Domestic Politics and Norm Diffusion in International Relations

Ideas do not float freely

Thomas Risse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138653665
• eBook ISBN: 9781317226680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book collects Thomas Risse's most important articles together in a single volume. Covering a wide range of issues – the end of the Cold War, transatlantic relations, the "democratic peace, " human rights, governance in areas of limited statehood, Europeanization, European identity and public spheres, most recently comparative regionalism– it is testament to the breadth and excellence of this highly respected International Relations scholar's work. The collection is organized thematically – domestic politics and international relations, international sources of domestic change, and the diffusion of ideas and institutions – and a brand new introductory essay provides additional coherence.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of International Relations, European Politics, and Comparative Politics.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1

Domestic politics and norm diffusion in international relations

An intellectual journey

DOI: 10.4324/9781315623665-1

According to Wikipedia, I am a social constructivist who borrows heavily from the work of Jürgen Habermas.¹ Yet, I did not start out that way. If one wants to label me at all, I have been a liberal scholar of international relations from the beginning with a heavy emphasis on domestic politics, domestic (institutional) structures, and trans-national relations among non-state actors (see chapters 2, 3, 5, and 9, this volume). As a young doctoral student at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, during the 1980s, I worked on the domestic politics of German foreign policy. Thirty years later, I am still interested in domestic politics, state institutions, and the study of governance in “areas of limited statehood” (see chapter 8, this volume; see also Risse 2011).

In that sense, my work has always been at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics focusing on three interrelated themes:

1. “From the inside out”: The domestic politics of international relations.
2. “From the outside in”: The international sources of domestic change.
3. “In between spaces”: Transnational relations and the diffusion of ideas and institutions.

This volume contains a collection of my articles and book chapters from the early 1990s to the mid 2010s. The chapters are ordered according to the three themes above – irrespective of whether they take an explicit social constructivist stance (chapters 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, this volume) or whether they deal with Western democracies, East–West relations, and NATO (chapters 2, 4, 9, this volume), with human rights and the global South (chapters 5 and 8, this volume), or with Europe and comparative regionalism (chapters 6, 7, 11, this volume).

However, this introductory chapter is structured differently since it attempts to describe my intellectual journey from the 1980s to the 2010s.² I start with reviewing the intellectual origins of my research on foreign policy, transatlantic relations, and the “democratic peace.” I then discuss my contributions to social constructivist theory-building – the “Habermas” part mentioned previously – and to the diffusion of ideas and international norms, particularly in the human rights domain and with regard to areas of limited statehood. The third part of this chapter focuses on research on Europeanization, European identities, and comparative regionalism. The chapter concludes with some ideas about future research on norm diffusion and the translation of norms into domestic practices of adoption, appropriation and resistance.

Beginnings: Foreign policy analysis, transatlantic relations, and the “democratic peace”

After graduating from the University of Bonn, I started out in the early 1980s as a “missiles and bombs” peace researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF), Germany. At the time, I was privileged to learn from three most inspiring scholars in German International Relations (IR), Ernst-Otto Czempiel, my doctoral supervisor; Gert Krell, my “boss” and friend in the research group on arms dynamics and arms control; and, last not least, Harald Müller, my close friend who guided my research in those days in more than one way. From the beginning, I was interested in the domestic side of foreign policy. I had already written my Master’s thesis at the University of Bonn on the West German foreign policy decision-making process with regard to Ostpolitik and the 1970 German–Polish treaty, which marked Germany’s new détente policy during the Cold War under then-Chancellor Willy Brandt.

Czempiel taught us that we needed to study domestic politics if we wanted to understand U.S. foreign policy (e.g. Czempiel 1979). He also introduced us to the system analytical framework of David Easton and applied it to comparative foreign policy analysis (Easton 1965). My PhD dissertation then served as an attempt to apply Easton’s approach to the study of German security policy (Risse-Kappen 1988a).

I had come to peace research as an activist engaged in a Catholic peace movement, Pax Christi. I also had a background in Catholic theology and ethics from my undergraduate years. My first job at PRIF was part of a larger project on “ethics and security policy” with an emphasis on nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence, which was funded by the German Catholic church (e.g. Böckle and Krell 1984). The early 1980s were exciting times in Germany. Hundred thousands of peace activists gathered at mass rallies against the deployment of U.S. nuclear missiles in Germany and against Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy.

I quickly learned that peace activism and peace research are two different things as a result of which I increasingly distanced myself from the slogans of the peace movement. My PhD was all about analyzing how the demands of the peace movements affected the political positions of the West German political parties and then again the security policy of the Federal Republic with regard to various issue-areas, including nuclear weapons. The demands of the peace movement led to a new West German foreign policy consensus on “common security” and the recognition that unilateral security was not an option in the nuclear age. This shift prepared the ground for the enthusiastic West German reaction to Michal Gorbachev’s new foreign policy of “perestroika” and, thus, in a way for German unification and the peaceful end of the Cold War (Sarotte 2009; see also Risse-Kappen 1991). Chapters 2 and 9 in this volume contain some of the empirical material collected during my dissertation research.

At the same time, and initially as part of my PhD dissertation,³ I process-traced NATO’s nuclear decision-making processes with regard to the 1979 “double-track” decision on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) and the subsequent nuclear arms negotiations, which then led to the 1987 INF disarmament treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (Risse-Kappen 1988b). The West German peace movement had blamed the U.S. and particularly Ronald Reagan for NATO’s nuclear policies. In contrast, I demonstrated that then–German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and the Federal Republic in general were crucial for NATO’s decisions at every step of the way and that the West Germans exercised a strong influence on U.S. foreign policy-making, even under President Reagan and throughout the arms control negotiations with the Soviets. These findings had quite an influence on my later work on transatlantic relations.

In 1988, I moved to the U.S., where I spent two years at Cornell University’s Peace Studies Program, followed by another two years at Yale University’s Department of Political Science. My first tenure-track job was at the University of Wyoming in 1992–93. The intellectual impact of each of these places was profound.

Let me start with Cornell where Peter Katzenstein and Richard Ned Lebow became my intellectual mentors – together with a whole group of terrific graduate students who taught me U.S. political science and methods.⁴ Katzenstein’s work was crucial in, first, adding a comparative perspective to my work on German foreign policy and, second, directing me toward studying the embeddedness of domestic politics in political institutions and the structure of state– society relations (see e.g. Katzenstein 1978, 1985). The latter was known at the time as the “domestic structure” approach, which inspired both historical institutionalism and the “varieties of capitalism” perspective (see e.g. Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth 1992; Hall and Taylor 1996; Hall and Soskice 2001).

My first attempt at applying the domestic structure framework and, at the same time, engaging in comparative foreign policy analysis was the 1991 World Politics article (chapter 2, this volume). In short, I argued that domestic structures – various combinations of state–society relations – explain the degree to which societal demands influence foreign policy decisions in liberal democracies. My 1994 article in International Organization (chapter 9, this volume) also uses the domestic structure framework. So does the edited volume on transnational relations which uses domestic structures as the main variable to explain the access and influence of non-state actors on state policies (Risse-Kappen 1995a).

Starting at Cornell, I also continued researching the transatlantic relationship. The INF book led me to conclude that the European influence on U.S. foreign policy might have been greater throughout the Cold War and beyond than conventional wisdom would have it. I decided, therefore, to dig deeper into European-American interactions during the Cold War.

At this point, the Cornell graduate students educated me in what is known today as social constructivism. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, a weekly Peace Studies Program seminar followed by (mostly pizza) dinner took place at the home of some Cornell faculty. We read and discussed the works of Friedrich Kratochwil, Nicolas Onuf, John Ruggie, Alexander Wendt, and others – sometimes deep into the night (Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986; Wendt 1987; Kratochwil 1989; Onuf 1989).

The other part of my social constructivist education took place at Yale University. From 1988–1990, I was commuting between Ithaca, New York, and New Haven, Connecticut. At Yale, Bruce Russett, whom I knew from my time in Frankfurt since he was a friend of Czempiel, became my mentor.⁵ Russett has been “Mister Democratic Peace, of course” (see Russett 1993; Russett and Oneal 2001), and a hard-core quantitative scholar. When Russett heard about my interest in transatlantic relations, he suggested that I read Karl W. Deutsch’s work on security communities (Deutsch et al. 1957). The other acquaintance at Yale was Alex Wendt, an assistant professor at the time who was working on the “Anarchy Is What States Make of It” manuscript, one of the defining pieces of social constructivism (Wendt 1992).

Karl Deutsch, the early social constructivist scholarship, and the literature on the “democratic peace” were eye openers for me. I started interpreting NATO not so much as a traditional alliance, but as a security community of liberal democracies. It incorporated a distinctive set of norms of consultation regulating the relationship, which then explained the extraordinarily significant influence of the British and the Germans in particular on U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War (Risse-Kappen 1995b). I used comparative case studies throughout the history of the Cold War to proof my argument empirically (the Korean War, the Suez crisis, the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and – of course – my earlier work on INF). I learned the hard way what it means to go to the archives and to interpret historical sources. While I was trying to make a social constructivist argument, Bob Keohane convinced me in ten-page single-spaced comments that I need to take alternative explanations more seriously, particularly a sophisticated realist account rather than simply Waltzian structural realism (Waltz 1979). A summary of my argument can be found in a chapter in The Culture of National Security volume edited by Katzenstein (Katzenstein 1996; chapter 4, this volume). The book established to a skeptical U.S. IR audience that the study of norms from a constructivist perspective yields significant insights in crucial issues of world politics.

Cooperation Among Democracies (Risse-Kappen 1995b) established me as a scholar of the transatlantic affairs, for better or worse. Almost ten years later, when I had moved on to different topics, the transatlantic crisis following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 renewed my interest in NATO. I got together with G. John Ikenberry and Jeffrey Anderson to put together an edited volume investigating the fundamentals of the transatlantic security community (Anderson, Ikenberry, and Risse 2008). My conclusion at the time was that the security community was still intact but that the European–American relationship was faced with a lingering crisis. At the end of Obama’s second term as President, I have become more pessimistic (Risse 2016). As Adler and Barnett suggested quite some time ago (Adler and Barnett 1998), the norms holding security communities together can actually erode.

During my time as a visiting assistant professor at Yale in the early 1990s, I became exposed to the emerging literature on the “democratic peace” through Russett’s work. Czempiel, my PhD supervisor, had written about democracy and peace already for a long time, but his work had been practically ignored outside Germany (Czempiel 1986; see, however, Czempiel and Rosenau 1992). The empirical evidence became ever more robust that consolidated liberal democracies almost never fight each other. What was lagging behind was the theoretical explanation. Neither Bueno de Mesquita’s argument about the constraining forces of democratic institutions (Bueno d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Sources
• List of tables and figures
• Preface
• 1 Domestic politics and norm diffusion in international relations: An intellectual journey
• Part I From the inside out: The domestic politics of international relations
• Part II From the outside in: The international sources of domestic change
• Part III In between spaces: Transnational relations and the diffusion of ideas and institutions
• Index