Cooperative diplomacy: Citizens, sovereignty, and the logic of democratic enlargement

The contemporary theory of international regimes holds that governments collaborate when they reach a consensus on a centralized supervisory mechanism for resolving compliance, monitoring, and distributive questions. Yet, in the least likely case of international nuclear security, governments have repeatedly established major international regimes without such a consensus, even though undetected defection would impose substantial long-term costs on those continuing to comply, and seriously complicate attempts at retaliation.; For example, despite more than ten years of almost continuous East-West negotiations, governments could not reach a consensus on the compliance questions related to the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) safeguards regime. Yet, threshold and potential nuclear powers, such as France and India, respectively, exempted themselves from the IAEA's safeguards regime, but gained access to the knowledge, facilities and materials intended exclusively for full participants. Similarly, France, Italy, and Germany failed to agree on a centralized mechanism for supervising the production of nuclear warheads for a Western European nuclear force. Indeed, even the member states of the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) could not agree on an effective centralized mechanism for supervising the regional production of fissionable materials. Yet, under the 1958 United States-EURATOM Nuclear Cooperation agreement, the United States agreed to expand its sales of enriched uranium and other special nuclear materials to the discordant members of EURATOM, who jointly assumed responsibility for an independent regional system of safeguards. Finally, the U.S. and Soviet governments could not agree on a centralized mechanism for solving the compliance questions related to the Partial Test Ban Treaty concluded in 1963, but the two superpowers and the U.K. left the resolution of those questions to the domestic authorities of the signatory states.; I hypothesize that intergovernmental agreement on compliance questions is most likely to occur when decision-making and policy-implementing processes are decentralized, and when governments establish and support decentralized intra- and trans-governmental institutions that enable private domestic groups of individuals to participate in international governance through two mechanisms. First, those decentralized institutions facilitate the formation of transnational coalitions of politically autonomous private domestic groups that can serve as a "horizontal transmission belt" for ideas and practices among private and public proponents of the major opposing domestic positions, thereby generating public transnational deliberation on compliance, monitoring and distributive questions. Second, politically autonomous private domestic groups can, by engaging in performance-based partnerships with senior government officials, also serve as a "vertical transmission belt" between domestic and intergovernmental regimes and vice versa, thereby encouraging their respective governments to adapt the social practices in issue-specific domestic regimes to international structural forces.; These findings have significant ramifications for the concept of democratic enlargement, the institutionalization of competitive pluralism in non-liberal states. The robustness, across changes in administrations both at home and abroad, of the norms codified in international agreements may hinge on institutionalizing the participation of politically autonomous private domestic groups in decentralized intra- and trans-governmental decision-making and policy-implementing processes.