‘Most Potent and Irresistible Moral Influence’: Public Opinion, Rhetorical Coercion, and the Hague Conferences

Abstract

International relations scholars debate whether the current liberal order can adapt to power shifts among the great powers. Yet historically, contestation among the great powers has often revolved around the question of whether the international system should be organized along liberal and institutional lines in the first place. In this paper, I examine great power negotiation strategies at the 1899 and 1907 Hague conferences, an often overlooked yet critical episode of liberal order-building. As rising powers shuffled the great power ranks, many hoped that the Hague conferences would prevent arms racing, reduce the barbarity of war, and promote peaceful solutions to international crises. Champions of liberal rules and institutions used principled persuasion, appealing to shared norms and collective identities. They also engaged in rhetorical coercion, seeking at times to shame potential obstructionists. Yet the conferences revealed the profound limitations of these soft-power based negotiation strategies. For a brief moment in 1899, circumstances allowed champions of the Hague system to persuade states to sign on to the laws of war and to embarrass states into accepting arbitration. Yet by 1907, conditions had changed and obstructionists were able to mobilize broad coalitions to block significant change. The Hague conferences highlight the importance of interstate coalitional networks in institutional adaptation. Policy Implications • States seeking institutional adaptation should use principled persuasion when preferences are relatively aligned and there is a strong normative consensus in favor of reform. • States seeking institutional adaptation should use rhetorical coercion when they are not acting in an obviously hypocritical manner and the target has clearly violated a widely shared normative principle.

Rhetorical Appeals and Strategic Cooptation in the Rise and Fall of The New International Economic Order

“…Lacking the material resources to compel institutional adjustments in the global economic order, the origins of the reform demands were found in the strategies of principled persuasion that the non‐aligned movement had articulated after the Bandung Conference and in the economic development models and dependency theories circulating within UNCTAD (Meagher, 1979; Nesadurai, 2008). As Kruck and Zangl (this issue) detail, such strategies are premised on legitimacy‐related argbut also in France andobilize third parties and alter the calculus and behavior of adversaries (see also Goddard, this issue; MacDonald, this issue). For many supporters of the NIEO, the group’s emphasis on themes of fairness and justice aimed less to shame than to persuade the global community to support extensive reform.…”

‘Stand up like a Taiwanese!’: PRC coercion and public preferences for resistance

“…The roles of the public in many of these accounts tend to be in terms of how elite decision-makers perceive, interpret, or expect public reactions to play out in response to some receipt or issuing of threat (Byman and Waxman, 1999;Schultz, 2001). Another common approach is to examine how elites mobilize public opinion in the face of threat or to extend some threat to another actor (Onderco, 2017;MacDonald, 2020). How publics actually understand and act around such threats receive less attention.…”