The point of this story is not to illustrate how unruly my children are, though I must admit they are at times, but rather to illustrate that virtually all negotiations are embedded within an environmental context that directly affects their course and outcome. The “child environment” in car shopping provided a way for me to tip the bargaining scales in my favor and to push the salesperson to come to a bottom-line price more quickly than might happen if my child were not in the showroom. Very quickly, the salesperson realized that if he or she was indeed going to sell me a car, or at least have me come back for a second look, a reason to do so had to be given quickly. If not, either something would get broken in that fancy showroom model or I would be out the door with my out-of-control child. Either way, without a firm price, the dealership would lose my business.

The four books discussed in this essay provide us with an opportunity to examine the notion that negotiations in our global community must be studied in an integrated way that accounts for the host of factors that influence them. The embedded nature of contemporary transnational negotiations is particularly important to study and understand in the context of trends toward globalization and the seemingly increasing empowerment of individuals in all aspects of global affairs. But as discussed below, the embedded character of negotiation is not as new as some analysts would have us believe, but rather it has always existed in such a form—even before the world became as globalized as it is today. Thus the following discussion explicitly embeds negotiation within a framework grounded in a broader study of international relations processes and outcomes. The works discussed here also point scholars of negotiation to the need to expand traditional approaches to negotiation and account more consistently and explicitly for the variety of environmental factors that influence the process and outcome of negotiations.

Negotiation in a Globalizing Age

Strobe Talbott recently argued that “Global interdependence affects the way governments think about international relations and practice diplomacy. The more engaged in and affected by the process, the more they must change.” This passage encapsulates a near truth of our age: globalization has changed the way the world works. A more significant question raised by this passage is whether contemporary diplomacy has become a different animal than what has traditionally been practiced and studied or whether it has more accurately changed only in speed and intensity. The world and communication within it have changed with the advent of the Internet, global travel, and the increasing contact with individuals and other international actors. Yet it is more difficult to identify a marked change in the array of political forces that condition the setting in which international negotiation takes place.

The lack of change in international negotiation also leads us to Paul Sharp’s recent argument in this journal that diplomacy and negotiation should be studied more fully by international relations scholars because diplomatic interaction is the transmission point that relates various international political, economic, and military forces to international interaction and outcomes. Sharp’s characterization implies that negotiation has always been embedded within the structure and process of global affairs and that forces of globalization have produced changes only in degree and not in kind. This sentiment is also echoed by the work of P. Terrence Hopmann, who examines negotiation from the vantage point of foreign policy analysis and its myriad methods and conceptual approaches. Yet Hopmann emphasizes that negotiation studies inevitably must account for the interdependent nature of decisionmaking in a bilateral or multilateral interactive negotiation environment.

The need to investigate negotiation from diverse perspectives and to account for many environmental factors is well illustrated in the collection of articles edited by Peter Berton, Hiroshi Kimura, and I. William Zartman. At the same time, the book does little to bring traditional international relations concepts and structures explicitly into the analysis. Zartman begins by laying out three contrasting ways to study and understand international negotiation—by examining 1) the actors and the impact of culture; 2) the structure and process of negotiations; and 3) the values at play in negotiation processes and outcomes. Of the other books discussed here, all clearly fit into the first category. The monographs by Richard H. Solomon and Scott Snyder focus on the impact of culture, while the collection of essays edited by Francisco Aldecoa and Michael Keating focuses on a neglected set of actors in the field of negotiation studies: substate governments and their paradiplomats.

The first part of International Negotiation focuses squarely on the impact of culture on negotiation. Guy Olivier Faure thoroughly refutes attempts to discard culture as a factor in negotiation and shows how it affects nearly all facets of a negotiation, though his article is not as broad based and rich a study as Raymond Cohen’s earlier work on the topic. Michael Blaker’s chapter deals with the interesting case of Japanese and U.S. rice negotiations and illustrates the impact of Japanese “coping behavior,” which is the ability of Japanese negotiators to assess negotiation stimuli and influencing factors and methodically reevaluate negotiation positions throughout a process.

The Japanese case is juxtaposed nicely with Hiroshi Kimura’s discussion of Russian approaches to negotiation, focusing primarily on the process as a struggle. Kimura’s essay is also full of quotes that vividly describe the Russian approach. For instance, Maxim Litvinov, a foreign affairs commissar under Stalin, once stated that “The Soviet diplomat tries in peacetime to perform the task which the Red Army would have to perform in wartime” (p. 67). Finally, the essay by Peter Berton moves the reader beyond cultural idiosyncrasies with a comparative examination of Japanese, Chinese, and Russian negotiators that stresses the interplay of culture, communication patterns, and negotiating styles.

The second part of International Negotiation purportedly focuses on structure and processes and their impact on negotiation. The unfortunate thing about this section is that two of the four chapters conclude that culture is the dominant force in determining outcomes, even when process is theoretically the focus of the section and would hopefully be highlighted more directly in the analyses.

John L. Graham’s chapter focuses on the give and take of negotiator interaction but points to culture’s crucial role in the process. Similar conclusions about the impact of culture are found in Robert L. Friedheim’s chapter on Japan’s experience in the international whaling negotiations. In contrast, the chapters by Frank R. Pfetsch and Gunnar Sjöstedt do a more straightforward job of placing negotiation within a broader international relations context. Pfetsch illustrates well that institutions indeed matter in European Union negotiations, while Sjöstedt places international trade and climate negotiations within the context of changing roles of international leadership in multilateral forums. This issue is particularly important for us to understand as the leadership roles in international forums evolve in our post-hegemonic and post–Cold War worlds.

The third and last section of the book examines how conceptions of ethics, fairness, justice, and also emotions influence negotiations. Written by Cecilia Albin, Zartman, Bertram Spector, and Fred Charles Iklé, these four chapters are well grounded in the interplay among process, power relationships, and values in international relations. As such, they move our understanding of the prospects for longer-term solutions to international problems forward and provide scholars and policymakers with fodder for the development of just and lasting negotiated outcomes.

The Solomon and Snyder books are part of a series of case studies commissioned by the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP) and aimed at providing detailed investigations of the impact of cultural factors on negotiation. With these two studies, we see two artfully detailed examples of how culture indeed plays a significant role in the negotiation process and its outcomes. Solomon, a former National Security Council staff member and assistant U.S. secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, provides an excellent study of Chinese negotiating behavior, based on an extensive examination of documents about U.S.-Chinese normalization from 1967 to 1984.

Solomon’s examination of Chinese officials’ efforts to “personalize” the negotiating process illustrates the ways the Chinese approach influenced the ongoing and evolving process of normalization during this period. Interesting and useful in this study is Solomon’s thorough historical chronicle of the relationship, through which he demonstrates how much words matter in diplomacy. Yet the primary value of his work is that it moves from history and concept to a systematic analysis of how the disjunctures between Chinese and American approaches to negotiation produce problems in the negotiating process. Table 4 of the book, “Asymmetries in the Chinese and American Political Cultures,” provides an insightful summary of the two national approaches and the significance of their disjunctures for negotiation (p. 163).

If for no other reason, this book should be read by anyone involved in Sino-American negotiations to understand and avoid the types of diplomatic problems laid out in Solomon’s work. In addition, especially given the transnational and domestic structural pressures that condition and surround Sino-American relations, the advice that can be gleaned from Solomon’s conclusions might at least eliminate one set of problems from a diplomatic process that continues to be fraught with controversy, misunderstanding, and international power struggles.

Snyder’s book on North Korean approaches provides a mosaic of recent diplomatic activity surrounding the internationally isolated state. It, too, should be extremely useful for scholars and policymakers alike. Based primarily on interviews with American officials, their North Korean counterparts, and some South Korean and Japanese diplomats who were involved in the negotiations from 1989 to 1996 over the North Korean nuclear program, Snyder’s study also demonstrates the impact of culture on the outcome of the negotiation process. Specifically, this study centers on an examination of the widely held assumption that North Korean negotiating behavior during the 1990s was “crazy” and dangerous, at least as measured by traditional international diplomatic and political-military norms.

What is most surprising in a book that aims at studying the cultural effects on negotiation is that Snyder concludes that North Korean behavior should not be considered crazy or dangerous. This conclusion is best read in Snyder’s own words:

Contrary to conventional wisdom among U.S. policy-makers, North Korea’s negotiating style and objectives have conformed to a consistent and all-too-predictable pattern. Those elements of the U.S.-DPRK negotiating equation that might fairly be termed “irrational” have less to do with North Korean negotiating behavior and more to do with the inconsistencies and the lack of coordination between American and South Korean negotiating approaches and the sporadic attention to North Korea as a policy priority despite the stakes and the size of the U.S. defense commitment on the Korean Peninsula (p. 143).

With these conclusions in mind, we must then turn to the various surrounding factors to understand fully the dynamics of the process. To address the diplomatic problems in the U.S.—North Korean—South Korean triad, scholars and policymakers must look to better cross-national policy coordination, the impact of military force deployments, and other “tools” of the diplomatic trade (e.g., trade and diplomatic sanctions). They must also examine the continued isolation of North Korea from the “normal” processes of world affairs. To extrapolate from Snyder’s conclusions, culture’s impact must be understood as an important aspect of negotiation, but also as only one part of the integrated whole of the negotiation process.

Moving to the final book discussed here, we find the most direct argument and evidence that globalization has indeed changed the way modern diplomacy works. The collection of essays contained in the Aldecoa and Keating anthology on paradiplomacy demonstrates how much the globalization of world politics has produced, somewhat counterintuitively, opportunities for the localization of negotiation and diplomatic processes. The editors define paradiplomacy as international activity by regional or local substate governments, which may or may not be pursued in concert with state-level diplomatic activity. Their arguments find academic resonance with the continuing debate over the efficacy of the state in a globalizing system. In their introduction, Aldecoa and Keating explicitly place the book within this debate by noting that paradiplomacy may represent a new paradigm for international relations because it accounts for the penetration of the international sphere by a multiplicity of nonstate actors. It also highlights how much states and substate actors may be in conflict not only over substance, but also over process: over control of international action by the responsible state-level authorities.

As Micheal Keating’s conceptual essay points out, it is difficult to argue against the notion that paradiplomacy has been on the rise in recent years. The question is whether or not the advent of paradiplomacy has significantly changed the nature of diplomacy. Does it provide yet more evidence of the decline of the state in contemporary world politics? Brian Hocking’s essay thoroughly lays out this controversy and situates our understanding of the phenomena within James Rosenau’s analysis of contending “spheres of authority” across the domestic-international frontier, where a variety of actors jockey for position in a world with changing conceptions of territoriality. For his part, Hocking concludes that paradiplomacy has not yet won the day as an entirely independent activity in world affairs. More accurately, he views paradiplomacy as one more challenge to the state that will generate policies of “containment and engagement, with an increasing emphasis on the latter as the centre [i.e., the state] recognizes the need to deploy a multifaceted diplomacy at both international and domestic levels” (p. 36; brackets mine).

The remaining essays in the book provide the reader with a fertile basis for future thinking and research on this topic by working through a series of cases where paradiplomacy has been evident. The cases range widely from an issue-driven discussion by Noé Cornago of the impact of paradiplomacy on security affairs to three separate essays dealing broadly with the European Union’s experience with paradiplomacy by Kepa Sodupe, Aldecoa, and José Luís de Castro. Further, John Kincaid and John Ravenhill respectively examine the experience of local governments in the United States and Australia. Discussions by Louis Balthazar of the Quebec experience and Alexander Ugalde of the first Basque Autonomous Government round out the book’s cases.

The final essay in the collection is by Iñaki Aguirre and produces an intertextual analysis of the paradiplomacy genre that attempts to relate this set of studies more broadly with postmodern approaches to international relations. Aguirre’s efforts to make this connection are valiant, but his conclusions fit more closely with the analyses provided by Rosenau or Yale Ferguson and Richard Mansbach than with purely postmodern texts when he states that paradiplomacy should be labeled “post-diplomatic.” The use of this term parallels closely the “post-international politics” approach enunciated and advocated by Rosenau, Ferguson, and Mansbach in some of their work on political identity and world politics.

My only significant criticism of the book is that although Aguirre’s essay provides an interesting analysis, it provides little closure to the set of essays. To place the entire set of essays in the context of the early conceptual chapters, the reader would have been better served by a synthetic concluding essay. Nonetheless, this minor criticism does not detract from an interesting and innovative collection of studies that address an important debate and evolving phenomena in a globalizing era.

Concluding Thoughts on Globalization and Negotiation

The four books examined provide readers with ample questions to consider in scholarly research agendas and in policy formulation. First, all of the books and the essays contained in them are examples of thoughtful scholarship on serious questions as they relate to diplomacy and negotiation. They nonetheless highlight the “messiness” of what we study in the field of contemporary international relations and the diversity of methods and conceptual approaches required to adequately research contemporary puzzles. There are few, if any, phenomena that can be explained with single causal factors, and most research questions can be answered only with the application of multiple methods of analysis and investigation. As Snyder’s study ably demonstrates, even when a project begins with a specific theme or focus, the data may prompt a researcher to look beyond that focus to other causal factors for an adequate explanation of the events at hand. In Snyder’s case, a North Korean diplomatic culture of “craziness” was shown as less a causal force than were problems of cross-national policy coordination and perceptual issues generated by the actions of the “rogue state’s” counterparts.

Thus a research agenda for the negotiation field must look beyond culture and work to embed such studies within the broader global political context that surrounds diplomatic interaction. It should actively seek multiple methods of analysis and not necessarily choose parsimony over accuracy, even at the risk of producing messy explanations of the stuff of global politics. The fields of inquiry evident in the works examined here demonstrate the value of broad training and study and also the need for open-minded analyses of contemporary phenomena. They also point to the need to move beyond studies of the impact of culture (or any other single set of variables) on negotiation. We must embed negotiation in the broader international relations context.

Second, and on a more theoretical note, these books also inform us about the role of diplomacy (and paradiplomacy) in a globalizing world. It remains unclear throughout our discipline what the implications of globalization are or if globalization is really something new. Certainly, many world systems theorists would argue that patterns of globalization have been extant for centuries. But the question from the vantage point of diplomacy and negotiation studies is whether the diplomatic interaction we are witnessing today is in fact a different genre than what has been practiced for centuries. At a microlevel, the one-on-one interaction among the actual human negotiators has likely changed little in our globalized world. Moreover, the interplay of state-level strategy and interpersonal tactics remains a mainstay of world affairs, as evidenced by such recent episodes as the peace talks between Yasser Arafat, Ehud Barak, and Bill Clinton.

At a macrolevel, it is less clear whether globalization has changed the array of forces within which diplomacy is embedded. States persist as the dominant actors, even when substate actors attempt to assert their influence beyond state borders. Other actors, such as nongovernmental organizations and corporations, also play important roles in the process and outcomes of international negotiations, though their independent, nonstate-related power remains a matter of debate. The impact of anti-World Trade Organization and anti-International Monetary Fund protests during the past two years provides ample evidence of the role of nonstate forces, though these protest movements arguably gain their access to the system through appeals to receptive states.

In the end, we are left with complexity but few simple answers about what happens when in the diplomatic world. At the risk of sounding hopelessly pessimistic about the prospects for scholars to understand the many forces and processes at work in contemporary world affairs, we are faced with a daunting task. To understand diplomacy fully, we must focus our attention on the interaction of the diplomats themselves, on the influence of their political and social cultures, constituents, and other domestic political forces. We must also focus on the global systemic forces that shape and constrain the relationships that exist among the globe’s current political entities. But this is a noble task when our failure at understanding may mean the difference between peace and justice or suffering, violence, and war. The studies covered here move us a step closer to such an understanding, though much work remains to be done. Moving targets are not easy to hit, especially when they have multiple bull’s-eyes.