Domestic Role Contestation, Foreign Policy, and International Relations

Cristian Cantir, Juliet Kaarbo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138653801
• eBook ISBN: 9781317226444
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Despite the increase in the number of studies in international relations using concepts from a role theory perspective, scholarship continues to assume that a state's own expectations of what role it should play on the world stage is shared among domestic political actors.

Cristian Cantir and Juliet Kaarbo have gathered a leading team of internationally distinguished international relations scholars to draw on decades of research in foreign policy analysis to explore points of internal contestation of national role conceptions (NRCs) and the effects and outcomes of contestation between domestic political actors. Nine detailed comparative case studies have been selected for the purpose of theoretical exploration, with an eye to illustrating the relevance of role contestation in a diversity of settings, including variation in period, geographic area, unit of analysis, and aspects of the domestic political process.

This edited book includes a number of pioneering insights into how the domestic political process can have a crucial effect on how a country behaves at the global level.

1
Unpacking Ego in Role Theory

Vertical and Horizontal Role Contestation and Foreign Policy¹

Cristian Cantir and Juliet Kaarbo

Introduction

In 2015, French president François Hollande promised to be a “faithful ally” to Cuba in its efforts to modernize its economy (“Cuba Cites Final Hurdle to Naming Ambassador,” 2015). That same year, a Vietnamese delegation led by State President Truong Tan Sang said that it wanted to cooperate with countries in Africa and Asia to “protect the principles of the Bandung Conference and international law” (“Vietnam President to Lead Delegation to African-Asian Conference in Indonesia” 2015). In 2013, Azeri foreign minister Elmar Mammadyarov said that his country has been a “bridge between civilizations for centuries” (“Azerbaijan Always Pays Particular Importance to Development of Relations With Islamic Countries” 2013). In 2014, a Turkish official stated that his country’s “approach to migration sets an example for the whole world” (“Turkish Official Says Number of Syrian Refugees Exceeded 700,000” 2014). All of these leaders, more or less consciously, have described a role that their countries play in the global arena, roughly consistent with some roles K. J. Holsti identified in a 1970 article: faithful ally, defender of the faith, bridge, and example, respectively.

States frequently articulate, argue about, and legitimize actions based on what they believe to be their proper place in the realm of international relations. Some evoke material power as the basis for such claims, while others look to their ethnic, religious, or political identities. This phenomenon goes to the heart of scholarly concerns in IR regarding the impact of material and ideational structures on states, as well as how agency matters both in the rhetoric and the actions of countries. Before the ideational turn in the discipline, answers to such questions were frustratingly sparse. Holsti’s (1970) article—which sparked the emergence of role theory in IR—was based on an observation that states vocalize significantly more roles for themselves than would otherwise be expected from a purely structural perspective. From the outset—and in the ensuing decades of role theory scholarship—these insights have been embedded in the broader discipline because they speak to matters of agency and structure, identity, status, and socialization, to name a few. The current volume is based on the belief that the theoretical development of role theory—more specifically, a better conceptualization of the domestic political process in which national roles may be contested—will allow it to make strong contributions to questions that foreign policy analysis (FPA) and international relations scholars continue to address.

With an aim of theory building, we identify a lingering problem in role theory research that we address theoretically and empirically. Despite the increase in the number of studies in international relations using concepts and relationships from a role theory perspective, scholarship continues to assume that a state’s own expectations of what role it should play on the world stage are shared among domestic political actors. In other words, most analyses of roles have tended to “anthropomorphize” the state (Harnisch 2012: 52). This book challenges that assumption and explores the domestic contestation of national roles and the effects of internal role disagreement on states’ foreign policy processes and behaviors. We situate our work within the role theory framework, explicitly using its rich language to conceptualize agents’ socially recognized positions in the world and the normative structures of expectations. We build directly on Holsti’s seminal work on national role conceptions (NRCs), which he defines as

the policymakers’ own definitions of the general kinds of decisions, commitments, rules and actions, suitable to their state, and of the functions, if any, their state should perform on a continuing basis in the international system or in subordinate regional systems.

(K. Holsti 1970: 246)

As decades of foreign policy analysis research has demonstrated, domestic consensus over a country’s external relations is rare. At the very least, consensus should not be assumed, but instead investigated as an empirical question. Since role theory has been hailed by numerous authors as particularly useful for bridging the agent-structure problem in international relations, we contend that role theorists must first find a way to integrate a more complex understanding of agency into its analyses by opening up heretofore ignored domestic political processes and the presence and impact of internal contestation over national role conceptions (NRCs). Although some recent scholarship, following Cantir and Kaarbo (2012), has explored role contestation (e.g., Brummer and Thies 2014; Wehner and Thies 2014), there is considerable room for empirical investigation and theoretical development.

This chapter briefly introduces role theory and its contributions and challenges prior research for assumptions of unified and unitary states. We then take inventory of research in foreign policy analysis and the vertical (elites vs. the public) and horizontal (elites vs. elites) points of possible role contestation within states and offer initial points of contribution that an integration of foreign policy analysis research with role theory can provide. This chapter concludes with observations on the focus, definitions, and methodological approach used in the empirical analyses of cases of role contestation in this book.

Role Theory: Contributions and Its Unitary Actor Assumption

Role theory² originates in sociological research, particularly symbolical interactionism (Harnisch 2011). Its core argument is that members of a society perform a variety of roles, which are commonly defined as a set of norms meant to guide behavior (Harnisch 2011; K. Holsti 1970; S. Walker 1987). This starting point has yielded a number of theoretical and empirical questions and prompted research on actors’ self-definition of their roles, the external (or structural) origin of roles, the processes of interaction between agents and structures during role enactments (i.e., behavior), the number of roles possessed by an actor, role conflict within elements of a role or between different roles, and how actors’ conceptions of their national roles influence their foreign policy.

Since Holsti’s (1970) first attempt at theoretical integration of role theory into the study of international relations, scholars have hailed its descriptive, organizational, and explanatory value (S. Walker 1987). In particular, the focus has been on the promise of role theory in bridging the gap between agency and structure and its ability to incorporate both ideational and material factors in explaining state behavior (Adigbuo 2007; Aggestam 2006; Barnett 1993; Breuning 1995, 2011; Le Prestre 1997a; McCourt 2011; Thies and Breuning 2012). The key contention is that conventional international relations theories (e.g., varieties of realism and Wendtian constructivism) provide structural explanations for state behavior and offer little theoretical insight into the importance of state agency. According to Breuning (2011: 16),

Role theory deserves to be better integrated [with scholarship on norms and identity], not only because it provides the link between identity and behavior, but also because it provides the tools that permit systematic empirical investigation of the relative importance of agent and structure as determinants of foreign policy behavior.

Furthermore, Harnisch (2011) contends that the value of a role theory approach comes through in its provision of a conceptual vocabulary to understand the interaction between one or more agents and the structure. One can look at ego (the “self”) and alter (the “other[s]”) role expectations and explore role conflict or the role location process in an effort to understand the relative strength of both.

Roles also combine ideational and material factors to get to the bottom of how leaders’ conceptions of their country’s place in the world interact with both ideational and material constraints from outside of its borders (Breuning 2011; see also Thies 2013 for an example). From this perspective, while early role theory research was largely structurally focused, examining how roles were distributed in the international system and how they constrained agents, recent efforts adopt a more sociological and symbolic interactionist approach in which roles are not “sets of rights and duties attached to particular social positions” prior to interaction (McCourt 2012: 376). Instead, the focus turns to “how the expectations that constitute roles emerge within interaction and on how individuals come to adopt and use them” (McCourt 2012: 376).

Attention to roles also dovetails with the concept’s natural connection to constructivism and the ideational, normative, and sociological turns in international relations theory (Aggestam 2006; Breuning 2011; McCourt 2011). Indeed, Wendt specifically invokes the notion of role in Social Theory of International Politics (1999: 251), and some have rightly pointed out that role theorists were emphasizing the importance of ideational factors and logics of appropriateness in international relations before constructivist research in international relations (Breuning 2011). More broadly, role theory scholarship has sought to make contributions to other important theoretical debates within international relations research. Thies (2013) engaged with the literature on socialization, offering a framework with which to understand how emerging states find a place in the international system. The natural affinities between role and identity have generated discussion about conceptual clarity, and the possible value of role theory for the study of identity (Breuning 2011; Harnisch 2011; McCourt 2012). Thies (2010: 6349) has argued that “the work that has been done with role theory has always been attuned to the realist tradition,” in part because of a common concern with status (Thies 2013). McCourt explains that role theory “has natural associations with the English School’s notion of an international society” (2011: 1620). More recently, Malici and Walker (2014) used role theory to analyze the concept of “rogue states,” while Brummer and Thies (2014) have shown how roles connect to comparative politics literature on types of democratic systems.

In light of the theoretical promise of the role theory approach, most role theorists begin with the assumption that structural factors are insufficient to explain the number and diversity of roles we see countries play (Aggestam 2006; Le Prestre 1997a). Although there is no definitive answer on the origins of roles³ research has examined the impact of material capabilities (Thies 2013), including country size (Breuning 2011; Chafetz, Abramson, and Grillot 1996; Le Prestre 1997c) and economic performance (Alden and Schoeman 2013). Others have highlighted ideational origins in role conceptions, including culture (Aggestam 2004), history (Backman 1970), and identity (Chafetz, Abramson, and Grillot 1996). Breuning (1997, 1998, 2011) has stressed the importance of decision-maker perceptions in the definition of roles.

More recent efforts, returning to role theory’s symbolic interactionist roots, offer a more complex conceptualization of the origins of roles in the interaction between individual states and role expectations from outside their borders (Harnisch et al. 2011; McCourt 2012; Thies 2012). Thies defines this interaction as socialization, or a role location process that “occurs when an actor attempts to achieve a role for itself in the system” and leads to a bargaining process between ego and alter to “determine an appropriate role” (Thies 2013: 3). If there is congruence between ego and alter expectations, one will most likely find a coherent interaction between the two. In the absence of agreement, on the other hand, the ego may attempt to impose its role despite alter resistance or may abandon the enactment entirely. The alter could also use several mechanisms to either reject the ego’s role or impose its own, which can include material sanctions or normative persuasion. Ultimately, the goal is to harmonize ego and alter expectations, in which case the process of socialization is successful. This “interactive” approach to role theory work has offered some innovative interpretations of cases such as Israel’s interaction with international society since independence (Thies 2013) and Britain’s decision-making process during the Suez Canal crisis (McCourt 2012). More recent symbolic interactionist approaches have revealed the importance of historical role experiences in the institutional preferences of countries like Germany and the Czech Republic (Benes and Harnisch 2015).

Role conflict has been a particular concern for researchers (e.g., Harnisch 2011). Since states often have more than one national role conception (K. Holsti 1970) and since other entities have role expectations for these states that may not be compatible with ego definitions (Jonsson and Westerlund 1982), the logical question is how agents deal with this tension and pressure. Role conflict is normally defined in one of several ways: as a clash between domestically defined national role conceptions and externally defined role expectations (i.e., a disagreement between ego conceptions and alter expectations); as a clash between two role prescriptions for the same situation; or as a clash between elements of the same role (Bengtsson and Elgstrom 2011; Cronin 2001; Harnisch 2011; Tewes 2002; S. Walker 1987). Scholars of role conflict have offered propositions about how conflict between two roles can be resolved (see Tewes 2002; S. Walker 1987) and the consequences of role conflict, including regional instability (Barnett 1993), policy dysfunctions (Le Prestre 1997b), hesitant policy (Tewes 2002), and international conflict (Le Prestre 1997b).

Role change has also been a key area of research in this line of scholarship. Roles are, theoretically, “sticky” concepts: they are assumed to be somewhat stable elements of a country’s sociocultural context, which is expected to be shared among decision makers, and they are thought to be constrained by external expectations and pressures (Breuning 1995; Thies 2010). Consequently, one would expect to notice some degree of stability across time in terms of role expression and role enactment. Empirical research demonstrates, however, that roles can change. Thumerelle and Le Prestre (1997: 150–151), for example, compare their findings with Holsti’s (1970) regarding roles expressed by France right before and after the Cold War and find that some continued to be expressed, others disappeared, while another set changed in content.

Other empirical work has investigated the effects of national role conceptions on foreign policy behavior (Breuning 1995; Chafetz, Abramson, and Grillot 1996). Some, for example, have examined the congruence between roles and the degree of foreign assistance (Breuning 1995), votes in international organizations (Grossman 2005), and the pursuit of nuclear weapons (Chafetz, Abramson, and Grillot 1996). Often the focus is on state behavior that seemingly goes against the national interest but is consistent with the state’s role conception (e.g., Adigbuo 2007).

Along with increasing theoretical refinement and a growing volume of empirical evidence, there is work to be done in establishing the origins of roles, the origins, process, and management of role conflict, the scope conditions under which change is more or less likely, and the exact manner in which roles connect to behavior. We argue that these lingering and underdeveloped issues can benefit from consideration of a surprising absence in role theory studies: role contestation in the domestic political arena.

Past research on role conflict does not encompass this issue. When scholars talk about role conflict, the actor experiencing it is the country (or, more often, a country’s leaders). Either a country’s (ego) expectations are incompatible with alter expectations, or that same country has to struggle with the presence of a number of mutually incompatible roles or elements of a role. The political setting in which these decision makers are embedded is usually absent from consideration, and the ego is a unitary and unified actor even if its role set is not. Our notion of role contestation is different—it disaggregates the state and examines the process by which domestic actors with various role conceptions interact in the foreign policy-making process. The agents in our studies are not only states or officials standing in for the state. They can also include political parties, bureaucratic agencies, public opinion, and individual elites, all with potentially different constellations of roles they want their country to enact. Furthermore, we do not equate individual elites with their government and therefore unpack groups of leaders that have foreign policy-making power. All of these actors may or may not experience role conflict as individuals (a prime minister, for example, may experience some tension over her country’s roles), but our interest is to describe and analyze the contestation that occurs among all relevant actors and establish how such contestation influences the country’s foreign policy. In other words, while role conflict treats the ego like a unitary actor, role contestation disaggregates the ego into a number of actors that contest how the state should behave.

The absence of the domestic political arena from role theory analyses is surprising given stated goals to understand and explain a country’s foreign policy. Decades of research in the field of foreign policy analysis have shown how and why the unitary state assumption is problematic. Our goal for the rest of this chapter is to establish the problems generated by the lack of attention to contestation in role theory, point to the foreign policy research that can “bring contestation in,” and lay out the advantages of its incorporation. We divide the site of contestation into two categories: vertical (elites vs. the public) and horizontal (elites vs. elites).

Privileging Elites, Overlooking the Masses

The first site where contestation can occur is between government elites and the public. The public is often missing from role theory accounts; instead, foreign policy decision makers are taken to represent a state’s national role conception. Two arguments are typically advanced for this choice. First, role conceptions are argued to have a social origin or are “social phenomena” and can, as a result, be shared intersubjectively “even among most of the individuals within a state” (Ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Unpacking Ego in Role Theory: Vertical and Horizontal Role Contestation and Foreign Policy
• 2 Role Contestation in the July 1914 Crisis: The British and French Cases
• 3 Active Independent or Faithful Ally? The Domestic Contestation of National Role Conceptions in Australia After World War II
• 4 Role Theory and Japanese Security Policy
• 5 Contesting Belgium’s Role in Development Cooperation
• 6 Domestic Sources of Changing Turkish Foreign Policy Toward the MENA During the 2010s: A Role Theoretic Approach
• 7 Intervention, Domestic Contestation, and Britain’s National Role Conceptions
• 8 Belief Systems and Foreign Policy Roles: Role Contestation in U.S. Foreign Policy Decisions
• 9 To Be or Not to Be a State? Role Contestation in the Debate Over Scottish Independence
• 10 Multilevel Role Contestation: The EU in the Libyan Crisis
• 11 Agents in Structures: Insights From Cases of Internal Role Contestation
• References
• Index