Preventive diplomacy begins at home. Whether in dealing with divided or disintegrating or neighboring states, or with commercial or environmental or security relations, the anticipation and prevention of conflict by negotiation, rather than pursuing current conflicts from given positions, is always an available policy option. It involves replacing an approach of winning (prevailing) over other parties for one of winning over (persuading) other parties, and calls for future-based cost-benefit calculations and for reframing the conflict to allow for a positive-sum formula for agreement. These are the three basic elements of preventive diplomacy--cooperation, calculation, reformulation. In a sense, the discussion stops there: When the parties are moved by the prospects of future costs to adopt a reconciling rather than a confronting mentality toward each other and a problem-solving attitude toward their conflict, the rest is detail and tactics. Indeed, many of the issue area analyses--on divided and disintegrating states, on territorial and boundary disputes, on inter-ethnic negotiations and cooperative disputes, and on transboundary and global environmental disputes--have emphasized these elements as the key to successful preventive diplomacy in their area. The preceding chapters have brought out the special characteristics of preventive negotiations in each issue area; it is the common elements to the practice and underlying mentality of preventive diplomacy drawn from disparate issue areas that this conclusion addresses.
A preventive diplomacy policy is not merely an ideological choice. It does not depend on a party's "believing in" peaceful relations or disaster avoidance or conflict prevention or other idealisms. It is a policy for realists, made in the name of efficiency and effectiveness. Parties find that they can increase their chances of attaining their goals and of doing so at a lesser cost by making allies out of their opponents and by making collaborators out of fellow targets of impending disasters. This involves buying the other party's cooperation with a consideration of its own goals, as in any negotiation, but with a particularly forward focus through an emphasis on the avoidance of future conflict rather than the ending of past/present conflict. It does not involve a renunciation of goals in conflict but a recasting--reduction or expansion--of goals to those which fit into the same frame and are attainable in cooperation with the other party. The choice is made under the impulsion of an awareness of future vs present costs and of present vs future achievabilities.
The requirements of preventive action go beyond early warning and reach into early awareness, before warnings. The parties calculate that unless present actions are taken, at some cost, the future costs will be significantly higher and future actions significantly more difficult. They reckon that there is a greater chance of achieving a greater part of the goals now than later (and that holding out, in turn, raises future costs). More lives will be saved by waterproofing the hull now than by subsequently fishing survivors out of the open sea. Unless something is done now, things will get doubly worse--worse not only in terms of costs but also in terms of chances of gain. This is not a normal negotiation calculation, which tend to compare alternative current outcomes, nor does it emerge from usual cost calculations, which tend to respond to the pressure of current costs.
Nor are such future calculations usual in the policy-making business. Cost-benefit considerations are common enough and are the usual basis of decision-making (Raiffa l968, Sfez l973). But preemptive decision-making to avoid future costs sets statesmanship apart from merely minding the store and putting out fires. Yet this is what "normal diplomacy" should be. Preventive policymaking is associated with terms like farsightedness and vision, underlying the fact that its success depends on a clear identification of future uncertainties which will--if the policy is successful--never materialize to confirm its wisdom. It is the need for action against uncertainty that has kept preventive diplomacy from being commonplace. Even when one party has adopted a preventive diplomacy stance, it usually has to overcome different calculations from the second party or parties to the conflict. And when no or neither parties have thought in preventive terms, third parties are needed to create new perceptions and calculations.
So preventive diplomacy, in fact does not begin at home, but in the need to
convince others--domestic as well as foreign, to be sure--of the need to think
ahead. Yet if the nub of the preventive diplomacy challenge appears is not how
to practice it but how to get other parties to practice it, the ways of both
are in fact identical. The main arguments available to a first or third party
to convince a second of the need to join preventive diplomacy negotiations lie
the looming costs of inaction, the prospects of a positive-sum outcome, and
the attraction of a reconciling attitude from the other party. These defining
characteristics of preventive negotiation are also its main incentives, a situation
which has its coherence and benefits but also its drawbacks. When conflicting
parties find the costs of inaction distant and bearable, the prospects of joint
gains irrelevant to their zero-sum aims, and offers of reconciliation either
untrustworthy or a sign of weakness to be exploited, then preventive negotiation
is not yet on the table, and the very basis for the attractiveness of the policy
is absent.
Conditions
Behind the choice of preventive diplomacy over confrontation or neglect lie objective criteria for efficiency and effectiveness, and not just an ideological choice or a philosophical predilection for a liberal rather than a realist approach in international relations. Since that choice is made by human beings, that objective basis is filtered by subjectivities, a matter of awareness if not of philosophy, concerning at least the ability to perceive the components of costs and benefit calculations. But the objective basis for that awareness involves real costs and opportunities that provide the structural conditions for preventive negotiating and that can be presented as six conditions, in ascending order of specificity.
The most basic requirement is a problem to be solved. Preventive diplomacy is a problem-solving effort. It is impelled by a felt need for some order in interdependencies and interactions, where the cost of disorder, inefficiencies and uncertainties impedes the achievement of the purposes for which the transactions were instituted. Although this may appear so basic as to be banal, it is important to recognize that preventive efforts begin their justification in response to the challenge, "What's the problem?" Impending dangers are a collective social "bad" that diminish some aspect of the security of affected parties. But parties must be convinced that the danger is indeed impending, a worsening situation that makes relations or transactions costly, and that their security is indeed at stake. In other words, the free spectator (equivalent to the free rider) phenomenon must be avoided, by avoiding the perception that it is someone else's problem that will pass us by. Whether it is an undefined status causing boundary or territorial disputes, the instability inherent in divided or dividing states, the disruption brought on by runaway competition in trade or other cooperative relationships, or the uncertainties endemic to competition in superpower or labor-management relations, the problem is an unregulated relationship that is turning costly to the parties who are part of it.
The second component is preventability, a problem that is removable and not just a problem pasted on the horizon about which nothing can be done. If the problem is to be understood as a opportunity, the preventable element must appear as a likelihood if preventive negotiations are to take place. Although, as has been noted, the major challenge of preventive diplomacy is to make the parties understand the likelihood of the impending cost, prevention fits very well in the current emphasis, expressed in prospect theory, on the protection against loss as a motivator over the accession of gain (Kahneman & Tversky l979, l995). The clearer the evidence of a worsening situation, the more appropriate the situation for prevention, but "clear evidence" has a subjective dimension large enough to allow for many shades of grey. This of course is what makes preventive diplomacy so rare and so difficult: By the time the evidence is incontrovertible, it is often too late for prevention.
Awareness of a worsening and preventable situation posed no difficulty to diplomats focusing on the global security dangers of the nuclear arms spiral, who saw the possibility of competitive nuclear armament's running out of control and worked to introduce predictability, stability and transparency into the relationship. In other issue areas, the awareness has been less clear-cut, with some perceptions of worsening situations providing an impetus to preventive negotiations and other situations generating awareness only too late, when things had already worsened beyond prevention.
Thus, some countries' boundary disputes have been forestalled by demarcation while others' uncertainty has led to war; some countries' ethnic grievances have been handled before they became irremediable, whereas others' experience has shown that grievances can only be handled when the aggrieved come in control of their own affairs; and when violence threatens to derail negotiations to end ethnic violence, the crucial element in keeping talks on track is the motivation to avoid a worse outcome; divided Germany was able to avoid the danger of war through constraint and then unification, contrasting with Yemen's experience with war in both division and unification and learning from Korea's experience in both constraint and war; in some cases, disintegrating states have sensed the specter of disaster sharply enough to part ways peacefully, while others have proven the specter real; and in the case of ozone depletion, clear awareness of the impending danger brought negotiations to stave it off, while in the case of climate change, diplomats waffled before clouded awareness. The difference between prevented and unprevented cases on each issue must therefore be found in further contextual elements, as well as appropriate policy responses.
The third objective element is a cost-sharing opportunity. If parties are to be involved in efforts to head off impending cataclysms, they need to be assured of the participation of others in bearing the burdens of the effort. Preventive negotiations always involves several parties, whether they are the parties to a conflict or problem or third parties intervening between first and second parties to a dispute. Preventive diplomacy always involves costs in heading off worse costs, and it is the costs of current action, not of avoided catastrophe, that enter first into the calculations of the preventing negotiators. Involved parties therefore need to be awakened to the need to share current costs, so as to diminish them for any one party, as well as to the need to avoid future costs for all.
Demarcation and autonomy policies impose restrictions on parties on both sides of the borders and both sides of the governance relationship. Unification efforts of divided states were not surrenders but bail-outs, political or economic. Conflicts in normally cooperative relations, including trade, are averted when the costs of cooperation can be shared rather than allocated unevenly. Much of the debate over preventive environmental measures against global natural disasters has centered on the way costs can be distributed equitably, without which preventive measures cannot find support; the debate mirrors, mutatis mutandis, the same concerns in preventing global security disasters. In building non-proliferation and chemical weapons regimes, the nuclear power imposed self-restraint as an inducement to the restraint of non-nuclear powers, and when they did not the regime-building efforts faltered.
The fourth condition is an opportunity for new benefits through prevention. Despite the strength of the prospect theory literature, already referred to, prevention of losses has not proved to be enough to motivate preventive negotiations on numerous issues; there must be an alternate pull factor, an opportunity to benefit from the outcome of prevention. Preventive diplomacy can create prosperity, not just avoid losses. Such benefits impel action, although as prospect theory does indicate, they must have a higher level of certainty than protection against losses. Preventive action is best likely to be mobilized by special interests who see a chance to make a profit from the new situation.
Preventive action is motivated by a change in stakes, when parties see an occasion for beneficial cooperation instead of zero-sum conflict. Thus, awareness of the ozone threat and measures to prevent it sharpened most notably when chemical companies saw in it an opportunity to sell replacement chemicals, where before they had seen preventive measure as a threat to their current sales. Divided states united when either incumbent leaders, as in Yemen, or alternative leaders, as in Germany, saw an opportunity for better fortunes in unity as their divided base faced collapsed; they saw a chance not just to jump from a sinking ship but to board a seaworthy one. Long-festering boundary disputes come to settlement, not simply when the danger of ongoing disruption becomes evident to the parties, but when some new good--such as mineral deposits or grazing areas or simply regional development--is discovered whose exploitation is not possible as long as the dispute hangs over the parties, as occurred in the Peru-Ecuador, Mali-Mauritanian, and Egypt-Sudan border disputes.
The fifth condition is supportive domestic pressure. The domestic base of preventive diplomacy is involved in both the challenge and the response. The relevant public has to join in--or even precede--official awareness of the coming cost and has to support the current costs of preventing it. If the public is not convinced that a danger is looming, it will not condone the efforts necessary to stave it off. There are a number of side implications of this awareness. The pressing public must be convinced that it is implicated in the danger to be prevented, that in cause or effect the danger is not someone else's problem. Usually, the supportive reaction comes not from a broadly undifferentiated public but from a "lumpy" public composed of ideologically-motivated consciousness-raising groups and payoff-motivated interest groups, the latter particularly susceptible to the opportunity for benefit in a preventive solution. Public-interest and private-interest groups make strange bedfellows, but support from both is needed to face future, not-yet-occurring dangers. This marriage is facilitated when the worsening situation and therefore the required cost-sharing has larger implications beyond the case at hand, so that generalized measures need to be undertaken and negotiations need to deal with causes and consequences in generic terms.
The need for public support also relates to the composition of the leadership group. Many studies have emphasized--as in any kind of conflict management--the need for a "centrist moderate coalition," broadly based in the various interest groups, open to the attitudes and calculations involved in preventive action, and committed to sidelining hardliners who could use confrontation to reinforce their position. On many types of dangers, an additional motivation to prevention is to avoid giving extremists an issue that could be used as a distraction in internal politics. Rather than leaving perceptions and awareness on a subjective level, the matter of internal support coalitions places preventive diplomacy on the more objective level of inter-elite politics. Polarized extremist groups make war, or eventually peace, but rarely undertake farsighted preventive action.
These elements of public and elite support are evident in the experience of various issue areas. Public support has been a crucial ingredient that has paced the negotiations to prevent both security and natural disasters; it was courted and generated when flagging, and it sometimes got ahead of official actions to lead the efforts. Leaders seeking to make long-range accommodations in their own disputes over territorial or population aspects of sovereignty or third parties seeking involvement in others' sovereignty disputes have been reined in when they get too far ahead of popular support for their action. The existence of a moderate centrist coalition has been the crucial variable in highly distributive situations revolving around sovereignty issues such as state disintegration and unification and ethnic and territorial conflicts. To be sure, leaders involved in preventive demarches need to pull popular and leadership support around them, but they also need to some extent to be pushed by a rising popular demand for action, as a precondition, in a very interactive relationship between leaders and followers.
The final condition is a galvanizing event, positive or negative, which can work up the ladder to improve the other broader objective elements. Like Oscar Wilde's hanging, galvanizing events focus the mind marvelously, bringing costs and problems into perspective and building public support for leaders' action. Often they run perilously close to a crisis itself which it is too late to prevent, however. A boundary and ethnic incident, a violent outbreak between divided or within disintegrating states, or a close brush with a global security or natural disaster are often last-minute warnings of sustained conflict if the problem is not handled, the last cry for attention before the situation turns irrevocably worse. Confirming scientific evidence, near accidents, unexpected crop failure or wildcat confrontations, even warning declarations can all be triggers to the early awareness required to start conditions climbing up the ladder to preventive action.
Parties cannot deal with a future problem until it becomes present. The near-assassination of President Reagan and the permanent disabilitation of Jim Brady, the subway attacks of the sect in Tokyo, the terrorist assassination of Israeli athletes in Munich, the bomb in the World Trade Center, the Chernobyl or Torrey Canyon or Exxon Valdez disasters, and the Cuban Missile crisis all brought the future dangers of uncontrolled guns, uncontrolled chemical weapons, environmental hazards, and superpower nuclear relations home in the present and sparked efforts to deal with them. Consumers enjoying their condition are unlikely to mobilize against a future threat to it until the rumble of the impending stampede is clearly heard.
Processes
Given these six structural conditions, corresponding processes can be employed by either a first party or a third party to promote preventive diplomacy negotiations. These processes are designed to bring about changes in both attitudes and the stakes themselves in order to provide early awareness of both the impending dangers to be prevented and the alternative opportunities deriving from effective prevention. A sequence of six steps emerges from the record across issue areas.
The basic step is a cultivation of early awareness. The term is used as a more meaningful alternative to "early warning," which has become a popular but misleading road sign on the path to prevention (George & Holl l997). Early warnings abound for the looking in any issue area where prevention could be involved (Jentleson l998). The problem is not the scarcity of timely indicators, but the lack of looking, the absence of a political culture that favors preemptive, proactive analysis and problem-solving. Early awareness therefore means a combination of "looking" and "seeing," a willingness to look ahead for distant problems and an ability to identify the warning signals that are available. Early awareness also involves an analytical understanding of the possibility of prevention, an awareness that not only is a problem looming but that something can be done about. As in any negotiation, diagnosis is the beginning of action (Zartman & Berman l982).
Ultimately, awareness and prevention may well be a cultural matter, with some societies more apt to looking to the future and more open to the notion that something can about it than others. American society is torn between the two notions, but is more prepared to take on the future than are more traditional societies imbued with fatalism. In popular culture, maxims such as "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," "A stitch in time saves nine," "Better safe than sorry," "Forewarned is forearmed," and "Plan ahead" vie with "Never trouble til trouble troubles you," "Don't go looking for trouble," "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," "Let sleeping dogs lie," and a recent addition, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."(1)
It is this ambivalence which is probably the most basic expression of the difficulties that preventive action runs into.
The next step is the elimination, or at least reduction, of uncertainties. Awareness is encouraged by a shift from certainty of no-danger to uncertainty; preventive negotiation solutions need to convert that uncertainty back again to certainty of no-danger under newly preventive conditions (Kahneman & Tversky l995). The first shift is accomplished by information on the current and impending situation and analysis of the dangers inherent in it, as discussed. The second is created by adequate measures to deal with the problem of conflict, removing its causes, allaying its effects, limiting the chance of accidents or motivated incidents, replacing its dangerous dynamic with a more beneficial one. The need to reduce uncertainties underscores the importance of regime-building, as Goodby has noted, enhancing predictability through rules.
The third step in prevention is the reframing of the problem in such a way that those involved can see a positive sum outcome to the preventive efforts. This means removing or softening the distributive nature or perception of the problem, and converting it into an integrative problem. Or, if the problem is indeed basically distributive, it means seeking an accepted notion of justice to govern the allocation of outcomes. These are the standard components of reframing an integrative perception of a conflict (Tversky & Kahneman l98l; Bazerman & Neale l99l; Pruitt & Carnevale l993; Spector l994), but they are of special importance when costs and tradeoffs take place over time, as in preventive negotiations. Thus, reframing is the key to the continuing process and a natural extension of the first step, awareness of the problem-solving possibilities. Indeed, it is also the key to a supportive mood that is crucial in underlying the subsequent efforts, one that continually keeps hope alive for a peaceful and beneficial solution.
At the same time, and in the same process, as a fourth step, first and third parties need to build home constituencies within their target partners, and nourish the home support that must already exist within their own polities. This cannot be a separate effort, since, as noted, it is interdependent with the sorts of solutions being worked out in the preventive negotiations. If the issue is large enough, it may even involve efforts to keep a moderate centrist coalition in place, by providing benefits and addressing appeals to the support groups of the coalition and helping isolate the extremist opposition. The use of information across national boundaries becomes an important aspect of preventive activity.
The fifth step involves the development of an attractive and balanced package of costs and opportunities, across several dimensions. As the objective characteristics have indicated, present costs need to be less than discounted future costs and need to be equitably distributed. In addition, there need to be up-front opportunities for benefits to outweigh both present and future costs, and to attract clusters of support among public and leadership groups. The same reasoning extends to the control elements of the agreement, by building in sanctions for non-compliance and benefits for compliance with its future provisions (Victor, Raustriala & Skolnikoff l998). The distribution of costs and opportunities needs to discriminate between adhering and non-adhering members of the affected community, so that free riding is discouraged and, equally explicitly, participation is rewarded. This may even mean that already-convinced first or third parties may need to provide side-payments or sweeteners in addition to the otherwise available benefits for second-party participation so that the initiators may be able to enjoy the benefits of a preventive agreement. Awareness and participation need their reward, and, as coalition theory indicates (Riker l962, Dupont l994, Brams l994), late awareness may require greater encouragement from the early joiners.
The final step is the creation or refinement of an appropriate regime to provide continuing prevention of the problem. Farsighted policymaking can deal preemptively with conflict in two ways, anticipating the consequences either of a specific situation or of a general type of situations. The first involves specific calculations and specific solutions, negotiating to prevent a particular conflict from breaking out or escalating; the second involves generic solutions and mechanisms to remove uncertainties, both in cost-benefit calculations and in solutions, negotiating to set up regimes to handle problems inherent in a category of problems that could lead them into conflict and violence. Each seeks to replace the current, dangerous course of events with an assured, alternative outcome, attaching negative payoffs to the former to make it less inviting and positive payoffs and certainties to the alternative to make it more attractive.
But the first is not effective as prevention until it has been generalized to handle the possibility of other such problems' occurring in the future (Hasenclever, Mayer & Rittberger l997). In some issue areas, the number of cases is small and idiosyncratic enough that regimes will take the shape of informal learning rather than formal instruments; such is the case in regard to the three divided states. Even where the number of cases is larger, the regime may remain on the level of implicit understandings on norms, practices, experiences and expectations rather than rules and conventions; such is the case in regard to boundary, territorial, ethnic, or disintegration conflicts, where the limitations of sovereignty work strongly against broad codified agreements. But in most cases, the problem is not prevented until formal regimes have been established through conventions, which are then continually reviewed and revised to make sure that they cover the problem (Spector, Sjöstedt & Zartman l999). In the light of the previous discussion, regimes are important not only in terms of preventing future recurrences, but as mechanisms for formalizing the balance of costs and benefits for prevention and compliance that make the negotiated agreement possible. There is no need here to repeat the literature of regime formation, but merely to emphasize that preventive negotiations necessarily join that process in their ongoing effort to handle their problem.
Negotiation
Lots of conflicts have been prevented, more than can ever be counted (since there is no methodology for counting things that have not happened). Many of these have been prevented specifically by negotiation, in a number of issue areas. Their lessons can be played back to the practice of negotiation, in order to improve its exercise. Although each issue area has its own characteristics, there are common threads that can be useful across issues.
Preventive negotiations focus on restructuring stakes, since it is easier to change stakes than to change attitudes and a change in stakes facilitates a change in attitudes. The key to bringing parties to a preventive outcome--either by one of the parties in a conflict with another, by one among many parties in a conflict against nature, or by a third party--is the ability to bring them to revise their view of what is involved in the conflict. There is no apriori basis to indicate whether side payments, reframing or tradeoffs is preferable or appropriate as a means of stake handling, although as Hampson suggests it might be useful to look first at tradeoffs and side payments for coordination disputes (where there are multiple equilibria), tradeoffs and reframing for public goods and externality (public bads) disputes, and any of the above for distributional disputes.
Conceiving of power as an added value (negative or positive) joined to available outcomes allows the negotiator think of ways to make alternatives more or less attractive (Zartman & Rubin l999). Both attractive incentives and dissuasive consequences can be highlighted as adjuncts or alternatives to either ending or continuing the conflict, respectively. For example, if parties see that jointly-achieved prosperity or economic development is preferable to a boundary, territorial, or state-division conflict, or that continued progress in talks to end ethnic conflict is the alternative to avoiding a worse outcome, preventive negotiations can move ahead. In many negotiations, parties often break and gesticulate or worse in order to test the alternative or brandish it before the other party (Druckman l986; Zartman l995b). Unfortunately there is no way to "brandish" favorable alternatives, at least with the same effectiveness. That would seem to support the lesson of prospect theory that parties tend to avoid losses rather than to assure gains. However, the issue area experience shows that incentives are indeed more frequently effective, but that they take a longer time to sink in. Parties are less often threatened than promised into cooperation, and even in the case of conflicts with nature--as in environmental prevention--it is the prospect of new benefits that clinches cooperation to avoid the impending worst.
Stake handling also involves reframing. When the present elements of the dispute can be redefined in other terms, even without new elements as incentives, negotiations to prevent conflict are facilitated. Thus, when parties can see the issue as one of usufruct rather than ownership, or autonomy rather than secession, or as mutual notification rather than prohibition of military exercises, the stakes are moved from being sharply distributive to only mildly distributive, and possibly even integrative.
Finally, stake handling can also involve tradeoffs among differently valued items, either by dividing the current stakes into two piles of different worth or by introducing new tradeable stakes. Trading off environment against development to head off climate change effects, compliance against incentives to head off global warming, access against demarcation to avoid boundary problems, consultation against enlargement to prevent security alliance confrontation, security and then aid against unification to remove divided state tensions were all the keys to deals that prevented conflict and escalation.
Preventive negotiation fundamentally and necessarily involves attitude change. As noted, parties must change their views about cooperation, either with their adversaries to prevent conflict between them and/or with others in the same boat to prevent conflicts with nature. No matter how the stakes are altered objectively, unless attitudes about cooperation are changed the conflict will go on. One branch of attitude change goes back to the way stakes are viewed; the other leads to the way the other party or parties are viewed. It is striking that parties locked in the demonizing demagoguery of global security conflicts in the end (or along the way) has less trouble in seeing each other as potential cooperators in preventing global security disasters than do non-adversaries faced with global natural disasters. Obviously, the difference is the degree of certainty of the impending disaster; actors are more readily galvanized by the prospects of being fried by a an atomic exchange than by an ozone deficiency.
Finally, the process of preventive diplomacy has its special nature among the tactics of negotiation. Preventive negotiations are integrative negotiations par excellence. The absence of this characteristic is the key to failure. Unlike other negotiations, preventive diplomacy does not respond to ripeness. By its nature, it is action before the problem calls for it. As a result, in the absence of urgency, it has to create its own motivation. It must build a disposition to negotiate out of the push factor of early awareness and the pull factor of future gain. Both are difficult to achieve, which in itself explains the rarity of effective prevention. Early awareness requires a receptivity to warnings and a willingness to make a place among present fires for future smoke. But allaying and redistributing future costs is not enough. Measures to do so must also carry with them an opportunity for gain to offset present and opportunity costs. Future trade-offs under uncertainty are among the hardest to make, yet in the end preventive diplomacy depends on the provision of early gains if it is to galvanize action to avoid later costs.
1. 1 Note that in the latter list, the first three come from fatalistic or traditionalistic strands in American culture, Negro spirituals and Judaic tradition.
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