Role Theory in International Relations

Sebastian Harnisch, Cornelia Frank, Hanns W Maull, Sebastian Harnisch, Cornelia Frank, Hanns W Maull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136738364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Role Theory in International Relations provides a comprehensive, up-to-date survey of recent theoretical scholarship on foreign policy roles and extensive empirical analysis of role behaviour of a variety of states in the current era of eroding American hegemony.

Taking stock of the evolution of role theory within foreign policy analysis, international relations and social science theory, the authors probe role approaches in combination with IR concepts such as socialization, learning and communicative action. They draw upon comparative case studies of foreign policy roles of states (the United States, Japan, PR China, Germany, France, UK, Poland, Sweden, and Norway) and international institutions (NATO, EU) to assess NATO's transformation, the EU as a normative power as well as the impact of China's rise on U.S. hegemony under the Bush and Obama administrations. The chapters also offer compelling theoretical arguments about the nexus between foreign policy role change and the evolution of the international society.

This important new volume advances current role theory scholarship, offering concrete theoretical suggestions of how foreign policy analysis and IR theory could benefit from a closer integration of role theory. It will be of great interest to all scholars and students of international relations, foreign policy and international politics.

Part I Theories

DOI: 10.4324/9780203818756-2

1 Role theory

Operationalization of key concepts

Sebastian Harnisch

DOI: 10.4324/9780203818756-3

Introduction

Role theory first emerged in foreign policy analysis (FPA) in the 1970s when scholars started to ascertain the regular behavioral patterns of classes of states in the bipolar Cold War structure, e.g. “non-aligned,” “allies,” “satellites” (Holsti 1970). Since then, a growing number of role theorists have asserted the existence of an expanding number of social roles – such as that of leader, mediator, initiator – and counter-roles – such as that of follower, aggressor – as the social structure of international relations evolved (Wendt 1999).¹ Early foreign policy role scholarship focused on the ego part of roles, i.e. self-conceptualizations of a state’s purpose by its leadership (Holsti 1970; Walker 1979, 1987b; Wish 1980). As a consequence, this literature did away with much of the foundations of role theory in sociology, social psychology, and anthropology, which stressed the relational and social roots of the concept, for example the constitutive effects of counter-roles and the recognition by others (Coser 2003: 340). In recent decades, role scholarship in both FPA and IR theory has come to rediscover these roots. It has thus started to transcend the individual or state level of analysis to investigate the systemic dynamics of role change (Wendt 1999: 227f.). Moreover, it has also commenced the analysis of more complex role sets (e.g. Jönsson’s pioneering study on superpower role sets), which include more than one role, and the stability of these role sets given the changes in the distribution of power and institutions in the wake of the Cold War (e.g. Elgström and Smith 2006a; Le Prestre 1997a; Maull 1990/91).

Today, leading role theorists differ with regard to the sources and factors shaping national roles: whereas American role theorists tend to stress the actor’s material or cognitive traits as determining factors, and the stability of roles as causes for action, European scholars tend to employ a constructivist understanding that explores language and social interaction and in which roles provide “reasons for action.”² And yet all role theorists seem to agree that roles in international relations cannot be thought of or theorized about without reference to other roles and a basic recognition through society (Stryker and Statham 1985: 323; Thies 2010b: 6338).

In this volume, we build on both of these threads of current role theory, the one that emphasizes cognitive or institutional structures as causes for certain roles, and the other which posits that roles are “embedded” in certain social orders or arrangements, which in turn give meaning and reasons for specific action.³ Our authors and role theorists in general also use a variety of methods to analyze ego and alter expectations that shape national roles. Nabers (this volume) uses linguistic techniques based on the discursive approach of the poststructuralist school of Laclau and Mouffe. Flockhart, Frank, and Bengtsson and Elgström use a phenomenological approach of inductively analyzing texts to recover roles Poland, Germany, NATO and other international actors play. Müller, Maull, and Wolf use an interpretive method seeking the meaning of ego and alter roles through textual analysis. James Sperling and Ulrich Krotz as well as Jörn-Carsten Gottwald and Niall Duggan employ historical narratives and process-tracing techniques to track core elements of the role expectations of the United States, France, and the People’s Republic of China.

Defining roles and related key concepts

Roles are social positions (as well as a socially recognized category of actors) that are constituted by ego and alter expectations regarding the purpose of an actor in an organized group (cf. Thies 2010b: 6336; Andrews 1975: 529).⁴ The position’s function in the group is limited in time and scope and it is dependent on the group’s structure and purpose. Whereas some roles are constitutive to the group as such, e.g. recognized member of the international community, other roles or role sets are functionally specific, e.g. balancer, initiator.⁵

Role expectations for corporate actors, such as states or international organizations, may vary considerably. On the one hand, they regularly comprise ego expectations – that is, domestic and/or individual expectations as to what the appropriate role is and what it implies – and alter expectations – that is, implicit or explicit demands by others (counter-roles or complementary roles, audience cues). On the other hand, role expectations differ with regard to their scope, specificity, communality and thus their obligation. Hence, roles, and even more so role sets, entail a potential for conflict within a role (intra-role conflicts, e.g. between ego and alter expectations) and between roles (inter-role conflicts) (Harnisch forthcoming).

Role conceptions refer to an actor’s perception of his or her position vis-à-vis others (the ego part of a role) and the perception of the role expectations of others (the alter part of a role) as signaled through language and action (Deitelhoff 2006: 66; Kirste and Maull 1996: 289). As such, role conceptions encompass what Wendt has called the social identity of an actor and the actions and perceptions of others (cf. Gaupp 1983: 109). Role conceptions are inherently contested, because roles and their enactment are closely related to the roles of other actors (counter- and complementary roles). This “structural environment of roles” may put severe limits on the behavior (social choice) and properties (social status) and even the very existence of others (Stryker 2006: 227). If, for example, the European Union were to assume a predominant role in the foreign policy making of its member states, finally displacing them, the resulting effect might be that the constituting parts would fear for their very existence as “sovereign states.”

Changes in roles or role sets are important determinants for both role enactment and identity formation. Role enactment, often taken as the dependent variable in role scholarship, refers to the behavior of an actor when performing a role.⁶ Role performances regularly differ considerably from role expectations, both ego and alter, and role enactment may also differ in its constitutive effect for the role beholder and the respective social group. For instance, Mead (1934) hypothesized that the number of roles performed by an actor in a group increased the actor’s social capacity for interaction in that group (complexity of role set). Conversely, complete non-performance in a possible role or set of roles implies that non-performed roles may not have an impact on the process of self-identification, as we shall see.

Whereas FPA role theory does not yet imply any particular assumption regarding the number of roles and processes of self-identification, the research in this volume suggests that the smaller the number of roles an actor performs, the more likely it is that these roles shape the identity of that actor (Krotz and Sperling, this volume).

Excursion: role and identity

The social categories role and identity are closely intertwined in the work of most researchers, but hardly ever clearly defined and related to each other (Breuning, this volume). Early role theorists modeled the relationship by equating the ego part of a role with the social role itself. Roles therefore were defined as self-conceptions, self-referent cognitions that agents apply to themselves as a consequence of the social role positions they occupy (cf. Hogg et al. 1995: 256). In this conceptualization, the social embeddedness of roles was mostly neglected, as we have seen, but causal theorizing was retained as these (fixed) national role conceptions could be interpreted as causing a specific role behavior. Identity, then, is reduced to a social identity, meaning that agency primarily or exclusively defines itself through the eyes of others and vis-à-vis society. Drawing on Wendt’s distinction between corporate and role identities,⁷ early role theorists and comparative foreign policy (CFP) analysts tended to focus on role identities only.

Figure 1.1 Role and identity in early role theory: Exogenization of corporate identity (I-part).

In the 1990s, social constructivist and discourse theorists were prone to distinguish role and identity more clearly by splitting national roles into distinct ego and alter parts and by endogenizing both of them. Drawing on Wendt and Mead, these later models refer to the ego part of a role as the self-conceptualization of an actor’s social position with regard to a given social group (social identity or role identity). This ego part is then endogenized in the process of role taking, where a corporate identity meets the role identity – that is, anticipated attributes of a social role as interpreted by the role beholder (cf. Harnisch and Nabers, this volume).⁸

Changes in roles and their enactment come in two types: adaptation and learning. As defined here, role adaptation refers to changes of strategies and instruments in performing a role. The purpose of that underlying role remains fixed. Adaptation processes are often used as causal mechanisms in rationalistic role approaches where roles primarily regulate behavior but are not interpreted as having constitutive effects for an actor or social order. Within the FPA literature, adaptation as defined here is similar to the first three levels of foreign policy change in Hermann’s typology (1990, 2007): (1) increasing or decreasing the use of certain instruments; (2) changing how and in what order certain instruments are used (tactics); and (3) changing the way the problem is perceived (strategy). In the scholarship on foreign policy learning, adaptation, in this sense, resembles simple learning – that is, shifts in behavior prompted by failure in which neither the values nor the goals of an actor are subject to reassessment (Levy 1994; Ziegler 1993: 6).

Learning, as defined by Jack Levy, describes a change of beliefs (or the degree of confidence in one’s beliefs) or the development of new beliefs, skills, or procedures as a result of the observation and interpretation of experience. Levy distinguishes diagnostic learning, which entails “the definition of the situation or the preferences, intentions, or relative capabilities of others” (1994: 285), from complex learning, which consists of changes in the actors’ own preference rankings or a transformation of the underlying understanding about the nature of the political system within which the actor functions (cf. along these lines Marfleet and Simpson 2006; Walker and Schafer 2004).

In general, Levy’s definition of complex learning is consistent with the behavioral approach towards international roles. It focuses on the behavior and the properties of an actor (i.e. identities, interests, and capabilities) but merely touches upon the existence, the constitutive effects of social learning (cf. Jepperson et al. 1996: 41). Drawing on Wendt’s distinction between the corporate and the social identity, however, we can also tie up Levy’s learning conceptualization with a more constitutive understanding of learning. In such a reading of learning processes, actors’ social identities and corporate identities can undergo profound changes, changes that may even transform the actors’ self-perception of who they are. In effect, this opening provides space for a structurationist reconfiguration of agency, i.e. roles and identities as agency properties, and structure, i.e. social order through social interaction (for a similar approach, see Aggestam 2006: 14; Delori 2009).

Role making, i.e. “as if” role taking, depicts the process of role learning from a specific symbolic interactionist perspective (Harnisch forthcoming). On the basis of differentiation between “I” and “me,” Mead conceives learning as a “transformation” of the constitutive parts of the self (Herborth 2004: 78–80). In routine situations, the “me part” of the self, like the “I part,” has been reconciled with the perceptions of social norms through practices (routines) (Mead 1934: 199). Learning, then, takes place when the process of role taking results in a transformation of the “I” and the “me.” In problematic situations, the “I part” becomes more prevalent, because old routines do not promise to achieve the anticipated effects, namely, material pay-offs and/or immaterial stabilizing effects for the self. In these situations, the “I part” takes over and the self acts “as if” it were performing a new role. Thus, “as if” role taking by definition excludes the routines of the old role and does not reify existing social structures (Mead 1934: 209–12, 214–18).

Significant and generalized others are central concepts in symbolic interactionism because various roles cannot be conceived of without them.⁹ In this reasoning, the generalized other is a (theoretical) starting point only, because the generalized other cannot be met in person. It can only be imagined as an abstract reference point for the “I” to recognize itself as belonging to a special type (identity) or social category (e.g. human being) (Dodds et al. 1997). Mead’s conceptualization of the significant other is built upon this process because it presupposes choice by agency. As Wendt notes, “not all others are equally significant, however, so power and dependency relations play an important role in the story” (1999: 327).

In interpersonal relationships, significant others are often associated with primary socializing agents, such as parents and siblings. The latter assert considerable levera...