The Politics of Resilience and Transatlantic Order

Enduring Crisis?

Gordon Friedrichs, Sebastian Harnisch, Cameron G. Thies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429647451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume bridges the "analytical divide" between studies of transatlantic relations, democratic peace theory, and foreign policy analysis, and improves our theoretical understanding of the logic of crises prevention and resolution.

The recent rise of populism and polarization in both the U.S.A and Europe adds to a host of foreign policy crises that have emerged in transatlantic relations over the last two decades. Through examining how democracies can manage to sustain and maintain mechanisms of crisis resilience that are embedded in the democratic peace, and particularly transatlantic relations, this book helps enhance the understanding of inter-democratic crisis resolution across issue areas. In doing so, it addresses some of the most important and prevalent crises of our time, such as anti-terrorism intervention in Afghanistan; Iran's nuclear program; burden-sharing within North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO; key aspects of the international order, such as binding norms for cyber security and the integration of China into the Western-led international economic order; as well as domestic order shifts, such as the British vote to leave the European Union (EU) and the impact of the Trump administration populist foreign policy on transatlantic crisis resolution.

This book will be of key interest to students and scholars of International Relations, Transatlantic Studies, Foreign Policy Analysis, and Comparative Politics.

1 Theorizing transatlantic crisis resilience

An introduction

Sebastian Harnisch, Cameron G. Thies, and Gordon Friedrichs

Introduction

In March 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump slapped unilateral tariffs on various imports from allied nations. He was hardly the first president in history to impose tariffs, but he was the first to do so for allied states on national security grounds since World War II. While Trump exempted Canada and Mexico in order to gain leverage in renegotiating the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it is clear that domestic populist impulses to protect weak industries rather than national security concerns drove the approach vis-à-vis the European Union (EU), Germany, and South Korea.

For critics of this kind of protectionism, the President’s “America First” approach fosters American isolationism, thereby ending a transatlantic friendship that served America and Europe well in the past seven decades (Bollmann 2018). On a broader scale, academics, think tanks, and pundits debate whether the Trump presidency has furthered American decline and with it the eventual demise of the Western liberal order. Scholars ponder whether global institutions can moderate a nationalist American president and mediate intra-order crisis or whether America’s material preponderance (and its withdrawal) will eventually cause global turbulence and exacerbate existing crises, such as the one on the Iranian nuclear program (cf. Duncombe and Dunne 2018; Haas 2017; Ikenberry 2018; Stokes 2018).

Israeli and Saudi government officials alike expect President Trump to lead and complain about Europe’s naïve approach to Iran (Netanyahu 2015). The EU initially frustrated a more robust U.S. approach toward Tehran under President Bush Jr. but then supported the Obama administration’s ill-considered strategy to engage the Mullah regime, resulting in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Middle Eastern critics charge that the EU’s inclination for diplomacy and institutionalized conflict resolution dangerously underestimates the lust for power and dominance of the theocratic regime in Iran (Kaye and Martini 2014). Clouded by human rights concerns and a deep mistrust of military force, increasingly self-confident European institutions have thus set the EU and the U.S. on a collision course in the region (Pasha 2016).

Similarly, U.S. and European critics have excoriated Germany for its inability to take strong action during the Eurozone Crisis and its failure to deploy its armed forces together with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies in various international security hotspots, such as Iraq, Southern Afghanistan, Libya, or Syria (Binnendijk 2016, 76–79; Kundnani 2015). To many members of the U.S. Congress, Europeans (and Germans in particular) are self-serving multilateralists who dodge military duties and fail to impede an authoritarian Russia (and China), which is out to revise the current international order (Hudson 2016).

In brief, for some observers, the transatlantic security community appears to be a free-for-all, beggar-thy-neighbor arrangement, exploiting well-meaning member states. Created by a common threat, the security community has now turned into a relative gains-seeking exercise of predatory nation-states. For others, transatlanticism seems to work all too well when Europeans and Americans commit to a common course in third regions. Like Gulliver tied down by Lilliputians, a gang of European nations impose their ill-considered defeatist policies first on the U.S. and then onto other regions while hiding behind the façade of multilateral diplomacy. Still other analysts claim that while NATO and other Western institutions may have served their members well for a long time, their burden-sharing mechanisms have been hijacked by self-interested elites betraying the interests of “the people” they are supposed to serve. In this view, the polarization of party systems and the politics of populism are breeding conflicts about the distribution of values and wealth, thereby facilitating crises, i.e. a large-scale and short-term rupture of power, interests, and ideas which challenge the existing inter-state order (Brands 2017; Cha 2017; Chryssogelos 2017; Norrlof 2018). It follows that talk of a new and more serious transatlantic crisis abounds, yet scholars of transatlantic relations have not systematically assessed the mechanisms that stabilize or transform this community of democracies (for a first-cut, see Böller and Hagemann 2017).

The contributors to this volume address the resulting question of crisis resilience or transformation of the transatlantic order by drawing upon different theoretical approaches. In particular, the authors examine different social mechanisms, practices, actors, and institutions as stabilizing or transformative parts of transatlantic order, both between states and within. A wide variety of crisis concepts persist, we suggest, in part because the stability/instability of the transatlantic community results from a range of different social mechanisms that interact across various levels of analysis. For example, we contend that its member states ascribe different meanings to the transatlantic community, sometimes referred to as “the West” (Hellmann and Herborth 2016). Some member states have thus used institutions, such as NATO, to facilitate their national defense. As a consequence, they identify strongly with the common cause. Others, however, have merely used the alliance to broaden their national portfolio of foreign and security policy options (Williams 2005). It follows then that the social mechanisms focusing on the recalibration of interests, such as burden-sharing or task expansion, and mechanisms addressing the (re-)assertion of norms and values, such as policy learning, persuasion, or socialization, may interact over time in institutions and across policy areas and actors.

In addition, since transatlantic relations are the primary example of inter-democratic relations, foreign policy is no longer the exclusive domain of the executive branch of government. A range of other actors jockey for influence on the global agenda, often contesting their government’s policy and sidelining it via transnational networks (Slaughter 2017). Today, almost all domestic policy fields are increasingly characterized by substantial external influences and implications. Hence, this book assesses the effects of changes or crisis in domestic orders for transatlantic crisis resiliency. Shifts in the domestic order range from the polarization of national party systems to the recent emergence of populism throughout Western democracies.

We believe that particular forms of crises of domestic order correspond with the international and transatlantic inter-democratic order (Bafumia and Parent 2012; Marshall and Prins 2016; Snyder, Shapiro, and Bloch-Elkon 2009). Domestic order shifts originate in policy discrepancy between different institutional branches of power but also in the lack of identification between voters and politicians. This, in turn, has the potential to make democracies less capable of committing to long-term sustainable institutions and assurances, produce more drastic foreign policy changes that undermine their reliability as partners for burden-sharing, and expose value and identity rifts within the community of democracies (cf. Beinart 2008; Mattes, Leeds, and Carroll 2015; Peake, Krutz, and Hughes 2012; Schultz 2018; Trubowitz and Mellow 2011). Polarization reflects deep divisions between societal and political actors on a national level and serves as a hotbed for populist movements because populists voice their discontent with the existing political institutions as a body of misrepresentation and vis-à-vis other domestic actors that do not share the same identity as the we-group and are thus defamed. In fact, we believe the rise of populism across Europe, but especially in the U.S., challenges the production and distribution of public goods by global and transatlantic institutions. Populism, as a political and social phenomenon, triggers severe upheavals in democracies’ foreign policy vis-à-vis other democracies because populist leaders tend to represent a small winning coalition and thus distribute private goods at the cost of generating public goods that are shared by and compatible with other internal and external actors (cf. Galston 2017; Mudde 2007; Pauwels 2014).

To address the resulting variance in policies and interaction, this volume considers two related policy arenas of order formation: first, how and why do states react to instances of crisis in the security, political, and economic order? Second, how are shifts in domestic order related to changes in the transatlantic order? In general, we find the causes and consequences of crisis to be remarkably similar across the policy arenas and between domestic and international order. Thus, and in accordance with the assertion that domestic order and international order between democracies are closely interlinked, we find considerable overlap between reasons for domestic crisis in the U.S. under the Trump administration and why crises emerge in the transatlantic community in various policy areas. We also find substantial similarities in the mechanisms by which different actors try to contain large-scale variances in power, interests, and ideas or to transform the current order into a new equilibrium. But make no mistake: there are also important differences between respective actors and the mechanisms they use across policy arenas.

Even so, based on our findings in this volume, we contend that the shock emanating from polarization and populism is not inherently more destructive/transformational to a domestic system than to an international system, i.e. the transatlantic order. There are variations in the mechanisms used for resilience, not least because stability in one realm may be used to counterbalance volatility in another. However, because populism rests on an inherent discontent with an established order by a disillusioned minority protected from a betraying elite by a responsive leader, the effects emerging from populism are questions of degree, filtered through the social mechanisms investigated here, rather than of kind. This volume helps to better understand the effects of domestic order shifts and crisis in a broad range of policy arenas.

The scholarship

Transatlantic crises are understood here broadly as large-scale, short-term volatilities of power, interests, and ideas which have the potential to unsettle the institutionalized order between North America and the EU. As such, they have long been of interest to historians, political scientists, and security experts (Anderson, Ikenberry, and Risse 2008; Barany and Rauchhaus 2011; Eder, Mangott, and Senn 2007; Gordon and Shapiro 2003; Ikenberry 2001, 2011; Lundestad 2008; Schulz and Schwartz 2010; Sloan 2018; Thies 2009; Zaborowski 2006).

In recent years, however, scholarship on contestation and transformation of the transatlantic order has expanded considerably (cf. Böller and Hagemann 2017; Dytrich 2014; Hofmann and Yeo 2015; Koschut 2010, 2014, 2016; Müller 2006; Pouliot 2010; Risse 2006; Simoni 2013; Wickett 2018). Building on a diverse set of disciplinary perspectives, researchers from a variety of theoretical and methodological backgrounds have inquired about the effects of structural factors, interests, and institutions as well as ideas and norms on the crisis resilience and stability of issues such as global environmental governance and economic and security issues. The findings of this scholarship converge around two insights: first, crises are a constant feature of the transatlantic community’s evolution (Böller and Hagemann 2017; Ikenberry 2011; Koschut 2016). Second, these crises generate social, political, and institutional dynamics different from those of other cooperative arrangements of states, particularly in the security realm (Johnston 2017; Thies 2009; Webber, Sperling, and Smith 2012). In sum, the transatlantic character of the community has a distinctive effect on its evolution.

The debate about the specific character of transatlantic order has evolved in three distinct phases since the end of the Cold War. During the 1990s, the theoretical discussion focused on whether and for how long NATO would survive after the Cold War (Hellmann and Wolf 1993; McCalla 1996). In the second phase, the debate moved on to explain why NATO had survived, and the EU emerged as an international actor by focusing on institutionalist factors, such as sunk costs, mechanisms of intramural conflict resolution, and future gains, by expanding NATO’s functional remit (Barany and Rauchhaus 2011; Webber, Sperling, and Smith 2012). More recently, initiating a third phase, the discussion has moved beyond the question of persistence toward identifying the transformation of the transatlantic order, including its dissolution, and the social mechanisms involved (Böller et al. 2017; Hofmann and Yeo 2015; Ikenberry 2018; Koschut 2016; Wickett 2018).

During the initial stage of the debate, realists, such as Kenneth N. Waltz and John Mearsheimer, posited that transatlantic institutions, in particular NATO, were bound to dissolve (Mearsheimer 1990; Waltz 1993). Military alliances and institutions emerge when a set of states facing a common danger share their capabilities to counterbalance their adversaries’ potential. Once the danger eases, the alliance will dissolve because further cooperation benefits may spread unequally, enabling former allies to become future enemies (Walt 2000). In a sim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Theorizing transatlantic crisis resilience: an introduction
• 2 America first, NATO second: deciphering the Dutch-American alliance in post-9/11 out-of-area operations
• 3 Ukraine crises and the limits of transatlantic cooperation
• 4 Thaw or containment? NATO divisions over Russia and the quest for alliance credibility
• 5 New politics of burden-sharing in NATO? Crisis, conflict, and resilience in an era of populism
• 6 Preventing crisis militarization: the European Union, the United States, and the Iranian nuclear program
• 7 The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action at a crossroads
• 8 Business as usual or norm promotion? Divergent modes and consequences of transatlantic crisis resilience in cybersecurity and data protection after the Snowden revelations
• 9 A crisis of trust: transatlantic cybersecurity relations in the post-Snowden era
• 10 A coming transatlantic clash over international development banks? The case of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)
• 11 International development banks in the aftermath of the global financial crisis: a turn from transatlanticism?
• 12 “Brexit” and the politics of resilience in the U.S.-UK special relationship
• 13 A new grand bargain? Trumpian populism and shifts in the liberal economic order
• 14 The logic of crisis resilience in transatlantic relations
• Bibliography
• Index