The Ugly? Rogue States as Norm Entrepreneurs

Chapter 4 The Ugly? Rogue States as Norm Entrepreneurs As outlined in the previous chapter, “rogue states” are seen in large parts of the political and academic discourse as transgressors of universally accepted standards of behavior. They are perceived as norm breakers who display their opposing attitude vis-á-vis the current normative order by disregarding and transgressing basic rules and duties. Consequently, empirical studies usually focus on tracing their alleged non-compliance with norms. This perspective is also shared by (liberal-constructivist) norms research, which at the best considers the countries concerned as objects of normative education, the norm-violating behavior of which must be prevented and which—if possible— should be reintegrated into the overarching normative order. Scholars focusing on the diffusion and enforcement of norms tend to conceptualize norm-violating states as antagonists to liberal-democratic states (e.g. Risse and Sikkink 1999: 9), usually focusing on authoritarian states found guilty of human rights violations. Along these lines, Trine Flockhart considers “rogue states” to be actors that completely reject the social norms of a socializing agent, who know that they have very little to gain from compliance with those norms, and who know they have no chance of gaining group membership anyway, [and thus] have no incentive to follow an agreed code of conduct. (Flockhart 2004: 367) Conceptualized in such a way, “rogue states” cannot easily be socialized, since mechanisms based on social pressure are built on the assumption that the target of socialization efforts identifies in principle with the social reference group of the socializing agent to which it wants to belong. It is usually assumed that “rogue states” lack such a sense of identification. Found guilty of norm breaches, they are dismissed as “civilized” members of the international community and delegitimized (Risse 2002: 1). Notorious norm breakers and troublemakers as they are perceived to be, they are primarily conceptualized with regard to their resistance to prevailing norms. Their stigma as antagonists of prototypical moral entrepreneurs thus becomes manifest (e.g. Müller 2011: 72–73) and their potential for transformative change is theoretically and empirically dismissed as well. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. Wunderlich, Rogue States as Norm Entrepreneurs, Norm Research in International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27990-5_4 71 72 4 The Ugly? Rogue States as Norm Entrepreneurs Contrary to this stance, this book adopts a counter-intuitive and unconventional approach. I argue that the assumption that “rogue states” only aim at destroying established international norms needs to be verified empirically. Their hostile attitude may be based on an attempt to establish alternative norms which radically deviate from the prevailing Western liberal concept of normative order. “Rogue states”, as I will argue, can thus also take on the role of norm entrepreneurs. In the following section, I will first link my argument to recent works that share a critical constructivist stance and which try to overcome the narrow perspective of liberal norm research by applying the concept of norm entrepreneurship to unconventional types of actors. I will then discuss research on norm contestation and resistance toward international norms and link the two perspectives. I conclude this chapter by formulating two alternative hypotheses which—following liberal-constructivist research on norms—could also explain the behavior of “rogue states” toward norms. In the empirical part of this study, these alternative explanations will be tested against the assumption that “rogue states” might act as norm entrepreneurs. 4.1 Research on Unconventional Norm Entrepreneurs and Resistance to Norms Already in 1997, legal scholar Richard A. Posner referred to the existence of “badnorm entrepreneurs” besides “moral entrepreneurs”, citing as examples “aggressive panhandlers, vandals, drunks, junkies, prostitutes, gang members, loiterers, and other visibly antisocial persons” (Posner 1997: 42). While he did not provide a systematic empirical analysis, Posner identified a missionary eagerness as a unifying element for both types of entrepreneur: “Moral entrepreneurs typically try to change the boundaries of altruism, whether by broadening them, as in the case of Jesus Christ and Jeremy Bentham, or by narrowing them, as in the case of Hitler” (Posner 1998: 1667). In a similar vein, Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks argued that “bad guys […] also know quite a lot about norm creation” (Ehrenreich Brooks 2003: 2326–7). To substantiate her argument, she referred to Palestinian suicide bombers, Slobodan Milosevic, Hutu fighters and Adolf Hitler, who had succeeded in shattering the existing normative order through advocating fundamentally different concepts of order. While these studies did not go beyond the mere identification of such entrepreneur types, in the 2000s, political scientists began to empirically trace the applicability of the concept to actors other than the prototypical Western liberal actors. Based on the observation that norm entrepreneurship is embedded in discursive, institutional and geopolitical opportunity structures, Adamson (2005) analyzes the attempts of two competing norm entrepreneurs—namely democracy assistance networks based largely in Western liberal democracies and Islamist networks—to advocate their respective normative agendas in post-Soviet Central Asia. To her, the biased focus on Western liberal norm entrepreneurs is due to the dominance of global liberalism, which she also regards as the breeding ground of today’s established research 4.1 Research on Unconventional Norm Entrepreneurs and Resistance to Norms 73 community. As a consequence, concepts originating from political Islam have largely been neglected. Bettiza and Dionigi (2014) also turn their attention to non-Western norm entrepreneurship. Focusing on international organizations that are dominated by liberal actors, the authors analyze the advocacy of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) within the United Nations in promoting a “dialogue of civilizations” and a ban on defaming religion. They argue that the success of non-Western religious norm entrepreneurs largely depends on the extent to which they manage to translate Islamic concepts into secular liberal discursive structures. The authors ascribe the success of the initiative for a “dialogue of civilizations” initiated by Iranian President Mohammad Khatami to the fact that the norm advocates had refrained from explicitly referring to Islam in their campaign. Instead, they had produced an “open hermeneutic margin in the norm’s meaning” (Bettiza and Dionigi 2014: 16). Rather than translating references to Islam into the UN’s institutional grammar, the Islamic norm entrepreneurs made use of established secular principles such as selfdetermination, peace, equality, tolerance, and human rights. Their advocacy for a ban on the defamation of religion, in contrast, failed because the main focus was on preventing criticism of Islam and thus followed a particularistic concern. The propagated norm collided with basic liberal norms (such as equality, protection of the individual, and right to freedom of expression) and could not be translated to fit a secular order. The fact that the resolution eventually adopted by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011 did not contain any references to Islam is seen by the authors as a failure of the efforts of the OIC to establish a ban on defaming religion. The non-Western norm entrepreneurs analyzed in these studies mainly rely on “classical” norm entrepreneurial instruments identified in the literature, such as argumentative persuasion and framing strategies. Other studies transcend this focus by examining the norm advocacy of violent actors. Lynch (2006) uses the term norm “entrepreneur” to describe Osama bin Laden’s efforts to convince a critical mass of Arab and Muslim states of the superiority of a radical Islamic identity and corresponding norms. To this end, he contends, al-Qaeda has deliberately stylized world politics as a “clash of civilizations” in which religious extremism can be justified on moral grounds. Although Lynch describes al-Qaeda as a norm entrepreneur, he does not systematically apply the concept, and as a result, does not generate theoretical insights into its nature. Most recently, studies have explored Russian and Chinese efforts to challenge and—occasionally—undermine liberal norms as a form of norm entrepreneurship, e.g., Russia’s attempt to justify the invasion of Crimea as a humanitarian intervention (Jose and Stefes 2018, or Carpenter 2014 who describes the same effort as an example of norm antipreneurship; on China see Alden and Large 2015). Resistance to established norms has for long been ignored by norms research and dismissed as illegitimate hostility to norms (Acharya 2004: 242). Only in the course of the second wave of norms research have scholars shifted their attention to agency from below, i.e., processes of bottom-up norm diffusion. In this vein, scholars have analyzed processes in which local actors challenge global norms. Studies on norm appropriation and translation (e.g. Acharya 2004, 2009; Zwingel 2012; Großklaus 2015; Zimmermann 2017) emphasize that local actors should no longer be 74 4 The Ugly? Rogue States as Norm Entrepreneurs conceptualized as passive norm takers. Instead, these studies began to incorporate notions of criticism of global norms into their analytical models. Yet the focus was not on radical resistance to norms. Rather, criticism was perceived to be sparked by the effort to embrace and adapt basically desirable global norms to better fit local contexts. In contrast, authors taking a poststructuralist and critical constructivist perspective focus on the active resistance against global norms which often turns into a reinterpretation of global normative meanings (Hirata 2004; Acharya 2011; Epstein 2012; Inayatullah and Blaney 2012; Towns 2012; Widmaier and Park 2012; Hofius et al. 2014; Jabri 2014; Steinhilper 2015). As these studies show, supposedly universal norms are often rejected by non-Western norm addressees who regard them as Western liberal constructs and instruments of hegemonic imposition. In contrast to the top-down perspectives inherent to liberal-constructivist accounts on norm diffusion, these works emphasize the variety of bottom-up norm construction and negotiation processes by focusing on “all involved stakeholders” (Wiener 2018: 3) who are often denied agency in scholarly accounts, ranging from “post-colonial agency” (Jabri 2014) by affected populations such as the Indigenous Movement in the Global South (Steinhilper 2015; Hasenclever and Narr 2019) to letting the subalterns speak (Hofius et al. 2014). For the purposes of this study, I will focus on Amitav Acharya’s concept of norm localization and subsidiarity. In this context, Amitav Acharya extended his concept of norm localization with the notion of norm subsidiarity, which he defines as a “[p]rocess whereby local actors create rules with a view to preserve their autonomy from dominance, neglect, violation, or abuse by more powerful actors” (Acharya 2011: 97). Rather than adapting morally desirable norms to local contexts, subsidiarity describes an activity whereby local actors reject global norms by promoting normative alternatives (Acharya 2011: 98).1 Acharya applies the concept mainly to post-colonial states and countries of the Global South and contends that the propagation of alternative norms has to be seen against the countries’ historical background and experiences of marginalization, discrimination, and unfair treatment in an—in their view—Eurocentric international system that takes only insufficient account of the interests of former colonial states. Consequently, Acharya considers the promotion of subsidiary norms to be a merely reactive expression of resistance to hegemonic structures. While he describes the actors as “norm maker” (Acharya 2011: 98), he neither uses the term “norm entrepreneur”, nor does his conception refer to the prototypical use of the concept as described in Chap. 2. For Acharya, the advocacy of norms arises from a purely reactive impulse. Accordingly, actors in post-colonial states formulate subsidiary norms when they regard the norm-promoting efforts of Western liberal norm entrepreneurs as potentially harmful to their autonomy and reject them. Practices of resistance toward norms have also been taken up in work on norm erosion dynamics. Authors have pointed to the role of so-called “norm revision1 As examples of subsidiary norms, Acharya cites sovereignty, territorial integrity, formal equality, non-intervention, and regional autonomy. 4.1 Research on Unconventional Norm Entrepreneurs and Resistance to Norms 75 ists”, “agents of moral regress” (McKeown 2009: 6; Dunne 2007: 270) or “norm challengers” (Rosert and Schirmbeck 2007: 269; Heller et al. 2012: 285), who are conceptualized as antagonists to prototypical norm entrepreneurs. Their actions are seen as aiming to challenge and ultimately undermine those norms that are considered obsolete, or which run counter to their own normative ideas and/or interests, through opposing behavior and/or discursive contestation (for an overview see Heller and Kahl 2013). Mainly, these studies focus on attempts by state actors (often the US Government) to legitimize counter-terrorism policies as “necessary” norm transgressions serving a higher common good (e.g., the antitorture norm or the guarantee of civil liberties) (e.g. Rosert and Schirmbeck 2007; Liese 2009; McKeown 2009; Panke and Petersohn 2012; Jetschke and Liese 2013). Instead of actively propagating alternative norms, these actors are primarily concerned with questioning established norms, shifting their significance, and thus delegitimizing them in the long term (Heller et al. 2012: 286; Heller and Kahl 2013: 415). Lantis (2011) examines the redefinition and shift in the meaning of the norm of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons by the USA. Once a strict advocate of restraint in the area of civilian nuclear cooperation with non-NPT member states, he shows how the USA has changed its argumentation in the mid-2000s by distinguishing between “responsible” technology recipients and norm-breaking pariahs. This rhetorical reinterpretation was cemented in 2008 by a nuclear deal with India, a non-NPT state, even though the US administration subsequently insisted that this had been an exceptional case. In 2016, Alan Bloomfield coined the term “norm antipreneur” (Bloomfield 2016) for actors who aim to prevent the establishment of new norms (e.g., the Responsibility to Protect, R2P) by defending status quo norms (e.g., national sovereignty). Charli Carpenter (2014) took up this notion by arguing that especially powerful actors could try to sabotage emerging norms by reinterpreting them if they saw their interests endangered. As an example, she cites Russia’s military intervention in Georgia and Ukraine: Perhaps Putin intended to demonstrate Russia’s interpretation of the norm by referring to the norm of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). But it was more likely that Russia had deliberately tried to weaken the emergent norm by applying it to a bad example from a Western point of view. Jochen Prantl and Ryoko Nakano (Prantl and Nakano 2011: 214) also refer to the R2P in what they term China’s attempt to contain the norm’s meaning and scope. Regardless of the conceptual differences, all of these actors are primarily concerned with counteracting—possibly also blocking or blighting—the efforts of norm entrepreneurs.2 Clifford Bob (Bob 2012: Chap. 2) investigates such sabotage tactics in his analysis of conflicts between rival activist networks: In order to achieve their goals, they not only exert typical “affirmative” strategies such as persuasion or framing aimed at establishing or supporting the propagated norm (Bob speaks of “policy making”; 2 In practice, however, such efforts might have the opposite effect of strengthening the efforts of norm entrepreneurs, who see themselves obliged to defend the norm (interpretation) that they propagate (Carpenter 2014). 76 4 The Ugly? Rogue States as Norm Entrepreneurs Bob 2012: 16).3 In addition, advocates also use destructive tactics (“unmaking”) to advance their agendas and counteract their rivals and their goals.4 This includes the following attempts: deconstructing the problem definition put forward by the adversary, i.e., denouncing the urgency of the situation, denying the existence of the problem altogether (“unframing”, Bob 2012: 29) or reinterpreting their opponent’s frames (“framejacking”, Bob 2012: 30). Moreover, advocates try to discredit competing networks or institutional platforms chosen by them through staged accusations or scandals: “They [contending groups; CW] despise their adversaries as misguided, self-interested, deceitful, or downright evil” (Bob 2012: 7). In addition to rhetorical interferences such as protest actions or disruption of debates, counteranalysis or counter-initiatives are frequently used tools of activist networks. Rival groups are less interested in reaching political compromises than in “outdoing” their opponents. Such obstructionist policies are also analyzed by other authors: e.g., the tactic of “filibustering”, meaning prolonged speaking, or procedural procrastination/delaying tactics such as excessive debates on the rules of procedure, discussion of voting rules, or deliberately produced lack of quorum by sending unauthorized negotiators in order to lengthen negotiations (Glozman et al. 2014; Junk 2014). To sum up, while efforts have been made to apply the concept of norm entrepreneurship to non-liberal and illiberal actors, most of these studies still do not operate with a systematic conceptualization. In contrast to the literature on social movements, with the exception of Bob (2012) studies of norm entrepreneurship have not yet systematically analyzed such destructive strategies employed by norm advocates. Research on norm contestation and resistance toward norms focuses on the agency that is directed against attempts by prototypical norm entrepreneurs to establish (Western liberal) norms or to maintain or strengthen already established ones. Common to all of these works is the lack of a theoretically founded and systematic comparison of alleged norm antipreneurs and norm entrepreneurs. 4.1.1 Shift of Perspective: “Rogue States”—Norm Breakers or Norm Makers? According to the literature, “rogue states” are mainly to be considered as norm breakers who reject the established normative order by all means. Compliance with norms and in particular norm entrepreneurship of supposedly norm-averse “rogue states”, is, by contrast, regarded as rather unlikely. Against this background, the following alternative explanations for their behavior seem more plausible (from the perspective of liberal norms research): “Rogue states” will try to assert their rejection of the current normative order by resistance in words 3 Consequently, he compares affirmative and negative strategies: constructing/deconstructing problems; network building/unbuilding; activating/deactivating institutions; agenda setting/unsetting; persuasion/dissuasion; promoting/demoting outcomes (Bob 2012: 21–33). 4 While Bob uses the term “negative” strategies, I feel destructive is the more appropriate term. 4.1 Research on Unconventional Norm Entrepreneurs and Resistance to Norms 77 and deeds. At best, they will act as antagonists of norm entrepreneurs and try to undermine established norms, or try to block their diffusion. Being outsiders to the international community, their strategies are not be characterized by restraint, but by resorting to destructive practices designed to undermine existing norms and/or negotiation processes. This type of actor is hereinafter referred to as norm destroyer. It is, however, quite conceivable that “rogue states” may advance subsidiary norms as conceptualized by Acharya (2011): They reject established norms because they perceive them as a threat to their autonomy and counteract them with normative alternatives. In summary, the following (alternative) explanations (AE) for the behavior of “rogue states” in relation to norms can be derived from the literature on norms and “rogue states”: AE 1: “Rogue states” are primarily to be understood as norm breakers. Their actions and rhetoric are aimed at undermining and, if necessary, even destroying the normative order. This includes attempts to block or sabotage efforts of norm diffusion (“rogue states” as destructive forces or antipreneurs). Active norm entrepreneurship by “rogue states” is not to be expected. AE 2: As an expression of their rejection of Western liberal norms, which they perceive as hegemonic interventions in their autonomy, “rogue states” may formulate subsidiary norms. These are conceived as mere counter-proposals to global norms and do not have their own normative impetus. In the empirical part of this book, these alternative explanations are contrasted with the hypothesis that “rogue states” can also be prototypical norm entrepreneurs. AE 1 is an antithesis—should it prove to be valid, my hypothesis must be rejected. The possibility that “rogue states” propagate subsidiary norms in the sense of Acharya does not completely contradict my hypothesis—norm subsidiarity could rather be understood as a type of norm entrepreneurial activity. 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