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State Power and the Structure
of International Trade
STEPHEN D.KRASNER
In this essay, Stephen D.Krasner addresses the relationship between
the interests and power of major states and the trade openness
of the international economy. In this international political
analysis, he identifies four principal goals of state action: political
power, aggregate national income, economic growth, and social
stability. He then combines the goals with different national
abilities to pursue them, relating the international distribution of
potential economic power to alternative trade regimes. Krasner
maintains, most significantly, that the hegemony of a leading
power is necessary for the creation and continuance of free trade.
He applies his model to six periods. Krasner’s analysis in this
1976 article is a well-known attempt to use international political
theory, and Realism more generally, to explain international
economic affairs. The theory he propounds, which has been
dubbed the “theory of hegemonic stability,” has influenced many
subsequent analyses.INTRODUCTION
In recent years, students of international relations have multinationalized,
transnationalized, bureaucratized, and transgovernmentalized the state until it has
virtually ceased to exist as an analytic construct. Nowhere is that trend more apparent
than in the study of the politics of international economic relations. The basic
conventional assumptions have been undermined by assertions that the state is
trapped by a transnational society created not by sovereigns, but by nonstate actors.
Interdependence is not seen as a reflection of state policies and state choices (the
perspective of balance-of-power theory), but as the result of elements beyond the
control of any state or a system created by states.
This perspective is at best profoundly misleading. It may explain developments
within a particular international economic structure, but it cannot explain the structure
itself. That structure has many institutional and behavioral manifestations. The central
continuum along which it can be described is openness. International economic
structures may range from complete autarky (if all states prevent movements across
their borders), to complete openness (if no restrictions exist). In this paper I will