Constructivist international relations (IR) scholars have produced a robust literature focusing on the mechanisms and processes that generate norms and rules in world politics. Yet this research agenda has yet to specify how agents understand the means by which they can change rules. Mark Raymond’s new book investigates the origins and dynamics of rule formation and change. He argues that implicit rules establish a social practice of “rule-making, interpretation, and application” (p. 4) that suggests which actors can participate in deliberation about rules and the procedures by which they can do so.
Raymond demonstrates how the practice turn in IR can help us address questions about the emergence of norms and rules. He builds on H. L. A. Hart’s research regarding secondary rules, the socially accepted guidelines that structure how actors negotiate changes to the primary rules that regulate their behavior. Agents’ background knowledge about secondary rules tells them who can engage in rule change and how to do so competently. Intersubjective understandings thereby shape how actors propose rules based on their identities and preexisting procedures for making proposals about how to govern their relations.
In this way, the book extends practice theory’s application beyond specific aspects of world politics (like diplomacy) to the more general phenomenon of argumentation. Agents who master tacit rulemaking procedures are thus more likely to succeed in changing how they relate to each other compared to counterparts who do not. This approach enables Raymond to make constitutive and causal explanations about the process of rule change. Not only do intersubjectively held ideas make possible the modification of rules but they also inform agents’ proposals and the subsequent outcomes of those deliberations. Raymond’s approach further permits us to understand how rule change is possible within the path-dependent parameters of existing knowledge.
Empirically, Raymond relies on qualitative case studies of rulemaking regarding international security issues. These constitute hard cases for his ideational theory since mainstream security scholars assume that material concerns drive state interaction regarding “high politics.” Raymond’s evidence is composed of primary and secondary sources that demonstrate the logic of arguments made by various agents and the presuppositions that generated their claims. By illustrating how states seek each other’s consent to develop new primary rules, he can demonstrate their commitment to rulemaking. Together, these case studies show how his procedural explanation can better explain rule formation than mainstream realist and liberal approaches.
A key thread running through all four cases is how agreement or disagreement about secondary rules shapes the ways in which agents propose primary rules and respond to others’ proposals. In discussing the Concert of Europe, Raymond shows how the system of great power management that emerged after the Napoleonic Wars built on, yet simultaneously deviated from, the rules governing the old eighteenth-century balance of power. The possibility of change was a function of all five powers’ acceptance of secondary rules associated with sovereignty, international law, and diplomacy, as well as the recognition of each other’s right to design agreements that concerned all of Europe. This shared understanding established the terms of debate regarding how and when the Concert of Europe would authorize antirevolutionary intervention. For example, when Tsar Alexander proposed a robust collective security system, Metternich and Castlereagh invoked the Treaty of Chaumont (which already committed the Great Powers to mutual defense) and sovereignty over decision making to rebut his proposal. Given their mastery of preexisting rules, they dominated deliberations on how to realize their new commitment to maintain European order and thereby undermined the claims of their less competent counterparts.
Mastery of rulemaking and interpretation is again decisive in the contemporary case on multilateral deliberations regarding cybersecurity norms. The United States rebuffed Russia’s proposal for a new treaty on cybersecurity by extending the applicability of the Law on Armed Conflict and the law of state responsibility to this new problem. The US interpretation limited its use of information and communication technologies for military purposes while also enabling authoritarian states to invoke sovereignty and contest the relevance of human rights claims. Shared knowledge about the competent manner of international legal claims guided all these proposals and fundamentally shaped the extension of international law to the cyber domain. Mainstream explanations of rules that assume self-interested behavior are unable to explain both the US position and Russian acquiescence to it.
Raymond further demonstrates how agents maintain rule-oriented behavior even when they fundamentally disagree on the procedures for rulemaking. During the War on Terror, both the United States and al-Qaeda justified military action based on secondary rules rooted in their differing cultural and political traditions. Whereas al-Qaeda relied on the procedures of Islamic jurisprudence, the United States relied on the Law of Armed Conflict and the broader corpus of international law while nonetheless seeking to modify those rules to justify unilateralism. The Taliban played the most interesting role in this case because it claimed to act on the basis of both sets of rules, thereby suggesting that rulemaking procedures drawn from different traditions are not mutually exclusive.
However, two particular aspects of the book can be frustrating. The theory chapter argues that a focus on secondary rules can help us establish the scope conditions for the successful activation mechanisms and processes associated with norms, including persuasion and strategic social construction. However, these aspects of norms drop out of the case studies and only reemerge in the conclusion as an avenue for further research. After establishing the reader’s interest in agents’ constraints on the invocation of norms, we are left waiting for Raymond’s next academic project.
Another issue is the problem of compliance with agreed-to secondary rules, evident in the chapter on the emergence of a norm against war embodied in the Locarno and Kellogg-Briand Treaties. The author convincingly argues that Kellogg-Briand was an unintended product of the process of rulemaking grounded in the Versailles settlement, rather than a specific objective of either French or US diplomats. However, the question of rule violation by revisionist states hangs over this case. Although Raymond does illustrate how the revisionist Soviet Union supported the treaty in principle despite being excluded from the negotiations, the reader is left wondering about aggressive forms of revisionism by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the following decade. How do these states justify such radical change in relation to existing secondary and primary rules? How do proposals for rule change vary along with the different types of revisionism? Although US justifications for the War on Terror are made in relation to existing rules, one can only speculate about the relationship between secondary rules and more intense forms of revisionism.
These two concerns do not detract from the broader contribution of Raymond’s work. Given scholars’ heightened interest in the problems of great power competition and hegemonic power transitions, Raymond suggests that we should apply a rule-based approach to these phenomena. He implies that maintaining great power peace is possible despite the increasing diversity of the international system. Further research can explore those factors that enable or inhibit the emergence of basic agreements about secondary rules.
