Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

Twenty years ago, in the pages of the, Journal of Common Market Studies, Hedley Bull launched a searing critique of the European Community's "civilian power" in international affairs. Since that time the increasing role of the European Union (EU) in areas of security and defence policy has led to a seductiveness in adopting the notion of "military power Europe". In contrast, I will attempt to argue that by thinking beyond traditional conceptions of the EU's international role and examining the case study of its international pursuit of the abolition of the death penalty, we may best conceive of the EU as a "normative power Europe".

Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?

The newest “new institutionalism,” discursive institutionalism, lends insight into the role of ideas and discourse in politics while providing a more dynamic approach to institutional change than the older three new institutionalisms. Ideas are the substantive content of discourse. They exist at three levels—policies, programs, and philosophies—and can be categorized into two types, cognitive and normative. Discourse is the interactive process of conveying ideas. It comes in two forms: the coordinative discourse among policy actors and the communicative discourse between political actors and the public. These forms differ in two formal institutional contexts; simple polities have a stronger communicative discourse and compound polities a stronger coordinative discourse. The institutions of discursive institutionalism, moreover, are not external-rule-following structures but rather are simultaneously structures and constructs internal to agents whose “background ideational abilities” within a given “meanin...

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Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse

This article reformulates liberal international relations (IR) theory in a nonideological and nonutopian form appropriate to empirical social science. Liberal IR theory elaborates the insight that state-society relations—the relationship of states to the domestic and transnational social context in which they are embedded—have a fundamental impact on state behavior in world politics. Societal ideas, interests, and institutions influence state behavior by shaping state preferences, that is, the fundamental social purposes underlying the strategic calculations of governments. For liberals, the configuration of state preferences matters most in world politics—not, as realists argue, the configuration of capabilities and not, as institutionalists (that is, functional regime theorists) maintain, the configuration of information and institutions. This article codifies this basic liberal insight in the form of three core theoretical assumptions, derives from them three variants of liberal theory, and demonstrates that the existence of a coherent liberal theory has significant theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications. Restated in this way, liberal theory deserves to be treated as a paradigmatic alternative empirically coequal with and analytically more fundamental than the two dominant theories in contemporary IR scholarship: realism and institutionalism.

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Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics

The history of international political orders is written in terms of continuity and change in domestic and international political relations. As a step toward understanding such continuity and change, we explore some ideas drawn from an institutional perspective. An institutional perspective is characterized in terms of two grand issues that divide students of international relations and other organized systems. The first issue concerns the basic logic of action by which human behavior is shaped. On the one side are those who see action as driven by a logic of anticipated consequences and prior preferences. On the other side are those who see action as driven by a logic of appropriateness and a sense of identity. The second issue concerns the efficiency of history. On the one side are those who see history as efficient in the sense that it follows a course leading to a unique equilibrium dictated by exogenously determined interests, identities, and resources. On the other side are those who see history as inefficient in the sense that it follows a meandering, path-dependent course distinguished by multiple equilibria and endogenous transformations of interests, identities, and resources. We argue that the tendency of students of international political order to emphasize efficient histories and consequential bases for action leads them to underestimate the significance of rule- and identity-based action and inefficient histories. We illustrate such an institutional perspective by considering some features of the coevolution of politics and institutions, particularly the ways in which engagement in political activities affects the definition and elaboration of political identities and the development of competence in politics and the capabilities of political institutions.

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The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders

List of contributors Preface 1. The socialization of international human rights norms into domestic practices: introduction Thomas Risse and Kathryn Sikkink 2. Transnational activism and political change in Kenya and Uganda Hans Peter Schmitz 3. The long and winding road: international norms and domestic political change in South Africa David Black 4. Changing discourse: transnational advocacy networks in Tunisia and Morocco Sieglinde Granzer 5. Linking the unlinkable? International norms and nationalism in Indonesia and the Philippines Anja Jetschke 6. International norms and domestic politics in Chile and Guatemala Stephen C. Ropp and Kathryn Sikkink 7. The Helsinki accords and political change in Eastern Europe Daniel C. Thomas 8. International human rights norms and domestic change: conclusions Thomas Risse and Stephen C. Ropp List of references Index.

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The power of human rights : international norms and domestic change

Transforming Europe: Europeanization and Domestic Change

Part I. Setting the Agenda: 1. Bringing transnational relations back in: introduction Thomas Risse-Kappen Part II. Case Studies: 2. Transnational relations and the development of European economic and monetary union David R. Cameron 3. 'Bullying' , 'buying', and 'binding': US-Japanese transnational realtions and domestic structures Peter J. Katzenstein, and Yutaka Tsujinaka 4. MNCs and developmentalism: domestic structure as an explanation for East Asian dynamism Cal Clark, and Steve Chan 5. Transnational relations, domestic structures, and security policy in the USSR and Russia Matthew Evangelista 6. Mechanics of change: social movements, transnational coalitions, and the transformation processes in Eastern Europe Patricia Chilton 7. Ivory, conservation, and environmental transnational coalitions Thomas Princen Part III. Conclusions: So What?: 8. Power politics, institutions, and transnational relations Stephen D. Krasner 9. Structures of governance and transnational relations: what have we learned? Index.

Bringing transnational relations back in : non-state actors, domestic structures and international institutions

Realist or liberal explanations for the end of the cold war cannot account for the specific content of the change in Soviet foreign policy or for Western responses to it. These theories need to be complemented by approaches that emphasize the interaction between international and domestic factors and that take seriously the proposition that ideas intervene between structural conditions and actors' interests. Some of the strategic prescriptions that informed the reconceptualization of Soviet security interests originated in the Western liberal internationalist community, which formed transnational networks with “new thinkers” in the former Soviet Union. These new ideas became causally consequential for the turnaround in Soviet foreign policy and also had an impact on American and German reactions to it. Even though transnational networks were active in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States, their success varied. Domestic structures like the nature of political institutions, state-society relations, and political culture determine the ability of transnational networks first, to gain access to a country's political system and second, to build “winning coalitions.” These differences in domestic structures can largely explain the variation in impact of the strategic prescriptions among the three countries.

http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~lorenzo/Kappen%20Ideas%20do%20not%20Float%20Freely.pdf

Ideas do not float freely: transnational coalitions, domestic structures, and the end of the cold war

The paper discusses the role of public opinion in the foreign policy-making process of liberal democracies. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, public opinion matters. However, the impact of public opinion is determined not so much by the specific issues involved or by the particular pattern of public attitudes as by the domestic structure and the coalition-building processes among the elites in the respective country. The paper analyzes the public impact on the foreign policy-making process in four liberal democracies with distinct domestic structures: the United States, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Japan. Under the same international conditions and despite similar patterns of public attitudes, variances in foreign policy outcomes nevertheless occur; these have to be explained by differences in political institutions, policy networks, and societal structures. Thus, the four countries responded differently to Soviet policies during the 1980s despite more or less comparable trends in mass public opinion.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0043887100019729

Thomas Risse-Kappen

Papers

The power of human rights : international norms and domestic change

Transforming Europe: Europeanization and Domestic Change

Bringing transnational relations back in : non-state actors, domestic structures and international institutions

Ideas do not float freely: transnational coalitions, domestic structures, and the end of the cold war

Public Opinion, Domestic Structure, and Foreign Policy in Liberal Democracies