Book Reviews
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702016661180 |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
James Raymond Vreeland and Axel Dreher,
The Political Economy of the United Nations Security Council: Money and Influence,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 291pp., USD$34.99 (paper),
ISBN: 978–0–5217–4006–7
Reviewed by: David Bosco (bosco.david@gmail.com), American University,
Washington D.C., USA
A seat on the elite United Nations Security Council is a valued diplomatic
commodity. States mount sometimes expensive and almost always protracted cam-
paigns to secure one of the council’s ten rotating seats. But what happens when
aspirants have succeeded? In their new book, James Vreeland and Axel Dreher ask
whether elected council members are able to turn their diplomatic prize into cold
hard cash. They build their analysis on a simple but powerful insight: Major
powers often care a lot about Security Council outcomes, while poorer and
weaker states may be willing to trade their council votes for economic assistance.
And the authors marshal strong evidence that a seat on the Security Council does
in fact loosen the spigots of financial aid.
Most of that evidence comes in the form of number crunching. Employing an
array of tests, Vreeland and Dreher demonstrate that many states serving on the
council see an increase in bilateral aid from certain major powers. Germany and
Japan emerge from the analysis as particularly likely to reward elected council mem-
bers, while the United States appears to do so only during select periods of intense
interest in the council. Interestingly, the authors’ evidence suggests that Britain and
France do not use foreign aid to reward council members. But the explanation they
proffer for this pattern—that Britain and France are not as active on the council—is
not convincing. After all, on many issues, Britain and France are in fact the most
active P5 (permanent five) members and they tend to prioritize council diplomacy.
On the multilateral front, the authors find that elected council members can also
expect better outcomes when they seek loans from the IMF, World Bank, and
certain regional development banks. African and Asian development banks
appear particularly inclined to give serving council members a boost. The authors
also present some evidence that council members get easier treatment—primarily
through reduced IMF conditionality—for the multilateral loans they receive.
The authors supplement their quantitative analysis with limited but intriguing
qualitative material, including brief case studies that suggest linkages between foreign
aid and council votes. Vreeland and Dreher conduc ted interviews with a few notable
practitioners,including John Bolton and Madeleine Albright. While both former US
envoys insisted that explicit qui d pro quos are almost unheard of, they acknowledged
that the United States pursues its interests through a variety of mechanisms, includ-
ing financial leverage (66–67). The authors explore but do not fully illuminate the
specific ways in which council membership might influence foreign aid policy.
The bulk of the book is empirical, but the authors do wade briefly into prescrip-
tive waters. They insist that their findings about the Security Council’s ‘‘under-
belly’’ do not necessarily diminish the importance of the body as a diplomatic tool
(221). ‘‘Real-world organizations should not be judged by utopian criteria,’’ they
Book Reviews 501
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