Suchergebnisse

Over the past century, crises have enabled the construction of Australian foreign policy orders, or sets of ideas that reduce uncertainty and stabilise interests. However, such ideas have also engendered misplaced certainty and renewed crisis. Developing a constructivist framework, I stress the ways in which ideas can over time impede the use of information and fuel instability and crises. In a staged model, I trace the construction of ties with "great and powerful friends", their conversion in ways that fuel misplaced certainty, and the construction of crises which advance change. Empirically, I then trace the construction of an early Imperial order, misplaced certainty in UK‐backed austerity and appeasement, and crises in the Great Depression and fall of Singapore.

"International Organizations and Economic Governance" published on by Oxford University Press.

Emotional forces shape not only market tendencies to 'manias, panics and crashes', but also policy debates as they predispose agents to definitions of state and societal interests. Nevertheless, IR scholars often downplay emotional influences, casting them as secondary to coalitional or cognitive forces. In this article, I address these limitations by disaggregating intersubjective understandings into popularly resonant traditions of thought and elite-based paradigmatic frameworks. Drawing on the insights of Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard Hofstadter, I then argue that elite anxieties regarding populism can engender the 'technocratic repression' of emotion from paradigmatic debates in ways that paradoxically render policy less stable and pragmatic. Firstly, such repression obscures the emotional bases of market trends and engenders overconfidence in the ability of monetary fine-tuning to restrain manias and to contain panics. Secondly, in isolating paradigmatic debate from everyday language, technocratic repression frustrates deliberation and can exacerbate populist resentments, requiring the construction of crises to advance change. Shifting to an empirical focus, I suggest that tendencies to technocratic repression in the 1990s and early 21st century engendered overconfidence in monetary fine-tuning. In the post-subprime context, the key question is the extent to which this bias in favour of monetary policy has been reversed, or whether constructions of the subprime crisis have legitimated a revived regulatory stress. In sum, this analysis highlights the reality of emotion as an influence on the international political economy.

In 1971, the United States and India — the world's two largest democracies — almost went to war in a 'near-miss' at odds with the hypothesis that democracies do not fight one another. In this article, I reformulate the democratic peace hypothesis by subsuming it under a broadened constructivist analysis, one that recognizes that institutional qualities do not 'speak for themselves' but rather that struggles over the meaning of democracy can engender conflict. I then argue that differences regarding the meaning of democracy shaped post-World War II US perceptions of the South Asian distribution of power, explaining shifts from periods of Democratic friendship to Republican enmity toward India, with the latter most clearly manifested in the 1971 crisis. I conclude by emphasizing the merit of a constructivist theory of democratic interactions in explaining cooperation and conflict.