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Middle power leadership and coalition building: Australia, the Cairns Group, and the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Richard A. Higgott  and
Andrew Fenton Cooper
Richard A. Higgott
Affiliation:
Reader in International Relations and Director of the Graduate Programme in Foreign Affairs and Trade in the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
Andrew Fenton Cooper
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
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Abstract

Perhaps the key question of debate among neorealist scholars of international political economy concerns the manner in which cooperation may or may not be secured in the global economic order "after hegemony," a question posed by Robert Keohane. A second broad question of interest to scholars of international politics concerns the manner in which weaker states attempt to influence stronger ones. A conflation of these two questions could cause scholars and practitioners alike to pay closer attention than they have in the past to coalitions of the weak as vehicles for cooperation and regime building in the global political economy.

This article offers a case study of one recent exercise in coalition building as an attempt to foster cooperation in a "nonhegemonic" environment. Specifically, it examines the role of the Cairns Group of Fair Trading Nations in its attempts to foster reform in global agricultural trade within the current Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. The Cairns Group is shown to be an atypical, single-issue driven, transregional coalition. Led by Australia, the Group's actions represent an interesting exercise in "middle power" politics in a global economic order whose decisionmaking processes are increasingly more fragmented and complex and whose major actors need coaxing toward processes of cooperative economic management.

Type
Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , Autumn 1990 , pp. 589 - 632
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1990

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References

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