Abstract

Emotions have been found to underpin the moral hierarchy of values and beliefs within and among groups by restraining undesirable attitudes and behavior. As such, emotions serve as potential indicators for analyzing whether or not certain norms are still deemed relevant. As Jon Mercer puts it: “One way to test for the presence of norms is to look for emotion”. While the literature in International Relations (IR) generally accepts the emotional underpinnings of norms, there has been strikingly little elaboration of appropriate methods and criteria for studying the link between emotion and norms in IR. In this contribution, I suggest that socialization processes in a security community involve the internalization of appropriate rules of emotional expression or, in short, emotion norms. I propose that emotion norms can be historically traced via the emotional vocabulary and expressive rules derived from the production of texts. To do this, I searched for documents and treaties that serve as canonical texts for the collective self-conception and self-image of the transatlantic security community. As I hope to show, in these texts one can find substantial evidence of emotion norms, which designates these documents as ‘emotional landmarks’ that embody the emotional construction of the transatlantic emotional (security) community.

Highlights

  • How do members of international institutions exercise power and authority when they generally lack formal rules and norms? In this contribution, I argue that international institutions— the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—are composed of emotion norms that set the frame for appropriate interpretations and meanings of emotional performance among its members, and incorporate sociocultural standards into the emotional lives of agents

  • I advanced the argument that social relations between members of a security community resemble an emotional community

  • I sought to demonstrate how security communities are constituted through the development and expression of emotion norms and proposed that emotion norms can be historically traced via the emotional vocabulary and expressive rules derived from the production of texts

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Summary

Introduction

How do members of international institutions exercise power and authority when they generally lack formal rules and norms? In this contribution, I argue that international institutions— the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—are composed of emotion norms that set the frame for appropriate interpretations and meanings of emotional performance among its members, and incorporate sociocultural standards into the emotional lives of agents. Resistance to comply with established emotional conventions challenges the very foundations of such communities and paves the way for undermining and transforming them (Fattah & Fierke, 2009; Hutchison, 2016; Koschut, 2014) Such a communitarian theory of emotions can help unpack and resolve the puzzle of how communities manage and distribute authority and power, when they lack formal or writtendown rules and norms. Rosenwein looks at how emotional communities formed and vanished during the Early Middle Ages and shows how these communities emotionally linked together a particular group of actors through the expression of a particular set of collectively shared emotions While her empirical focus lies on selected emotional communities at a particular point in time, she explicitly formulates her concept as being universally applicable, for all times and cultures including nation-states and the modern world, making it relevant for the study of world politics I suggest some elements that a methodology of emotional communities must entail

Gathering a Dossier of Sources
Establishing Patterns and Meanings
Tracing the Cultural Script
Detecting Change over Time
Tracing the Emotion Norms of the Transatlantic Security Community
Inside Emotion Norm
Outside Emotion Norm
Conclusion
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