The Time Factor → Regimes and Negotiations
p.i.c: kannan status: Yes
The Time Factor
- Macro sense = past events → impacts present and prospective of bargaining process
- Positive impact: Time and the expectation of harmonious processes in the future will help negotiators to be more flexible in give-and-take.
- Negative impact: negative expectation fed by bad experiences in the past will leave negotiators less open to a fruitful bargaining process
- Micro sense = boundary to bargaining
- Negative impact on the success of the negotiation process: shortage of time limits the opportunities for finding integrative solutions, pressuring via the use of time as deadlines to reach conclusion.
- Pre-negotiation and post-agreement bargaining as a solution
Order Through Organization
How can we deal with the challenges (conflicts) resulting from the structure, the system or the environment we exist in and how can we navigate within inter-state relations?
As noted in the previous chapter, negotiations have been used since time immemorial as an instrument to reach goals in situations in which parties strive towards a common goal, when at the same time their interests are not exactly running parallel.
Regimes:
- device to make agreement possible, created because of the lack of an international framework with enforcement capability.
- It is cheaper for states to have consultations on a permanent basis than constantly have to organize separate conferences.
International Regimes is a natural way of group of countries trying to deal with their differences in a peaceful way.
Hans Morgenthau notes ‘Each of the three world wars of the last century an international Government. The Holy Alliance followed the Napoleonic Wars; the League of Nations, the First World War; the United Nations, the Second World War’ (Morgenthau, 1967: 438). Groom adds ‘[I]t was not until […] Vienna in 1815 that institutions of the modern type emerged.
As long as the international organization serves the interests of a supreme power, it continues to exist; when this is no longer the case, international organizations will disappear
According to this view, the orderly effect of international organizations is therefore restricted and only as lasting as the international power structures themselves.
If we consider this notion in the context of time where for example at the beginning of the 1980s, the United States was considered a supreme power past its prime or it was experiencing a hegemonic decline. Therefore in order to guarantee its position of power and to ensure maximum control over prospective inter-state negotiations, the US had created a great number of international organizations.
Regimes and Negotiations
Depledge observes that ‘[g]lobal negotiations are often closely associated with the formation and development of regimes, defined as sets of both formal and informal rules, institutions and procedures aimed at governing action in a particular issue area, usually based on a founding treaty’, while ‘an important function performed by regimes is precisely to provide an efficient framework for negotiations’
Spector distinguishes three kinds of national, and three kinds of international regime negotiations. On the national level, he identifies:
- acceptance/ratification negotiations
- rule-making negotiations and enforcement
- monitoring and reporting negotiations.
As for international regime negotiations, he classifies:
- regime formation negotiations
- regime governance negotiations
- regime adjustment negotiations
It is important to recognize that regime and negotiation are symbiotic: while regimes are created through national and international negotiation processes, they then protect these processes and thereby enhance their effectiveness in reaching outcomes. Moreover, ‘for the most part, exogenous shocks or crises increase the probability of success in efforts to negotiate the terms of international regimes’