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The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, by Peter J. Katzenstein, editor
2. Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security
Ronald L. Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and Peter J. Katzenstein
The analytical perspective of this book departs in two ways from dominant assumptions in contemporary national security studies. First, we argue that the security environments in which states are embedded are in important part cultural and institutional, rather than just material. This contrasts with the assumption made by neorealists and many students of the domestic sources of national security policy. In their views, international and domestic environments are largely devoid of cultural and institutional elements and therefore are best captured by materialist imagery like the balance of power or bureaucratic politics. Second, we argue that cultural environments affect not only the incentives for different kinds of state behavior but also the basic character of states--what we call state "identity." This contrasts with the prevailing assumption, made by neorealists and neoliberals
alike, that the defining actor properties are intrinsic to states, that is, "essential" to actors (rather than socially contingent), and exogenous to the environment. Although we believe these arguments apply to both the domestic and the international environments in which national security policy is made, we shall illustrate them at this point only with reference to the latter.
There are at least three layers to the international cultural environments in which national security policies are made. Commonly recognized in existing scholarship is the layer of formal institutions or security regimes: nato, osce, weu, arms control regimes like the npt, cwc, salt treaties, and the like. Less widely acknowledged is the existence of a world political culture as a second layer. It includes elements like rules of sovereignty and international law, norms for the proper enactment of sovereign statehood, standardized social and political technologies (such as organization theory and models of economic policy) carried by professional and consultancy networks, and a transnational political discourse carried by such international social movements as Amnesty International and Greenpeace. Finally, international patterns of amity and enmity have important cultural dimensions. In terms of material power, Canada and Cuba stand in roughly comparable positions relative to the United States. But while one is a threat, the other is an ally, a result, we believe, of ideational factors operating at the international level. In each case realists will try to reduce cultural effects to epiphenomena of the distribution of power; we argue that these effects have greater autonomy.
Our second argument refers to the effects of cultural environments on the identity, as opposed to just the behavior, of states. The term identity here is intended as a useful label, not as a signal of commitment to some exotic (presumably Parisian) social theory. Indeed, this concept has become a staple of mainstream social science, whether or not the term itself is actually used. Frederick Frey has written an underappreciated article on the problem of actor designation, which calls attention to the problems and importance of specifying who the actors are in a system. 1 Kenneth Waltz was implicitly talking about identity when he argued that anarchic structures tend to produce "like units." 2 Early on in the development of regime theory, Stephen Krasner 3 suggested that regimes could change state interests and, later, that an "institutional" approach would problematize "the very nature of the actors: their endowments, utilities--preferences, capacities, resources, and identity." 4 And Robert Keohane, 5 too, has called for a "sociological" approach to state interests, in which transformations of interests become an important effect to be investigated. None of these scholars, however, has systematically pursued these insights; we attempt to do so here. 6
More specifically, our argument envisions at least three effects that external cultural environments may have on state identities and thus on national security interests and policies. First, they may affect states' prospects for survival as entities in the first place. Just as Waltz argued that competitive material environments will "select out" states that do not adopt efficient organizational forms, so Robert Jackson 7 and David Strang 8 have argued that recognition of juridical sovereignty by the society of states has enabled weak states to survive when they otherwise might not. Second, environments may change the modal character of statehood in the system over time. Today, in contrast to the late nineteenth century, it would be almost inconceivable for a country readily to vote to become a colony. 9 Relatedly, as late as the nineteenth century warfare was seen as a virtuous exercise of state power; today, while states are still organized to fight wars, changing international norms and domestic factors have "tamed" the aggressive impulses of many states, especially in the West, thus creating a disposition to see war as at best a necessary evil. 10 Finally, cultural environments may cause variation in the character of statehood within a given international system. The aftermath of World War II, for example, initiated a period of identity politics in both Germany and Japan, which generated "trading state" identities, as Thomas Berger shows in this volume. Similarly, unlike Britain, France maintained its commitment to the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System (ems) partly because it is a founding member--that is, because of its identity interests. 11 In each case a choice theoretic approach that treated the properties of state actors as exogenously given would fail to capture important effects of the external cultural environment on state identities, interests, and policies.
We develop this analytical perspective in the rest of this essay. What emerges is not a "theory" of national security so much as an orienting framework that highlights a set of effects and mechanisms that have been neglected in mainstream security studies. As such, this framework tells us about as much about the substance of world politics as does a materialist view of the international system or a choice theoretic assumption of exoge nous interests. It offers a partial perspective, but one important for orienting our thinking about more specific phenomena.
The next section of this essay sketches an intellectual map that conceptualizes international and domestic environments and their relationships to state identity. Subsequent sections locate prominent theoretical approaches in the field of national security on this map, in comparison to the approach of this book, pull together the book's main substantive arguments, and briefly discuss some methodological and metatheoretic issues. We conclude with some extensions of our analysis.
Analytical Context
The empirical essays in this volume focus on the ways in which norms, institutions, and other cultural features of domestic and international environments affect state security interests and policies. In pursuing this idea we do not claim that theories that do not do so are unhelpful or wrongheaded. The relationship between different lines of argument will vary from complementarity to competition to subsumption. One cannot prejudge the relative utility of different arguments apart from the specification of the problems that motivate the research in the first place. It is in this spirit that this volume departs from realism and liberalism as the dominant approaches in security studies.
Figure 2.1 provides a map for positioning the arguments of these essays relative to those of realism and liberalism. 12 The map is analytically general; we use it here to categorize domestic and international theories of national security.
One axis of the map (the x-axis) focuses on the relative cultural and institutional density of the environments in which actors move. 13 States can be conceived of as interacting with environments that range from having limited cultural and institutional content on the one hand to being thickly structured by cultural and institutional elements on the other.
At the low end of this continuum are theories that depict the environment in materialist terms. The analogy would be to ecology in the physical sciences. In international relations this is the view held by neorealists, who conceive environments in terms of a distribution of material (military and economic) capabilities. Materialists need not ignore cultural factors altogether. But they treat them as epiphenomenal or at least secondary, as a "superstructure" determined in the last instance by the material "base." This is probably the dominant view of state environments in security studies. Indeed, this view is so pervasive that even its critics, such as neoliberal institutionalists, typically refer to structure in material terms and then treat norms, rules, and institutions as mere "process."
At the high end of the x-axis are theories depicting environments as containing extensive cultural elements. Such theories might refer to the states system as an "anarchy" in the strict sense, that is, as lacking a world state. But they insist that even anarchies can be highly "social." What ultimately determines the behavior of actors within these anarchies is shared expectations and understandings that give specific meaning to material forces. 14 When thinking about the relationship between theories located at opposing ends of this dimension, it is important to avoid two common misunderstandings. The first is assuming that materialist theories are necessarily about conflict and cultural ones are about cooperation. Although neorealism tends to predict conflict, Daniel Deudney's work on nuclear weapons 15 suggests that material forces may also lead to cooperation. 16 And conversely, although neoliberals tend to focus on cooperation, cultural explanations of conflict are equally possible, as Samuel Huntington's work on the "clash of civilizations" illustrates. 17 In this respect the perspective of this volume, and of social constructivism more generally, is like that of game theory; it is analytically neutral with respect to conflict and cooperation. In contrast to the work of regime theorists, the value of the arguments here does not depend on the extent to which states cooperate in security affairs. We argue that any general theory of national security, realist or otherwise, needs to accommodate both cooperation and coercion.
A second common misunderstanding in comparing theories along the x-axis is smuggling in unacknowledged cultural factors that do most of the explanatory work within ostensibly materialist theories. Alexander Wendt, 18 for example, has argued that neorealist arguments about the role of the distribution of power in world politics in fact trade on an implicit characterization of the background of shared expectations, a culture of fear and enmity. Whether or not neorealists in fact adopt such an explanatory strategy, however, it is important to disentangle claims about the effects of "brute" or generic material forces from claims about their effects that presuppose specific contingent cultural contexts. Relatedly, categories like "revisionist" or "status quo" power, when deployed in a realist explanation, often refer to social identities. To establish the validity of a materialist argument, one has to show that the material base as such governs a cultural superstructure.
An important consequence of both these points is that the use by states of material power and coercion in their security affairs in no way speaks to the validity of theories along the x-axis. Power is ubiquitous in social life, whether in the "coercive" sense of punishing and constraining behavior as emphasized by neorealists or in the "productive" sense of producing subjects as emphasized by students of culture. The issue that separates the contributions to this volume from mainstream security studies is therefore not the extent to which power and coercion are thought to matter in international life. In general the authors are just as attentive to coercion and force as neorealists are. The issue, rather, is whether the manifold uses and forms of power can be explained by material factors alone, or whether ideational and cultural factors are necessary to account for them. In the latter case it makes little sense to separate power and culture as distinct phenomena or causes: material power and coercion often derive their causal power from culture. This volume does not concede the study of conflict and war to neorealism, as if the latter provided a confirmed theoretical "baseline," to which cultural arguments merely add a few secondary variables. The issue is what accounts for power, not whether power is present.
The second line of argument of this book is represented by the y-axis. It focuses upon the relationship between actors, such as states, and their environments. This relationship is two-sided. It includes the impact of actors on their environments and the impact of environments on actors. 19 Specifically, this volume wants to draw attention to the significance of the latter. However, this intention does not stem from a belief that the effects of actors on environments are unimportant. On the contrary. The contributors to this volume argue that agency and environment are mutually constitutive--in contrast with the primacy that the dominant realist and rationalist perspectives in international relations theory accord to the effects that actors have on environments. In this volume Richard Price and Nina Tannenwald, for example, illustrate such a constitutive relationship in the case of the non-use of chemical and nuclear weapons. Similarly, Berger's analysis suggests that the transformation in Germany's and Japan's collective identity affects the international environment.
In thinking about the effects of environments on actors it is useful to distinguish three kinds of effects, which correspond to progressively higher levels of "construction." First, environments might affect only the behavior of actors. Second, they might affect the contingent properties of actors (identities, interests, and capabilities). 20 Finally, environments might affect the existence of actors altogether. For example, in the case of individual human beings, the third effect concerns their bodies, the second whether these bodies become cashiers or corporate raiders, and the first whether or not the cashiers go on strike. Theories that call attention to lower-order construction effects may or may not stress higher ones. In this book we focus on the first and, especially, the second effects, usually taking the existence of states as given.
At the low end of this continuum are theories, such as rational choice and game theory, that depict the defining properties of actors as intrinsic and thus not generated by environments. Such theories may acknowledge a role for environmental structures in defining the opportunities and constraints facing actors, and thereby in conditioning the behavior of the latter via "price" effects, 21 but not in constructing actors themselves. Neoclassical economics, for instance, treats the preferences and capabilities of actors as exogenously given. Relatedly, Waltz 22 allows for what he calls "socialization" and "imitation" processes. But in so doing he envisions the shaping of the behavior of pregiven actors. He thus assumes that the processes determining the fundamental identity of states are exogenous to the states' environments, global or domestic.
At the high end of the continuum are theories that treat unit properties as endogenous to the environment and, at the limit, assume that units have no essential intrinsic properties at all, a possibility that we neglect here. That someone has the identity (and associated interests) of a "student," for example, has no meaning outside of a particular institutional environment that also defines related identities, like "professor" (with its associated interests). A similar argument can be made about the identity of some states as "sovereign," which presupposes a system of mutual recognition from other states with certain competencies. In both cases the properties of an actor, as well as its behaviors, depend upon a specific social context. The identities that states project, and the interests that they pursue, can therefore be seen as partly constructed by their environments.
Theoretical Perspectives
Figure 2.1 provides a way of thinking about the relationship of this book to dominant approaches in security studies. Each approach represents different views about what environments consist of, and about how such environments affect actors--here, states. In this section we briefly characterize approaches to security studies in terms of this figure, dividing the review into international/systemic and domestic theories. 23 We should note that the two dimensions of figure 2.1 are continua, but for ease of exposition we discuss approaches by reference to the quadrant in which they fall.
International Politics
Few approaches fall cleanly in the upper-left quadrant. This combination is difficult to sustain. If actor properties are constructed, a dense cultural and institutional environment is normally implicated. But, nevertheless, there probably are a few representatives of this quadrant. Strands of neo- Marxism, especially world-systems theory, offer some examples. And Deudney's "security materialism" might also fall in this category. 24
Since they insist on the determining effects of international structure, neorealists like Waltz 25 might also be located here. But it is not clear whether such a classification is accurate. Waltz claims to derive state interests from an ecological argument about how the logic of anarchy produces "like units." His argument, however, takes the self-interested and sovereign character of states as given, and in practice his neorealist "structuralism" ends up focusing on how structure conditions the behavior of given state actors. 26 This interpretation is reinforced by his reliance on analogies from microeconomics, a discipline that treats actors' properties as exogenously given. Analytically, then, in neorealism states have largely unproblematic--that is, unvarying and acontextual--identities and interests. 27 In this view, neorealism might therefore more accurately be located in the lower-left quadrant of the map.
In fact, most mainstream strategic and deterrence theory and policy research fall in this quadrant. Actor identities are taken for granted, and material capabilities are considered the defining characteristic of environments. Game theoretic models are then typically used to analyze how material structure provides incentives for particular kinds of behavior. This perspective focuses on how to contain or manage given conflicts, neglecting strategies for solving them by transforming underlying identities and interests. The analytical problem of conflict management and order is thereby reduced to the problem of balancing or achieving cooperation between exogenously given competitors.
Scholars in the lower-right quadrant retain a rationalist approach to actor construction but attach considerably more importance to norms, institutions, and other cultural factors than do neorealists. This neoliberal school argues that norms and institutions matter both at the domestic level, where regime type is found to have an important effect on some domains of foreign policy behavior, 28 and at the systemic level, where international regimes change the incentives for state action. 29 They have conceptualized the difference that norms make, for instance, in terms of their effects on the relative cost of specific forms of behavior--for example, through lowering transaction costs and reducing uncertainty about others' behavior. However, neoliberals have been relatively inattentive to varying constructions of actor identities on interests and policies. This contrasts with the keen interest of traditional realists in the effects of nationalism on state identity. Neoliberalism leaves that topic largely unexamined. 30
In recent years theoretical disagreements between neorealists and neoliberals have constituted the core of mainstream international relations theory, which in turn has shaped security studies. 31 In terms of figure 2.1, these disagreements have occurred along the x-axis. While disputing the relative importance of material power versus norms and institutions, both approaches are committed to a rationalist view of the difference that structure makes. Structure merely affects behavior; it does not construct actor properties. Compared with earlier advances in international relations theory, this approach marks a substantial narrowing in analytical perspective. In the 1960s, for example, theorists of neofunctionalism and regional integration developed sophisticated approaches to investigating the effects of integration processes on actor properties. 32 These theories are precursors of current theoretical alternatives to neorealism and neoliberalism that can be found in the upper-right quadrant. 33 Since they differ greatly on important issues of research practice, such alternatives should not be lumped together as representing one intellectual position. They offer instead a range of analytical perspectives that differ from realist and liberal variants of international relations theory.
The oldest stream of scholarship that might be positioned within this space, and to which subsequent traditions are partly indebted, is the Grotian tradition represented by Hedley Bull 34 and the English School. 35 From this perspective the international system is a "society" in which states, as a condition of their participation in the system, adhere to shared norms and rules in a variety of issue areas. Material power matters, but within a framework of normative expectations embedded in public and customary international law. Scholars in this tradition have not focused explicitly on how norms construct states with specific identities and interests. But sociological imagery is strong in their work; it is not a great leap from arguing that adherence to norms is a condition of participation in a society to arguing that states are constructed, partly or substantially, by these norms.
Perhaps the most fundamental institution in international society is sovereignty. It has become an important focus of a second body of scholarship, constructivism. 36 John Ruggie's important critique of Waltz 37 conceptualizes sovereignty as an institution that invests states with exclusive political authority in their territorial spaces, which he sees as crucial in the construction of state identity. By constituting states, and only states, with territorial rights, sovereignty determines what the basic political units of the system are. It thus defines also categories of "deviant" units, such as international trusteeships or safe zones, whose existence within the states system is thereby made problematic. 38 In addition to defining political identities, the institution of sovereignty also regulates state behavior through norms and practices of mutual recognition, nonintervention, and (state) self-determination--which in turn help reproduce state identities. These norms find expression in public international law, which communicates global agreements about how the society of states should operate. Such agreements matter. Sovereignty norms establish a largely "juridical statehood," for example, in Africa, which becomes a key political resource for these states within the interstate system. 39 And David Strang has shown that states externally recognized as sovereign show less movement between independent, dependent, and unrecognized statuses than do states not so recognized. 40
Another body of scholarship, poststructural international relations theory, pursues a radical constructivist position. Beginning with the work of Richard Ashley, 41 poststructuralists have focused on how state identities are, down to their core, ongoing accomplishments of discursive practices. Crucial among these practices is foreign policy, which produces and reproduces the territorial boundaries that seem essential to the state. 42
Neorealism's disregard of questions of identity formation, and classical realism's emphasis on the power-seeking interests of states as a function of human, rather than male, nature have given feminist critiques of realism a dual target. In the words of Ann Tickner, "in the name of universality, realists have constructed a worldview based on the experiences of certain men: it is therefore a worldview that offers us only a partial view of reality." 43 In both of its incarnations, realism seeks to articulate objective and timeless laws--the will to power and the tendency to balance power--that feminist critics argue reflect a deeply gendered view of reality. Relativizing that view, feminist theory insists, is a crucial first step in eventually transforming it. 44
Like feminism, a fourth theoretical perspective that fits into the upper-right quadrant also is not state-centric, and perhaps for that reason is not well known in international relations scholarship. This is the sociological research that John Meyer and his colleagues have done on the world polity. 45 This group has focused on the cultural and institutional foundations of world society as opposed to the society of states. 46 A parallel concern is quite natural to students of domestic affairs, who analyze the social embeddedness of states and markets as a crucial feature of national politics. And it resonates partly with theories of transnational relations that have informed international relations research during the last two decades. 47
This body of empirical research has focused on a world political culture, carrying standardized models of statehood. The spread of democratic ideologies and market models provides obvious examples, along with the underlying consolidation of regional and even global ideologies of citizenship and human rights. 48 Even states' military procurement is partly scripted in models of statehood that diffuse widely in the world system, as Dana Eyre and Mark Suchman argue in their essay in this volume. Adoption of such evolving world models has shown a weakening relationship over time with specific characteristics of particular states, which indicates conventionalization and in some instances even institutionalization at the global level.
This sociological literature, now well developed empirically, 49 has tracked a rapidly intensifying world institutional and discursive order, carried by an expanding range of "epistemic" communities 50 as well as intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations. This line of argument does not describe any formal change in sovereignty, however, nor does it foresee any movement toward a global protostate. 51 Rather, the jurisdiction and agendas of states are increasingly worked out within a transnational context. Without reference to this standardizing world political culture, it is difficult to account for the high stability of the states system, as well as the decreasing variability of political forms and the rapid spread of political and social technologies within it. 52
At the same time, new forms of global homogeneity and order also generate new forms of heterogeneity and disorder. "The insistence on heterogeneity and variety in an increasingly globalized world is . . . integral to globalization theory." 53 World society carries standardized oppositional ideologies that are usually selective reifications of elements of dominant world ideology. Thus authoritarian ideologies and experiments with state socialism in Third World settings in the 1960s, and the spread of Third World demands for a New International Economic Order (nieo) in the 1970s, both drew upon Western principles of justice. 54 Indeed, during the Cold War socialist models achieved (counter)hegemonic status in many Third World states, despite the absence of the standard preconditions for socialism. With the end of the Cold War it is conceivable that some strains of Islamic fundamentalism may assume a similar oppositional role. For as J. P. Nettl and Roland Robertson have argued, religion and societal ideologies may exercise stronger control functions over global society than do international law and industrialism. 55
Domestic Politics
The differences in analytical perspective captured in figure 2.1 apply as much to theories of domestic politics as to those of international relations. 56 Thus, in their analyses of domestic politics, orthodox national security studies tend to adhere to the same materialist and rationalist perspective that characterizes realism at the international level. This work has taken two main forms: scrutiny of individual decision makers, often observed at times of crisis, and of bureaucratic organizations involved in the process of policy formulation and implementation. The theory of the state implicit in the former is the rational-state-as-actor model; the theory of politics implicit in the latter is bureaucratic pluralism or bureaucratic routinization.
Critics of deterrence have questioned these implicit theories by invoking in a variety of ways the cultural content of the environment, thus moving rightward along the x-axis. The cognitive and motivational biases impairing rationality that have attracted attention are, in this view, rooted not only in the information-processing proclivities of individuals but also in the operational codes, understandings, and worldviews shared by decision makers and diffused throughout society. 57 Similarly, Elizabeth Kier and Alastair Johnston, in their respective essays in this volume, rely on studies of organizational and strategic cultures that criticize the lack of attention to cultural variables in the mainstream literatures on organizations and deterrence. 58
To the extent that they focus on the effects of collective understandings (as embodied, for example, in ideologies and policy paradigms) rather than individual-level variables, these critics share much with recent writings in the fields of security studies, comparative political economy, and foreign policy analysis. 59 Although particular studies differ, they all pay attention to the institutionalization of ideas--in research institutes, schools of thought, laws, government bureaucracies--as a crucial determinant of policy. On this point the latter studies all belong to the "new institutionalism" in the analysis of domestic politics.
But the new institutionalism also has spurred debate about state identity, which moves one along the y-axis of figure 2.1, away from the origin. In the 1970s and 1980s, various forms of institutional analysis reemerged, providing powerful criticisms of the liberal and Marxist theories that regard the state as epiphenomenal. 60 Many realists were unmoved by these developments. If unitary state actors had to be disaggregated analytically, it was in terms of a plurality of bureaucratic and organizational actors. Other realists, however, embraced the return of an analytical perspective focusing on the state and looked for the enduring ideologies and world visions that motivate state action. Thus Stephen Krasner argued that American foreign policy was motivated by ideology rather than by the pursuit of a national interest more narrowly conceived. 61 But in the analysis of domestic politics, the state remained for these observers a largely unitary actor, as it was in the analysis of international politics.
Some students of domestic politics, on the other hand, viewed the state in its relation to society. In their view the identity of the state and of social actors--for example, interest groups or political parties--could be understood only as mutually constitutive. 62 Conceiving of the state in relational terms and investigating the domestic sources of foreign policy focuses attention on the degree to which the identities of actors are constructed by state-society relations. Ideologies of social partnership, for example, helped define for the rich, small European states after World War II a set of political strategies that combined economic flexibility with political stability. 63 Furthermore, the relatively generous welfare policies associated with these political strategies are representative of moral and humanitarian concerns that have prompted foreign aid policies not easily explained in terms of narrow conceptions of economic self-interest. 64 Put differently, shared conceptions of identity appear to have had an important indirect effect on a number of policies. 65
This brief review suggests a concluding observation about the pattern of theorizing in national security studies. In the case of international relations theorizing, one can discern a dominant arc of research. It starts in the lower-left quadrant with a materialist-rationalist neorealism, extends to the right along the x-axis in the form of neoliberal regime theory, which adds more cultural imagery, and moves into the upper-right quadrant with constructivist theories that seek to link cultural structures to actor identities. One can also map the analysis of the domestic sources of national security policy along this arc, although with less clarity. Different intellectual currents have challenged two analytical positions that lie close to the origin: the bureaucratic politics paradigm and the presumption of rational, individual decision makers.
This volume (located in the upper-right quadrant) seeks to establish the fruitfulness of a sociological perspective on national security. As one moves away from the origin, one captures the two theoretical departures of this project: the imagined cultural and institutional density of states' environments increases, and so does the extent to which states' properties are constructed by these environments.
Arguments
Most of the essays in this volume feature norms, culture, or identities in causal arguments about national security policy. (We will clarify conceptualizations of these terms in the appropriate subsections below.) The main lines of argument advanced herein can be captured by a simple schema: 66 Referring to the causal pathways summarized in figure 2.2, we outline five main types of arguments present in the substantive essays of this volume. (The numbers here correspond to the numbers labeling the pathways of the figure.)
Effects of norms (I). Cultural or institutional elements of states' environments--in this volume, most often norms--shape the national security interests or (directly) the security policies of states.
Effects of norms (II). Cultural or institutional elements of states' global or domestic environments--in this volume, most often norms--shape state identity.
Effects of identity (I). Variation in state identity, or changes in state identity, affect the national security interests or policies of states.
Effects of identity (II). Configurations of state identity affect interstate normative structures, such as regimes or security communities.
Recursivity. State policies both reproduce and reconstruct cultural and institutional structure.
The five essays in part 1 of this volume--by Eyre and Suchman, Price and Tannenwald, Finnemore, Kier, and Johnston--focus primarily on the cultural and institutional content of the environments in which states act. These essays give analytical priority, respectively, to norms of military prowess, the limited use of nuclear and chemical weapons, humanitarian intervention, and the organizational and strategic cultures of the military that define interests or affect policy directly. The four essays in part 2--by Herman, Berger, Risse-Kappen, and Barnett--highlight the contested construction or reconstruction of actor identities within environments. These essays problematize the notions of a "Western" Soviet Union, of a Japanese merchant state and a Europeanized Germany, of a security community of liberal democracies in the North Atlantic community, and of the tension between pan-Arabism and Arab statehood. Identities shape actor interests or state policy.
The essays differ in the details of their language and conceptualization, but they share a common idiom. They are cumulative in the challenge they pose to established analytical perspectives, and they illuminate how empirical analysis of cultural content and constructed identities can contribute to the study of national security. All essays specify one or more outcomes to be explained, compare alternative explanations, and stress the importance of agency and conflict in the construction of identity and the enactment of norms. All reach new and nontrivial conclusions regarding substantively important national security issues. The main lines of argument from the essays, in terms of the five main categories outlined above, appear below. 67
1. Cultural or institutional elements of states' environments--in this volume, most often norms--shape the national security interests or (directly) the security policies of states. Many of the essays feature effects of norms. It has become more common to argue that, given constant interests, institutions change the transaction costs or information requirements for certain policies or that they change interests themselves. The essays in this volume build upon but broaden this insight, in ways that we will describe.
We should first mention that the essays employ the concept "norms" in a sociologically standard way. Norms are collective expectations about proper behavior for a given identity. (We will describe the concept "identity" momentarily.) Sometimes norms operate like rules defining (and thus "constituting") an identity--like the descriptors defining the basic characteristics of professorhood within a university, in relation to the other main identities found within that institution. These effects are "constitutive" because norms in these instances specify the actions that will cause relevant others to recognize and validate a particular identity and to respond to it appropriately. 68 In other instances, norms are "regulative" in their effect. They operate as standards for the proper enactment or deployment of a defined identity--like the standards defining what a properly conforming professor does in particular circumstances.
Thus norms either define ("constitute") identities in the first place (generating expectations about the proper portfolio of identities for a given context) or prescribe or proscribe ("regulate") behaviors for already constituted identities (generating expectations about how those identities will shape behavior in varying circumstances). Taken together, then, norms establish expectations about who the actors will be in a particular environment and about how these particular actors will behave. 69 With this conceptualization in mind, we proceed to arguments.
Price and Tannenwald show how models of "responsible" or "civilized" states are enacted and validated by upholding specific norms. 70 These norms constrain the use of some technologies for killing or incapacitating people in large numbers. Berger shows how Germany's and Japan's antimilitaristic norms have made it very difficult for their governments to adopt more-assertive national security policies since the end of the Cold War. Finnemore argues that nonwhite and non-Christian peoples can make claims for humanitarian military protection in the twentieth century in a way that was not conceivable in the nineteenth century. Humanitarian concerns have expanded and have shaped the interests and policies of states. Intervention now often occurs when geostrategic interests are absent or unclear, and when multilateral coalitions restrain the unilateral exercise of power.
Herman's analysis of Soviet foreign policy argues that the regime that emerged between the two superpowers during the era of detente articulated nascent norms--the avoidance of military force, the maintenance of strategic stability, and the legitimation of human rights--norms that shaped in demonstrable ways the definition of national interests advanced by liberal reformers within the ussr. Contesting definitions of security in the Soviet Union were tied to new interpretations of regime dynamics and U.S. debates by a significant sector of Soviet policy makers. These interpretive processes fostered a softening of the ussr's manichaean image of world order. 71
The strength of the causal effects of norms varies. Norms fall on a continuum of strength, from mere discursive receptivity (as in the early years of American deterrence policy, discussed by Price and Tannenwald), through contested models (as revealed in Kier's contrasts of French, British, and German military doctrines in the interwar period), to reconstructed "common wisdom" (as in the eschewing of militarist policies in Japan and Germany that Berger discusses). Weak norms, as in the case of nuclear deterrence, and political ideologies, as in the case of the French military, have behavioral consequences neither as permissive as instrumental justifications nor as constraining as unthinking common sense.
Thus the presence of norms does not dictate compliance. Any new or emergent norm must compete with existing, perhaps countervailing, ones. This is a political process that implicates the relative power of international or domestic coalitions. But norms make new types of action possible, while neither guaranteeing action nor determining its results. Extending Finnemore's line of reasoning, one might argue that as norms become institutionalized, support for institutions may partly supplant adherence to norms as motivators of government behavior. It is plausible to argue, for instance, that the United States intervened in Somalia as much to make up for its own inaction in Bosnia and to show support for the un as to alleviate human suffering in Somalia. A dramatic expansion in the scope of un activities points in that direction. 72
Other cultural effects. Some essays rather than invoking "norms" propose other "cultural" effects on the interests or national security policies of states. The use of the term culture in this volume also follows conventional sociological usage. While the authors who use the term vary in the details, they all invoke it as a broad label denoting collective models of nation-state authority or identity, represented in custom or law. As typically used (and as used here), culture refers both to a set of evaluative standards, such as norms or values, and to cognitive standards, such as rules or models defining what entities and actors exist in a system and how they operate and interrelate. 73 For example, in their discussions here of domestic cultures, both Berger and Kier invoke country-specific models of (and discourse about) national identity and political organization. These models are constructed and contested by politicians, leaders of political movements, groups and parties, propagandists, lawyers, clerics, and even academics. Kier's analysis focuses on the military's organizational culture, but she also examines the broader domestic political culture. The French army in the interwar period did not, as many claim, inherently prefer an offensive military doctrine. Instead, given the constraints established in the domestic political arena, the French army's organizational culture fostered the adoption of a defensive doctrine. Other military organizations would not have responded the same way. In short, what the civilians and the military understand to be in their interest depends on the cultural context in which they operate. 74
Kier's analysis focuses on the organizational culture of the military, which is nested in a broader domestic political culture. Berger's essay concentrates more directly on this broader setting, in his words the "politico- military culture." Price and Tannenwald in their essay follow recent trends in the field of science and technology studies and military technology, 75 arguing that even technologies of mass destruction are socially constructed. They concentrate on how political actors, in international, transnational, and national communities of discourse, contest different categories of weapons and thus contribute to the emergence and evolution of norms. 76
Similarly, Jeffrey Legro turns to the military's organizational culture to explain why during World War II submarine attacks on merchant ships and aerial bombings of nonmilitary targets escalated beyond all restrictions, while the use of chemical weapons did not. 77 Dana Eyre and Mark Suchman's essay provides an international example. In referring to models of military apparatuses and their world diffusion, they invoke what John Meyer has called a "more or less worldwide rationalistic culture," indicating "less a set of values and norms, and more a set of models defining the nature, purpose, resources, technologies, controls, and sovereignty of the proper nation state." 78 These models are politically constructed and contested within international organizations, transnational professions, the sciences and other "epistemic communities," social movement networks, and so forth.
2. Cultural or institutional elements of states' global or domestic environments--in this volume, most often norms--shape state identity. Cultural and institutional structure may also constitute or shape the basic identities of states, that is, the features of state "actorhood" or national identity. For example, in essay 3 Eyre and Suchman show how many states enact standardized models of statehood. Specifically, they analyze how many such states procure a standardized weapons portfolio, one related more to domestic display and international prestige than to the actual security threats that the states face. Analogously, Third World states draw upon other models of proper organization from un agencies, 79 which helps to account for the extraordinary diffusion of social and political technologies within the world system. Similarly, the International Labor Organization (ilo) has been central in global standardization of some elements and practices of welfare states. 80
Ideas of more or less legitimate state identities develop in world society, as do technologies of statehood. With the recent "third wave" of democratization, even authoritarian regimes now use the rhetorical and constitutional trappings of democracy. 81 Norms of racial equality that emerged from domestic debates over race relations eventually diffused globally through transnational politics and politicized South African apartheid. 82 Analogously, ideas about citizenship, developed in domestic contexts, were implicated in the process of decolonization. 83 In this volume, Herman discusses how Soviet reformers sought ways to reconstruct the Soviet Union as a more "normal" country and how they articulated contrasting radical "global" and more conventional "national" political visions. And Berger shows how the aftermath of World War II occasioned a period of identity politics in both Germany and Japan, in which global models of legitimate state and national identities affected the domestic political process of reconstructing identity. The institution of multilateralism has had a particularly powerful effect on Germany. 84
The concept of "identity" thus functions as a crucial link between environmental structures and interests. The term comes from social psychology, where it refers to the images of individuality and distinctiveness ("selfhood") held and projected by an actor and formed (and modified over time) through relations with significant "others." Thus the term (by convention) references mutually constructed and evolving images of self and other. 85
Appropriation of this idiom for the study of international relations may seem forced, since states obviously do not have immediately apparent equivalents to "selves." But nations do construct and project collective identities, and states operate as actors. A large literature on national identity and state sovereignty attests to this important aspect of international politics. We employ the language of "identity" to mark these variations. For the purposes of this project, more specifically, we employ "identity" as a label for the varying construction of nationhood and statehood. Thus we reference both (a) the nationally varying ideologies of collective distinctiveness and purpose ("nationhood" or nationalism, for short), and (b) country variation in state sovereignty, as it is enacted domestically and projected internationally ("statehood," for short).
This dimension of variation in statehood is less codified in the literature and requires a few words of further explication. We refer to two main forms of variation. First, the modal character of statehood varies over time within an international system, as well as varying across international systems. For instance, statehood in the contemporary West is arguably less militarist than statehood elsewhere and in earlier periods. Second, the kinds of statehood constructed within a given system also vary. For instance, the statehood of many African countries is more notably external and juridical than that found elsewhere. 86
3. Variation in state identity, or changes in state identity, affect the national security interests or policies of states. Identities both generate and shape interests. Some interests, such as mere survival and minimal physical well-being, exist outside of specific social identities; they are relatively generic. But many national security interests depend on a particular construction of self-identity in relation to the conceived identity of others. This was certainly true during the Cold War. Actors often cannot decide what their interests are until they know what they are representing--"who they are"--which in turn depends on their social relationships. A case in point is the current ambiguity surrounding U.S. national interests after the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet empire as a dominant "other" occasions instability in U.S. self-conception, and hence ambiguity in U.S. interests. The issue is considerably more pressing in Russia and several other successor states of the Soviet Union.
States can develop interests in enacting, sustaining, or developing a particular identity. For example, Price and Tannenwald (in essay 4) argue that a commitment to a "civilized" identity reinforced acceptance of norms defining chemical and nuclear weapons as illegitimate. And the wishes of American elites to present a pacific picture of the American nation facilitated the development of these norms.
Further, constancy in underlying identity helps to explain underlying regularities in national security interests and policy. Thus Johnston argues in essay 7 that China's strategic culture in the Maoist period was based on a zero-sum view of the world, a division between "self" and "other" that generated specific strategic commitments. Classical Chinese conceptions were reinforced by contacts with the European state system: nationalism and Marxism-Leninism provided themes of class war and anti-imperialist war that could be grafted onto traditional constructions. Historical variations in the structural conditions of the Chinese empire do not account well for the constancy in strategic culture: the relation between "anarchy" and realpolitik depicted by neorealism, Johnston suggests, is in this case spurious. Rather, it is China's strategic culture that drives its realpolitik.
Correspondingly, change in identity can precipitate substantial change in interests that shape national security policy. Redefinition of Soviet identity, and of the U.S.-Soviet relationship, Herman argues, precipitated a new picture of Soviet interests. And the security dilemma of the Cold War was rooted, as Risse-Kappen demonstrates, in definitions of self and other that elites constructed politically in the late 1940s. In the current period, as multilateralism is "internalized" as a constitutive part of some states' identities, these states develop an interest in participating in and promoting it. As Berger shows, German state elites have sought to lock in a reconstructed German identity--pacified, democratic, and internationalist--by linking this identity to regional and multilateral institutions and iden tities. These processes are directly analogous to those of "self-binding" 87 and "character planning" conspicuous in personal identity.
Second, state policy or activity may be a direct enactment or reflection of identity politics. Postwar domestic battles in Germany and Japan over proper security policy were part of a broader political conflict over identity. In Germany, but not in Japan, these were open contests over the reconstruction and retelling of national history. Berger argues that the new constructions of national identity have little resemblance to the militarist visions driving these states before World War II. One might argue that identity reconstruction is more consolidated in Germany than in Japan precisely because of Germany's greater "self-entanglement" in regional and world institutions. 88 In any case, Berger's study shows how identity politics and change in collective identities can precipitate substantial change in state interest and policy.
This argument has important implications for the post-Cold War era. The continuity in Germany's and Japan's security policy, Berger argues, must be attributed to their domestic politics of identity, rather than to discontinuity in the structure of the international system. Despite stark contrasts between China's hard realpolitik and Japan's and Germany's antimilitarist stance, analytically Berger's and Johnston's conclusions are isomorphic: China's strategic culture and Japan's and Germany's politico-military culture have stronger effects on national security policies than international structure does. Analogously, Kier shows that during the interwar years domestic, not international, conflict over the identity of the French state provided the setting in which the organizational culture of the French military caused the adoption of a defensive doctrine.
We have exemplified "identity interests" and "identity politics" as useful constructs for the analysis of states' national security interests and policy. Barnett's contribution to this volume suggests another contribution of the identity idiom. In his discussion of U.S.-Israeli relations, Barnett refers to the identity "crisis" that began in Israel in the late 1980s. It was rooted not in the dramatic changes in the international system but in the debates spurred by Israeli occupation policies in the West Bank. Israel was deeply divided between those defending a traditional conception of geostrategic security, even at the risk of losing the emotional support of the American public, and those favoring strategic retrenchment while strengthening the notion of Israel as a Western-style democracy. The peace offensive of the Rabin government illustrates that identity can trump geostrategy as a determinant of national security policy. 89
4. Configurations of state identity affect interstate normative structures, such as regimes or security communities. The preceding section focused on the effects of constructed and contested state identities on national security interests or policy. One can also analyze how states seek to enact or institutionalize their identities (potentially shifting or multiple ones) in interstate normative structures, including regimes and security communities.
Risse-Kappen discusses how the formation of nato both expressed the common identity of liberal democracies and reinforced an embryonic North Atlantic security community, 90 allowing for the development of new practices of collective defense, institutionalized over time in the nato security regime. Specifically, he shows that an important aspect of that security community was the norm of multilateral consultation that clashed at times with the American urge for unilateral action. He argues further that this security community is persisting despite the evaporation of a common enemy, for it has come to embody norms of consultation, among others, that reinforce an acquired collective identity. 91 Also, proponents of European integration, believing that integration requires agreement, actively championed human rights ideologies, promoting an ideology in order to deepen European identity. 92
Barnett similarly argues that shifts in models of Arab collective identity--specifically, an ongoing competition between pan-Arabism and state-centric models--have driven the search for normative structures to implement this identity. From this analytical vantage point, arguments that invoke the balance of threat as an explanation of alliance formation remain incomplete in their specification of causation, as long as they neglect variable and contested state identities as the main factor that defines for decision makers what constitutes a threat in the first place. 93
5. State policies both reproduce and reconstruct cultural and institutional structure. The causal imagery captured in figure 2.2 represents a process. Cultural and institutional structures have no existence apart from the ongoing knowledgeable actions of actors. 94 This does not mean that such structures are reducible to such actions; it means that cultural and institutional structures cannot be divorced analytically from the processes by which they are continuously produced and reproduced and changed. Emanuel Adler, 95 for example, has analyzed how a particular political coalition of scientists close to the Kennedy administration helped establish the political practice of arms control for the United States, how that practice was exported, and how it eventually became institutionalized internationally.
Since this volume concentrates on invoking cultural and institutional elements as causes of national security policy, this recursive feature is less stressed in the substantive essays. But all of the authors take pains to avoid reifying cultural and institutional structures. All stress the contested construction and contested interpretation of such structures. Power and agency thus matter greatly. And all at least sketch some of the patterns of agency and microstructure upon which their macroscopic arguments depend.
For instance, Risse-Kappen, Berger, Barnett, and Herman all develop the recursive argument that states enacting a particular identity have profound effects on the structure of the international system to which they belong. The forging of an identity as a Western security community, for example, contradicts the expectation of Europe's quick return to nineteenth-century balance of power politics. 96 It predicts instead the continuation of institutional forms of security cooperation in nato, the West European Union (weu), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (osce), or some other multilateral forum. Germany's and Japan's identities as trading states have important consequences for the international security conditions in Europe and Asia. 97 The waxing and waning of pan-Arabism has had a profound effect on military alliances in the Middle East. And changes in Soviet identity and policy helped bring about the end of the Cold War.
In our insistence on documenting effects of norms and identities, we have unavoidably slighted important cognate topics. For instance, the essays do not offer detailed investigation of how cultural norms or constructed identities have effects. Ideas on this topic are scattered throughout the volume, but the topic itself does not receive concerted treatment. 98 And the essays do not present a sustained common argument about how one detects a norm or when a prescription is sufficiently endorsed, conventionalized, or institutionalized to be considered normative. Discussion of these topics is important in future research and would certainly complement and extend the work produced here. But the arguments and causal effects that this essay and this book emphasize are freestanding without this further development.
In sum, the arguments developed in the empirical essays address the major pathways depicted in figure 2.2. The essays show that "norms," "identities," and "culture" matter. They impute, furthermore, a higher cultural and institutional content to environments than do the more materialist views informing, for example, neorealist explanations. Furthermore, the insistence on socially constructed and contested actor identities militates against the rationalist imagery informing most neorealist and neoliberal theories, which take identity as unproblematic. These lines of argument thus open avenues for further research that dominant theories so far have unduly neglected.
Methodological and Metatheoretic Matters
Methodological Nonissues
The departures of this volume are theoretical rather than methodological. This book neither advances nor depends upon any special methodology or epistemology. The arguments it advances are descriptive, or explanatory, or both. All of the essays start by problematizing a politically important outcome; they then develop their own line of argument in contrast with others. Many employ comparison across time or space, in ways now standard in social science. When they attempt explanation, they engage in "normal science," with its usual desiderata in mind.
Many of the essays make descriptive claims that seek in the first instance to document phenomena that have been insufficiently noticed, let alone analyzed. For example, Price and Tannenwald chart the emergence of norms with regard to non-use of nuclear and chemical weapons; Berger delimits changes in Japanese and German identities after World War II. Both are complex descriptive tasks. Many of the essays then go on to make a variety of explanatory claims positing causal effects either of identities or of the cultural/institutional content of global or domestic environments. Authors thus problematize features of national or international security often overlooked by dominant analytical approaches. And they posit causal effects typically left unexplored.
When the essays make explanatory arguments, they assume no special causal imagery. For example, in most of them, norms are invoked as context effects, affecting the interests that inform policy choices. Some essays make occasional references to "constitutive processes" of identity formation, invoking a set of processes whereby the specific identities of the acting units in a system are built up or altered. 99 In these instances, the analytical problem concerns the shape of identities that inform interests rather than, directly, behavior--a characteristic blind spot in the rationalist vision. But reference to "constitutive" processes invokes a category of substantive arguments and is more a theoretical than a methodological departure. Similarly, when essays deal with issues of "meaning" (for instance, when discussing contested interpretations of or explanatory, oughgoing structuralists: they are interested in how structures of constructed meaning, embodied in norms or identities, affect what states do.
These essays have a decidedly empirical bent to them. The evidence employed runs the gamut of statistical and interview data, as well as documentary sources. The authors have sought substantial comparative and historical variation and subjected it to intensive and varied empirical probes.
The empirical work amassed here does suggest that security scholars have occasionally been too narrow in their consideration of both topics and causal factors. This project tries to contribute to widening the scientific "phenomenology" of the national security field in both senses. Herman's and Berger's essays suggest two examples. During the 1970s and 1980s realists and liberals debated at great length competing models of hegemonic stability or decline for the United States. With the exception of the broader sociological literature, no similar attention was lavished on developments in the Soviet Union. 100 Yet it was developments in Soviet, not American, politics and the effects of U.S.-Soviet regimes that brought about the current revolution in world politics. 101 Detailed analysis of the military balance of power between the two superpowers overlooked aspects of reality that turned out to be of great significance. Similarly, the growth of Japanese and German power during the same period was not just constrained by their status as client states in an anarchic international system. Military defeat, occupation, and the political experience under the Pax Americana affected norms of appropriate behavior and conceptions of identity that help shape the current security situation in Asia and Europe.
Problematizing what others take for granted or even reify, such as the construction of state identity and interests, does not in and of itself involve any specific methodological imperatives. For instance, despite the concern in these essays with cultural forces, and hence implicitly or explicitly with "meanings," they do not depend exceptionally upon any specialized separate "interpretive methodology." For example, Price and Tannenwald's essay is in part about the emergence of structures that carry meaning--specifically, norms. It identifies the ways in which nuclear and chemical weapons have been delegitimated, placing emergent proscriptions in the context of larger legitimating discourse defining standards of appropriate conduct for "civilized" states. The empirical work here amounts to a form of "process tracing," whereby the development of the interpretive frames employed by actors is recounted in historical fashion. The "interpretations" at issue here are either explananda or causes in the world, rather than some specialized methodological approach or technique.
In stressing our methodological conventionalism we part company with those scholars who have pointed the way toward a sociological approach but who insist on the need for a special interpretive methodology--as do, for instance, Friedrich Kratochwil and John Ruggie, in an oft-cited article. 102 We note that neither author, either in this article or in subsequent writings, has explicated what such a methodology would entail in practice or provided an empirical exemplar representing concretely the kind of work he has in mind. Ruggie's illuminating recent work on sovereignty 103 is not especially interpretivist in any specific methodological sense. And the ways in which Kratochwil's substantive work 104 is and is not interpretivist are themselves not very clear. Moreover, the research practices of scholars like Ruggie, Kratochwil, and others identified with constructivist or interpretive approaches converge substantially with those advocated by mainstream scholars. We are not claiming that these research practices are identical in details. But methodological differences in practice appear to be small--or at least are not clearly conceptualized, specified, and articulated in the literature. 105 We suggest that the literature is prone to conflate substantive and theoretical differences with methodological ones, as if a theoretical departure necessarily depends upon some methodological uniqueness. It need not, and does not do so in this volume.
This methodological conventionalism matters to us. From today's perspective, for example, the methodological differences dividing "traditionalists" like Stanley Hoffmann from "behavioralists" like Karl Deutsch in the 1960s assumed disproportionate importance. In their actual studies, both scholars subscribed to different variants of the analytical perspective of historical sociology as the most productive means for understanding security issues in the middle of the twentieth century. Disagreements on secondary issues of methods, for example, should not short-circuit the incipient sociological turn among some realist and liberal scholars that essay 13 reviews briefly.
Relations Between Lines of Theorizing
Stressing that our intended departures are theoretical rather than methodological does, however, raise a more substantial issue: what is the relationship of the "cultural," "institutional," and "constructivist" arguments of this volume to those of realism and liberalism? The short answer is that there is no one a priori relationship to be assumed or found. Sometimes this volume's arguments supplement extant arguments; sometimes they compete with them; in some instances the intent would be to subsume realist or liberal arguments within a broader perspective. Although this listing is not exhaustive, the point is simple: one cannot prejudge the relationship between lines of argument; various relations are possible, and they have to be established theoretically and empirically, rather than assumed.
This matter merits a bit more development. The discussion of the various possible relationships between differing lines of argument seems impaired by the highly reified "paradigm"-talk common to contemporary analyses of international relations. Scholarly communities are quick to reify differing arguments as distinct and competing paradigms. Then scholars are prone to assume, often without much thought or argument, that differing arguments are in immediate and direct competition. Or they will resort to an additive view of theorizing, suggesting that newly suggested lines of argument at best add variables to a previously established explanatory model. These images are procrustean and facile.
We see the different arguments of this volume as having differing relationships to the arguments of realism and liberalism. In some cases one finds instances of direct competition. In these instances, an author has taken up an explanandum already addressed (or readily addressable) by extant arguments and has offered an alternative (more sociological) explanation. Kier's essay provides an excellent example. Kier develops a cultural explanation of French military doctrine that contradicts existing functional explanations favored by realists. The evidence suggests the superiority of her explanation over conventional ones. Eyre and Suchman's essay provides a second example of intentionally direct competition. They set up two distinct models of weapons acquisition and attempt to adjudicate them empirically. In this case, the empirical results are not clear-cut; both models receive some support, and thus the relative strength of the differ ent explanatory approache sometimes they compete with them; in some instances the intent wos is not settled unambiguously. Johnston's essay provides a more complex instance of direct competition, as he attempts to subsume a realist argument within a broader cultural one. In Johnston's account, the continuities in China's strategic culture, not the changes in the international balance of power, offer the most compelling argument for marked continuities in China's definition of and response to security "threats."
In some cases the arguments of this volume are meant to supplement or complement more conventional arguments in the security field, rather than to displace, modify, or subsume them. The most straightforward, and commonly acknowledged, instance is when new arguments offer description and explanation of phenomena unaddressed by existing argumentation. In effect, the differing lines of arguments address different empirical domains; in principle their contributions are complementary, since the contributions are subject to eventual bridging and thus integration. For instance, Finnemore investigates humanitarian interventions, a domain left largely unexplored by realist and liberal analysis. Similarly, the non-use of chemical and nuclear weapons that Price and Tannenwald examine is a topic mostly overlooked or treated schematically in conventional deterrence theory with its heavy reliance on realist and rationalist imagery.
More-complex forms of complementarity also occur. One can imagine what might be called "stage-complementarity," whereby one argument covers one phase of a process, while another argument takes up the next phase. 106 Thus this project's focus on the problem of interest definition leaves virtually unattended problems of strategic interaction, a complementary process. An integrated analytical perspective of politics should have room for both. For example, sometimes the authors of these essays limit themselves to providing the front end, as it were, to largely realist arguments--trying to specify further the character of the actors involved in interaction and/or qualifying the character of the interests being pur sued. Barnett, for example, argues that threat perceptions in the Arab world offer no more than a partial explanation of alliance patterns in the Middle East. For threat perceptions depend, in turn, on collective identities. Stage-complementarity does not mean, however, that only cultural and institutional arguments operate at the front end of a causal chain. Herman's analysis, for example, links dramatic changes in Soviet foreign policy and the end of the Cold War to the "New Thinking" of parts of the Soviet elite. In this case a realist argument offers a plausible starting point of a more fully specified causal chain. Adverse shifts in the relative capabilities of the Soviet Union may have been a major factor in how the reformers could install themselves in power in the first place. 107
Alternatively, arguments can be nested within one another and become complementary in this sense. There are two main forms of nesting: (1) one argument provides foundations for another, as when microeconomics provides, at least in theory, foundations for macroeconomics; and (2) one argument provides conditions for another, as when Weberian institutionalism, in aspiration, describes and explains the conditions under which microeconomics obtains. 108 In this volume, the second form of nesting is more likely, since the sociological (institutionalist and constructivist) thrust of the book's argument departs from the convention that nation-state actors are somehow contextless or ultimately "real." Eventually, these arguments should attempt to do two things. First, they should specify the institutional "scope conditions" under which realist interactions and liberal coordinations unfold. 109 And, second, they should characterize features of the role as actors (and interests) that states adopt when they compete and coordinate politically. Such arguments depart from weaker versions of "historical" institutionalisms by positing that the processes of institutional contextualization and construction are ongoing, rather than relegated to past epochal moments (such as the putative effects of the cre ation of the Westfalian state system on state sovereignty, or the effect of the Great Depression on a Keynesian consensus). 110
In brief, competition is not the only possible analytical relationship between different lines of argument; various forms of complementarity, both immediate and more distant, are possible. Often metatheoretical assumptions afford too limited a picture of competition anyway. We are rarely in a position where differing arguments take the form of two (non-nested) regression models, with the same explananda ("dependent variables"), sitting side by side in two panels--with agreed-upon sets of goodness-of-fit statistics offering ready adjudication between them. Neither realism nor liberalism thus can reasonably be depicted as representing a baseline model against which all comers must be measured. For instance, one cannot simply assume that alternative lines of argument are properly depicted as merely "adding possible new variables" to an extant framework. Such a picture makes no allowance for reinterpretation of concepts given new arguments, or for transformation of original arguments given new ones, or for some other form of integration. Limiting the discussion of relations between lines of argument to a few comments about relative "explained variance" is a superficial and misleading appropriation of statistical imagery. 111
In a world full of anomalies, realism is neither sufficiently established nor sufficiently precise to be treated as a sacrosanct "paradigm" to which other lines of argumentation must defer. Similarly, power-and-interest-based arguments should not be rendered as foundational, with other arguments relegated merely to providing ancillary modules. Such imagery is unwarranted. The end of the Cold War has reminded us once more how naked the emperor of international relations theory is. 112 It will take more than a couple of tailors to provide the necessary clothes.
Extension and Conclusion
So far this essay has treated realism and liberalism as broad orienting frameworks for the analysis of international relations; it has offered sociological institutionalism as an additional frame that also generates specific arguments about national security issues. But we can also consider theories of national security as part of the explananda of an institutionalist perspective.
In making this move, we treat different lines of academic theorizing as highly articulated versions of world cultural models. 113 Consider realism. Because states remain the predominant legitimated "actors" in the current world system, theories of national-security-in-international-anarchy remain dominant, building around world-cultural reifications of state sovereignty and actorhood. Realism thus frames the political discourse about national security. As more overt forms of international coordination have developed and become more prominent, an intellectual space has opened for the network, functional, and bargaining theories characteristic of neoliberalism.
As the world system changes, so does the way in which the domain of security is defined and conceptualized. For instance, as some types of state interaction have been reorganized into "regimes," the domain of security has been redefined in a correspondingly narrower fashion. International trade provides one example. As the multilateral coordination of trade conflicts has spread, trade has moved off the core agenda of national security scholars. Similarly, education systems were once core security concerns, because of their connection to military mobilization. Over time, the theories and practices of mass education have been reoriented around economic development and domestic social concerns. Discussion of education on the world scene is now about human capital, not military strength. This second example shows the movement of national security issues into taken-for-granted conventions and beliefs--that is, into culture, rather than into regimes. Eugenics and population control provide a third example. Previously conceived as national security concerns, these issues were redefined over time as environmental and public health matters.
In these particular instances, the conceptualization of security has become more narrowly defined, after what had once been core national security issues were reorganized into regimes or into the taken-for-granted culture of the world system (e.g., into scientific discourse). Issues previously classified as national security have been reclassified as economics (as with trade) or as culture (as with education), or sometimes as simply disorder (as perhaps with terrorism, genocide, or international crime). Left behind is a more concentrated conceptualization of national security, one defined along realist lines. That is, if changing state practices transform national security issues into international regimes or world conventions or doctrines, then they are no longer coded as security matters. In this way realism continues to define the domain of national security--if in a rather tautological fashion.
Issues can also move in the other direction, from culture or regimes into security. A number of regimes are quite unstable, and the bargaining that they organize can readily spill back into more "anarchic" types of interstate relations, thus expanding the domain of national security. A number of weak regimes, like that concerning the non-use of nuclear weapons, operate in this way. Environmental issues present a parallel example. Some could easily shift from world scientific culture or transnational regimes into the domain of interstate conflict or bargaining. Consider also the renewed contestation of issues surrounding population migration and the associated problems of immigration policy. These issues have reemerged as deeply politicized from relatively taken-for-granted conventions of nationalism and citizenship. While such issues are not yet loci of substantial interstate tension, they have attracted the attention of some security scholars and could induce expansion in the conceptualization of security affairs.
The domain of national security theorizing thus evolves as issues flow between the interactions of states in "anarchic" settings, political bargaining in regimes, and conventions or doctrines relatively taken for granted in world culture. Over time, the domain of pure "anarchic" security politics, the realists' home domain, has probably narrowed somewhat, with the partial and fitful expansion of multilateral regimes and world society. Simultaneously, this security domain has intensified, with instances of "anarchic" conflict receiving intense scrutiny and problematization by their main world-cultural theorists, namely realists.
The security domain has been partly transformed in two other ways, changes that are now affecting security discourse. First, the state actors considered by security scholars have themselves been transformed by the reorganization of issues in the world system. Where military functions have attained more multilateral organization, most notably in Western Europe, state identity has been substantially pacified or tamed. Similarly, if less powerfully, as states are drawn more deeply into the world economy (with its attendant regimes, institutions, and associated doctrines of non-zero sum national development), state actorhood is partly reconstructed around less militarist lines. There is substantial regional variation in this process. It is a striking phenomenon in much of Latin America; in contrast, East Asia shows a picture of a more classic realist politics (and doctrines of common and benign economic development are, corre spondingly, more weakly represented there). But it nevertheless remains notable that contemporary security discourse, even in Asia, no longer renders states inevitably as war machines locked into natural or routine Darwinian competition. "Lebensraum" is no longer assumed to be a desideratum of state identity.
Second, independent of the modal identity of states, it is clear that the security domain has become less exclusively an interstate realm: states' hegemony over security has partly eroded. States have undercut their own security by allowing (or promoting) a vast unregulated market in arms sales, feeding myriad civil wars and newly armed security-relevant "actors." Various mafias, narcotics cartels, crime syndicates, terrorist groups, and ethno-religious camps have proliferated and have attained regional and even global reach.
Thus while the interstate system, narrowly considered, is in some respects more pacified and ordered--some realists now consider it a "mature" anarchy 114 --the broader global system is not. Various dissipative forces could undermine or overwhelm existing forms of coordination or elements of world institutional and cultural structure. World crises could even give a new lease on life to traditional militarism in previously pacified states or regions. But that would not occur automatically or overnight. It would require highly visible and contested reconfigurations of state identities (even in countries like Japan or Germany, which have a substantial military apparatus). Conversely, it is notable that there has been a heightened reification of a world responsibility to respond to or manage collective threats. States more routinely organize interventions via multilateral regimes and justify such action in the name of a putatively existing or emerging world order, as Finnemore argues in her essay.
If one employs the above sociology of knowledge, it comes as no surprise that the analytical domain of "national security" has become less clearly defined and less canonically theorized. First, the realists' "anarchy" is now sufficiently embedded and penetrated that some core generalizations of realism--for example, the relationship between polarity and war--attenuate or break down. Second, the heightened reification of the "world" as an economy or society or physical environment expands the list of threats to security. Policy makers and scholars correspondingly call for a broadened conceptualization of the security field, or alternatively they demarcate entirely new fields outside traditional notions of national security (dealing, for example, with terrorism, genocide, or organized transnational crime).
The arguments of this book variously compete with, complement, and begin to contextualize those of realism and liberalism. We have represented realism's nation-state actor as a construction and reconstruction of evolving world and domestic social environments. And we see liberalism's functionalism as made possible in part by a broader evolving world society and culture. A developed institutionalist picture of the world system would describe the scope conditions under which realism and liberalism coexist. And it would also consider how realist and liberal theorizing is itself implicated in constructing and reconstructing the domain of international and national security.
For their careful readings and critical comments of previous drafts we would like to thank the members of the project; the participants at the Social Science Research Council/MacArthur Workshops at the University of Minnesota and Stanford University in 1994; and Emanuel Adler, Pierre van den Berghe, Thomas Christensen, Alexander George, Lynn Eden, James Goldgeier, Peter Gourevitch, Ernst Haas, Peter Haas, Robert Hariman, Stanley Hoffmann, Christine Ingebritsen, Robert Keohane, Jonathan Kirshner, Atul Kohli, Friedrich Kratochwil, Charles Kupchan, David Laitin, Lisa Martin, John Meyer, Henry Nau, Judith Reppy, David Rowe, Heiner Schulz, David Skidmore, Richard Smoke, Jack Snyder, Dan Thomas, Janice Thomson, Stephen Walt, and two anonymous reviewers for Columbia University Press.
Note 1: Frederick Frey, "The Problem of Actor Designation in Political Analysis," Comparative Politics 17, no. 2 (January 1985): 127-52. Back.
Note 2: Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 74-77. Back.
Note 3: Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 362-64. Back.
Note 4: Stephen D. Krasner, "Sovereignty: An Institutional Perspective," Comparative Political Studies 21 (1988): 72. Back.
Note 5: Robert O. Keohane, "International Liberalism Reconsidered," in John Dunn, ed., The Economic Limits to Modern Politics, p. 183 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Back.
Note 6: We are thus following the general line of argument suggested by John Ruggie's and Friedrich Kratochwil's writings during the last decade. See John Gerard Ruggie, "International Responses to Technology: Concepts and Trends," in "International Responses to Technology," special issue of International Organization 29, no. 3 (Summer 1975): 557-84; John G. Ruggie, "International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order," in Krasner, International Regimes, pp. 195-231; John G. Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis," World Politics 35, no. 2 (January 1983): 261-85; John G. Ruggie, "Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution," in John G. Ruggie, ed., Multilateralism Matters: The Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 3-47; John G. Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations," International Organization 47, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 139-74; Friedrich V. Kratochwil, "The Protagorean Quest: Community, Justice, and the 'Oughts' and 'Musts' of International Politics," International Journal 43 (Spring 1988): 205-40; Friedrich V. Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Friedrich V. Kratochwil, "The Embarrassment of Changes: Neo-Realism as the Science of Realpolitik Without Politics," Review of International Studies 19 (1993): 63-80; Friedrich V. Kratochwil, "Norms Versus Numbers: Multilateralism and the Rationalist and Reflexivist Approaches to Institutions--A Unilateral Plea for Communicative Rationality," in Ruggie, Multilateralism Matters, pp. 443-74; Friedrich V. Kratochwil, "Is the Ship of Culture at Sea or Returning?" in Yosef Lapid and Friedrich V. Kratochwil, eds., The Return of Culture and Identity in International Relations Analysis (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, in press). Back.
Note 7: Robert Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Back.
Note 8: David Strang, "Anomaly and Commonplace in European Political Expansion: Realist and Institutional Accounts," International Organization 45, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 143-62. Back.
Note 9: Robert H. Jackson, "The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization: Normative Change in International Relations," in Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, pp. 111-38 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 10: On changing attitudes toward war, see John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989); and James Lee Ray, "The Abolition of Slavery and the End of International War," International Organization 43, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 405-40. A distinguished military historian, John Keegan, concurs with the view that wars are not "natural" but "cultural." They are institutions of society that evolve. Keegan is "impressed by the evidence that mankind, wherever it has the option, is distancing itself from the institution of warfare. . . . War, it seems to me, after a lifetime of reading about the subject, mingling with men of war, visiting the sites of war and observing its effects, may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a desirable or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their discontents" (John Keegan, A History of Warfare [New York: Knopf, 1993], p. 59). See also John Mueller, Quiet Cataclysm: Reflections on the Recent Transformation of World Politics (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), pp. 111-23. Back.
Note 11: David Cameron, "British Exit, German Voice, French Loyalty: Defection, Domination, and Cooperation in the 1992-93 erm Crisis" (paper prepared for delivery at the 1993 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., September 1993). Back.
Note 12: The map is Wendt's idea; the conceptualization of this version, however, was developed jointly with Jepperson, who has produced a related but different map of social theories; see Ronald L. Jepperson, "Institutions, Institutional Effects, and Institutionalism," in Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, pp. 143-63 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). For further discussion of Wendt's own version, see Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press). Essays 1 and 13 in this volume provide some additional discussion of realist and liberal thought. In the interest of brevity we treat them here in a reified manner. Back.
Note 13: Throughout, we mean nothing special by actors. Typically, we are referring to governments or government elites. We treat states and governments largely as synonyms--sloppy practice for comparative politics, we realize, but this treatment is conventional in international relations. These shorthand references are not intended to anthropomorphize or reify actors. Back.
Note 14: It is important to note that while this more elaborated picture of structure is often associated with sociological analysis, it can be quite compatible with some versions of realism and rationalism. Paul Schroeder's critique of neorealism, for example, makes a move in this direction. See Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Paul W. Schroeder, "Neo-Realist Theory and International History: A Historian's View," Security Studies (in press); Jack S. Levy, "The Theoretical Foundation of Paul W. Schroeder's International System," The International History Review 16, no. 4 (November 1994): 715-44. The same is true of game theoretic analyses that represent institutions as shared expectations or "common knowledge" that generates "focal points" in situations of strategic interaction; see David Kreps, "Corporate Culture and Economic Theory," in James Alt and Kenneth Shepsle, eds., Perspectives on Positive Political Economy, pp. 90-143 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, "Ideas and Foreign Policy: An Analytical Framework," in Goldstein and Keohane, Ideas and Foreign Policy, p. 17; Arthur T. Denzau and Douglass C. North, "Shared Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions," Kyklos 47, no. 1 (1994): 3-31; and John Kurt Jacobson, "Much Ado About Ideas: The Cognitive Factor in Economic Policy," World Politics 47, no. 2 (January 1995): 283-310. Similarly, Robert Axelrod and Robert O. Keohane note that the interstate "anarchy" they address is contained within an "international society"; see their essay "Achieving Cooperation Under Anarchy: Strategies and Institutions," in Kenneth A. Oye, ed., Cooperation Under Anarchy, p. 226 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). But this literature typically does not theorize this "society," suggesting at times that one does not need such theorization or that it is too difficult or unpromising to do so. Back.
Note 15: Daniel Deudney, "Dividing Realism: Structural Realism Versus Security Materialism on Nuclear Security and Proliferation," Security Studies 2, nos. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 1993): 7-37. Back.
Note 16: Put differently, realism does not equal materialism. Back.
Note 17: Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22-49. Back.
Note 18: Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics," International Organization 46, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 391-425. Back.
Note 19: Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Alexander Wendt, "The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory," International Organization 41, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 335-70. Back.
Note 20: The difference between these first two effects is partly captured by Robert Powell's useful distinction between "preferences over action" and "preferences over outcomes," though the actor properties in which we are interested go beyond preferences over outcomes to include identities and capabilities. See Robert Powell, "Anarchy in International Relations Theory: The Neorealist-Neoliberal Debate," International Organization 48, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 313-44. Back.
Note 21: George Stigler and Gary Becker, "De Gustibus non est Disputandum," American Economic Review 67, no. 2 (March 1977): 76-90. Back.
Note 22: Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 74-77. Back.
Note 23: We make no claim that figure 2.1 captures all significant differences among these traditions. And we are reasoning by illustration rather than canvassing the literature systematically. Back.
Note 24: Deudney, "Dividing Realism." Back.
Note 25: Waltz, Theory of . Back.
Note 26: Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It." Back.
Note 27: In his Theory of International Politics, pp. 74-77, Waltz does allow for "socialization" and "imitation" processes, but in so doing he envisions these primarily in terms of effects on behavior, thereby assuming that the processes determining the fundamental makeup or identity of states are exogenous to states' environments. Back.
Note 28: Michael Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (December 1986): 1151-69. Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 29: Krasner, International Regimes; Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Oye, Cooperation Under Anarchy. We are neglecting here very substantial differences between international and domestic versions of the liberal argument. For an important statement of some of these differences, see Andrew Moravcsik, "Liberalism and International Relations Theory" (unpublished paper, Harvard University, 1993). Back.
Note 30: Uday A. Mehta examines liberalism from this perspective in "Liberal Strategies of Exclusion," Politics and Society 18, no. 4 (1990): 427-54. This tendency is exemplified in Robert O. Keohane, Joseph S. Nye, and Stanley Hoffmann, eds., After the Cold War: International Institutions and State Strategies in Europe, 1989-1991 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 31: Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 90-143; Joseph S. Nye Jr., "Neorealism and Neoliberalism," World Politics 40, no. 2 (January 1988): 235-51; David Baldwin, ed., Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Robert Powell, "Anarchy in International Relations Theory"; Emerson M. S. Niou and Peter C. Ordeshook, " 'Less Filling, Tastes Great': The Realist-Neoliberal Debate," World Politics 46, no. 2 (January 1994): 209-34. Back.
Note 32: Karl W. Deutsch et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in the Light of Historical Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Ernst B. Haas, Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International Organization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964); Karl W. Deutsch et al., France, Germany, and the Western Alliance: A Study of Elite Attitudes on European Integration and World Politics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967). Back.
Note 33: It is not entirely clear how to label these theories, given the confluence of different theoretical traditions that they represent. In "International Institutions: Two Approaches," International Studies Quarterly 32, no. 4 (December 1988): 379-96, Robert Keohane called some of them "reflectivist," but we find this appellation to be far too subjectivist in connotation, as well as analytically vague. The perspective represented in this volume is thoroughly structuralist rather than subjectivist. From our perspective it makes more sense to refer to research of this type as institutionalist or constructivist (or both). See, for example, Jepperson, "Institutions, Institutional Effects, and Institutionalism," and Wendt, Social Theory of . Back.
Note 34: Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). Back.
Note 35: Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds., The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Tony Evans and Peter Wilson, "Regime Theory and the English School of International Relations: A Comparison," Millennium: Journal of International Studies 21, no. 3 (1992): 329-51; Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (London: Routledge, 1992); Barry Buzan, "From International System to International Society: Structural Realism and Regime Theory Meet the English School," International Organization 47, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 327-52; Ole Waever, "International Society: Theoretical Promises Unfulfilled?" Cooperation and Conflict 27, no. 1 (1992): 97-128. Back.
Note 36: For representative works, see Ruggie, "Multilateralism" and "Territoriality and Beyond." See also David Dessler, "What's at Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?" International Organization 43, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 441-74; Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions; Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989); Emanuel Adler, "Cognitive Evolution: A Dynamic Approach for the Study of International Relations and Their Progress," in Emanuel Adler and Beverly Crawford, eds., Progress in Postwar International Relations, pp. 43-88 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Emanuel Adler, "The Emergence of Cooperation: National Epistemic Communities and the International Evolution of the Idea of Nuclear Arms Control," International Organization 46, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 101-46; Peter Haas, ed., "Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination," special issue of International Organization 46, no. 1 (Winter 1992); and Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It." Note that sovereignty is not the only form of identity in which constructivists are interested. Back.
Note 37: Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity." Back.
Note 38: Strang, "Anomaly and Commonplace in European Political Expansion." Back.
Note 39: Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, "Why Africa's Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood," World Politics 35, no. 1 (October 1982): 1-24; Jackson, "The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization." Back.
Note 40: Strang, "Anomaly and Commonplace in European Political Expansion." Back.
Note 41: Richard K. Ashley, "The Poverty of Neorealism," International Organization 38, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 225-86; Richard K. Ashley, "The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space," Alternatives 12, no. 4 (1987): 403-34. Back.
Note 42: David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Back.
Note 43: J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 30. Back.
Note 44: Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland, eds., Gender and International Relations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Spike Peterson, ed., Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Vision of International Relations Theory (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992). Back.
Note 45: John W. Meyer, "The World Polity and the Authority of the Nation-State," in Albert Bergesen, ed., Studies of the Modern World System, pp. 109-37 (New York: Academic Press, 1980); George W. Thomas, John W. Meyer, Francisco O. Ramirez, and John Boli, Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society, and the Individual (London: Sage, 1987); John W. Meyer, "Rationalized Environments," in W. Richard Scott and John W. Meyer, eds., Institutional Environments and Organizations, pp. 28-54 (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1994); and John W. Meyer, "The Changing Cultural Content of the Nation-State: A World Society Perspective," in George Steinmetz, ed., New Approaches to the State in the Social Sciences (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). We should note that work in the tradition of Gramsci, such as Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), and Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), also seeks to combine the analysis of structure, power, and ideas. Back.
Note 46: Buzan, "From International System to International Society." Back.
Note 47: Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, eds., Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972); Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977); Thomas Risse-Kappen, ed., Bringing Transnationalism Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures, and International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Back.
Note 48: See Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991) on democracy; Thomas J. Biersteker, "The Triumph of Neoclassical Economics in the Developing World," in James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, eds., Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, pp. 102-31 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) on market models; Francisco O. Ramirez and John W. Meyer, "The Institutionalization of Citizenship Principles and the National Incorporation of Women and Children, 1870-1990" (unpublished research proposal, Department of Sociology, Stanford University, 1992); John Boli, "Sovereignty from a World Polity Perspective" (unpublished paper, Department of Sociology, Emory University, Atlanta, 1993). Back.
Note 49: Consult the citations to studies in Meyer, "The Changing Cultural Content of the Nation-State." For a paper reviewing this research, see Martha Finnemore, "Norms, Culture, and World Politics: Insights from Sociology's Institutionalism," International Organization (in press). Back.
Note 50: Haas, "Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination." Back.
Note 51: For an interesting argument that analyzes U.S. hegemony as a form of international governance from a moral perspective, see Lea Brilmayer, American Hegemony: Political Morality in a One-Superpower World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Back.
Note 52: Meyer, "The World Polity and the Authority of the Nation-State," and "The Changing Cultural Content of the Nation-State." Back.
Note 53: Roland Robertson, "Globalization Theory and Civilization Analysis," Comparative Civilizations Review 17 (1987): 22. Back.
Note 54: Ronald Dore, "Unity and Diversity in Contemporary World Culture," in Bull and Watson, The Expansion of International Society, pp. 407-24. Back.
Note 55: J. P. Nettl and Roland Robertson, International Systems and the Modernization of Societies: The Formation of National Goals and Attitudes (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 153; Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992). Back.
Note 56: We are reviewing them here more briefly simply for reasons of economy. Back.
Note 57: Alexander George, "The 'Operational Code': A Neglected Approach to the Study of Political Leaders and Decision-Making," International Studies Quarterly 13 (June 1969): 190-222; Alexander L. George, "Ideology and International Relations: A Conceptual Analysis," The Jerusalem Journal of International Relations 9, no. 1 (1987): 1-21; Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Richard Herrmann, Perceptions and Behavior in Soviet Foreign Policy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985). Back.
Note 58: For a recent overview of the literature on organizational culture, see Frank R. Dobbin, "Cultural Models of Organization: The Social Construction of Rational Organizing Principles," in Diana Crane, ed., Sociology of Culture: Emerging Theoretical Perspectives, pp. 117-41 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Alastair Iain Johnston's Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Ming China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) reviews the literature on strategic culture. See also his article "Thinking About Strategic Culture," International Security 19, no. 4 (Spring 1995): 32-64. Back.
Note 59: Peter Hall, The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Haas, "Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination"; Judith Goldstein, Ideas, Interests, and American Trade Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Charles A. Kupchan, The Vulnerability of Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). Back.
Note 60: Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989); Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth, Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Back.
Note 61: Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Back.
Note 62: Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., Between Power and Plenty: Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). Analogously, industrial sociology and social economics focus on the social context that envelops markets. "Industrial orders," writes Gary Herrigel, "have a relationship to agents within them that is analogous in some generic respects to the relation between a modern liberal constitution and its citizens" (Gary Herrigel, "Industry as a Form of Order: A Comparison of the Historical Development of the Machine Tool Industries in the United States and Germany," in J. Rogers Hollingsworth, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Wolfgang Streeck, eds., Governing Capitalist Economies: Performance and Control of Economic Sectors, p. 99 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994]); Gary Herrigel, "Identities and Institutions: The Social Construction of Trade Unions in Nineteenth-Century Germany and the United States," Studies in American Political Development 7 (Fall 1993): 371-94; Frank Dobbin, Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Back.
Note 63: Peter J. Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Back.
Note 64: David Halloran Lumsdaine, Moral Vision in International Politics: The Foreign Aid Regime, 1949-1989 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 65: Relatedly, a substantial number of empirical studies suggest that democracies do not fight wars with one another. See Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics"; Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace; Randall Schweller, "Domestic Structure and Preventive War: Are Democracies More Pacific?" World Politics 44, no. 2 (January 1992): 235-69; and several articles and subsequent correspondence in International Security 19, no. 2 (Fall 1994), and 19, no. 4 (Spring 1995). Back.
Note 66: Figure 2.2 labels broad categories of causal construction effects. It is thus not a total causal model of state security activity. Specifically, since some actor properties are intrinsic, "identity" is not the only cause of "interest." Figure 2.2 is not in itself a "theory." Back.
Note 67: We occasionally add arguments and examples drawn from other sources. Back.
Note 68: Francesca Cancian, What Are Norms? A Study of Beliefs and Action in a Maya Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 137-38. Janice E. Thomson, "Norms in International Relations: A Conceptual Analysis," International Journal of Group Tension 23, no. 2 (1993): 67-83. Back.
Note 69: Norms may be "shared," or commonly held, across some distribution of actors in a system. Alternatively, however, norms may not be widely held by actors but may nevertheless be collective features of a system--either by being institutionalized (in procedures, formal rules, or law) or by being prominent in public discourse of a system. It is thus useful, following Emile Durkheim's fundamental discussion of types of social facts, to sustain a distinction between common (or shared or widely held) norms and collective ones, allowing for the possibility that some norms may be both common and collective. The now typical identification of norms as necessarily a "shared" social property is thus inappropriate. It builds subjectivist and aggregative imagery into the very conceptualization of norms. Instead, a distinction between collectively "prominent" or institutionalized norms and commonly "internalized" ones, with various "intersubjective" admixtures in between, is crucial for distinguishing between different types of norms and different types of normative effects. For a more extended discussion, see Ronald L. Jepperson and Ann Swidler, "What Properties of Culture Should We Measure?" Poetics 22 (1994): 359-71; Charles Taylor, "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man," The Review of Metaphysics 25 (1971): 3-51; and Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, ch. 6. Back.
Note 70: See also Gerritt W. Gong, The Standard of "Civilisation" in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1984). Back.
Note 71: Harald MŸller, "The Internalization of Principles, Norms, and Rules by Governments: The Case of Security Regimes," in Volker Rittberger, ed., Regime Theory and International Relations, p. 384 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1993). Back.
Note 72: Taking 1988 as a baseline figure, by 1994 the number of Security Council resolutions adopted had increased from fifteen to seventy-eight; the number of disputes in which the un was directly involved through preventive diplomacy or peacekeeping operations increased by a factor of three, as did the number of countries contributing military or police personnel. The un budget for peacekeeping operations increased fifteen-fold, to $3.6 billion. The un undertook election monitoring in twenty-one countries in 1994, as compared to none in 1988. And the number of sanctions imposed by the Security Council increased from one to seven. See Barbara Crossette, "U.N. Chief Chides Security Council on Military Missions," New York Times, January 6, 1995. Yet this expansion in un activities has generated political contradictions and conflicts of its own, as is illustrated, for example, in the growing strength of the voices, especially in the U.S. Congress, favoring a unilateral approach in the United States. See John G. Ruggie, "Peacekeeping and U.S. Interests," The Washington Quarterly 17, no. 4 (1994): 175-84. Back.
Note 73: For further discussion of conceptual issues, see Jepperson and Swidler, "What Properties of Culture Should We Measure?" Back.
Note 74: Two related research projects point in directions similar to that of Kier. See Jeffrey W. Legro, "Military Culture and Inadvertent Escalation in World War II," International Security 18, no. 4 (Spring 1994): 108-42; Jeffrey W. Legro, Cooperation Under Fire: Anglo-German Restraint During World War II (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Deborah D. Avant, "The Institutional Sources of Military Doctrine: Hegemons in Peripheral Wars," International Studies Quarterly 37, no. 4 (December 1993): 409-30. Avant's analysis of military doctrine relies on an institutional model that focuses on civil-military relations in Britain and the United States. Back.
Note 75: John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975). Back.
Note 76: Their essay suggests that prohibitionary norms can be institutionalized either early or late; they can arise spontaneously in a diffuse manner in a national setting, or they can be created intentionally at the international level to become subsequently internalized in various states. Finally, norms can arise from dramatically different political sources: power politics in the case of nuclear weapons and moral opprobrium in the case of chemical weapons, also one of Robert W. McElroy's conclusions in Morality and American Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). One preliminary finding that the analysis of Price and Tannenwald suggests is that historical contingency in the emergence of norms deserves close attention and may be more important as a starting point of social processes than rationalist perspectives tend to assume. Back.
Note 77: Legro, "Military Culture and Inadvertent Escalation in World War II"; Legro, . Back.
Note 78: Meyer, "The Changing Cultural Content of the Nation-State," p. 2. Back.
Note 79: Connie McNeely, "Cultural Isomorphism Among Nation-States" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1989). Back.
Note 80: David Strang and Patricia Mei Yin Chang, "The International Labor Organization and the Welfare State: Institutional Effects on National Welfare Spending, 1960-80," International Organization 47, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 235-62. Back.
Note 81: Larry Diamond, Juan Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset, Democracy in Developing Countries (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988). Back.
Note 82: Zimbabwe's support for sanctions against South Africa illustrated the significance of this symbol, that country's high vulnerability to and dependence upon its neighbor state notwithstanding. Zimbabwe's identity interests--the import of enshrining racial equality for the identity of the new regime--trumped more narrowly defined security interests. See Audie Klotz, Protesting Prejudice: Apartheid and the Politics of Norms in International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Back.
Note 83: Jackson, "The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization." Back.
Note 84: Ruggie, "Multilateralism," pp. 8-9. Back.
Note 85: More precisely, identities come in two basic forms--those that are intrinsic to an actor (at least relative to a given social structure) and those that are relationally defined within a social structure. Being democratic, for example, is an intrinsic feature of the U.S. state relative to the structure of the international system. Being sovereign is a relational identity that exists only by virtue of intersubjective relationships at the systemic level. Put in the language of game theory, intrinsic identities are constituted exogeneously to a game (though they might be reproduced or transformed through play of the game), whereas relational identities ("roles") are constituted by the game itself. In the latter case, part of what is "going on" in a game is the reproduction and/or transformation of identities. Back.
Note 86: Jackson and Rosberg, "Why Africa's Weak States Persist." Why does one identity prevail over another one? To put a very complicated matter much too briefly, identities will be affected by the social density of transactions and communications, as well as by the power-dependency relations between actors. The greater the social density and actor dependency, the more the actors' identity will be wrapped up in and affected by that relationship. Small states, for example, are more affected in their identity by their relationship with regional hegemons than with global superpowers. Since social densities are typically much greater in domestic than in international politics, domestic identities normally carry more weight than international ones. If we view this question as a social process, we should look for reciprocity, or "reflected appraisals," in identity formation. In such dynamics actors learn to see themselves in the roles that other actors, especially powerful ones, attribute to them. For example, if states treat ("appraise") each other in threatening ways, they will come to internalize ("reflect") identities as "enemies." If more powerful states treat less powerful ones as "clients," weaker states will internalize that identity. Back.
Note 87: Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Back.
Note 88: Peter J. Katzenstein, "Taming of Power: German Unification, 1989-1990," in Meredith Woo-Cumings and Michael Lorriaux, eds., Past as Prelude: History in the Making of a New World Order, pp. 59-82 (Boulder: Westview, 1993). Back.
Note 89: See also Ian S. Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 90: Deutsch et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area. Back.
Note 91: The United States and the European members of nato have been very careful not to risk the survival of nato despite their deep differences over the war in Yugoslavia. Although Risse-Kappen stresses the primacy of domestic politics, his analysis is compatible with recent analyses of the institution of multilateralism; see Ruggie, "Multilateralism," and Alexander Wendt, "Collective Identity Formation and the International State," American Political Science Review 88, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 384-96. Back.
Note 92: Kathryn Sikkink, "The Power of Principled Ideas: Human Rights Policies in the United States and Western Europe," in Goldstein and Keohane, Ideas and Foreign Policy, pp. 139-70. Back.
Note 93: Stephen M. Walt, The Origin of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Stephen M. Walt, "Testing Theories of Alliance Formation: The Case of Southwest Asia," International Organization 42, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 275-316. Back.
Note 94: Giddens, The Constitution of Society.
Note 95: Adler, "The Emergence of Cooperation." Back.
Note 96: John Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War," International Security 15, no. 1 (1990): 5-56. Back.
Note 97: Katzenstein, "Taming of Power." Back.
Note 98: It is likely that greater attention to language will be important in specifying these effects. Language is neither an asset employed by given subjects nor an external constraint that is imposed on a subject. Rather it exemplifies the general social practices that form both social subjects and the objects to which they speak. There exists disparate work that engages this problem both inside and outside the field of ethnomethodology. See, for example, Francis A. Beer and Robert Hariman, "Realism and Rhetoric in International Relations," in Francis A. Beer and Robert Hariman, eds., Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, in press); Albert Yee, "The Causal Effects of Ideas Themselves and Policy Preferences: Behavioral, Institutional, and Discursive Formulations" (unpublished paper, Brown University, 1993); Hayward R. Alker, Jr., "Fairy Tales, Tragedies, and World Histories: Towards Interpretive Story Grammars as Possibilist World Models," Behaviormetrika 21 (1987): 1-28; and Deirdre Boden and Don H. Zimmermann, eds., Talk and Social Structure: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Back.
Note 99: We neglect here to develop possible differences between constitutive and causal processes as conventionally understood. Most of the essays in this volume do not depend upon such further differentiation. See Wendt, Social Theory, for a discussion of this distinction and its implication. Back.
Note 100: Randall Collins, "The Future Decline of the Russian Empire," in Weberian Sociological Theory, pp. 186-212 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Randall Collins, "Prediction in Macrosociology: The Case of the Soviet Collapse," American Journal of Sociology 100, no. 6 (May 1995): 1552-93. Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Back.
Note 101: For a significant exception, see Valerie Bunce, "The Empire Strikes Back: The Transformation of the Eastern Bloc from a Soviet Asset to a Soviet Liability," International Organization 39, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 1-46. Back.
Note 102: Friedrich V. Kratochwil and John G. Ruggie, "International Organization: A State of the Art on an Art of the State," International Organization 40, no. 4 (Autumn 1986): 753-76. Back.
Note 103: Ruggie, "Multilateralism" and "Territoriality and Beyond." Back.
Note 104: Ray Koslowski and Friedrich V. Kratochwil, "Understanding Change in International Politics: The Soviet Empire's Demise and the International System," International Organization 48, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 215-48. Back.
Note 105: A recent book on methodology, for example, argues that "science . . . and interpretation are not fundamentally different endeavors aimed at divergent goals;" see Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 37; also pp. 34, 36, 84 n. 8. Back.
Note 106: In the language of Robert Powell ("Anarchy in International Relations Theory"), this volume's analytical perspective complements neorealism's and neoliberalism's lack of a theory of "preferences over outcomes." Because problems of indeterminacy and incompleteness limit the claims that neorealism and neoliberalism can make concerning "preferences over actions," this volume's analytical perspective, at least potentially, might help us formulate stronger claims. We are indebted to Heiner Schulz for helping us sharpen our thinking on this point. Back.
Note 107: William C. Wohlforth, "Realism and the End of the Cold War," International Security 19, no. 3 (Winter 1994/95): 91-129. Back.
Note 108: Arthur Stinchcombe, "Review of Max Weber's Economy and Society," in Arthur Stinchcombe, Stratification and Organization: Selected Papers, pp. 282-89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Back.
Note 109: Bernard P. Cohen, Developing Sociological Knowledge, 2d ed. (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1989). Back.
Note 110: Michael R. Smith, Power, Norms, and Inflation: A Skeptical Treatment (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1992), pp. 253-59. Back.
Note 111: One cannot assume that alternative arguments are limited in effect to mopping up "unexplained variance" left behind by an extant argument. Such a suggestion is not only blatantly tendentious, it also prescribes a logical fallacy, best illustrated by referring to multiple regression analysis once more. As is well known, one cannot take the residuals from one regression model and then assess the import of a second set of explanatory variables by regressing these residuals on the new variables. In regression, one must allow for the possible intercorrelation of independent variables. Neglecting to do so will result in a form of specification error. The extension of this analogy to issues of explanation in general is direct. Back.
Note 112: Baldwin, Neorealism and Neoliberalism. Back.
Note 113: We attempt to develop an argument suggested by John Meyer. Back.
Note 114: Barry Buzan, People, States, and Fear, 2d ed. (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1991), pp. 175-81. Back.