Domestic Politics and Norm Diffusion in International Relations

Front matter

Domestic Politics and Norm Diffusion in International Relations

Thomas Risse N

Domestic Politics and Norm Diffusion in International Relations

Contents

Sources List of tables and figures Preface

1 Domestic politics and norm diffusion in international relations: An intellectual journey

PARTI From the inside out: The domestic politics of international relations

PART II From the outside in: The international sources of domestic change

5 The socialization of international human rights norms into domestic practices: Introduction (with Kathryn Sikkink; 1999)

6 Conceptualizing the domestic impact of Europe (with Tanja A. Börzel; 2003)

Vil vi Contents

7 European institutions and identity change: What have we learned? (2004)

8 External actors, state-building, and service provision in areas of limited statehood: Introduction (with Stephen D. Krasner; 2014)

PART III In between spaces: Transnational relations and the diffusion of ideas and institutions

9 Ideas do not float freely: Transnational coalitions, domestic structures, and the end of the Cold War (1994)

10 “Let’s argue!”: Communicative action in world politics (2000)

11 From Europeanization to diffusion: Introduction (with Tanja A. Börzel; 2012)

Chapter 7

“Public opinion, domestic structure, and foreign policy in liberal democracies,” World Politics, Vol. 43, No. 4, July 1991, 479-512. Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

“Democratic peace — warlike democracies? A social constructivist interpretation of the liberal argument,” European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1995, 489-515. Reproduced by permission of SAGE Publications Ltd., London, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC. Copyright (© SAGE, 1995). Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

“Collective identity in a democratic community: The case of NATO,” in Peter Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security. Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 357-399. Copyright © 1996 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

(with Kathryn Sikkink) “The socialization of international human rights norms into domestic practices: Introduction,” in Thomas Risse, Stephen S. Ropp, Kathryn Sikkink (eds.), The Power of Human Rights. International Norms and Domestic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1-38. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

(with Tanja A. Börzel) “Conceptualizing the domestic impact of Europe,” in Kevin Featherstone, Claudio M. Radaelli (eds.), The Politics of Europeanisation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 57-80. Free permission co-author’s own material. By permission of Oxford University Press.

“European institutions and identity change: What have we learned?” in Richard Herrmann, Thomas Risse, Marilynn Brewer (eds.), Transnational Identities. Becoming European in the European Union (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 247-271. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

vili Sources

Chapter 11

(with Stephen D. Krasner) “External actors, state-building, and service provision in areas of limited statehood: Introduction,” in Thomas Risse, Stephen D. Krasner (eds.), External Actors, State- Building, and Service Provision in Areas of Limited Statehood. Special Issue of Governance, Vol. 27, No. 4, 2014, 545-567. Reproduced with permission of the publisher. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

“Tdeas do not float freely: Transnational coalitions, domestic structures, and the end of the Cold War,” International Organization, Vol. 48, No. 2, Spring 1994, 185-214. Copyright © 1995 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher and © 1994 by the World Peace Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

““Let’s argue!’: Communicative action in world politics,” International Organization, Vol. 54, No. 1, 2000, 1-39.

© 2000 by the IO Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute

of Technology.

(with Tanja A. Börzel) “From Europeanization to diffusion: Introduction,” West European Politics, Special Issue From Europeanization to Diffusion, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2012, 1-19. Reproduced with permission of the publisher, www.tandfonline.com.

Tables and figures

Tables

2.1 Domestic structures 5.1 The spiral model, dominant actors, and dominant interaction modes 6.1 The different degrees of domestic change 11.1 Diffusion mechanisms following direct influence model 11.2 Emulation: Indirect mechanisms of diffusion 11.3 Theoretical framework

Figures

2.1 Net threat perception of the USSR

2.2 Net support for defense spending

2.3 Policy toward the Soviet Union

5.1 The process of norms socialization

5.2 The “boomerang effect”

5.3 The “spiral model” of human rights change

6.1 The domestic effect of Europeanization

6.2 Two logics of domestic change

8.1 World map: Degrees of statehood

8.2 Service provision and degrees of statehood 2010

8.3 Legitimacy, task complexity, and institutional design 10.1 Three logics of social action

142 163 294 297 302

Preface

Three people were crucial in persuading me to publish this collection of my articles: Federica Bicchi (London School of Economics and Political Science), Mark Pollack (Temple University, Philadelphia), and Tanja A. Börzel (Freie Universität Berlin). Interestingly enough, I came to know all of them in Florence at the European University Institute (EUI) during the mid-to-late 1990s. Fede was one of my first PhD students in Florence; I hired Mark as scientific director of a transatlantic program; and Tanja has been my partner, wife, and collaborator ever since.

Fede, Mark, and Tanja not only talked me into publishing this book, they were also critical in helping me to select the various pieces and in commenting on the introductory chapter. So, a huge thank you to all three of them!

Moreover, Anja Jetschke (University of Göttingen) and Andrea Liese (University of Potsdam), one of my first PhD researchers and postdocs, respectively, organized a workshop, “Re-Reading Risse,” at the occasion of my 60th birthday in Berlin, December 18-19, 2015. This workshop came as a complete surprise to me. I had the honor and pleasure of colleagues discussing and critically commenting on my work, including some of the articles included in this volume. I learned so much from these two days, and I am extremely grateful for the experience.

Last but not least, I want to thank Susan Bergner, Alexandra Kuhles, and Stefan Wiechmann for helping to prepare the manuscript, Sophie Iddamalgoda as the editor at Routledge, Jennifer Bonnar for her project management, Katie Mcllvanie for her very careful copyediting, Francesca Hearn for production editing, and Michael McKeen for preparing the index.

Thomas Risse Berlin, May 2016

1 Domestic politics and norm diffusion in international relations

An intellectual journey

According to Wikipedia, I am a social constructivist who borrows heavily from the work of Jürgen Habermas.’ Yet, I did not start out that way. If one wants to label me at all, I have been a liberal scholar of international relations from the beginning with a heavy emphasis on domestic politics, domestic (institutional) structures, and transnational relations among non-state actors (see chapters 2, 3, 5, and 9, this volume). As a young doctoral student at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, during the 1980s, I worked on the domestic politics of German foreign policy. Thirty years later, I am still interested in domestic politics, state institutions, and the study of governance in “areas of limited statehood” (see chapter 8, this volume; see also Risse 2011).

In that sense, my work has always been at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics focusing on three interrelated themes:

1 “From the inside out”: The domestic politics of international relations. “From the outside in”: The international sources of domestic change.

3 “In between spaces”: Transnational relations and the diffusion of ideas and institutions.

This volume contains a collection of my articles and book chapters from the early 1990s to the mid 2010s. The chapters are ordered according to the three themes above - irrespective of whether they take an explicit social constructivist stance (chapters 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, this volume) or whether they deal with Western democracies, East-West relations, and NATO (chapters 2, 4, 9, this volume), with human rights and the global South (chapters 5 and 8, this volume), or with Europe and comparative regionalism (chapters 6, 7, 11, this volume). However, this introductory chapter is structured differently since it attempts to describe my intellectual journey from the 1980s to the 2010s.” I start with reviewing the intellectual origins of my research on foreign policy, transatlantic relations, and the “democratic peace.” I then discuss my contributions to social constructivist theory-building — the “Habermas” part mentioned previously — and to the diffusion of ideas and international norms, particularly in the human rights domain and with regard to areas of limited statehood. The third part of this chapter focuses on research on Europeanization, European identities, and comparative regionalism. The chapter concludes with some ideas about future research on norm diffusion and the translation of norms into domestic practices of adoption, appropriation and resistance.

Beginnings: Foreign policy analysis, transatlantic relations, and the “democratic peace”

After graduating from the University of Bonn, I started out in the early 1980s as a “missiles and bombs” peace researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF), Germany. At the time, I was privileged to learn from three most inspiring scholars in German International Relations (IR), Ernst-Otto Czempiel, my doctoral supervisor; Gert Krell, my “boss” and friend in the research group on arms dynamics and arms control; and, last not least, Harald Müller, my close friend who guided my research in those days in more than one way. From the beginning, I was interested in the domestic side of foreign policy. I had already written my Master’s thesis at the University of Bonn on the West German foreign policy decision-making process with regard to Ostpolitik and the 1970 German-Polish treaty, which marked Germany’s new détente policy during the Cold War under then-Chancellor Willy Brandt.

Czempiel taught us that we needed to study domestic politics if we wanted to understand U.S. foreign policy (e.g. Czempiel 1979). He also introduced us to the system analytical framework of David Easton and applied it to comparative foreign policy analysis (Easton 1965). My PhD dissertation then served as an attempt to apply Easton’s approach to the study of German security policy (Risse-Kappen 1988a).

I had come to peace research as an activist engaged in a Catholic peace movement, Pax Christi. I also had a background in Catholic theology and ethics from my undergraduate years. My first job at PRIF was part of a larger project on “ethics and security policy” with an emphasis on nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence, which was funded by the German Catholic church (e.g. Böckle and Krell 1984). The early 1980s were exciting times in Germany. Hundred thousands of peace activists gathered at mass rallies against the deployment of U.S. nuclear missiles in Germany and against Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy.

I quickly learned that peace activism and peace research are two different things as a result of which I increasingly distanced myself from the slogans of the peace movement. My PhD was all about analyzing how the demands of the peace movements affected the political positions of the West German political parties and then again the security policy of the Federal Republic with regard to various issue-areas, including nuclear weapons. The demands of the peace movement led to a new West German foreign policy consensus on “common security” and the recognition that unilateral security was not an option in the nuclear age. This shift prepared the ground for the enthusiastic West German reaction to Michal Gorbachev’s new foreign policy of “perestroika” and, thus, in a way for German unification and the peaceful end of the Cold War (Sarotte 2009; see also Risse-Kappen 1991). Chapters 2 and 9 in this volume contain some of the empirical material collected during my dissertation research.

At the same time, and initially as part of my PhD dissertation,’ I process-traced NATO’s nuclear decision-making processes with regard to the 1979 “doubletrack” decision on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) and the subsequent nuclear arms negotiations, which then led to the 1987 INF disarmament treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (Risse-Kappen 1988b). The West German peace movement had blamed the U.S. and particularly Ronald Reagan for NATO’s nuclear policies. In contrast, I demonstrated that then-German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and the Federal Republic in general were crucial for NATO’s decisions at every step of the way and that the West Germans exercised a strong influence on U.S. foreign policy-making, even under President Reagan and throughout the arms control negotiations with the Soviets. These findings had quite an influence on my later work on transatlantic relations.

In 1988, I moved to the U.S., where I spent two years at Cornell University’s Peace Studies Program, followed by another two years at Yale University’s Department of Political Science. My first tenure-track job was at the University of Wyoming in 1992-93. The intellectual impact of each of these places was profound.

Let me start with Cornell where Peter Katzenstein and Richard Ned Lebow became my intellectual mentors — together with a whole group of terrific graduate students who taught me U.S. political science and methods.* Katzenstein’s work was crucial in, first, adding a comparative perspective to my work on German foreign policy and, second, directing me toward studying the embeddedness of domestic politics in political institutions and the structure of state-society relations (see e.g. Katzenstein 1978, 1985). The latter was known at the time as the “domestic structure” approach, which inspired both historical institutionalism and the “varieties of capitalism” perspective (see e.g. Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth 1992; Hall and Taylor 1996; Hall and Soskice 2001).

My first attempt at applying the domestic structure framework and, at the same time, engaging in comparative foreign policy analysis was the 1991 World Politics article (chapter 2, this volume). In short, I argued that domestic structures — various combinations of state-society relations — explain the degree to which societal demands influence foreign policy decisions in liberal democracies. My 1994 article in International Organization (chapter 9, this volume) also uses the domestic structure framework. So does the edited volume on transnational relations which uses domestic structures as the main variable to explain the access and influence of non-state actors on state policies (Risse-Kappen 1995a).

Starting at Cornell, I also continued researching the transatlantic relationship. The INF book led me to conclude that the European influence on U.S. foreign policy might have been greater throughout the Cold War and beyond than conventional wisdom would have it. I decided, therefore, to dig deeper into European- American interactions during the Cold War.

At this point, the Cornell graduate students educated me in what is known today as social constructivism. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, a weekly Peace Studies Program seminar followed by (mostly pizza) dinner took place at the home of some Cornell faculty. We read and discussed the works of Friedrich

Kratochwil, Nicolas Onuf, John Ruggie, Alexander Wendt, and others — sometimes deep into the night (Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986; Wendt 1987; Kratochwil 1989; Onuf 1989).

The other part of my social constructivist education took place at Yale University. From 1988-1990, I was commuting between Ithaca, New York, and New Haven, Connecticut. At Yale, Bruce Russett, whom I knew from my time in Frankfurt since he was a friend of Czempiel, became my mentor.’ Russett has been “Mister Democratic Peace, of course” (see Russett 1993; Russett and Oneal 2001), and a hard-core quantitative scholar. When Russett heard about my interest in transatlantic relations, he suggested that I read Karl W. Deutsch’s work on security communities (Deutsch et al. 1957). The other acquaintance at Yale was Alex Wendt, an assistant professor at the time who was working on the “Anarchy Is What States Make of It” manuscript, one of the defining pieces of social constructivism (Wendt 1992).

Karl Deutsch, the early social constructivist scholarship, and the literature on the “democratic peace” were eye openers for me. I started interpreting NATO not so much as a traditional alliance, but as a security community of liberal democracies. It incorporated a distinctive set of norms of consultation regulating the relationship, which then explained the extraordinarily significant influence of the British and the Germans in particular on U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War (Risse-Kappen 1995b). I used comparative case studies throughout the history of the Cold War to proof my argument empirically (the Korean War, the Suez crisis, the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and — of course — my earlier work on INF). I learned the hard way what it means to go to the archives and to interpret historical sources. While I was trying to make a social constructivist argument, Bob Keohane convinced me in ten-page singlespaced comments that I need to take alternative explanations more seriously, particularly a sophisticated realist account rather than simply Waltzian structural realism (Waltz 1979). A summary of my argument can be found in a chapter in The Culture of National Security volume edited by Katzenstein (Katzenstein 1996; chapter 4, this volume). The book established to a skeptical U.S. IR audience that the study of norms from a constructivist perspective yields significant insights in crucial issues of world politics.

Cooperation Among Democracies (Risse-Kappen 1995b) established me as a scholar of the transatlantic affairs, for better or worse. Almost ten years later, when I had moved on to different topics, the transatlantic crisis following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 renewed my interest in NATO. I got together with G. John Ikenberry and Jeffrey Anderson to put together an edited volume investigating the fundamentals of the transatlantic security community (Anderson, Ikenberry, and Risse 2008). My conclusion at the time was that the security community was still intact but that the European—American relationship was faced with a lingering crisis. At the end of Obama’s second term as President, I have become more pessimistic (Risse 2016). As Adler and Barnett suggested quite some time ago (Adler and Barnett 1998), the norms holding security communities together can actually erode.

During my time as a visiting assistant professor at Yale in the early 1990s, I became exposed to the emerging literature on the “democratic peace” through Russett’s work. Czempiel, my PhD supervisor, had written about democracy and peace already for a long time, but his work had been practically ignored outside Germany (Czempiel 1986; see, however, Czempiel and Rosenau 1992). The empirical evidence became ever more robust that consolidated liberal democracies almost never fight each other. What was lagging behind was the theoretical explanation. Neither Bueno de Mesquita’s argument about the constraining forces of democratic institutions (Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman 1992; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999) nor Russett’s emphasis on the norms of restraint embedded in the political cultures of liberal democracies (Russett 1990, 1993) convinced me. If one wanted to explain the democratic peace, one also had to account for democratic wars. Yet, the prevailing theories at the time emphasized variables that would make democracies peaceful on the monadic rather than the dyadic level. The empirical evidence only supported the latter, while disconfirming that democracies were peaceful in general.

Dissatisfied with the prevailing accounts, I developed a social constructivist interpretation of the “democratic peace,” arguing that elites in liberal democracies take their cues about the peaceful (or aggressive) intentions of their counterparts from their domestic political orders and the degree of transparency and publicity embedded in these orders. Chapter 3 of this volume re-prints my contribution to the literature on the “democratic peace” (for a similar, less constructivist argument see Owen 1994, 1997). Ten years later, Harald Müller at PRIF developed a research program around investigating the dark sides of the “democratic peace,” namely aggressive interventionism of liberal democracies in the post-Cold War era (Müller 2002; Geis, Müller, and Schörnig 2013).

The end of the Cold War: Transnational actors, international norms, and domestic change

In the meantime, a momentous event in the history of the 20th century happened before our eyes, namely the end of the Cold War. The sudden and peaceful end of the division of Europe and of Germany challenged core assumptions of our prevailing IR theories, which simply led us to misperceive what was happening before our eyes. I am no exception. In late 1989 when the Berlin wall was coming down, I published a short piece why German unification was not in the cards any time soon — and I had many good reasons for my judgement (Risse-Kappen 1989).° So, the end of the Cold War was quite a puzzling event in search of explanation.

As a result, Ned Lebow and I began planning a conference at Cornell to probe our IR theories with regard to accounts for the sudden and peaceful end of the East-West conflict (Lebow and Risse-Kappen 1995). My contribution was based on my own experience at PRIF during the 1980s (chapter 9, this volume). I had witnessed first-hand transnational exchanges between West German arms control experts and peace researchers, on the one hand, and Soviet security specialists at various institutes, including the Moscow Institute for World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) and the Institute for US and Canadian Studies (ISKRAN), on the other. Little did we know at the time that the Soviet experts were becoming leading foreign policy advisors to Mikhail Gorbachev. In a way, this piece was my first attempt to write about the diffusion of ideas, and thus, it is located in the third part of this volume.

This piece was about transnational actors and their contribution to the end of the Cold War (for a similar argument about transnational human rights networks see Thomas 2001). Therefore, I thought that it was about time to revive the theme of transnational relations in world politics (Keohane and Nye 1971), which had been all but forgotten by state-centered international relations approaches in the U.S. I organized two workshops at Yale, which resulted in the 1995 Bringing Transnational Relations Back In volume (Risse-Kappen 1995a). We — once again — used a domestic structure approach claiming that differences in political institutions explained both the policy access of transnational actors and their ability to build domestic winning coalitions.

When I returned to Germany in late 1993 to take up a position at the University of Konstanz, the articles and books on domestic structures, transatlantic as well as transnational relations, and the end of the Cold War were either finished or in their final stages. Thus, it was time to move on. So far, most of my research had focused on the “second image,” i.e., liberal approaches to international relations emphasizing domestic politics and structures as well as interconnections among societal actors. The “dependent variables” — so to speak — had been national foreign policies or outcomes on the international (inter-state) level, such as the emergence of new international norms. By the mid-1990s, we sort of knew how to explain national foreign policies or to account for the emergence of international institutions. The “neo-neo” debate was over, and (moderate) social constructivism had become a widely accepted paradigm in IR theories.

But what about the impact of all those international norms? Mostly inspired by the emerging social constructivist work on norms and on socialization (e.g. Finnemore 1996a, b; Checkel 1997), I changed the perspective toward the “second image reversed” (Gourevitch 1978). How and under what conditions do international institutions and the norms embedded in them affect domestic policies as well as domestic structures (political institutions) of states?

This marks the beginning of my scholarship on international human rights (chapter 5, this volume) and on Europeanization (chapter 6, this volume). With regard to human rights and similarly to my earlier work on peace and security, there is a personal history to it. In the early 1970s, I had been one of the founders of our local Amnesty International group in my hometown — together with other high school students. Our activism was heavily influenced by Pinochet’s military coup in Chile in 1973 and by the widespread reports about torture. More than twenty years later, I returned to research on human rights and successfully applied for my first research grant by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), which has funded most of my subsequent research. This and other projects also employed my first graduate students.

In particular, Anja Jetschke (Jetschke 2010) and Hans Peter Schmitz (Schmitz 2006) have to be mentioned here. We started our work with pairwise comparisons of human rights change in North African, Subsaharan African, and Southeast Asian countries (Gränzer 1999; Jetschke 1999; Schmitz 1999).

In this context, I met Kathryn Sikkink for the first time. She was interested in my work on transnational relations, while I was attracted to her research on transnational advocacy networks with Margret Keck (Keck and Sikkink 1998). This encounter led to a long-lasting cooperation. Keck and Sikkink had theorized the “boomerang effect” in their book, arguing that domestic norm change was likely to occur when domestic opposition groups mobilized and linked up with transnational networks so that repressive regimes were somehow “sandwiched” between domestic and transnational pressure. Stephen Ropp, my former colleague from the University of Wyoming and a Latin Americanist, Sikkink, and myself got together and concocted a joint project that resulted in the Power of Human Rights volume (Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999; see chapter 5, this volume). Our final meeting took place in the winter at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, overlooking a herd of 5,000 elk who had migrated down from the Yellowstone National Park. Inside the museum, we reported the findings of our various empirical case studies. We scribbled our findings on a large piece of brown wallpaper on the floor distinguishing various phases of human rights change. Suddenly, Kathryn exclaimed: “This looks like a spiral!” This was the birth of the “spiral model” of human rights change, an attempt to transform the “boomerang effect” into a more dynamic model.

When we started our work on human rights and domestic change, the method of choice for most researchers in this area was qualitative comparative case studies and process-tracing. This changed dramatically over time, when large-n quantitative research entered the human rights scholarship (e.g. Hafner-Burton 2008, 2013; Simmons 2009). For some time, it looked as if qualitative researchers were the “optimists” with regard to the possibility of sustained compliance with human rights norms, while quantitative scholars were the “pessimists” who doubted that ratification of international treaties had any effect on compliance (Hafner-Burton and Ron 2009). Moreover, scholars started to argue that the scholarship of the 1990s was too positive with regard to the effects of transnational mobilization. Human rights backlash became the conventional wisdom in the post-9/11 period (see e.g. Hopgood 2013; Posner 2014). Last not least, Power of Human Rights (PoHR) was still rather state-centric in the sense that we concentrated on national governments as the main perpetrators of human rights violations. But what about human rights violations by non-state actors such as firms or rebel groups?

Thus, in 2009, ten years after PoHR had been published, we met again in Wyoming to take stock of human rights research. This workshop ultimately resulted in an update of PoHR, the Persistent Power of Human Rights (PPoHR) volume (Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 2013). We tried to demonstrate that sophisticated qualitative and quantitative work on human rights yields rather similar results, confirming basic insights of the original “spiral model” (particularly

Simmons 2013). We also suggested that the “spiral model” could deal with rights violations by firms (Deitelhoff and Wolf 2013), rebel groups (Jo and Bryant 2013), and private individuals (Brysk 2013). And we investigated backlash dynamics of great powers such as China (Kinzelbach 2013) or the U.S. under George W. Bush (Sikkink 2013).

As mentioned previously, the beginning of my work on “the second image reversed,” the international sources of domestic change, at the University of Konstanz also concerned my venturing into a new field of empirical inquiry: European integration. It was only natural that I became interested in the European Union (EU) when returning from the U.S. to Europe. Besides, I had to teach a core class on European integration in Konstanz. Since I had not worked on the EU before, I was on a steep learning curve at the time — mostly from bright graduate students whose diploma theses on the EU I supervised (including my later wife, Tanja Börzel, who studied in Konstanz at the time before pursuing her PhD at the European University Institute [EUI]). A 1996 article in the Journal of Common Market Studies (Risse-Kappen 1996) was my first attempt at making sense of the EU. So little did I know about EU scholarship that it did not even occur to me that the title — “Exploring the Nature of the Beast” — was a take on Donald Puchala’s famous article “Of Blind Men, Elephants, and International Integration” (Puchala 1972).

I was not interested in explaining the EU or in engaging in the various debates between neo-functionalism, (liberal) intergovernmentalism, or multi-level governance. Instead, and in parallel to the human rights project, I wanted to know how the European integration process affected domestic politics and institutions in the member states. At a meeting in Chicago in early 1996, I met Jim Caporaso and Maria Green Cowles who were also interested in this question. This led to the book Transforming Europe (Cowles, Caporaso, and Risse 2001). Chapter 6 of this volume summarizes the state of the art of Europeanization research at the beginning of the 2000s. It is co-authored with Tanja Börzel since my work on Europeanization coincided with her own research interests (for similar attempts see Olsen 2002; Featherstone and Radaelli 2003; Radaelli and Pasquier 2006).

My collaboration with Tanja (as well as my dating and later marrying her) started at the EUI, overlooking the city of Florence where I had moved from Konstanz in early 1997. Tanja not only became my partner, but also my closest academic collaborator. We worked together on Europeanization and — more recently — on diffusion and comparative regionalism as well as governance in areas of limited statehood (see the next section). Over the past twenty years, there is nobody else in my life who has had a greater intellectual (and, of course, other) influence on me than Tanja.

Besides, it was virtually impossible to work at the EUI and its Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and NOT to study Europe and the EU. For somebody like me who had just begun research on the EU, the EUI turned out to be a most inspiring place. There is probably no other place in the world where your colleagues and your doctoral students, as well as the many postdocs and visitors, are focusing on Europe and European integration from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.