Trust Mechanism Analysis Of International Alliance Evolution

Since the end of the cold war, the traditional forms of alliance have developed to be networks. Big alliances and small alliances, such as "NATO" and "ASEAN", also experienced adjustment and enlargement. Because the enlargement means receipting new members and orientating new functional goals, so there will be debates between member states in expanding process. But these controversies and resistance reflect the important role of trust in the alliance. How the changes of trust relationship between members led to the build, development, consolidation and decay of alliances? In other words, how trust changes affect the alliance evolution? This paper is dedicated to answer these questions, namely what is the trust mechanism about the international alliance evolution? Although trust as a complex concept has yet have one unified definition, but the international trust research has been booming, especially the social-psychology approach of international trust research has trend to become mature.Throughout the existing literatures, the psychological level analysis and behaviors analysis are the two basic modes in international trust analysis, which have three main approaches: the game theory, the cognitive psychology path and legitimacy path .The literatures have systematically analyzed the establishment of alliance trust, but the analysis of alliance trust evolution was weak, because the existing approaches basically did not discuss the evolution mechanism of alliance trust. Social network analysis focuses on how social relations foster trust and underlines"embeddedness", which means that rational trust embedded within perceptual trust. That is, there still exists "relationship trust" except for rational trust and perceptual trust. Relationship trust analysis model planes trust from the relationship between nodes rather than attributes of them, using a social network analysis method (SNA) which is a new perspective and emerging method to breakthrough existing alliance trust research. Therefore, based on the synthesis of three trust modes, we will pay close attention to alliance formation, development, decline and collapse. So, the contribution of this paper is studying on the trust mechanism of alliance evolution from the theory of life cycle.To differentiate the big and small alliances, also the formal and informal alliances, we select "NATO" and "ASEAN" as two cases to verify the possibility of hypotheses. Moreover, we will give four kinds of alliance strategy choices, which provide policy suggestions for foreign practice to deal with different alliance stages. In general, we try to add the third model "relationship trust model", which is the key characteristic of this paper. But we should know that three types of trust do not have one-to-one relationship between three development stages of alliance. Therefore, the task of this paper is to reveal the different trust models in each stage and deepen the research of alliance trust.