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This chapter takes a ‘top-down’ perspective on how European integration and Europeanization more generally affect domestic policies, politics and polities of the member states and beyond. The emerging literature on the topic is used to develop some preliminary hypotheses on the conditions under which domestic change would be expected in response to Europeanization. Various propositions made in the literature are simplified, and topics needing further research are pointed out. The chapter proceeds in the following steps: first, what is meant by the ‘domestic impact’ of Europeanization is specified; second, the concept of ‘misfit’ is developed, and differential empowerment and socialization are distinguished as the two theoretical logics of domestic adaptation to Europe; third, the degree and direction of domestic changes to be expected by the two logics and causal mechanisms are discussed, focusing on the question of whether convergence or divergence is likely. The conclusion offers propositions on how differential empowerment and socialization relate to each other.

This final chapter summarises the findings of the book and relates them to broader debates about internationalisation of markets and domestic institutional reform. It presents a policy analysis approach of market internationalisation and economic institutions that builds on, but develops, second image reversed and comparative institutionalist approaches. The framework put forward differs from these last two by adopting a broader definition of internationalisation, one that includes international policy decisions. It suggests that carriers of internationalisation are not just socio-economic interests but also political and state actors, especially governments. It argues that internationalisation affects national decisions through a broader range of mechanisms than economic efficiency or distributional conflicts, and highlights those mechanisms that feed in directly to the domestic policy process and involve governments. It suggests that nations that represent very different varieties of capitalism can adopt similar sectoral institutions, but that they do so through diverse routes that reflect their domestic politics.

An examination is made of the relationship between the US and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and its successor, the World Trade Organization, addressing the crucial question of the likelihood that the US will exit, or through its behaviour undermine, the multilateral trade organization in favour of regional or bilateral alternatives. It is concluded that the probability of a US‐inspired weakening of the WTO is low, although the incentives for protectionism in the US are strong and growing as a result of globalization and the changing international division of labour. The US domestic political system gives voice to such protectionist interests in international trade policy through a set of administrative and legal remedies that are reinforced by principles such as reciprocity and ‘fair trade’. Countervailing factors to this situation include the growing power of US export interests, the effectiveness of the Executive in deflecting the protectionist tendencies in the US Congress, and the exceptional power and influence of the US over the multilateral regime, in which it is a rule maker rather than a rule taker, enjoying the power to bend the rules selectively to serve its interests. As such, the WTO tends to reflect and reinforce US economic interests, and the US is, therefore, likely to continue in overall terms its efforts to comply with and generally strengthen the multilateral organization, rather than to break away from it.

This chapter summarizes the key findings and discusses the implications of the results for the study of international relations and international trade. It argues that that the decision to enter a preferential trading arrangement (PTA) owes much to domestic politics. Although there are other sources of trade agreements, the domestic political factors uncovered in this study have been vastly neglected. Moreover, the linkages between domestic politics and international institutions, like PTAs, have been underappreciated. Political leaders are highly attuned to their domestic political situation; they take few actions without considering the consequences for domestic politics and their longevity in office. Combining an understanding of their domestic political calculations and their foreign policy behavior may better illuminate the sources of their actions.

Starts by asking where women are in international society. While observing the absence of women from theories of international society, it argues that women are nonetheless present as actors in diplomatic encounters between and among states, and that gender relations have been an integral part of the evolution and expansion of international society. then proceeds to account for the conceptual exclusion of gender in the approaches of the English School of International Relations to international society. It reveals the gender bias behind two core assumptions of international society: i.e. that states are the major actors and that domestic politics are irrelevant in the workings of this interstate society. Ends by considering the future viability of the international society concept given its neglect of gender, arguing that, as a concept, international society risks irrelevance unless it can be revised to account fully for contemporary developments that significantly affect international norms and interstate behaviour.

This chapter discusses how the new terrain of international law is an artifact of a number of indirectly connected decisions: the decision to expand the substantive reach of international law, to embed international legal rules into national legal orders, to expand the extraterritorial enforcement capacity of domestic judges, and to create more international courts with a compulsory jurisdiction and access for nonstate actors to initiate litigation. International law and the prospect of international court (IC) legal review are now creating a global judicialization of politics regarding a growing range of issues. As the various case studies in the book have demonstrated, international courts are now adjudicating issues that used to be entirely subjects of national determination. And their decisions are affecting both domestic and international politics.

This chapter considers the experiences of practitioners who work inside and around the international human rights legal system. Those insider views—many of them from lawyers who have one foot in academia and another in the practical efforts of nongovernmental organizations and international legal bodies—point to many similar findings. They see a system in which legal obligations and membership have expanded much faster than the capacity to yield practical improvements in human rights. According to many of these practitioners, the legal system has been extremely successful at declaring universal values, yet has fallen quite short in practical implementation. The chapter discusses some good news regarding the impact of international treaties and legal customs on constitutions, national law, and domestic politics, as well as some barriers to a more effective human rights legal system; for example, insider politics and underused or ineffective complaints mechanisms.

This chapter explains the book's threefold goal. First, it reveals a paradigm change in creating and using international courts (ICs), leading to the creation of the new international judicial architecture. Second, the book conceptualizes how new-style ICs affect domestic and international politics across countries, courts, cases, and issues. An international court's political influence comes from its authority to say what the law means for the case at hand, its jurisdiction to name violations of international law, and its ability to specify remedies that follow from international legal violations. Finally, the book aims to create nonutopian and thus more realistic expectations for ICs. This research builds on theories developed in the study of domestic courts and uses the presence of similarly designed ICs, of cross-time design changes, and variations in the influence of the same ICs across countries.

Scholars have examined the tempestuous course of French domestic politics between the wars with an eye to explaining what went wrong in the spring of 1940. Two opposing tendencies emerge in literature. The first and oldest leans toward wholesale condemnation of the political system. The second tendency presents a more favourable picture of pre-war and wartime French politics. Scholars argue that following Munich, political divisions gave way to a common determination to resist Germany, if necessary by war. This chapter argues that both tendencies fail to capture the reality of French domestic politics during the late 1930s and 1940s. Political divisions led to France's failure to meet the challenge of war.

This chapter looks back at the question of paradigms in the study of politics, both domestic and international, and global politics. It argues that the paradigms that have been dominant in political science and international relations, although they have served well up to a point, have been undermined by structural developments and patterns of political action over many decades, particularly since the middle of the 20th century and increasingly as we get further into the 21st; what is generally referred to as the process of globalization. What Kuhn called “normal science” is continually being challenged and undermined by a fundamental transformation referred to as “world politics.” World politics not only crosses over between the international and domestic levels of analysis but also involves a process of interaction and semi-fusion of the two supposedly distinct levels which, however uneven and continually evolving, is fundamentally transforming the way we understand how the world works. In attempting to explain globalization, therefore, a new paradigm is needed: transnational neopluralism.

This chapter examines the role of courts in the ability of democratic politicians to support international commitments. Taking a closer look at the domestic political origins of trade disputes is necessary to understand the demand for adjudication. The logic of tied hands and two-level games in bargaining has influenced a large research agenda that brings together analysis of domestic politics and international relations. In particular, existing scholarship highlights the role for domestic politics in the area of trade. The chapter develops hypotheses about how variation in domestic politics affects the demand for use of adjudication in dispute settlement. It also explains how political pressures that shape conditions for liberalization of trade policy also affect trade law enforcement.

This chapter introduces the global debate on IP and presents the core arguments advanced in the book. It begins by placing contemporary global IP debates in the context of long‐standing tensions on IP regulation and the rocky, political road to the conclusion of TRIPS. It then introduces the core elements of variation in developing country approaches to TRIPS implementation, emphasizing variation in timing of IP reforms and in the use of TRIPS flexibilities. The heart of the chapter sets out an analytical framework for explaining TRIPS implementation as a complex political game, involving the interplay of global IP debates, international pressures, and political dynamics within developing countries. The chapter then previews this book's contribution to the international relations literature and global policy debates, and concludes with a note on research methods, sources and the scope of the book.

This chapter begins by identifying a new set of global threats and actual and potential responses, including the EU's use of law to transform new members ‘from the inside-out’. It argues that the future relevance, power, and potential of international law lie in its ability to backstop, strengthen, and compel domestic law and institutions. The chapter then examines the potential pitfalls and dangers of these new functions of international law. Finally, it contrasts its analysis with other recent efforts to blur the boundaries between the international and domestic spheres, noting that what is distinctive about our claim is not the intermingling of two kinds of law, but rather the impact of international law on domestic politics and vice versa.

Examines the role of the US in international financial institutions with particular reference to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Describes the extraordinary influence of the US on these institutions as a function of both formal means (e.g., US financial contributions) and informal practices and conventions that have developed over time, with the informal mechanisms of influence often being more important than the formal ones. However, it is also argued that, notwithstanding the weight of US influence, it would be inaccurate to consider the World Bank and the IMF as mere instruments of US power and policy, and that their remaining credibility and legitimacy rest in part on their ability to create some political distance between themselves and their most powerful state patron. US domestic political conditions are also important. Within the country, the division of authority between Executive and Congress sometimes enhances and at other times constrains US influence; the effective exercise of US power also requires interlocutors in host governments who share the technical mind‐set and ideological predispositions of the US and international financial institutions. The different sections of the chapter: analyse the formal and informal structures of power in the World Bank and IMF; look at the US in relation to the financing, lending decisions, staffing and management of these institutions; and discuss formal power structures and informal exercises of influence.

An examination is made of the evolution of US behaviour in the United Nations Security Council since the 1990s; this behaviour shows an inconsistency born out of a general suspicion of the organization, particularly of its General Assembly, and the author demonstrates that US historical experience of the UN largely explains that suspicion. First provides some evidence of this US inconsistency of behaviour, with reference both to conflict resolution and humanitarian issues. Then goes on to explain the primary influences on this behaviour, arguing that US ambivalence towards the UN has been more affected by struggles over a New International Economic Order in the 1970s and US perceptions of unbalanced UN approaches to the Arab–Israeli dispute than by the end of the cold war. Having made special reference to America's chequered historical experience of the UN, the chapter examines the ways in which negative perceptions of the UN have played out in US domestic politics, particularly since the late 1990s. Finally, America's experience of the UN's expanded post‐cold‐war security agenda is reviewed, noting that the inherent tensions between the promotion of values and the promotion of interests, and the difficulties of relating means to ends, have come sharply to the fore during this period.

This chapter looks into society-related variables, or, in the case of political parties, a variable that mediates between state and society. Conceivably, it is in the domestic political environments that cross-national differences are most likely to be reinforced or reduced depending on the balance of actors, interests, and pressures. A central element of these domestic political systems is the role of electoral competition on the part of political parties vying with one another for votes from mass publics. Political parties and public opinion do not as such determine policy, but they may help to shape policy strategies and preferences over the environment on which governments act. In addition to all these, the willingness of people to abide by norms and regulations for protecting the environment is obviously a significant element in the extent to which any policy strategy is feasible and successful.

This chapter examines the democratic propensity for adjudication by conducting a statistical analysis of the use of adjudication by eighty-one states during the period 1975–2004. It uses the data to explore different dimensions of democratic politics and whether demand for adjudication reflects electoral preference for free trade, legal norms, or accountability mechanisms arising from legislative constraints on executive autonomy. The domestic constraints hypothesis receives support from evidence that states with high checks and balances at home are the most frequent users of adjudication. The chapter also shows that the same dynamic generates a positive correlation between democracy and the likelihood of a state to be targeted as a defendant in World Trade Organization (WTO) disputes. The pattern of trade disputes is shaped by domestic politics in terms of institutions of the complainant and defendant and by geopolitics in terms of alliance relations between trade partners.

This chapter tests the theoretical propositions about domestic politics developed in chapter 2. Using a new dataset, it aims to identify the domestic and international factors that affect a country's decision to join and ratify a preferential trading arrangement (PTA). It reviews whys democratic regimes are especially likely to enter PTAs and why a large number of veto players reduce the odds that a country will join such arrangements. Then, it tests these arguments after accounting for the effects of various other economic and international variables, including those that were of greatest importance in the systemic analysis conducted in chapter 3. The results provide strong support for these claims. Both regime type and veto players significantly influence whether and when states conclude trade agreements.