Theories of International Politics and Zombies Read online

  In a world of sophisticated zombies, alliances between human states and zombie states are possible. Indeed, any government that tried to develop a grand coalition targeting the undead would immediately trigger the security dilemma. Realpolitik states could exploit any move toward an idealistic global war on zombies by creating temporary alliances of convenience with emerging ghoul governments. A more passive strategy would be to encourage what John Mearsheimer labels “bait and bleed” and “bloodletting” strategies.20 In these instances, realist states would try to foment conflict between anti-zombie states and the ghouls themselves, profiting at the relative losses incurred by both sides.

  Zombies could defend their actions at the United Nations.

  Realists would advocate noninterference in how zombie states treated their own living and undead populations.* In the end, realists would conclude that there would be little intrinsic difference between human states and zombie states. Human beings have an innate lust for power in the realist paradigm; zombies have an innate lust for human flesh. Both are scarce resources. Regardless of individual traits, domestic institutions, or variations in the desire for living flesh, human and zombie actors alike are subject to the same powerful constraint of anarchy. Both sets of actors would engage in strategic opportunism to advance their interests in anarchy. The fundamental character of world politics would therefore remain unchanged. In the end, realists would caution human governments against expending significant amounts of blood and treasure to engage in far-flung anti-zombie adventures—particularly blood.

  * * *

  *Indeed, Ben tells Harry, “If you stay up here, you take orders from me!”

  *As the biker gang rampages the mall, Stephen mutters, “It's ours. We took it. It's ours.” He then starts shooting the bikers.

  *In World War Z, Pakistan's failure to control its zombie infestation leads to a militarized dispute with Iran.

  *The very first zombie we see in Night of the Living Dead uses a rock to break into Barbara's car.

  *Some realists would no doubt warn against the power of a “human lobby” to blind governments from their national interests.

  REGULATING THE

  UNDEAD IN A LIBERAL

  WORLD ORDER

  Like the realist paradigm, there are many varieties of liberalism.1 All liberals nevertheless share a common belief: cooperation is still possible in a world of anarchy. Liberals look at world politics as a non-zero-sum game. Mutual cooperation on issues ranging from international trade to nuclear nonproliferation to disease prevention can yield global public goods on a massive scale. These gains are not always distributed evenly, but they do make all actors better off than they would be in the absence of policy coordination. Major actors in world politics therefore have an incentive to realize the benefits that come from long-term mutual cooperation and avoid the costs that come with mutual defection.

  Liberals do not believe that cooperative outcomes always happen in world politics. In some cases, preferences might be so divergent that no compromise or bargain can be struck among the actors. Even if a nonzero-sum bargain is possible, this incentive to realize these gains does not guarantee that collaboration takes place. The benefits generated by cooperation are often nonexcludable—in other words, anyone will benefit from broad-based cooperation even if they themselves do not cooperate. For example, if a plucky band of survivors were to devise a way to eliminate the plague of the undead, all humans would benefit regardless of whether they helped or not. This creates a free-rider problem, as the payoff structure in table 2 demonstrates. The conundrum for liberals is that while an outcome of mutual cooperation is better than one of mutual defection, everyone is best off in a situation in which they can unilaterally defect. Since every actor has these same incentives, the outcome can be a “tragedy of the commons”—everyone defecting, even though everyone is better off cooperating.2

  This situation is not hopeless, however. The liberal paradigm offers multiple strategies to overcome the tragedy of the commons.3 Conditions that lengthen the shadow of the future increase the likelihood of cooperation. The longer one's time horizon, the greater the rewards from mutual cooperation are in comparison to the fleeting benefits from free riding. If an actor expects to be around for a while, then response strategies that punish noncooperation but play well with “nice” actors—such as tit-for-tat—can sustain multilateral cooperation over the long run.

  TABLE 2

  Tragedy of the Commons Game

  Other gambits can increase the rewards from cooperation and reduce the benefits from defection. Economic interdependence reduces the incentive to defect by magnifying the gap in gains between a world of collective action and a world of mutual distrust.4 Governments will be less likely to cheat in the short term if they know it means they will lose the benefits from trade in the long term. Multilateral institutions that monitor and disseminate information can ensure that cheating will be detected and punished.5 Institutions reassure all participating actors that they are on the same page in terms of the rules of the game—and they clarify how and when those rules will be broken.

  Finally, democracies are more likely to cooperate with each other. Liberals posit that democracies are more likely to have similar preferences, making cooperation easier. More significantly, domestic laws and institutions provides democracies with the means to credibly commit to international agreements.6 Liberals allow that the Hobbesian war of all against all predicted by realism could happen, but only under very extreme conditions.7 A world of economic interdependence, democratic governments, and international institutions should foster extensive amounts of multilateral cooperation.

  At first glance, the liberal paradigm appears to be a bad fit for a genre that specializes in zombie apocalypses. Indeed, the tragedy of liberalism in a universe with zombies is that some of its central tenets would accelerate the spread of flesh-eating ghouls. Liberals advocate an open global economy in order to foster complex interdependence and lock in incentives for governments to cooperate. Just as open borders foster greater migration of peoples and pandemics, they would also facilitate the cross-border spread of both the undead and infected human carriers.8 In sharp contrast to realism, liberal policy prescriptions would appear to exacerbate the first stages of the zombie menace. It is little wonder, therefore, that so many critical theorists equate the unchecked spread of zombies with the unchecked spread of capitalism itself.9

  Similarly, liberals acknowledge that cooperation with zombies would be next to impossible. One would be hard-pressed to devise sanctions that would compel zombies into cooperating. The divergence of preferences is also too great. The refrain in Jonathan Coul-ton's song “Re: Your Brains,” written from a zombie's point of view, best encapsulates the implacable nature of the zombie bargaining position:

  All we want to do is eat your brains

  We're not unreasonable; I mean, no one's gonna eat

  your eyes

  All we want to do is eat your brains

  We're at an impasse here; maybe we should compromise:

  If you open up the doors

  We'll all come inside and eat your brains

  If this represents the zombie bargaining position, then the liberal assumption of a non-zero-sum bargain does not hold. As table 3 shows, in the Tragedy of the Zombies game, the dominant strategy for zombies is to eat humans. Tit-for-tat strategies do not work. Neither cooperation nor coordination is possible with the living dead.

  A second glance reveals that the liberal paradigm still offers significant analytical bite. Romantic zombie comedies—rom-zom-coms for short—contain both implicit and explicit elements of liberalism. Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland (2009) is about the articulation and adherence to well-defined rules for surviving in a zombie-infested landscape. Its central message—beyond the need for cardio workouts—is the need for disparate individuals to credibly commit to each other. The characters in Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead (2004) cooperate with each other far more than in any of Georg
e Romero's films. Indeed, just before the climax of that film, the character Shaun rallies his friends and relations with a stirring paean to liberalism: “As Bertrand Russell once said, ‘the only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.’ I think we can all appreciate the relevance of that now.”

  TABLE 3

  Tragedy of the Zombies Game

  The liberal paradigm offers some intriguing predictions and explanations for how a global zombie outbreak could affect world politics. Perhaps the most important liberal insight is an answer to one of the biggest mysteries in zombie studies—the failure of ghouls to ever attack each other. In Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978), a scientist observes that “there are no divisions” among the undead. Even those infected with the “rage virus” in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002) focus their rage only on other humans—not their fellow zombies. We assume that zombies have no wish to eat each other, but it is surprising that they do not turn on each other when trying to divvy up a human carcass—especially as human flesh grows scarce. From Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) onward, however, zombies have either tolerated each other's company or actively cooperated to defeat humans.

  Why? The liberal paradigm provides a simple, rational answer: the living dead have the longest possible shadow of the future. John Maynard Keynes famously commented that “in the long run, we are all dead.” In the long run, the undead still have to interact with each other—and therefore they have the strongest of incentives to cooperate.10 If zombies hang together, then humans face the danger of hanging separately.

  Despite the daunting degree of zombie solidarity, liberals would predict that the incentive for multilateral cooperation among humans would be powerful as well. The proliferation of the differently animated represents a classic negative externality problem of economic globalization. Countries that profit from trading with each other would nevertheless reward a third party—flesh-eating ghouls—by unwittingly facilitating their spread. States would therefore view zombies the same way they viewed other public bads that emerged from the open global economy, such as money laundering or food-borne diseases. Powerful governments would create and reinforce international institutions designed to control their spread. Indeed, the zombie menace would touch so many different spheres of life that liberals would predict a “regime complex” to emerge.11 A welter of international governmental organizations—including the United Nations Security Council, the World Health Organization, and the International Organization for Migration—would promulgate a series of policies and protocols designed to combat existing zombie hordes and prevent further outbreaks.* A coordinating body, perhaps even a World Zombie Organization (WZO), would need to be formed in order to handle all of the overlapping health, trade, and security issues. In the end, some organization would announce a “comprehensive and integrated dezombiefication strategy,” with sufficient buy-in from stakeholders across global civil society, as their plan of action.**

  The liberal expectation would be that a counter-zombie regime complex could make significant inroads into the zombie problem. The public benefits of wiping the undead from the face of the earth are quite significant, boosting the likelihood of significant policy coordination.12 The undead would fall into the category of systemic threats—such as terrorism and global pandemics—where states have engaged in meaningful cross-border cooperation. This prediction is also consistent with key portions of the zombie literature. In Max Brooks's novel World War Z (2006), the decision to go on the offensive comes after a United Nations meeting.13 Consistent with liberal internationalism, the United States provided the necessary leadership and a strong sense of social purpose in order to rally support.14

  How effective would these global governance structures be in combating the undead? The question of regime effectiveness has haunted international relations scholarship for decades.15 To be sure, liberal security regimes such as NATO or the Chemical Weapons Convention have a credible track record of success.16 The ability of both security and health regimes to monitor and spread information quickly in the era of instant messaging would facilitate rapid reactions to the zombie problem at an early stage. Globalization has certainly fostered the technical and regulatory coordination necessary for enhancing biosecurity.17 At a minimum, one would expect a significant rollback and stringent regulation of the living dead, roughly consistent with the outcome in Brooks's World War Z or Mira Grant's Feed (2010).18

  Although the macrosituation might appear stable, it would also be imperfect. At present, the regime for cross-border movement of the dead already has significant loopholes.19 Even if current international law is fixed, zombies represent a tough test for global governance structures. They are most difficult kind of governance problem—a prohibition regime.20 Unless every single ghoul is hunted down and destroyed beyond recognition, a recurrent spread of the undead remains a possibility. The international regimes designed to eliminate disease demonstrate the difficulties inherent in this task. The scourge of smallpox has been erased, but few other diseases have been completely and totally eradicated.21 The persistence of AIDS, polio, malaria, tuberculosis, and the myriad strains of influenza demonstrate the challenges that would face an international counter-zombie regime.

  The liberal paradigm would predict two significant loopholes that could form within the confines of a global counter-zombie regime. First, some countries might fail to provide timely information about zombie outbreaks until the problem had escalated beyond local control. Authoritarian countries are often reluctant to admit health crises because of the threat such an admission could have on state control over society. Non-democratic regimes are less likely to invest in the public goods necessary to prevent or contain disasters.22 This is one reason why the loss of life from disasters is greater in authoritarian countries.23 Local officials could delay reporting a zombie outbreak up the chain of command for fear of being the bearer of bad news. Developing countries might lack the infrastructure to detect the reemergence of the living dead. They would certainly fear the economic impact of any policy response by large market jurisdiction to an announced outbreak of flesh-eating ghouls.* China's initial refusal to notify the rest of the world of its SARS cases in a timely, transparent, and verifiable manner is the exemplar case of this kind of policy conundrum.24 China behaves in a similar manner in World War Z—going so far as to trigger a crisis with Taiwan to disguise the extent of their zombie problem.25

  Second, it would not be surprising if nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) devoted to the defense of the living dead acted as an impediment to their eradication. The ability of NGOs to alter global governance structures is a matter of some debate within international relations scholarship.26 At a minimum, however, global civil society can raise the transaction costs of implementing the rules of global governance. At least one nonprofit organization in favor of zombie equality already exists—Great Britain's Citizens for Undead Rights and Equality.27 The formation of more powerful activist groups—Zombie Rights Watch, Zombies without Borders, ZombAid, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Zombies—would undoubtedly make it difficult for the WZO to achieve perfect eradication.

  While these pitfalls could prove problematic, they should not be overstated. China has moved down the learning curve as a result of the SARS episode; authorities in Beijing were much more transparent during the 2009 H1N1 epidemic, for example.28 As countries have adapted to the problem of pandemics, fewer of them would be expected to conceal a growing problem with the undead. Even if multilateral solutions proved to be inadequate, liberals would envision the emergence of “minilateral” or regional organizations to act as a backstop. The United States would likely respond to any failure of a WZO by creating a North American Counter-Zombie Agreement to handle the problem regionally. Similarly, one would expect the European Commission to issue the mother of all directives to cope with the issue.* The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Mercosur, the Arab League, and the African Union would not be far behind. The bulk of global civil soci
ety would also be unlikely to raise too much of an objection to the eradication of the undead. Zombie rights would likely be one of those issues that more powerful NGOs would resist pushing on their advocacy agenda for fear triggering donor fatigue or political backlash.29

  The liberal paradigm would predict an outcome that would be imperfect and vulnerable to political criticism over time—much like the European Union in its current form. That said, the system would also be expected to function well enough to ward off the specter of a total zombie apocalypse. Zombie flare-ups would no doubt take place. Quasi-permanent humanitarian counter-zombie missions, under United Nations auspices, would likely be necessary in failed states. Liberals would acknowledge the permanent eradication of flesh-eating ghouls as unlikely. The reduction of the zombie problem to one of many manageable threats, however, would be a foreseeable outcome. To use the lexicon of liberals, most governments would kill most zombies most of the time.

  * * *

  *Given that zombies would be covered under genetically modified organisms, the European Union would immediately invoke the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety as the key regulatory mechanism for the cross-border movement of reanimated dead tissue.

  **This liberal prediction hinges crucially on whether the initial policy responses could mitigate the spread of ghouls. If decision makers concluded that no action could halt the spread of the undead, then the shadow of the future would disappear; liberals would predict actors to pursue endgame strategies of noncooperation. Hiding and hoarding would be the appropriate responses at this juncture.

  *This problem is not limited to developing countries. If flesh-eating ghouls were detected, two immediate and obvious predictions would follow: the European Union would impose a complete ban on British beef, and Japan and South Korea would impose a similar ban on U.S. beef.