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The Foreign Imposition of Domestic Institutions John M The Foreign Imposition of Domestic Institutions John M. Owen, IV International relations research has paid little attention to why states often spend precious resources building and maintaining domestic institutions in other states. I identify 198 cases of forcible domestic institutional promotion, the most costly form of such interventions, between 1555 and 2000. I note several patterns in the data: these interventions come in three historical clusters; they are carried out by states of several regime types; states engage in the practice repeatedly; target states tend to be undergoing internal instability; states tend to promote their own institutions; and targets tend to be of strategic importance. The most intensive periods of promotion coincide with high transnational ideological tension and high international insecu- rity. I argue that these two conditions interact: forcible promotion is most likely when great powers (1) need to expand their power; and (2) find that, by imposing on smaller states those institutions most likely to keep their ideological confreres in power, they can bring those states under their influence. Although in periods of high insecurity domestic variables alone may account for institutional impositions, such impositions may nonetheless extend the promoting states’ influence and thereby alter the balance of international power. Some assert that, if institutions did not affect international relations, then states would not devote valuable resources to their creation and preservation.1 Among international relations scholars this assertion carries some weight. Its primary opponents, structural realists, agree that wasteful, irrational behavior by states is I thank the University of Virginia’s Sesquicentennial Fellowship and the Center of International Studies at Princeton University for generous support, participants in the CIS Visiting Fellows’ Seminar at Princeton, and participants in Paul Stephan’s and John Setear’s seminar on international relations at the University of Virginia Law School for comments on the data and arguments. I am grateful to Jorge Benitez, Rachel Brewster, Mark Haas, Howard Hechler, Gideon Rose, Kenneth Schultz, Randall Schweller, Paul Stephan, Mira Sucharov, Topher Turner, David Welch, Mark Zacher, three anonymous referees, and especially Jeffrey Legro and the editors of IO for comments on previous drafts of this article. For research assistance, I thank Rachel Vanderhill and Eric Cox. Any errors are the author’s sole responsibility. 1. See, for example, the exchange between Keohane and Martin 1995; and Mearsheimer 1995. International Organization 56, 2, Spring 2002, pp. 375–409 © 2002 by The IO Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 376 International Organization selected out by the international system. If building and maintaining institutions were wasteful, then states would be socialized into stopping the practice, especially in a competitive security environment.2 The institutions at issue are usually international, but the same reasoning may be applied to states’ promotions of domestic institutions within other states. Domestic institutional promotion is arguably as common as, and sometimes more costly than, the construction of international institutions; it certainly has a longer pedigree. Since the dawn of the modern states system in sixteenth-century Europe, states have used bribery, coercion, and brute force to modify and maintain other states’ internal regimes. The Counter-Reformation (1550–1648) was partly constituted by the efforts of Catholic and Protestant princes to forcibly overturn the established (institutional) religion in one another’s states. The French Revolution and reaction to it (1789–1849) and the ideological struggles of the twentieth century (1917–91) involved more clusters of forcible domestic regime promotion. In calmer times governments have offered material inducements to foreign states to alter or keep their institutions; they have also used various covert means to the same ends. Since the end of the Cold War the United States and its allies have used economic incentives to promote liberal institutions in Russia and China, and force to impose them in Haiti and the Balkans. In spite of its historical, theoretical, and policy importance, we have little literature on the causes and consequences of the promotion of domestic institutions. Historians and political scientists have examined U.S. efforts to promote democ- racy, but none has subsumed such efforts under this more general phenomenon. This article focuses on forcible promotions, or what I call impositions, for two reasons. First, uses of force to promote domestic institutions are particularly puzzling because our theories on the use of force tend to be least concerned with states’ domestic institutions. Second, using forcible interventions reduces selection bias because such interventions are the easiest to identify. In this article I identify 198 cases of forcible institutional promotion, the most costly variety, since 1555. The data show the following: The great majority of cases have occurred in one of three historical clusters (1600–50, 1790–1850, and 1917–today). Legitimist (absolute) monarchies, constitutional monarchies, republics, dictatorships, and communist states have all often promoted institutions. Most promoting states are great powers. Most promoters engage in the practice repeatedly. Almost half of the target states border the promoting states; another quarter are close neighbors of the promoters. A significant number of targets are undergoing civil unrest. States usually promote their own institutions. Finally, the incidence of forcible promotion rises with transnational ideological strife, and especially sharply when such strife coincides with high international insecurity. Of the 198 cases, 141 take place in such periods. Taken together, these findings suggest that variables stressed by competing theories of international relations—ideas and institutions on the one hand, power on 2. See Waltz 1979, 128; and Walt 1996, 3. Imposition of Domestic Institutions 377 the other—are all necessary to an explanation of the phenomenon. I argue that the majority of foreign impositions of domestic institutions are explained by an interaction of ideology and power. Transnational ideological struggles cause ideo- logues across states to favor close relations with great powers ruled by their chosen ideology. A country that needs to increase its power—such as one involved in a hot or cold war—may pull lesser states into its sphere of influence by promoting in those states the institutions called for by the ideology; such institutions make it more likely that the ideologues supporting them will rule. Thus domestic institutional imposition can alter the balance of international power. It may also exacerbate the security dilemma and provoke counter-promotion by rival states. This argument may not explain all cases of forcible institutional promotion. Some historical periods feature moderate amounts of promotion yet low systemic insecu- rity or ideological tension. Domestic-political factors alone, including moral norms and fear of ideological subversion, may account for many cases. Even then, states may alter the balance of power, wittingly or not, by imposing domestic institutions. U.S. policymakers promoting democracy abroad today need to be mindful that, in helping people in the Balkans and elsewhere, they are also extending U.S. power, which as always incurs costs as well as benefits. The Puzzle of Domestic Institutional Promotion Institutional promotion has been little studied as a general phenomenon. In separate studies, Werner3 and Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson4 have identified conditions under which a war victor is likely to overthrow the government of a vanquished state. Both studies advance our understanding of institutional promotion, and some of their findings are corroborated here. But both begin only in 1816, use data sets that include a higher threshold of violence than that included here, and omit most of the variables examined in this article. A number of scholars have analyzed the causes of one particular set of institutional promotions, namely, U.S. efforts to promote liberal democracy in other countries.5 None of the scholars treat U.S. democracy promotion as an instance of a broader empirical phenomenon, and so the explanations they offer are hampered by selection bias. Domestic institutional promotion is any effort by state A to create, preserve, or alter the political institutions (as distinguished from the ruler or government) within state B. Although imperial states often promote their institutions in regions they annex or directly rule, I study only those states that retain juridical sovereignty. Why an imperial state imposes institutions upon areas it directly rules—that is, non- sovereign territories—is an interesting question in its own right. But institutional promotion in (otherwise) sovereign states is particularly interesting because it is a 3. Werner 1996. 4. Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson 1996. 5. See Smith 1994; Robinson 1996; and Cox, Ikenberry, and Inoguchi 2000. 378 International Organization matter for mainstream systemic international relations (IR) theory. Yet systemic IR theories cannot explain it, inasmuch as they abstract from states’ domestic proper- ties. For all of their disputes with structural realists, many liberal neo and construc- tivist theorists agree that IR theory should be systemic, inasmuch as theories that include
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