The ties that bind? Economic regions and patterns of global cooperation

This dissertation empirically assesses the structure of global relations, as indicated by trading behavior and cooperative interactions. Specifically, two issues of contention within international politics are examined: the concept of the economic region, and the relationship between economic ties and cooperative behavior.;Much scholarly and popular attention has been devoted to the regionalization of the world economy. An underlying problem which obscures such analyses, however, is the lack of a clear definition regarding precisely what a "region" is. Resolving this conceptual weakness is one task embraced by this dissertation. To this end, various conceptualizations of the region are compared to the trading patterns of states during the post-World War II period. Though the findings most strongly support the systemic structure of the global trading order posited by world systems theorists, evidence also substantiates the increasingly geographic nature of post-Cold War commerce.;Next, analysis turns to the relationship between trading interactions and patterns of cooperation among states. While liberal theorists posit trading relations as a pathway towards peace, other scholars have argued that such ties have no impact upon cooperation among states. Still others contend that commercial relations lead not to cooperation, but to conflictual behavior. Despite the great deal of theoretical attention devoted to this issue, relatively little empirical analyses exist. This study determines the direction of the relationship between trade and cooperation, and examines their respective impacts upon the structure of the world trading order. Results indicate that while trading ties and cooperative behavior are positively related, neither explains all of the variance of the other. Further analysis reveals that though there are structural similarities between patterns of commerce and cooperative behavior, trading relations are generally more averse to change and vary more along systemic lines. Overall, trading relations emerge as an important, but limited, component of the systemic web underlying broader patterns of cooperation.