European Identity Checkel, Jeffrey T; Katzenstein, Peter J
02/2009
eBook
Why are hopes fading for a single European identity? Economic integration has advanced faster and further than predicted, yet the European sense of 'who we are' is fragmenting. Exploiting decades of ...permissive consensus, Europe's elites designed and completed the single market, the euro, the Schengen passport-free zone, and, most recently, crafted an extraordinarily successful policy of enlargement. At the same time, these attempts to de-politicize politics, to create Europe by stealth, have produced a political backlash. This ambitious survey of identity in Europe captures the experiences of the winners and losers, optimists and pessimists, movers and stayers in a Europe where spatial and cultural borders are becoming ever more permeable. A full understanding of Europe's ambivalence, refracted through its multiple identities, lies at the intersection of competing European political projects and social processes.
Socialization and violence Checkel, Jeffrey T
Journal of peace research,
09/2017, Volume:
54, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article sets the stage for a special issue exploring group-level dynamics and their role in producing violence. My analytic focus is socialization, or the process through which actors adopt the ...norms and rules of a given community. I argue that it is key to understanding violence in many settings, including civil war, national militaries, post-conflict societies and urban gangs. While socialization theory has a long history in the social sciences, I do not simply pull it off the shelf, but instead rethink core features of it. Operating in a theory-building mode and drawing upon insights from other disciplines, I highlight its layered and multiple nature, the role of instrumental calculation in it and several relevant mechanisms – from persuasion, to organized rituals, to sexual violence, to violent display. Equally important, I theorize instances where socialization is resisted, as well as the (varying) staying power of norms and practices in an individual who leaves the group. Empirically, the special issue explores the link between socialization and violence in paramilitary patrols in Guatemala; vigilantes in the Bosnian civil war; gangs in post-conflict Nicaragua; rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo, El Salvador, Sierra Leone and Uganda; post-conflict peacekeepers; and the US and Israeli military. By documenting this link, we contribute to an emerging research program on group dynamics and conflict.
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International institutions are a ubiquitous feature of daily life in
many world regions, and nowhere more so than contemporary Europe. While
virtually all would agree that such institutions matter, ...there is less
agreement on exactly how they have effects. This special issue brings
together European Union specialists and international relations theorists
who address the latter issue. In particular, we explore the socializing
role of institutions in Europe, with our central concern being to better
specify the mechanisms of socialization and the conditions under which
they are expected to lead to the internalization of new roles or
interests. Drawing on a multifaceted understanding of human rationality,
we consider three generic social mechanisms—strategic calculation,
role playing, and normative suasion—and their ability to promote
socialization outcomes within international institutions. This
disaggregation exercise not only helps consolidate nascent socialization
research programs in international relations theory and EU studies; it
also highlights points of contact and potential synergies between
rationalism and social constructivism.For
comments on earlier versions, I am grateful to two anonymous referees,
IO editors Lisa Martin and Thomas Risse, as well as to John
Duffield, Alexandra Gheciu, Liesbet Hooghe, Peter Katzenstein, Ron
Mitchell, Frank Schimmelfennig, Martha Snodgrass, and Michael Zürn.
More generally, thanks are owed to all the project participants for
numerous and valuable discussions on the themes addressed in this
volume.
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Civil wars are the dominant form of violence in the contemporary international system, yet they are anything but local affairs. This book explores the border-crossing features of such wars by ...bringing together insights from international relations theory, sociology, and transnational politics with a rich comparative-quantitative literature. It highlights the causal mechanisms - framing, resource mobilization, socialization, among others - that link the international and transnational to the local, emphasizing the methods required to measure them. Contributors examine specific mechanisms leading to particular outcomes in civil conflicts ranging from Chechnya, to Afghanistan, to Sudan, to Turkey. Transnational Dynamics of Civil War thus provides a significant contribution to debates motivating the broader move to mechanism-based forms of explanation, and will engage students and researchers of international relations, comparative politics, and conflict processes.
Why do agents comply with the norms embedded in regimes and international institutions? Scholars have proposed two competing answers to this compliance puzzle, one rationalist, the other ...constructivist. Rationalists emphasize coercion, cost/benefit calculations, and material incentives; constructivists stress social learning, socialization, and social norms. Both schools, however, explain important aspects of compliance. To build a bridge between them, I examine the role of argumentative persuasion and social learning. This makes explicit the theory of social choice and interaction implicit in many constructivist compliance studies, and it broadens rationalist arguments about the instrumental and noninstrumental processes through which actors comply. I argue that domestic politics—in particular, institutional and historical contexts—delimit the causal role of persuasion/social learning, thus helping both rationalists and constructivists to refine the scope of their compliance claims. To assess the plausibility of these arguments, I examine why states comply with new citizenship/membership norms promoted by European regional organizations.
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Building on the empirical findings of the preceding articles, we
advance three arguments. First, while socialization research has typically
been construed as constructivism's home turf, this volume's
...emphasis on mechanisms and scope conditions reveals that rational choice
has much to contribute here as well. We develop this claim by undertaking
a “double interpretation” of each essay, which allows us to
advance more fine-grained arguments connecting the two social theories.
Second, while there are good conceptual reasons for expecting a
predominance of international socialization in Europe, the empirical cases
instead suggest that its effects are often weak and secondary to dynamics
at the national level. We make sense of this puzzle by reasoning more
explicitly in longitudinal terms, by drawing on work on European identity,
and by noting that students of European socialization—as well as
integration—have much to gain by “bringing the domestic back
in.” Finally, while our collaborators have demonstrated the
empirical and theoretical benefits of combining a social ontology with a
positivist epistemology, this comes at a cost, with normative perspectives
neglected. This matters—and all the more so in a Europe marked by
supranational constitution- and polity building. Socialization dynamics
may well take us beyond the nation-state, but their legitimacy and
governance implications bring us back—forcefully—to it.We are grateful to the project participants and
contributors to this volume for valuable discussions on the themes
addressed here. For detailed comments on earlier versions of this essay,
we thank two anonymous reviewers, the IO editors, Peter
Katzenstein, and Ron Mitchell.
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Since the path-breaking work of Karl Deutsch on security communities and Ernst Haas on European integration, it has been clear that international institutions may create senses of community and ...belonging beyond the nation state. Put differently, they can socialize. Yet the mechanisms underlying such dynamics have been unclear. This volume explores these mechanisms of international community building, from a resolutely eclectic stand point. Rationalism is thus the social theory of choice for some contributors, while others are more comfortable with social constructivism. This problem-driven perspective and the theoretical bridge building it are the cutting edge in international relations theory. By providing more fined-grained arguments on precisely how international institutions matter, such an approach sheds crucial light on the complex relationship between states and institutions, between rational choice and social constructivism, and, in our case, between Europe and the nation state.
The constructivist study of norms faces two central challenges-reintegrating agency into its largely structural accounts and unpacking its arguments at the national level. This article addresses ...these issues, and does so in four parts. First, I briefly review the burgeoning constructivist literature, exploring the ontological and theoretical reasons for its neglect of agency. Second, by adding social content to the concept of diffusion, the transmission mechanism linking international norms to domestic change, I explain the motivation of domestic actors to accept new normative prescriptions, thus making a start at restoring agency to constructivist accounts. Third, I argue these key actors will vary cross-nationally as a function of state-society relations ("domestic structure"). Fourth, the argument is applied to the politics of national identity in post-Cold War Europe. In particular, I examine the degree to which international norms are affecting debates over citizenship and national minorities in contemporary Germany, with empirical data drawn from the European human rights regime centered on the Council of Europe.
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9.
"Going Native" In Europe? Checkel, Jeffrey T.
Comparative political studies,
02/2003, Volume:
36, Issue:
1-2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article advances hypotheses linking specific European institutions to changes in agent preferences, with the objective to explore the pathways and mechanisms through which such shifts occur. ...Drawing on work in social psychology and communications research, the author develops a micro-, process-, and agency-based argument on the nature of social interaction within institutions. Empirically, he examines committees of the Council of Europe, the main European rights institution, asking whether the preferences/interests of social agents changed as they discussed and debated issues. Put differently, did they "go native" in Strasbourg? Theoretically, a series of scope conditions for when argumentative persuasion will be effective in "changing minds" is advanced. By thus defining clear domains of application, the article contributes to a central goal of this special issue: building bridges to other-rationalist, in this case-views on social interaction.
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