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International Business Negotiation

NG508E

Professor: Dr Mohammad Elahee

Article Critique: the Paradox of Weakness in the Politics of Trade Integration

Barbara Dluhosch• Nikolai Ziegler

Published online: 26 May 2011

Group 4

Yafei KONG

Lan ZHOU

Yiling CHEN

Tianjiao DU

Maimouna KEITA

Written in 9 February 2013

Introduction

The article is trying to examine by means of a simulation study to see how far we can take Schelling-conjecture in the framework of the Two-level games. It focused on the discussion of the trade policies in international political economy.

There are two basic theories involved. One is Schelling-conjecture. It says that constraints or weakness is not necessarily to be burdened during the negotiation. And the other one is two-level games. It talks about that the international negotiations between liberal democracies as consisting of simultaneous negotiations are always processed in two levels. One is the intra-national level (e.g. domestic) and the other is international level (e.g. between governments). As a negotiator, he or she has to negotiate with the people from other countries and at the same time with the related domestic authorities and stakeholders to get the permission. So these two levels are affecting each other in the international negotiations. And in the imbalanced power situation, the low power party is not necessary to be in a disadvantageous position in the international negotiations.

It is very interesting to test the Schelling-conjecture in such context. It offers more tactics thinking and diverse to the parties in an imbalanced negotiation. However, we think the Two-level games theory has its defections. For example, the domestic power is not only about the governmental authorities, but also related to the majority of common people. Governmental authorities only stand for some certain group’s benefits. So in some negotiations, even if the negotiators get the...