Coercion and Rational Bargaining: Two sides of the same coin?

As our group worked on our interactive presentation regarding coercive power versus rational bargaining, I began thinking more on what exactly constitutes “coercion”. Typically, for an individual or at the state level, it is using some means of power to force someone or some country to do something they otherwise wouldn’t do. In the international realm, it’s typically considered the threat of some type of military force or implementation of trade or economic sanctions.  But after researching and presenting on Amnesty International and seeing the two presentations on the World Bank and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), I decided to expand my definition and rethink “power”.

            Amnesty International quite effectively uses the power of shame to achieve it’s goal of universal human rights, thoroughly researching and then publicly releasing the results of that research to identify which states are failing to provide or actively suppress whatever human right is the focus of the campaign.  As I think we demonstrated, Amnesty has successfully used shaming to motivate states to change repressive practices as well as motivate other states to apply pressure to those repressive regimes. Amnesty has no military and controls no economy but it has significant power in the world to change the behavior of nations.

            I watched the presentations dealing with the World Bank and the UNCTAD, which turned out to provide for an interesting comparison. The World Bank, and by extension the United States via its sole veto, have immense economic power. World Bank loans do not come with only an interest rate and a repayment plan. They come with requirements to restructure economies, open markets, privatize state-owned industries and a host of other possibilities the World Bank deems necessary to negate future World Bank intervention. While the World Bank may be rational in its decision-making, the fact that any particular country needs World Bank assistance means it is in a weakened position to negotiate and quite possibly desperate. Can this be a rational bargaining situation if one of the bargaining parties is in such a weakened position? The only real power it has against the World Bank is the power to walk away from negotiations and it probably does that at the risk of economic collapse. The World Bank may well be offering to throw them a rope, but how much can you argue about the terms when you’re about to fall off the cliff?

            I then watched the presentation on the UNCTAD and came to the conclusion it is the epitome of the rational bargaining idea because it has no inherent power. It has to provide rational analysis and serve as a neutral third party because it has to convince other participants on only the strength of its arguments and the analysis underpinning it. Even the provided examples of the UN Security Council's coercive capacity are limited in power because the UNSC has no standing military or banking system. It relies on its more powerful members to man, enforce, fund, and/or provide credibility to the sanctions, no-fly zones, and other tools to enforce its desired policy. If any one of the five veto-holding members decides against a course of action, there is little the remainder of the UNSC or wider assembly can do to impel action. 

            Thinking further, rational bargaining can work between powerful states but only if the one state possesses sufficient means to negate the other side’s power. An example that comes to mind is the SALT and START nuclear treaties signed between the United States and the USSR. The fact that both countries had sufficient nuclear arms to destroy each other multiple times over made it possible for both to rationally bargain to reduce their nuclear holdings while not truly giving up the power of the weapon itself or tilt the balance to one side or the other.  It made rational sense because nuclear weapons are expensive to design, build, and maintain and both sides were apparently confident that the goal of strategic deterrence could be met with fewer weapons. Contrast that with negotiations with nuclear-free states attempting to acquire them and the balance of power shifts and rational bargaining becomes coercive power, even if the threat of nuclear attack is off the table.

            As we delve further into the subject and I’ve done research and seen additional presentations, I’m beginning to think that power by its very nature is coercive and that if one side has power, it can only be overcome by equal applications of power from an opposite direction, the Newtonian physics of international relations forcing rational bargaining.