The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Military Interventions ◽  
Parliamentary Debates ◽  
The Us

According to a widely shared notion, foreign affairs are exempted from democratic politics, i.e., party-political divisions are overcome—and should be overcome—for the sake of a common national interest. This book shows that this is not the case. Examining votes in the US Congress and several European parliaments, the book demonstrates that contestation over foreign affairs is barely different from contestation over domestic politics. Analyses of a new collection of deployment votes, of party manifestos, and of expert survey data show that political parties differ systematically over foreign policy and military interventions in particular. The left/right divide is the best guide to the pattern of party-political contestation: support is weakest at the far left of the spectrum and increases as one moves along the left/right axis to green, social democratic, liberal, and conservative parties; amongst parties of the far right, support is again weaker than amongst parties of the centre. An analysis of parliamentary debates in Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom about the interventions in Afghanistan and against Daesh in Iraq and Syria shows that political parties also differ systematically in how they frame the use of force abroad. For example, parties on the right tend to frame their country’s participation in the US-led missions in terms of national security and national interests whereas parties on the left tend to engage in ‘spiral model thinking’, i.e., they critically reflect on the unintended consequences of the use of force in fuelling the conflicts with the Taliban and Daesh.

Contestation and Politicization of Security and Defence Policy

2020 ◽  
pp. 37-63
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Military Interventions ◽  
Congressional Voting ◽  
Us Congress ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

Votes in parliament reveal the degree to which foreign affairs are contested and politicized. Data from the US Congress since its first session in 1789 confirm the established narrative that foreign affairs have become politicized since the Vietnam War but also qualify the politicization narrative by showing that post-Vietnam levels of contestation are far from unusual if compared to the first 150 years of Congressional voting. While levels of contestation vary, foreign affairs have never been fully exempted from democratic politics. An analysis of voting behaviour in the German and the Dutch parliament confirm that democratic politics does indeed not stop at the water’s edge. A new dataset of deployment votes in eleven countries shows that dissent is also common in votes on military interventions but also highlights differences across countries. In many countries, the government is successful in building a broad coalition in support of the military intervention in question. The rising numbers of deployment votes indicate that military interventions have gained in saliency since the end of the Cold War.

Countering Violent Extremism in Canada and Abroad

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora Abdelrahman Ibrahim
Keyword(s):  
Best Practice ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Significant Development ◽  
The Us ◽  
Violent Extremism ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
The Uk

Terrorism and violent extremism have undoubtedly become among the top security concerns of the 21st century. Despite a robust agenda of counterterrorism since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the evolution of global terrorism has continued to outpace the policy responses that have tried to address it. Recent trends such as the foreign fighter phenomenon, the rampant spread of extremist ideologies online and within communities, and a dramatic increase in terrorist incidents worldwide, have led to a recognition that “traditional” counterterrorism efforts are insufficient and ineffective in combatting these phenomena. Consequently, the focus of policy and practice has shifted towards countering violent extremism by addressing the drivers of radicalization to curb recruitment to extremist groups. Within this context, the field of countering violent extremism (CVE) has garnered attention from both the academic and policy-making worlds. While the CVE field holds promise as a significant development in counterterrorism, its policy and practice are complicated by several challenges that undermine the success of its initiatives. Building resilience to violent extremism is continuously challenged by an overly securitized narrative and unintended consequences of previous policies and practices, including divisive social undercurrents like Islamophobia, xenophobia, and far-right sentiments. These by-products make it increasingly difficult to mobilize a whole of society response that is so critical to the success and sustainability of CVE initiatives. This research project addresses these policy challenges by drawing on the CVE strategies of Canada, the US, the UK, and Denmark to collect best practice and lessons learned in order to outline a way forward. 

Democratic Politics and Foreign Affairs

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-36
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Democratic Peace ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Role Of Government ◽  
Foreign And Security Policy

Whether foreign policy should be exempted from democratic politics has been discussed since the early days of modern democracy. While this debate has oscillated between executive-friendly and democracy-friendly positions, it has neglected the role of political parties as essential actors in democratic decision-making and in providing cues to the public more broadly. Institutionalist and ideational theories of the so-called Democratic Peace in particular have neglected political parties, even though they silently assume that foreign and security policy is a matter of party-political contestation. Therefore, the theoretical framework outlined in this chapter also draws on scholarship in Foreign Policy Analysis that examined the role of ‘government ideology’. It suggests two propositions to inform the empirical analyses, namely 1) that foreign affairs are systematically contested, rather than shielded from democratic politics; 2) that party-political contestation is structured along the left/right dimension.

Conclusions and Outlook

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-154
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Party Positions ◽  
External Relations ◽  
External Events

Summarizing the various findings from the empirical chapters, this chapter concludes that party politics does matter for external relations and that democratic politics does not stop at the water’s edge. However, the concluding chapter discusses a number of caveats and qualifications to this general finding: first, party-political contestation over foreign affairs is often less intense than over domestic politics; second, party positions do not simply translate into state policy when parties enter government; third, party positions develop in interaction with external events, especially if parties are in government. Altogether, party politics is best understood as an independent and thus far understudied factor in explanations of foreign policy that interacts with other domestic politics variables, such as a state’s institutional structure, and international ones, such as a state’s international position or exposure to threats. The conclusion closes with suggestions for further research. (Populist) far-right parties and parties in the ‘Global South’ are identified in particular as areas for future research, as both have barely been studied systematically and both are very likely to have an impact on the liberal international order and world politics more broadly.

scholarly journals Do TJ policies cause backlash? Evidence from street name changes in Spain

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 205316802110585
Author(s):  
Francisco Villamil ◽  
Laia Balcells
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Sensitive Topics ◽  
Electoral Support

Memories of old conflicts often shape domestic politics long after these conflicts end. Contemporary debates about past civil wars and/or repressive regimes in different parts of the world suggest that these are sensitive topics that might increase political polarization, particularly when transitional justice policies are implemented and political parties mobilize discontentment with such policies. One such policy recently debated in Spain is removing public symbols linked to a past civil war and subsequent authoritarian regime (i.e., Francoism). However, the empirical evidence on its impact is still limited. This article attempts to fill this gap by examining the political consequences of street renaming. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we show that the removal of Francoist street names has contributed to an increase of electoral support for a new far-right party, Vox, mainly at the expense of a traditional right-wing conservative party, PP. Our results suggest that revisiting the past can cause a backlash among those ideologically aligned with the perpetrator, and that some political parties can capitalize on this.

Committed Moderates and Uncommitted Extremists: Ideological Leaning and Parties’ Narratives on Military Interventions in Italy

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Luigi Curini ◽  
Valerio Vignoli
Keyword(s):  
Text Analysis ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Analysis Method ◽  
Military Interventions ◽  
Parliamentary Debates ◽  
Strategic Narratives ◽  
Security Operations ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Current research highlights that ideology decisively affects political contestation concerning peace and security operations in European countries. In particular, recent studies suggest that party preferences on this issue follow a curvilinear distribution along the left-right axis, delineating a conflict between moderate and extreme parties. However, the impact of this cleavage on the use of strategic narratives to either support or criticize these missions requires more attention. This article aims to fill this gap by employing seeded latent Dirichlet allocation, a semi-supervised automated text analysis method, to analyze parliamentary debates on Italy's most significant troop deployments between 1994 and 2013. We expect to find that while moderates express a supportive narrative aimed at justifying the use of force, extremists attempt to delegitimize military interventions. Accordingly, we hypothesize that moderate parties emphasize more on the multilateral and humanitarian framework of a mission, while extremist parties focus more on its military means. The empirical findings largely confirm our hypotheses. By means of its method and results, the article contributes both empirically and methodologically to the debate on the party politics of military interventions in Europe.

Liberalism and the democratic peace

2004 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
John MacMillan
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Democratic Peace ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
The Right ◽  
Liberal Imperialism ◽  
The Relationship

Recent trends in Democratic Peace theory have called into question the orthodox ‘separate democratic peace’ position that liberal states are peace-prone only in relations with other liberal states. This article seeks to recast the bases and scope (or parameters) of the relationship between liberalism – primarily left-liberalism – in domestic politics and peace-proneness in foreign affairs, to the effect that whilst this is manifest more broadly than conventionally understood, it is far from universal or undifferentiated. Whilst liberal ‘norms’ – as indicators of the legitimacy of force – are an important factor in determining when liberals will and will not support the use of force, liberals are also shown to have a higher threshold for the use of force than other groups on the mainstream domestic political spectrum (usually to the Right), indicating greater unwillingness to use force. The cases examined are reasonably neutral, not cherry-picked, in that they are drawn from the three major conflicts of the twentieth century and, as a starting point for the examination of liberal imperialism, Gladstone's Second Ministry (1880–1885).Whilst the above findings are presented as highly significant for understanding the character of liberal peace-proneness and an advance on the separate democratic peace position, the argument is necessarily qualified in an effort to reflect the political complexities of the phenomenon and the limitations of liberal norms as an explanatory factor. It is, however, these very qualifications that put the politics back into the research agenda and connect the knowledge claims to a wider body of academic scrutiny which, ultimately, should lead to a fuller understanding of the relationship between liberalism, democracy and peace.

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