The Political Economy of Nuclear Restraint

Abstract

e choice between establishing a regional nuclear regime and maintaining an ambiguous nuclear status among the second tier or would-be nuclear powers is at the heart of debates about global security in the aftermath of the Cold War era.' The study of nuclear postures of regional powers (beyond the original five nuclear states) in the last three decades has traditionally emphasized their external security concerns. Such emphasis provided a powerful tool to explain the pursuit of a nuclear deterrent by countries like South Korea, Israel, and Taiwan, on the basis of legitimate existential fears. However, while their security concerns have been more or less constant for over thirty years, the nuclear postures of some of these countries have shifted over time. The external security context in and of itself is not enough, therefore, to advance our knowledge about why these states embraced different instruments, at different times, for coping with such fears. More recently, the notion that the democratic nature of states explains their reluctance to wage wars against their democratic brethren (but not against others) has become central to theoretical endeavors in international relations theory. The explosion of studies on the relationship between liberal democ- racy and peace has not yet included a systematic extension to the study of nonproliferation, but it is often asserted that democratization will have a benign effect on denuclearization. However, this apparent connection may be less solid than we might like to expect: I argue that examining the eco- nomic component of domestic liberalization in the different regional contexts may bring us closer to identifying an important engine of regime creation. In particular, ruling coalitions pursuing economic liberalization seem more likely to embrace regional nuclear regimes than their inward-looking, nation- alist, and radical-confessional counterparts.

Keywords: Nuclear weapons, Political economy, Democracy, Neoliberalism, International economic cooperation, Liberalization, Peacetime, Economic liberalization, Nuclear deterrence