This article seeks to explain the influence of the democratic-peace thesis on politics by offering a new understanding of theory: as a hermeneutical mechanism of attaching meaning to political concepts. The hermeneutical mechanism is understood as a three-stage model in which theoretical constructions transform into public conventions and then into political convictions. By using discourse-tracing—analyzing the process in which the theoretical discourse was transformed into political discourse—the article explores two case studies in which the democratic-peace thesis played a political role: the Israeli Right and its criticism of the Oslo accords, and the American neoconservatives and their policies in the Middle East. En route, I will apply Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to reconstruct constructivism from a purely social theory to a sociopolitical theory that considers seriously the political dimension of social reality. The model that is developed here advances our metatheoretical understanding of...

Theory as a Hermeneutical Mechanism: The Democratic-Peace Thesis and the Politics of Democratization:

It has been common, at least since 1945, to exaggerate and to overreact to foreign threats, something that seems to be continuing with current concerns over international terrorism. This paper sketches threat exaggeration during the Cold War and applies the experience from that era to the current one. Alarmism and overreaction can be harmful, particularly economically. And, in the case of terrorism, it can help create the damaging consequences the terrorists seek but are unable to perpetrate on their own. Moreover, many of the forms alarmism has taken verge on hysteria. The United States is hardly “vulnerable” in the sense that it can be toppled by dramatic acts of terrorist destruction, even extreme ones. The country can, however grimly, readily absorb that kind of damage, and it has outlasted considerably more potent threats in the past.

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Simplicity and Spook: Terrorism and the Dynamics of Threat Exaggeration

What are the general costs associated with a U.S. shift toward unilateralism? According to the overwhelming majority of international relations (IR) scholars, the costs are very high. We evaluate the key arguments that underlie this assessment, namely that increased U.S. unilateralism will: (1) spur the formation of a coalition to check U.S. power; (2) reduce efficiency gains through lost opportunities for institutionalized cooperation; and (3) undermine the legitimacy of the American-led international order. We conclude that the theoretical arguments that IR scholars advance do not show that a shift toward unilateralism necessarily has high costs. Our analysis reveals the need to, first, distinguish clearly between criticisms of unilateral policies based on procedure and those based on substance and, second, to recognize the weakness of current procedural arguments.Stephen G. Brooks is assistant professor (Stephen.G.Brooks@Dartmouth.edu), and William C. Wohlforth is professor (William.C.Wohlforth@Dartmouth.edu) in the Department of Government at Dartmouth. They are currently writing a book entitled The Challenge of American Primacy. The authors thank the three anonymous reviewers for Perspectives on Politics and, especially, Erik Voeten for detailed critical comments. They are also grateful to Mlada Bukovansky, Ian Hurd, Martha Finnemore, Ben Valentino, Nina Tannenwald, Alex Wendt, and participants at seminars at the Dickey Center at Dartmouth College, the Olin Institute at Harvard University, the Mershon Center at Ohio State University, and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. Thanks also to Dartmouth's Rockefeller and Dickey Centers for supporting research on which this article draws.

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International Relations Theory and the Case against Unilateralism

This thesis generates a greater understanding of the George W. Bush administration’s Freedom Agenda for the Middle East and North Africa. It is motivated by two central research questions: How and why was the Freedom Agenda developed? And, how was the Freedom Agenda constituted? To address these questions, a constructivist institutionalist methodology is developed. The value of this undertaking, is that it theorises the relationship between the events of September 11, 2001, and the rise of the Freedom Agenda. Consequently, this research focuses on the narrative constructed in the aftermath of the “crisis”, and how this laid discursive tracks for the evolution of the Freedom Agenda. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the Bush administration appropriated and articulated multiple discourses into a distinctive ideological-discursive formation, which in turn, sedimented particular definitions of concepts such as ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. This created a new policy paradigm, which failed to address the ‘conflict of interests’ problem central to US-Middle East relations. As a result, the Freedom Agenda demonstrated a commitment to regional stability and the gradual reform of ally regimes, whilst seeking to challenge regimes hostile to the US. It was a policy caught between promoting democracy and domination.

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George W. Bush, September 11th and the rise of the Freedom Agenda in US-Middle East relations: a Constructivist Institutionalist approach

This article analyses the ideological and theoretical underpinnings of neoconservative discourses on international relations. It moves beyond recent polemics and debates over the Bush administration's foreign policy to offer a deeper look at the intellectual premises of the peculiar synthesis of realism and idealism which characterizes the neoconservative mode of political engagement with the world. Looking at the domestic and foreign policy dimensions of neoconservative political sociology, the article argues that neoconservatism is not the centrist ‘liberal’ conservatism that it pretends to be (and that many foreign policy analysts have diagnosed in recent years). It argues that to the extent that neoconservatism is committed to the Enlightenment narrative of human rights and liberal democracy, these commitments are predicated on an atavistic conservative philosophy that is in fact ferociously predatory on liberal values and liberal mechanisms of governance. The aim here is not to provide a normative de...

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A liberalism betrayed? American neoconservatism and the theory of international relations

ON FEBRUARY 10, 2004, I delivered the Irving Kristol Lecture to the American Enterprise Institute outlining a theory of foreign policy that I called democratic realism. It was premised on the notion that the 1990s were a holiday from history, an illusory period during which we imagined that the existential struggles of the past six decades against the various totalitarianisms had ended for good. September 11 reminded us rudely that history had not ended, and we found ourselves in a new existential struggle, this time with an enemy even more fanatical, fatalistic and indeed undeterable than in the past. Nonetheless, we had one factor in our favor. With the passing of the Soviet Union, we had entered a unique period in human history, a unipolar era in which America enjoys a predominance of power greater than any that has existed in the half-millennium of the modern state system. The challenge of the new age is whether we can harness that unipolar power to confront the new challenge, or whether we rely, as we did for the first decade of the post-Cold War era, on the vague internationalism that characterizes the foreign policy thinking of European elites and American liberalism.

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Charles Krauthammer

Papers

In Defense of Democratic Realism