Compliance with International Agreements

The study of compliance with international agreements has gained momentum over the past few years. Since the conclusion of World War II, this research agenda had been marginalized by the predominance of realist approaches to the study of international relations. However, alternative perspectives have developed that suggest that international law and institutions are important influences on the conduct of international politics. This review examines four perspectives and assesses their contribution to understanding the conditions under which states comply with international agreements. Despite severe conceptual and methodological problems, this research has contributed significantly to our understanding of the relationship between international politics and international law and institutions. A central theme in much recent international relations scholarship is the growing role of formal international agreements and supranational authority in the ordering of relations among sovereign states. The growing range of authoritative commitments is evidenced by the movement since World War II to codify customary practices into explicit international legal instruments. The range of international agreements has grown rapidly over the past 40 years with the development of rules that regulate economic, social, communications, environmental, and human rights behavior. Evidence of the growth in supranational authority includes not only the number of international organizations that have mushroomed in the postwar years, but also, most strikingly, the growth and de1094-2939/98/0616-0075$08.00 75 velopment of legally binding forms of third-party dispute settlement: The evolution of the dispute-settlement procedures of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) into the more formal and less discretionary structure of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the 1996 inauguration of the International Maritime Court in Hamburg to handle disputes arising from the United Nations’ Law of the Seas, the growing activism of the European Court of Justice, and the recent flurry of contentious case activity at the International Court of Justice1 are all examples of states agreeing voluntarily to give up a portion of the most basic aspect of their sovereignty—the authority to act as the final judge of one’s own actions—to authoritative international institutions. These developments are a puzzle for the study of international relations, the traditional assumption of which has been that national governments generally desire to preserve their legal sovereignty, particularly the sole authority to judge the acceptability of their policies in the international sphere. According to much mainline theorizing, states make commitments—especially formal legal commitments—either cautiously or cynically, and are reluctant to delegate decision making to supranational bodies. Over the past two decades, a good deal of theoretical and empirical work has been devoted to explaining why states have entered into this vast web of agreements voluntarily. Much of this work has examined issues relating to international economic and social interactions among states (the primary focus of this essay). Explanations have focused on the functional need for agreements due to the rising level of interdependence (Keohane 1984), the desire for greater regularity and predictability in actors’ mutual relations (Brierly 1963), and growing state responsibility in the economic and social realm (Röling 1960, Friedmann 1964). Dominant international-relations paradigms generally hold that governments agree to sacrifice a degree of their legal freedom of action in order to secure policy changes from others or to gain influence over other states’ policies (Keohane 1993). Until recently, far less attention has been devoted to understanding why governments actually comply with such agreements, given that they can be costly in the short term and are not likely to be centrally enforced. Four broad approaches to this question are reviewed here: realist theory, rational functionalism, domestic regime–based explanations, and normative approaches. These perspectives are not mutually exclusive, and the less one is willing to strawman the arguments of the major proponents, the clearer become the numerous points of overlap. For example, although realist theory has rarely been articulated in such as way as to take international legal constraints seriously, some of its major proponents would admit that international law compliance is fairly 76 SIMMONS 11During the Cold War, the Court decided only one contentious case on average per year; in 1995, however, the Court had a record number of 13 cases before it. widespread (Morgenthau 1985). Similarly, scholars who focus on normative convergence as a source of compliance hardly rule out coercive processes to encourage such convergence (Bull 1977). Approaches that link domestic regime type with international rule compliance often tap into a deeper set of factors relating to the role of liberal principles and beliefs in securing international behavior consistent with the rule of law (Dixon 1993). Some functionalist arguments point to domestic regime characteristics as a source of “market failure” that make international agreements all the more necessary. Nonetheless, these four broad approaches diverge in important respects and provide a useful way to arrange the growing literature on compliance with international agreements. Despite the recent interest in issues surrounding compliance, and more generally the effects of rules on international politics, the effort to link theory with evidence is still in its infancy. This is partly due to conceptual difficulties in identifying compliance itself. Another obstacle has been methodological: Difficulties in demonstrating causation remain, along with problems of selection bias in the use of cases and the analysis of data. Because the endeavor to understand compliance has been interdisciplinary, involving legal scholars and sociologists as well as political scientists, differing methods of analysis, reasoning, and standards of proof pervade the literature. Although these differences are enriching and have narrowed through scholarly cooperation, they do help account for the disparate nature of much of the relevant literature. The first section of this review discusses the concept of compliance and presents strategies for its measurement. The second section reviews four strands of international relations theory (inserting legal scholarship where arguments are compatible, even if the authors are not self-consciously writing within the tradition under examination) and culls from them a range of explanations and empirical findings regarding international legal commitments and compliance. The third section of this essay draws some conclusions about our knowledge of compliance with international agreements and suggests directions for future research. THE MEANING AND MEASUREMENT OF COMPLIANCE In his groundbreaking study on compliance with international public authority, Oran Young (1979) suggested: “Compliance can be said to occur when the actual behavior of a given subject conforms to prescribed behavior, and noncompliance or violation occurs when actual behavior departs significantly from prescribed behavior.” This definition distinguishes compliance behavior from treaty implementation (the adoption of domestic rules or regulations that are meant to facilitate, but do not in themselves constitute, compliance with inCOMPLIANCE 77