The Five Hundred Years' Argument

Abstract

Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention. By Neta C Crawford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 466 pp., $85.00 cloth (ISBN 0-521-80244-X), $30.00 paper (ISBN 0-521-00279-6). The end of the Cold War witnessed an impressive growth in the study of the impact of norms on international and domestic politics. The subject matter of the new work typically involved issues that had previously been the provenance of normative philosophers and international lawyers. Issues connected to just war theory and international humanitarian law, such as inhumane weapons and military intervention, received considerable attention (Price 1997; Tannenwald 1999). The broad category of human rights (women's suffrage, antislavery movements, torture, democratization) also figured prominently (Nadelmann 1990; Ron 1997; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Kaufmann and Pape 1999; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999). The focus on such issues in the new scholarship often seemed driven by ethical concerns, but the methods for studying them were fairly conventional and empirical rather than normative. The main innovations came in the theoretical realm, as students of normative change found traditional realist and institutionalist approaches (usually linked under the rubric “rationalist” or “materialist”) lacking in explanatory power. Thus, much of the new work on norms developed constructivist theoretical frameworks and pitted them against rationalist accounts, sometimes finding that a combination of approaches worked best (Katzenstein 1996; Checkel 1997; Thomas 2001). In parallel with the mainly North American constructivist study of norms, a group of German scholars was drawing upon the work of political theorist Jurgen Habermas to produce valuable insights into the effect of “communicative action” on international politics. A number of intrepid bridge-builders have sought to integrate the Habermasian work on argument and persuasion with mainstream constructivist and rationalist approaches, often with promising results (Risse 2000; Checkel 2001; Schimmelfennig 2001). Now, with the publication of Neta Crawford's Argument and Change in World Politics , we have a work that makes a major theoretical advance in …