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European Journal of International Relations
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European Integration as a Solution to War

Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni

University of Cambridge, UK

Daniel Verdier

Ohio State University, USA

We seek to establish the conditions in which binding international institutions can serve as a solution to preventive war. Scholars of international integration portray institutions as a response to problems of incomplete information, transaction costs and other barriers to welfare improvement for their members. In contrast, we show that international institutions can have binding properties that solve credible commitment problems among member states — even in the case of volatile preventive war dilemmas. Our primary case is post-war Europe. We show that European integration since the early 1950s was conceived as a means of committing a temporarily weakened West Germany not to use its future power to pursue military ends in Europe, thereby obviating a preventive war against it. The various institutions that form part of the European Communities, now the European Union, still bear the mark of this goal. In this article, we establish the game theoretic conditions for the existence of binding international institutions as a solution to preventive war. We also provide evidence that the model is a good approximation of what political elites had in mind in the wake of World War II.

Key Words: credible commitment • European integration • institutional solutions to conflict • integration theory • power transition • preventive war

European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 11, No. 1, 99-135 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1354066105050138
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