Title: The New Sovereignty: Compliance with International Regulatory Agreements
Abstract: The New Sovereignty: Compliance with International Regulatory Agreements, by Abram Chayes and Antonia Handler Chayes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Pp. 285. $49.95 (hardcover) . I. INTRODUCTION Just after the end of the second World War, and at the dawn of the modern age of technological innovation, the future prime minister of the United Kingdom, Sir Anthony Eden, told the House of Commons that [e]very succeeding scientific discovery makes greater nonsense of old-time conceptions of sovereignty.1 Five decades later, despite the sustained assault mounted not only by science but by the dissolution, association, and recombination of what used to be thought of as indisputably sovereign states, and by the expanding importance of intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, lawyers have been slow to discard those conceptions. Sovereignty is still seen as a defining criterion of legal personality, rendering more difficult questions regarding the juridical status of such entities as the European Union, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and insurgent forces exercising government authority in such places as Liberia, Bosnia, Burma, and Sri Lanka.2 Despite both its title and the need for a scholarly yet provocative book on the evolution of the concept of sovereignty at the end of the twentieth century, this is not the set of issues to which Abram and Antonia Chayes turn their attention in The New Sovereignty: Compliance with International Regulatory Agreements.3 Rather than a theory of sovereignty, new or otherwise, they present a theory of behavior modification. More accurately, it is a theory of getting states to do what they should do, either because they accepted obligations voluntarily, as in the case of treaties and other agreements, or because obligations were imposed on them by other legal processes, such as the maturation of custom into binding law. The book's principal thesis is that noncompliance with norms is usually the result, not of deliberate contumacy, but of a lack of capacity, sluggishness brought on by domestic political paralysis, or, occasionally, ambiguity in the rule itself.4 Compliance, therefore, is most efficiently secured not by coercive measures, or even by threatened or actual withdrawal of membership rights in organizations, but by interactive, cooperative efforts and transparency.5 Such efforts result not only in improved behavior by recalcitrant states but in improvement of the regimes themselves. The most valuable and persuasive parts of the book are those in which the Chayeses draw upon their first-hand experience to discuss specific regulatory treaty regimes of which they have been participants or close students.6 The least effective are those in which generalizations are hazarded with insufficient empirical support and theoretical underpinnings that are not developed with adequate rigor. The volume also suffers from inconsistent and even incorrect readings of U.S. law and policy (U.S. law is regularly deployed as illustrating key aspects of the authors' thesis), which undermine some of the credibility that the authors work so hard to earn elsewhere in the book. In particular, the critical argument that coercive sanctions do not work fails to take into account other objectives, beyond bringing about compliance with treaties, that states have in view when they decide that other states' behavior is intolerable and requires a response. II. THE NEW SOVEREIGNTY The agenda in The New Sovereignty is the development of a theory under which the community can attain a level of compliance with what the authors call international regulatory agreements superior to that commonly observed.7 To that end, they set out to prove, first, that sanctions-whether collective or unilateral, economic or military-do not work. …
Publication Year: 1995
Publication Date: 1995-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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