Wither Europa Irredenta? Norms in International Politics

Abstract

Irredentism in European Politics: Argumentation, Compromise and Norms. By Markus Kornprobst. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 317 pp., $90.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-5218-9558-3). More than half a century ago Karl W. Deutsch and colleagues (Deutsch, Burrell, Kann, Lee, Lichterman, Lindgren, Loewenheim, and Van Wagenen 1957) elaborated on a question of fundamental importance for students of international politics, namely why some nations seem to entertain “dependable expectations of peaceful change” and thus refrain from the practice of settling disputes with force. It might be argued that Deutsch's original thinking on security communities was limited in that it relied heavily on behavioralist assumptions, but it indirectly presented thought-provoking insights on identity-formation processes “beyond the nation-state” which have served as a source of inspiration for more recent constructivist scholarship in International Relations (IR) (cf. Adler and Barnett 1998; Acharya 2001). Understanding change in international politics was central to Deutsch's thinking on security communities but it did not explore at length and with rigor the role of norms in the politics among nations. Constructivist scholarship has engaged head-on with this problem, and a recent, well-written and highly interesting contribution in this vein is Markus Kornprobst's Irredentism in European Politics . In this book the author identifies an intriguing empirical puzzle related to the demise of European irredentism and the changing practice of settling border disputes. This is a puzzle of both theoretical and practical interest since irredentist conflicts between states tend to be violent as well as long-lasting. Using a five-fold classification scheme, Kornprobst is able to detect a radical change in the pattern of how European states have come to settle their territorial conflicts in the period 1848–2000. Up until World War II numerous wars were fought in Europe over territories “wrongly” belonging to other states and border disputes were usually settled by force or left unresolved. However, the post-World War II (1946–2000) pattern is radically different. At the end of the millennium only one …