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In Germany, the Russian war on Ukraine is widely perceived as a “Zeitenwende,” a watershed moment undermining key foreign policy beliefs. Despite mounting evidence contradicting them, German elites previously failed to adapt core beliefs regarding Russia and the use of force because these beliefs were not only deeply embedded in largely uncontested identity constructions but also shaped the definition of economic interests, which in turn made ideational adaptation more costly. Moreover, Germany’s extraordinarily beneficial geopolitical situation in the post-Cold War era meant that the country could afford not to learn. Although the “Zeitenwende” will trigger significant change, it is unclear which lessons exactly Germans will now be learning and how far that adaptation will go. Given Germany’s key position in Europe and its previous role in shaping the European and transatlantic policy toward Russia, the results of these learning processes will significantly shape the emerging European security order.
Career Pressures and Organizational Evil: A Novel Perspective on the Study of Organized Violence
(2022)
Dictators, rebel commanders, and mafia bosses frequently delegate gruesome and immoral tasks to their subordinates. However, most individuals want to avoid such work. This analytical essay proposes an institutional logic to understand how dictatorships, insurgent organizations, and criminal gangs get their evil work done nonetheless. We argue that common features of organizations produce mundane career pressures that incentivize subordinates to zealously execute reprehensible tasks. Subordinates may come under pressure for six distinct reasons: incompetence, misconduct, origin, isolation, organizational backlog, and shrinkage. Superiors, in turn, can exploit that pressured subordinates hope to improve their prospects for advancement by loyally executing the organization’s evil tasks. Empirically, we illustrate how Nazi Germany utilized each of the suggested career pressures to staff the units in charge of the Holocaust. We highlight that our logic might also apply to less extreme forms of organizational evil. Together, the essay offers a novel perspective to demystify radical behavior in state and non-state organizations with important implications for our understanding of transnational terrorist violence and underworld crimes.
How does witnessing regime atrocities influence the political attitudes of bystanders? We argue that observing regime violence against innocent civilians triggers psychological dissonance between beliefs about the regime and the witnessed moral transgression. As a result, regime support should decrease among bystanders of state atrocities. We analyze original, highly disaggregated archival data from the Nazi death marches at the end of World War II, which confronted ordinary German citizens with the regime’s crimes. We find that locations with higher victim numbers had lower vote shares for right-wing nationalist parties after the war. Supporting our proposed mechanism, we show that (1) this effect was strongest when Nazi crimes were at the center of public discourse and (2) that witnessing Nazi atrocities was associated with individuals’ rejection of Hitler 20 years later. The findings have implications for understanding democratization prospects and people’s nostalgia for fallen autocrats.
Research on postwar peace focuses primarily on how elites and institutions can prevent relapse into civil war. In line with this special issue’s focus on citizens’ experiences, we take a micro-level approach to explore peace beyond the absence of war. We investigate how members of opposing sides experience peace a decade after a decisive victory of the majority. Using original survey data from a representative sample of 2000 respondents in 2018 Sri Lanka, we find that even one decade after the conflict members of the Sinhalese winning majority are consistently more likely to report improvements in peace than Tamils, who were represented by the defeated minority. But the benefit of a “victor’s peace” does not seem to translate into an optimistic outlook of the victorious group, nor does it increase people’s endorsement for repressive state measures. Despite the drastically improved physical security for the defeated ethnic minority since the war, they experience a deterioration in other dimensions of peace. Our findings have important implications for a deeper understanding of variations in peace and reconciliation processes.
Brexit initially raised the prospect of new forms of external differentiation in the European Union (EU), should the United Kingdom continue to participate in a number of the Union’s policy areas. Security and defence was one area where agreement on the terms of UK participation was more likely, given the clear interests of both sides in the development of a close partnership in this area. But agreement has been so difficult to reach, and the final Brexit deal makes no mention of collaboration in foreign, security and defence policy. We argue that the key to understanding this puzzle lies in understanding the politics of differentiated disintegration, of which Brexit is the prime example, and the distinction between strategic and political interests. While strategic interests constitute a driver for external differentiation, the political interests arising from the withdrawal process make it difficult to reach an agreement. Divorcing strategic cooperation from the short-term politics of negotiations is the first step to overcoming the stalemate, and this chapter presents several ways this can be achieved. By perceiving Brexit as a case of differentiated disintegration, this chapter accounts for the significant constraints associated with external differentiation as a mode of integration in the EU.
Research on differentiated integration has flourished in recent years, highlighting the political and efficiency gains to be had from selective participation and third country engagement in EU policy areas. Proposals for an EU-UK security and defence agreement represented a paradigmatic example of differentiated disintegration, for which both strategic and political prospects initially appeared positive, yet which ultimately foundered on the back of the EU’s reluctance to create new third country models and subsequent political upheaval in the UK. This Article asks why these proposals failed and what this can tell us about the politics of differentiated (dis)integration, focusing on the referendum to the recent Ukraine crisis, and drawing on several elite interviews conducted with policymakers in London and Brussels. It shows that while the strategic benefits of differentiation increased following the Brexit vote, the growing concern in Brussels for the precedent set by Brexit, the collapse of issue-specific dynamics into a singular concern for UK “cherry picking”, and the rightward shift in UK politics occasioned by the Brexit negotiations all undermined the prospects for a differentiated outcome in security and defence. The Ukraine crisis, while precipitating significant changes in many European states, had thus far failed to alter the new status quo locked in after Brexit.
Informal groupings have proliferated in EU foreign policy over the past decade, despite the enhanced role of the High Representative tasked with ensuring the coherence of this policy domain under the Lisbon Treaty. This article analyzes how the decision of select EU member states to act on certain policy issues through informal groupings, bypassing the EU framework, affects the High Representative’s room for maneuver. Drawing on the principal-agent model, the emergence of informal groupings is conceptualized as a manifestation of pathological delegation, which undermines High Representative’s role. The findings reveal two factors that may nevertheless increase the agent’s discretion in cases of delegation anomalies: the low heterogeneity of member state preferences toward the informal grouping and the interaction between agents in the same domain, facilitating agent’s performance. By examining agent's discretion when delegation anomalies arise, the article may be useful for scholars investigating delegation and agency in international organizations.
In the summer of 2021 deliberate actions by the Belarusian state authorities led to a huge increase of people irregularly crossing the border from Belarus to Poland. Instead of addressing this humanitarian crisis, the Polish government responded with actions that were in violation of its international obligations and domestic law. Among these measures was carrying out “pushbacks” and grounding them in Polish domestic law. “Pushbacks” are the practice of returning people to the border without assessing their individual situation. The formalization of those practices in 2021 was done within two legal frameworks; one interim and one permanent. They continue to function in parallel while containing different provisions. This article assesses the two frameworks’ compatibility with domestic and international law and concludes that they both violate domestic and international rules. In the context of EU law, the article demonstrates the incompatibility of the two frameworks with the so-called Asylum Procedures Directive and Return Directive. The article urther argues that the pushbacks violate the European Convention of Human Rights and would not fall within the exceptions to the prohibition of collective expulsions.
Both the academic political science literature and the popular discourse are replete with narratives seeking to explain the concurrent rise of income inequality and legislative polarization over the past half century. We focus on a prominent subset of such accounts, which posit the faithful representation of polarizing constituencies as the key causal mechanism linking the two phenomena, and which we therefore refer to as “electoral theories of polarization.” We show, however, that constructing a coherent, causal electoral theory of polarization is substantially more complicated than the literature has appreciated. First, we enumerate the necessary ingredients, with special emphasis on the importance of accounting for electoral geography. Second, we develop a causal framework for assessing the effect of income on polarization via a particular electoral channel, and we propose a set of estimation strategies that researchers may tailor to their particular model of how legislative ideology and partisanship are (co)determined. Third, we apply our framework to evaluate how well a model of self-interested “pocketbook voting” can explain patterns of polarization on the economic dimension observed in the U.S. Senate from 1984 to 2018. We conclude that voters’ private benefit from redistribution is unlikely to be a mechanism linking inequality to polarization.