Tobias Lenz

DOES REGIONALISM DIFFUSE? A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA FOR THE STUDY OF REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

In the post-World War Two era, regional organizations have proliferated. The accompanying literature focuses on analysing the drivers and effects of regionalism, but has, to date, largely neglected a series of puzzling macro-phenomena: the marked spatial and temporal clustering of regional organizations, as well as similarities in their institutional design. This contribution argues that the existing approaches analyse regional organizations primarily as independent phenomena, whose genesis and design are seen as being determined either by dynamics internal to the region itself or by external forces such as powerful hegemons and globalizing pressures. Against this background, this research note argues for the broadening of existing analytical perspectives and sketches a diffusion-oriented research agenda that instead conceives of regional organizations as being interdependent.

EU normative power and regionalism: Ideational diffusion and its limits

The ideational impact captured by Manners’s notion of normative power Europe (NPE) appears most distinct and potentially most consequential in the realm of regionalism. However, empirical research on the topic has been hampered by the focus on EU actorness and methodological difficulties. Drawing on diffusion theory, this article develops conceptual, theoretical and methodological foundations for conceiving NPE as ideational diffusion. It argues that Europe’s ideational influence on regionalism can be fruitfully understood as the largely indirect process by which the EU experience travels to other regions through socialization and emulation. Yet, as structural conditions vary across regions, EU ideational diffusion rarely leads to similar or even comparable institutional practices and outcomes. A choice-orientated approach is proposed for examining these claims empirically, which focuses on specifying the underlying counterfactual: political decisions in regionalism would have been different in the absence of the EU. The article concludes by outlining the analytical and normative promise of the proposed recasting of Manners’s original concept.

Vergleichende Regionalismusforschung und Diffusion: Eine neue Forschungsagenda

The number of regional organizations and regional trade agreements has risen sharply since the 1990s. In its wake, comparative research on regionalism has seen a re- vival. An important strand of this literature asks about the drivers of these developments, but has to date largely neglected a puzzling phenomenon: the similarities between regional organizations in their institutional design and the chosen methods of integration. Existing perspectives analyze different cases of regionalism primarily as phenomena that develop independently of each other, and whose genesis and design are determined either endog- enously by domestic regional dynamics or exogenously by powerful hegemons. Against this background, this article argues for an extension of existing analytical perspectives and sketches a diffusion-oriented research agenda that conceives of regional organizations as interdependent phenomena.

Institutional pioneers in world politics: Regional institution building and the influence of the European Union

What drives processes of institution building within regional international organizations? We challenge those established theories of regionalism, and of institutionalized cooperation more broadly, that treat different organizations as independent phenomena whose evolution is conditioned primarily by internal causal factors. Developing the basic premise of ‘diffusion theory’ — meaning that decision-making is interdependent across organizations — we argue that institutional pioneers, and specifically the European Union, shape regional institution-building processes in a number of discernible ways. We then hypothesize two pathways — active and passive — of European Union influence, and stipulate an endogenous capacity for institutional change as a key scope condition for their operation. Drawing on a new and original data set on the institutional design of 34 regional international organizations in the period from 1950 to 2010, the article finds that: (1) both the intensity of a regional international organization’s structured interaction with the European Union (active influence) and the European Union’s own level of delegation (passive influence) are associated with higher levels of delegation within other regional international organizations; (2) passive European Union influence exerts a larger overall substantive effect than active European Union influence does; and (3) these effects are strongest among those regional international organizations that are based on founding contracts containing open-ended commitments. These findings indicate that the creation and subsequent institutional evolution of the European Union has made a difference to the evolution of institutions in regional international organizations elsewhere, thereby suggesting that existing theories of regionalism are insufficiently able to account for processes of institution building in such contexts.

The identity/policy nexus in European foreign policy

ABSTRACT This article analyses the relationship between identity and foreign policy in the European Union (EU) – a linkage that we term the ‘identity/policy nexus’. Our principal argument is that the collective identity of the EU exerts a systematic yet contingent influence on its foreign policy. We develop this argument in three steps. First, we observe that much of the existing literature under-specifies how identity translates into foreign policy, resulting in a problematic tendency to essentialize the nexus. To remedy this weakness, we propose an inductive approach that empirically traces the political processes constituting the nexus. Second, to facilitate such analysis, we introduce a novel heuristic framework. The framework delineates two translation processes – identity construction and identity operationalization – both of which are conditioned by the political dynamics of the supranational space in which the processes unfold. Finally, we apply this framework to the time period between 1962 and 1975. We observe that the operation of the nexus was characterized by a high degree of contingency. This finding, we suggest, validates an inductive approach to the study of the nexus.

Legitimacy and Institutional Change in International Organizations: A Cognitive Approach

Why are some institutional designs perceived as more legitimate than others, and why is the same institutional design sometimes perceived as legitimacy-enhancing in one setting and not in another? In a world in which most international organisations (IOs) do not fully embody societal values and norms, such as democratic participation and equal treatment, why do legitimacy deficits in some organisations lead to pressure for institutional change while in others they are tolerated? These are important questions given that many analysts have diagnosed a ‘legitimacy crisis’ of IOs, but we argue that existing approaches are ill equipped to answer them. We show that the existing legitimacy literature has an implicit model of institutional change – the congruence model – but that this model has difficulty accounting for important patterns of change and non-change because it lacks microfoundations. We argue that attributions of legitimacy rest on perceptions and this implies the need to investigate the cognitive bases of legitimacy. We introduce a cognitive model of legitimacy and deduce a set of testable propositions to explain the conditions under which legitimacy judgments change and, in turn, produce pressures for institutional change in IOs.

Regionalism and diffusion revisited: From final design towards stages of decision-making

An emerging research programme on diffusion across regional international organisations (RIOs) proposes that decisions taken in one RIO affect decision-making in other RIOs. This work has provided a welcome corrective to endogenously-focused accounts of RIOs. Nevertheless, by focusing on the final design of policies and institutional arrangements, it has been conceptually overly narrow. This has led to a truncated understanding of diffusion’s impact and to an unjustified view of convergence as its primary outcome. Drawing on public policy and sociological research, we offer a conceptual framework that seeks to remedy these weaknesses by disaggregating the decision-making process on the ‘receiving’ side. We suggest that policies and institutional arrangements in RIOs result from three decision-making stages: problematisation (identification of something as a political problem), framing (categorisation of the problem and possible solutions), and scripting (design of final solutions). Diffusion can affect any combination of these stages. Consequently, its effects are more varied and potentially extensive than is currently recognised, and convergence and persistent variation in scripting are both possible outcomes. We illustrate our framework by re-evaluating research on dispute settlement institutions in the EEC, NAFTA, and SADC. We conclude by discussing its theoretical implications and the conditions that likely promote diffusion.

Discovering Cooperation: A Contractual Approach to Institutional Change in Regional International Organizations

This paper offers a fresh perspective on institutional change drawing on recent advances in the economic theory of contracting. Contractual incompleteness enhances organizational flexibility, but only at the cost of perceptual ambiguity. We hypothesize that the willingness to engage in a highly incomplete contract depends on shared understandings which reduce the cost of perceptual ambiguity. These claims are evaluated using a new dataset on delegation of state authority to non-state actors in 35 regional international organizations from 1950 to 2010. We are able to confirm across a wide range of models and specifications that reform is guided by contractual incompleteness and that contractual incompleteness is rooted in shared historical experience.