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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change InternationalNorm Dynamics and PoliticalChange MarthaFinnemore and Kathryn Sikkink Normativeand ideationalconcerns have alwaysinformed the study of international politicsand are a consistentthread running through the life of International Organi- zation.When IO was founded,dominant realist views of politics,while rejecting idealism,were verymuch concerned with issues of legitimacyand ideology.The earlyCold War,after all, was not simplya positionalconflict among anonymous greatpowers: it was a war for "heartsand minds."The couplingof powerwith "legitimatesocial purpose"was centralto Americanforeign policy of thisperiod.' At the same time,international relations scholars were busy studyingtwo of the greatestsocial construction projects of the age: Europeanintegration and decoloniza- tion.Neofunctionalists, like therealists, were consciously trying to distancethem- selvesfrom "idealist" predecessors (in thiscase, David Mitranyand his colleagues), butthe complex web of technical tasks that they designed aimed at more than promot- ing materialwell-being; they aimed ultimately at ideationaland social ends.Spill- overwas supposedto do morethan create additional technical tasks; it was supposed tochange attitudes, identity, and affect among participants. Likewise, scholars recog- nizedthat decolonization was drivenby a profoundlynormative agenda and thatit explicitlysought to reconstitutethe identities of both the new states and their former colonizers,as wellas therelationships between them. Attemptsin the 1960s and 1970sto build a scienceof politics modeled on econom- ics or naturalscience never displaced these normative and ideationalconcerns com- pletely.They have surfacedconsistently in thestream of critiquesof thedominant state-centricparadigms that focused on materialpower. Scholars of transnational relationsin the 1970s called attentionto transnationalactors who weresometimes influencedby norms and ideas.2 The regimesscholarship of the early 1980s similarly Wewould like to thank the three editors, two reviewers, and Emanuel Adler, Michael Barnett, Elizabeth Boyle,Audie Klotz, Jeff Legro, Richard Price, Thomas Risse, and Daniel Thomasfor their very helpful commentson variousdrafts of themanuscript. We are also gratefulto JamesFearon, Kurt Gaubatz, and JimMorrow for answering questions, sharing manuscripts, and making suggestions related to ourwork. 1. Ruggie1983b. 2. Keohaneand Nye 1971. InternationalOrganization 52, 4, Autumn1998, pp. 887-917 ? 1998by The 10 Foundationand the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 888 InternationalOrganization emphasizedthe role of principles and norms in waysthat opened the door for a more sweeping"ideational turn" in thelate 1980s. Elsewherein thisissue JohnRuggie, James March, and JohanOlsen explorethe intellectualhistory of thisrecent "turn" and locateits proponentsin themore ab- stracttheoretical debates of social science.Building on theircontributions, we ad- dresstheoretical issues facing those of us interestedin empiricalresearch on social constructionprocesses and norminfluences in internationalpolitics. We are con- cernedwith such questions as How do we knowa normwhen we see one? How do we knownorms make a differencein politics?Where do normscome from? How do theychange? We areparticularly interested in therole norms play in political change- boththe ways in whichnorms, themselves, change and the ways in whichthey changeother features of the political landscape. Like othertheoretical frameworks in internationalrelations (IR), muchof themacrotheoretical equipment of constructiv- ismis betterat explainingstability than change. Claims that actors conform to "log- ics of appropriateness"3say littleabout how standardsof appropriatenessmight change.Such staticapproaches to IR areparticularly unsatisfying during the current era of global transformationwhen questions about change motivate much of the empiricalresearch we do. Lackinggood macrotheoreticguidance, our approach to thesequestions relies heavily on inductionfrom the extensive and growingbody of normsresearch that has sprungup, not just in politicalscience, but in law,econom- ics, sociology,and psychology. This varietyof conceptualand empiricalmaterial is usefulfor our inductive enterprise, but it also raisessome importantquestions for macrotheorythat we exploreat theend of the article. We use ourreview of scholarshipon normsand relatedideational phenomena in thisarticle to makethree arguments. First, the ideational "turn" of recentyears is actuallya returnto sometraditional concerns of the discipline, but it has notbrought us backto precisely the same place we began.Standards for good empirical research havechanged dramatically (and for the better) since the founding of IO, andapplying thesestandards to long-standingnormative issues has had realpayoffs. Second, we generatesome propositions about three aspects of norms-theirorigins, the mecha- nismsby whichthey exercise influence, and theconditions under which norms will be influentialin worldpolitics. Specifically, we arguethat norms evolve in a pat- terned"life cycle" and thatdifferent behavioral logics dominate different segments of thelife cycle. Third, we arguethat the current tendency to opposenorms against rationalityor rational choice is nothelpful in explainingmany of the most politically salientprocesses we see in empiricalresearch-processes we call "strategicsocial construction,"in whichactors strategize rationally to reconfigurepreferences, iden- tities,or social context.4 Rationality cannot be separatedfrom any politically signifi- cantepisode of normative influence or normativechange, just as thenormative con- textconditions any episode of rationalchoice. Normsand rationalityare thus intimatelyconnected, but scholars disagree about the precise nature of their relation- 3. Marchand Olsen, this issue. 4. See Kahler,this issue, for a historyof debates over rationality in internationalrelations. NormDynamics and Political Change 889 ship.We identifyfour focal points of debatewhere the relationship between norms and rationalityis leastunderstood and mostimportant, and we showhow thesede- batescross-cut research traditions in potentiallyfruitful ways. The Returnto Norms Normsand normative issues have been central to thestudy of politics for at least two millennia.Students of politics have struggled with questions not only about the mean- ingof justice and the good society but also aboutthe influence on humanbehavior of ideas aboutjustice and good. Our conclusions(or ourassumptions) about these is- suescondition every form of political analysis. Aristotle and Plato understood this in thefourth century B.C.E. just as E. H. Carrdid in thetwentieth century. Carr has becomecanonized in thediscipline as a debunkerof Wilsonianidealism, but this simplificationmisrepresents his message:"Political action must be basedon a coor- dinationof morality and power." Realism fails, in Carr'sanalysis, precisely because it excludesessential features of politics like emotional appeal to a politicalgoal and groundsfor moral judgment.5 This conviction that understanding social purpose and legitimacywas essentialto understandingpolitics continued through the 1950sand 1960s and is evidentin the pages of IO. Inis Claude's workon the legitimation functionof the United Nations deals preciselywith this issue.6 Early IR scholarship on certainissues-decolonization, human rights, education-recognized that much UN activityinvolved establishing norms, but it often failed to theorizethese norma- tiveprocesses.7 Certainly the work of theintegration theorists such as ErnstHaas was implicitly,and often explicitly, about creating shared social purpose.8 Even real- istslike Hans Morgenthauwrote extensively about the way in whichideational and normativefactors such as nationalism,morality, and internationallaw limitstates' exerciseof power.9 The "turn"away from norms and normativeconcerns began with the behavioral revolutionand itsenthusiasm for measurement. Normative and ideationalphenom- ena weredifficult to measureand so tendedto be pushedaside formethodological reasons.This tendency was reinforcedby the emerging infatuation of political scien- tistswith economic methods in thelate 1970sand 1980s.10Realists began recasting thepursuit of power as "utilitymaximization" and, following the economists, tended to specifyutility functions in materialterms only. Liberals drew on microeconomic analysesof collective action games (Prisoners' Dilemma, Stag Hunt) to reinvigorate theirlong-standing debate with realists and showthat cooperation, welfare improve- 5. Carr[1946] 1964,97, 89. 6. Claude 1966. 7. See Kay 1967;Henkin 1965; Jacobson 1962; and Ball 1961. 8. Haas 1961,1964a. For an argumentrelated to someconcerns of this article, see Haas 1993. 9. Morgenthau[1948] 1985,pt. 5, 6. 10. Fora discussionabout the causes and effects of the dominance of economic models and methods in thestudy of U.S. politics,see Lowi 1992; Simon1993a; Lowi 1993a,b;and Simon 1993b. 890 InternationalOrganization ment,and "progress"were possible even given some of realism's pessimistic assump- tionsabout self-seeking human nature. In fact,these "neos," both realist and liberal, mightmore appropriately be called "econorealists"and "econoliberals,"since what was newin bothcases was an injectionof microeconomic insights.'1 Althoughthe move to rationalchoice in no way requireda move to a material ontology,its proponents showed little interest in ideationalor socialphenomena, and studyof these issues languished during this period. However, when
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