Hierarchy in International Relations: Authority, Sovereignty, and the New Structure of World Politics

Rooted in a formal-legal tradition, international relationists have been thinking about anarchy and sovereignty wrong for over a century. Building on an alternative view of relational authority and recent research on the practice of sovereignty, a new conception of security hierarchy is developed that varies along a continuum from alliances at one end to protectorates at the other. This construct is operationalized and validated, and then tested in a large-n quasi-experiment examining the effects of international hierarchy on the defense effort of countries. The principal finding is that states in hierarchical security relationships spend significantly less on defense relative to GDP than states not in such relationships. In short, hierarchy matters and subordination pays; states appear to trade some portion of their sovereignty for protection from external security threats. 1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, September 2-5, 2004, and the Peace Sciences Society (International), Houston, TX, November 13-14, 2004. I am indebted to Susan Hyde for invaluable research assistance and Miles Kahler for numerous conversations inside and outside of the classroom on topics developed in this paper. Neither is implicated in any errors.