Advancing the Rule of Law Abroad: Next Generation Reform by Rachel Kleinfeld

Author:Rachel Kleinfeld [Kleinfeld, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Public Policy, Diplomacy, Democracy, Political Ideologies, Social Policy, Political Science
ISBN: 9780870032660
Google: OQmVCwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17472629
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2012-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

Enmeshment: (Indirect Socialization of Elites or Society)

For decades, the U.S. military has forged ties with counterparts in other countries. In Egypt, as democracy protesters took to the streets for weeks in early 2011, it was the Egyptian military that ultimately turned the tide by refusing to fire on its own people. Though the Egyptian military has hardly become a democratic force, did its deep ties with the U.S. armed forces help military leaders come to their historic conclusions? An Indonesian Army Major who had spent a year at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, told his military sponsor that:

The thing that most impressed him about the United States was that “everybody obeys the law.” By that he meant such apparently trivial (to Americans) concepts as stopping at traffic signs, paying taxes voluntarily, accepting traffic tickets, and—most remarkable to Indonesians—that American military officers have no greater authority or power than ordinary civilian citizens.66

Enmeshment is perhaps the least commonly understood method of creating change in another country. But anyone who supports foreign exchange programs understands its logic—by socializing people into another culture, their norms and expectations can be changed—and they return to their own lives with newly opened eyes. In the rule-of-law context, the United States can either enmesh other countries into its own culture, through exchange programs for everyone from military leaders to parliamentarians and university students, or it can undertake a much stronger form of enmeshment by integrating other countries into international institutions—such as NATO or the WTO. Not only do these institutions build cultures of rule-of-law norms among their members, but they also have membership rules that “enmesh” other countries into legal structures that deepen the rule of law. While the EU looks at enmeshment as its main method of catalyzing change, both through integration into the EU itself, and through the creation of other regional groupings from South America to the Middle East, the United States only occasionally conceives of organizations like NATO or the WTO in this light.67 Because American politicians, diplomats, and development professionals rarely think in quite these terms, it’s important to take a deeper dive into understanding this method.

The most robust form of enmeshment ties a country into an international organization with binding rules. There is considerable evidence that this strong form of enmeshment has lasting effects, which seem to spring largely from the diplomacy phase, in which countries must reform to meet membership requirements—a process in which outsiders can legitimately assert real leverage. While arguing for the enlargement of the then-European Community in 1990 to consolidate democracy, Jack Snyder explained the theory of change well:

The favorable political effect comes not just from interdependence, but from the institutional structures and changes in domestic interests that may or may not accompany high levels of interdependence… . The institutionalized, legal character of the relationship would make for predictability, irreversibility, and deeply penetrating effects on the domestic order of the state.68

For the United States and other non-EU countries, the WTO, NATO,

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