Reason, Emotion and Cooperation

Abstract

The realist, liberal institutionalist, social capital, ‘tit-for-tat’and ‘thin’ constructivist explanations for cooperation rely on the same explanatory mechanisms imported from micro-economics. They further assume that international cooperation should be studied from the perspective of egoistic, individual actors responding primarily to external stimuli. These several explanations assume much of the cooperation they purport to explain. They also rest on questionable ontological assumptions, as their unit of analysis, the autonomous, egoistic individual is a fiction of the Enlightenment. Most actors, states included, have social commitments that lead them to frame their identities and interests at least in part in collective terms. Collective identities lead to a general propensity to cooperate with another group of actors. They explain why actors may cooperate in instances that may not appear to be in their interest if cooperation is studied on a case-by-case basis — as it is by the approaches I critique —. To understand how a propensity to cooperate develops, we must look at the ways in which reason and emotions interact to create and sustain common identities.