Overview

This book challenges the traditional view that meaningful analogies cannot be drawn between domestic and international politics. Alexandru V. Grigorescu shows that there are important parallels to be drawn across these two realms, if political interactions among states over the past two centuries are compared to those within states going back about a thousand years. He focuses specifically on the evolution of institutions that restrain concentrated power, such as courts, assemblies, and bureaucracies. Restraining Power through Institutions begins by developing a set of theoretical arguments about the emergence, change, and consolidation of institutional restraints on power. These are primarily derived from literature focusing on domestic politics going back to events such as those surrounding the signing of the Magna Carta and the emergence and evolution of the Curia Regis in England, or of the Estates General and Parlements in France. It then assesses the relevance of such arguments for the evolution of numerous international institutions: international courts, such as the Permanent Court of Arbitration, International Court of Justice, and International Criminal Court; international assemblies and parliaments, such as the Assembly of the League of Nations, UN General Assembly; and European Parliament; and international secretariats, such as those of the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, League of Nations, UN, and World Bank. The similarities between developments in the domestic and international realms lead to a number of important conclusions about future expectations for international institutions and for world politics more broadly. In particular, the book argues that complementing the traditional focus on efforts to acquire power with the ""Lockean"" focus on restraining power offers a more complete depiction of international politics. This novel perspective consequently shifts the focus from the interests and actions of a handful of powerful states to those of virtually all states and groups of states, regardless of how powerful they are.

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9780192863683

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Reviews

A masterful study of the rise and evolution of institutional restraints on power in world politics. Looking back at the emergence of courts, parliaments, and bureaucracies in early modern Europe and subsequent efforts by nation-states to build global assemblies and organizations, Grigorescu illuminates the complex and often surprising parallels between domestic and international efforts to circumscribe and limit the concentration of power. A smart and original contribution to our understanding of the limits and possibilities of institutional controls on power. * G. John Ikenberry, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University * Do you see international and domestic politics as following fundamentally distinct logics? Think again. In this masterly study, Alexandru Grigorescu marshals an impressive array of evidence and insights to demonstrate that political life within and between countries is more similar than commonly thought, when we take a broader historical perspective. Strikingly, it is not just that the pursuit of power features in both domains-it is the development of institutions for restraining power that emerges as central unifying theme in the long run. After reading this book it is difficult not to look at global politics in a different light. * Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, Associate Professor of Global Politics, The London School of Economics and Political Science * This is a very important book that makes a major contribution to IR theory. It offers a coherent and empirically supported justification for the 'optimism' about international institutions. By shifting back more to some of the Lockean rather than Kantian arguments about how institutions that constrain power can and do arise, Grigorescu makes sense of the real consequences of international law and courts, assemblies, and bureaucracies, that many IR scholars simply ignore either because their theories cannot account for them or because, guided by such limited theories, they have never looked closely at what modern international institutions actually do. * Craig N. Murphy, Betty Freyhof Johnson '44 Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Wellesley College * In Restraining Power through Institutions Grigorescu goes straight at some of the most fundamental questions on international politics - how do institutions constrain the power of governments, how do small and medium states fit into a world of great powers, and how has world politics changed over the past centuries? He offers a strikingly novel account of world politics by tracing how institutional constraints arise around concentrations of power. Tracing the work of constraints on power, in theory and in practice, Grigorescu deftly combines IR theory with history, domestic politics with the international, and past with present, into an engaging take on fundamental issues of the discipline. * Ian Hurd, Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University * Restraining Power through Institutions offers a major new argument regarding international order-namely, that the causal logics that explain the development of important domestic institutional restraints on power also explain the development of international institutional restraints. Although the two levels are at different stages of development, their common logic of institutional consolidation is carefully traced through Grigorescu's historical analysis. This is a highly ambitious work with a bold argument and an encompassing scope. It will surely be an important contribution to ongoing debates about the development of international institutions. * Lora Anne Viola, Professor for North American Foreign Policy, Freie Universität Berlin *

Author Information

Alexandru V. Grigorescu is Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. His research focuses on international organizations, especially on how they adopt structures and roles similar to domestic institutions. His work has been published in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Review of International Organizations, and World Politics. He is the author of Democratic Intergovernmental Organizations? (2015) and The Ebb and Flow of Global Governance (2020), both with Cambridge University Press. In the early 1990s, before his academic career, he served as a diplomat in the Romanian Foreign Ministry and was posted to the UN.

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