Multilateral Treaties (Hoffman)

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Cooperation and Conflict

DOI: 10.1177/0010836708089082 2008; 43; 185 Cooperation and Conflict

Robert A. Denemark and Matthew J. Hoffmann Just Scraps of Paper?: The Dynamics of Multilateral Treaty-Making

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Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of the Nordic International Studies AssociationVol. 43(2): 185–219. © NISA 2008 www.nisanet.orgSAGE Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore www.sagepublications.com0010-8367. DOI: 10.1177/0010836708089082

Just Scraps of Paper?

The Dynamics of Multilateral Treaty-Making

ROBERT A. DENEMARK AND MATTHEW J. HOFFMANN

ABSTRACTDespite its importance in the global system, the literature provides lit-tle guidance on how treaty-making emerged as a well-accepted prac-tice. In either assuming the appropriateness of treaty-making (and thenanalysing design) or treating treaties as strategic choices in the pursuitof gains (without analysing how treaties came to be a way to pursuegains), the current literature discounts the emergence and evolutionof treaty-making. This lacuna contributes to a biased view of treaty-making as the epiphenomenal result of specific, ahistorical factors,rather than as a patterned, historical practice. We contend that the evo-lution of the practice of treaty-making is significant for questions ofdesign/compliance, the future of multilateral interaction and globalorder. In addressing this concern, we pursue two linked goals. The firstis self-consciously descriptive. We introduce a dataset of multilateraltreaties that provides a novel picture of treaty-making across time,space and issue-areas. The second goal is explanatory. We develop andtest a social constructivist and path-dependent explanation for thepatterns of treaty-making evident in the data, especially 150 years ofexponential growth, the spread of treaty-making across multiple issuesand the diffusion of the practice across the world.

Keywords: increasing returns; multilateral treaties and treaty-making;path dependence; social constructivism

Introduction

Early in the twentieth century, treaties were famously described as mere‘scraps of paper’, and in the ensuing years treaties have been criticized aslittle more than traps set for naïve liberals by unscrupulous dictators(Beilenson, 1969). Even if treaties on the allegedly unimportant matters aresometimes adhered to, it is suggested that important matters cannot be leftto the unreliable confines of pen and ink. Some have gone so far as to sug-gest that the entire idea of cooperative multilateral interaction is a chimera



(Mearsheimer, 1994/5). These criticisms are popular, but unsupportable.Indeed, it is odd that the ‘scrap of paper’ critique survived, given the con-text in which it was made. Its author was German Chancellor Theobald vonBethmann-Hollweg, who believed he had managed relations with GreatBritain sufficiently well to allow Germany’s 1914 invasion of Belgium toproceed despite the UK pledge to uphold Belgian neutrality. The Britishambassador reported that upon hearing that the UK would live up to itsagreement, the German Chancellor asked if war was to be waged: ‘… justfor a word — “neutrality,” a word which in war time had so often been dis-regarded — just for a scrap of paper …’ (Horne, 1923: vol. 1, p. 406). TheBritish honoured their agreement, and went to war against Germany. TheChancellor’s career entered a steep decline as a result. He was chased fromoffice and Germany went on to suffer a costly and humiliating defeat.

The British did not support Belgium because of a scrap of paper. Theymade an agreement to do so because that is what appeared to best serveBritish interests, and they wished this to be well and publicly understood.We contend that decisions to negotiate individual treaties are neither sep-arate from other actor strategies in the global system, nor do they beginwith a blank slate. Reus-Smit (1997: 558) asserts that ‘… contractual inter-national law and multilateralism have become the dominant institutionalpractices governing modern international society’ and we argue that, overtime, states have come to accept and internalize treaty-making as theappropriate foundation for both. Despite its important role in the globalsystem, the literature provides little guidance on how treaty-makingemerged as a well-accepted practice. From early interest in internationallaw and formal organizations through the debates between realism andidealism, then neo-realism and neo-liberalism, onto the current discussionsof institutional design and compliance, extant analyses of multilateraltreaties tend to examine either the specific architecture of agreements toassess the factors that influence the probability of compliance and effective-ness, or the strategic use of treaties to attain relative or absolute gains(Grieco, 1990; Martin, 1993; Goldstein et al., 2000; Leeds et al., 2000; Pahre,2001; Koremenos et al., 2001; Leeds, 2003; Mitchell, 2003).These foci are use-ful and have facilitated significant advances in our knowledge. They areincomplete, however. In either assuming the appropriateness of treaty-mak-ing (and then getting on with analysing design) or treating treaties as strate-gic choices in the pursuit of gains (without analysing how treaties came to beunderstood as a way to pursue gains), the current literature ignores theemergence and evolution of this practice. These studies contribute to abiased view of treaty-making as the epiphenomenal result of specific, ahis-torical factors rather than as a patterned, historical behavioural practice.This leaves us unable to appreciate how this practice has evolved, how itsevolution influences questions of design/compliance, how it might change inthe future, and how it connects with larger questions of global order.

To address this concern we pursue two linked goals. The first is self-consciously descriptive. We introduce a dataset of multilateral treaties withwhich to consider the role that treaty-making has played in the global system.

186 COOPERATION AND CONFLICT 43(2)



Multilateral treaties, broadly defined as those that have been signed bythree or more actors, tend to represent areas in which there exists substan-tial agreement, and are more often available to the public. To discover whatpatterns of treaty-making might exist across time, space and issue-area, wecreated the Multilateral Agreement and Treaty Record Set (MATRS). Thedataset includes 6976 multilateral treaties signed between 1595 and 1995.The MATRS dataset was constructed by consolidating information fromseveral compendia of multilateral agreements and specialty lists, and con-tains data on the title, date of signature and two substantive categorizations(one broader and one more specific). For about 6000 treaties we also haveinformation on signators and place of signing (see Appendix 1 for moreinformation on the construction of the database).

Our treatment of the multilateral treaties in the MATRS dataset differsfrom other orientations. The MATRS dataset is designed to facilitateresearch into the patterns of multilateral treaty-making. Treaties are con-sidered here as discrete and observable instances of a given form of co-operation, as opposed to indicators of the status of agreements in specificissue-areas, or examples of specific elements of design. We recognize, ofcourse, that not all treaties are of equal importance. The founding instru-ments of the United Nations play a very different role in global politics thanthe 1934 agreement unifying methods of analysing cheeses. But we areinterested in the evolution of the practice of treaty-making and it is there-fore crucial to understand both system-defining agreements and the day-to-day business of global affairs that are manifested through multilateraltreaties. The global distribution of treaty-making, rather than the role orefficacy of individual treaties, is our analytical target.1 This systemic exam-ination of treaty-making makes visible the entrenched-ness of the practicein a way that examining treaties individually or sectorally cannot.

In brief, the descriptive enterprise finds that multilateral treaty-makinghas increased over time, and has been doing so systematically, and expo-nentially, from the 1850s until quite recently. The empirical pattern oftreaty-making across time, space and issue-area confirms the sense of theliterature that multilateral interaction has been increasing, but confoundsmuch of what has been suggested about the reasons for this increase.Interdependence (as traditionally measured by trade volume) does not cap-ture the treaty-making dynamic, nor is there a simple relation to the growthof the number of actors or the presence of a hegemon. Most surprisingly,multilateral treaty-making activity does not emerge as a response to crisis.Far from being crisis-driven, the consistent increase in treaty-makingappears to be only temporarily crisis-interrupted.

The second goal of this work is explanatory. The patterns that emerge inthe first part of this work, especially the 150 years of exponential growth,appear to be most plausibly understood through the lens of social con-structivism. Several additional patterns (transference across time and issuearea, geographic spread, persistence of locations of treaty-signing and per-haps even the recent downturn in multilateral treaties) are also consistent with constructivist explanations.

DENEMARK AND HOFFMANN: MULTILATERAL TREATY-MAKING 187



Patterns of Treaty-Making and Conventional Wisdom

We begin with the broadest picture of multilateral treaty activity over thepast 400 years. Figure 1 presents the number of multilateral treaties signedeach year from 1595 to 1995, and immediately challenges traditional wis-dom. Those who assume that multilateralism has increased over time arecorrect, yet the explosion of treaty-making in the past 150 years is quite dra-matic. Exponential growth is notable for nearly the entire period, andnot just following the Second World War, as is conventionally argued.Furthermore, while multilateralism as a mode of interaction might wellhave suffered political attacks from the 1980s, multilateral treaty signingspeaked in the 1960s and, following a decline, levelled off in the 1980s andenjoyed a mild resurgence in the 1990s. Beyond challenging conventionalwisdom about how much multilateral treaty-making there is and how it isdistributed over time, Figure 1 also casts doubt on four common conjec-tures about multilateral treaty-making: that it should be related to crises,demographic shifts in the international system, alterations in (mainly eco-nomic) connectivity and hegemonic influence.

First, there is no evidence that multilateral treaty-making is a crisis-driven activity or that as crises fade into historical memory our propensityto make treaties declines. Certainly, the two world wars were followed byincreased treaty activity, but what is remarkable is how the post-war pat-terns return to the trajectories of the pre-war eras. Multilateral treaty-making does not appear crisis-driven so much as crisis-interrupted. Even withthe slate wiped clean by the events of 1918 and 1945, and the opportunity toremake the international system, states returned to the practice and priortrajectory of multilateral treaty-making.

Second, we might be concerned that the number of multilateral treatieswould increase as the number of sovereign states rises. This relationship isnot a certainty. It could be that states that are new to the system, especiallythe relatively small ones that emerged from decolonization from the 1950sto the 1970s, and again after 1989, would tend to join existing agreements orfollow more powerful states into new agreements, as opposed to sponsoringtheir own. Assuming that additional states would nonetheless tend toincrease the number of agreements, this might provide an explanation forsome of the increase noted in Figure 1. Figure 2 casts doubt on the efficacyof using demographic shifts to explain treaty-making over time, showingthat there is a complex relationship between the number of states in the sys-tem and the number of treaties signed. We may see a threshold effect oreven an inversion, but the signing of multilateral treaties is no simple func-tion of the addition of new actors to the global system. Bivariate regressionresults (Model 1 in Table 1) appear to support a more direct relationship,but when the post-war period is controlled for, as in Model 2 in Table 1, therelationship between the number of states in the system and treaties signeddisappears.2

A third argument concerns the increase in treaty-making that mightemerge from an increase in the interaction of nation-states. Assuming thattreaties emerge at least in part from the discovery of collective problems,





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and the search for collection solutions, the more interdependent statesbecome, the more incentives for treaty-making we might expect. Increasingtrade, important both in its own right and as the most generally agreed-upon surrogate measure of interdependence, does not appear to explain therise of multilateral treaties. Figure 3 contrasts the growth of internationaltrade with multilateral treaty signings over a period of 40 years thatincludes both increases and decreases in treaty behaviour. The figure castsdoubt on the ability of (trade-based) interdependence to explain treaty-making patterns. Models 3, 4 and 5 of Table 1 also question the efficacy ofexplaining the growth of treaty-signing with traditional markers of interde-pendence. While trade is a significant variable in all three models, it has thewrong sign, indicating that increasing trade volume is correlated with adecrease in the number of treaties signed per year. There is no simple rela-tionship between interdependence and treaty-making.

Finally, those who portray multilateralism as a post-Second World Warphenomenon driven by the hegemony of the US are at best only partially cor-rect (Martin, 1993; Ruggie, 1993b; Ikenberry, 2001).While multilateral treaty-making surged in the 20 years following the Second World War, this isremarkable not for its novelty but rather for how it fits within a pattern ofaccelerating multilateral treaty-making that began a century prior. Figure 1casts suspicion on any suggestion that the incidence of multilateral treatiesought to rise or decline with any given distribution of power. Treaty-makingdid not suffer with the decline of the British (circa 1885 to 1910), nor enjoyunusual increases with the rise of the US (circa 1945 to 1955).With the excep-tion of the largest and most disruptive wars, treaty-making continues apace.3

This lack of apparent impact between hegemony and treaty-making isinteresting given the prevalence of suggestions about such a link. Not all ofthe arguments are consistent. Dominant powers, especially those dedicatedto representative forms of rule, are suggested to facilitate more agreements(Keohane, 1984; Ikenberry, 2001). Alternatively, such powers may eschewagreements given problems of group size and their lack of a need for col-lective support (Oye, 1986; Taylor, 1987). Or their decline might provideincentives for others to engage in increased cooperation (Krasner, 1982;Keohane, 1984; Hasencleaver, 1997). Certainly, as Ruggie (1993b) contends,‘American hegemony’ was important, but the existence and promulgationof multilateral treaties from 1850 to 1945 appears to have had a profoundeffect on the manner in which the emergent US sought to order the globalsystem.4 What the data force us to consider is that hegemony may affectmultilateral treaty-making less than the acceptance of the practice oftreaty-making influences hegemonic behaviour. In the case of hegemonyand the establishment of a multilateral treaty system, the traditional causalarrow may have to be reversed (Jönsson and Hall, 2005).

Explaining Multilateral Treaty-Making

Much of what we have come to expect about multilateral treaty-making doesnot fit with how multilateral treaty signings are distributed through time.





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When assessing conjectures empirically, we note that extant understandingsof treaty-making cannot account for the most striking feature of Figure 1,the century-long exponential increase. One explanation for this failure is thatmost aspects of conventional wisdom about multilateral treaties assumethey are essentially reactive. They assume that multilateral treaty-makingresponds to politics. ‘Politics as usual’ is not multilateral. Something happens(i.e. crisis, change in connectivity, hegemonic transition, demographic shift)and we suddenly need multilateral treaties.These data suggest a radically dif-ferent conception. ‘Politics as usual’ is multilateral, as it has come to includethe practice of multilateral treaty-making. Multilateral treaty-making has along-term historical dynamic with which other forces must contend.

We posit that once multilateral treaty-making emerges as an acceptedpractice, increasing returns to this activity alter expectations and behav-iours. The increasing returns are both material (in that states engaging inmultilateral treaty-making are successful even if the organizational form isnot necessarily optimal) and ideational (in that states come to see multilat-eral treaty-making as appropriate), and these returns enhance the attract-iveness of future multilateral treaty-making. This dynamic leads to thespread of multilateral treaty-making geographically and across issue areas.The result is that treaty-making begets treaty-making, leading to exponen-tial growth. Multilateral treaties are not mere ‘scraps of paper’ becausestates have internalized this means of interaction (Jönsson and Hall, 2005).

In the following sections we elaborate on this proposed explanation for theexponential rise in treaty-making and provide initial tests of it with treatydata. We first explore the notion of social construction through path depend-ence and increasing returns, detailing the mechanisms that could explainexponential growth. We then examine the plausibility of this explanation byreviewing key literature on multilateralism and multilateral treaties. Finally,we interrogate our explanation empirically with the MATRS dataset.

Constructivism, Path Dependence and Multilateral Treaties

The central notion of social constructivism is that actors and their social con-texts are mutually constitutive. The behaviours of actors help create theirsocial context (rules, meanings, institutions), that social context shapes actoridentities, perceptions and wants, which are then translated into subsequentbehaviours. We posit that the accelerating adoption of multilateral treatiesas a mode of international cooperation in the early to mid-nineteenth cen-tury altered the global social context. Multilateral treaty-making was intro-duced as a way to deal with a growing set of transnational issues. Increasinguse of this instrument reinforced its appropriateness and states began to ori-ent their domestic structures, behaviour and expectations to this practice.Multilateral treaty-making became the accepted way to deal with trans-national issues, and came to constitute how states conceived of appropriateinteractions.

This broad understanding is incomplete. It fails to provide insight intowhy and how states might come to conceive of multilateral treaty-making




as appropriate, and thus how and why it came to be a popular response totransnational issues. We argue that the relevant mechanism of social con-struction was path dependence through increasing returns.

Path dependence arises when a confluence of actions, intended or not,provides a given mechanism with the advantage of being considered ‘bestpractice’.5 Once a ‘best practice’ emerges, this advantages one mechanismat the cost of others, some of which might even be technically superior.6 Thedynamics of path dependence naturally complement social constructivistideas about mutual constitution. Many path dependency arguments rely onrational choice to drive the processes by which practices are adopted orlocked-in around an institution, but rational cost-benefit calculation isnot the only mechanism that leads to path dependence. At its core, pathdependence is a probability mechanism whereby the chance of future useof a technology or institution increases every time it is used in the present(North, 1990; Arthur, 1994; Thelen, 2000; Couch and Farrell, 2004; Boas,2007). While utilitarian considerations can drive the ‘self-reinforcingsequences’ inherent in path-dependent processes, an institution can alsoexhibit path dependency when ‘an initial precedent about what is appropri-ate forms a basis for making future decisions about what is appropriate’(Mahoney, 2000: 523). There is thus no reason that the self-reinforcingmechanisms of path dependence cannot work within the logic of appropri-ateness highlighted by constructivists or through some hybrid that con-siders both costs and ideas of appropriateness in reinforcing a practice likemultilateral treaty-making.

Social constructivism recognizes the limits of flexibility in social life.Whilebehaviours shape social context, the historical accumulation of behavioursserves to reify/alter structures, putting history on a certain path, closing offsome avenues and opening others. Path dependence is a crucial mechanismof social construction. With regard to multilateral treaties, we agree withReus-Smit’s (1997: 569) claim that:

It matters little whether, in an abstract rational sense, arbitration or multilat-eralism constitute a more efficient response to coordination and collaborationproblems; what matters is that at particular historical moments states havedeemed them the right responses.

Once multilateral treaty-making was deemed the right response in the latenineteenth century, a certain path was chosen. Increasing returns to thisinstitution solidified the choice and the practice moved, in the parlance ofnormative dynamics, from emergence to internalization (Finnemore andSikkink, 1998). Once chosen, continued use of a given practice alters expect-ations such that it eventually achieves the enviable state of being simplytaken for granted.

The increasing returns that drive path dependence are expected in sys-tems exhibiting four characteristics (Pierson, 2000). First, start-up costs andthe costs of switching institutions are high. It is expensive or difficult toestablish institutions in the system, or to change them once established.Second, learning effects are significant. There are steep learning curves




allowing for higher returns with continued use of existing institutions.Third, coordination effects are significant. Benefits from the use of an insti-tution or practice increase as more actors adopt the same mechanisms.Fourth, adaptive expectations dominate actor calculations. In this sense,‘projections about future aggregate use patterns lead individuals to adapttheir actions in ways that help make those expectations come true’(Pierson, 2000: 254). Our claim is that the practice of multilateral treaty-making that emerged significantly in the nineteenth century exhibits thesecharacteristics and can fruitfully be analysed through the lens of increasingreturns with a combination of what Mahoney (2000) calls legitimation andfunctional processes of self-reinforcement whereby the efficacy and appro-priateness of an institutional choice is reinforced over time.

Combining notions of social construction with path dependence throughincreasing returns presents a unique mechanism for understanding the per-sistence and evolution of global practices. In addition, such an analyticframework can bring ideational and material factors into a single mech-anism, a type of explanation for which both constructivist and rationalistscholars have been calling. Very simply, multilateral treaties emerge in the1850s as a potentially dominant practice for a series of material and ide-ational reasons. The emergence and early success of multilateral treaty-making alters the social context and states respond with changes in theirexpectations about international interactions. The new expectations makefurther treaty-making more likely, reinforcing these early actions and reify-ing the appropriateness and utility of multilateral treaty-making. Eventually,this positive feedback lends multilateral treaty-making a taken-for-grantedquality across large swaths of the global system. In the sections that followwe examine this argument in greater detail and challenge it with MATRSdata.

Emergence of Multilateral Treaty-Making

Treaties, multilateral and otherwise, have been in use for millennia (Beckman,1996; Cohen and Westbrook, 2000). Multilateral treaty-making exploded inthe latter half of the nineteenth century and grew exponentially through the1960s.The puzzle we address is why this form of global interaction floweredat this time, and with this pattern. The growth and dominance of multilate-ral treaty-making as a solution to the problems generated by transnationalinteractions began with a specific confluence of changes in the materialenvironment, ideational context and distribution of power resources of theglobal system.

Regarding the material context, Murphy (1994) claims that the emergenceof multilateral practice is inextricably tied to the development of the globalcapitalist system. As capitalist industry outgrows the physical boundaries ofthe nineteenth and early twentieth century state, capitalist interests expressa preference for republican forms of government where they might have achance to counteract both the power of entrenched privilege and the pol-icies of sovereigns bent on territorial aggrandizement rather than prosperity.




What results is an ideology of liberal internationalism, supported by a coali-tion of social forces and devoted to the creation of international institutions,that might facilitate peaceful interaction, further integration and the result-ing prosperity. Far from the blind choice of simple and immediate pecuniaryinterests, this system offers us a variety of institutions with which to over-come different short, medium and longer-term barriers to profitable inter-actions. Those practices that garner sufficient backing, generating sufficientresources to attract viable support, are ‘selected’ in the evolution of globalorganization. Successful organizational forms then mould behaviour byshaping the understandings and motivations that confront actors.

What Murphy seeks to understand are not multilateral treaties but thegreat conferences that led to the development of various public unions inthe last half of the nineteenth and the earliest years of the twentieth cen-turies. Some 105 multipurpose conferences gave birth to over 30 worldorganizations designed to foster industry, manage social conflict and streng-then states, societies and the state system. The great conferences had sev-eral advantages, being easy to call, efficient in the breadth of their coverageand popular with both political elites and a wide range of technical andbureaucratic professionals. They also had advantages relative to treaties,Murphy argues, because they allowed for the exposition of a problem,its consideration by experts and the development of agreements withoutthe need to submit to a formal process of ratification. Though Murphy con-siders conferences and public unions the more important form of multi-lateralism in the early period, his explanation of the forces that led to theemergence of multilateral practice in the 1850s is entirely relevant for ourpurposes.

Reus-Smit (1997, 1999) provides a primarily ideational counterpoint toMurphy’s material analysis, explaining the emergence of multilateral prac-tices and contractual international law (especially permanent universalconferences and international judiciaries, which are analogues to domesticlegislatures and courts), by referring to two deep constitutional structures:the moral purpose of the state and norms of procedural justice. Reus-Smit,like Murphy, finds the origins of multilateralism in the nineteenth century,but rather than looking to the needs of capital, he focuses on ideationalchanges. In particular, he claims that the ideological revolution in the lateeighteenth century changed how people and politics were considered. Hedoes not ignore the material context, and claims that ideational shifts, com-bined with the industrial revolution, ‘profoundly altered the nature andterms of intraterritorial governance, generating distinctively modern stan-dards of legitimate statehood and rightful state action’. After the shift, the‘moral purpose of the state’ became ‘increasingly identified with augment-ing individuals’ purposes and potentialities’ generating ‘a new legislativenorm of procedural justice’ (1997: 577).

Changes toward ‘reciprocally binding social rules’ and ‘legislative normsof justice’ filtered outward to the international sphere. The domestic valuesof dominant states diffused, and ‘the principle that social rules should beauthored by those subject to them’ … ‘came to license multilateral forms ofrule determination …’ (ibid., pp. 568, 578). Such an expansion of domestic




norms into the global sphere was the catalyst for the multilateral order asevidenced by the initiation of universal conferences, the proliferation oftreaties, and the formation of international courts. Keene (2007) observes asimilar ideational shift in the dominant legal discourses of the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries that also facilitated increasing use of internationallegal mechanisms.

The hallmarks of the multilateral practice that Reus-Smit analyses arethe most crucial multilateral agreements that set the parameters of inter-national law and its adjudication. He (1997, 1999) provides an in-depthanalysis of The Hague Conferences of the late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and the founding conference for theUnited Nations. In tying the emergence of multilateralism to ideationalconcerns, Reus-Smit provides additional elements to Murphy’s primarilymaterial account and significant evidence for the existence of a multilateralorder that extends beyond the temporal boundaries of material incentives.He claims that the norms of procedural justice that flow from ‘the moralpurpose of the state’ constrained institutional choices by shaping both cog-nitive horizons and the range of legitimate actions. In the modern case, legis-lative norms led the international community (or at least the dominantstates within it) to advance multilateral forms of interaction.

Ikenberry (2001) reminds us that powerful actors have a significant roleto play in the emergence of multilateral treaty-making as a potentially dom-inant practice, and his account of its emergence diverges sharply from bothReus-Smit and Murphy. For Ikenberry, multilateral order, or ‘constitutionalorder’ as he describes it, is a potential solution for the problem that hege-mons face at the end of major wars: how to institutionalize their advantages.He (2001: 4) argues: ‘Major postwar junctures are rare strategic momentswhen leading or hegemonic states face choices about how to use their newlyacquired power.’ A constitutional order is one of the choices, and it has sig-nificant advantages in that it allows the new hegemon to show restraint andcope with the mistrust that accompanies asymmetric power. By institutionallybinding itself into a multilateral order, the hegemon is able to achieve ‘buy-in’ by smaller powers and institutionalize a durable, advantageous inter-national order.

Different hegemons may institute different post-war orders, andIkenberry attributes the choice to the extent of power disparities andfidelity to democracy (the more unilateral, the more readily a hegemon cancement its preferred order, while more democratic hegemons can morereadily lock-in a constitutional order). While Ikenberry sees ‘hegemonicestablishment of constitutional orders’ and we observe a relatively un-broken dynamic of interaction through multilateral treaty-making, hisreminder of the role of material power in reinforcing multilateralism iswell-taken.

The emergence in the 1850s of multilateral treaty-making as a potentiallydominant practice resulted from a confluence of material, ideational anddistribution of power factors. Industrialization altered the needs of power-ful actors, providing a drive toward cooperative international interactionat the same time that a new set of values favouring legislative justice and




reciprocity within dominant states was being externalized into the inter-national community. These forces combined to build powerful momentumbehind the practice of multilateral treaty-making.

Acceptance and Spread of Multilateral Treaty-Making

What we see in the mid to late nineteenth century is the critical juncturethat Mahoney (2000: 513) urges those pursuing path-dependent argumentsto seek. A number of contingent forces led to the emergence of multiplemultilateral institutional possibilities — most notably public unions, multi-lateral conferences, systems of arbitration and multilateral treaty-making.7What we observe in subsequent decades is the growing dominance of mul-tilateral treaty-making as the increasing returns to this institutional practicereinforce its legitimacy and generate positive feedback. States orient them-selves toward making multilateral treaties, altering their organizationalstructures and shifting domestic resources. Their actions reify the appropri-ateness of multilateral treaty-making and the practice spreads over time,across space and to varied issues.

The secondary literature on multilateral treaty-making confirms theplausibility of the social construction through the increasing returns argu-ment. The hallmarks of increasing returns — high start-up and switchingcosts, learning effects, coordination effects and adaptive expectations — areevident in observers’ accounts of the multilateral treaty system. A brief dis-cussion of each characteristic of increasing returns reveals how multilateraltreaty-making spread and came to be a dominant institutional feature ofworld politics.

Both the start-up and switching costs of cooperation via multilateral treatyare high. Murphy (1994) notes that it was only under the extreme pressureapplied by those defining the new economic system (both its dominant fig-ures and popular sectors) that sovereigns altered their tendency to seekaggrandizement through territorial conquest and moved toward a systemthat facilitated increased wealth.This required extensive and carefully craftedcooperative agreements. The social movements that emerged behind thesechanges were costly to establish and difficult to decommission. Ikenberry(2001) makes similar claims about the establishment of constitutional ordersand highlights the ‘stickiness’ of a system founded on multilateral treaties andorganizations. In addition, as multilateral treaty-making grew in legitimacy,the costs of switching to a different interaction mechanism grow as well.

Once multilateral interactions became more frequent, it grew difficult toalter the form or nature of that behaviour. Conferences may have had sig-nificant advantages, but the agreements that emerged and lasted the longestwere those posed as contracts negotiated by experts, ratified by legislaturesand/or signed by sovereigns. Eventually the need to expand and updatecooperative agreements increased beyond the ability, willingness or neces-sity of leaders and their vast entourages to travel. Once this happened, itwas difficult to even conceive of an alternative form for the updating andfurther codification of binding agreements. These first movements changed




the cost of future choices. Adopted early on, it would have been quite diffi-cult to prospect for, prove the value of and convince others to adopt differ-ent norms. Norm-destroying wars of the sort that gave birth to modernEurope after 1815 were few in number, and even before 1918 the tendencywas to settle them with the same mechanisms (conferences and treaties)that had come to dominate international relations in the century prior.

Learning effects emerge quickly in the cooperative environment of con-ferences and multilateral treaty-making. Not only are sovereigns satisfiedwith what they have created, but also we see the almost immediate growthof an international civil service staffed by what Murphy (1994) calls ‘publicsystems builders’ with generic skill sets.Additional officials and bureaucraciesemerge to cope with the new activities. Specialists, and the agreements theynegotiate, eventually eclipse the conferences themselves.

What is generally observed is the emergence of a stratum of experts co-evolving with the practice of multilateral treaty-making. As these publicsystem builders become more expert in the handling of a given issue areaat a conference or in the drafting of a treaty, expertise and cosmopolitanexperience become associated with the ability to navigate the great confer-ences and create or service the important treaties that emerged. Murphy(1994) traces this process through the nineteenth century and into the twen-tieth. Sacriste and Vauchez (2007) illuminate how a heterogeneous popula-tion of international lawyers came to define international law and alter theorientation of states towards international law and treaty-making in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finnemore (2003) observedsimilar dynamics in the politics of military intervention, where the disciplin-ary growth of international lawyers led to a reinforcement of ideas aboutthe rule of law in the international system. Ikenberry (2001: 66) records thesame kind of support for the constitutional order, noting that:

[I]nstitutions are not just agreements, they are also interstate processes thatrequire state officials to engage in ongoing interaction with other states. Thisrequires state bureaucracies be organized in particular ways — with mandates,missions and routines.

This trend tracks nicely with how Boli and Thomas (1999) and Barnett andFinnemore (2004) describe a longer-term trend toward the acceptance ofrational-legal norms. Indeed, what emerges around the institution of multi-lateral treaty-making is what Adler (2005) describes as a ‘community ofpractice’. States and their agents come to expect multilateral interactionand are geared toward multilateral treaty-making. In this way, multilateraltreaty-making structures state practices and is in turn the result of thosepractices.

The end result of learning effects is that multilateral treaty-making gainsits own momentum as participation comes to be understood and advocatedby state functionaries as the composition of acceptable practice. Other com-munities of experts follow suit. Murphy (1994: 112) notes that once greatpowers began to interact in characteristic ways, ‘Governments and privateassociations regularized their own work to match …’ Experts in solving the




problems of the state were defined as experts in dealing with conferencesand treaty-making.

The reorientation of states toward multilateral treaty-making has effectsbeyond altering the costs of institutional change. As more and more statesbegin to engage in the same sorts of endeavours, there are growing advan-tages and a growing sense of appropriateness attributed to engaging inmore and more multilateral treaty-making, both into new issues-areas andin the engagement of new actors. As these coordination effects emerge,states adapt their practices so as to be able to participate in global life.Multilateral interaction came to be perceived as the key to advancement,given the needs of the new industrial markets that Murphy identifies. Theexact form of that interaction was not as important as was its existence. Anyorganizational form that offered access and generated results would havebeen seen as superior to lack of access to the growing global system. And,once adopted, whatever advantages multilateral treaties possessed, theircontinued and expanded use by actors in the system would significantlymagnify.

This is not to suggest that multilateral treaty-making was a wholly arbi-trary formulation that could provide no more real advantage than any otherconceivable system. The co-evolution of industrial markets and sovereignstates posed no small difficulty, but emerged as the dominant political formgiven the benefits the two systems offered one another (Chase-Dunn,1981). The treaty system, which recognized the sovereignty of the actorsinvolved and facilitated cooperative interaction, was well suited to this con-text. Given the material returns that states (and individuals and capitalists)were receiving, and the ease with which this cooperation gained acceptancewith leaders so jealous of their sovereignty, the incentive to coordinate withthe dominant treaty-making system was maximized.

The final attributes of the process of increasing returns are adaptiveexpectations. Like learning effects, not only do new actors attempt to co-ordinate with the new ‘realities’ of the system, but also actors come toexpect that this will be both the current and future norm in internationalrelations. Individuals, states and organizations came to expect multilateralactivities and adjust their strategizing and actions to fit this expectation(Jönsson and Hall, 2005). When states come to expect multilateral treaty-making, this changes not only how they view interstate interactions, but alsohow they view the global system in general. The multilateral treaty-makinglens helps them to define transnational problems, in some sense creating orconstituting these problems themselves.

The result of these material, ideational and institutional features isuniformly positive feedback. Issues came to be viewed in terms of theirability to be handled with some form of treaty. As states sought to dealwith them, treaties were not surprisingly the tools used. Other statesadapted, populations adapted and the future was defined in terms of theapplication of more treaties to more issues. Material, ideational and institu-tional factors served to reinforce the place of multilateral forms of inter-action in the global system, and an exponential rise in multilateral treatieswas the result.




Interrogating Social Construction through Path Dependence

Path dependence through increasing returns is a novel way to explain theprocess of social construction — how an emergent practice comes to be takenfor granted and becomes a regular feature of the global social context — andit plausibly captures the observed exponential rise in treaty-making. It isnovel because it both contains a specified mechanism that provides testableimplications and because it allows for the integration of ideational and mater-ial factors that should be evident in a constructivist explanation. The socialconstruction/path dependence/increasing returns approach also provides anumber of additional conjectures about multilateral treaty-making that canbe explored with the MATRS dataset.

In this section, we suggest three non-obvious and verifiable indicators ofthis explanation. These include the diffusion of treaty-making across issue-areas, across geo-political contexts, and the continued importance of initiallocations/procedures. The relatively recent peaking and apparent decline oftreaty-making over the past 30 years may also emerge from our argument.In each case, one or more of the four elements of path dependence (highstart-up and switching costs, learning effects, coordination effects and adap-tive expectations) are implicated.

Our large-n examination of hypotheses about treaty-making departs fromtraditional constructivist empirical analyses that call upon rich historicaldescription. This methodological move is necessary precisely because theappropriateness of treaty-making is so ingrained that the forces shaping thechoice of this instrument in any particular instance are invisible. Once apractice is so well ingrained that it is taken for granted, it becomes difficultto apprehend empirically if analysis is restricted to individual treaties oreven sectoral treaty-making. Historical accounts and recollections areinevitably concerned with the particulars of constructing agreements toaddress the issues at hand and lend little insight into the influence of largerpatterns of practice. With a broader view of treaty-making practices, path-dependent processes become more visible.

Diffusion across Issues — Switching Costs and Waves of Treaty-Making

One hallmark of the constructivist explanation is that practices come to betaken for granted. For a number of ideational (framing how actors conceivetheir world) and material (distributing the resources that actors use torespond to their world) reasons, multilateral treaty-making becomes a lensthrough which actors look upon and define transnational problems andissues. If the argument is correct, we should observe the diffusion of multi-lateral treaty-making practices to different transnational issue areas as theyarise over time. Disaggregating the treaty data into specific categoriesreveals waves of treaty-making, just as the constructivist explanation wouldpredict. Consider the composite Figure 4. What we see is the exponentialpattern repeated in five of the six major substantive treaty categories withdifferent dates of initiation and peaking. As the international community





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confronted issues, it turned to multilateral treaty-making as the means foraddressing them over and over again.8 These waves produce the overallexponential curve and they are evidence that the international communityidentifies multilateral treaty-making as the mechanism for dealing withglobal issues.

Furthermore, the figures support the argument that start-up/switchingcosts inherent in systems with increasing returns constrain institutionalchoices. When confronted with a new transnational issue, state leaders arenot likely to spend time thinking about new forms of interaction with whichto address the problem. Conceiving a new form of interaction to addresseach transnational issue-area as it arises would be inherently inefficient.There are also costs involved in switching to a new and untried institutionalform.9 The high cost of switching engenders a taken-for-granted qualitysuch that state leaders do not actively weigh the costs of continuing with agiven form of interaction. Thus, once certain forms of interaction emergeand begin to lock-in, states continue to use these tools to approach prob-lems in new issue-areas.

An extreme, though telling, example of how diffusion arises from path-dependent lock-in is the fact that multilateral treaty-making migrated soeasily to issues of space exploration in the latter half of the twentieth cen-tury. In this entirely new environment, one where the prerogatives of sov-ereignty and international cooperation are ambiguous at best, multilateraltreaty-making is a standard way for states to interact. In the late 1980s,March (1988: 328) noted that ‘for over two decades, multilateral treatieshave governed the spaceborne activities of nations in a variety of situa-tions’. Prasad’s (2005) report on international efforts to deal with spacedebris further demonstrates that multilateral treaty-making structures howstates deal with issues of ambiguous transnational character. The possibili-ties for dealing with space debris appear to be bounded by amending exist-ing treaties or creating new ones (Prasad, 2005: 247).

Diffusion across Space — Learning/Coordination Effects and SocializingNew Members

Demonstrating that multilateral treaty-making has migrated to most, if notall, transnational issues is one hallmark of the effects of increasing returns.Another is the diffusion of this practice from the community that adoptedit in the modern era (the West) to the remainder of the international sys-tem. If there are increasing returns to multilateral treaty-making, not onlyshould existing states use it, but those that newly emerge should adopt (orbe made to adopt) the practice as well. Increasing returns facilitate thesocialization of new actors. The treaty data demonstrate this effect. InFigure 5 we observe the spread of the locus of treaty-signing beyond theWest with the decolonization movements of the 1950s and 1960s. As newstates join the international community, even when their independence wasbitterly contested, they still chose to adopt multilateral treaty-making inpatterns similar to those of the more established members. Not only did



these states start signing treaties devised in the West, they began to negoti-ate treaties on their own and host the negotiations and signings.10 Therewere serious concerns in much of the Third World about Western imperial-ism and neo-colonialism, but this did not appear to impact on the adoptionof (typically Western) multilateral treaty-making as a generic form ofinteraction.

In a report on how recently independent states viewed the instruments ofinternational law, Abi-Saab (1962: 100) pointed out that such states ‘do noteasily forget that the same body of international law that they are nowasked to abide by, sanctioned their previous subjugation and exploitation’.Even so, these states readily accepted treaty-making as a means of inter-action with the global community (Abi-Saab, 1962; Sinha, 1965; Akintoba,1996). International law and multilateral treaty-making served a purposefor newly independent states because they define what it is to act like astate. As Akintoba (1996: 21) notes ‘this need to communicate and tradeinvariably makes necessary resort to the system of law originally created byWestern states for regulating interstate relations’.

This adoption or socialization demonstrates either learning effects orcoordination effects, depending on one’s perspective on the autonomy ofnon-Western states. If one takes seriously the de jure sovereignty of statesin the periphery, and considers them to be autonomous actors with inde-pendent initiative, then Figure 5 demonstrates the learning effects ofincreasing returns. As states enter the international community, they find asystem of international interaction in place with its experts, diplomats andthe other technologies of multilateralism. States adopt this practice as partof the process of becoming ‘modern’ (Finnemore, 1996).

On the other hand, if one questions the autonomy of peripheral states,focusing on the lack of de facto sovereignty in some areas, coordinationeffects appear to be driving this extension of multilateral treaty-making.This interpretation recalls that increasing returns are evident when benefitsfrom a given practice increase to the extent that more participants adoptthem. From this perspective, it is in the interests of the West to incorporateemerging actors into the extant multilateral order. Of course, both perspec-tives are likely implicated in explaining Figure 5. States outside the Westhave had varying levels of autonomy and thus varying abilities to ‘choose’.In either case, our argument anticipates the spread of multilateral treaty-making evident in Figure 5.

Stability in Centrality — The Continued Importance of InitialLocations/Procedures

While evidence for increasing returns is found in the diffusion of treaty-making,additional support is revealed in the stability of the organizational form. It is notonly the functional form that gets taken for granted; the procedures for opera-tionalizing the practice are also internalized. Thus, we expect and observeremarkable stability in the multilateral treaty system, here viewed in terms ofwhere treaties are negotiated and signed. While multilateral treaty-making has





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diffused around the globe, the sites where most of the treaty-making takes placehave altered only slightly. Figure 6 presents data on the top five locations fortreaty-making (where the most treaties are signed) in six different periods ofglobal politics.The identities of the top locations for multilateral activity remainnotably consistent over 400 years.

This geographical consistence demonstrates the functioning of adaptiveexpectations. Not only do states adapt their actions to fit the expectation ofmultilateral treaty-making, but they also adopt specific expectations ofwhere treaty-making will take place. Table 2 reinforces this finding by fur-ther illustrating the continuity.Thirty cities could conceivably fill our six dif-ferent ‘top five’ lists. We find only fifteen. Eight of those fifteen appear onlyonce, and seven of those eight appear only during the two short wartimeperiods. This leaves a list of only seven cities that serve as the top treaty-signing locations over a period of four centuries.

Going a step further in collaboration with geographer Herman van derWusten, we analysed the development and persistence of urban specializa-tion in treaty negotiations.As early as the period from 1782 to 1849, we notethe focus of ‘Vienna in state relations…. London in others’. Although somespecializations emerge by issue-area, like Berne in the area of communica-tion treaties, ‘those places that lack any specialization receive conferencesconcerned with a wide variety of issues’ like London, Paris and Brussels(van der Wusten et al., 2007). Once a particular location becomes an estab-lished site of multilateral activity, this alters the way actors view appropri-ate places to negotiate.These adaptive expectations are driven by a numberof factors, including learning and coordination effects. The cities in the topfive thus remain pre-eminent centres for treaty-making for long stretches oftime, beyond any rationale they may have had for being an early primarylocation for negotiations in the first place.

Establishing Plausibility

The initial plausibility of our social constructivist/path dependence/increasingreturns argument was founded on its ability to explain the exponential risein multilateral treaty-making over the long term, the conjecture being thattreaty-making came to beget treaty-making. The test of this conjecture con-sisted of empirically assessing a number of expectations that flow from it,namely that if increasing returns are in place we should see a spread oftreaty-making across issues and actors, while also reinforcing the initial con-ditions (viewed here as the matter of where treaty-making originally tookhold) of the multilateral system. All three of these expectations are borneout by the MATRS data. We conclude that the practice of multilateraltreaty-making has emerged, grown and evolved through a process of socialconstruction by increasing returns — a process that is independent of thecontent of individual treaties, that is resilient to change in the distributionof power, and that shapes (rather than responds to) changes in the socio-economic characteristics of the global community.





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The Future of Multilateral Treaties

In Figure 1, multilateral treaty-making grows exponentially from the 1850sthrough the 1960s, peaks and declines.The decline predates the current pre-occupation with the erosion of multilateral norms and institutions and pro-vides some perspective on the current anxiety. This raises the question ofwhy a socially constructed, path-dependent process that enjoys increasingreturns should evidence decline. There are three possible conjectures thatappear from within the context of our research that would help us under-stand this apparent anomaly and shed light on current concerns about thefate of multilateralism.

First, this decline may be an artifact of the data. Treaties may take as longas a decade to make it into the official record, and some may not be enteredat all. Linguistic and geographic biases are more prevalent in the sources weused in the later years than earlier on. The resurgence of the Cold War inthe 1980s may have been a crisis large enough to interrupt the series, andnew data for the last decade, once gathered, may reveal a continuation ofthe exponential pattern.

A second conjecture would find multilateral treaty-making in real decline.Perhaps there are forces at work that are making the turn to this practice lessautomatic and states are escaping from the path (Couch and Farrell, 2004).These could consist of the familiar arguments about hegemonic unilateral-ism, or the intriguing possibility that the forces of globalization are makingstates less central relative to private regulatory regimes that manifest struc-tures with historically different modes of interaction (Hall and Biersteker,2002; Haufler, 2003).


TABLE 2Top Places for Treaty-Making

Number of Place of Signature Eras in Top 5

London 6Paris 4The Hague 3Washington 3Vienna 2Brussels 2Geneva 2St. Petersburg 1Montevideo 1Moscow 1Berlin 1Stockholm 1Bucharest 1Le Havre 1Brest-Litovsk 1



Finally, a growth in treaty signings by international organizations may besignalling another evolution in this multilateral practice. Ruggie (1993b: 9)argues that the ‘adaptive and reproductive capacities’ of multilateral formsare key to their effectiveness and persistence. Figure 7 provides evidencefor this adaptiveness, demonstrating the growing number of non-state sig-natures on multilateral treaties. At first glance, the increase in treatiessigned by (and among!) international organizations serves to support ourargument, just as the adoption of treaty-making by peripheral states did.But as international organizations grow more autonomous it is possiblethat they, rather than treaties, will become the locus of multilateral diplo-macy. Murphy described a similar transition in global processes during thesecond half of the nineteenth century. Barnett and Finnemore’s (2004)recent work on the autonomy of international organizations is suggestivealong these lines. Adding treaty data beyond 1995, an ongoing project, willenable us to begin to adjudicate these various possibilities.

Conclusion

Treaties have long been a staple of global interaction, and this has been eventruer for the last century and one half. Their exponential increase since 1850has been interrupted, but not generated, by global crises. The exponentialincrease cannot be attributed to the growing number of actors, interdepend-ence or hegemony. A plausible explanation rests with constructivism/pathdependence/increasing returns. Such an explanation is consistent with majormaterial, ideational and power distribution treatments of internationalorganization and cooperation. The constructivist explanation is supportedempirically by the replication of patterns across issue-areas, across politicaland geographic contexts, and in terms of the uncanny consistency with whichcertain cities serve as the locus of treaty signings.

These insights differ from those that could be generated by more trad-itional, small-n, treatments of treaty-making. Substantive concerns regardingparticular issue areas and the effects of different designs provide importantinformation, but do not speak to the overarching role of treaty-making inthe global system as does this project. From this perspective, treaties aremore prevalent, and their exponential growth through the 1960s and 1970ssuggests a far more important role for cooperative interaction in the evolu-tion of international relations than other perspectives can offer.

Specifically, the results of this study provoke us to consider the connec-tions between the practice of multilateral treaty-making and the broadernorms of multilateralism. Ruggie (1993b: 7) argues that the generic multilat-eral form entails more than arrangements of three or more states andincludes the generalized principles of indivisibility (participants see them-selves as a unit), and diffuse reciprocity (participants expect roughly equiva-lent benefits over time). Multilateralism is thus more than a quantitativedescription; it has to do with the quality of an institutional arrangement(ibid., pp. 7–12). Individual treaties can be signed for a number of reasons. Itwould be folly to suggest that all treaties are consistent with the principles





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of indivisibility and diffuse reciprocity. Some treaties (especially alliances)are discriminatory and others do little to promote reciprocity. But multilat-eral treaties are also consistently employed to serve the purpose that Ruggiedefines for multilateralism, namely to ‘define and stabilize internationalproperty rights of states, to manage coordination problems, and to resolvecollaboration problems’ (ibid., p. 8).

While there is not an exact match between multilateral treaties and mul-tilateralism, studying multilateral treaty-signing dynamics may have muchto offer us in studying the dynamics of multilateralism. It may contribute toour understanding of where the global order has been and where it is going.If the dynamics of multilateral treaty-making track the dynamics of multi-lateral norms and institutions more broadly, we observe a profoundly multi-lateral world in the MATRS data. Both banal and weighty matters areaddressed through multilateral treaty-making, whose role has expandedand evolved over time. Sustained understanding of the global system maydepend on treating multilateral treaty-making and multilateralism as con-stitutive elements of the global system and on seeking to understand thepath-dependent treaty-making dynamics that continue to unfold.

Notes

We acknowledge the research assistance of April Collins, Charlotte Freeman, TomIsherwood, Markus Lang, Lauren Twist, Stephen Walls and, especially, HasanYonten. We also thank Mark Boyer, Yale Ferguson, Robert Johansen, StuartKaufman, Phil Triadafilopolous and the three anonymous reviewers from Co-operation and Conflict for insightful comments on previous versions — all remainblameless for inadequacies that remain. This research was supported by the Centerfor International Studies and the Undergraduate Research Program at theUniversity of Delaware.

1. We, of course, realize that signing treaties is only one dimension of the treaty-making process; ratification, duration and compliance being other crucial dimen-sions. However, treaty-signing is a significant endeavour and tracking the signing oftreaties over time provides an illuminating if less than complete picture of the treaty-making practice.

2. The bulk of any linear relationship between the number of states and treatysignings is actually an artifact of the post-1945 period, while the exponential expan-sion of treaty-making begins well before 1945.

3. The suggestion that treaties of special importance emerge during periods ofhegemony is not supported by the preliminary data, and will be the focus of forth-coming work.

4. This is contraposed to the literature that finds modern multilateralism result-ing from an externalization of United States’ domestic preferences. See Martin,1993; Ruggie, 1993a.

5. See Arthur, 1994; Pierson, 2000. Mahoney (2000) stresses the necessity of contin-gency in the emergence of the ‘best practice’. As we discuss below, because significantmultilateral treaty-making was a response to industrialization, a highly contingentevent, this condition is satisfied in this case.

6. The classic example of this from economics is the QWERTY keyboard. Thisconfiguration arose for rational reasons (the need to slow typists to stop typewriters




from jamming), yet its emergence as best practice closed off avenues of history thatmight have led to the development of more ergonomic letter placement morerational for the computer age. See Arthur, 1994.

7. In line with Couch and Farrell’s (2004) analysis of changes in paths, alterna-tives to multilateral treaty-making do not necessarily disappear even when multi-lateral treaty-making grows in prominence. Public Unions survive into the twentiethcentury and large multilateral conferences saw resurgence in the late twentieth cen-tury. This retention of latent institutional forms is entirely consistent with the path-dependence argument and is, according to Couch and Farrell, a means for change inpaths.

8. It has not escaped our notice that treaties of war and peace depart from this pat-tern. The politics of war and peace may be more crisis-driven than the bulk of inter-national interaction.We take up the implications of this departure in forthcoming work.

9. Ikenberry (2001) considers these costs to be so high that nothing short of amajor war provides the opportunity to restructure the system.

10. Initial social network analyses of treaty signings indicate the emergence ofdistinct, non-Western regional treaty systems (Hoffmann et al., 2007).

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Appendix I

There exists a great deal of information on multilateral treaties. The chal-lenge, from the perspective of those who wish to understand general trendsin treaty-making behaviour, is that this information is usually presentedin formats designed to serve very specific purposes. The majority of indi-viduals with a professional interest in treaties want to know the currentstatus of agreements in a given issue-area, or the current status of a givenstate’s obligations. Hence there are several places to find the most currentversions of treaty texts, the most current set of signators and the mostcurrent sets of agreements to which a given state may be party. Very fewstudents of multilateral treaties have been interested in cumulating infor-mation on overall trends in treaty-making behaviour. This dataset was builton those few sources, and supplemented with information garnered fromnational or special-focus treatments.

The three largest contemporary sources of general information on multi-lateral treaties are Christian Wiktor’s Multilateral Treaty Calendar, VaclavMostecky’s Index to Multilateral Treaties and Multilateral Treaties: Indexand Current Status by M. Bowman and D. Harris (1984). The two most use-ful older sources, both with something of a national orientation, includeWilliam Malloy (for the first two volumes) and G. Charles (for volume 3),Treaties, Conventions, International Acts, Protocols, and AgreementsBetween the United States of America and Other Powers and Clive Parry,Consolidated Treaty Series, 1648–1919.

We reviewed the material in each of these sources, noting every inter-national agreement concluded between three or more states (or interna-tional organizations) that emerged in written form and were understood tobe governed by international law. This is essentially the definition of theterm ‘treaty’ under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Werecorded the title, date of signing, number of signators, identity of signatorsand place of signing.We also recorded information on links to other treatiesand dates of coming into or going out of force. When this informationwas not available, we searched other sources, including the United NationsTreaty Series, national collections and specialty treatments, for missingmaterial. In all, we identified 6976 treaties, although certain elements arestill incomplete. For example, we only have a full list of signators for 6033treaties, and complete information on place of signing is only available in5957 cases. We continue to work on completing these elements.

We categorized the treaties into both specific and more general group-ings. Our more specific categorizations were adopted from those used byWiktor in the largest of the contemporary compendia. He uses 282 catego-rizations that were assigned ‘… following those used by the U.S. StateDepartment, Treaty Office, slightly modified, by subjects employed by theUnited Nations in its treaty publications’ (Wiktor, 1998: xxii). We familiar-ized ourselves with those categories so that we could categorize treaties notincluded in Wiktor’s work. Categorization was based on consensus amongtwo faculty members, the graduate student in charge of the dataset, and




either the graduate or undergraduate coders who were involved.A set of sixbroader categorizations was created into which all sub-categories wereplaced. Appropriate placement of about two-thirds of the sub-categoriesinto their broader categorizations was apparent, although the graduate stu-dent in charge of the dataset, and both faculty members involved, reviewedthese choices. Those categories that were more difficult to fit were brokendown by treaty title, and all three of us discussed proper placement. Alldecisions were based on review and consensus, and as a result there are noconcerns with inter-coder reliability.

In this article, we use version 1.2 of the dataset. It is not perfect. Thelargest source is self-consciously biased toward treaties that were publishedin either English or French (Wiktor, 1998: xxi). This is justified by Wiktor inpart given the requirements of the League of Nations and the UN to sub-mit all treaties in one of those languages to its depository. Our secondlargest sources (Mostecky, 1965) is less constrained by language, but ends in1963. Version 1.3 of this dataset is in process, and will include treaties fromupdates of the Mostecky dataset, as well as material from treaty calendarsof the USSR and China. It will also include materials from specialty sourcesin areas like the environment and human rights. While the dataset is notperfect, we believe it is sufficiently representative of multilateral treaty-making to serve as the foundation of the large-n study presented here. Welook forward to future modifications and we welcome input.

ROBERT A. DENEMARK is an Associate Professor in the Departmentof Political Science and International Relations at the University ofDelaware. His research and teaching interests include international politi-cal economy, multilateralism and the historical evolution of the globalsystem.Address: Department of Political Science and International Relations,University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA.[email: [email protected]]

MATTHEW J. HOFFMANN is Assistant Professor of Political Scienceat the University of Toronto. His research and teaching interests includeglobal governance, social constructivism, multilateralism and environ-mental politics.Address: Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, 100 St.George St, Toronto, Ontario M5S2K3, Canada.[email: [email protected]]




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