Transnational Diffusion: Norms, Ideas, and Policies

Abstract

International interdependence is at the core of the international relations discipline, which is premised upon the fact that states interact with one another and examines the nature, causes, and consequences of different types of cooperative and conflictive interactions. This chapter discusses how international interdependence shapes domestic decision making through transnational diffusion processes. In other words, how are decisions in one country influenced by the international context, and especially by the ideas, norms, and policies displayed or even promoted by other countries and international organizations? This idea has played an important role in international politics for a long time. Consider, for instance, US president Eisenhower’s “falling domino principle,” which expressed the risk that communist regimes would spread rapidly throughout the world: “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.”1 More recently, George W. Bush used a similar argument to justify the second Iraq war: “The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”2 More or less implicitly, the notion that international interdependence is a powerful driver of domestic change is present in many important academic works. For instance, Huntington’s (1991) “third wave of democratization” directly refers to a possible interdependent diffusion

The authors' abstract, as published at the source., 2013 · DOI ↗