Democracy and International Trade: Britain, France, and the United States, 1860-1990.

• Author: Nye, John V.C.

By Daniel Verdier Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp. xx, 387. $62.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.

How should we best discuss interdisciplinary questions? And what role do differing theoretical perspectives have in an analysis that borrows from multiple disciplines? What role does narrative play independent of any theoretical considerations?

These questions sprang to my mind as I read Daniel Verdier's historical survey of the political economy of international trade in the three leading Western powers over the last century and a half. Verdier proposes to provide us with a general theory of the impact of political competition on trade policy in democratic regimes while guiding us through a historical overview that illustrates his main points. In particular, he wishes to criticize what he views as the partial explanations provided by economic analysis while more generally incorporating political actors into the model.

However, his book is oddly structured for such an endeavor, reading like two separate monographs only weakly linked together. The first part is a "Political Theory of International Trade," which serves as a criticism of the existing literature and a schematic overview of Verdier's own theories. The second part, 80 percent of the book, is a historical overview of trade policy that does not come to grips with any of the theoretical issues laid out in the previous section. By Verdier's own admission, his aim was

not to submit the propositions to a systematic test, nor to deliver

the definitive versions of British, French, and American modern

trade history, but rather to show how easily the facts of these three

national experiences line up with the categories and causal statements

of part one and to contribute a new interpretation of these

three cases."

Therein lies the heart of my difficulty with this work. To my mind, Verdier's theoretical criticisms are interesting but not decisive, and his mix of taxonomy and ad hoc hypothesizing is unpersuasive. The history is interesting for its own sake and is perhaps the best reason to read this book. But the cases he presents in no way serve as clear-cut illustrations of his complicated arguments; nor do they help us unravel the contradictions of mixing political analysis with rational choice theory or abstract models of political economy.

Let us treat the two parts and their corresponding merits separately. On the theory of trade policy: surely no one in either economics or political...