Pierre Bourdieu and the Birth of European Defense

This paper uses an analytical framework derived from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology to explain the genesis of the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP). Long-term social and institutional processes at work in the making of ESDP are addressed through an emphasis on the institutionalization of social fields, the impact of structural crises, and the socialization of policy makers into specific schemes of perception and action (habitus). Two arguments follow from this framework. First, the paper shows that the creation of ESDP after 1998 would have been impossible without the prior institutionalization of two transgovernmental arenas: (1) the European foreign policy field, wherein EU diplomats vie for influence over EU policies; and (2) the international defense field, centered upon military relations within NATO. Second, ESDP results from the strategies of a number of diplomats and military leaders who, following the end of the Cold War, perceived that they faced important organizational crises in their respective fields. This sociological framework provides a more nuanced account of ESDP's creation than that proposed by the two dominant explanations in international relations theory—realism's balancing and constructivism's strategic culture convergence. Combining structural and ideational factors, it elucidates three empirical puzzles: the lack of opposition to ESDP when it was launched, the motives of policy makers who proposed ESDP, and the disappearance of alternative options for the European security architecture.     

Informal institutions,forms of state and democracy: the Turkish deep state

Democratization studies have proven that the main difference between autocracy and democracy is, counter-intuitively, not the basic regime structure, but rather, the function and validity of democratic formal institutions defined as rules and norms.1 For the institutionalist turn in democratization studies, see O'Donnell, ‘Delegative Democracy’; O'Donnell, ‘Another Institutionalization’; O'Donnell, ‘Polyarchies’; Lauth, ‘Informal Institutions’; Merkel and Croissant, ‘Formale und informale Institutionen’; Weyland, ‘Limitations’; Helmke and Levitsky, Informal Institutions. View all notes In ‘defective democracies’,2 Merkel, ‘Embedded and Defective’. View all notes or in the grey zone between authoritarian regimes and consolidated democracies, formal institutions disguise specific informal institutions which are usually ‘the actual rules that are being followed’.3 O'Donnell, ‘Illusions About Consolidation’, 10. View all notes Moreover, scholars have investigated the issue of stateness: ‘without a state, no modern democracy is possible’.4 Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, 17. View all notes This article sheds light on this grey zone, particularly, on the type of state whose coercive state apparatus is autonomous. Its autonomy results primarily from the interplay between formal and informal institutions in post-transitional settings where ‘perverse institutionalization’5 Valenzuela, ‘Democratic Consolidation’, 62. View all notes creates and fosters undemocratic informal rules and/or enshrines them as formal codes. If the military autonomy reaches a threshold ranging from high to very high, constitutional institutions become Janus-faced and can enforce a sui generis repertoire of undemocratic informal institutions. Thus, the state exerts formal and informal ‘domination’,6 Weber, Economy and Society. View all notes Herrschaft in a Weberian sense. This modality of dual domination is what I call ‘deep state’.     

Malaysia – towards a topology of an electoral one-party state

For the first time in 51 years of independence, Malaysia's ruling coalition Barisan Nasional (National Front, BN) under the weak leadership of Abdullah Badawi was denied its customary parliamentary two-third majority in the 2008 elections. The three major opposition parties, which formed the Pakatan Rakyat (The People's Alliance, PR) after the elections, increased the number of opposition-held state governments from one to five. The opposition had never held more than two state governments at any one time.1 Chin and Wong, ‘Malaysia's Electoral Upheaval’. Parts of this paper were used in a research project organized by the Malaysian Strategic Research Centre. View all notes For many practitioners and students of Malaysian politics, the 2008 poll means the birth of a long overdue ‘two-party system’, where two multi-ethnic coalitions contest for power and alternate in running the country. After all, two similar attempts to build a Malay-dominated second coalition to rival the ruling coalition dominated by the ethno-nationalist United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) were made in the 1990 and 1999 elections by former UMNO leaders who lost in their party in-fighting. Sadly, the coalitions built did not survive even the next elections. We argue that such optimism may be misplaced due to a failure to appreciate the ‘electoral one-party state’ nature of Malaysia.2 Wong and Norani, ‘Malaysia at 50’. View all notes Despite having held 13 national elections without failure, and having almost no incidence of in- or post-election violence, neither a military coup nor ‘people's power’, Malaysia has never been anywhere close to being a ‘consolidated democracy’, 52 years after joining what Huntington called the second wave of democratization.3 Huntington, The Third Wave. View all notes For Linz and Stepan, a consolidated democracy requires not only a government with de facto authority to generate policy and exclusive de jure power, but also that ‘this government comes to power that is the direct result of a free and popular vote’. In other words, democracy has to become ‘the only game in town’.4 Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, 5. View all notes     

Military Mobilization and Commitment Problems

Because of its costliness, military mobilization is generally seen as a mechanism by which high-resolve leaders can credibly signal their high resolve in international crises, thereby possibly overcoming informational asymmetries that can lead to costly and inefficient war. I examine how power-shifts caused by mobilization within a crisis can lead to commitment-problem wars. In a simple ultimatum-offer crisis bargaining model of complete information, war occurs if and only if the power-shift caused by mobilization exceeds the bargaining surplus, which is Powell's (2004 Powell, Robert. 2004. The Inefficient Use of Power. American Political Science Review, 98 May: 231–241. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2006 Powell, Robert. 2006. War as a Commitment Problem. International Organization, 60(1): 169–203. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) general inefficiency condition for commitment-problem wars. When private information is added, and hence mobilization potentially has a stabilizing signaling role, under certain conditions the commitment problem overwhelms the signaling role and mobilization leads to certain war. Finally, I analyze an infinite-horizon model that captures the reality that mobilizing takes time, and find that commitment-problem wars occur under broader conditions than the general inefficiency condition implies.     

The problem of peace: understanding the ‘liberal peace’

To remember Hiroshima is to commit oneself to peace. Pope John Paul II, 1 ?1. Pope John Paul II, 25 February 1981. View all notes 1981

Pax Invictis2 ?2. ‘Peace to the undefeated’ or the victor's peace. Inscribed on the Tomb of the Unknown Solider in St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney, Australia. View all notes

Virtue runs amok. Attributed to G.K. Chesterton     

“I SEE DEAD PEOPLE”: AIR-RAID PHOBIA AND BRITAIN'S BEHAVIOR IN THE MUNICH CRISIS

Arguments about the importance of democracy for international behavior assume that states rely on military organizations rather than “hired guns.” With the growth of the private security market this assumption no longer holds true. Focusing on the United States, we use original data to compare the impacts of using private military/security forces and military forces on attributes identified as endemic to democracies: constitutionalism, transparency, and public consent. Our evidence indicates that forces raised via contract are harder to learn about and thus less transparent than military forces. Largely due to lowered transparency, Congress has a harder time exercising its constitutional role, which impedes constitutionalism. Finally, though the public is just as sensitive to the deaths of private forces as it is to military deaths, it is less likely to know about them. Thus the lack of transparency also circumvents meaningful public consent. We conclude with a consideration of the potential implications of these changes for U.S. foreign policy.     

Presidential Leadership on Foreign Policy,Opinion Polling,and the Possible Limits of “Crafted Talk”

The strategy of “crafted talk” (or framing) suggests that a politician uses public opinion to anticipate the most alluring, language to convince the public to follow a politician's own preferred policy (Jacobs & Shapiro, 2000 Jacobs, L. R. and Shaprio, R. Y. 2000. Politicians don't pander: Political manipulation and the loss of democratic responsiveness, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  [Google Scholar]). This manipulatory behavior by presidents has important consequences in the realm of constructing foreign policy, especially if the policy involves military service personnel, international prestige, or foreign conflict. However, no scholar has investigated White House archival data to examine the theoretical nuances of presidential “crafting” talk when constructing arguments for foreign policy. This article examines three case studies using internal polling memoranda and focus group results concerning the Vietnam War under President Johnson, the signing of the INF Treaty with the Soviet Union under President Reagan, and the Gulf War under President Bush. In each of the three cases, public opinion places serious constraints on presidential framing of foreign policy. Implications for the effectiveness of political framing and the limits of presidential persuasion are discussed.     

Arab Muslim Attitudes Toward the West: Cultural,Social, and Political Explanations

We utilize pooled data from Zogby International's 2002 Zogby, James. 2002. What Arabs Think: Values Beliefs and Concerns, Utica NY: Zogby International.  [Google Scholar] Arab Values Survey (carried out in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and UAE) in order to test for “cultural,” “social” and/or international “political” influences on Arab Muslim attitudes toward “Western” countries (Canada, France, Germany, UK, and USA). We find little support for “cultural” hypotheses to the effect that hostility to the West is a mark-up on Muslim and/or Arab identity. We find only limited support for “social” hypotheses that suggest that hostility to the West is predicted by socioeconomic deprivation, youth, and/or being male. We find the strongest support for a lone “political” hypothesis: hostility toward specific Western countries is predicted by those countries' recent and visible international political actions in regard to salient international issues (e.g., Western foreign policies toward Palestine).     

Economic aid to post-conflict countries: a methodological critique of Collier and Hoeffler

In the past five years, research sponsored by the World Bank on the economic aspects of civil war1 ?1. The project was titled the Economics of Political and Criminal Violence. View all notes under the research directorship of Oxford economist Paul Collier has had an extraordinary influence on the subsequent study of violent conflict and civil war and on international policy. The research project has now turned its attention to the problem of countries emerging from civil war and what Collier and his co-author, Anke Hoeffler, call ‘a first systematic empirical analysis of aid and policy reform in the post-conflict growth process.’2 ?2. First reported in a World Bank Policy Research Working Paper circulated in October 2002, their article, ‘Aid, Policy, and Growth in Post-Conflict Societies,’ the paper was in 2003 posted on the website of the Centre for the Study of African Economics, Oxford University until it was published in 2004 in the European Economic Review. There are some minor differences between the two versions of their work, but the conclusions are identical. In the present article, the paper version will be referred to as Collier & Hoeffler (2003) and the published version as Collier & Hoeffler (2004). View all notes Building on the influence of their earlier research and the lively interest currently in knowledge about and policy on post-conflict strategies, this work is likely to be equally influential on research, thinking, and policy. It is all the more important, therefore, to subject the research to critical examination before it becomes established as conventional wisdom. This note reports one such attempt to analyze some major methodological problems with the study and argues that the research cannot sustain the conclusions they draw or the resulting policy recommendations.     

Borderlands and the transformation of war economies: lessons from the DR Congo

Border towns bring out the worst in a country… 1 ?1. Charlton Heston ‘Vargas’ in Touch of Evil, 1958. View all notes     

Militancy and violence in West Africa: reflecting on radicalisation,comparing contexts and evaluating effectiveness of preventive policies

By 2000, ‘radicalisation’ had become a major global issue. Although ‘9/11’ was still a year away, the American Embassies in East Africa had been bombed in 1998 and violent conflicts simmered in many parts of the world. At just about the same time, bitter civil wars, resource-centred conflicts and intra-ethnic strife raged in West Africa. Against the background of research being undertaken at King's College London,1 1. For example, Dr Olonisakin was researching into the civil wars in the region and was completing her book on the politics of United Nations involvement in the Sierra Leone war, while Dr Alao Alao, Abiodun. 2007. Natural Resources and Conflict in Africa: The Tragedy of Endowment, Rochester: University of Rochester Press.  [Google Scholar] was looking at the politics of natural resource conflicts in the region and was also completing a book on the subject. The Conflict Security and Development Group (CSDG), King's College London, was awarded a grant from the UK Department for International Development (DfID) to undertake a research project on youth vulnerability and exclusion in West Africa, with Dr Olonisakin Olonisakin, 'Funmi. 2008. Peacekeeping in Sierra Leone: The Story of UNAMSIL, Boulder: Lynne Reinner.  [Google Scholar] as principal investigator. the mutually reinforcing links between ‘radicalisation’ and ‘violence’ (potentially sensitive terms, discussed below) in West Africa became clearly obvious and a successful application to investigate this was submitted to the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).2 2. ‘Militancy and Violence in West Africa: Reflecting on Radicalisation, Comparing Contexts, and Evaluating Effectiveness of Preventive Policies’. Dr F. Olonisakin and Prof A.J.W. Gow. ESRC Award No. RES-181-25-0024. This Special Issue contains articles emerging from that work, with a set of country studies complemented by overarching synthetic analysis.     

Evaluating Spain's Reparation Law

The Reparation Law1 This article follows Aguilar, Balcells, and Cebolla in referring to the Law of Historical Memory as the Reparation Law. Although Aguilar et al. do not specify why they choose this terminology, the term is used here as it better denotes the law's content. Aguilar, Balcells, and Cebolla, ‘Determinants of Attitudes Towards Transitional Justice’, 3. View all notes approved on 26 December 2007 is the latest link in a chain of reparatory measures from the earliest days of Spain's transition to democracy to deal with the legacy of the Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship. Numerous articles have analysed the historical memory movement2 See Encarnación, ‘Reconciliation After Democratization’; and Gálvez Biesca, ‘El proceso’. View all notes and the reasons behind the timing and scope of Spain's reckoning with the past.3 See Encarnación, ‘Reconciliation After Democratization’; Aguilar, ‘Justice, Politics and Memory’, Barahona de Brito, Gonzaléz-Enríquez, and Aguilar, The Politics of Memory; and Blakeley, ‘Digging Up Spain's Past’. View all notes This literature presents the case of Spain as a counterpoint to the received wisdom of the transitional justice literature that successful democratization requires reconciliation. This article contributes to the specific literature on Spain, and the wider transitional justice literature, by focusing on an area which has not yet been analysed: the ‘co-construction’ and content of the Law. Through a comparison of the draft bill and the final Law, this article fills this gap.     

Chimeric governance and the extension of resource regulation

The contemporary securitisation of underdevelopment is based on the myth of mutual vulnerability—the idea that underdevelopment and state failure pose diverse threats both to the developed world and the poor in the developing world. The mutual vulnerability thesis provides the rationale for an attempt to expand the range of both military and regulatory interventions inside the developing world. The promise of these interventions is of a synthesis between security for the developed world and solidarism with the poor. The reality is a form of chimeric governance which purports to protect the rich from a range of imagined threats and which masks an unwillingness to really address the problems of the poor.

One illusion has been shattered on 11 September: that we can have the good life of the West irrespective of the state of the rest of the world…. Once chaos and strife have got a grip on a region or a country trouble will soon be exported. Out of such regions and countries come humanitarian tragedies, centres for trafficking in weapons, drugs and people, havens for criminal organisations, and sanctuaries for terrorists…. The dragon's teeth are planted in the fertile soil of wrongs unrighted, of disputes left to fester for years, of failed states, of poverty and deprivation.1 ?1. Tony Blair, Prime Minister, speech at the Lord Mayor's Banquet 13 Nov. 2001. View all notes     

New Media and the Polarization of American Political Discourse

Scholars of political communication have long examined newsworthiness by focusing on the news choices of media organizations (Lewin, 1947 Lewin, K. 1947. Frontiers and group dynamics. Human Relations, 1: 143–153. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; White, 1950 White, D. M. 1950. The “gate keeper”: A case study in the selection of news. Journalism Quarterly, 27: 383–390. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Sigal, 1973 Sigal, L. V. 1973. Reporters and officials, Lexington, MA: Heath.  [Google Scholar]; Gans, 1979 Gans, H. J. 1979. Deciding what's news, New York: Vintage Books.  [Google Scholar]). However, in recent years these traditional arbiters of the news have increasingly been joined or even supplanted in affecting the public agenda by “new media” competitors, including cable news, talk radio, and even amateur bloggers. The standards by which this new class of decision makers evaluates news are at best only partially explained by prior studies focused on professional journalists and organizations. In this study, we seek to correct this oversight by content analyzing five online news sources—including wire services, cable news, and political blog sites—in order to compare their news judgments in the months prior to, and immediately following, the 2006 midterm election. We collected all stories from Reuters' and AP's “top political news” sections. We then investigated whether a given story was also chosen to appear on each wire's top news page (indicating greater perceived newsworthiness than those that were not chosen) and compared the wires' editorial choices to those of more partisan blogs (from the left: DailyKos.com; from the right: FreeRepublic.com) and cable outlets (FoxNews.com). We find evidence of greater partisan filtering for the latter three Web sources, and relatively greater reliance on traditional newsworthiness criteria for the news wires.     

Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis: Security,Ethics and Global Health

*This article is part of a project on infectious diseases, security and ethics sponsored by the Australian Research Council. For their valuable feedback on earlier versions, the author thanks Simon Rushton, Stefan Elbe and the Global Society reviewers. View all notesThe worldwide spread of drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis (TB) bacteria is out of control and incidents of harder-to-cure TB illness are rising. This article explores the present and potential impact of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB)—a deadly, contagious and virtually incurable disease—on human health and state capacity. Detected cases of XDR-TB can occasion the implementation of extraordinary control measures, because some governments are sufficiently fearful of the disease as to frame it as an issue of national security. Such framing has the potential to precipitate more financial resources and stronger legal powers to bolster public health, but it might also increase the risk that emergency response measures will be counterproductive and/or unjust. Framing XDR-TB as a security issue is empirically plausible, and doing so is a good thing provided that increased response efforts promote rather than hinder the provision of universal access to adequate TB treatment over the long term. Two disease control measures that are motivated particularly by security concerns are border control and patient isolation. This article offers an assessment of each measure by reference to public health ethics in order to differentiate good and bad securitisation.     

Robbing Peter to pay Paul: changing clientelist patterns in East Timor’s 2017 parliamentary elections

This article examines the adverse impact of clientelist relations between political parties and campaign donors on parties’ relations with voters. Clientelism is generally conceptualized as a vertical, pyramid structure, whereby resources are distributed from politicians to voters at the base through brokers or programmatic politics. As Gherghina and Volintiru¹1 Gherghina and Volintiru, A New Model of Clientelism.View all notescontend, what is often overlooked is that in tandem with this vertical relationship with voters there is a complementary horizontal relationship with party donors. Parties with a weak organizational base focus on relations with party donors, such as private contractors, at the expense of their relationship with voters. Drawing on fieldwork conducted during East Timor’s 2017 parliamentary elections, I engage with Gherghina and Volintiru’s framework to argue that a bi-dimensional approach is integral to both understanding electoral outcomes and economic trajectories in developing country contexts. In East Timor, despite a decade of rampant patronage politics, the incumbent CNRT party’s prioritization of their relationship with party donors cost them the election. In turn, this focus on party donors has distorted policy and public spending priorities, with severe implications for future development.     

Power-sharing and political party engineering in conflict-prone societies: the Indonesian experiment in Aceh

Establishing legitimate political leadership through non-violent means is an essential step in the rebuilding of post-conflict societies. For this reason the successful holding of democratic elections is often seen as the crowning achievement of the peace process. In recent years, however, it has become clear that elections do not always guarantee the peace, and may in fact, make societies more dangerous.1 ?1. Collier Collier, Paul. 2009. Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places, New York: Harper Collins.  [Google Scholar], Wars, Guns and Votes; Brancati, Peace by Design. View all notes This has prompted political scientists to look more closely at other dimensions of the transition from violent conflict to democratic politics, including the role of political parties. Political parties play an essential role in all democracies, but their importance is magnified in conflict-prone societies. While some scholars have argued that political parties may help to consolidate peace by forming coalitions between groups formerly in conflict, more recent research suggests that such parties may also entrench social cleavages, especially if party formation is based along former conflict fault lines. This article considers these arguments in the case of Aceh, Indonesia, where an historic peace agreement allowed former Acehnese rebels to form their own political party—one based along both ethnic and former conflict lines.     

Why Japan Could Revise Its Constitution and What It Would Mean for Japanese Security Policy

This article seeks to make sense of the policy debate on constitutional revision underway in Japan, to consider what international and domestic factors are driving the debate forward, to assess the range of proposals currently on the table, and to gauge the likelihood of actual constitutional change. Additionally, it considers how various forms of constitutional revision, if actually implemented, might affect Japan's military doctrines and capabilities; the extent of its alliance cooperation with the United States; its devotion of military capabilities to un operations; and the repercussions for Japan's regional relations in East Asia.     

Victim participation at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia: are retributive and restorative principles enhancing the prospect for justice?

This article assesses the utility of victim participation in the trials before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, in fostering reconciliation and realizing restorative justice. Specifically, it investigates the parameters of a legal mechanism designed to give ‘victims of atrocity’ a voice, whilst striking a vital balance between rights of victims and rights of defendants to a fair trial. Where participation affords victims the opportunity to present their views and observations, thereby enhancing prospects for retributive and restorative justice, this article submits that participation affords the international community an historic opportunity to meet Rome Statute objectives to ‘not only to bring criminals to justice but also to help the victims themselves obtain justice’ (See Victims Witness Section at the ICC Victims Witness Section at the ICC, < http://www.icc-cpi.int/Menus/ICC/Structure+of+the+Court/Victims>  [Google Scholar], < www.icc-cpi.int/Menus/ICC/Structure+of+the+Court/Victims>). Indeed while concrete benefits of participation remain to be seen, victim participation in the ECCC's case offers promise for breaking new ground, setting international standards and establishing precedence for other ad hoc and hybrid tribunals as well as the permanent International Criminal Court.     

Europe's others and the return of geopolitics

In the context of European Union enlargement and the discussions about a European constitution, the question of Europe's identity has once again entered the limelight of political debates. From a poststructuralist perspective, identities are constructed through practices of othering, articulating a difference. In this article, I follow Ole Wæver to argue that for most of the time after the Second World War the most important other in the construction of a European identity has been Europe's own past. This temporal form of othering offered the possibility to form an identity through less antagonistic and exclusionary practices than was common in the modern international society. However, since the 1990s geographic and cultural otherings are on the increase, marking a return of geopolitics in European identity constructions and undermining the notion of European integration as a fundamental challenge to the world of nation‐states.1 A previous version of this paper was presented at the workshop ‘Other Europes’, organised by the Poststructuralism working group of the British International Studies Association, Keele University, England, 16 May 2003. I would like to thank the workshop participants, Alessandra Buonfino, Bahar Rumelili and the three referees of this journal for their critical and constructive comments. View all notes