In this article, I offer a framework for understanding the domestic sources of nonproliferation-regime creation by outlining how contending coalitions affect nuclear postures. The growing attention to domestic factors has mostly been directed at understanding the structure of interests within a specific issue area to explain cooperation (or its absence) in that same area, but understanding outcomes in the security arena requires a broader consideration of how political-economic strategies affect security choices. Such an approach helps specify what early neoliberal-institutionalism left unexplained: where the preference to cooperate comes from. By relying on a single analytical category, this approach transcends the practice of nonproliferation studies of explaining each country or region through a list of individualized peculiarities.
The evidence points to an association between strategies of industrialization and nuclear postures that is worthy of both theoretical and policymaking consideration. The findings suggest that the credibility of commitments by fence-sitters may be more affected by what kind of domestic political-economic coalition underwrites them than by the institutional constraints of democracy. Where these coalitions rely for their domestic political survival on an open economic system, they will not only be more susceptible to international inducements to cooperate but will favor denuclearization for its domestic effects as well. State structures influence the fate of different coalitions and, in turn, are changed by them; states are both the agents of liberalization and the victims of it. The performance of coalitions varies with the nature and strength of technocratic agencies on the one hand, and of rent-seeking actors and their challengers on the other. Exploring how this variation accounts for different paths to regional denuclearization may be a logical next step. Additional research may also enable us to understand thresholds, lags and sequences in the process by which developmental grand strategies and nuclear postures become linked.
Because international institutions bankroll free-trade coalitions, they are a great source of strength for such coalitions, as repositories of side-payment "currency." At the same time, they constitute a potential Achilles heel, a symbol of curtailed sovereignty. Thus, these institutions must calibrate their performance to enable cooperative coalitions to mobilize societal resources in support of nuclear regimes. Imposing heavy burdens on such coalitions may result in their "involuntary defection,"55/ or in their inability to deliver because of low prospects for domestic ratification. Understanding the impact of international processes on the strength of domestic coalitions is not equivalent to reducing the politics of these countries to external forces. As the international political economy literature suggests, different coalitions have chosen contrasting grand strategies of industrialization (integrative or inward-looking) under similar international circumstances.
Finally, economic liberalization appears to require democratization if it is to be sustained over the long term. In that sense, it may well be that many regional partners negotiating nuclear regimes, now and in the future, are and will be democratic. Yet, it could still be that both democracy and nuclear cooperation are outcomes of economic liberalism. Exploring further the extent to which political freedom will be necessary or sufficient for the emergence and maintenance of regional nuclear regimes is a compelling task for a social science theory sensitive to the construction of a more peaceful global order.