Checkel presents the cases of Germany and Ukraine as examples of norm socialization and persuasion, respectively. His cases suggest three different ways institutions influence the compliance process. It should be noted, however, that other explanations for the German and Ukrainian experience exist.
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Moreover, the existence of European understandings favoring inclusive conceptions of citizenship played an important role in the campaign. Yet, exactly how, at the agent level, did this occur? That is, why were social actors complying with normative injunctions? Large parts of the compliance dynamic, in other words, were consistent with key elements of a more enlightened rational-choice argument, where a consequentialist choice mechanism is integrated with a social ontology that allows agents to pursue non-material goals.
A final point about the social sanctioning described here is its apparent lack of effect. Throughout the mids, German policymakers decided not to comply, despite this pressure and mobilization. Minor changes to citizenship and nationality laws were indeed enacted during these years; however, on the key issue of dual citizenship, stasis and lack of change prevailed. Compliance Attained and Regional Norms Triumphant?
Interpreting these changes drives home the importance and necessity of systematically integrating both institutional and counterfactual analysis into studies of compliance. Theoretically, recent events confirm the relevance of my earlier discussion of cognitive priors and role conflict H 6 , with historically constructed and institutionalized ethnic conceptions of German identity clashing with new, emergent and more civic understandings.
The result has been a wide-ranging debate in Germany unlike any -- with the exception of those over the Holocaust -- seen in many years. It is a heated, impassioned and very public disagreement over what it means to be German. For sure, much of the rhetoric is just that: Rhetoric employed strategically in an ongoing political contest. This said, one must still ask: Are not the recent changes compelling evidence of the power of norms to promote compliance, especially through a process of social sanctioning?
Yet, correlation is not causation, and I am skeptical of any strong claims along these lines. For one, the shift in policy also correlates with a dramatic changeover at the elite level. Methodologically, however, it is important to ask the counterfactual: Absent the development of new regional norms and absent domestic social sanctioning, would liberalizing changes to conceptions of citizenship in any case be occurring in a modern industrial democracy such as Germany? That is, would it look like compliance driven by norms when in fact something else was at work?
While the sentiment of the general public is typically anti-immigration, this interest is diffuse; in contrast, the interests of immigrant advocacy groups tend to be concentrated.
Indeed, the very process of exploring the counterfactual helps me sharpen the argument. In particular, I would reconcile the three causal strands identified above -- social sanctioning spurred by regional norms, generational turnover and client politics -- in the following manner.
For one, it is very likely that the SPD election victory and accompanying generational shift simply accelerated a process of change that was already under way, due to the mobilization dynamics sketched earlier. My more general point is that detailed process tracing along with careful consideration of counterfactuals are crucial components of any argument about norm-driven compliance. Analysis of this sort can thus help both constructivists and cognitive regime theorists to delimit more carefully the scope of their explanatory claims, thus stimulating dialogue with theoretical opponents.
Now, perhaps this result is skewed by the absence of a key variable: transnational networks promoting normative change. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Since and, in many cases, long before, human-rights practices in post-Soviet states -- including Ukraine -- have been targeted by a wide range of actors: international organizations such as the CE, OSCE and, more recently, the European Union; numerous international NGOs; and wealthy industrialized democracies who have crafted assistance programs specifically designed to empower new social actors in these transition polities.
Thus, in principle, the network was in place to spur compliance through a process of social sanctioning and mobilization. However, the latter has not occurred. Instead, due primarily to the efforts of a small number of individuals and units within the state, Ukrainian discourse and law on citizenship and rights issues have changed in ways consistent with emerging CE norms on national membership.
In contrast to many other post-Soviet states, Ukraine has moved to create a civic definition of citizenship. This inclusive conception of national identity has helped policymakers craft one of the more liberal minority-rights regimes in the former Soviet area. A decree and a law on national minorities that permit a high degree of cultural autonomy have been promulgated. In addition, civic conceptions of citizenship and minority rights are explicitly embraced in the new constitution adopted in June Compliance and Social Learning.
Four factors were key in promoting this process of compliance. The Commission came to play a major role on citizenship and rights issues; within it, Tarasyuk was a progressive force.
Those who dealt with him described a creative thinker who encouraged subordinates to seek out new ideas and approaches. His own unclear preferences H 5 led him to use the Commission as a vehicle for soliciting a wide range of advice on rights issues within Ukraine as well as from the international community, as it met repeatedly H 3 over the course of two years.
Key conditions were thus in place for processes of persuasion and social learning to play out. Second, the head of the Citizenship Division within the Presidential Administration, turned out, largely by chance, to be a liberal-minded former academic: Petro Chaliy.
Chaliy and those he gathered around him were very open to regional norms and the prescriptions they embodied. Their views mattered because in the top-heavy Ukrainian state, the presidential administration -- even more so than post-Soviet Russia -- plays a dominant role in policymaking. Several components of the minorities law, for example, are modelled on the Council's European Convention on Human Rights.
Process tracing of this sort allows me to move beyond correlations and establish a causal role for Council norms. More important, it reveals the mechanism through which Ukrainian agents came to comply with CE norms: learning.
Tarasyuk and Chaliy are examples of moral entrepreneurs -- individuals open to learning from new norms and willing to promote them. Moreover, the promoters of these norms were not NGOs utilizing a politics of social sanctioning, but regional experts and Ukrainians engaged in a calm dialogue, where exploration and arguing, and not lecturing, were the rule H 8.
Third, pre-existing institutional structure played a central, causal role in promoting compliance via persuasion and social learning. In particular, the autonomous and insulated nature of Ukrainian state institutions, which lessoned the amount of political friction to which administrative elites were exposed, gave agents like Tarasyuk and Chaliy the possibility of learning new preferences on citizenship and minority rights H 4, H 9.
However, a crucial question is why this possibility turned into a reality. What motivated these agents to learn? One factor, readily admitted in interviews was a simple combination of Western coercion and Ukrainian strategic interest.
Yet, this membership was withheld for several years , in a direct attempt to coerce Ukraine into adopting and implementing CE principles. At the same time, this strategic adaptation argument fails to capture important parts of the compliance story. Much of the social learning occurred in and early ; it thus predates Kuchma's election as president in July, , when Ukraine made a strategic decision to seek closer ties with various Western institutions.
At that point, there was thus no consensus on a balancing strategy against Russia, which clearly would have made it in Ukraine's self interest to instrumentally adopt Council norms. Fourth, many of these Ukrainian agents were truly novices, with few deeply ingrained cognitive priors on matters of nationality and citizenship H 6.
Consider Dr. Chaliy in the Presidential Administration. Before taking this position, he was a researcher at the Institute of State and Law of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; his scholarly work focused on constitutional law and local self-governance.
A comparison with post-Soviet Russia is instructive. In contrast, the USSR bequeathed Ukraine a vastly smaller personnel inheritance, as most key decisions during the Soviet period were taken in Moscow. The Non- Role of Social Sanctioning. Moving beyond the elite level, an important issue, from an analytic perspective, is the absence in Ukraine of compliance spurred by social sanctioning.
However, for three reasons such mobilization has failed. One often encounters NGOs that are basically one individual; moreover, even for genuine NGOs, lack of experience and poor networking with like-minded organizations have resulted in many false starts and weakened their ability to mobilize public pressure. Compounding these internal problems is the poorly developed state of the Ukrainian press: Even when NGOs do orchestrate pressure campaigns, the media, due to inexperience, often fails to cover them.
Second, NGOs in Ukraine are operating in a fiscal and political environment that, to say the least, is inhospitable.
On the former, the taxation and incorporation laws currently in effect make it virtually impossible for NGOs to survive -- unless, that is, they engage in commercial activities that consume valuable time and energy. The political setting as well has worsened in recent years, with many NGOs and activists complaining of a growing gap that separates governmental structures from civil society.
The legislature Rada , in particular, reacts very negatively to any overt NGO pressure campaigns. Third, Ukrainian NGOs have a strategic disincentive to engage in social sanctioning activity. With good ties to individuals newly installed in state institutions, it simply makes strategic sense to exploit, instead, these personal contacts, seeking to exert behind-the-scenes influence, via persuasion and social learning.
Unfortunately, this is an unreliable mechanism through which to pursue norm-driven compliance, given the rapid personnel turnover in so many government departments. Correlation, Causation and Counterfactuals. In sum, one has a clear correlation between CE norms and a compliance process driven by persuasion and social learning; this has led to important changes in Ukrainian citizenship and minority rights policy.
Furthermore, process tracing confirms a significant causal role for these regional norms. Nonetheless, to delimit more clearly my explanatory claims it is essential to explore the counterfactual. Specifically, would Ukrainian policy on citizenship and membership be any different in the absence of compliance with CE norms? The weak answer is that, yes, self interest explains why new policies were considered in the first place, but that Council-sponsored norms tell much about their content.
The strong answer begins by observing that a country's objective interest in dealing with minority populations is not always clear -- witness the differing ways in which Croatia, Hungary and Latvia have dealt with minorities within their borders.
Compared to other similarly situated countries with similar problems, Ukraine has reacted with a much more liberal and inclusive conception of minorities' place within the state. This indicates a stronger role for norms in shaping the very definition of interests. None of this is to deny the role that strategic calculation and consequentialist choice mechanisms have played in the compliance dynamics discussed above.
Something else is occurring at the agent level, with elites complying because they have leaned new interests. More generally, the Ukrainian case suggests that recent constructivist studies of norm-driven compliance may have over-emphasized, in causal terms, the role played by a politics of social sanctioning at the expense of a process of social learning.
Involuntary Non-Compliance. If I stopped at this point, Ukraine would appear as the great compliance success story.
However, more recent events paint a different picture and suggest, again, the importance of integrating institutional variables into studies of compliance. However, they had few strategic incentives, given the centralization of state structures and their autonomy from key societal actors, to worry about such matters. As rationalists would correctly predict, the structure of the game had logically led to the selection of certain -- flawed, in this case -- strategies.
An example, taken specifically from the human-rights area, is helpful here. An important step forward for Ukraine and most other post-Soviet states has been elimination of the death penalty. To some Americans, say , this may seem odd; however, in Europe a strong norm against it exists.
Indeed, a prerequisite of CE membership is that states remove death penalty statutes from their judicial codes. In Ukraine, this never actually happened. Instead, several years ago, President Kuchma did the logical thing: He issued a decree -- just like in Soviet times -- announcing a moratorium on executions.
The necessary implementation procedures -- changes to the Ukrainian judicial code, an information campaign to convince a sceptical public why the penalty should be banned, say -- were never fully carried out. In fact, during , Ukraine conducted executions, which, worldwide, was second only to China.
Council officials in Strasbourg, to say the least, are dismayed at this state of affairs, and, more recently, have begun efforts to help Ukraine develop the necessary legal and social implementation mechanisms. Conditionality and Compliance. The last comment highlights an important issue: How the conditionality policy of an international organization affects its strategies to attain compliance.
Many such organizations the EU, NATO or the World Trade Organization, say utilize a rather strict conditionality criterion: An applicant must do x, y and z before attaining membership status, that is, be in nearly full compliance with fundamental regime norms.
In contrast, the Council of Europe has pursued a mixed policy: Once an applicant like Ukraine is deemed to be on the way to full compliance, membership is granted. This policy becomes problematic, however, if new members then become non-compliant. What strategies can be employed to restore compliance? Furthermore, in the case of the CE, countries like Ukraine know the institution has been very reluctant to employ sanctions of this sort, especially once a country has membership status.
Instead, Council officials have thus sought to reinforce the social context of CE membership and have done so through a new, non-public monitoring procedure designed not to sanction, but persuade recalcitrant members to move toward compliance.
For one, it is built around an ongoing series of small, private seminars in Strasbourg H 3, H 4, H 9 that bring together CE bureaucrats, experts and national officials. More important, the central dynamic at these meetings is not finger pointing and shaming, but persuasion and the power of arguments H 7, H 8.
It is worth quoting at length one Council document on how the seminars work. There is thus both an individual and collective recognition that certain situations are not compatible with commitments entered into and that these situations must be changed. They also discover that other member States have had to face similar problems. Exchange of experience can therefore take place to identify ways of dealing with the situation. Council officials claim the seminars have helped persuade several member states to improve instances of non-compliance.
For example, Ukraine and Russia have more recently promulgated new moratoriums on further use of the death penalty. Obviously, such assertions need to be verified through additional process tracing and empirical analysis. The distinguishing feature of the constructivism discussed in this essay is its ontological stance of mutual constitution -- the reproduction of social reality through the interaction of agents and structures.
While this is fine as a meta-theoretical starting point, the devil has been in the details: the practical application of this insight in empirical research. Early work responded to this challenge in a pragmatic and understandable way, adopting a bracketing strategy where one holds agency constant, while exploring its effects on structure and then the reverse.
More recent constructivist studies have restored greater balance to the agent-structure problematic by drawing upon the work of social movement theorists. While my approach faces its own methodological and theoretical challenges, two trends -- in two very different research communities -- suggest it is worth pursuing.
First, a number of constructivists who study international institutions are moving in directions similar to that sketched here, exploring, for example, literatures on learning, persuasion, social influence and Habermasian communicative rationality to better model processes of social interaction. As a point of theoretical departure, this is excellent; however, from an empirical perspective, the challenge is to apply these Habermasian insights in real world settings.
Second and perhaps more surprisingly, researchers who study international institutions from a rational choice perspective are also calling for increased attention to interaction and process. Indeed, in a recent agenda-setting essay, prominent rationalists argued that the study of international institutions faces two key challenges -- specifying in a systematic manner the mechanisms through which they have effects on states, and unpacking the implicit and often underspecified models of domestic politics employed in earlier research on them.
Institutional Analysis. My case studies suggest three different ways in which institutions matter in the compliance process. First, institutional legacies can frustrate the well-intentioned plans of national agents to comply.
This involuntary defection dynamic was clearly at work in my Ukrainian case. Second, the structure of domestic institutions seems to be key in explaining variance in the mechanisms through which compliance occurs. Consider again the German and Ukrainian cases: Ceteris paribus , the relatively insulated nature of Ukrainian institutions increased the likelihood that compliance would be attained via persuasion and learning; likewise, pluralist German institutions made it likely that social sanctioning would play a more important role in the compliance process.
Third, institutions were also causally important at a deeper level. In particular, pre-existing norms were key in affecting agent willingness to comply with the injunctions of emerging European understandings.
The presence of such cognitive priors hindered compliance the one national representative in the Strasbourg case; many elites in the German case , while their absence promoted it through persuasion and learning the noviceness of so many agents in my Ukrainian study.
Consistent with the problem-driven focus of this paper, I should note that these three institutional effects are best captured and explained by differing theoretical tool kits. The first -- involuntary defection -- is one that rational-choice analysts have often highlighted, while the third -- normative structures -- is best theorized through sociological and constructivist approaches.
The second, which is essentially a domestic structures argument, sits somewhat uneasily between rational choice and social constructivist analyses. Thus, one important lesson to draw from these findings is that researchers would do well to cast their nets broadly when asking why social actors comply.
Scope Conditions. That is, when and under what conditions are rationalist as opposed to constructivist methods more appropriate for understanding why social actors comply? To be fair, I have advanced a number of such conditions in this essay: the second and third institutional factors above and my earlier discussion of persuasion and social learning H 1 - H 9. However, more work is required: To take just one example, material power and capabilities are underspecified in my analysis.
Consider again the German and Ukrainian studies, with the latter broadly a case of compliance and the former an instance of non-compliance.
I attributed these outcomes to differing degrees of agent noviceness and domestic institutional insulation; however, power differentials likely played a role as well.
Ukraine is a weak supplicant seeking to join Europe, while Germany is the dominant politico-economic power on that continent. Methodologically, this suggests a way to sharpen my propositions: Extend the analysis to a case where one has novice agents who come from stronger, more powerful states -- say, China or Russia. Despite such difficulties, there are two important reasons for proceeding in a more synthetic direction. First, analytic synthesis is essential if we are to understand fully why social actors comply with norms.
In this essay, I have examined the European human rights regime; a powerful argument has been made that rational choice approaches are necessary and sufficient for explaining why states comply with its injunctions. Yet, my Ukrainian case indicates that compliance at times occurs through dynamics that simply cannot be captured through standard rationalist accounts.
Theoretical pluralism is thus necessary to explain this empirical reality. This shift is seen in forums as diverse as the flagship journal of German IR, regime analysis, the 50th anniversary issue of International Organization and the work of prominent rationalists. Theoretical opponents, in other words, are spending less and less time hurtling meta-theoretical insults at each other, and, more and more, conducting an empirically informed dialogue, where tough issues of process, operationalization and scope are addressed.
Copyright by the American Political Science Association. Special thanks also to Johan P. Olsen for helpful discussions on the issues raised here. The financial support of the Norwegian Research Council is gratefully acknowledged. Box Blindern, Oslo, Norway. Tel: 47 22 85 56 97, Fax: 47 22 85 78 32, E-mail: jeffrey. One recent review identifies the specification of such switching points as a central challenge facing students of norms.
Finnemore and Sikkink , Katzenstein is a good introduction to the first generation modernist constructivism. See Milliken , , passim , for example. On socialization, see Sigel , 1; and Ikenberry and Kupchan , Underdal , 6, passim ; and Joerges and Zuern are excellent definitional introductions to the compliance literature.
Joerges and Zuern , 9. See Joerges and Zuern , ; and Underdal , , respectively. For constructivism, see Adler ; and Ruggie b. On these points, see the excellent discussion in Levy, Young, Zuern , , , Exemplars of the rationalist bargaining literature include Wagner ; and Fearon For critiques, which note how this work systematically brackets both social context and social interaction, see Risse , ; and Schoppa , , See Ernst Haas , chapter 2, passim ; Adler , ; and Ruggie b, , for example.
In the comparative literature, Heclo , , passim , advances similar arguments. Early neo-functionalist work on the EU emphasized social context and interaction, but was marred by serious methodological and theoretical flaws. See Pollack for an excellent discussion. More recent efforts go some way towards correcting these problems -- Joerges and Neyer a, b; Lewis ; Egeberg ; and Eriksen and Fossum , for example.
A similar heuristic approach still dominates in the non-rationalist EU compliance literature. See Checkel c, , , for discussion.
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