著者

三浦 聡

出版者

JAPAN ASSOCIATION OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

雑誌

国際政治 (ISSN:04542215)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2000, no.124, pp.27-44,L7, 2000-05-12 (Released:2010-09-01)

参考文献数

69

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The last quarter century has witnessed a rising scholarly interest in international institutions. Various reviews of the study have identified several schools of thought. Popular among them is a variable-focused typology: power, interests, and ideas, which in turn produces a neorealism-neoliberalism-constructivism trilogy. Also widely accepted is a distinction based on ontology, epistemology, and methodology, the schism of which is between rationalism and constructivism.While building on these works, I pose different questions: How can we conceive of actions and institutions, and how are we to characterize and explore the relationship between them? I would argue that we can answer them in three ways, namely, instrumental, deliberative, and cognitive approaches to international institutions. Appropriating insights of “new institutionalisms” in social sciences, I develop these approaches by explicating three faces of concepts such as rationality, interaction, communication, decision-making procedures, compliance, interests, and ideas.Relying upon the logic of consequentiality, instrumentalists focus on actors' calculation and ask how institutions intervene in the process. Actors live under uncertainty so that exchange of private information becomes an important aspect of strategic interaction. They regard institutions as various types of information and as procedures for aggregating various interests. Institutions are only one among many instruments, and actors utilize them as long as they serve their own interests.The deliberative approach adopts the logic of appropriateness and argues that actors match their choices not with expected consequences but with situations they find themselves in. Actors live in a world of multiple and potentially conflicting roles and rules. Appropriateness of actions, therefore, can be contested so that common standards need to be established in the process of deliberation. Consensus constitutes the basis of communicative action. Actors can change their conception of appropriateness—norms and rules—while transforming their own conception of interests and identities through socialization. Institutions construct the practice of deliberation, serve as reasons for action, and situate deliberation within the overall decision-making process.Cognitivists, with the logic of orthodoxy, explore how actors perceive the world as they know it, and argue that institutions make social cognition possible. Actors live under an ambiguous world. As templates for cognition, schema, scripts, frames, and symbols enable actors to divide the world into many components, to categorize and classify themselves to formulate their identities, and to make the world meaningful. Actors can strategically appropriate these templates from the “cultural toolkit” and construct historical narratives, through which they transform the tools themselves.I conclude with considering some implications of this typology for the furure of theories of international institutions. I propose that we should view rationality as “embedded, ” and inquire conditions under which a particular mode of rationality is dominant. Also, I suggest a need for elaborating and expanding the “theoretical toolkit” presented herein.