, or piping in solar energy from Africa, basically, or China, because of just the environment. And inland is a great proponent of nuclear power for their nation because of that issue. They're in the dark a lot of the time.
So, to what extent, when we're thinking about institutions to manage the challenges of climate change, are these institutions going to be environmentally determined, shaped? I’m not a determinist. But if we can get back to thinking about that component of it, as well as what political polities might agree to or negotiate.
Robert Keohane: Well, we're back to one of the greatest economists in world history, David Ricardo, comparative advantage. And also competitive advantage, which is not the same thing. We're seeing a shift here, but there's a fortunate element in this.
Which is: Europeans are rich, they have lots of skills. They have many things that other people want, and they can export. So if they're disadvantaged by this shift by not having as much sunlight, this is actually a good thing, because you're going to have gains from trade.
Classic Riccardian gains from trade, when they have to pipe in energy from Algeria, or from, if Libya ever gets solidified, or from West Africa, from sunny places, and they have to therefore export something in return. So I think that is very positive.
Rebecca Slayton: Do you have concerns about that being weaponized? I'm thinking about Ukraine and Russia and energy. Obviously, that's petroleum, but that creates a kind of vulnerability as well.
Robert Keohane: It’s a wonderful phrase, Henry. Henry and Abe have weaponized interdependence. That takes us back to the question of vulnerability. You can't weaponize interdependence if a lot of other sources exist for it. You can weaponize it if you have only have it. So we don't really know where the rare earths in the world are because they weren't looked for very much before.
The US may have more than we think. But suppose that China really has a dominant supply of lithium and other rare earths. They can weaponize, and they have a little bit already, weaponize that interdependence.
But sunlight is going to be hard to weaponize. Don't try to be running Niger and say, okay, well, we're going to weaponize all the sun we have in this desert. It's not going to work because ten other countries have it as well.
Henry Ferrell: So I think one area that's interesting to think about this dynamic in is the relationship between the United States and China. Because as you said earlier, for a lot of the problems that we see with climate change, we really want to see the two of them working together. And obviously, this is an extremely difficult and tense relationship right now.
And we're talking just after the balloon scare, which whether you think that this is a real thing or not a real thing, I think it is at least symptomatic of a broader level of fear and distrust. So how do you manage this relationship of complex interdependence between these two great powers in ways that could perhaps allow for these global solutions to be reached rather than instead having a collapse into mutual forms of weaponization of different parts of their economy, which could have unfortunate consequences in a wide variety of ways?
Robert Keohane: It’s a tough question. I have no answers to it. I'll go back to the plan I wrote after hegemony. The presenting issue, one of the presenting issues was what happens after hegemony? Will there be conflict? Because Kinneberger's theory was that if you didn't have one hegemon, you'd have conflict. And the only prominent exception to that was the Anglo-American agreement around 1900, which prevented an Anglo-American war as coming out of the rise of the US to challenge British hegemony. So that's a continual concern, and when China and the US are as different as they are, and China's rise has been as fast as it has, it's been a source of worry. It's been a source of worry in my work, quite apart from climate change.
Then in climate change, you have to say, well, the US and China have to agree, have to work together, otherwise we'll destroy the planet, and it's going to be much, much tougher. It looked before the Xi regime, before the nationalism and the assertiveness of the Xi regime, it looked as if this might be a struggle that could be dealt with more effectively. It hasn't looked so good recently, and there've been setbacks on the climate front as well since the 2014 Xi-Obama semi-agreement.
So I would be a lot happier if China had a regime which was more like the pre-Xi regime than like the regime now.
Henry Ferrell: So, I think after hegemony is a very interesting framework to think about this through because as I understand, and here I'm crudely simplifying the book in ways that you should feel completely free to correct me on, the basic argument is that for hegemony, the really important thing is that hegemony has been set up and the institutions of hegemony have been set up in the first place. And once those institutions have been set up, there's such obvious value to them, that plausibly you can see other countries looking to maintain them, even after the powerful actor that can knock heads together in the kindleberger sense, even after that actor has basically disappeared from the stage. And in some ways, I think John Ikenberry's theory of China and of how China might integrate into the global institutional framework of liberalism is a variant on that big argument.
It's an argument that any sensible aspiring power is going to look to these institutions and realize that these institutions are such a good deal that you might want to tinker with them around the edges and that nonetheless you're going to want to go ahead and you're going to want to adopt them and you're going to want to rule a world or hegemonize a world which is somewhat similar to what has happened before. Now, as you say, the one really successful example is of the transition from the United Kingdom as hegemon to the United States as hegemon, but obviously there's a lot of cultural similarity between the two. Both of those were liberal powers in a certain sense.
So I guess the question I have is, as you say, the Xi regime has not shown itself to be particularly interested in liberalism. So could we still see a world in which a more intelligent hegemonic power, which is non-liberal in its basic motivations, might decide to adopt and to work together in something roughly resembling the multilateral framework that we have had for the last century and a half, or do you think instead that maybe these arguments have to be qualified some because of differences in how regimes work?
Robert Keohane: Well, you gave a strong example when you were summarizing. When you summarized my work, that was accurate. When you summarized John Ikenberry's work, you gave a very strong interpretation, which I don't know if it's true. You said any power, any sensible power would go along with this. Well, I would say I would not agree with that. I say it's not true that any power would. Nazi Germany wouldn't have. And geez, China's not going to. Because if your priority is to be powerful, if you especially want to be the most powerful country in the world, not just in your region, then you won't necessarily go along with it. And you'd be willing to pay a price, pay a trade-off for, an economic trade-off for your attempt to be dominant, right?
And that would have been very common before 1800. That was the normal great power behavior. So I'm not quite as optimistic as John would be. I don't think it's true that any power will. And I think that it would be, it's, we'd be in much better shape if China had liberalized, had become a liberal democracy. We'd be in much better shape. They'd be much more willing to deal with the United States. There'd be many more openings to them. There'd be more pluralism inside it and more ability to persuade than there is now.
So I think there's a, we have a real, a real, real problem. And the fact that China has, look at the way China has responded to the Ukraine crisis. Yes, they have basically cautioned the Russians against using nuclear weapons. That's a red line for them. But otherwise they've been in the Russians' camp, except they're not willing to take a lot of risks by sending the Russians equipment, which we really dislike. So they're, but they're leaning to the Russian side, if not otherwise. So I'm not happy about that.
Rebecca Slayton: So not all research projects work out as you expect. Can you give us an example of a project that you embarked on that did not go as planned? Was it productive in ways that you didn't expect? Where did it lead you?
Robert Keohane: Well, I had a big project, which was a center of my 1987-88 Center Fellowship, which didn't, which did not work out, and I'll describe it. It came out of After A Gemini Book, because the key, as I mentioned earlier in this conversation, the key to that argument was reputational. That is, why would countries which didn't have to obey what the institutions they had supported said they should do, like the World Trade Organization, why should they go along with the institutions and not just flagrantly violate them the way realists would expect?
And the answer I gave was that they have a stake in maintaining their reputations. So I thought, well, let's check that out. Let's check that out.
And I did a study, it led to a lot of pages of typescript, of US foreign policy from the founding. I went back and looked at the 17, I know a lot about the 1790s if you want to hear about the 1790s, and because the United States in 1778 made an alliance with France, it was crucial for the success of the Independence War. We didn't win that war alone.
The French Navy bottled up the British Navy at Yorktown and therefore led to Cornwall's surrender. So it's undetermined what would have happened in that revolution if the French alliance hadn't been made, and Benjamin Franklin brilliantly made it. But it had a sting to the tail.
It said that the US was responsible to support France. It was reciprocal under certain conditions, and these conditions were essentially met with the Anglo-French War. It began after the French Revolution.
So of course the agreement was pre-revolution, but it's an interstate treaty. It doesn't depend on the regime in power. So the French asked the US to deliver.
And the Washington administration, with Jefferson, who was seen as a Francophile, as Secretary of State, was well aware that we had to renege in effect because the US was totally vulnerable to the British Navy, which the French Navy had only temporarily had the upper hand. So the Eastern Seaboard, as it eventually was in 1814, could be ravaged by the British Navy. So they had to somehow get out of their commitment, which was quite a long and arduous process and led to the Quasi-War of 1798, when the US and France in effect fought a naval war against one another, even though it was undeclared.
So there's the first example. So I thought, well, look, let's look and see, the hypothesis was that reputational concerns will lead the United States in general to keep its commitments, even when they become, in my terms, inconvenient. Well, if you ever saw a hypothesis that was flattened by the evidence, that was one of them.
So it was not just the French, where the US fought the cause of war. The US reneged on many agreements with Indian tribes, we know that. And in fact, reneged in the War of 1812, the US basically got the British to concede to the US at the expense of their Indian allies, which the US persuaded the British to sell out their Indian allies.
The US continued that pattern. US behavior, as anybody who's Mexican knows, toward Mexico was not respectful of commitments. The United States made immigration treaties with China in the 1860s, wanting to get labor to come to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
Within 15 years, it was passing legislation which revoked those treaties, in fact, prevented Chinese who had a right by US law or US administrative action to return to the United States, having visited their families in China, turn them back on the high seas with no warning. So I didn't publish that study, I became much more cynical about the reputational incentives to keep one's agreements.
Henry Ferrell: So a different project which I think was not a failure, but perhaps didn't get as much attention as it might, was your work together with another person who later won a Nobel Prize, Lin Ostrom. So I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about what you wanted to do in that, and what value there is to international relations scholars working with people like Lin, and what their ideas can do to help us understand the world.
Robert Keohane: Well, it's a wonderful question, and Lin was a wonderful person. This came about simply from reading. I had never met Lin Ostrom. I had published After Hegemony, and I was on a trip to Norway. And in the old days, before the laptop, you had to be very careful about what books you took on trips, because they were very heavy. And if after half an hour of an airplane ride, it was nonsense, you were stuck with this book, either you left it on planes, which I did often, told the flight attendants, I'm not, this is not an accident. This is in the, I'm leaving this on purpose. I don't want it.
So there were costs. So I checked out, well, it's probably, it looks pretty interesting. So I took it over and read it, therefore, very carefully on a long plane flight. And Linz in her book on cooperation, the 1990 Commons book, she has a set of propositions about cooperation.
They're about small-scale cooperation. They're almost identical to the propositions in After A Gemini. The scale is different. Her scale is tiny. My scale was macro. Reciprocity was at the core of both arguments. And institutions were at the core of both arguments.
So I got back. I wrote her a letter. This was, I think, before email. Maybe it was just the beginning. I think it was just the beginning of email. You can have emails, but not much else in social media. And said, you know, we have the same theory, but we don't know each other and we have different domains.
So we both had access to… I was at Harvard. We had access to resources. So we set up a couple of meetings, one at Harvard, on global and local commons, and then a later one with more developed papers in Bloomington.
And that led to the volume that Henry's referring to. Now, my big regret about that is that I'd let Lyn say, well, we'll publish this as part of, as a special issue of my journal, which wasn't very heavily read, and we'll let Sage Publications, I hope I'm not offending anybody here, be the publisher. And Sage has buried it. It was never promoted. And there's some good essays in that volume, especially one by Ken Oye and someone named Maxwell, on common issues. But it never got, as you said, never got the attention because it wasn't promoted.
So if you compare it with work I've done of edited volumes that appeared in International Organization, which became, wasn't always, became the leading IR journal, the uptake is very, very different. So I would reverse that. I would push back on that and say, no, no, we're going to go to some, we're not going to go to your little journal, we're going to go to some more prominent place.
Henry Ferrell: Good advice, I think, for anybody trying to make a splash in the world. Although I think it's also, it's harder for journal issues like that, which are, by their definition, they're trying to build connections between different fields. It sometimes is harder. So I can imagine that Sage or another publisher, which is thinking in terms of how do we market this to X or how do we market it to Y, may not have as easy a time when it's something that is genuinely difficult to classify.
Robert Keohane: Well, the world has changed too. This was before the Internet was so dominant. Now there's no market for it. There's no market, zero market for that kind of edited volume because it's appeared in a journal and it's readily available to all of us online and nobody's going to buy it.
Whereas then, if you didn't get the journal and paper and you heard about it, well, you had a big incentive to buy the volume because there's some good articles in it and you otherwise don't have them available. So I think technology has wiped out the market for that kind of edited volume. And that was probably happening about the same time. So whether I may be misattributing causality, it may not be that it was Sage, it may be the world was changing.
Rebecca Keohane: Publishers are very reluctant to publish edited volumes at this point.
Robert Keohane: Right, right. And they should be. They can't sell.
Rebecca Slayton: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So can you say a little bit about problems in world politics today and questions that you think people should be asking, really big questions, but maybe aren't asking? Are there particular questions you think people should be pursuing and that your work applies to or could be expanded upon?
Robert Keohane: That’s a great question. This takes us back to Kim Stanley Robinson. He raises a question.
And that is, suppose climate catastrophe looks likely. And suppose that a large number of people, preponderant, educated people, take the view that Kim Stanley Robinson does, that we're probably doomed, and that many of these climate sci-fi authors take, that we're probably doomed as a species. Or even more extreme, that there's nothing we can really do about it. It's going to happen. It's already, as you were implying before, already baked in. And so the human race is on its last century. Take the really negative side. What does that do to how human beings think existentially?
What does it do about how people think about religion? How they think about ethics? Does ethics depend on a view that there's a long future? Does religion depend on this? I think it would change, if you think about the humanities, it's a fundamental change in many of the ways we think about human life. If that occurs, I'm too much of an optimist to believe that will happen. I'm a technological optimist, as you saw before. I think we're going to somehow wiggle our way out of that one. But if we don't, then I think it raises these huge, these are really existential problems, in a deeper sense than the Kogan-Hale-Green sense of existential problems.
Rebecca Slayton: Maybe one of the problems is that it's more existential for some than for others, so that some can buy their ways out of it more than others. I mean, some countries are going to disappear. Others will be able to adapt more. And so the incentives to do the right thing are not necessarily in place with the most powerful players.
Robert Keohane: That’s right. And it's also right within countries, as some of this climate science fiction indicates, right? It might be in certain countries will be more, less vulnerable to these changes than other countries.
On the other hand, there's a lot of vulnerability. Consider the mass migration scenario. So the United States is very vulnerable to mass migration. And it's clear it's one of the biggest issues in American politics and one of the hardest to resolve the immigration issue, which will more and more be driven by climate. It's not really for the US less driven by climate so far than for Europe, but it will be driven by climate. And I think that's another dimension of the issue.
Henry Ferrell: So, like many other political scientists of my generation, I was expected to read and to absorb the lessons of King, Keohane and Verba designing social inquiry, this methodological textbook which you and two colleagues wrote. So I'm wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about where that book came from, how that book was intended to work, and what you think of the book's impact on the field a couple of decades later.
Robert Keohane: Well, thanks. It's ironic because until 1988, I had written not a word about methodology, and probably hadn't thought about methodology. If somebody had reviewed my work and said, well, Keohane is a methodological innocent, and maybe there are some interesting insights here intuitively, but from a certain point of view, it's not really political science because it doesn't have a clear methodology.
I was chair of the Harvard Government Department, and in that we were hiring lots of people in the late 80s, a flush time for Harvard. I went to 24 job talks in the course of one year, and in about half the occasions, maybe two-thirds, the job talk was dead on arrival after 10 minutes because it was clear there was no clarity about what the methods were and what the rationale for doing this inquiry was.
So I complained. I'm a complainer in some way. I complained to colleagues about this. And my brilliant colleague, Gary King, said, well, he agreed. And then I said, well, you know, we don't teach our graduate students this. Why should we expect the outsiders coming in to talk about methods? We don't teach them ourselves. We have no courses in general. We have all these courses on quantitative methods. We have no courses in general on methods in general or qualitative methods.
So Gary, of course, says, well, let's teach a course. And Sid Verba and I had previously been friends not knowing each other super well. He was this famous political scientist when I joined the department. And Sid and I had said, well, we'll teach a course together sometime. It was kind of a throwaway line. So Sid said he would join us.
So the three of us then put together a course. And after the first year, where it seemed to be interesting, and certainly a lot of the students seemed to think it was worthwhile, we decided we'll teach it again. And Gary said, well, this time we're going to make a book out of it. It wasn't Sid's and my ambition. And so we sat in my office every week, once or twice a week at lunchtime, working out the argument. And it's King, Kohane, Verba, because Gary had the largest impact on it.
But the way it's presented has a lot to do with me and with Sid, although some of the core arguments, I think, are King's. And I learned a lot from it. It's maybe a case where I've learned in a joint project, maybe I've learned the most. Partly because when you start with zero knowledge, you can learn things fast. You aren't redundant at all because you don't know anything to start with. So that was, to me, a very useful enterprise. And I was pleased and surprised at how much it's become sort of something that graduate students have to read, even though they may not be pleased by this situation.
Rebeca Slayton: Well, thank you very much for spending the time to talk with us. This is very enlightening.
Henry Ferrell: Thank you.
**Robert Keohane:**Thank you for the questions. I hope it was interesting.
Narrator: That was Robert Keohane in conversation with Henry Farrell and Rebecca Slayton. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the center's people, projects and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
Until next time, from everyone at CASBUS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.