Global Strategic Engagement by Marchetti Raffaele;

Author:Marchetti, Raffaele;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Framing and the Politics of Norm Change

From the notion of hegemony of Antonio Gramsci to the soft power argument of Joseph Nye, the relevance of ideas in international affairs is nowadays widely accepted. Without doubt, tanks and money are still important elements, however the role of ideas on good and evil is increasingly recognized as a determinant behavioral factor for international political actors.

Ideas matter not only because they provide a motivational push for action, but overall because they shape our understanding of the world and, in so doing, strongly predetermine the understanding and the use of the military and economic power. If this is the case, the key question to be faced to understand international affairs is thus: who are the actors best equipped to influence the battle of ideas beyond boundaries? Here the conventional answers point to a large number of different actors, from religious leaders to epistemic communities, from the NGOs of activists to philanthropic foundations, from the media to social movements, from multinational corporations to transnational local authorities and standard setting bodies.

These actors, because of their presumed independence from governmental interests, are usually considered to be in the best position to promote ideas and to support guiding principles. By contrast, governments, notwithstanding the fact of frequently having more resources, tend to have less credibility because of their politics which is often accused of practicing double standards. This is in the end the reason for which the actors of civil society, as widely understood, are increasingly studied by politicians and consequently by the academic world.

At the center of the action of the new transnational actors there is the construction of transnational networks, generally characterized by the promotion of normative change pursued through the use of transnational campaigns. A typical phenomenon of any transnational process is the sense of instability generated by the emergence of non-institutionalized actors and of new (previously unheard) legitimacy claims in the public sphere. These actors attempt to ameliorate their political and institutional power, with the aim of adjusting it to their social and economic power. These actors who are generally excluded from the international system promote their inclusion in the political system through a number of different strategies that span soft lobbying to hard protest.

In the global public sphere, state-centric visions of international affairs are mixed with new, non-state-centric visions of global politics, producing a complex map of ideological positioning. This has been possible through the partial substitution of the international Westphalian system, in which authority and legitimacy were circumscribed to delimited territorial jurisdictions and interacted only at intergovernmental level. The global public sphere remains a central place in which new dimensions of global legitimacy in contrast to conventional interpretations are developed. This does not necessarily entail that reformist or even revolutionary understanding of global political legitimacy influences political action, however the very possibility of starting a dynamic of normative change makes this global political arena and its idea-based content of great importance for present-day global politics. It is to this global public discourse

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.