Suchergebnisse

Although there is increasing evidence of a relationship between domestic and foreign policy attitudes among American elites, we have less of an idea about why these sets of attitudes cohere. The answer lies in a better understanding of what we mean when we talk about "left" and "right" or "liberal" and "conservative." Drawing on the literature on rights theory, partisan cleavages, and ideological continua, I posit the existence of two core values, hierarchy and community, that should manifest themselves both at home and abroad. I perform a principal components analysis on data capturing both the domestic and foreign policy attitudes of American elites. The results indicate an almost identical structure of attitudes in both domains, indicating that it is generally inappropriate to distinguish between the two. Using factor scores in a series of logistic regressions, I demonstrate that support for community is most important for predicting support for humanitarian military operations, while hierarchy and community both help determine positions on strategic missions.

Germany's behavior during the lead-up to the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003 seemed to confirm that the country is marked by a strategic culture of pacifism and multilateralism. However, a closer look at German actions and pattern of participation in military operations reveals that German pacifism is a myth. There was no cross party consensus on German foreign policy in the 1990s around a principled opposition to the use of force. Even in the early years after the Cold War, the Christian Democrats began very quickly, albeit deliberatively and often secretively, to break down legal and psychological barriers to the deployment of German forces abroad. Pacifism persisted on the left of the political spectrum but gave way following a genuine ideological transformation brought about by the experience of the Yugoslav wars. The nature of Germany's objection to the Iraq invasion, which unlike previous debates did not make ubiquitous references to German history, revealed how much it has changed since the end of the Cold War. Had the election in 2002 gone differently, Germany might even have supported the actions of the U.S. and there would be little talk today of a transatlantic crisis. It is now possible to treat Germany as a "normal" European power.

More often than not, violence between states in the field of international relations is understood in instrumental terms. States are thought to act purposively in the pursuit of some tangible object, treating those in their way as objects; the targets of that violence respond to such treatment phlegmatically, without any sense of outrage. Drawing on psychological research in 'virtuous violence', which argues that intergroup violence is primarily moralistic in character, we present results from three survey experiments in the United States and Russia and a re-analysis of a recent study, which demonstrate that moral condemnation of adversaries is extremely easy to invoke, hard to avoid, common across different cultural contexts, and a central feature of 'binding' morality, one of the most fundamental moral foundations. Our first survey experiment presents American respondents with a fictional state developing nuclear weapons. Strategic features of the situation – offensive capability, past history, and interest divergence – generate not only threat perception but, crucially, negative moral attributions that mediate between the two. In the next two survey experiments, we show that American and Russian respondents judge aggressive action against a third country, regardless of whether the aggressor pursues water necessary for its population or oil useful for its economy. Finally, our re-analysis of Rathbun & Stein 1 shows that moral condemnation strongly mediates the effect of binding morality on support for nuclear weapons use against terrorists. Our results suggest a future agenda on morality's role in international relations that highlights ethical dynamics beyond the taming influence of humanitarianism and cosmopolitan individualism. Morality can drive conflict, not just restrain it.

AbstractA central theme in the study of international relations is that anarchy requires states to set aside moral concerns to attain security, rendering IR an autonomous sphere devoid of ethical considerations. Evolutionary and moral psychology, however, suggest that morality emerged to promote human success under such conditions. It is not despite anarchy but because of anarchy that humans have an ethical sense. Our argument has three empirical implications. First, it is almost impossible to talk about threat and harm without invoking morality. Second, state leaders and the public will use moral judgments as a basis, indeed the most important factor, for assessing international threat, just as research shows they do at the interpersonal level. Third, foreign policy driven by a conception of international relations as an amoral sphere will be quite rare. Word embeddings applied to large political and nonpolitical corpora, a survey experiment in Russia, and an in-depth analysis of Hitler's foreign policy thought suggest that individuals both condemn aggressive behavior by others and screen for threats on the basis of morality. The findings erode notions of IR as an autonomous sphere and upset traditional materialist–ideational dichotomies.

While much research has been done on the domestic determinants of alliance institutionalization, there has been a neglect of the effect of domestic politics, by which we mean contestation between political actors in the same country. We hypothesize that the ideology of the parties governing countries negotiating the terms of security relationships will affect their preferences over the degree and kind of institutionalization seen in alliances. Drawing on previous literature, we argue that rightist parties are more sensitive to sovereignty costs and will therefore insist on maintaining more control over policy than their leftist counterparts. They can assert control either by imposing hierarchical forms of institutionalization when they are a stronger party to an alliance or by avoiding institutionalization altogether if they are the weaker party in an alliance. In contrast, we expect leftist parties to be less sensitive to sovereignty costs and generally favorable to more voice-driven, egalitarian institutions that have institutionalized mechanisms for consensus-building, regardless of their country's relative power position. Combining the ATOP dataset on alliance design with the Parties Manifesto Project, we find broad support for our hypotheses. Our findings indicate that scholars should pay more attention to the internal ideological contestation within countries, making room for domestic political factors that go beyond regime type.

Recent research into the public's attitude toward the use of nuclear weapons repeats long-standing mistakes in how international relations theorists think about morality. Falsely equating consequentialism with state egoism and normative obligations with restrictions on the use of weapons of mass destruction implies that ethically motivated beliefs about foreign affairs must be other-regarding and that other-regarding behavior is not utilitarian in character. Drawing on empirical research into moral psychology, we argue that liberal, other-regarding morality is only one kind of ethical foundation. Alternative moral concerns such as retribution, deference to authority, and in-group loyalty also help to determine foreign policy beliefs. We find that all three are associated with support for the use of nuclear weapons in the American public. Our survey respondents act as moral utilitarians who weigh different ethical considerations in forming their judgments.