The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions: Political Parties, Contestation, and Decisions to Use Force Abroad 0198846797, 9780198846796

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The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/5/2020, SPi

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The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions Political Parties, Contestation, and Decisions to Use Force Abroad WOLFGANG WAGNER

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Wolfgang Wagner 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020906501 ISBN 978–0–19–884679–6 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Preface and Acknowledgements My interest in political parties and foreign policy grew the more I studied the role of parliaments as the allegedly most important constraint on imprudent government decisions to use military force. Although I found parliaments to have an— albeit limited—effect on governments’ use of force, the positions and actions of parties in parliament conditioned parliaments’ influence. Studying the actors that populate contemporary democracies was a natural next step in my endeavour to understand what makes states intervene militarily and what could restrain them from doing so. At the beginning of this new line of research, I decided that a research monograph rather than a series of articles would be the ideal way to examine the matter and share the results. Several years later, I feel vindicated, as this booklength study allowed me to go into much more depth than a series of articles would have permitted, both historically as well as in presenting and interpreting the findings. As a field of study, political parties are outside the comfort zone of International Relations scholars like myself. In navigating the field, I benefited enormously from my collaboration with one of its leading scholars: Tapio Raunio at Tampere University. In 2015 and 2017, we brought together scholars from International Relations and Comparative Politics to two workshops on legislatures and foreign policy and on political parties and external relations, and we examined political groups in the European Parliament together. Many insights and ideas for this book originated from this very fruitful cooperation and the many discussions I had with Tapio. The special issue on legislatures and foreign policy that resulted from the 2015 workshop also included a very first pilot study that I had carried out together with Julie Kaarbo, Anna Herranz-Surrallés, and Falk Ostermann. ‘Deploymentvotewatch’, a network of scholars that contributed data on parliamentary deployment votes from a growing number of countries, emerged from this collaboration and has been another source of inspiration for this book. I am grateful to Michael Zürn at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin—the place to be for everyone studying politicization—for hosting me as a visiting scholar for two summers in 2016 and 2017 and to his ‘Global Governance’ unit there for commenting on the very first inroads into this book. Jonathan Zeitlin, Juliet Kaarbo, Brian Rathbun, and Catherine de Vries gave great advice on how to turn my ideas into a proper book proposal.

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I am very much indebted to my colleagues who took the time to read draft chapters and share comments and suggestions: Tapio Raunio, Julie Kaarbo, Anna Geis, Dirk Peters, Michal Onderco, Tim Haesebrouck, Catherine de Vries, Florian Böller, Brian Rathbun, Patrick Mello, Olivier Rozenberg, Stephen Saideman, and Paul Pennings. Draft chapters were presented at the meetings of the German Political Science Association in Frankfurt, of the Dutch-Flemish Political Science Association in Leiden, at the European Initiative for Security Studies in Paris, at the European Workshops in International Studies in Cardiff, at the General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research in Hamburg, at the workshop ‘Political Parties and Foreign Policy’ at the University of Genoa, and at research colloquiums at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the University of Osnabrück, and the European University Institute. I received valuable feedback, especially from Federcia Bicchi, Fabrizio Coticchia, Ben Crum, Silvia d’Amato, Catherine de Vries, Mette Eilstrup Sangiovanni, Catherine Gegout, Philipp Genschel, Hendrik Hegemann, Marijn Hoijtink, Liesbet Hooghe, Ulrich Krotz, David Levine, Gary Marks, Stefano Merlo, Carolyn Moser, Patrick Overeem, Alice Pannier, Ulrich Schneckener, Ursula Schröder, Thijs van Doremalen, Kristine and Remco Vlagsma, and Moritz Weiss. As student assistants, Léa Carty, Petros Dautidis, Martin Hock, and Sophie Hölscher did a fantastic job in coding hundreds of parliamentary speeches; Maartje van de Koppel helped formatting the bibliography and the final manuscript. Thanks to Brigid Laffan and Ulrich Krotz at the European University Institute, I had the privilege to spend the autumn of 2019 in Florence and to finalize the manuscript at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies.

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Contents List of Figures List of Tables List of Abbreviations

1. Introduction and Plan of the Book 1.1 The ‘Neglected Element’: Political Parties and Foreign Affairs 1.2 Which Parties? Which Policies? 1.3 Plan of the Book

ix xi xiii

1 2 6 8

2. Democratic Politics and Foreign Affairs: A Theoretical Framework 2.1 The Normative Debate: The (In)compatibility of Democratic Politics with International Conflict and Security 2.2 Zooming in on the Democratic Politics of International Conflict: The Democratic Peace Debate and Beyond 2.2.1 Democratic Institutions 2.2.2 Liberal Ideas and Political Culture: Ambivalence and Diversity 2.3 Differences Among Democracies and Party-Political Orientation of Government 2.4 Conclusion

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3. Contestation and Politicization of Security and Defence Policy 3.1 Contestation and Politicization 3.2 Methodology 3.3 Long-Term Patterns of Contestation: Congressional Voting between 1789 and 2014 3.4 Foreign, Security, and Defence Policy Votes in Germany and the Netherlands 3.5 Deployment Votes 3.5.1 US Declarations of War and Authorizations to Use Force 3.5.2 Deployment Votes since the End of the Cold War 3.6 Conclusion

37 37 41

4. The Party Politics of Foreign and Security Policy 4.1 Why Political Parties Differ 4.2 How Political Parties Differ: The Left/Right and the ‘New Politics’ Dimensions

64 67

15 20 22 28 31 35

44 50 54 55 59 61

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 4.3 Dimensions of Party-Political Contestation: Evidence from Manifestos, Experts, and Parliamentary Votes 4.3.1 Pro or Against the Military and Security and Defence Policy: Evidence from Party Manifestos 4.3.2 Pro or Against Peace and Security Missions: Evidence from Expert Surveys 4.3.3 Pro or Against Actual Military Deployments: Evidence from Votes in Parliament 4.4 Conclusion

85 95

5. Debating Military Interventions: Party-Specific Arguments and Justifications 5.1 Selecting Countries and Military Missions 5.1.1 Selecting Missions

98 99 99

5.1.1.1 The Military Intervention in Afghanistan 5.1.1.2 Fighting Daesh in Iraq and Syria

5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

5.1.2 Selecting Countries 5.1.2.1 United Kingdom 5.1.2.2 Canada 5.1.2.3 Germany Method Findings Conclusion Technical Appendix

75 76 81

100 103

107 110 112 114 116 119 134 136

6. Conclusions and Outlook 6.1 Party Politics Matters 6.2 Nuancing the Role of Political Parties in Foreign Affairs 6.3 The Democratic Politics of Foreign Affairs 6.4 Policy Implications 6.4.1 Making Space for Transnational Party Politics 6.4.2 The Impact of Politicization 6.5 Directions for Further Research

139 139 141 144 147 147 150 151

References Index

155 173

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List of Figures 3.1 Number and share of external relations votes in the US House of Representatives, 1789–2014 3.2 Number and share of external relations votes in the US Senate, 1789–2014

46 46

3.3 Levels of agreement for external relations votes in the US House of Representatives, 1789–2014 3.4 Levels of agreement for external relations votes in the US Senate, 1789–2014

47 48

3.5 Number of recorded votes per issue area in the German Bundestag, 1949–2015 3.6 Number of recorded votes per issue-area in the Dutch Tweede Kamer, 1995–2015 3.7 Mean agreement index for external relations and other votes in the German Bundestag 3.8 Mean agreement index for external relations and other votes in the Dutch Tweede Kamer 3.9 Share of no-votes and agreement index in Congressional votes authorizing the use of force 3.10 Number of deployment votes over time, 1990–2017

50 51 52 53 55 60

3.11 Agreement index of deployment votes 61 3.12 Agreement index of deployment and other votes 61 4.1 Political parties’ manifesto positions on left/right and on security and defence policy 78 4.2 Political parties’ manifesto positions on gal/tan and on security and defence policy 80 4.3 Political parties’ left/right position and support for peace and security missions, according to expert survey data 83 4.4 Political parties’ gal/tan position and support for peace and security missions, according to expert survey data 84 4.5 Parliamentary votes for military deployments along left/right axis 88 4.6 Parliamentary votes for military deployments along left/right axis per country 90–91 4.7 Parliamentary votes for military deployments along the new politics axis 93 4.8 Parliamentary votes for military deployments along the new politics dimension axis per country 5.1 Argumentative maps of Canada, Germany and the UK

94–95 120

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5.2 Argumentative map for party families 5.3 Argumentative map for left and right parties 6.1 Share of yes-votes of German political parties voting on military deployments, 1990–2019

124 130 143

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List of Tables 5.1 Tests of between-subjects effects 5.2 List of parliamentary debates on Afghanistan mission in Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom 5.3 List of parliamentary debates on fighting Daesh in Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom 5.4 Number of parliamentary speeches in the dataset

133 137–138 138 138

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List of Abbreviations AfD AI ATAKA AWACS CERD CDU CHES CP CPC CSU ESP EU FCC FDP FRN GAL GATT GDP GER HNS ICESCR IHL IPC-CFSP/CSDP IPI ISAF ISIL LGBT MANOVA MARPOR MEP MP NATO NATO-PA NDP NGO NPD OEF OSCE

Alternative for Germany (political party in Germany) Agreement Index Attack (political party in Bulgaria) Airborne Warning and Control System Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination Christian Democratic Union (political party in Germany) Chapel Hill Expert Survey Conservative Party (political party in the United Kingdom) Conservative Party of Canada Christian Social Union (political party in Germany) Spain European Union Federal Constitutional Court Free Democratic Party (political party in Germany) France green/alternative/libertarian General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Gross Domestic Product Germany Croatian People’s Party (political party in Croatia) International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights International Humanitarian Law Interparliamentary Conference for the Common Foreign and Security Policy/Common Security and Defense Policy Interparliamentary Institution International Security Assistance Force Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant Lesbian, Gay, Bisexuals, and Transgender Multivariate Analysis of Variance Manifesto Research on Political Representation Member of the European Parliament Member of Parliament North Atlantic Treaty Organization Parliamentary Assembly of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization New Democratic Party (political party in Canada) Non-Governmental Organization National Democratic Party (political party in Germany) Operation Enduring Freedom Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe

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PASOK PC PDS PDVD PVV R2P RCV SaS SPD SYRIZA TAN UK UKIP UN UNDOF UN SC Res UNIFIL USA

Panhellenic Socialist Movement (political party in Greece) Progressive Party of Canada Party of Democratic Socialists (political party in Germany) Parliamentary Deployment Votes Dataset Partij voor de Vrijheid (political party in the Netherlands) Responsibility to Protect roll call vote Freedom and Solidarity Party (political party in Slovakia) Social Democratic Party of Germany Coalition of the Radical Left (political party in Greece) traditional/authoritarian/nationalist United Kingdom United Kingdom Independence Party (political party in the United Kingdom) United Nations United Nations Disengagement Observer Force United Nations Security Council Resolution United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon United States of America

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1 Introduction and Plan of the Book ‘I no longer know parties’, the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, declared on 1 August 1914 from the balcony of the Berlin City Palace to a cheering crowd (Wehler 2003: 44). Earlier that day, Germany had entered World War I by declaring war on Russia. Although the public mood was a complex mix of euphoria and apprehension, the Emperor’s appeal to overcome party politics worked as intended: on 4 August 1914, the German Reichstag voted unanimously in favour of the first war credit bill. Party political divisions that had characterized the business of the Reichstag in the years before disappeared in the face of war. The notion that foreign and security policy should be exempted from party politics is not unique to the German Emperor, to Prussian militarism or authoritarianism,¹ nor to the early twentieth century. The adoption of the ‘Gulf of Tonkin’ resolution in the US Congress illustrates that appeals to overcome party politics in foreign affairs are also effective in a liberal democracy in the aftermath of World War II: on 7 August 1964, one day after an American destroyer, the USS Maddox, was reported to have been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats, President Johnson asked Congress ‘to join in affirming the national determination that all such attacks will be met, and that the United States will continue in its basic policy of assisting the free nations of the area to defend their freedom’.² Although two Senators voted against the resolution that authorized the escalation of the war, the overwhelming majority in the Senate voted in favour, and the House adopted the resolution unanimously. In the words of Senator Fulbright, essentially the joint resolution is an exhibition of solidarity in regard to the will and determination of this country as a whole, as represented in Congress, to support the broad policies that have been well announced and well described in the words of the President, both recently and in past months. We are exhibiting a ¹ In France’s Third Republic, the French Section of the Worker’s International (SFIO) also chose to support the government and voted for war bonds on the same day as their German counterparts in the Reichstag. President Poincaré had coined the term union sacrée (sacred union) to describe the political truce, according to which the socialists would not call any strikes and instead accepted the invitation to appoint two ministers. ² US Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, 90th Congress, 1st Session, Background Information Relating to Southeast Asia and Vietnam (3rd Revised Edition) (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, July 1967), pp. 120–22. The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions: Political Parties, Contestation, and Decisions to Use Force Abroad. Wolfgang Wagner, Oxford University Press (2020). © Wolfgang Wagner. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846796.001.0001

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      desire to support those policies. That will have a strong psychological effect upon our adversaries wherever they may be (quoted from Gibbons 1986: 328f.).

The idea that national unity contributes to the effectiveness of foreign and security policy and thus ultimately to a common interest is also captured in the famous saying that politics stops at the water’s edge—uttered by one of Fulbright’s predecessors in the chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, Arthur Vandenberg. As a Republican Senator in a Republican-controlled Congress, Vandenberg had reached out to support a Democratic president for the sake of the national interest during the early days of the Cold War. As a norm for policymakers, Vandenberg’s bipartisanship in foreign affairs resonated widely and has been frequently evoked whenever dissenting voices appear to undermine a negotiating position. Yet, the normative appeal to overcome partisanship for the sake of a common interest should not be taken as an accurate description of the empirical reality—which would also make the appeal unnecessary. Examples of parties differing over foreign affairs abound, ranging from negotiating (and ratifying) international trade agreements to sanctions against Russia to selling arms to Saudi Arabia. According to a widely shared perception, party-political contestation of foreign affairs has dramatically increased recently with populist parties at the far-right end (and some at the far-left end) challenging the very foundations of the liberal international order that has evolved after World War II and includes ‘embedded liberalism’, human rights (including the rights of refugees and asylum seekers), arms control agreements, and environmental protection.

1.1 The ‘Neglected Element’: Political Parties and Foreign Affairs Scholars of foreign, security, and defence policy have only mildly protested against the idea that party politics stops at the water’s edge. This is least surprising with a view to the (neo-)realist school of thought that has dominated International Relations theory during the Cold War period. Proponents of this school of thought emphasize the primacy of national interests and structural forces. The public is regarded as ill informed and volatile, and, as Walter Lippmann criticized destructively wrong at the critical junctures. The people have impressed a critical veto upon the judgments of informed and responsible officials. They have compelled the government, which usually knew what would have been wiser, or was necessary, or what was more expedient, to be too late with too little, or too

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long with too much, too pacifist in peace and too bellicose in war, too neutralist or appeasing in negotiations or too intransigent. Mass opinion has acquired mounting power in this country. It has shown itself to be a dangerous master of decision when the stakes are life and death (Lippmann, 1955: 20).

Parliaments and the political parties that populate them fare little better in the realist perspective. According to Rasler and Thompson, ‘decentralising power in the face of threat would seem inefficient and highly dangerous, perhaps even inviting attack’ (2005: 44). In (neo-)realist theorizing, the analytical approach that privileges executives over parliaments, parties, and the public blends with normative arguments according to which executive dominance is highly desirable. A mechanism that strengthens the executive at least in times of crisis is the ‘rally around the flag’ effect, according to which an external threat increases group coherence and silences dissent within the group. Although this mechanism had been identified by sociologists before, the term was coined by the godfather of neorealism, Kenneth Waltz (1967). Although its magnitude and duration have been the subject of ongoing research since, the general proposition that the public tends to rally behind the executive in times of crisis is well established. Others do not share the normative ideal but agree with the description of security and defence policy as executive dominated. Critical security studies scholars argue that ‘securitization’, i.e., the framing of an issue as a matter of security, moves an issue outside the realm of normal, democratic politics (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998). The normative ideal, however, is ‘desecuritization’ ‘since it restores the possibility of exposing the issue to the normal haggling and questioning of politicization’ (Wæver 2000: 251). Securitization theory thus shares with (neo-)realism the notion that dissent and contestation decline in the face of an external threat. However, critical security studies scholars emphasize that an external threat is not simply given but socially constructed by political elites who benefit from this as it bestows extraordinary powers to them to ensure the survival of the group. The normative commitment of critical security studies scholarship therefore is to (re-)open political space for dissent, contestation, and deliberation. Although critical security studies scholarship sees normal democratic politics as its normative ideal it has paid far more attention to processes of securitization than to desecuritization and has left democratic politics by and large under-theorized (see also Aradau 2004). Most surprising is the lack of attention to political parties by foreign policy scholars who accept the importance, if not primacy of domestic politics, especially in the wake of globalization (Verbeek and Zaslove 2015). In the course of the ‘domestic politics turn’ (Kaarbo 2015), ample attention has been paid to public opinion, coalition politics, parliaments, and the media. Political parties, however, have been the ‘neglected element’ (Alden and Aran 2012: 60) in the study of

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domestic politics and foreign affairs.³ To be more precise, individual political parties have been woven into many case studies of a particular state’s security and defence policy, for example when shedding light on the dynamics between coalition partners (Kaarbo 2012); what is lacking, however, is a line of research comparable to those on public opinion or parliaments. The lack of attention for political parties and foreign affairs corresponds to a division of labour between the (sub-)disciplines of political science and comparative politics, on the one hand, and international relations on the other hand. According to established practices in research and teaching, political parties, parliaments, and elections are the home ground of comparative politics, whereas security and defence is the turf of International Relations scholars. Appreciation for cross-disciplinary collaboration notwithstanding, the respective scholarly communities are not free of protectionist instincts that stand in the way of funding and publishing work by scholars whose prime affiliation is with a different subdiscipline. Yet, the disciplinary divide seems particularly impermeable when it comes to political parties, as public opinion or parliaments have become integrated in foreign policy analysis with much more ease than political parties. While there is an abundance of research on the positions of national parties towards economic policy and the welfare state, comparative politics scholars have rarely gone beyond the water’s edge to analyse party behaviour in foreign and security policy. A major exception is the field of European Union politics, which began as a subfield of international relations and foreign policy analysis but has since migrated into the remit of comparative politics. As a consequence, the positions of political parties on issues of European integration have been well documented and their examination has contributed to theory-building in the field of party politics. However, the adoption of policies with regard to the European Union (EU) seems to be as far as students of political parties are prepared to go. To fully understand the disciplinary divide, path dependencies in theorybuilding and in empirical research have to be considered. With a view to theory-building, many comparative politics scholars build on the seminal work of Lipset and Rokkan (1967) and proceed from the assumption that political parties are agents of socio-structural classes that mobilize in order to pursue economic goals (Korpi 1983). This lends plausibility to parties differing over social policies but not over foreign policy. With a view to empirical research, in the founding period of the discipline, American and, to a lesser extent, British foreign policy has been the most important reference point in foreign policy ³ The Oxford Research Encyclopedia on Foreign Policy (which is part of the Research Encyclopedia of Politics) has entries on ‘public opinion’, ‘democratic domestic institutions’, ‘parliaments’, ‘coalition politics’, as well as ‘domestic politics and foreign policy’ in general, but none in political parties and foreign policy. However, the entry on ‘populism in foreign policy’ (Chryssogelos 2017a) includes a discussion on populist parties.

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analysis and the most obvious yardstick against which theories are evaluated. Since both countries have been prime examples of two-party systems throughout most of their history, foreign policy theories have been developed with a view to political systems in which political parties are characterized by high levels of internal pluralism. What is more, party discipline in the presidential system of the US is low, as the government does not depend directly on a majority in Congress to stay in power. In crucial periods of American and British foreign policy, caucuses within a political party, cross-party coalitions, or even individual parliamentarians have been a more obvious object of empirical inquiry (see for example the discussions in MacMillan 1998). For the founding generation in Foreign Policy Analysis, political parties were not an obvious starting point. With a view to International Relations, Angelos-Stylianos Chryssogelos muses that the lack of attention to political parties is ‘perhaps because the analytical turn to domestic affairs coincided with the empirical novelty of the rise of sub-state and transnational actors like NGOs, epistemic communities etc’ (Chryssogelos 2012: 6). This book closes this gap by systematically analysing political parties in foreign, security, and defence policy. ‘Systematically’ means going beyond individual cases in order to explore discernible patterns. Whether such patterns are universal or differ across regions and time periods is part of this investigation. Two questions are at the centre of this book, namely 1) to what extent is foreign, security, and defence politics exempted from party politics? and 2) how is party-political contestation in foreign, security, and defence politics structured? The first question echoes the more general question of whether foreign, security, and defence politics is—and should be—exempted from democratic politics. Since the eighteenth century, when war and treaty-making powers were discussed in the constitutional conventions in Paris and Philadelphia, this question was on the agenda of democratic politics and political theory. After political theorists and philosophers had dominated the debate in its first two centuries, the period since the 1980s saw a wave of empirical studies examining the claim that external relations differ from domestic politics when it comes to public opinion, coalition politics, or legislative-executive relations. Normative and empirical arguments, however, were never strictly separated, as political philosophers referred to contemporary events to buttress their normative claims while scholars of international relations and foreign policy often saw their empirical studies as a contribution to a more prudent foreign policy and a more peaceful world. I will discuss these debates in much more depth in the next chapter. I will show that the debate’s centre of gravity has swung back and forth between executive-friendly and executive-critical positions and that no consensus has emerged as to whether foreign affairs is or should be shielded from democratic politics. This book contributes to these debates by systematically analysing whether foreign, security, and defence politics has been exempted from party politics. The findings,

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however, have also normative relevance: if political parties promote different foreign, security, and defence policies, a key ingredient for democratic scrutiny and accountability is in place and supports the normative position that democratic politics extends to foreign affairs. The debate about democratic politics and foreign affairs tends to dichotomize the issue under investigation and to contrast the total absence of democratic politics with its immaculate presence. In contrast, I propose to examine to what extent foreign, security, and defence politics has been exempted from democratic politics and party politics in particular. The systematic analysis that this book undertakes allows us to move beyond anecdotal evidence that either supports or disconfirms a party-political dimension to foreign affairs and instead examines to what extent and under which circumstances party politics extends to foreign relations. As I will show in chapter 3, my findings indeed suggest that party politics of foreign affairs is a matter of degree: party politics does not stop at the water’s edge, yet party political-contestation over foreign affairs tends to be less pronounced than over domestic politics. The second question presupposes that foreign, security, and defence politics is not entirely exempted from party politics and zooms in on how foreign affairs are contested amongst political parties. The underlying assumption is that parties do not adopt positions on foreign affairs randomly and ad hoc but tend to do so in a predictable way that reflects their general political standing—just as they do on other issues such as the economy, the welfare state, environmental politics, or European integration. Of course, any particular party’s position on an foreign affairs issue also depends on factors that are unique to the party in question, the party system in which it operates, and its country’s history, political culture, and international environment. Yes, the second question aims at detecting patterns beneath this surface of idiosyncrasies. This requires insight into how differences over foreign affairs relate to other differences and thus to the dimensions along which contestation is structured.

1.2 Which Parties? Which Policies? Although political parties are ubiquitous, there is no single, commonly accepted definition. Different conceptualizations emphasize either their purpose (i.e., ‘gaining control over governmental power’ (Huckshorn 1984: 10)), their organization (i.e., the degree of internal hierarchy and the rules and procedures for electing their leadership, adopting programmes, and being held accountable by their members) or the methods of competition (i.e., in open and fair elections). For the purposes of this book, political parties’ organizational structure is least relevant. Whether a party has emerged from a broad social movement (as most social democratic parties and later green parties did) or has no more than a single

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member (as the Dutch ‘Party for Freedom’) does not matter in the context of this book. With a view to the first research question, it is essential that parties compete with each other in free elections because the extent to which foreign, security, and defence politics is exempted from party politics cannot be established in a oneparty state or a political system that outlaws the establishment of parties outside a narrowly defined ideological corridor. The book’s remit is democratic politics and therefore parties are conceptualized as organizations that compete in free elections. In fact, the process of competition is more important than the aim of gaining control over governmental power. Some parties may not stand a chance of coming even close to governmental power, yet they contribute to the diversity of opinions in the public sphere and thus to contestation. The empirical analyses in this book make use of a variety of data that differ in how broad they define the issue area in question. At one extreme, a collection of roll call votes in the German Bundestag includes all issues under the remit of the foreign affairs committee, which also covers European Union policies. At the other extreme, a collection of deployment votes in eleven countries is limited to decisions to send armed forces abroad. Wherever possible, the analyses zoom in on the foreign and security policy and military interventions in particular because decisions on the use of force are at the core of foreign and security policy. If decisions to militarily intervene are contested amongst political parties, we can safely conclude that party politics does not stop at the water’s edge. In contrast, if there is evidence of contestation over a reform of the European Union, we should not jump to the conclusion that foreign, security, and defence policies are not exempted from party politics. The data also differ with a view to whether political parties are conceptualized as unitary actors. The manifesto project only includes documents that ‘reflect the position of the whole party’ (Merz and Regel 2013: 149), thus treating parties as unitary actors. The Chapel Hill Expert Survey includes one question on internal dissent or conflict in the party on the survey’s main issue of interest: European integration. This item shows that the survey method does not need to assume unitary actorness and instead can turn the degree of party unity into an object of inquiry. However, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey has only done so for European integration and not for the item of interest here: international security. For this and most other items, parties are de facto treated as unitary actors. In contrast, parliamentary voting data always also report degrees of party unity, although not for all party members but only for those representing the party in parliament. Of course, party discipline is a common feature of contemporary democratic politics and may gloss over the actual extent of intra-party dissent. As the analyses in this book show, however, intra-party dissent on military missions is not uncommon, also because deployment decisions are considered questions of conscience in many parties and are thus exempted from party discipline. Taken together, the data used in this book differ in either assuming that parties are

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     

unitary actors (manifesto project and Chapel Hill Expert Survey) or enabling us to gauge the degree of intra-party dissent (parliamentary voting data). This diversity is useful as political parties are both: organizations with a considerable degree of internal pluralism, on the one hand, and strong incentives to appear united to the outside world and the electorate in particular, on the other hand. In a similar vein, the empirical analyses in this book zoom in and out of different time periods and regions, following the coverage of various datasets. At one extreme, a dataset on roll call votes in Congress covers the entire period between 1789 and 2016. At the other extreme, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey gathered data on political parties’ positions regarding military interventions in two rounds in 2010 and 2014. Data on party platforms fall between these extremes by covering the period since the end of World War II. At the same time, the party manifesto data are the most comprehensive in terms of geographical coverage, providing information on manifestos in more than fifty countries. What makes the manifesto data also particularly valuable is their coverage of non-European and non-North American countries such as Japan, South Korea, Sri Lanka, or South Africa. The manifesto data therefore allow insights into the degree of universality of any detected pattern. Other datasets only include European and North American countries or only a single country. A final set of differences concerns methods of collecting data, which include document analyses, expert surveys, and voting data, which will be discussed in more depth when the datasets are introduced in chapters 3 and 4. Taken together, the various data sources and their differences with a view to time periods, geographical coverage, and the conceptualization of the issue area allow for a comprehensive triangulation of the issue under discussion.

1.3 Plan of the Book Given the manifold ad hoc references to particular political parties in case studies of individual countries, it seems safe to assume a general interest in a systematic analysis of political parties and foreign affairs. As I will argue in chapter 2, however, political parties are not only interesting in and of themselves but are of particular relevance for one of the most prominent recent debates in International Relations, Foreign Policy Analysis, and conflict studies: the socalled Democratic Peace debate. This debate is often understood narrowly to be about whether and why there have been (almost) no wars among liberal democracies. Although the significance of this non-trivial finding is beyond doubt, a more fruitful understanding of the Democratic Peace debate is to conceive of it as a research programme about ‘democratic distinctiveness’ (Owen 2004) that examines to what extent and why liberal democracies differ from other states as well as amongst themselves in a broad range of policies, including war-making,

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cooperation, trade, aid, etc. In the course of the Democratic Peace debate and the ensuing democratic distinctiveness programme, the theoretical foundations and the causal mechanisms linking domestic politics to international peace have been explored and elaborated. These theories of democratic politics and foreign and security policy provide the theoretical framework of this book. As I will show in chapter 2, the two most prominent lines of Democratic Peace theorizing both imply a role for political parties, but scholars have thus far stopped short of spelling it out and examining it empirically. The first proposition that is introduced in chapter 2 and will guide the empirical analyses in the subsequent chapters makes explicit what Democratic Peace theorizing has assumed, rather than theorized. It states that foreign, security, and defence policy is systematically contested among political parties. A second proposition that chapter 2 introduces states that the left/right dimension structures party-political contestation. As I will show in chapter 2, this proposition builds on studies in foreign policy analysis that incorporated government’s left/right orientation into multivariate models of explaining the use of force and international cooperation. Chapters 3 to 5 present the empirical findings of the book. The third chapter addresses the first main research question: to what extent is foreign, security, and defence politics exempted from party politics? In order to answer this question, I examine the salience of foreign affairs for political parties as well as the degree of contestation amongst them. Voting data are used to assess the share of foreign affairs in the business of parties in parliament. I then introduce an agreement index that has been developed to quantify the degree of cohesion of political groups within parliament. I argue that the agreement index can also be used to quantify the degree of contestation among political parties and indeed does a much better job in measuring party-political contestation than previously used indicators such as bipartisanship. I find that foreign affairs are clearly not exempted from party politics. Foreign affairs account for a significant—and in the case of deployment votes—growing number of parliamentary votes. Most importantly, political parties clearly disagree about a country’s desired course in international affairs. At the same time, however, the level of disagreement over foreign affairs is often lower than over domestic politics. Although party politics does not stop at the water’s edge, it does change its nature and becomes less controversial. The normative expectation to put party interests behind national ones has some appeal, although it does not suffice to stifle party politics entirely. Chapter 3 also discusses variation across time and space: party-political contestation of deployment decisions since the end of the Cold War, for example, are much more contested in the US and the UK than in Spain, Finland, or Belgium. Congressional roll call votes that cover American politics since 1789 show that foreign affairs were less contested in the period between World War II and the Vietnam War than in most other periods

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     

before and after. Recent scholarship about a politicization of international politics is correct to point out that party-political contestation has increased over the last couple of decades, but it underestimates the extent to which the period between World War II and the Vietnam War was an exception in the first place and how controversial foreign affairs had been in the period before World War II. The second main research question—how is party-political contestation in foreign, security, and defence politics structured?—is addressed in chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 introduces the two main dimensions along which differences among political parties are plausibly structured: the left/right dimension and a ‘new politics’ dimension that pits green/alternative/libertarian (gal) parties against traditional/authoritarian/nationalist (tan) ones. Data on party manifestos, expert survey data, and deployment votes are examined to detect patterns of partypolitical contestation. As I will show, the main findings are robust across different datasets and thus time periods and countries covered: First, party-political contestation of the military and its interventions follows first and foremost a left/right logic and to a lesser extent the logic of ‘new politics’. This pattern can be found in party manifestos, expert assessments, and parliamentary voting behaviour. In contrast to many previous studies that assumed a dichotomous or linear relationship between left/right and military interventions, my analyses show that the relationship is curvilinear: opposition against the military in general and to the use of force in particular is strongest among parties of the radical left and weakest at the centre right. The radical right is less supportive than the centre right but more so than the radical left. Second, support for the military and its interventions is also related to the ‘new politics’ dimension. Across the data sources analysed above, however, the relationship is weaker when compared to the left/right dimension. Again, the relationship is curvilinear, with opposition coming from both the gal and the tan pole. Thus, the most green/alternative/libertarian and the most traditional/authoritarian/nationalist parties tend to be most reluctant to support military interventions; support comes from the centre of this political spectrum in particular. Third, a disaggregation across regions reveals interesting differences: partypolitical contestation of military missions in the post-Communist party systems in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe follows a different pattern than elsewhere. In the post-Communist party systems, the relationship between left/ right and support of military interventions is weaker. The relationship with the new politics dimension is either weak (in case of the manifesto data) or points in the opposite direction as in Western Europe: in the post-Communist party systems, traditional/authoritarian/nationalist parties tend to oppose military missions whereas the green/alternative/libertarian parties tend to support them. It is important to note, however, that the influence of the left/right dimension is not limited to Western Europe. As the manifestos of various non-European countries show, the correlation can also be found in Asia, Oceania, Africa, and Latin America.

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Chapter 5 continues the analysis of the second main research question but does so by zooming (back) in on the issue of military intervention and on only three countries: Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Whereas chapter 4 studies parties’ positions, chapter 5 examines the underlying rationale. Specifically, the chapter introduces a dataset of more than a thousand speeches in the parliaments of Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany during debates about the military interventions in Afghanistan and the fight against Daesh. The three countries are all liberal-democratic NATO members that have participated in both missions, but they include ‘militant’ and ‘pacifist’ democracies (Müller 2004). Every speech is coded for the presence of eight frames, i.e., eight ways to approach the issue of using armed force. Parliamentarians are coded for justifying or criticizing military interventions in terms of 1) universalism/humanitarianism, 2) national interest and security, 3) international law, 4) spiral model thinking, 5) democratic accountability, 6) enemy image, 7) multilateralism and alliances, and 8) national identity and role conception. The intervention in Afghanistan and the fight against Daesh blend a plurality of justifications ranging from self-defence to humanitarian intervention. Therefore, they do not come with a particular bias towards any of the eight frames. The analyses show that the use of frames is patterned along party-political lines. For example, ‘spiral model thinking’, i.e., a critical reflection on the unintended consequences of the West’s military actions, is a trademark of left and particularly radical left parties. In this view, the death of civilians and an appearance as an occupying power all contribute to the strengthening of the Taliban and Daesh respectively. In contrast, the invocation of enemy images is far more frequent among MPs from right parties. Furthermore, the analyses confirm the expectation that international law resonates in particular with the left whose internationalism has a long tradition that reaches back to the Socialist International of the late 19th and early 20th century. In contrast, conservative politicians tend to assess military interventions against the yardstick of a national interest and of national security. Chapter 5 concludes with a MANOVA analysis that quantifies the effects of an MP’s nationality, party affiliation, and being in government or opposition. The analysis shows that all three predictors impact on some of the frames being used. The strongest predictor, however, is an MP’s affiliation with one of the party families. In other words, party politics is a more powerful guide to deciphering debates about military interventions than national interest or culture! Taken together, the three empirical chapters clearly show that party politics does not stop at the water’s edge. Foreign, security, and defence policies are not exempted from the core mechanism of democratic politics: party-political contestation. My analyses confirm previous studies in finding the party politics of foreign affairs to be structured along the left/right dimension, but they also refine previous scholarship in highlighting the curvilinear relationship between the left/ right dimension and foreign policy positions.

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     

With a view to recent debates about the politicization of international politics (Zürn 2018), the analyses in this book remind us that foreign affairs have hardly ever been uncontested, despite political appeals to the contrary and although one might be tempted to think otherwise if one compares current levels of contestation with those of the 1950s and 1960s. Whereas politicization scholarship has mostly focused on trade, human rights, public health, and the environment, this book demonstrates that contestation is not limited to the soft edges of international politics but also includes the traditional hard core of foreign, security, and defence politics. Conceiving of foreign affairs as party politics reintroduces politics into a key area of public policy, namely a country’s relations with the outside world. The concluding chapter 6 situates the findings in a broader perspective. First, it draws on second-image-reverse theorizing (Gourevitch 1978) to nuance the book’s main finding: although there is ample evidence that party politics matters in foreign policymaking, a country’s position in the international system and its exposure to external threats remain influential and impact on the positions and behaviour of political parties. Second, it points out how party politics complements the study of democratic institutions, particularly parliaments, which remain empty shells without the agency of political parties. What is more, party politics also adds to understanding the emergence and developments of democratic institutions, e.g., parliament’s role in foreign policy decision-making, as parties often differ in their preferences over institutions and procedures as a result of their preferences over policy. Chapter 6 closes with a discussion of policy implications and suggestions for future research.

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2 Democratic Politics and Foreign Affairs A Theoretical Framework

The question whether democratic politics stops—and should stop—at the water’s edge or extends into the realm of international politics has been a matter of debate since the early days of modern democratic politics. The theories of democratic politics and foreign affairs that emerged from these debates provide the main theoretical framework for this book. Theorizing the relationship between democracy and foreign policy gained some initial momentum in the early days of modern democratic politics when constitutional conventions in the USA and in France looked into the proper place for war- and treaty-making powers in the constitutions of these new democracies. These early debates had little, if any experience to draw on and were thus first and foremost of a normative nature, revolving around the question whether foreign affairs need to be shielded from democratic politics or whether processes of democratization should be extended to external affairs. In this chapter, I show that this normative debate has oscillated between executive-friendly positions that champion secrecy and distrust of the ‘masses’, on the one hand, and democracy-friendly positions that favour transparency, deliberation, and accountability in external relations as well, on the other hand. More specifically, I argue that, in the two-and-a-half centuries since the American and French revolutions, the normative debate has been closely intertwined with the popularity of democracy in general: periods in which democracy prospered and proliferated saw executive-sceptical positions on the rise, whereas periods of authoritarian tendencies and soul-searching among democrats went hand in hand with a renaissance of executive-friendly positions (section 2.1). The wars between revolutionary France and a coalition of autocracies in the 1790s, the American war with Britain of 1812 and the ‘Quasi-War’ with France before provided early examples of democratic politics and foreign affairs in action,¹ which were taken up by political philosophers to buttress their normative arguments. However, it was only in the 1980s that the influence of democratic politics on foreign affairs became the object of systematic empirical inquiry

¹ The Dutch and Swiss Republics, remarkable for the absence of a monarch, although not for freely elected governments, served as further reference points for late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury political thinkers. The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions: Political Parties, Contestation, and Decisions to Use Force Abroad. Wolfgang Wagner, Oxford University Press (2020). © Wolfgang Wagner. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846796.001.0001

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     

(section 2.2). The so-called Democratic Peace debate made ample references to the philosophical traditions discussed in section 2.1, especially to Kant’s Perpetual Peace, but shifted its focus away from normative arguments to rigorous social scientific inquiry. The finding that democracies (rarely) fight each other has triggered an examination of liberal democratic politics and its effects on foreign and security policy. This inquiry quickly moved beyond the core finding that democracies rarely fight each other to a broad assessment of ‘democratic distinctiveness’ (Owen 2004) in foreign and security policy, i.e., an examination of the effects of democratic politics on a broad range of foreign policy issues, including alliances, multilateralism, international law, and international trade. The search for an explanation and for causal mechanisms has revolved around democratic institutions (section 2.2.1) and liberal ideas (section 2.2.2). As I will show below, both institutionalist and ideational accounts suggest a prominent role for political parties but stop short of investigating them even though the causal mechanisms they identify suggest their relevance. The neglect of political parties in Democratic Peace theory-building is surprising because, in Schattschneider’s famous phrase, ‘democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties’ (Schattschneider 1942: 1). A key aim of this chapter—and this book more broadly—therefore is to redress this shortcoming and to systematically examine party politics and contestation as core ingredients of the democratic politics of foreign affairs. This endeavour builds on a number of studies in Foreign Policy Analysis that incorporated the party-political orientation of government into multivariate models of explaining external behaviour, or—as in the monographs by Rathbun (2004) and Hofmann (2013)—even placed it at the centre of their analysis. I argue that this line of research makes an important contribution to Democratic Peace scholarship. Taken together, this body of literature finds that the party-political orientation of the government sometimes impacts on foreign and security policy: Parties on the right tend to be more ‘hawkish’ and less ‘internationalist’ than parties on the left of the political spectrum (section 2.3). Altogether, I will show in this chapter that the desirability of democratic politics in external affairs has been contested since the early days of democratic politics. Since the nineteenth century, empirical evidence has played a growing role in this debate, which culminates in the Democratic Peace debate and the ‘democratic distinctiveness’ research programme. Political parties have been conspicuously absent in theorizing democratic politics and foreign affairs; redressing this shortcoming is a key aim of this book. The theoretical framework that I outline in this chapter revolves around two main propositions that correspond to the two main research questions in the previous chapter and that serve as reference points for the subsequent empirical chapters: first, foreign, security, and defence policy is not exempted from party politics but systematically contested among political parties; second, party-political contestation of foreign,

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security, and defence policy is structured along the left-right dimension, with left parties more dovish than right parties.

2.1 The Normative Debate: The (In)compatibility of Democratic Politics with International Conflict and Security When the delegates to the Philadelphia convention discussed the proper place of war- and treaty-making powers in the new constitution of the American republic, their debate did not start from scratch. Many delegates were familiar with Niccolò Machiavelli’s appreciation of the republic as the best form of state for imperial expansion (Doyle 1986: 1154) and John Locke’s theory of the social contract. According to Locke, ‘the power of war and peace . . . is much less capable to be directed by antecedent, standing, positive laws than the executive, and so must necessarily be left to the prudence and wisdom of those whose hands it is in, to be managed for the public good’ (Locke 1960 [1690], §146 and 147). Locke’s executive-friendly position is echoed by Alexander Hamilton, according to whom foreign policy should be left to the executive because Congress was simply unsuited to handle it: The fluctuating and, taking its future increase into the account, the multitudinous composition of that body, forbid us to expect in it those qualities which are essential to the proper execution of such a trust. Accurate and comprehensive knowledge of foreign politics; a steady and systematic adherence to the same views; a nice and uniform sensibility to national character; decision, SECRECY, and dispatch, are incompatible with the genius of a body so variable and so numerous (Hamilton 2009 [1788]: 225).

The rise of enlightenment philosophy, however, also challenged the arguments brought forward by Locke and Hamilton. Montesquieu and Paine both argued that the distinct ‘spirit’ of democracy (or republic in their terminology) has an impact on a country’s international affairs as well. According to Montesquieu, the ‘spirit of monarchy is war and enlargement of dominion: peace and moderation are the spirit of a republic’ (1989 [1748]: 132). For Thomas Paine, the ‘republics of Europe are all (and we may say always) in peace. Holland and Switzerland are without wars, foreign or domestic’ (Paine 1989 [1776]: 26). A particularly forceful challenge to the notion of separate spheres came from the icon of Continental enlightenment philosophy: Immanuel Kant. Writing in the Prussian city of Königsberg with no first-hand experience of democratic politics at all, Kant’s essay ‘Perpetual Peace’ envisioned democratic accountability as a cornerstone of a peaceful international order. In Kant’s famous words,

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      if (as must be the case in such a constitution) the agreement of the citizens is required to decide whether or not one ought to wage war, then nothing is more natural than that they would consider very carefully whether to enter into such a terrible game, since they would have to resolve to bring the hardships of war upon themselves (which would include: themselves fighting, paying the costs of the war from their own possessions, meagerly repairing the ravages that war leaves behind, and, finally, on top of all such malady, assuming a burden of debt that embitters the peace and will never be repaid (Kant 2006 [1795]: 75).

The question whether democratic politics should extend into the realm of foreign affairs has thus been a matter of debate since the early days of modern democratic politics. Locke and Hamilton, on the one hand, and Kant, Paine, and Montesquieu, on the other, mark the opposite poles on a continuum along which the subsequent discourse has swung back and forth. The Napoleonic Wars and the subsequent era of restauration in Europe have stifled Kantian hopes for a democratically accountable foreign policy. For the idealist philosopher Fichte, the government alone was responsible for alliances, war, and peace (Fichte 1977 [1800]: 89). In a similar vein, Hegel acknowledged that England cannot wage any war that is unpopular, but adds that if it is imagined that sovereign princes and cabinets are more subject to passion than parliaments are, and if the attempt is accordingly made to transfer responsibility for war and peace into the hands of the latter, it must be replied that whole nations are often more prone to enthusiasms and subject to passion than their rulers are (Hegel 1991 [1821]: 365).

In Hegel’s philosophy of law, therefore, it is the sovereign who has ‘direct and sole responsibility for the command of the armed forces, for the conduct of relations with other states through ambassadors etc., and for making war and peace and concluding treaties of other kinds’ (Hegel 1991 [1821]: 365). This position was shared by political thinkers and constitutional lawyers in Great Britain who consider war-making powers to be part of a ‘royal prerogative’ that may have been transferred from the monarch to the government in the process of democratization but remains shielded from parliament and the public more broadly (White 2009; Joseph 2013). With ‘Democracy in America’, Alexis de Tocqueville joined the choir of those who associate democracy with ‘impulse rather than prudence’ (1990 [1835]: 235) and elaborates: Foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which are peculiar to a democracy; they require, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all those in which it is deficient ( . . . ) It (a democracy, WW) cannot combine its measures with secrecy or await their consequences with patience. These are qualities which

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more especially belong to an individual or an aristocracy; and they are precisely the qualities by which a nation, like an individual, attains a dominant position (de Tocqueville 1990 [1835]: 235).

In the United States, the appreciation of a strong executive gained momentum after the Civil War, when protection of commercial interests abroad became a priority and Congress frequently refused to ratify treaties of annexation (LaFeber 1993). Alfred Thayer Mahan’s widely read book on sea power thus combined a plea for an American navy with doubts ‘whether a democratic government will have the foresight, the keen sensitiveness to national position and credit, the willingness to insure its prosperity by adequate outpouring of money in times of peace, all of which are necessary for military preparation’ (Mahan 1949 [1890]: 67). Although the constitution of the French Second Republic gave parliament a veto over the president’s decision to wage war,² all in all, political thinking and practice in the nineteenth century was heavily tilted towards executive dominance in foreign and security policy. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Kantian tradition in thinking about democracy and security policy resurfaced in several places. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party included a demand that parliament should take decisions on war and peace in its 1891 Erfurt programme. The emerging peace movement, particularly in the US, is also influenced by the democracy-friendly tradition (Eberl and Niesen 2011: 312). Although their main focus had moved from democratic control of the executive to international law and arbitration, peace activists also called for the introduction of referenda to decide about war and peace. The election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and his re-election in 1916 added clout to this intellectual tradition, and Wilsonianism left its mark on the post– World War I peace settlement (Ikenberry 2001). Although Wilson is best known for his design of the League of Nations, he also subscribed to the Kantian notion of peaceful democracies. In his war message to Congress in April 1917, Wilson argued that World War I was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and war were provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns and tools (quoted from Russett 1993: 3).

² Constitution de la République Française du 4 Novembre 1848, article 54 (‘Il [le président, WW] veille à la défense de l'État, mais il ne peut entreprendre aucune guerre sans le consentement de l'Assemblée nationale.’)

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     

In Great Britain, the decision to enter World War I had come as a surprise even to members of the cabinet as the prime minister had not disclosed the de facto commitment to come to France’s defence in case of a German attack. This commitment contradicted the official British policy to avoid an entanglement in a war on the Continent. Several members of the cabinet stepped down and, together with the writer Norman Angell and others, founded the ‘Union for Democratic Control’ that demanded a democratization of foreign and security policymaking. Specifically, the Union for Democratic Control asked that ‘no treaty, arrangement or undertaking shall be entered upon in the name of Great Britain without the sanction of parliament’ (quoted from Harris, 1996: 54). In Denmark, which had remained neutral during World War I, a practice of consulting the heads of the political parties on foreign policy had developed during the war and became institutionalized afterwards (Lüddecke 2010: 135). The slide of some liberal democracies into autocratic and aggressive states and the initial failure of the remaining democracies to contain their expansionism made the pendulum swing back again towards an executive-friendly position. World War II and the first decades of the Cold War saw the rise of a ‘garrison state’ (Lasswell 1941), of an ‘imperial presidency’ (Schlesinger 1989) and, as an intellectual counterpart, of (neo-)realism as the dominant approach in theorizing about international security. Clinton Rossiter’s notion of ‘constitutional dictatorship’ marked a middle position that argued for a temporary suspension of democratic procedures and fundamental rights in the event of an existential threat. Rossiter (1948) argued that the Roman Republic had successfully practised such constitutional dictatorship and that the presidential emergency powers in Weimar Germany and the ‘state of siege’ in France were modern versions of constitutional dictatorship. In contrast to Carl Schmitt, who conceived of the power to declare a state of emergency to be the privilege of the sovereign and de facto of the executive (Schmitt 1922), Rossiter was confident that states can manage the transition back to democracy. The Vietnam War ushered in a new era of contestation of foreign and security policy (Lindsay 2003). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, anti-war protests spread across Western democracies. While opposition against the war in Vietnam was a unifying theme and focal point for many protestors, their agenda quickly broadened to include further questions of international governance, especially concerning a just economic order. A decade later, a new wave of protests blended environmental and civil rights issues with opposition against nuclear armament in the wake of NATO’s double-track decision. This time, the protests’ centre of gravity lay in North Western Europe, with 400,000 protestors in Amsterdam in 1981 and 500,000 in Bonn in June 1983. Protests against foreign and security policy, particularly against the major uses of armed force, continued after the end of the Cold War. The Gulf War in 1991, the air strikes against Serbia in 1999, and of course the toppling of Saddam

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Hussein in 2003 were all accompanied by large anti-war rallies in several countries. The protests against the Vietnam War had clearly established a practice of publicly questioning government decisions to use force. Although prominent liberal intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas greeted the protests as a welcome sign of cosmopolitan citizenship, their theoretical efforts focused on models of good international governance and democracy beyond the nation state, rather than the (further) democratization of foreign policy (see, amongst many others, Held 1995). For this group of thinkers, the democracy-friendly position had become a common practice and mainstream position that did not require any further elaboration or justification. A noteworthy exception is political theorist Christopher Lord (2011) who argues that security policy involves legally enforceable obligations, fundamental normative choices, and last but not least, puts citizens’ lives at risk, all of which works against exempting this issue area from democratic politics. Given the dominance of the democracy-friendly position in the decades following the Vietnam War, conservative thinkers felt the need to revitalize the Lockian/Hamiltonian line of argument. In the US, the cornerstone of this line of theorizing was the ‘unitary executive theory’ that emphasized the executive’s unconstrained room for manoeuvre in its area of responsibility, which includes security policy (Calabresi 1995; Yoo 2005). The ‘unitary executive theory’ is based on a close reading of the debates in the constitutional convention and an acknowledgement of constitutional practices since. John Yoo argues that the constitutional convention deliberately did not give Congress the power to make war but instead the power to declare war, which implies that the power to make war lies elsewhere (namely with the executive). This is also in line with the political practice since the early days of the republic, which saw numerous executive decisions to use armed force without Congressional authorization and—equally important—no criticism of the president acting ultra vires. The theory resonated particularly well in the post-9/11 period and particularly with the Republican administrations of George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Outside the US, whose presidential system makes the assignment of foreign policy competences a natural candidate for legislative–executive contestation, questions of war- and treatymaking powers received much less attention, also because an executive-friendly or democracy-friendly practice was firmly established. While empirical reference points have changed, the main lines of argument in favour of or in opposition to executive dominance in foreign and security policy have remained remarkably stable. For proponents of the executive-friendly position, the main rationale has been the protection of a national interest from a poorly informed, unreasonable, and emotional public and its representatives. Although the public has occasionally been portrayed as war-mongering, more common are concerns about a lack of understanding of the necessity of using armed force. Critics of the executive-friendly position do not deny the asymmetry of information and expertise that characterizes the relation between the government and

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the broader public. They do emphasize, however, that foreign and security policy are also about fundamental values and decisions about acceptable levels of risks and costs on which citizens are sufficiently competent. What is more, they assume that the executive discounts the costs of foreign policy decisions, especially involving the use of force, because they are also driven by considerations about prestige and reputation and because the foreign policy elite manages to shield themselves and their families from bearing costs personally. Any revelation about the executive having deliberately misrepresented information, e.g., in the run-up to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in the US Congress, feeds the sentiment that the executive’s interests differ from those of the broader public. Taken together, for the last two-and-a-half centuries, the debate about democracy and foreign policy has revolved around the question whether the executive or the broader public and its representatives in parliament is more likely to misjudge international affairs and the country’s interests. Such debates differ across countries and periods, depending on the most recent foreign policy success or failure. After World War II, for example, democracy-friendly positions prevailed in Germany and Japan, countries which had initiated and lost the war, whereas executive-friendly positions dominated in the USA and the United Kingdom, who had been victorious.

2.2 Zooming in on the Democratic Politics of International Conflict: The Democratic Peace Debate and Beyond The normative debate reviewed in the previous section took on a new twist when a growing number of empirical studies identified democracy as a prime source of international peace. Starting with Dean Babst (1964) and gaining momentum with Michael Doyle (1983) and Bruce Russett (1993), proponents of a so-called Democratic Peace argued that democracies have not fought each other and, echoing Kant and Wilson, the third wave of democratization would therefore contribute to a more peaceful world. The so-called Democratic Peace resonated with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and a widespread sense that liberal democracies carried the day. In a modified form, and against protests by some key proponents (Russett 2005), the Democratic Peace was woven into the justification of using armed force to democratize authoritarian states and particularly to topple Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 (Ish-Shalom 2006). The core empirical finding—the (near) absence of war amongst democracies³— has been quickly elevated to one of the few non-trivial laws in International

³ The Anglo-American War of 1812, the American Civil War, Britain’s War against the Orange Free State and Transvaal (Boer War), Finland’s fight against the Soviet Union and its allies in World War II, and the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan have been considered as possible exceptions (see Russett 1993: 16–19; Ray 1995: 86–130).

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Relations (Levy 1988) and has been successfully defended against a wide range of criticisms. In the context of this book, however, the democratic distinctiveness research programme (Owen 2004; Geis and Wagner 2011) that emerged in its wake is far more interesting than the Democratic Peace debate proper. Whereas the Democratic Peace revolves around (major) interstate wars, the democratic distinctiveness programme looks into the effects of democratic politics on a wide range of foreign and security policies such as the use of force short of war, armaments, and military strategy. What is more, the Democratic Peace proper is about pairs (dyads) of states and therefore focuses on the interactions between states, whilst the democratic distinctiveness programme zooms in on liberal democracies’ foreign policies (the so-called monadic level). Because the number of interstate wars has been declining generally, the broader view that comes with the democratic distinctiveness programme is more relevant for an understanding of liberal democracies’ current policies. On the core question of democracies’ general peacefulness (i.e., against all other states, not limited to fellow democracies), democracies were initially reported to be indistinct, i.e., just as conflict prone as other states (Maoz and Abdolali 1989). However, this finding relies heavily on a simple count of the number of conflicts in which democracies are involved. A closer look into the ways in which democracies use armed force reveals a more nuanced picture. Siverson has shown that interstate ‘wars initiated by democratic leaders are significantly less lethal than wars initiated by non-democratic leaders’ (Siverson 1995: 486). Gleditsch et al. (2009) report a similar finding for civil wars. Whether democracies are more or less likely to target civilians in times of war, however, has remained contested. Whereas Valentino et al. (2006) find no evidence and Downes (2006) even concludes that democracies are more likely to target civilians, Watts (2008) finds that democracies inflict fewer casualties on their opponent’s civilian population. Democracies are also found to be more cooperative and willing to support and obey international law. In the realm of security law, Geoffrey Wallace (2012) finds democracies to be more likely to ratify the Geneva conventions. James Morrow (2007) finds that democracies are more likely to comply with the security law commitments they have made. More generally, democracies join international organizations more frequently (Shanks et al. 1996; Russett et al. 1998) and they are more supportive of judicialized dispute settlement and compulsory jurisdiction of international courts (Hooghe et al. 2014; Powell and Mitchell 2007; Allee and Huth 2006). In the context of this book, however, the statistical technicalities are less interesting than the debate about the theoretical foundations that led to an exploration of the causal mechanisms linking democratic politics to international peace. In search of an explanation of the empirical finding of peace amongst democracies, International Relations scholars delved into democratic politics. In line with the Zeitgeist of the 1990s, democratic institutions were pitted against

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     

liberal ideas, and rationalist theorizing was contrasted with a constructivist alternative. As I will argue below, however, both approaches evoke an image of democratic politics that remains incomplete in one crucial aspect: with few exceptions (discussed extensively below), political parties were barely mentioned, despite the fact that modern democratic politics revolves around them.

2.2.1 Democratic Institutions Institutions are at the centre of rationalist explanations of the Democratic Peace and democratic distinctiveness. Institutions are conceived as impacting on rational actors’ strategies by way of incentives and constraints.⁴ In democracies, two sets of institutions are particularly significant: elections and a system of checks and balances. Competitive and free elections ensure that the government enjoys the support of a (relative) majority of the electorate and can be unseated if the latter disapproves of its policies. With the extension of suffrage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ‘selectorate’, i.e., the proportion of society selecting the leadership, has been broadened. This has come with an incentive for political leaders to provide public goods (such as peace and economic growth) rather than private goods (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003). However, democratic leaders are not only constrained by voters’ ex post evaluation of their policies (‘electoral punishment model’). They are also ‘constantly monitoring and campaigning for public support, even when there is no election immediately impending’ (‘contemporary consent model’) (Reiter and Stam 2002: 198). As a consequence, democratic leaders ‘virtually never initiate war that is unpopular at the time’ (ibid.: 200).⁵ A key determinant of a war’s popularity is the number of casualties suffered (Mueller 1971; 1973), especially if they are local (Gartner and Segura 1998). ⁴ An alternative perspective holds that democratic institutions do not constrain but ‘facilitate information revelation by improving a government’s ability to send credible signals of its resolve’ (Schultz 1999 with reference to Fearon 1994). This line of theorizing, however, contributes mostly to a better understanding of the interactions between democracies and their counterparts, rather than to an explanation of liberal democracies’ policies. ⁵ It is not without irony that Reiter and Stam published this statement on the eve of the 2003 Iraq War, which lacked public support in most liberal democracies. To be sure, US public opinion was supportive of President George W. Bush’s confrontational policy in 2002/3 and the actual invasion in March 2003. Support only plummeted as the war dragged on (Berinsky 2009: 32). The public in European democracies, however, clearly opposed the war. The decisions of European governments to participate in the US-led intervention therefore pose a challenge to the ‘contemporary consent model’, even though only a few actually sent combat troops. They have either been explained by the absence of actual checks and balances in the form of a parliamentary veto power (Dieterich et al. 2015) or by the Bush administration’s resort to a comprehensive set of carrots and sticks to create what critics called a ‘coalition of the bribed, bullied and blind’ (Gilfeather, 2003, quoted from Newnham 2008: 183). In addition, especially Central and Eastern European democracies saw the support of the Iraq War as an opportunity to demonstrate transatlantic solidarity, often with a view to US support in possible future conflicts with Russia (Schuster/Maier 2006).

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Competitive and free elections thus make decision-makers highly casualty averse, both when considering the initial use of military force and when deciding about escalation, de-escalation, or withdrawal during an armed conflict. Although the causal mechanism that runs from competitive and free elections to casualty aversion does not rule out the use of force, e.g., against weak adversaries or by relying on air power instead of ground troops, it makes democracies risk and casualty averse and therefore unlikely to start long and costly wars without a clear prospect of victory. Although competitive and free elections are essential to the rationalistinstitutionalist explanation, Democratic Peace scholars barely examined whether and how foreign and security issues are contested in election campaigns. Scholars were satisfied to note that the POLITY dataset (Marshall et al. 2019) provides 200 years of data on regime type, built on components such as the openness and competitiveness of executive recruitment and the regulation and competitiveness of participation.⁶ The fact that the POLITY data were gathered without an interest in foreign and security policy and the Democratic Peace was considered as an advantage because the data ‘thus were not subject to bias in its favour’ (Russett and Oneal 2001: 97). The POLITY data allowed quantitative analyses of whether democracies differ in their conflict behaviour from other states, but they do not spell out how elections, and accountability more broadly, constrain the executive in using armed force. War and peace are assumed to be treated essentially as any other public policy: the executive knows that blunders may be punished at the ballot box and therefore refrains from actions that are likely to be costly and unsuccessful. However, whether and to what extent foreign and security issues are contested and subject to political competition remains unexamined. Elections only constrain governments against unpopular policies. Without further knowledge about the popularity of policies, the explanation says very little about the substance of government policy.⁷ The assumption of selectorate theory that electoral accountability will steer governments away from private to public goods can guide expectations only in a few dramatic cases, e.g., democracies not starting wars they are likely to lose at high costs. In many other cases, the explanatory buck is passed on to public opinion, i.e., the institutional constraints model heavily relies on assumptions about a pacifist public. Students of public opinion, however, pass the explanatory buck back to students of elites—and political parties. After a period during which rationality and ⁶ Competitiveness of participation is coded as ‘competitive’ if ‘there are relatively stable and enduring, secular political groups which regularly compete for political influence at the national level; ruling groups and coalitions regularly, voluntarily transfer central power to competing groups. Competition among groups seldom involves coercion or disruption. Small parties or political groups may be restricted in the Competitive pattern’ (Marshall et al. 2019: 27). ⁷ What is more, the theory has difficulties accounting for policies the costs of which have been concentrated in a minority, e.g., when wars are fought with marginalized groups doing the actual fighting.

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prudence were attributed to the public (Jentleson 1992), more recent studies argue that ‘public opinion can be understood as a response to the relative intensity and stability of opposing flows of liberal and conservative communications’ (Zaller 1992: 185f.). This new generation of studies builds on insights from experiments in social psychology that show the influence of partisan cues on attitudes and behaviour. Geoffrey Cohen summarizes a series of experiments as follows: If information about the position of their party was absent, liberal and conservative undergraduates based their attitude on the objective content of the policy and its merit in light of long-held ideological beliefs. If information about the position of their party was available, however, participants assumed that position as their own regardless of the content of the policy (Cohen 2003: 819).

The public is thus receptive to cues from political elites who ‘have the power to shape the meaning of those events for the public’ (Berinsky 2009: 5). As a consequence, ‘patterns of conflict among partisan political actors shape mass opinion on war’ (Berinsky 2009: 7). Zaller and Berinsky illustrate their theory on the example of the Vietnam War: public opinion supported the war as long as political elites sent a unified message, portraying the war as necessary and in the nation’s interest. Public opinion became more sceptical only once alternative cues, critical of the war, were sent. Although public opinion can thus act as an important constraint on the executive, it can only do so if political elites do not send a uniform message. In an experiment about the support for the war in Afghanistan, Wells and Ryan (2018) also show that the impact of casualties on support for the war is conditioned by partisan cues. In the experiment, all subjects are presented with news about American deaths in Afghanistan. One group, however, is informed that Republicans and Democrats agree on the need for further interventions, whereas another group is informed about within-party divisions in both parties. For independents, i.e., subjects without affinity to any party, news about casualties increases the opposition to the war, independent of partisan cues. For partisans, news of American deaths increases war opposition to a greater exten when elites are fractured than when they are united. Thus, casualty sensitivity, one of the key causal mechanisms linking democracy to reticent use of force, heavily depends on cues from political elites. Baum and Potter have integrated these insights into a general theory of democratic constraint. According to them, citizens successfully hold their democratic governments accountable when a diverse and independent political opposition and a robust media are present to make timely information accessible (Baum and Potter 2015). Taken together, the institutional constraints explanation that revolves around free election and the government’s accountability to a critical public collapses unless foreign and security policy is politicized. Given the nature of contemporary democratic politics, this implies that executives are not constrained unless political parties send competing messages to the public.

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In addition to elections, a system of checks and balances has been identified as a key institutional constraint on the executive. In his seminal Grasping the Democratic Peace, Bruce Russett argued: Democracies are constrained in going to war by the need to ensure broad popular support, manifested in various institutions of government. Leaders must mobilize public opinion to obtain legitimacy for their actions. Bureaucracies, the legislature, and private interest groups often incorporated in conceptualizations of the ‘state’ must acquiesce (Russett 1993: 38).

Checks and balances slow down the decision-making process. Russett emphasizes that this can buy time for a diplomatic solution (Russett, 1993: 40). In addition, the ‘checks and balances’ explanation echoes veto player theory according to which any veto player makes any decision less likely for the simple reason that an additional actor needs to agree.⁸ Subsequent research has focused on legislatures as the most powerful institutional constraint on executives—although legislative war powers vary widely between countries (Peters and Wagner 2011). In their study of democracies’ involvement in the 2003 Iraq War, Dieterich, Hummel, and Marschall find strong evidence for a ‘parliamentary peace . . . [H]igh parliamentary war powers are associated with reduced war involvement. Countries with a high degree of parliamentary war powers were significantly less militarily engaged in the Iraq War’ (Dieterich et al., 2015: 100). For the Kosovo intervention, Mello finds that the absence of parliamentary veto power is a necessary condition for participation (Mello 2014). As regards to UNIFIL, Haesebrouck finds that ‘the presence of parliamentary veto [ . . . ] is associated with the absence of large contributions’ (Haesebrouck, 2016: 152). With a view to the air strikes against Daesh, he finds that a legislative veto ‘is a relevant condition’ (Haesebrouck 2018: 268). Wagner (2018) also finds that ‘countries with a parliamentary ex ante veto power are less likely to contribute to a military mission than countries without one’, although a closer examination of individual missions demonstrates that such a pattern is only statistically significant for three of them: Operation Allied Force (Kosovo 1999), Operation Unified Protector (Libya 2011), and the campaign against Daesh. However, as with the election-centred explanation above, veto players amount to a constraint only if they have preferences independent of and different from the executive, ⁹ and this is often difficult to establish ex ante without knowing who ⁸ Veto player theory was developed by George Tsebelis (1995; 2002). Although Democratic Peace Theory has developed a very similar argument, reference to Tsebelis’s work is hardly ever made. ⁹ Another group of authors has assumed a longer-term perspective and argued that the checks and balances, which are typical of democracies, make them more ‘reliable partners’ (Lipson 2003), thus facilitating institutionalized cooperation and thereby contribution to a stable peace. Because entering into an international commitment requires the consent of parliaments, courts, interest groups, etc.,

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populates the institutions in question. In the US, for example, it matters for legislative–executive relations, in general as well as in foreign policy, whether the president’s party has a majority in Congress or not. Howell and Pevehouse argue that as ‘the size of the president’s party increases within Congress, the president should enjoy additional discretion to deploy troops abroad’ (2005: 219). Political parties transform legislative–executive relations even more profoundly in parliamentary systems where the government and the parliamentary majority form a functional unit.¹⁰ In fact, in parliamentary systems, veto players are partisan, rather than institutional (Tsebelis 1995). This has led to the expectation that coalition governments should be more constrained than single-party governments. According to David Auerswald, Premiers in coalition governments will only reluctantly use force. They must pay particular attention to achieving immediate success or risk a parliamentary revolt, especially if the governing coalition is fragile. With unexpected elections always a possibility should the government coalition dissolve, the legislature will be especially vigilant of the premier’s success or failure in international conflicts, hoping to capitalize domestically on the premier’s international failure

(Auerswald 1999: 477; see also Maoz and Russett 1993; Auerswald and Saideman 2014: 14). Based on events data, Beasley and Kaarbo (2014) indeed find that coalitions behave more cooperatively and less conflictually than single-party governments. The empirical evidence from conflict data, however, does not confirm the institutional constraints proposition. Ireland and Gartner (2001), Leblang and Chan (2003), and Clare (2010) find no significant differences between single party and coalition governments. Palmer/London/Regan even find the opposite, namely that ‘single-party governments are somewhat less likely to become involved in disputes’ (2004: 13). In a similar vein, Prins and Sprecher (1999) found coalition governments to be more, not less likely to reciprocate in conflicts. A number of explanations have been suggested to account for the bellicosity of coalition governments (for an overview see also Beasley and Kaarbo 2014: 730–2):

defection becomes less likely once such consent has been achieved (Martin 2000). Moreover, free media and a vital civil society make the detection of defection likely, which in turn helps to mitigate problems of monitoring characteristic of collective action problems. From a constructivist perspective, one may add that democracies’ esteem for the rule of law extends to the honouring of international (legal) commitments (Gaubatz 1996). ¹⁰ A noteworthy exception are minority governments, which for this reason are expected to be less likely to use military force (Maoz and Russett 1993: 626). Empirical results, however, have been contradictory, with Ireland and Gartner (2001) finding support whereas Brulé and Williams finding minority governments to be ‘more likely to initiate conflict because they lack the parliamentary majority to demonstrate domestic economic competence’ (2009: 787).

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First, because accountability in coalition governments is diffused, ‘[c]oalition governments may be more inclined to risk a foreign policy venture inasmuch as a failure cannot be attributed solely to one political faction’ (Prins and Sprecher 1999: 279). Second, bellicose coalition partners may successfully ‘hijack’ a coalition and impose their policy on the government. The German Free Democrats in the 1980s and the National Religious Party in Israel after the Camp David Peace Treaty illustrate the ability of junior coalition partners to dominate foreign policy despite their junior status (Kaarbo 1996). Third, theories of diversionary use of force suggest that the higher fragility of coalition governments may entice them to take bigger risks and thus become more confrontational abroad.¹¹ Finally, coalitions are more prone to favour-trading (logrolling), which privileges concentrated group interests over more diffuse general ones because interests in ‘militarism are typically more concentrated than the interests opposed to them, logrolling is inherently more apt to produce overexpansion’ (Snyder 1991: 18). With a view to these countervailing tendencies, Juliet Kaarbo and Ryan Beasley (2008) argue that the search for either bellicose or pacifist effects of coalitions is misleading. Instead, the substance of government policy depends on coalition partners’ preferences and their strategies. One weakness of the single party/coalition distinction is that it does not distinguish between different types of coalitions, even though the underlying veto player theory would lead us to believe that a two-party coalition is less constrained than a three-, four-, five-, or even six-party coalition. Empirical findings are inconclusive, however. Using the number of parties as independent variable, Brulé and Williams (2009) find the number of parties negatively correlated with the initiation of conflict. In contrast, Beasley and Kaarbo find that ‘coalitions with more parties are more conflictual’ (Beasley and Kaarbo 2014: 735). A major weakness of the institutionalist argument is that checks and balances may make a decision less likely and accountability may prevent the executive from shirking, but none of these institutional constraints per se makes a country less belligerent if the legislature, the judiciary, and the public more broadly share the executive’s preference. Institutions may work as safeguards against the unwanted use of force, but they do not stand in the way if the use of force is widely seen as legitimate. To serve as vehicles of scrutiny and control, institutions require actors which do not simply rally behind the executive but maintain a critical distance. To be sure, civil society and social movements have been instrumental in politicizing foreign affairs. The veterans who protested against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, the peace movement that campaigned against NATO’s dual track decision of the 1980s, and the demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 all point to the importance of civil society as an independent and ¹¹ The literature on the diversionary use of force has been growing enormously and cannot be summarized here. For a good summary see Schultz 2013.

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powerful force in liberal societies. Yet, their significance increased substantially by being associated with—or, as has been the case with many green parties, being midwife to—political parties.

2.2.2 Liberal Ideas and Political Culture: Ambivalence and Diversity Whereas rationalists focus on the institutional constraints on self-interested but by and large opportunistic leaders, constructivists examine the ideational driving forces of democracies’ foreign and security policy. Although they agree that democracies are driven by liberal ideas, they differ as to how liberalism predisposes democracies towards a peaceful foreign policy and whether this predisposition is limited to fellow democracies or states in general. Maoz and Russett argue that ‘states, to the extent possible, externalize the norms of behaviour that are developed within and characterize their domestic political processes and institutions’ (1993: 625). Whereas political conflict in non-democracies is more likely to be resolved by violence and coercion, ‘democratic regimes are based on political norms that emphasize regulated political competition through peaceful means’ (Maoz and Russett 1993: 625). However, democracies’ disposition towards peaceful conflict resolution can only be realized in interactions with fellow democracies. When dealing with non-democracies, democracies are aware of the risk of being exploited and therefore adapt to the general norms of international conflict, which include the use of force. Thomas Risse has added that leaders of democratic states can communicate their peaceful intentions with reference to domestic practices and can establish a common understanding of peaceful conflict resolution as a norm that also guides their interactions internationally. A collective identity emerges that substantially reduces the security dilemma and facilitates cooperation (Risse-Kappen 1995). In contrast to Russett, Doyle (1983), Owen (1994), and Kahl (1999) argue that liberal norms not only make democracies peaceful amongst themselves but also explain their undeniable belligerence vis-à-vis non-democracies. According to Doyle, ‘[t]he very constitutional restraint, shared commercial interests, and international respect for individual rights that promote peace among liberal societies can exacerbate conflicts in relations between liberal and non-liberal societies’ (Doyle 1983: 324f.). The conception of liberal norms in Democratic Peace research was heavily influenced by the emergence of social constructivism since the late 1980s. In order to establish norms as an observable variable whose influence can be examined within a falsificationist research design and anticipating criticism that norms are vague and volatile, constructivists tended to emphasize their stability and unambiguousness (Deitelhoff and Zimmermann 2013: 2). This stability bias allowed general, testable propositions because ‘the normative

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model does not expect variation within democratic political systems’ (Maoz and Russett 1993: 626). Conceptually, this stability bias in normative/constructivist explanations of the Democratic Peace downplayed the richness of the liberal tradition, which has been the home of ‘conservative, left and radical strands’ (MacMillan 2004: 473). John Macmillan criticized that ‘Democratic Peace research effectively privileges a conservative-liberal representation of the relationship between democracy and peace’ (2004: 473). Empirically, the stability bias glossed over great differences amongst democracies. Harald Müller points out that four states—Israel, the United States, India, and the United Kingdom—account for more than 75 per cent of stable democracies’ involvement in militarized disputes in which force is used. He suggests to distinguish ‘pacifist’ from ‘militant’ democracies to account for the highly uneven conflict involvement of democracies. Whereas ‘militant democracies conceive of their entire relationship with non-democracies in antagonistic terms’, pacifist democracies ‘believe in a modus vivendi with autocracies, perceiving them to be non-threatening’ (Müller 2004: 508). Both ideal types emanate from the liberal tradition but are grounded in different strands. Although Müller acknowledged that ‘whether a democracy is rather “pacifist” or “militant” depends on the ruling coalition in a given moment’ (Müller 2004: 511), subsequent work zoomed in on political culture, rather than ruling coalitions and the political parties of which they are composed. In a large comparative research project, Geis, Müller, and Schörnig studied justificatory discourses in order to identify ‘the norms that are prevalent in the political culture and institutions of a given democratic polity’, allowing ‘deeper insights into the variation among democracies’ (Geis et al. 2013: 307). They find that liberal norms are deeply ambivalent. Whether they are used to justify the participation in military interventions or the abstention therefrom is influenced by national identity and role conceptions, often resulting from historical experiences. The study by Geis et al. is typical of a larger number of studies in two ways: first, different interpretations of liberal norms are attributed to a society as a whole, rather than to political parties, even though there are ad hoc references to ‘the new German left-wing government’, ‘intra-party opposition’, and newspapers’ reactions being ‘divided along partisan lines’ (Geis et al. 2013: 312 and 316). Second, the examination of liberal norms is by and large inductive. There are no ex ante theoretical propositions as to what interpretation to expect in which case. Instead, the analysis tends to treat cases as idiosyncratic representations of liberal norms. Other case studies have found ideological differences between political parties to be influential in explaining democracies’ conflict behaviour. In John Owen’s study of Franco-American relations between 1796 and 1798, the Federalists were prepared to go to war with France but were constrained by the Republicans in opposition that considered France a sister republic. In 1812, the Federalists

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     

opposed war against Britain that a Republican majority in Congress supported (Owen 1994). John Widmaier’s study of the 1971 crisis between India and the US argues that ‘tensions between the pro-Indian “social” Democratic party and proPakistani “liberal” Republican party gave meaning to the South Asian balance of power, and help to explain the Nixon administration’s antagonism toward India’ (Widmaier 2005: 432). The notion that political parties’ foreign policy positions result from their visions of how domestic society should be ordered is confirmed by Miriam Fendius Elman’s case study of Finland’s failure to avoid war with the Soviet Union in 1939. Elman finds that ‘the Conservatives supported a proGerman policy; the Progressives advocated a pro-British policy; the Swedish People’s Party supported a policy of joint Finnish-Swedish defence of Scandinavia; and the radical left favoured cooperation with the Soviet Union’ (Elman 1997c: 220). The resulting impasse led to the breakdown of negotiations with the Soviet Union and the winter war of 1939/40. In another case study, however, Elman finds more genuine party-political contestation about the appropriateness of using force. In her study of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, ideological differences between the Labour party and Likud play a crucial role in accounting for Israel’s decision to invade: whereas ‘the Labor party believed that the Arab-Israeli conflict could not be solved by military means’ (Elman 1997b: 313f.), for the Likud party ‘the only way to achieve a stable peace was to use force to drive out the Arab invaders’ (Elman 1997b: 314). Consequently, ‘military strategy was bound to change as one leadership replaced the other’ (Elman 1997b: 313). Reviewing a broad set of case studies, Miriam Elman criticizes Democratic Peace theory for presenting ‘a truncated view of domestic politics in general, and democratic politics in particular. Specifically, the theory ignores the role of leaders; underemphasizes norms that are not associated with domestic political ideology; obscures the role of political parties; and discounts how civilmilitary relations can concentrate or disperse war powers’ (Elman 1997a: 483). Altogether, Democratic Peace research has stopped short of examining the role and impact of political parties on liberal democracies’ foreign and security policy systematically. This remains surprising for three reasons: First and most generally, democratic politics has been party politics since the early days of the French revolution and American independence. Political parties not only structure the political debate; they are also the most important actors when it comes to the recruitment of personnel for key positions in government and administration. Obviously, scholars of International Relations ignored what their colleagues in comparative politics find a truism. Second, institutional explanations must assume a minimum of contestation between legislative and executive, between government and opposition, or within the executive in order to conceive of institutions as constraints. Case studies find that contestation is linked to political parties, but this lead has not been systematically followed. Third, ideational explanations find that liberal norms are ambiguous and contested, and qualitative case studies point

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to different interpretations of liberal norms among conservatives, centrists, socialists, and social democrats. Although political parties have not been entirely overlooked by scholars of the Democratic Peace, what is missing is a systematic analysis and incorporation in the theory-building efforts of the democratic distinctiveness programme. Although Democratic Peace research has barely examined political parties, the institutionalist line of theorizing assumes that there is a minimum of controversy when the use of force is on the political agenda. As students of democratic politics are quick to point out, political parties are the obvious carriers of such controversy. The ideational line of theorizing adds to this that liberal norms are often ambiguous and allow for a plurality of interpretations on how core liberal values should be translated into policy. Again, it seems highly plausible that political parties would play a prominent role in articulating and promoting these alternative readings of what a liberal-democratic foreign policy ought to be. Altogether, this leads to the following proposition Proposition 1: Foreign, security, and defence policy is systematically contested among political parties. This proposition formulates a tentative answer to the first main research question whether foreign, security, and defence policy is shielded from democratic (read: party) politics. ‘Systematically contested’ means that political parties do not just opportunistically criticize the government of the day when in opposition but that they have genuine beliefs about foreign affairs and that these beliefs are not identical. This proposition will guide the empirical investigation in this book, particularly in chapter 3, which looks into levels of contestation, and chapters 4 and 5, which examine the positions of political parties and the way they frame the use of armed force abroad.

2.3 Differences Among Democracies and Party-Political Orientation of Government As shown in the previous section, political parties have barely been studied by those whose main aim has been theory-building to account for the absence of war amongst democracies. However, political parties have received some attention by those whose prime interest has been the explanation of differences among liberal democracies’ foreign and security policies. This line of research has been given a boost by the Democratic Peace debate, as variation at the level of the units (states) are potentially ‘further observable implications’ (King et al. 1994) in support (or lack thereof) of dyadic theories about interactions between democracies (Müller 2004). At the same time, this line of research has never been completely absorbed

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     

by Democratic Peace research but has first and foremost remained a subfield of foreign policy analysis in its own right. There, the role of ‘government ideology’, i.e., the party-political composition of the executive, has been examined for a range of foreign policies, particularly the use of armed force and the making of international treaty commitments. Students of American foreign policy became interested in the president’s partisan affiliation in the context of the electoral cycle and the debate about diversionary use of force. Fordham (1998) argues that economic conditions, understood as incentives to use force to divert from domestic problems, interact with partisanship: In periods of high unemployment, Republican presidents were more likely to use force than Democratic presidents because the former are more reluctant to use potentially inflationary macroeconomic policies to reduce unemployment. Democratic presidents, in turn, are more likely to use force in periods of high inflation. Whereas Fordham’s study is limited to the Cold War period, Gowa (1998) examined the period between 1870 and 1992. She found no support for any partisan effect on the use of force. In a later study, replicating and amending Gowa’s results, Fordham confirms this finding but adds an important caveat: Gowa’s study assumes ‘that the Democrats and Republicans held consistent preferences concerning the frequency with which force should be used between 1870 and 1992’ (Fordham 2002: 592), although there is ample evidence to the contrary. The difficulties of comparing partisan affiliations over long periods of time make comparisons across countries particularly appealing: In an early study of defence spending between 1955 and 1975, Keman (1982) explored to what extent government ideology matters in eighteen democracies. Keman finds that ‘socioeconomic and geopolitical factors are of particular importance’ whereas ‘domestic politics appear to have little influence on the actual effort devoted to external security’ (Keman 1982: 192), although they may occasionally retard developments. More recently, Wenzelburger and Böller (2020) examine democracies’ ‘bomb-or-build’ balance that approximates the relative importance of government spending on the military and foreign aid. They find that, in line with mandate theory (Klingemann et al. 1994), government spending priorities follow the pledges that governing parties made in election manifestos.¹² Thérien and Noël (2000) find that levels of foreign aid cannot be explained by the left/right orientation of the government of the day but by ‘leftist cumulative power’, i.e., by the dominance of left parties over a longer period of time. On the key issue of using armed force, Brian Rathbun’s (2004) book-length study of British, French, and German politics of intervening in the Balkans ¹² In a longitudinal study of a single country (Germany), Kauder and Potrafke (2016) also find evidence for the partisan hypothesis that an increase in defence spending is more likely when right parties are in government.

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pioneered the study of party politics and military interventions. Most importantly, Rathbun demonstrates that politicians, whether in government or in opposition, are driven by partisan positions on the use of force, multilateralism, and egalitarianism (which, when applied to foreign affairs, translates into the protection of human rights). Rathbun paints a very nuanced picture of the party politics of military interventions in the three countries that includes an acknowledgement of intra-party dissent and country-specific legacies that account, for example, for the higher degree of pacifism in the German Social Democratic Party as compared to its French and British counterparts. Although Rathbun attributes shared core values to the left and the right parties in all three countries, he also finds that value conflicts may be resolved in different ways in each of these countries. This is particularly true for the left parties which faced a conflict between their reluctance to use armed force, on the one hand, and their commitment to human rights, on the other hand. In the face of this value conflict, left parties in Britain and France were more determined to support military intervention than their counterparts in Germany. In any case, parties on the left and the right support the use of force for different reasons. Whereas the right endorses force for the defence of national interests, the left supports it if used for humanitarian missions. In sum, Rathbun shows that political parties matter but that cross-country differences within the same party family remain, which work against the identification of patterns and regularities, certainly with a limited number of country studies. Building on Rathbun’s work, Auerswald and Saideman argue that ‘left-leaning coalitions will be more likely to try to impose significant constraints on how operations are conducted than will conservative coalition governments’ (2014: 69). In a study of Dutch, Norwegian, and Danish participation in the 2011 Libya intervention, Frost-Nielsen finds that the imposition of caveats is not limited to left-leaning coalitions. Because the Dutch government depended on the support of the populist right PVV that was against interventions, the government decided to limit the use of its F16 to air-to-air operations and to rule out any bombing of targets on the ground (Frost-Nielsen 2017). In a similar study on Belgium’s participation in the Libyan intervention, Fonck et al. (2019) confirm that leftwing parties have a stronger inclination to imposing restrictions on the use of force than right-wing parties. In case studies of Canadian and Dutch withdrawals of combat troops from Afghanistan, Massie shows that right-wing governments are slower to withdraw forces because their confidence in the efficacy of using force is higher and because they value their reputation as a reliable ally of the US higher than left-wing governments (Massie 2016). Other studies have paid less attention to the nuances of party politics in different countries and instead have examined patterns across larger number of democracies and time periods. Examining eighteen parliamentary democracies during the Cold War period, Palmer et al. (2004) find that right-wing

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governments are more likely to be involved in militarized disputes than leftist governments. For the period 1960–96, Arena and Palmer (2009) find that rightwing governments are more likely to initiate them—a finding confirmed by Clare (2010) for the period 1950–98. Studying twenty-nine cases of presidential elections between 1815 and 2010 that were so close that they were essentially ‘tossups’ between the candidates, Bertoli, Dafoe, and Trager find that ‘electing right-wing parties does increase state aggression, particularly when it comes to high-level disputes’ (Bertoli et al. 2019: 963). Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, Patrick Mello finds that right-wing governments are more willing to engage militarily than their leftist counterparts with a view to the Kosovo conflict and the Iraq War. By contrast, ‘for the Afghanistan conflict partisanship did not generate a conclusive pattern’ (Mello 2014: 197). Schuster and Maier (2006) confirm Mello’s Iraq War finding for Western European but not for Central and Eastern European democracies. In their study of liberal democracies’ fight against the so-called Islamic State, however, Haesebrouck (2018) and Saideman (2016b) did not find support for the influence of government ideology. According to Koch (2009), governments of the left engage in shorter disputes, while Koch and Sullivan (2010: 627) find that ‘executives from parties of the political right are less likely to terminate foreign military interventions when public approval of their job performance is low. But left party leaders become more likely to terminate foreign military interventions as their domestic popularity declines, even if they must withdraw short of victory.’ According to Heffington’s (2018) study of twenty-six democracies, the executive’s foreign policy position, as indicated in its party manifesto, has an impact on conflict initiation, whereas its general left/right position does not. Taken together, and with individual conflicts possibly exempted, scholarship in this field finds consistent support for the notion that right-wing governments tend to be more ‘hawkish’ or ‘bellicist’ than left governments. A number of studies have examined the impact of government ideology in another main area of interest to International Relations scholars: international cooperation and international law. In a qualitative case study on European security integration, Stephanie Hofmann (2013) argues that political parties have different positions on three dimensions, namely unilateralism vs multilateralism, Europe-as-a-geographic-space vs Europe-as-a-political community and intergovernmentalism vs supranationalism. Steps towards a European military capacity were possible whenever like-minded political parties governed in the three most important European capitals: Berlin, Paris, and London. Hofmann, however, does not assume that parties of the same party family always share the same positions on the three dimensions just mentioned. In contrast to Hofmann, who established partisan positions inductively, quantitative studies have proceeded from ex ante propositions about the positions that parties on the left or right of the political spectrum hold and tested them

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empirically. In a study of twenty-five countries between 1945 and 1998, Milner and Judkins show that partisan identity matters for the positions that parties adopt in their election manifestos: left parties advocate more protectionist policies than right parties (Milner and Judkins 2004: 114). Chang and Lee (2012) find that an increase in the share of government seats held by left parties comes with less open and more restrictive trade policies. Other studies have focused on the ratification of international human rights treaties and international humanitarian law. Simmons (2009) finds left-wing governments to be more likely to ratify human rights treaties such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Along similar lines, Neumayer (2008) reports that leftist governments are more likely to commit to the abolition of the death penalty under international law. Finally, Wallace (2012) reports that leftist governments are more likely to commit to the protection of civilians under International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Taken together, the finding is thus very clear: leftwing governments are more supportive of international law in the areas of human rights and humanitarian law. Notwithstanding country-specific legacies and intra-party quarrelling, research into the different foreign policies of liberal democracies suggest the following proposition: Proposition 2: The left/right-dimension structures party-political contestation. This proposition corresponds to the second main research question of how partypolitical contestation in foreign, security, and defence politics is structured. With the exception of studies of US foreign policy, for which Republican/Democrat or liberal/conservative are the most obvious reference points, the left/right dimension is a natural reference point for students of foreign policy analysis outside the US. Country-specific legacies and various caucuses within parties notwithstanding, there is plenty of evidence for the relevance of this dimension for external relations. Whereas several studies have demonstrated that the party-political composition of government does, ceteris paribus, impact on foreign, security, and defence policy, differences between political parties are mostly assumed, rather than demonstrated. The second proposition will guide research into the patterns of party-political contestation, particularly in chapters 4 and 5.

2.4 Conclusion The finding that liberal democracies (almost) never fight each other has sparked a wave of theorizing the links between democratic politics and foreign and security policy. The theories of the Democratic Peace and the ensuing democratic

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distinctiveness programme thus provide important building blocks for the theoretical framework of this book. Although these theories frequently make ad hoc references to political parties and although the causal mechanisms make implicit assumptions about them, they have remained undertheorized, if not entirely ignored, in Democratic Peace scholarship. Scholarship in Foreign Policy Analysis that examined ‘government ideology’ is therefore another key source for a more comprehensive theoretical framework of democratic politics and foreign affairs. The theoretical framework of this book attributes a crucial role to political parties in democracies’ foreign and security policy: political parties are key in providing coherent alternative positions and programmes to the public. Partypolitical contestation is essential to the democratic process, as the public otherwise misses cues on how to interpret and assess executive foreign policy performance. Civil society activism and social movements notwithstanding, there is very little if any democratic politics beyond the water’s edge without political parties. The theories of the Democratic Peace and foreign policy analysis scholarship on ‘government ideology’ thus motivate the two key propositions of this book: 1) that foreign affairs is systematically contested, rather than shielded from democratic politics; 2) that party-political contestation is structured along the left/right dimension. Although the theoretical framework is first and foremost an analytical one, it also reminds us of the normative context and repercussions of any empirical findings. Proponents of an executive-friendly position will see their normative arguments supported should political parties fail to contest foreign affairs. In contrast, adherents of an executive-sceptical position silently assume that democratic politics is possible beyond the water’s edge and will see their normative position strengthened by findings that party-political contestation extends to issues of foreign affairs.

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3 Contestation and Politicization of Security and Defence Policy Theories of the Democratic Peace and of ‘democratic distinctiveness’ assume that democratic politics does not stop at the water’s edge. More specifically, they suggest that foreign and security policies are not exempted from democratic politics but are subject to contestation. This chapter empirically examines whether and to what extent foreign affairs are contested. I will first discuss the key concepts of contestation and politicization that have much in common but do not completely overlap (section 3.1). I will then introduce the methods used in my analyses (section 3.2). Sections 3.3 to 3.5 present my empirical analyses and findings. I begin with a long-term study of Congressional votes in the US that yields two insights: first, foreign affairs have never been exempted from democratic politics since the early days of the republic; second, the degree of contestation has been fluctuating, qualifying notions of a recent politicization. Section 3.4 presents analyses of parliamentary votes in Germany and the Netherlands, two countries for which voting data of sufficient quality are available. The two countries confirm the finding that foreign affairs are not exempted from democratic politics. In addition, they underline that the degree of contestation differs not only over time but also across countries. Section 3.5 introduces a new dataset of more than 500 parliamentary deployment votes in eleven countries between 1990 and 2017. My analyses show that roll call votes on military missions have gained in frequency since the end of the Cold War, which can be taken as an indication of their salience. What is more, calculations of an agreement index for military missions and its comparison with domestic politics shows that military missions tend to be less contested than domestic business in parliament. Furthermore, degrees of contestation again differ significantly across countries. Taken together, this chapter shows that democratic politics does not stop at the water’s edge, although a difference between foreign affairs and domestic politics remains, as the former is often less contested than the latter.

3.1 Contestation and Politicization The two key concepts in this chapter are contestation and politicization. Contestation has been defined as a ‘social practice [that] entails objection to The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions: Political Parties, Contestation, and Decisions to Use Force Abroad. Wolfgang Wagner, Oxford University Press (2020). © Wolfgang Wagner. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846796.001.0001

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specific issues that matter to people’ and that ‘discursively express[es] disapproval of norms’ (Wiener 2014: 1). Contestation is often driven by and tied to social movements and it sometimes does not only challenge dominant policies but also established forms of the political process. In this chapter, however, the focus is not on social movements and new practices of contestation but on the ‘discursively expressed disapproval’ of policies within the political system and the legislature in particular because ‘[p]arliaments allow for representation of a wide range of viewpoints and thus may be a forum for discourse on and conflict over national role conceptions’ (Cantir and Kaarbo 2012: 14). I will use contestation as the genuine term to capture disagreement over policy that results from a plurality of views. In contrast to politicization (see below), contestation does not imply an increase in the level of disagreement over time. This very well fits Democratic Peace scholarship, which has been geared towards building a general theory of how distinctly liberal-democratic institutions and/or ideas account for policy differences between democracies and non-democracies. In line with the finding that democracies have not fought each other since the early nineteenth century—the starting point of the Correlates of War dataset—the general theory under construction is ahistorical in the sense that the main causal mechanisms are assumed to remain unchanged over the entire period under study. If anything, developments over the last 200 years or so have brought about more democracies and thus more cases on which these causal mechanisms can be studied but have not transformed them themselves. Similar to contestation, the term politicization captures the movement of an issue from the private sphere or the ‘realm of necessity’ (Hay 2007: 79) into the realm of open public debate and contingent action (Zürn 2018: 139; Hegemann and Schneckener 2019). In many respects, it is the opposite of securitization (Wæver 2000: 251), i.e. the opposite to a speech act which refers to an existential threat and claims the necessity of extraordinary measures outside the routines of (liberal) political decision-making. In addition, politicization refers to a broader, longer-term transformation, i.e. an ‘increasing contentiousness of decision-making’ (Hooghe and Marks 2012: 840). In this broader understanding, politicization is different from contestation as it does not refer to the initial move of transferring an issue from the private sphere or the realm of necessity to the public sphere but rather to a transformation of the latter that is characterized by growing levels of contestation, sometimes also referred to as ‘polarization’ (Kriesi 2012: 113). According to an influential position in this debate, the politicization of international politics has followed the emergence of international authority, which in turn has followed rising levels of interdependence (Zürn 2014). The iconic episode of this kind of politicization is the ‘battle of Seattle’ in 1999 when some 40,000 protested against the ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization. The scale of the protests surprised organizers and local police as international

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trade negotiations had thus far been limited to disagreements between governments that were closely watched by business but barely noted by a broader public. The transition from the GATT to the WTO, however, marks a dual shift in international trade politics: ‘behind the border’ issues eclipsed tariffs as the main negotiation issue and new dispute settlement mechanisms helped enforce the commitments made. For scholars of European integration, the iconic events are the referenda on the Maastricht Treaty in Denmark and France in 1992. The Maastricht Treaty stands for an unprecedented transfer of authority to a newly established European Union, crowned by the creation of a common currency. The referenda showed that majorities in member states could be mobilized against such steps. The ‘European integration of core state powers’ (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2016) put an end to the long period of a ‘permissive consensus’ (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970: 41) during which the public barely interfered into elites’ efforts to move European integration forward. For observers of American foreign policy, politicization set in even earlier, namely during the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. Interestingly, the transfer of authority to an international or supranational institution played no role in this notion of politicization. Instead, the growing interest in the war and the polarization of opinions about it are attributed to rising levels of education and new forms of journalism and media coverage. As a consequence, a comparably well-informed and interested public emerged (Norris 2011), as public protests against war demonstrate. In the years to follow the ‘Gulf of Tonkin’ resolution, anti-war demonstration spread across the US and grew in size, culminating in 2 million protesters marching in various cities against the continuation of the war in October 1969. With 500,000 protesters, Washington saw the largest political rally in the nation’s history. Fifteen years earlier, when the US fought a war in Korea, such protests were absent. Rising levels of education and new forms of journalism and media coverage also provided an increasing ‘electoral connection’ to foreign affairs (Aldrich et al. 2006). Many observers expected a further increase in the politicization of foreign affairs after the end of the Cold War and the concomitant disappearance of an external threat, but the empirical evidence points in the opposite direction. However, politicization rose again in the wake of ‘9/11’, not only in the US (Trubowitz and Mellow 2011) but also in other liberal democracies, indicating ‘the collapse of the partisan liberal consensus in foreign policy following the onset of the War on Terror’ (Ishiyama et al. 2015: 333). Scholars in international relations, European integration, and US foreign policy not only differ on the timing and trigger of politicization, but also emphasize different dimensions: social movements and protest in international relations, parties, elections and referenda in European integration, a more assertive Congress in US foreign policy analysis. However, de Wilde, Leupold, and Schmidtke (2016) note a recent convergence in understandings of politicization.

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     

With a view to studying politicization of European politics empirically, they suggest that ‘politicization can be empirically observed in (a) the growing salience of European governance, involving (b) a polarisation of opinion, and (c) an expansion of actors and audiences engaged in monitoring EU affairs’ (2016: 4). With only minor amendments, these three dimensions can also form the basis for studying politicization of foreign and security policy in this chapter. Actor and audience expansion generally ‘captures the growing number of citizens and collective actors who dedicate resources in the form of time and money to follow and engage with’ a political issue (de Wilde et al. 2016: 7). In this chapter, I will mostly focus on corporate actors within the political system, namely legislatures and political parties. Of course, citizens may also contribute to the politicization of foreign and security policy, for example by participation in anti-war protests or by activities in social media. However, foreign and security politics differs from European politics by an even higher degree of executive dominance. Stronger involvement by legislatures as well as by political parties are therefore decisive steps towards politicization. The same rationale applies to salience. In general, salience refers to the importance attributed to an issue. In EU studies, it is operationalized and observed in various ways, including the number of newspaper articles or tweets, citizens’ awareness and attitudes, statements by politicians, and activities in political fora. Again, while citizens and media can also contribute to politicization, I argue that the importance attributed to an issue by parliament and by political parties is key, also because, as outlined above, citizens and media take cues from political elites. Polarization is defined as the depletion of neutral, ambivalent, or indifferent attitudes and the occupation of more extreme positions, either in favour or against. While scholars in EU studies often focus on polarization of citizen attitudes, I will apply this conceptualization again to parliaments and political parties. Political parties have been a prime object of investigation in empirical studies of politicization of international politics. This reflects their crucial role in expressing citizens’ attitudes and in channelling and structuring dissent.¹ Political parties do not only indicate which issues are salient but also how they are integrated into larger political ideologies. Studies on political parties and European integration have been facilitated by the low entrance costs for new parties and the resulting large overall number of parties (which translates into a large number of cases and observations) that are typical of systems of proportional representation that are common in Continental European political systems. In the US, in contrast, the positioning of political parties has not been the prime object of investigation in studies of politicization. ¹ Next to political parties, scholars have also studied the media and social protest (Rucht 2013; Hutter 2012).

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This is also because the perceived abuse of executive power, rather than the transfer of political authority, has been the trigger for a politicization of foreign and security policy. In the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, Congress became more assertive and no longer left foreign and security policy to the executive (Lindsay 2003: 533f.). When President George H. Bush asked Congress to authorize the use of United States armed forces against Iraq in January 1991 he faced a far more critical public than Johnson did in 1964. This is also reflected in the outcome of the vote in Congress: 183 members of the House and forty-seven Senators voted against the resolution (which was passed nevertheless with 250 members of the House and fifty-two Senators voting in favour).

3.2 Methodology I will study votes in a country’s legislature to establish whether, when, and to what extent foreign, security, and defence policy have been politicized. Legislative votes are a particularly useful indictor of contestation because they capture what de Wilde et al. (2016) identified as the three major dimensions of politicization: First, the mere fact that there is a vote or even several votes in parliament is an indication of what de Wilde et al. call ‘actor and audience expansion’, i.e. the ‘growing number of citizens and collective actors who dedicate resources [ . . . ] to follow and engage’ with an issue (2016: 7). If a legislature decides to engage with an issue, it is no longer left exclusively to the executive or to technocrats. A legislative vote is an indication that an issue is seen as political in the fundamental sense of being subject to open debate and contingent action (Hegemann and Kahl 2016; Hay 2007; Zürn 2014: 48). Of course, legislatures have various ways to engage with an issue. For example, the German Bundestag, whose prior consent is required before armed forces can be deployed, can approve of a deployment of minor importance in a special procedure according to which consent is considered to be given unless a political group insists on an actual vote. Furthermore, legislatures can decide to dedicate debating time to an issue or pose a question to the executive. Legislatures also differ in the quorum that is required for a formal vote to be held. Often, it suffices that a political group demands a vote for a vote to take place. This makes voting in a legislature a useful indicator of politicization because it suffices that a minority considers the issue a political one to have a vote. Second, and overlapping with the previous point, votes in a legislature are an indication of an issue’s salience. The more often a legislature votes on an issue, the more salient it is, also because votes in a legislature are often accompanied by media attention. Third, roll call votes allow an analysis of the degree of controversy of an issue. In the example of the US Congress’ votes on the military interventions in Vietnam

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and in Iraq, the number—or, in order to facilitate comparisons over time and across countries—the share of members of Congress voting against the use of force is a straightforward indicator of the degree of contestation. In order to gauge the degree of consensus across political ideologies, students of American foreign policy have calculated the percentage of ‘bipartisan votes’, defined ‘as the extent to which majorities or near majorities of both parties in Congress vote together’ (Kupchan and Trubowitz 2007: 11; see also Meernik 1993; McCormick and Wittkopf 1990: 1082). Comparisons over time, however, are hampered by changes in the US party system: Although there has been a two-party system most of the time, the current parties have populated it only since the late nineteenth century and transition periods have seen more than two parties in Congress. Peter Trubowitz and others therefore focus on bipartisanship since the 1880s. In the following, I will use the ‘agreement index’ that has been well established in the study of the European Parliament, i.e. a legislature with a large number of political parties (Hix et al. 2007). In comparison to the measure of bipartisanship, the ‘agreement index’ comes with three advantages: first, it can also be calculated when more than two parties populate a given legislature and, together with related indicators such as the Rice index, it is the only measure that can be used for parliaments with a larger number of political parties. Second and related to the previous point, it allows comparisons of the US Congress with other legislatures (for which the measure of bipartisanship might not work because too many parties populate it). Third and finally, the agreement index is a more fine-grained measure of the degree of support for a particular bill or resolution: whereas the bipartisanship measure is dichotomous (a bill or resolution either receives majority support from both parties or it does not), the agreement index has an interval scale, which is sensitive to individual voting decisions. It should be noted that an agreement index can only be calculated if there is a precise record of the number of ‘Ayes’ and ‘Noes’ and, where applicable, abstentions.² In most legislatures, however, only a portion of all votes is recorded, either by recording every individual voting decision (‘roll call votes’³) or by recording the decision of every political party, which is then assumed to carry the votes of all MPs from this party. Other decisions are taken by acclamation or a show of hands, leaving it to the chair to determine whether there is a majority in favour. This has raised questions about a possible bias that comes with the study of roll call votes, rather than all legislative decisions (Carrubba et al. 2008; Hug 2010). To be sure, ² Some parliaments do not provide for abstentions. The British House of Commons, for example, asks MPs to indicate their vote in favour or against a bill by walking through one of two lobbies. However, MPs sometimes deliberately walk through both lobbies, thus voting both ‘aye’ and ‘no’, which is a functional equivalent to an abstention. ³ Strictly speaking, a roll call vote is a procedure during which every individual MP is called and then announces his vote. However, I will follow common usage and refer to all votes for which individual voting decisions are recorded as a roll call vote, even though the procedure might differ, e.g. by voting electronically or using voting cards.

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the very fact that a vote is recorded can be seen as an indicator that an issue under consideration has been politicized. Even in cases in which support from the majority in the legislature is not in question, a roll call might be requested in order to make those opposing a decision publicly visible. Nevertheless, some scholars recommend to exclude ‘hurrah’ votes as non-meaningful expressions from their analyses and to focus on high-profile votes instead (Bowler and McElroy 2015; Cicchi 2016). This, however, would introduce a bias against the ‘politics stops at the water’s edge’ thesis because excluding (near) unanimous votes, such as the Gulf-of-Tonkin resolution, ‘would seriously underrepresent the solid consensus that existed between the president and Congress on many key foreign policy issues’ (Meernik 1993: 573). In addition to possible selection effects, voting practices differ widely between legislatures. According to Thomas Saalfeld, Some parliaments such as the British House of Commons, the Danish Folketing, the Norwegian Storting and the Swedish Riksdag, witness more than 1,000 recorded votes per parliamentary term. In other chambers, like the Austrian Nationalrat or the German Bundestag during the 1960s and 1970s, only a handful of votes were recorded in each parliamentary session (year)

(1995: 538; see also Hug et al. 2015). When it comes to foreign, security, and defence policy, legislative competences also differ widely (Fish and Kroenig 2011; Dieterich et al. 2010; Wagner et al. 2010). Activities in this realm reflect not only general legislative practices but also country-specific legacies and threat environments (Peters and Wagner 2014). As a consequence, for example, the German Bundestag has voted more than 160 times on military missions since the end of the Cold War, whereas the British House of Commons voted no more than six times. Although legislative votes are generally archived and are thus in principle available for research purposes, there are only few datasets that make voting data over longer periods available in digitized form. By far the largest dataset is provided by the voteview project (Lewis et al. 2018), which includes data on all roll call votes in both houses of the US Congress from its first session in 1789 to the present day.⁴ For the period between 1789 and 2014, voteview has also coded the issue area of each vote,⁵ which allows filtering out votes on foreign and defence policy. ⁴ See www.voteview.com, accessed October 2019. ⁵ Voteview includes two sets of codes for the issue area of each roll call vote until December 2014: the Clausen scheme distinguishes five issue areas, amongst which ‘foreign and defence policy’, which includes ‘all nondomestic policy questions: foreign aid, trade, participation in international organizations and conferences, presidential “doctrines” such as the Eisenhower Mideast Doctrine, and lesser questions of international content’ (Clausen 1973: 41); the Peltzman scheme distinguishes thirteen

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More recently, similar datasets were made available for Germany and the Netherlands: Bergmann et al. (2016) gathered voting data for the Bundestag from its first session in 1949 until the end of the seventeenth legislative term in 2013, totalling 1971 recorded votes. Moreover, they assign one out of twenty-three issue categories, including ‘defence’ and ‘international affairs and foreign aid’ to every vote. The Dutch Parliamentary Behaviour Dataset (Louwerse et al. 2018) provides data on 63,000 votes in the Dutch Tweede Kamer between 1945 and 2015. Issue codings, however, are only available for the period between late 1994 and 2015. Data from other countries are available only to a limited extent: John Carey (2017) provides data on nineteen chambers in twenty-one countries, including Israel, Canada, Czech Republic, Poland and Russia, New Zealand, Australia, and many Latin American states. However, the data often cover only a small number of years and do not provide any issue codings; Martin Hansen and Marc Debus (2012) studied roll call votes in the Weimar Reichstag and in Ireland (Hansen 2009) but coded the topics of the votes only in a small number of cases.⁶ The deploymentvotewatch research group⁷ has been collecting parliamentary voting data on decisions to deploy military forces since the end of the Cold War. Initially, the group collected data on France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom; in 2018 the dataset was extended to Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Slovakia (from 1998 onwards), and the US (Ostermann et al. forthcoming). In the following analyses I will work with the most comprehensive datasets, i.e. with voteview.com on the US (section 3.3), with Bergmann et al. (2016) on Germany and the Dutch Parliamentary Behaviour Dataset (Louwerse et al. 2018) on the Netherlands (section 3.4), and with the data provided by deploymentvotewatch (section 3.5).

3.3 Long-Term Patterns of Contestation: Congressional Voting between 1789 and 2014 Amongst all datasets on legislative voting, the one on the US Congress stands out for the long stretch of time covered: While the country as well as the suffrage categories amongst which are ‘Defence Policy Budget’, ‘Defence Policy Resolutions’, ‘Foreign Policy Budget’, and ‘Foreign Policy Resolutions’ (Peltzman 1984). A version of the dataset with issue-area codes until 2014 can be found on voteview’s legacy page (https://legacy.voteview.com/dw-nominate_ textfile.htm, accessed October 2019). The subsequent analyses are based on this version of the dataset, which includes 53,530 votes in the House and 49,275 in the Senate. ⁶ Beyond the nation state, voting in the European Parliament has been very well documented and studied (see Hix et al. 2007). ⁷ Deploymentvotewatch was founded by Wolfgang Wagner, Falk Ostermann, Juliet Kaarbo, and Anna Herranz-Surrallés (see deploymentvotewatch.eu) and has been joined by Florian Böller, Flemming Juul Christiansen, Fabrizio Coticchia, Daan Fonck, Kryštof Kučmáš, Michal Onderco, Rasmus Brun Pedersen, Tapio Raunio, Yf Reykers, Michal Smetana, and Valerio Vignoli.

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expanded, votes kept being recorded from the first Congress in 1789 to the present day. Although rules of procedures have of course changed in the course of more than two centuries of Congressional history, the basic parameter of Congress’ functioning have remained rather stable,⁸ which facilitate comparisons over long periods of time. One of the features that make Congressional voting data stand out is the availability of additional information. In the context of this study, the coding of issue areas for all votes is particularly helpful. Except for the most recent Congresses, almost every single vote since 1789 has been assigned an issue area code. This allows for an analysis of external relations votes between 1789 and 2014. I first look into the frequency of external relations votes and their share of the total number of votes in Congress as a measure of salience. To avoid any bias resulting from particular international crises, I have calculated moving twentyyear averages to smooth the data. I calculate the mean agreement index for all foreign relations and all other votes of every year in each chamber of Congress. To determine the extent to which external relations have been exempted from democratic politics, I first map the degree of politicization of external relations votes over time, using a five-year moving average. I then run t-tests to determine whether lower levels of politicization for external relations votes are statistically significant in comparison with votes on domestic issues. Figures 3.1 and 3.2 show the annual numbers of all RCVs (dark dotted line) and of the votes on foreign and defence policy (light dotted line) in the House (3.1) and the Senate (3.2). The straight lines in the upper part of the figure (plotted against the y-axis on the right) show the percentage of foreign and defence votes of all RCVs with the light straight line showing annual fluctuations and the black straight lines showing twenty-year moving averages. The data show an increase in the absolute number of foreign and defence votes after World War II. In the Senate, the highest ever numbers were reached in 1978 (150), 1971 (145), and 1972 (143). A similar trend can be observed in the House, but in contrast to the Senate, the trend continues after the end of the Cold War and peaks after 2001 with record number of votes in 2007 (272) and 2005 (223). However, the figure also shows that these swings are by and large in line with the overall voting activities in both chambers, which reached all-time highs in the House in the 2000s. To control for the overall number of votes, the straight lines indicate the share of external relations votes in both houses. These lines show peak years such as 1941 when the share of external relations votes was 55 per cent in the

⁸ Most importantly, Congress’s position in the US political system has remained unchanged. In contrast to parliamentary systems, where the majority in parliament forms a functional unit with the government with high degrees of party discipline, Congress is designed as a check on the executive branch, which comes with lower degrees of party discipline.

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Figure 3.2 Number and share of external relations votes in the US Senate, 1789–2014

Senate and 45 per cent in the House. However, the figure also shows that there is no general long-term trend towards heightened salience (understood as a growing share of all votes) of foreign and defence votes. Instead, the number of votes suggests periods of heightened salience of foreign and defence policy in the 1800s (with many votes related to France and Britain in the context of the Napoleonic

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Wars) and the 1890s and 1900s when the US became an empire. Because the overall number of votes was small in the early years of the US, the share of foreign and defence votes was never as high as in the 1790s and 1800s. It then dropped in the 1820s and 1830s and again in the 1870s. Over the entire period, the share of foreign affairs amounts to c.21 per cent in the Senate and 19 per cent in the House. Figures 3.3 and 3.4 show the average annual agreement index in the House (Figure 3.3) and the Senate (Figure 3.4) for external relations votes (straight lines) and for all votes (dotted lines). The thin lines, which refer to the annual means, show a high degree of volatility, especially in the House and especially on external relations.⁹ For example, the agreement index for external relations votes in the House dropped from 0.6 in 1906 to 0.3 the year later and back to 0.7 in 1908. Because of this volatility, the five-year moving averages are a better measure to map trends in Congressional voting. All in all, there is a long-term trend towards lower degrees of contestation. With 0.66 in the House and 0.62 in the Senate, the average agreement index for the period since the US entry into World War II is higher than for the period from 1789 to World War I (0.49 in the House and 0.52 in the Senate) and the interwar 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1

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Figure 3.3 Levels of agreement for external relations votes in the US House of Representatives, 1789–2014

⁹ On average, the agreement index on external relations changes by 0.077 (House) and 0.061 (Senate) from one year to the next on external relations and by 0.050 (House) and 0.060 (Senate) on all votes. Over the entire 1789–2014 period, volatility slightly increased in the House and decreased in the Senate.

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Figure 3.4 Levels of agreement for external relations votes in the US Senate, 1789–2014

period (0.57 in the House and 0.54 in the Senate). In both houses, the trend lines for the entire dataset are positive. Figures 3.3 and 3.4 confirm the well-established narrative that there has been bipartisanship over foreign affairs during the first two decades of the Cold War and that the Vietnam War has put an end to this foreign policy consensus (Wittkopf 1990: xvii; Meernik 1993; Trubowitz and Mellow 2011: 166). According to Kupchan and Trubowitz, the ‘threat posed by Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union combined with the fading of ideological divisions in the United States [enabled] Democrats and Republicans to coalesce around a common strategy’ (Kupchan and Trubowitz 2007: 8). Also in line with previous research is a ‘comeback’ of depoliticization ‘in the latter half of the 1990s’ (Trubowitz and Mellow 2011: 168) that lasted until shortly after the 9/11 attacks (Hurst and Wroe 2016).¹⁰ Finally, my analyses concur with Trubowitz and Mellow in finding that, ‘in the twentieth century, the first sustained “moment” of bipartisanship occurred a few years before the outbreak of World War I’ (Trubowitz and Mellow 2011: 166). According to the average agreement index, however, this bipartisan moment already comes to an end in the Senate during World War I and does not re-emerge in both houses before 1939. The long-term analysis that the voting data allow qualifies previous findings that the periods after the Vietnam War and after 9/11 were characterized by ¹⁰ Jeong/Quirk (2017), however, find that polarization is increasing steadily since the 1960s.

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exceptionally high levels of politicization. In comparison to the period between 1789 and World War I, the level of politicization during the 1970s and 1980s is still low. In the House, the moving average agreement index is almost always below 0.6 until 1914 and almost ways above during the Cold War. In the Senate, the moving average is always below 0.6 before 1945 and mostly above since the early 1950s. In both Houses of Congress, the founding years of the US exhibited moving five-year averages between 0.4 and 0.48.¹¹ Figures 3.3 and 3.4 not only visualize the absolute levels of contestation over time but also show how contestation over external relations relates to contestation in general as captured by the agreement index for all votes. The two graphs show that the five-year moving averages are often, but not always, higher for external relations. A comparison between AI levels for external relations and other votes shows to what degree foreign affairs has been exempted from the democratic politics of a particular period. Over the entire period between 1789 to 2014, external relations votes have, on average, a higher degree of coherence and are thus less politicized than other votes. However, the difference is small: In the House as well as in the Senate, the AI for all external relations votes is, on average, about 0.04 higher than for all other votes, suggesting that, in the aggregate over the entire lifespan of Congress, politics does usually not stop at the water’s edge. In order to examine when external relations votes have been more (de-) politicized than other votes, I have run t-tests to establish whether lower levels of contestation for external relations votes are statistically significant. In about three out of four years, this is not the case, i.e., external relations do not show a significantly lower degree of contestation than other votes. Again, there are interesting differences across periods: In both houses of Congress, there is not a single year in the interwar period for which external relations votes would have significantly lower levels of contestation than other votes. In the 129-year-period until World War I, only 15 per cent of the years show significantly less contestation for external relations. In contrast, in about half of the years in the postWorld War II period, Congressmen and -women have voted signficantly more coherently on external relations than on domestic politics, with respective years clustering in the period since the mid-1990s. The long-term perspective taken in this analysis qualifies the common wisdom about the politicization of external relations. While confirming that the periods between the Vietnam War and the end of the Cold War and after 9/11 have higher

¹¹ Students of US history will not be surprised by the high levels of politicization over external relations in the early days of the republic as relations with England, on the one hand, and France, on the other hand, were the prime rationale for the establishment of political parties in the United States. Tensions between pro-British Federalists and pro-French Democratic-Republicans came to a boiling point when the US declared war on Britain in 1812. At that point, the Federalists, who were the strongest party in the north-east, seriously considered secession from the Union (see also section 3.5.1 below).

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     

levels of politicization than the periods between the entry into World War II and Vietnam and between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the increase in the levels of contestation post-Vietnam and post-9/11 appear as ‘back to normal’, when viewed from a larger distance that takes the entire lifespan of Congress into account.

3.4 Foreign, Security, and Defence Policy Votes in Germany and the Netherlands As discussed above, parliamentary voting data for the German and the Dutch parliaments have recently been made available (Bergmann et al. 2016; Louwerse et al. 2018). With the exception of the period before 1995 in the Dutch Tweede Kamer, they include information on the issue area. The data thus allow a comparison between voting behaviour in foreign affairs and in other business. I will first present some descriptive statistics on the number of votes in general and on external relations. I will then calculate the agreement index for both types of votes and run t-tests to determine whether any differences are statistically significant. Figures 3.5 and 3.6 visualize the number of all recorded votes, the number of foreign affairs votes (called ‘international’ in the Dutch cases and the sum of ‘defence’, ‘foreign trade’, and ‘foreign affairs’ in the German case), and the share of the latter in the former (plotted against the right y-axis). With an average 300

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Figure 3.5 Number of recorded votes per issue area in the German Bundestag, 1949–2015

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Figure 3.6 Number of recorded votes per issue-area in the Dutch Tweede Kamer, 1995–2015

of c.1,900 votes per year, the Dutch Parliamentary Behaviour Dataset contains many more votes than the German counterpart with only 115 votes on average per legislative term! This big difference results from decisions about the type of votes to be included in the two datasets: whereas the German dataset only includes roll call votes, the Dutch one is much more comprehensive. Roll call votes account for less than 4 per cent of the Dutch dataset. The vast majority are ‘votes by show of hands or the older comparable method of rising in place’ (Louwerse et al. 2018: 156). The parliamentary minutes then do not report individual MPs’ voting behaviour but mention how party groups voted. Unless an individual MP has indicated that s/he deviates from the party group, the Dutch dataset then records as many votes as the party group has members. In the Bundestag, most external relations votes are about defence, followed by foreign affairs; foreign trade votes are a small minority. Because the absolute number of votes results from differences in dataset design, they cannot be taken as an indicator of salience. The relative share of external relations votes is more meaningful, although the differences in dataset design undermine their comparability. The higher share of external relations votes in Germany—18 per cent on average compared to c.10 per cent in the Netherlands—may result from the exclusion of non-roll call votes from the German dataset as this introduces a bias towards more high-profile votes that are considered to be of particular importance. In German parliamentary practice, all deployment decisions are taken by a roll call to underline the importance of a parliamentary vote for sending troops abroad.

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     

In both parliaments, the share of external relations votes has been increasing over time. In the Bundestag there is a clear upswing in foreign affairs and defence votes since the end of the Cold War. In defence, this upswing results mostly from the requirement to have the Bundestag approve of every military deployment and a strict interpretation of this obligation, which requires a new vote for each prolongation, usually once a year. In the period between 1990 and 2017, therefore, the Bundestag had more than 160 roll call votes on military missions (Ostermann et al. forthcoming). In foreign affairs, a large number of these votes are on the Euro crisis (Bergmann et al. 2016). Whereas the comparisons of numbers of votes across parliaments must be taken with great caution, comparisons of the agreement indexes across parliaments are easier to make. The following two figures visualize the degree of contestation of external relations votes in comparison to other business. Figure 3.7 shows that, in the Bundestag, the mean level of agreement has almost always been higher in external relations votes than on other, domestic issues; exceptions include the very first legislative period, the second and third government of Helmut Schmidt and the second government of Helmut Kohl. During Adenauer’s first government, highly politicized votes mostly concerned the ‘Westbindung’, i.e., the course of the Christian-democratic/liberal coalition to join the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Defence Community, even at the risk of hampering unification with the German Democratic Republic. During the coalition governments of Social Democrats and Liberals under Helmut Schmidt between 1976 and 1982, several highly 0.90 0.80 0.70 0.60 0.50 0.40 0.30 0.20

mean AI external relations votes

mean AI other votes

Figure 3.7 Mean agreement index for external relations and other votes in the German Bundestag

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contested votes about a reform of the draft and conscientious objection account for low levels of agreement in matters of external relations. During Helmut Kohl’s second term as Chancellor, votes on arms reduction and arms sales were highly contested. The figure also shows a general upwards trend in the level of agreement that begins in the early 1980s and continues until the late 2000s. Although still less controversial than other business, external relations became more contested again in the 2009–2013 legislative term under Merkel’s coalition government of Christian democrats and liberals. A series of votes on the Euro crisis and several motions, sponsored by the opposition on the nuclear accident in Fukushima account for the rise of dissent. T-tests show, however, that the higher levels of agreement for external relations votes are statistically significant only in the mid1980s and since 1994. Figure 3.8 shows that the picture in the Netherlands looks quite different from the German one: Whereas agreement is rising in Germany, it has been declining in the Netherlands. Whereas the upswing in agreement is particularly pronounced in external relations in Germany, mean agreement levels on international issues are by and large identical with the ones from other votes on domestic Dutch politics; t-tests confirm that differences are statistically insignificant in about 80 per cent of the years. In a majority of years, external relations votes had lower levels of agreement than other votes. Because the number of cases is much larger in the Dutch case, mean agreement indexes fluctuate less than in the German case. With a mean agreement index of 0.65, agreement over external 0.85

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Figure 3.8 Mean agreement index for external relations and other votes in the Dutch Tweede Kamer

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     

relations is generally higher in the Dutch case than in the German case, with a mean agreement index of 0.58.

3.5 Deployment Votes Within the larger pool of parliamentary votes on foreign, security, and defence policy, deployment votes form a relatively coherent and particularly interesting subset. Whereas the larger pool includes votes on issues as diverse as the ratification of international treaties, the condemnation of human rights violations, and, more recently in European countries, also decisions on austerity measures in the Eurozone, deployment votes all concern decisions at the heart of security and defence policy, namely decisions to send the armed forces onto a military mission. This section therefore analyses deployment votes in depth. Of course, military missions also differ widely. Parliaments vote on deployments that are small and low-risk, e.g. training missions, as well as on the massive use of force in an armed conflict, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Whereas some deployments are mandated by the United Nations Security Council as measures of collective security, others are justified in terms of self-defence or as humanitarian interventions, possibly without an endorsement of the United Nations Security Council, as was the case in 1999 when NATO decided to bomb targets in Serbia. What is more, parliaments have developed different practices of voting on military deployments. Some parliaments, such as the German Bundestag or, since 2005, the Spanish Cortes, have an ex ante veto power and therefore vote before a mission can begin. Other parliaments, such as the French Assemblée nationale since 2008, vote on a military deployment before it is to exceed a period of four months (Ostermann 2017: 102). Yet other parliaments do not enjoy a right of approval but might be asked to indicate its—legally not binding—support for a military deployment. This has been the case when President Mitterrand asked parliament for a vote on the French participation in the 1991 Gulf War, when Prime Minister Tony Blair asked the House of Commons for a vote on the British participation in the 2003 Iraq War, or when Belgian caretaker governments asked parliament to vote on the country’s contribution to the 2011 mission in Libya and the 2014 strikes against Daesh. In the context of this chapter, however, it does not matter whether a vote is legally binding or whether it has any impact on the decision-making process. In the context of this book, votes are highly interesting indications of whether and to what extent policy decisions are politically contested. The agreement index discussed above is a good measure to gauge the degree of contestation over time and across countries. I will first analyse authorizations to use armed force by the US Congress (3.5.1) and then examine deployment votes in a larger group of countries since the end of the Cold War (3.5.2). Because the Congressional voting data

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cover such an exceptionally long time period, they allow unique insights into levels of contestation of using force over time—even though the sometimes long intervals between the votes make it necessary to interpret them with great care. I will therefore delve below the surface of the agreement index and provide some historical background of the votes taken in order to discuss to what extent the votes reflect the level of contestation accurately and in what way the use of force was contested.

3.5.1 US Declarations of War and Authorizations to Use Force An important indication of the degree to which the use of armed force has been contested are votes authorizing the executive to use such force. Some of these authorizations have been formal declarations of war. However, since the end of World War II and the establishment of the United Nations system, declarations of war ceased to be a legitimate instrument of diplomacy. Instead, presidents asked Congress to authorize the use of force. Figure 3.9 shows the share of no-votes for both the Senate and the House when voting on authorizations to use armed force, including declarations of war, as well as the agreement index, which is by and large the reverse curve of the share of novotes.¹² The figure shows high levels of contestation in the periods before World 1.00 0.90 0.80 0.70 0.60 0.50 0.40 0.30 0.20 0.10

share no votes Senate

share no votes House

AI House

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War on Terror 2001

Gulf War 1991

Lebanon 1983

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Middle East 1957

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0.00

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Figure 3.9 Share of no-votes and agreement index in Congressional votes authorizing the use of force

¹² I follow Elsea/Grimmett 2007 in identifying deployment votes.

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     

War I and after the Vietnam War. In between these two periods, i.e. in the era of the two World Wars and the early Cold War, contestation is much lower or even absent. The first declaration of war in 1812 was highly contested. It was also an extreme case of party-political division: whereas more than 80 per cent of the DemocraticRepublicans voted for war with Britain, the Federalists voted unanimously against. The split over the war reflected long-standing divisions over relations with England (and France) that had been midwife to the establishment of American parties in the first place. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans shared deep-seated sympathies for France, which was admired for its revolution and its republicanism, and equally deep-seated distrust of England whose monarchy was detested (Owen 1994: 108). In addition, commercial and territorial expansion was considered ‘indispensable to the preservation of republican institutions, and thus essential ingredients of Republican foreign policy’ (Herring 2008: 97). Although opposition to the war concentrated in the north-west, the stronghold of the Federalists, historians emphasize the party-political nature of the division over a sectional one (Brown 1964: 45). Although the war of 1812 ended inconclusively and expansionist ambitions were not met, the outcome was seen as evidence for the viability of the republic. This interpretation gave a boost to the DemocraticRepublicans who would dominate American politics in the next years, and delivered a fatal blow to the Federalist Party that withered away soon thereafter. It took more than three decades before Congress voted again on a declaration of war. In the meantime, the first party system, consisting of Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, was replaced by a second party system that pitted Democrats against Whigs, with the former in the Jeffersonian tradition of the Democratic-Republicans and the latter upholding several traditionally Federalist positions (Gerring 1998). With a view to foreign policy, the two parties differed on the question of territorial expansion. Whereas the Democrats ‘were aggressive exponents of Manifest Destiny’ (Schroeder 1973: 6), the Whigs were unmoved by this doctrine according to which (white) settlers were entitled to spread across the continent. The Whigs feared the ungovernability of a rapidly expanding country and prioritized consolidation and industrialization (Herring 2008: 182). In the South, territorial expansion was also tied to the creation of new slave states. In fact, ‘slavery had become for southerners the driving force behind expansionism and for abolitionists the reason to oppose acquisition of new territory’ (Herring 2008: 176). James K. Polk who became president in 1845 had made territorial expansion a central issue of his campaign. Once in office, he followed a dual Mexican policy: ‘While publicly committed to peaceful diplomacy, Polk maneuvered to ensure war if necessary to gain his objectives’ (Schroeder 1973: 9). After the annexation of Texas in 1845, Polk sent troops into territory that was disputed between the US and Mexico. When these troops became involved in skirmishes, Polk sent a war

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message to Congress. The disciplined majority in the House made sure that the bill under consideration was about the provision of volunteers and the appropriation of funds to help the embattled US troops. Only in a later amendment it was proposed that a state of war exists and that the administration would be empowered ‘to prosecute said war to a speedy and successful termination’ (quoted from Elsea and Grimmett 2007: 83). An angry Whig opposition and several opponents within the Democratic Party voted in favour of war because this was the only way to approve of reinforcements. The unanimity in the Senate is thus deceptive of the true depth of the party-political split over the issue. Because in 1898, Congress declared war against Spain by acclamation, there are no roll call voting data for the period of American imperialism and the fourth party system, in which the Republican Party follows the Whigs as the major opposition to the Democrats. Fuelled by the so-called yellow press and in a jingoistic climate, the war and the imperialist programme for which it stood were popular in general. Indeed, the large gains in popularity appear to have motivated Republican President William McKinley, himself a ‘reluctant expansionist’ (Trubowitz 2011: 90), to go to war. In Congress, Democrats ‘lined up solidly against McKinley’s expansionism’ (Trubowitz 2011: 95), in part because of the strong partisanship of the era, but also because ‘democratic constituencies, mostly southern, agrarian, and export-oriented, saw little advantage in war, imperialism (in Cuba or elsewhere), or naval build-up’ (Trubowitz 2011: 95). Democrats’ opposition to war was still discernible in Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 presidential campaign under the motto ‘he kept us out of war.’ But it was of course Wilson who asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany in 1917 after the leaked Zimmermann telegram had enraged the American public and after Germany had begun unlimited submarine warfare. As the voting data above show, however, the war was not uncontested. Opposition, however, did not cluster in a particular party. Instead, votes against the war came primarily from ‘progressive Republicans or Bryanite Democrats from Midwestern and southern states’ of which some had strongly German constituencies’ (Luebke 1974: 210; Berinsky 2009: chapter 6). Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, the Democrats were more interventionist and pro-war than Republicans (Berinsky 2009: 88). The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, however, effectively silenced voices that were sceptical of war. The declaration of war against Japan saw only a single vote against, coming from Republican member of the House Jeannette Rankin, the first female member of Congress. Rankin faced so much hostility that she abstained when Congress declared war on Germany and Italy two days later, leading to unanimity in both Houses of Congress. A few months later, in June 1942, unanimous declarations of war against Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania followed. The Vietnam War changed the grammar of partisan contestation of US use of force. As discussed in chapter 2, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution sent a message of

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     

unity and support for the government’s policy. With hindsight, however, it is interesting to note that the only two no-votes in both houses of Congress came from Democrats: Senators Ernest Gruening (Arkansas) and Wayne Morse (Oregon). Opposition to the war gained momentum over the next couple of years, mostly driven by the actions of further Democrats Fulbright and MacCarthy. During Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, the divisions over the war remained limited to within the Democratic Party. During Richard Nixon’s presidency, however, the war became ‘Nixon’s war’ and contestation of US policy shifted ‘from one within the Democratic Party to one between the two major parties’ (Berinsky 2009: 20). After the United Nations Security Council had passed a resolution calling for ‘all necessary means’ to force Iraq out of Kuwait, Congress voted in January 1991 on a resolution to send US troops for this purpose. This vote is particularly interesting for several reasons: First, there were major differences within the Bush administration over the appropriate course of action with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, opposed to using force at all (Herring 2008: 901). Second, Republican President George H. Bush faced a Democratic majority in both Houses of Congress. Third, the House Democratic leadership deemed the vote a ‘conscience vote’ and thus refrained from requesting party discipline (Burgin 1994: 325). Fourth, the prospect of war ‘provoked vigorous opposition in the United States, a revival in many ways of the Vietnam anti-war movement’ (Herring 2008: 909). Indeed, many Democratic members of Congress were highly sceptical if not outright opposed to using force in the Gulf. Reflecting this dominant position, Democratic Senate majority leader George Mitchell and Speaker Tom Foley both voted against the authorization to use force (Böller 2014: 151). However, a considerable number of Democrats did not join their opposition and voted in support of the Gulf War. A few dissenters notwithstanding, the Republican minority in both Houses voted overwhelmingly in support of the resolution. All in all, the pro-war Democrats helped ensure that the authorization to use force passed both houses of Congress. During Bill Clinton’s two terms as president, the ‘anti-war MacGovernites’ gave way to a ‘New Democrats’ faction that supported interventions in Somalia (1992), Bosnia (1995), and Kosovo (1999). At the same time, the Republicans had become more anti-interventionist again, criticizing Clinton’s interventions. After the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, President George W. Bush decided to intervene in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). The 2001 authorization to use force was virtually uncontested. In contrast, the 2002 authorization to use force against Iraq that would lead to the invasion in 2003 was highly contested again. A few Republican dissenters notwithstanding, the Democratic Party had again become the voice of the war sceptics. Taken together, the historical review of deployment votes in the US Congress yields a number of interesting insights. Most importantly, a long-term perspective on Congressional voting shows that levels of contestation have been fluctuating

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heavily. Of course, conclusions about any long-term trends cannot be drawn with confidence because the number of deployment votes is limited and distributed unevenly over time. What is more, the purposes for which armed force is authorized differ widely, ranging from territorial defence in 1941 to imperial expansionism in 1846, and from collective security (1991) to Cold War politics (1964). These caveats notwithstanding, we see that the use of force was highly contested in periods as diverse as the early nineteenth, the late twentieth, and early twenty-first century, while being much less contested during the two World Wars, the beginning of the Vietnam War, and the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Furthermore, the historical background has shown that contestation is often structured along partisan lines, i.e., proponents and opponents of military action cluster in particular parties. Finally, however, parties have not been consistently supportive of or opposed to the use of armed force. Rather, control of the White House tends to make the presidential party move towards interventionism and tends to make the opposition more sceptical of military action (Lewis 2017).

3.5.2 Deployment Votes since the End of the Cold War Figure 3.10 shows that parliamentary votes on military interventions have proliferated since the end of the Cold War. This trend is particularly driven by Germany and Italy that together account for around two-thirds of all deployment votes, many of them votes on the extension of existing missions. However, the finding that there is a trend towards a growing number of parliamentary votes on military missions does not depend on votes from Germany and Italy; it can also be found in the other countries. In fact, a practice of voting on military missions only began in Spain with the new deployment law of 2004 and in France with the 2008 constitutional reforms (Ostermann 2017). In the United Kingdom, the 2003 vote on the Iraq War was the first deployment vote since a vote on the Korean War and has since raised expectations that military missions should be subjected to a parliamentary vote (Strong 2018; Mello 2017). The sheer number of deployment votes indicates a growing salience of military interventions in parliamentary business. Figure 3.11 shows the agreement index for deployment votes in the eleven countries for which PDVD has collected data. It shows that the degree of contestation differs significantly across countries. The lowest degree of agreement is recorded in the US. This puts the findings on Congressional voting from the previous section in perspective; clearly the US is not representative of liberal democracies when it comes to the politicization of foreign affairs. The fact that Congressmen and -women operate not in a parliamentary but in a presidential system may partly explain the high degree of contestation in the US because opposition from the governing party does not risk bringing down the government

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Figure 3.10 Number of deployment votes over time, 1990–2017

(although it does weaken it). However, France and Finland who have/had semipresidential systems show rather high levels of agreement. What is more, the abolishment of presidentialism in Finland in 2000 has not led to higher levels of agreement on military interventions. For four countries—France, Germany, Spain, and the UK—agreement indexes for parliamentary votes other than military missions are available and can serve as a yardstick against which contestation of military missions can be compared. As shown in Figure 3.12, military interventions are almost always less contested than other business in parliament (the Cameron II government in Britain is an exemption but should be treated with great caution because the figure for deployment votes is based on a single vote only). The difference with other business is largest when centre-left governments are in power (Schröder II and Hollande) because, as will be shown in more depth in chapter 4, right parties tend to favour military interventions anyway, whereas left parties are pressured to support their own government. The analysis of deployment votes since the end of the Cold War nuances the overall picture on the politicization of foreign and security policy. The increasing

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Agreement Index deployment votes

Merkerl III

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Figure 3.11 Agreement index of deployment votes

FRN FRN UK UK UK ESP ESP ESP GER GER GER GER GER GER GER deployment votes

other votes

Figure 3.12 Agreement index of deployment and other votes

number of legislative votes, binding or non-binding, indicates an upswing in salience of military missions. The agreement index shows that the deployment of military forces has not been uncontested but that levels of contestation typically stay below those for other business in parliament. Finally, the analysis cautions against quick generalizations, as practices of contestation differ across countries.

3.6 Conclusion Those who argue that foreign, security, and defence policy are exempted from democratic politics may overstate their case, but they do have a point, at least for some countries and some periods and to some extent. Politics does not stop at the

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water’s edge, but it does change its character, at least partially. However, this effect differs across countries, and to a lesser extent also across time periods. The previous sections analysed voting on foreign affairs and military missions in particular because votes in legislatures are an indication of an issue’s salience and because they reveal degrees of contestation amongst representatives. Unfortunately, datasets on legislative votes are not available for all countries and, with the exception of the US, not for long periods of time. The generalizability of the findings is thus qualified by the limited availability of high-quality datasets. A recurrent theme of the analyses in the previous sections is indeed the diversity of practices of contestation between countries. The number of recorded votes on foreign affairs, and on military interventions in particular, differs widely between countries, mostly depending on general voting practices in parliament. An upswing of foreign affairs and deployment votes can be observed in several datasets. However, such an upward trend is often correlated with higher frequencies of recorded votes in general. The share of foreign affairs votes in relation to all recorded votes also differs across countries with longer-term averages ranging from c.10 per cent in the Netherlands (for the entire period between 1995 and 2015) to c.20 per cent in the US (for the entire period between 1789 and 2014). The agreement index helps to make degrees of contestation comparable between countries, again pointing to considerable differences: When it comes to sending armed forces on a military mission, MPs in Spain, Finland, Slovakia, France, Belgium, and Denmark all show relatively high levels of agreement, whereas their peers in the US are far more divided. Deputies in the Czech Republic, Italy, the UK, and Germany operate in-between these two poles. Widening the focus beyond deployment votes to foreign affairs more broadly is only possible for three countries where respective data are available. Again, levels of contestation differ between Germany (0.58 on average) and the US (0.57 (Senate) and 0.59 (House) on average), on the one hand, and the Netherlands (c.0.65 on average), on the other hand. For all three cases, however, one can conclude with some confidence that politics does not stop at the water’s edge. This finding is further buttressed by comparisons between foreign relations and other votes. Although levels of contestation for external relations are often lower than for other votes, these differences are frequently not statistically significant. Only the US allows a glimpse of how contestation has developed in the long term. The analyses of Congressional votes confirm the common wisdom that the period between World War II and the Vietnam War saw high levels of agreement about the country’s course in international affairs and that external relations became politicized since. The analyses in this chapter, however, also suggest that the degree of contestation since Vietnam is far from unusual if viewed from a longer-term perspective. The early days of American politics saw levels of contestation that have not been reached since. From a long-term perspective, the

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recent upswing in contestation appears as a movement back to previously normal levels of disagreement over the country’s role in the world. Altogether, the analyses in this chapter provide ample evidence that foreign affairs are not exempted from democratic politics. What theories of Democratic Peace and democratic distinctiveness often silently assumed can thus be stated with more confidence: democratic politics does extend to the realm of foreign affairs. Nevertheless, two caveats should be kept in mind: first, contestation over foreign affairs tends to be lower than over other business, at least in some countries and some periods, pointing to a ‘water’s edge’ effect; second, the picture that emerges from the available data is inevitably patchy, as we lack high-quality data on a large number of interesting countries and on all countries except the US for the period before World War II.

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4 The Party Politics of Foreign and Security Policy Chapter 3 demonstrated that foreign, security, and defence policy is not exempted from party politics. Although the degree of contestation over external relations is often lower than over domestic politics, foreign, security, and defence policy is clearly controversial among political parties. What is more, an analysis of voting in the US Congress showed that party-political disagreement is not a recent phenomenon, as some contributions to the debate about politicization suggest, but was present from the very beginning of democratic politics. The finding that foreign affairs are contested does not say anything about the structure of party-political disagreement. Does contestation result from genuine ideological differences over the use of force or international cooperation? Or do parties, especially in opposition, simply criticize what their opponents in government do? Are differences over foreign affairs connected to fundamental political orientations of being either ‘left’ or ‘right’? Or are ideological differences among parties better captured by a ‘new politics’ dimension that pits cosmopolitans who plead for ‘saving strangers’ beyond a nation’s borders against nationalists who prefer to use force only for purposes of territorial self-defence? As discussed in chapter 2, several studies have found evidence for policy differences being connected to the ideological orientation of the government with left governments more hesitant to use force and more willing to cooperate with others. At the same time, in-depth studies have often found country- and party-specific factors to cloud any party-political pattern across countries. As Rathbun (2004) has shown for the military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, British, French, and German politicians are best understood as partypoliticians. However, the reluctance of the social democrats in Germany to endorse the use of force positioned them closer to the Christian democrats there than to its sister parties in France and particularly Britain, where Labour was at the forefront of calling for a humanitarian intervention. Students of political culture point out that ‘we cannot just assume that all left-wing parties prefer the same policies . . . they must be understood within their cultural context’ (Kier 1997: 24). For example, ‘unlike some Left or Socialist Parties in Europe, the French Left, born in and inspired by revolution, has never been anti-militaristic or pacifistic’ (Kier 1997: 59).

The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions: Political Parties, Contestation, and Decisions to Use Force Abroad. Wolfgang Wagner, Oxford University Press (2020). © Wolfgang Wagner. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846796.001.0001

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In the USA, Democrats and Republicans have switched positions on foreign policy several times: In the 1840s, the Democrats were the party of territorial expansion, deliberately provoking a war with Mexico in order to annex its vast territories in the South-West and West (see section 3.5.1 in chapter 3). At the end of the century, Democrats had turned into critics of expansionism and champions of peaceful conflict resolution and arbitration. During the 1916 presidential election, voters eager to keep the US out of World War I would vote for the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, whose campaign motto was ‘he kept us out of the war.’ Although the American entry into World War I a year later made Democratic Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resign, it marked the beginning of an era during which the Democrats were more interventionist and pro-war than Republicans (Berinsky 2009: 88). This era only came to an end after President Johnson left the White House and his Republican successor Nixon took ownership of the unpopular war in Vietnam. Verlan Lewis (2017) argues that the long-term control of the White House makes the presidential party move towards interventionism. This theory of party politics conceives of parties as opportunistic vote-maximizers and office-seekers: policy positions change in response to being in or out of government. Foreign policy is contested to the extent that criticism is expected to help the opposition gain votes and ultimately win the presidency.¹ This opportunistic model of party politics is perfectly compatible with the theories of Democratic Peace and democratic distinctiveness, as discussed in chapter 2, as it ensures that policy failures (such as long, costly, and unsuccessful military campaigns) will be publicly criticized and decision-makers will be careful to avoid such failure in anticipation of such criticism, which may ultimately make them lose office. The opportunistic model of party politics can also be found in much of the literature on public opinion and foreign policy, where an affinity to the party in government impacts on the assessment of government policies (for a recent overview see Gelpi 2017). The model has clearly been inspired by American politics, where most of the scholars in the field reside. However, the political parties in the US differ from their counterparts elsewhere, especially in Continental Western Europe in various respects: because the first-past-the-post ¹ Lewis refers to his theory as a political institutional theory of party ideology development according to which ‘members of a party in control of the White House have incentives to change their party’s theory of governance to advocate for a strong presidency, centralized bureaucratic administration, and unilateral executive action. Because intervening in foreign affairs is one of the primary powers that the party in control of the presidency can exercise, they are also likely to advocate for more foreign intervention’ (Lewis 2017: 32). Although Lewis does not connect his findings to theories and debates in international relations, they can be read as evidence for a second image reversetheory of domestic politics and international conflict according to which a country’s institutions and political culture are not a cause of but result from international conflict (see also the discussion in chapter 6). With a view to the Democratic Peace, this argument had been advanced by William Thompson, who finds that democracies emerged in regions of lowered conflict and that heightened tensions tend to make democracies become more authoritarian (Thompson 1996).

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     

electoral system gives rise to a two-party-system, American parties are broad tents with a high level of intra-party diversity;² furthermore, because the presidential system does not stimulate a fusion of the government with the majority in parliament, party discipline is low. Taking cues from American politics for a model of party politics in foreign affairs might therefore be deceptive as it pays insufficient attention to the European multi-party systems where parties show higher levels of coherence and discipline. In this chapter I will examine the proposition that party-political contestation goes beyond opportunistic partisanship and involves genuine ideological commitments. Specifically, this chapter will be guided by the second main proposition, introduced in chapter 2, that party-political contestation is structured along the left/right axis. Such a structure implies that political parties do not adopt foreign policy positions for primarily opportunistic reasons. Instead, political parties are conceived of as having genuine commitments to core values from which foreign policy beliefs emerge. I do not argue that being in government or in opposition does not matter for political parties and their foreign policy positions. In fact, as I will show below, how parties vote on military missions is very much influenced by being in government or in opposition. However, I argue that the opportunistic rationale of defending or criticizing the political opponent may qualify but not trump genuine ideological positions for which parties stand. In the next section, I will first discuss various ways in which party-political differences over foreign policy can be understood (section 4.1). I will then introduce two dimensions that potentially structure differences across political parties: the well-established left/right dimension and a ‘new politics’ dimension that pits green/alternative/libertarian (‘gal’) parties against traditional/authoritarian/nationalist (‘tan’) ones (section 4.2). In section 4.3, I will then present my own empirical analyses that draw on party manifestos (4.3.1), expert surveys (4.3.2), and votes in parliament (4.3.3). The thematic focus as well as the time periods and countries covered by the three data sources differ and thus contribute to the robustness of the main findings: support for the military and its interventions is systematically related to the left/right dimension in a skewed inverted U-curve. Support is weakest at the far left and increases as one moves along the left/right axis to the centre right, where it reaches its peak. The far right is less supportive then the centre right but less opposed than the far left. The relation to the new politics dimension is shaped very similarly but is generally weaker. A disaggregation by time periods and regions shows that these patterns are stable over the post-1945 period but differ across regions: in Central and Eastern Europe, differences between left and right parties are less pronounced and, according to

² This is also the case in the United Kingdom. In the period before World War I, for example, the Liberal Party that was in government since 1906 included a radical and an imperialist wing that occupied opposite positions on many foreign policy questions (Macmillan 1998: 174).

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expert survey and voting data, green/alternative/libertarian parties tend to be more supportive of security and defence policy and military interventions than traditional/authoritarian/nationalist parties.

4.1 Why Political Parties Differ One of the key functions that political parties perform in a democracy is to aggregate positions on countless issues into comprehensive and coherent programmes, which form the basis for citizens’ voting decisions and subsequent government formation. To understand whether and why particular parties tend to assume particular positions about foreign affairs, one has to understand how these positions relate to the political ideology of a party more broadly. Political ideologies, whether at the level of individual leaders, of the public more broadly, or of intermediate organizations such as political parties, are ‘ways of organizing values at abstract as well as relatively concrete levels’ (Hofmann 2013: 15), with core values explaining positions on specific questions. Once established, parties’ political ideologies often have a high degree of stability because core values do not change easily and because programmatic flexibility is constrained by ‘a durable constituency of voters, a decentralized decision-making structure, a self-selected cadre of activists, a self-replicating leadership and a distinct programmatic reputation’ (Hooghe/Marks 2018: 112). This is particularly the case for niche parties (i.e. communist, green, or nationalist parties) that are sensitive to shifts in the positions of their supporters but much less so to shifts in the positions of the median voter (Ezrow et al. 2011). At the same time, a party’s political ideology is also contingent and depends on entrepreneurs, key competitors, institutional rules (both within a party and in the political system at large), and country-specific circumstances. Countries with majoritarian electoral systems tend to be dominated by ‘catch-all parties’ because the hurdle for niche parties to gain seats in parliament is high. Since catch-all parties are more sensitive to shifts in the positions of the median voter (Ezrow et al. 2011), the positions of political parties tend to be more volatile and less committed to the ideology of a core constituency in countries with majoritarian electoral systems. Foreign policy positions can be linked to general political ideology in different ways: first, foreign policy positions can be judged instrumentally with a view to their expected impact on policies at the core of political ideology, such as the economy, the welfare state, or civil liberties (Chryssogelos 2015: 229). Parties that promote the welfare state tend to oppose large armies and expensive military procurement as well as the actual use of armed force abroad because spending on defence competes with expenses for the welfare state (Koch and Sullivan 2010: 619). In the nineteenth century, socialists and many liberals in Germany and France opposed standing armies because they were also an instrument in the

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     

hands of a semi- or undemocratic elites to squash domestic unrest or strikes and because standing armies at the time came with privileges for the nobility that stood in the way of a democratic and egalitarian society. The length of military service was therefore heavily contested. Conservatives cherished a long mandatory service, not least with an eye to shaping conscripts’ personalities in an authoritarian direction, whereas socialists were opposed for the very same reason. Socialists favoured militia systems that were successfully practised by revolutionary France. Conservative opposition to such ‘citizens in arms’ was mainly driven by the expected subversive effects on the traditional hierarchy in society (Frevert 2001). Parties’ attitudes towards other states also depend on the values they represent: in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Republicans viewed France as a sister republic that also inspired their vision of American society, whereas Federalists’ sympathies for Great Britain went hand in hand with a more sceptical attitude towards societal reforms (Owen 1994). During the Cold War, parties that campaigned for high levels of redistribution domestically tended to see the Soviet Union and its allies more positively (and the USA more critically) than parties which aimed for a retrenchment of the welfare state. More recently, parties eager to restore traditional ‘family values’ tend to have a more sympathetic view of Putin’s Russia than parties campaigning for LGBT rights. In turn, support for NATO and the European Union as a security actor among European parties results from the degree of sympathy for the US and the level of suspicion of Russia (Chryssogelos 2015: 230). This instrumental approach to foreign policy issues finds support in cleavage theory (Lipset/Rokkan 1967) according to which political parties emerge in response to social conflict, which, by and large has been purely domestic, pitting the centre against the periphery, the state against the church, or workers against employers and capitalists. With few exceptions,³ foreign policy played a very marginal role in cleavage theory because most foreign policy issues were too abstract and far removed to divide and mobilize citizens. From this instrumental perspective, foreign policy positions are linked to political ideologies about the economy and the welfare state. Second, foreign policy positions can be genuine rather than instrumental, often echoing core values that are also important for domestic politics. One obvious dimension concerns the use of force. Brian Rathbun (2004: 19) notes that some parties believe in what Robert Jervis dubbed the ‘deterrence’ model of ³ Exceptions include Ireland and the USA. In Ireland, the first election after independence in 1922 revolved around the question whether the Anglo-Irish Treaty and thus the terms of independence should be accepted. The Irish party system resulted from this cleavage. In the early years of the US, it was the question whether the US should be allied with France or Britain that pitted Alexander Hamilton against Thomas Jefferson and led to the establishment of a federalist and a democraticrepublican party.

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international politics whereas others subscribe to what he dubs the ‘spiral’ model. According to the former, interests are best guarded by military strength and resolve; in contrast, the latter stresses empathy and ‘security dilemma sensitivity’ (Jervis 1976), i.e., the ability to understand that one’s own actions, even if defensively motivated, may be perceived as hostile by others. Whereas the former translates into more ‘hawkish’ policies, the latter implies more ‘dovish’ ones. Differences over foreign affairs often result from different notions of community. A. Burcu Bayram surveyed German parliamentarians to examine the relationship between a cosmopolitan social identity and a feeling of obligation towards international law. She finds considerable heterogeneity in parliamentarians’ sense of obligation toward international law. The strongest sense of obligation was found among parliamentarians who see themselves as members of the international community (Bayram 2017). Different levels of development aid can also be attributed to different notions of community and of moral obligations towards others beyond one’s own community. Lumsdaine finds that ‘parties with strong socialist or domestic redistributive concerns strengthened aid when in power, while conservative governments tended to retrench’ (Lumsdaine 1993: 163). Not much is gained from discussing whether parties’ foreign policy ideologies are instrumental or genuine. Both notions complement each other as they contribute to an understanding of how foreign policy issues involve general concepts of community, equality, or liberty that resonate with respective commitments in domestic politics.

4.2 How Political Parties Differ: The Left/Right and the ‘New Politics’ Dimensions Whereas the previous section has shown that foreign and domestic policies connect to a shared set of values and beliefs, this section discusses how such convictions relate to fundamental structures of party-politics: the left/right and the new politics dimension. The distinction between left and right has structured democratic politics since the French Revolution, when partisans of the king and of gradual change clustered to the right of the chair, and more radical promoters of equality to the left. The left’s emphasis on equality has remained, whereas the right has come to prioritize liberty and to embrace the market as a way of securing it. The distinction is most firmly established in the realm of economic and social policies where the left’s commitment to equality makes it more interventionist and redistributionist than the right. The distinction has survived since the French Revolution because it has absorbed the main social conflict of the nineteenth and twentieth century between owners and employers, on the one hand, and tenants, labourers, and workers, on

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the other hand. The latter have given rise to communist, socialist, and social democratic parties whereas the former have been the social basis for conservative or Christian-democratic parties, depending on the salience of the conflict between the state and the church in a given country. The party systems that emerged in the course of suffrage extension and mass mobilization remained remarkably stable up to the 1960s when Lipset and Rokkan introduced their famous ‘freezing hypothesis’, according to which ‘the party systems of the 1960s reflect [ . . . ] the cleavage structures of the 1920’ (1967: 50) and the Michigan school found ‘party identification’ to stabilize the voting decisions of the electorate (Campbell et al. 1960). In the wake of the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century, debates about the nature and meaning of democracy were also a conflict about the nature of the world order: On the left, proponents of equality and popular rule championed national sovereignty, cooperation among free peoples, and peace. On the right, defenders of the status quo preferred a stable international order governed by the most powerful states, by military strength, and, when necessary, by war (Noël and Thérien 2008: 89).

Rathbun further argues that fundamental disputes about the importance of two core values, equality and liberty, can explain partisan debates about foreign policy: The left’s stress on equality manifests itself in a general pattern of concern for minorities and the underprivileged. The international counterpart of this agenda encompasses the promotion of human rights and liberal values in other countries. I call this an inclusive foreign policy. Such a program indicates a broader conception of political community to which the left believes it has more obligations than the right does. This is also evident in a more pronounced multilateralism. Egalitarianism also leads the left to oppose the use of force since military action is the imposition of an unequal hierarchy of power. This antimilitarism is reinforced by the left’s stress on liberty and its resistance to coercive state action

(Rathbun 2004: 2). The left’s broad notion of community resonates with insights in moral psychology according to which ‘conservatives are more parochial—concerned about their group, rather than all of humanity’ (Haidt 2012: 204). Conservative parochialism and left inclusiveness explains why left parties care more about development aid than right parties (Joly/Dandoy 2016: 12). What is more, the left’s inclusiveness was also visible in the early establishment of transnational organizational structures, such as the Second International, which was founded in 1889 by socialist parties and built on the International Workingmen’s Association, also known as the First International (1864–76).

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Of course, the focus of its activities was the coordination of efforts to strengthen workers’ rights. However, alarmed by the advancing arms race and an accelerated frequency of crises among the great powers since the turn of the century, the congresses of the Second International devoted more and more attention to the discussion of international politics. Some delegates were unafraid of the outbreak of a great war as they saw the victory of socialism as its inevitable result. Others combined a general preference for arbitration with a bellicose attitude towards some countries, especially Tsarist Russia. For most delegates, however, the question was rather whether a great war could best be prevented by parliamentary action (such as voting against the credits necessary to fund it), by a general strike, or by other means (see Joll 1955: 126–57). At its 1907 congress in Stuttgart, the Second International adopted a compromise resolution that called for the prevention of war by whatever means considered effective, which was understood to include general strikes (Lyons 1963: 188). In the event of the July Crisis in 1914, however, the socialist parties in France, Germany, and elsewhere did not withstand the wave of nationalism and signalled their support for the defence of their countries to their respective national government. The dissolution of the Second International in 1916 marked the preliminary end of the socialists’ internationalist ambitions. After World War II, transnational party organizations were no longer a stand-alone feature of the left as other party families followed suit, in part also encouraged by trans- and later supranational parliamentary bodies that organized on the basis of transnational party groups. Beginning in the 1960s, the ‘satisfaction of sustenance needs for increasingly large parts of the population’ (Inglehart 1977: 5), the expansion of secondary and higher education, and ‘an information explosion through the mass media’ (Dalton 1984: 265) have led to the proliferation of ‘postmaterialist values’ (Inglehart), a lowered salience of economic conflict, and the weakening of party identification. As citizens are better educated and political information is made available at much lower costs, the ‘functional need for partisan cues to guide voting behaviour, evaluate political issues, and mobilize political involvement is declining for a growing sector of society’ (Dalton 1984: 265). This results in higher levels of electoral volatility as voting decisions are increasingly based on individual assessments of issues and parties, rather than traditional loyalties. Economic security for large parts of the population has created space for ‘postmaterialist’ concerns such as ‘protection of the environment, the quality of life, the role of women, the redefinition of morality, drug usage, and broader public participation in both political and non-political decision-making’ (Inglehart 1977: 13). These concerns were articulated by new social movements and a new group of ‘green’ parties that entered the parliaments in Western European democracies in the 1980s. Their political success, however, ‘provoked a reaction among older and less secure strata who felt threatened by the erosion of familiar traditional values’ (Inglehart/Norris 2017: 444). This cultural backlash,

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spurred by growing economic inequality and by immigration, led to the emergence of xenophobic and authoritarian parties. Taken together, the emergence of green parties, on the one hand, and xenophobic parties, on the other hand, gave rise to a ‘new politics dimension’ that has not been absorbed by the traditional left/ right cleavage but is orthogonal to it. Hooghe and Marks coined the terms ‘green/ alternative/libertarian (gal)’ and ‘traditional/authoritarian/nationalist’ (tan) to capture the two end points of this dimension. In a similar vein, Zürn and de Wilde argue that ‘the process of globalization leads to a new cleavage between those wanting to further “integrate” beyond the national state and allow border crossings of goods, people, values, etc. on the one hand, and those advocating a closure or “demarcation” of the state on the other hand’ (Zürn/de Wilde 2016: 280). Whereas Hooghe/Marks and Zürn/de Wilde emphasize the transfer of decision-making authority to international institutions, such as the EU, Hans Peter Kriesi and colleagues also refer to migration and globalization more broadly as giving rise to an integration vs demarcation cleavage (Kriesi et al. 2008). The few available studies of political parties and foreign policy mostly take the left/right distinction as their starting point, assuming that the extent to which political parties matter for foreign policy is identical with the extent to which the left parties systematically differ from right ones. The ‘new politics’ dimension has remained much less explored in foreign policy analysis. This is surprising, as the protests again the war in Vietnam in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the against nuclear weapons in the 1980s were an integral part of the post-materialist shift in societal values. Moreover, scholars of political attitudes and behaviour have highlighted the importance of a generational cleavage between an older generation with first-hand memories of World War II and younger generations that take peace for granted. Issues of security and defence policy were thus at the heart of the ‘new politics’ dimension from the very beginning. Green parties that were the harbingers of the new politics dimension in Western Europe also exhibited a distinct foreign policy profile: with strong roots in the peace movement of the 1980s and with conscientious objectors to the draft as a core constituency, they positioned themselves in opposition to the military and to the use of force abroad. At the same time, however, human rights activists were another green core constituency and green parties thus positioned themselves as strong advocates of human rights in international politics. As a consequence, in the 1990s, green parties experienced internal conflicts between a pacifist wing and a faction that advocated the use of force in order to prevent large-scale human rights violations such as in Bosnia and Kosovo. The latter group by and large carried the day. The new ‘tan’- parties generally assumed positions at the opposite end of the new politics dimension with a strong emphasis on the family and the nation as core institutions. However, as Fabian Virchow (2006) argues in his study of German extreme right parties, the implications of these normative commitments

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for foreign, security, and defence policy, however, have been far from clear: the new far-right parties brought together militarists who admire soldiers for their patriotism and masculinity, isolationists that opposed the cosmopolitanism of the post-materialists, and nationalists who do not hesitate to use armed force in the defence and promotion of the national interest. The contributions to Christina Schori Liang’s collection of studies on populist radical right parties in Europe confirm this ambivalence (Liang 2007). Studies of populist parties find a large variety of foreign policies with parties on the right such as the French National Rally (previously: National Front) or the Hungarian Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik) highlighting their opposition to European integration and immigration, and those on the left (such as the Spanish PODEMOS and the Greek SYRIZA) emphasize their anti-globalization stance (Balfour et al. 2016; Verbeek and Zaslove 2017). On military interventions, some, as the Italian Northern League, are opposed (Verbeek and Zaslove 2017: 394), where populist parties on the right often ‘decide their position on a case-bycase basis, rather than on the basis of a non-interventionist ideology’ (Balfour et al. 2016: 35) with individual decisions driven by a complex mix of anti-Islamism, anti-Americanism and pro-Russian attitudes. The most comprehensive and systematic study of political parties’ foreign policy positions thus far has been written by Paul Pennings (2018). Making use of the dataset on party manifestos that the MARPOR project⁴ provides, Pennings mapped the positions of political parties on defence and internationalism since the end of World War II and examined to what extent the left/right dimension and the ‘new politics’ dimension structure party-political contestation. Pennings finds that right parties were, on average, always more pro-defence than left parties. Since the mid-1990s, differences between left and right parties declined as left parties became overall positive towards defence. The policy differences between ‘gal’ and ‘tan’ parties are similar to those between left and right parties because c.60 per cent of all left parties are ‘gal’ parties, on the one hand, and c.60 per cent of all right parties are ‘tan’ parties. The trend towards convergence since the end of the Cold War, however, is less pronounced for the new politics dimension than it is for the left/right dimension. Pennings also analysed party positions on ‘internationalism’, which includes support for development aid, global governance, international courts, the United Nations and other international organizations (Volkens et al. 2017). In contrast to defence, this item is less contested at a fundamental level as both left/progressive and right/conservative parties are generally positive about ‘internationalism’ (the

⁴ The group changed its name from Manifesto Research Group (1979–1989) to Comparative Manifestos Project (1989–2009) and finally Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR). The group comprises a broad network of country experts and has been coordinated and hosted at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB).

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minor exemption being left parties in the late 1970s). Most of the time, left/ progressive parties are on average more positive about ‘internationalism’, especially in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. During the 1970s and early 1980s, however, left/progressive parties were less supportive of ‘internationalism’ than right/conservative parties. The average positions of left/progressive parties exhibit much more fluctuation than those of right/conservative parties (Pennings 2018). For the post–Cold War period, Wenzelburger and Böller concur that parties on the left (ecologists, social democrats and communists) hold a more positive position in terms of internationalism and a more negative in terms of the military . . . In contrast, the traditional parties of the right (conservatives, nationalists) exhibit a much more pro-military position and are somewhat less positive with regard to internationalism (Wenzelburger/Böller 2020: 8).

Whereas Pennings (2018) dichotomized the left/right and progressive/conservative dimensions, Wagner et al. (2017) used a gradual measure of these dimensions. They found a curvilinear relation between support for military missions and a party’s position on either the left/right or the gal/tan axis, with support being highest at the centre and lower towards both ends. The correlation, however, is much stronger for left/right than for gal/tan.⁵ Tim Haesebrouck and Patrick Mello (2018) confirm the curvilinear relation between support for military missions and a party’s left/right position for different operationalizations of the left/right scale. However, they find the correlation to be statistically significant only for Western European parties, not for Eastern European ones. In their study of eight military operations,⁶ they further find ‘contradictory results for the gal/tan indicator’, namely a significant negative correlation between this indicator and military participation in peacekeeping operations among Western European States, while there is a significant positive correlation among Eastern European States . . . . Western European Libertarian/Postmaterialist governments are more likely to participate in peacekeeping operations. In Eastern Europe however, Traditional/ Authoritarian governments are more likely to participate in these operations (2018: 12).

Taken together, there are theoretically sound reasons to expect political parties’ positions on security and defence policy, and military missions in particular, to be

⁵ The r² for gal/tan is 0.11, whereas for left/right it is 0.35. ⁶ Haesebrouck/Mello (2018) study the Kosovo War (1999), Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan (2001), the Iraq War (2003), EUFOR Congo (2006), UNIFIL II (2006), EUFOR Chad (2008), the Libya Intervention (2011) and the anti-Daesh coalition (2014).

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related to their positions on a left/right and a gal/tan scale. However, few scholars have studied patterns of party-political contestation in a systematic way.

4.3 Dimensions of Party-Political Contestation: Evidence from Manifestos, Experts, and Parliamentary Votes In this section, I will examine various existing data sources as well as newly collected data to explore party-political contestation systematically. Specifically, three types of data will be examined: party manifestos (4.3.1), expert survey data (4.3.2), and data on parties’ actual voting behaviour in parliament (4.3.3). Compared to the roll call vote data from the USA, analysed in chapter 3, data from these sources are only available for more limited periods, ranging from the post-1945 period to the post–Cold War era. While it would be highly interesting to examine patterns of party-political contestation in the interwar period or even the late nineteenth century, at least in those countries that already had free and fair elections, we lack the data to do so at this point. Nevertheless, the manifesto, survey, and voting data that I will analyse in the subsequent sections allow comparisons across a considerable number of parties and countries and, ultimately, for a triangulation of the object under study. For students of party-political contestation, party manifestos and expert surveys have been the two most important data sources. Both have been used extensively to examine patterns and developments of party-political contestation over the economy, the welfare state, and European integration. However, they have barely been used to analyse contestation over foreign and security policy.⁷ Parliamentary voting data have primarily been used to gauge individual legislators’ positions or to map the policy space in general but have less frequently been used to establish positions of parties. As I will show below, however, they are a valuable data source to complement manifesto and expert survey data. The methodological merits and shortcomings of manifesto data and expert surveys have been discussed extensively. Mello argues that the manifesto data provide a better measure of cross-national variation as they are less interested in a political party’s ideological position within a country but rather in its position among all other parties, domestic as well as foreign (Mello 2014: 81). Thus, manifesto data are more likely to capture if all main parties in a country are more hawkish than all main parties in a different country.

⁷ Of course, as shown in chapter 2, political parties’ overall left/right position, as derived from manifesto data, has been used frequently in foreign policy analysis to capture government ideology and correlate it with foreign policy behaviour (see, amongst others, Palmer et al. 2004; Mello 2014). To my knowledge, however, Pennings (2018) is the only comprehensive study that actually analyses parties’ foreign policy positions, as indicated in campaign manifestos.

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Rather than preferring one over the other, I will use both (as well as parliamentary voting data) to triangulate the object under scrutiny here: political parties’ positions on security and defence policy and the use of force in particular. I will first present findings derived from the manifesto data as their category (‘military’) is quite broad (4.3.1). The Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) data are more specifically about ‘peace and security missions’ (4.3.2). Finally, the voting data are on actual deployment of armed forces (4.3.3). The basic structure of party competition in Eastern and Western Europe has been found to differ fundamentally (Marks et al. 2006; Vachudova and Hooghe 2009). Four decades of socialist rule have eroded the socio-economic basis for the class cleavage. In contrast to workers in the West, their colleagues in postCommunist countries do not have strong ties to parties of the left because ‘the institutionalized system defined itself as left and has become untrustworthy’ (Wessels and Klingemann 1994: 17). As a consequence, the primary ideological basis of party competition in post-Communist countries is often not the economy but cultural issues (von Schoultz 2017: 46). What is more, left-wing economics and cultural traditionalism have been bundled in the East, whereas in the West ‘there are strong affinities between Left and gal and between Right and tan’ (Marks et al. 2006: 157). Where possible, I will thus disaggregate the data by region in order to examine whether differences in the basic structure of party competition also impact party positions on security defence policy.

4.3.1 Pro or Against the Military and Security and Defence Policy: Evidence from Party Manifestos The Manifesto Project started the coding of election platforms in the late 1970s. It has since grown to an enormous dataset, covering more than a thousand political parties in over 700 elections in over fifty countries, mostly since 1945. The project starts from the assumption that election manifestos matter because parties are policy-seekers that aim at the implementation of their programme once in power. The Manifesto Research Group has indeed found evidence for manifestos to be good predictors of governmental action after an election (Klingemann et al. 1994: 20). In a rare study on governmental foreign policy priorities, Joly and Dandoy (2016) find that coalition agreements in Belgium reflect governing parties’ priorities as expressed in their manifestos. The project divides manifestos into quasisentences and classifies all quasi-sentences into one of more than fifty categories. This procedure is informed by the ‘ “saliency theory” of party competition’ (Klingemann et al. 1994) according to which parties compete primarily via emphasizing issues, assuming that they are valence issues whose desirability is not contested. Parties then emphasize the issues that they ‘own’ in order to increase their salience. Critics have pointed out that saliency theory is modelled

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on the majoritarian electoral systems in the US and the UK and does not apply to multi-party systems competing under a system of proportional representation. Many categories in the coding scheme also imply a position on an issue, implicitly undermining the commitment to saliency theory. For example, the categories of interest in the subsequent analysis are ‘military: positive’ and ‘military: negative’, which capture support for or opposition to a set of items such as military expenditure, manpower in the military, the modernization of the armed forces, and the improvement of military strength, rearmament, and self-defence and military treaty obligations. However, the vast majority of these categories are about domestic politics. In addition to ‘military: positive’ and ‘military: negative’, eight categories belong to the domain of external relations, including, ‘peace: positive’, ‘internationalism: positive’, and ‘internationalism: negative’.⁸ The two ‘military’ categories aim at capturing the importance of external security and defence. By subtracting the number of negative statements from the number of positive statements I derive a variable ‘military’ that approximates a party’s position on security and defence policy. The MARPOR project has also developed a measure of a party’s position on the left/right dimension (‘rile’). Based on factor analyses, the measure results from a combination of twenty-six policy positions (Laver/Budge 1992). Although the two ‘military’ categories are part of the calculation of ‘rile’, it would go too far to take the relationship with rile as tautological, as the twenty-four other variables in the equation weigh more heavily into the calculation of the rile measure. The following analyses are based on the 2017b version of the dataset covering 4,282 manifestos of 1086 parties in fifty-six countries (Volkens et al. 2017). Figure 4.1 plots 4,250 party manifestos for their positions on ‘military’ and on the left/right dimension.⁹ The figure shows that political parties on the right tend to be more positive towards defence than parties on the left, as suggested by Pennings (2018), even though the curve is rather flat. What is more, the graph shows that views on defence are curvilinear (r² is 0.127 for the curvilinear function and 0.119 for the linear one; both are statistically significant at the 0.001 level): while the most scepticism towards defence can be found at the extreme left, parties most supportive of defence are not at the extreme right but at the centre right. The manifestos with the highest scores (on ‘military’ and on left/right) can shed further light on the curvilinear nature of the relation between left/right and the military: the three manifestos that emphasize security and defence most positively and strongly come from the Israeli parties ‘Freedom’ (1961) and ‘Israel is Our Home’ (1999) and from Denmark’s Conservative People’s Party (1988). None of ⁸ In addition, the dataset comprises the categories of ‘foreign special relationships: positive’, ‘foreign special relationships: negative’, ‘anti-imperialism: positive’, ‘European community/Union: positive’, and ‘European community/Union: negative’. ⁹ The dataset includes a few entries for the pre-1945 period, mostly from Northern Ireland and the US, which I excluded as they are too few to draw any inferences for the pre-1945 period.

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Figure 4.1 Political parties’ manifesto positions on left/right and on security and defence policy

these three parties belongs to the far right; instead they belong to the conservative and liberal party families. Out of the ten manifestos that are coded as farthest to the right, eight do not mention the military at all and thus cluster on the zero line for defence!¹⁰ Since the MARPOR data include a wide range of issues, we can compare the pattern of party-political contestation over defence with other issues. Such a comparison shows that the correlation between a party’s left/right orientation and defence is weaker than with questions about the economy and the welfare state but stronger than with issues of democracy, human rights, environmentalism, or law and order.¹¹ For all issues, including defence, the curvilinear function has a higher explanatory value than the linear one. Based on the MARPOR data, therefore, defence does not stand out as an issue.

¹⁰ These manifestos come from Israel’s ‘Likud’ (2015), the ‘Slovenian Peasant League’ (1990), Australia’s ‘Country Party’ (1954), Israel’s ‘Torah Judaism’ (1992), Iceland’s ‘Progressive Party’ (1974), the ‘Finnish Social Democrats’ (1945), the ‘Finnish Christian Union’ (1970), the ‘Family of the Irish’ (1957), and the Swiss ‘Federal-Democratic Union’ (2007). The only far-right manifestos mentioning defence (positively) is Iceland’s ‘Progressive Party’ (1974) and Israel’s ‘Freedom’ (1961). ¹¹ The coefficients are as follows (the first figure refers to the linear function, the second one to the curvilinear; three asterisks indicate statistical significance at the 0.001 level): 0.023***/0.024*** (freedom and human rights); 0.031***/0.035*** (environmental protection); 0.042***/0.043*** (democracy); 0.042***/0.058*** (law and order); 0.162***/0.184*** (planned economy index); and 0.241***/ 0.247*** (welfare).

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A disaggregated analysis by regions¹² shows that the correlation is weak amongst the post-Communist parties of Eastern Europe (r² = 0.040 / 0.044¹³, in contrast to r² = 0.131 / 0.154 for Western Europe and r² = 0.153 / 0.157 for the non-European countries). The general finding, however, that support for defence is stronger at the right, holds. The long time period covered by the MARPOR data also allows for a disaggregation between the Cold War and the post–Cold War period. At the first glance, the correlation between left/right and ‘military’ is stronger during the Cold War period (r² = 0.135 / 0.139, in contrast to r² = 0.103 / 0.113 afterwards). This, however, is mainly an effect of Eastern European parties being included since the end of the Cold War. For parties other than from the post-Communist Eastern Europe, the correlation after the end of the Cold War is almost as strong (r² = 0.130 / 0.137). The manifesto datasets include no measure of the ‘new politics’ dimension. However, Pennings (2018) has calculated a measure for ‘postmaterialism’ for all parties covered by MARPOR.¹⁴ Figure 4.2 plots party manifestos for their positions on ‘military’ and on the gal/tan dimension. Obviously, the curve for gal/tan strongly resembles the one for left/right, as political parties on the tan end of the gal/tan scale tend to be more supportive of defence than parties on the gal end. The explanatory power of the gal/tan scale, however, is weaker than the one of the left/right scale (r² = 0.084 for the curvilinear and 0.069 for the linear function). However, the correlation has become stronger since the end of the Cold War (r² = 0.053 / 0.073 during the Cold War and r² = 0.088 / 0.106 afterwards), which is in line with the notion that post-materialism entered the scene only around the 1980s and that the post–Cold War security agenda resonates with post-materialist themes. Amongst parties in the post-Communist Eastern European countries, the correlation is weak (r² = 0.046 / 0.064). Apparently, the notion that postCommunist party politics is more strongly influenced by a ‘new politics’ rather than a left/right dimension does not apply to security and defence policy.

¹² I distinguish three regional groups, namely 1) Western Europe, including those Southern and Eastern countries that democratized already during the Cold War period; 2) Eastern Europe, which includes all post-Communist countries in Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe; and 3) a diverse group of non-European countries whose main commonality is to not belong to the previous two groups (this group includes the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel, Sri Lanka, Turkey, South Korea, Mexico, and South Africa). ¹³ The first figure refers to the linear, the second to the curvilinear estimate. All correlations are statistically significant at the p < 0.001 level. ¹⁴ Pennings (2018) has operationalized the ‘new politics’ dimension as the sum of national way of life (+), traditional morality (+), law and order (+) minus equality (+). This scale results from correlating the expert gal/tan variable from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey with all MARPOR variables for the same parties. Variables are included if they have a Pearson correlation higher than 0.20 and if they are not part of the left/right scale. A limitation of this procedure is that the gal/tan scale is modelled on European parties as there are no experts scores available for the non-European ones. A high score means a traditional conservative view, whereas a low score means a left, green and alternative view. The gal/tan dimension is only weakly correlated with the left/right dimension (r = 0.199).

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Figure 4.2 Political parties’ manifesto positions on gal/tan and on security and defence policy

The correlation is particularly strong—also in comparison with the left/right dimension—amongst parties from Western countries after the Cold War (r² = 0.144 / 0.171). It is also interesting to note that the relationship between gal/tan and security and defence policy is again curvilinear. At the gal end of the spectrum, four manifestos are negative on defence, four are silent and two are positive. Out of the ten manifestos that score highest on ‘tan’, seven do not mention the military at all. Of the three parties that do mention the military, the Dutch ‘Reformed Political Party’ in 1946 is rather critical, warning against rampant defence spending. The two scatterplots above confirm what is known about the manifesto data in general, namely that they are centripetal, i.e. the parties are positioned near the middle of the spectrum (Pennings 2018). The manifesto data have been criticized on various counts. The reliability of the coding has been subject of heated debate (Gemenis 2013). Cicchi et al. (2017) note that the longitudinal character of the data is an asset but also ‘forces coders to use issue categories developed in the early waves of the study dating back to the 1970s’. Whereas some of these categories (e.g. anti-imperialism) have by and large become irrelevant, others have radically changed their meaning. This is also the case for the central category in this study: the items subsumed under the category of ‘military’ have changed dramatically from the late 1940s to the 2010s. During the Cold War, defence revolved mostly

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around nuclear deterrence, détente, and alliance politics; since the end of the Cold War, military interventions and related reforms of the armed forces dominated the agenda; since 2011, counterterrorism was added to the agenda. It is possible to search such keywords in a growing number of manifestos that the manifesto group has made digitally available. However, there are no entries for ‘deterrence’, ‘military interventions’, and similar items in the manifesto dataset as foreign policy analysis was clearly a minor concern to the manifesto group. A further point of critique is conceptual: the manifesto project assumes that party-political competition ‘is characterized by the prevalence of valence issues’ (Gemenis 2013: 4). Parties are thus assumed to broadly agree about policy goals but differ in emphasizing some over others. At an abstract level, this seems plausible also for the security and defence policy, as pleas for the abolition of the military are scarce. More specific issues, such as the participation in military interventions, however, are more contested.

4.3.2 Pro or Against Peace and Security Missions: Evidence from Expert Surveys Expert surveys have emerged as the main alternative to manifesto data. Most relevant in the context of this book are the data of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES). Initiated by Gary Marks and Liesbet Hooghe, surveys were carried out in 1999, 2002, 2006, 2010, and 2014. The survey’s prime aim has been to gather data on parties’ positions on European integration. Again, foreign policy more broadly was not the project’s main concern, but in 2010 and 2014, a question about peace and security missions was included in the survey (Bakker et al. 2015).¹⁵ In 2014, the CHES asked more than 300 experts to map the positions of 268 political parties in thirty-one European countries on ‘international security and peacekeeping missions’ on an eleven-point scale ranging from ‘0: Strongly favours [country’s] troop deployment’ to ‘10: Strongly opposes [country’s] troop deployment’. Of course, the subject in question is not very precise, as it lumps together various types of missions that differ on characteristics found to influence attitudes towards them, such as the level of risk, the presence or absence of a UN Security Council mandate, their unilateral or multilateral nature, etc. Nevertheless, the question is far more precise than the manifesto category of ‘military’. The main advantage of expert surveys in general is that they tap into the expertise of those who have dedicated lots of time and effort into understanding the object under study. Such expertise includes a critical examination of the

¹⁵ Earlier surveys included a question on the European Union foreign and security policy, but this item was designed to capture party positions on the level at which foreign and security should take place, rather than on the substance of foreign and security policy, which is of interest here.

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     

sources used elsewhere, such as manifestos or voting behaviour. However, experts do not take the data at face value but interpret them critically by adding background knowledge, allowing them, for example, to take into account that votes may not always reflect genuine positions but can be strategically motivated. Furthermore, experts are less dependent on the availability of particular sources. For example, an expert can assign a foreign policy position to a political party even if it only has a one-page manifesto that is fully focused on domestic politics by using other sources including background talks with politicians and members of this party. Therefore, expert surveys can be designed deductively for the specific purpose of a research project. Of course, expert judgements can also be biased and good expert surveys therefore involve a large pool of experts. The CHES team has analysed the standard deviations among expert judgements and found them to be ‘quite small’ (Hooghe et al. 2010: 693). Because ‘familiarity breeds reliability’, evaluations of large parties, extreme parties, salient issues, and Western parties score highest on reliability. With a view to the issue under study here, we can safely assume that ‘international security and peacekeeping missions’ have been sufficiently salient to yield reliable judgements. In general, expert surveys on party positions are closer to the views of voters and parliamentarians than manifesto data (Marks et al. 2007). The correlation between the MARPOR data on ‘military’ and the CHES data on peace and security missions is statistically highly significant but explains only c.14 per cent of the variation.¹⁶ This correlation is much lower than the one for the general left/right positions (Bakker et al. 2015: 150). This underlines that MARPOR’s security and defence policy item and the CHES’s question on peace and security missions are distinct. Should we find the same pattern of party-political contestation, it would add to the robustness of the findings. Figures 4.3 and 4.4 visualize the positions of political parties on peace and security missions and on a left/right and gal/tan axis.¹⁷ The figures confirm the finding from the manifesto data that the relationships are curvilinear. Support increases from the far left to the centre right but decreases again when moving further to the far right; the same curvilinear pattern can be observed for gal/tan although the correlation is clearly weaker (r² = 0.088 for gal/tan and 0.422 for left/ right). The figures also illustrate Pennings’ observation that expert coding tends to be more centrifugal than manifesto data (Pennings 2018). Since the CHES dataset also includes a range of issues for which experts were asked to code political parties’ positions, we can again also compare the pattern of

¹⁶ I correlated the 2010 CHES data with MARPOR data on the same parties’ manifestos in the years 2009 to 2011 (n = 96). ¹⁷ In contrast to Wagner et al. (2017; 2018), the analysis here pools all available data from 2010 and 2014, yielding 448 entries.

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       

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R2 Quadratic = 0,422

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support peace and missions

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Figure 4.3 Political parties’ left/right position and support for peace and security missions, according to expert survey data

contestation for peace and security missions with these other issues. The results for the expert survey differ from those for the manifesto data as international security stands out in two respects: first, party positions are much closer aligned with the left/right axis, rather than with the gal/tan axis. On other issues, such as the environment, immigration policy, civil liberties vs law and order, deregulation or redistribution, the differences between the two structuring principles are much less pronounced. Second, on the other issues just mentioned, the explanatory value of the linear function is typically very close to the one of the curvilinear function. Contestation of international security stands out for being contested in a far more curvilinear, rather than linear way. A disaggregation by regions reveals interesting differences across regions. For left/right, the correlation is much stronger in the West than in the East (r² for the curvilinear function is 0.58 in the West but 0.18 in the East). For gal/tan, the direction of the causal relationship differs across regions: in the West, parties at the tan pole, such as the French ‘National Rally’ (previously: ‘National Front’), the German ‘National Democratic Party of Germany’, or the Belgian ‘Flemish Bloc’, tend to show moderate support of peace and security missions whereas opposition is more frequent at the ‘gal’ pole. In the East, parties at the ‘gal’ pole, such as the ‘Croatian People’s Party’ or the Slovakian ‘Freedom and Solidarity’, are more supportive of military missions than their peers in the West, such as the green

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      R2 Quadratic = 0,088

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Figure 4.4 Political parties’ gal/tan position and support for peace and security missions, according to expert survey data

parties in Belgium, the UK, Italy, and Spain. At the same time, parties at the ‘tan’ pole, such as Hungary’s ‘Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik)’, Bulgaria’s ‘Attack’, or the ‘League of Polish Families’ tend to be not only more opposed than their Western peers but also than Eastern parties at the ‘gal’ end and the centre of the spectrum. An additional expert survey of sixty-two parties in Ukraine and the EU candidate countries Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia further confirms the particular structure of contestation among post-Communist countries. Whereas the correlation between support for peace and security missions and parties’ left/right orientation is comparable with other post-Communist countries (r² for the curvilinear function is 0.19 among non-EU states compared to 0.18 among post-Communist EU member states), the correlation with parties’ gal/tan position is much stronger. Twenty-nine per cent of the variation in support for military missions can be explained by parties’ gal/ tan position (compared to 15 per cent among post-Communist EU states and 10 per cent among West European states). Parties at the ‘tan’ end of the spectrum are on average more opposed to the use of force than parties at the ‘gal’ end. In the countries in question, the experience with military interventions in the Balkans is of obvious importance: the four parties that are most decidedly against their country’s participation in military missions all score high to the ‘tan’ end of the

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       

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spectrum: what is more, the ‘Democratic Party of Serbia’ and ‘Dveri’ in Serbia, the ‘Socialist People’s Party of Montenegro’ and ‘New Serb Democracy’ in Montenegro share an affinity to Serbian nationalism, which experienced military interventions as a spoiler of their ambitions to establish a greater Serbia. In contrast, the Bosnian ‘Party of Democratic Action’ and the (Northern-) Macedonian ‘Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization—Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity’, while also scoring high on traditionalism, authoritarianism, and nationalism, are supportive of military interventions, since they experienced them as a welcome international measure to protect their constituents. Taken together, the expert survey data confirm the main findings from the manifesto data: first, a party’s left/right position is a better predictor of its position on the military and its use than its position on the gal/tan scale; second, the correlation is curvilinear with support peaking at the centre right; and third, these general patterns capture party-political contestation in Eastern Europe to a lesser extent.

4.3.3 Pro or Against Actual Military Deployments: Evidence from Votes in Parliament Voting in legislatures ‘provides an opportunity to observe the revealed preferences of elites’ (Milner/Tingley 2015: 129). In contrast to manifestos, which communicate policy intentions, voting informs about actual behaviour. However, the availability of voting data differs vastly across countries. In most parliaments, only a portion of all votes is recorded, either by recording every individual voting decision (‘roll call votes’¹⁸) or by recording the decision of every political party, which is then assumed to carry the votes of all MPs from this party. Other decisions are taken by acclamation or a show of hands, leaving it to the chair to determine whether there is a majority in favour. This has raised questions about a possible bias that comes with the study of roll call votes, rather than all parliamentary decisions (Carrubba et al. 2008; Hug 2010). To be sure, the very fact that a vote is recorded can be seen as an indicator that an issue under consideration has been politicized. Even in cases in which support from the majority in parliament is not in question, a roll call might be requested in order to make those opposing a decision publicly visible. In addition to possible selection effects, voting practices differ widely between legislatures.

¹⁸ Technically, a roll call vote is a procedure during which every individual MP is called and then announces his vote. However, I will follow common usage and refer to all votes for which individual voting decisions are recorded as a roll call vote, even though the procedure might differ, e.g. by voting electronically or using voting cards.

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     

To the extent that voting data are available, they have been mostly used to map individual legislators’ positions and to draw inferences about the dimensionality of the policy space (Poole and Rosenthal 2007). This approach works well for the US Congress with its low levels of party discipline but much less for the parliamentary systems that are characteristic of European democracies (Laver 2014: 219; Bräuninger et al. 2016). Political parties have been the unit of analysis in studies of party coherence and discipline. Party groups in the European Parliament have been of special interest as roll call votes reveal the relative coherence among MEPs from the same political group, on the one hand, and from the same country, on the other hand. The actual content of roll call votes has remained by and large unaddressed.¹⁹ Since 2016, a growing network of scholars has been collecting data on parliamentary deployment votes, i.e. votes in parliament on sending armed forces on a military mission.²⁰ Deployment vote data come with the advantage that they are about what political parties do, i.e., how they actually vote on specific deployments and thereby, although to varying degrees, influence the decision-making process. Although Klingemann et al. (1994) showed that party manifestos are a good predictor for government policies, foreign and security policy is notorious for gaps between words and deeds because once in government, parties are exposed to the pressures of the international system (see chapters 2 and 6). However, the deployment vote data also have shortcomings, the biggest of which is the highly uneven distribution of votes across countries, which results from different constitutional obligations, political culture, and governmental strategies: in some countries, such as Poland or Greece, parliament never votes on any military deployment, effectively excluding the country from the analysis. In other countries, the government is not obliged to submit military missions to a vote in parliament but may sometimes find it useful to do so: in Belgium, the constitution grants the right to declare war exclusively to the executive and the provision has been understood to apply to military missions. However, the governments of Leterme and Di Rupio have decided to put the Belgian contribution to the interventions in Libya, Mali, and Iraq to votes in parliament because they were caretaker governments in the process of coalition negotiations (Reykers/ Fonck 2016). In France, President Mitterrand decided to have the Assemblée Nationale vote on the 1991 Gulf War even though the decision then fell within the president’s domaine réservé (Wagner et al. 2017: 28). In a similar vein, Tony Blair in the United Kingdom had the House of Commons vote on the 2003 Iraq War, thereby setting a precedent that his successors have found difficult to ignore ¹⁹ In addition to my own pilot study (Wagner et al. 2018), van den Putte, de Ville, and Orbie (2015) have analysed how political groups in the European Parliament voted on trade agreements and Stefano Braghiroli examined votes in the European Parliament on Russia (Braghiroli 2015) and on Turkey (Braghiroli 2012). ²⁰ See the project’s website www.deploymentvotewatch.eu.

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       

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(Mello 2017; Strong 2018). Even amongst the countries that provide for an obligatory vote in parliament, practices differ widely. In Germany, the number of votes is inflated because the Bundestag votes even on small deployments and reapproves all missions in intervals of a year or even shorter periods and whenever the mandate or the maximum number of troops changes. In other countries, such as France since the 2008 reform, smaller missions or maritime deployments are exempted (Ostermann 2017). In Spain, extension votes are taken in committee, not in the plenary. In Italy, the (re-)financing of all military operations used to be put to a vote in parliament every six months, leaving MPs the choice to vote in favour or against all military deployments. Only since 2017 does parliament vote on individual missions (Coticchia and Vignoli 2018). Different practices result in highly uneven numbers of votes across countries in the Parliamentary Deployment Vote Dataset (PDVD). The subsequent analyses draw on the second, updated and extended version of the PDVD (Ostermann et al., forthcoming).²¹ The PDVD includes 514 votes between 1990 and 2017 in eleven countries: Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the USA. Because of the different voting practices mentioned above, the distribution of votes across countries is very uneven: Germany (169) and Italy (121) together account for more than half of all votes; the Czech Republic (69), Denmark (58), Slovakia (37), France (18), Finland (12), the USA (11), Spain (10), the UK (6), and Belgium (3) account for the rest. The ‘party-vote dataset’ provides information on the voting behaviour of c.140 parties in most of the 514 deployment votes, yielding 2,672 cases.²² The ‘party-vote dataset’ is also highly skewed as not only the number of votes but also the number of political parties differs considerably across the eleven countries, ranging from more than twenty in Italy to two in the USA. The German parties account for c.30 per cent of the ‘party-vote dataset’, the Italian ones for c.25 per cent, and the Danish for c.14 per cent; parties in the remaining eight countries for the remaining c.30 per cent. To examine the pattern of party-political contestation in actual parliamentary deployment votes, I have added data on parties’ left/right position from MARPOR and I have calculated their position on the ‘new politics’ dimension using Pennings’ formula (see above). Such data are available for the vast majority of parties and includes almost all major ones. In addition, I used data from PDVD on whether a party is in government or in opposition at the time of voting on a

²¹ At the time of writing, a third, updated and extended version is being prepared with the support of the Gerda-Henkel-Foundation. A release of the third version with additional data from Canada Croatia, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, South Korea, and Turkey is expected in late 2020. ²² For a small number of cases in the 1990s, only aggregate figures are available, while information on the voting behavior of individual MPs or parties has not been available.

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     

particular intervention. Although being in or out of government may also matter for manifestos, its impact on actual voting behaviour can be assumed to be very strong. In parliamentary systems in particular, party discipline is essential to secure government survival. As a consequence, defections in the ranks of the governing parties in parliament are uncommon and may trigger disciplinary measures. This logic is consistent with Lewis’s (2017) claim that when in power, political parties tend to become more internationalist and interventionist. Moreover, parties in opposition have a general incentive to present themselves as an alternative to the ones in government and thus to oppose government policies, even on deployment decisions. According to Williams (2014: 112–13), if opposition parties perceive a military mission ‘as being unpopular or potentially disastrous, then they will publicly oppose using force’ (see also Schultz 2001). Figure 4.5 takes the share of yes votes in 2,262 party votes for which a left/right score is also available from MARPOR to visualize the party-political pattern of support for deployment decisions. Parties in government are marked as circles, those in opposition as quadrats. The figure shows that unanimous support is the most common voting behaviour, accounting for c.46 per cent of all votes. What is more, such unqualified support can be found across the entire political spectrum, ranging from the ‘Socialist People’s Party’ in Denmark at the far left to the ‘Brothers of Italy’ at the far right. Unqualified support is not limited to parties in government but

gov/opp gov opp

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Figure 4.5 Parliamentary votes for military deployments along left/right axis

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includes parties in the opposition, echoing the ‘politics-stops-at-the-water’s-edge’ idiom discussed in chapter 3. In contrast, opposition to interventions mainly comes from parties out of government—exceptions (the circles at the lower part of the graph) coming almost exclusively from Italy. Clearly, opposition tends to cluster at the left of the political spectrum. Total lack of support—i.e. no single vote in support—accounts for c.22 per cent of all party votes and frequently comes from the ‘Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia’ in the Czech Republic, the ‘Red-Green Unity List’ (Denmark), ‘The Left’ in Germany, the ‘Communist Refoundation Party’ in Italy, and the ‘United Left’ in Spain. The curvilinear model again performs better than the linear one (r² = 0.21 for the curvilinear and 0.16 for the linear one) because the far right is not more supportive than the centre right. Instead, the graph visualizes that the far right is more ambivalent about military interventions. Indeed, the ‘Brothers of Italy’ and the ‘Danish People’s Party’ have all sometimes voted unanimously in favour and sometimes unanimously against a military intervention. Although the probability curve is not shaped in the same way across all countries (see below), it should be noted that the finding of a curvilinear correlation does not result from respective patterns in Germany and Italy, which account for the majority of the cases; they remain statistically highly significant when all cases from Germany and Italy are excluded. Figure 4.6 visualizes the relationship between party votes and the left/right dimension for each of the eleven countries under study individually. Parties are grouped into party families (with coding coming from PDVD) and marked respectively. Parties’ positions on the left/right scale fluctuate considerably while remaining on the left or on the right side of the spectrum. An examination at the level of individual countries shows that the skewed inverted U-curve can be found in Belgium, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. With the exception of Belgium (where there have been only three deployment votes with almost unanimous support), the correlations are statistically highly significant. In these eight countries, there is opposition against military interventions at the left part of the political spectrum. In the Czech Republic, Italy, Finland, Slovakia, and the USA, opposition includes parties at the right part of the spectrum with Finnish Christian Democrats opposing deployments to UNIFIL (2006) and ISAF (2010), Czech conservatives opposing participation in EU operations on the Balkans (2004) and in UNDOF in the Golan (2015), Slovak conservatives voting against the 2003 Iraq War, Italy’s ‘Go Italy’ and the ‘Christian Democratic Centre’ opposing various missions, and the US Republicans voting against deployments to Somalia (1993), Kosovo (1999), and Libya (2001). In Belgium, Denmark, and Spain, conservative and Christian-democratic parties are fully supportive of all deployments. In Germany, they only voted against the deployment to Afghanistan when the vote was linked to a motion of confidence for the red–green coalition in 2001.

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     

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        Slovakia

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Figure 4.6 Parliamentary votes for military deployments along left/right axis per country

The curves in the United Kingdom, Slovakia, and the USA show a different shape. In the UK, support for interventions grows almost linear towards the right of the political spectrum. This results from the ‘Conservative Party’ at the right end of political spectrum voting overwhelmingly in favour of interventions and opposition coming mostly from the ‘Labour Party’ and the ‘Liberal Democrats’.²³ It should be noted that, compared to the other countries under study here, the British parties are all relatively close to each other on the left/right axis, which only ranges from –18 to +18. This is also an effect of the ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system, which rewards political parties at the centre and imposes high hurdles for radical parties. Would the House of Commons host a similar range of positions as its Belgian, Italian, or French counterpart, the curve for the UK might well look more like the ones in these countries. In the USA and in Slovakia, support comes primarily from the fringes and opposition from the political centre. In the Slovakian case, this results from the volatile left/right positions of parties belonging to the social democratic,

²³ The ‘United Kingdom Independent Party’ (UKIP) is commonly viewed as a far-right party (and is counted amongst the radical right parties by CHES), but according to the MARPOR coding, its position is not to the right of the Conservative Party but to the left of it! UKIP only had a single MP during the second Cameron government, and he voted in favour of the strikes against Daesh in Syria.

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     

conservative, and Christian-democratic families: the ‘Christian Democratic Movement’ (KDH) and the ‘Slovak Democratic and Christian Union’ (SDKÚ) sometime position themselves to the right of the nationalist ‘Slovak National Party’ (SNS) while supporting deployment decisions. In a similar way, the social democratic ‘Direction’ has sometimes positioned itself to the left of radical left parties, while voting in favour of military interventions. When in opposition in the early 2000s, ‘Direction’ positioned itself at the centre right while voting against the government’s decision to participate in Iraq War and other missions. This volatility can be explained with the low salience of foreign and security policy and of the left/right dimension in Slovak politics (Malová 2013).²⁴ While Slovak political parties by and large vote in line with sister parties in the same party family, the positions of some parties on the left/right axis are so volatile that it has turned the shape of the U-curve. In research on the dimensionality of the political space, Slovakia has been spotted as an outlier before (Bakker et al. 2012: 219). With a view to the pronounced skewed inverted U-curve that characterizes Czech parties’ voting behaviour,²⁵ it seems more likely that the party politics in Slovakia is an exception and not representative of party politics and foreign affairs in postCommunist countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Ultimately, however, only further research on additional countries will be able to answer this question. In the case of the USA, the U-shaped curve also results from shifts in Democrats’ and Republicans’ left/right positions. While always to the left of the Republicans, fewer Democrats voted against the Afghanistan war when positioned relatively far to the left than against the interventions in Somalia, Kosovo, and Libya (under Democratic Presidents) when positioned more to the centre. In a similar vein, Republicans were more supportive of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (under a Republican president) when positioned relatively far to the right than of the interventions in Somalia, Kosovo, and Libya when positioned more to the centre. As in the British case, the spectrum that American parties occupy on the left/right axis as a result of the ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system is much smaller than in most other cases, ranging from –4 to +33. The country-level graphs also show that some political parties vote differently on different military interventions. The German Greens, for example, have not only voted unanimously in favour and unanimously against particular deployment decisions but have also split the group votes in many different ways. Figure 4.7 visualizes the correlation between political parties’ share of yes votes and Pennings’ calculation of their gal/tan position. As above, parties in government are marked as circles, those in opposition as quadrats.

²⁴ The CHES data also include measures of salience for the economic left/right dimension and for international security and peace missions. In both cases, Slovakia is assessed to be clearly below average. ²⁵ The r² for the curvilinear function is the second highest for the Czech parties amongst the eleven countries and statistically significant.

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        gov_opp gov opp

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R2 Quadratic = 0,163

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20

40

Figure 4.7 Parliamentary votes for military deployments along the new politics axis

Obviously, Figure 4.7 has much in common with Figure 4.5 above: again, the curvilinear correlation is stronger than the linear one (r² = 0.16 for the quadratic and r² = 0.12 for the linear one) but the correlations with gal/tan are weaker than with left/right. As indicated by the cusp, support is strongest amongst parties that are moderately traditional/authoritarian/nationalist. Although opposition to interventions comes from both poles of the spectrum, it is strongest amongst the green/alternative/libertarian parties. At the ‘tan’ end of the spectrum, the Danish ‘Christian People’s Party’ has consistently voted in support of interventions, whereas the ‘List di Pietro/Italy of Values’ has often voted against. Figure 4.8 visualizes the relationship between party votes and the gal/tan dimension for each of the eleven countries under study individually. Because differences between parties’ gal/tan position, on the one hand, and their left/right position, on the other hand, are often small, the overall pictures per country are very similar to the ones in figure 4.6: Belgium, Denmark, France, Spain, Finland, Germany, and Italy show inverted U-curves; Slovakia, the United Kingdom, and the USA do not. Czech Parties show an inverted U-curve for left/ right and a U-curve for gal/tan, but it should be noted that the gal/tan spectrum in the Czech Republic is limited to the traditional/authoritarian/nationalist half of the spectrum with not even the Czech greens in the green/alternative/libertarian part. The same caveat applies to the parties in the USA.

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Belgium

Czech Republic

share of yes votes

80%

60%

R2 Quadratic = 0,266 40%

party family PDVD christdem conservative green liberal radical left radical right socialist

100%

80% share of yes votes

party family PDVD christdem conservative green liberal radical right socialist

100%

20%

60%

R2 Quadratic = 0,087

40%

20%

0%

0% –10

–5

0

5 gal-tan

10

15

20

,0

2,5

5,0

share of yes votes

12,5

60%

2

R Quadratic = 0,150 40%

party family PDVD conservative liberal radical left socialist

100%

80% share of yes votes

party family PDVD christdem conservative liberal radical left radical right socialist

80%

20%

R2 Quadratic = 0,343

60%

40%

20%

0%

0% –20

–10

0

10 gal-tan

20

30

40

–10

–5

0 gal-tan

5

10

France

Finland

80%

60%

2 R Quadratic = 0,109

40%

party family PDVD conservative green liberal radical left radical right socialist

100%

80% share of yes votes

party family PDVD christdem conservative green liberal radical left radical right socialist

100%

share of yes votes

10,0

Spain

Denmark 100%

20%

60%

R2 Quadratic = 0,249 40%

20%

0%

0% –20

–10

0 gal-tan

10

20

–20

–10

0

Germany

10 gal-tan

20

30

Italy

80%

60%

2 R Quadratic = 0,461

40%

20%

party family PDVD christdem conservative green liberal radical left radical right socialist

100%

80% share of yes votes

party family PDVD christdem green liberal radical left radical right socialist

100%

share of yes votes

7,5 gal-tan

60%

2 R Quadratic = 0,076

40%

20%

0%

0% –30

–20

–10

0 10 gal-tan

20

30

–20

–10

0

10 gal-tan

20

30

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United Kingdom

80%

60%

2 R Quadratic = 0,077

40%

20%

party family PDVD conservative green liberal radical left social democrat

100%

80% share of yes votes

party family PDVD christdem conservative liberal radical left radical right socialist

100%

share of yes votes

95

60%

R2 Quadratic = 0,172

40%

20%

0%

0% –10

0

10 gal-tan

20

30

–15

–10

–5 0 gal-tan

5

10

USA party family PDVD conservative socialist

100%

share of yes votes

80%

2 R Quadratic = 0,092

60%

40%

20%

0% 7,5

10,0

12,5 15,0 gal-tan

17,5

20,0

Figure 4.8 Parliamentary votes for military deployments along the new politics dimension axis per country

4.4 Conclusion The ‘grammar’ of party-political contestation of the military and its interventions is best understood in terms of the traditional left/right dimension and only to a lesser extent in terms of ‘new politics’. This pattern is very robust, as it can be found in party manifestos, expert assessments, and parliamentary voting behaviour. In contrast to many previous studies that assumed a dichotomous or linear relationship between left/right and military interventions, my analyses show that the relationship is curvilinear: opposition against the military in general and to the use of force in particular is strongest among parties of the radical left and weakest at the centre right. The radical right is less supportive than the centre right but more so than the radical left. Support for the military and its interventions is also related to the ‘new politics’ or ‘gal/tan’ dimension that pits green/alternative/libertarian against traditional/ authoritarian/nationalist parties. Across the data sources analysed above, however, the relationship is weaker when compared to the left/right dimension. Again, the relationship is curvilinear with opposition coming from both the ‘gal’ and the

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     

‘tan’ pole. Thus, the most green/alternative/libertarian and the most traditional/ authoritarian/nationalist parties tend to be most reluctant to support military interventions; support comes from the centre of this political spectrum in particular. The relationship with gal/tan is not surprising because parties’ positions on the left/right and the gal/tan dimension are correlated. What is surprising— and difficult to interpret—is the peak of support at the centre where parties are neither ‘gal’ nor ‘tan’. This finding goes against the expectation that postmaterialism has an affinity with ‘saving strangers’ abroad, if necessary with military means. Of course, the data used above do not distinguish between humanitarian interventions and the use of force for self-defence and the combat of terrorist groups. Only further research can find out whether the correlation is a statistical artefact and what makes parties at the ‘gal’ and ‘tan’ poles less supportive than those at the centre. A disaggregation across regions reveals interesting differences: party-political contestation of military missions in the post-Communist party systems in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe follows a different pattern than elsewhere. In the post-Communist party systems, the relationship between left/right and support of military interventions is weaker, or entirely absent. The relationship with the ‘new politics’ dimension is either weak (in case of the manifesto data) or points in the opposite direction as in Western Europe (in case of the expert survey data): in the post-Communist party systems, traditional/authoritarian/nationalist parties tend to oppose military missions whereas the green/alternative/libertarian parties tend to support them. This conforms with studies on European integration that found the new politics dimension pointing in opposite directions in East and Western Europe. It is important to note, however, that the influence of the left/ right dimension is not limited to Western Europe. As the manifestos of various non-European countries show, the correlation can also be found in Asia, Oceania, Africa, and Latin America. Unfortunately, the available datasets do not allow any triangulation of developments over time. Comparisons between the Cold War and the post–Cold War period can only build on manifesto data, as the expert survey data and the voting data are both limited to the post–Cold War period. What is more, the regional differences mentioned above caution against any general interpretation as the post–Cold War period is also characterized by the inclusion of many postCommunist parties into the dataset. A meaningful interpretation of changes over time is only possible for the West European parties. Here, the impact of the left/right dimension is by and large unchanged, whereas the ‘new politics’ dimension has become more influential, confirming the notion that the ‘new politics’ dimension has in general gained prominence since the 1980s. While the three data sources lead to similar results, the predictive power of both the left/right and the gal/tan positions is generally much weaker for manifesto positions than for actual voting behaviour or the idealized positions that experts

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provide. This seems counter-intuitive, as actual voting is subject to strong external pressures, such as alliance expectations for parties in government, whereas manifestos are geared towards communicating parties’ ideal positions. Of course, the data are silent on the dynamics of party systems, which is a core interest to students of party politics. What makes new parties emerge and what determines their success or failure? How do established parties react to new challengers and to what extent do they adjust political positions in strategic ways? In the ‘intermestic’ issue area of European Union politics, such questions have been widely discussed. Yet, these questions go beyond the remit of this book and, at this point, can only be suggested for future research. None of the three data sources says anything about the underlying rationales of political parties’ positions. In fact, all three data sources lump together different issues into genuine categories that cloud any underlying rationale. This problem is largest in the manifesto data that aggregate a broad range of issues into the categories of ‘military: positive’ and ‘military: negative’. The CHES data and the deployment voting data are more focused on the use of force but lump together different types of missions on which parties at the left or ‘gal’ end of the spectrum may have decidedly different positions than their counterparts at the right or ‘tan’ end. Whether left parties’ scepticism stems from concerns about the diversion of funds at the expense of welfarist policies, from genuine pacifism or from a critique of postcolonialism is not revealed in the graphs and analyses above. Likewise, it remains unclear why the authoritarianism that characterizes far-right parties does not make them more supportive of military interventions. Whether this results from an anti-cosmopolitan refusal to ‘save strangers’ and whether exemptions are made for the fight against Islamic terrorism remains in the dark as long as such parties’ reasoning is not examined in more detail. This will be done in the next chapter.

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5 Debating Military Interventions Party-Specific Arguments and Justifications

The previous chapter has shown that political parties differ systematically in their positions on the military and the use of military force by correlating parties’ positions on a left/right and a ‘gal/tan’ scale with election manifestos, expert judgements and their voting behaviour. Across the three measures of parties’ policy positions, the findings converge around the same skewed inverted Ucurve: Opposition is strongest at the radical left and declines as one moves along the left/right axis, reaching a peak at the centre right. Far right parties are less supportive than centre-right parties but more supportive than radical left parties. These correlations, however, are silent on the underlying reasons for the different levels of support across parties. Of course, the previous chapter has discussed several ways in which scholars have linked parties’ security and defence policies to their core values, directly or indirectly. Left parties, for example, have been considered to be less supportive of the military because defence expenditure conflicts with spending on the welfare state and because the left subscribes to a ‘spiral’—rather than a ‘deterrence’—model of international politics. In contrast, right parties have been viewed as being more supportive because they honour military values and because their notion of community is national, rather than international, which makes them prone to endorse self-help strategies. Whether party positions are actually informed by these considerations and how much weight is given to any of them, however, is impossible to tell from the correlational analyses in the previous chapter. To gain an in-depth understanding of the positions that parties take, this chapter supplements the quantitative analysis of the previous chapter with a qualitative study of the arguments brought forward by parliamentarians of the various parties in debates about the deployment of armed forces. The study of justifications for using armed force is well established in foreign policy analysis. The majority of studies, however, are single-country studies that highlight the peculiarities of the justification for a particular military intervention. Such studies are not interested in the detection of any cross-country pattern but instead in understanding a particular incidence of using armed force or a string of such incidences in one particular country. Comparative studies are few and far between and they almost always compare countries, rather than political parties. The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions: Political Parties, Contestation, and Decisions to Use Force Abroad. Wolfgang Wagner, Oxford University Press (2020). © Wolfgang Wagner. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846796.001.0001

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This chapter draws on the studies by Anna Geis, Harald Müller, and Niklas Schörnig as well as by Tim Haesebrouck, Daan Fonck, and Yf Reykers, both of which stand out for their systematic comparative approach to the empirical analysis of justifications for military interventions (Geis et al. 2013; Haesebrouck et al. 2018). Geis et al. examined parliamentary debates in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States in the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 Kosovo War, and the 2003 Iraq War. Although all seven countries are liberal democracies, Geis et al., find large differences in the justification of military missions among them: Sweden and Germany, for example, are characterized by military restraint and an inhibition to participate in military interventions. Whereas it needs strong pressures from allies and conformity of the intervention with international law to overcome this barrier, Geis et al. find that ‘no such barrier exists in in the political culture of democracies with more positive experiences of their military past’ (Geis and Müller 2013: 351), such as the United Kingdom. Although their project codes the speeches of parliamentarians from the full spectrum of political parties in parliament, Geis et al. do not examine any differences across parties. Their focus is exclusively on the differences across states, which are understood as differences in political culture. In contrast, Haesebrouck et al. exclusively focus on differences between political parties within a single country, Belgium. They study parliamentary debates about participation in the missions in Libya (2011) and against Daesh (2014/15). They find some evidence for the hypotheses that left-leaning parties accord more importance to human rights and to international law (Haesebrouck et al. 2018: 19). However, they also find these arguments used occasionally among speakers from right-leaning parties. This chapter will build on the studies of Geis et al. and Haesebrouck et al. and examine differences in arguments in favour and against the use of armed force among political parties in several liberal democracies.

5.1 Selecting Countries and Military Missions Whereas the previous chapter analysed the full sample of countries that are covered in the various datasets, the qualitative approach in this chapter necessitates a careful selection of cases, both with a view to the countries and the military missions under study.

5.1.1 Selecting Missions To examine whether parties of the same family, but in different countries use similar arguments to support or oppose military interventions, it is useful to

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     

compare parliamentary speeches on the same set of missions. Otherwise, any cluster of arguments may result first and foremost from the character of the military mission in question but may not say much about party-specific justifications. The military mission in Afghanistan since 2001 and the military fight against Daesh since 2014 are particularly suited for the transnational study of partyspecific argumentation. First, they include combat operations and are thus at the higher end of the spectrum of contemporary military interventions. As a consequence, they have been extensively debated in the parliaments of participating states. Second, both operations have multiple purposes: both aim at a military victory over a clearly defined adversary, namely the Taliban in Afghanistan and Daesh in Iraq and Syria. In addition, both operations want to protect and support the civilian population in the conflict zones against these adversaries. In Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was deployed ‘to assist the Afghan Interim Authority in the maintenance of security in Kabul and its surrounding areas, so that the Afghan Interim Authority as well as the personnel of the United Nations can operate in a secure environment’.¹ This mandate was interpreted widely to include not only the training of the Afghan army and police but also drilling wells and building schools. The Afghanistan mission is therefore often described as a state- and nation-building mission. The anti-Daesh intervention in Iraq was triggered by the atrocities against religious minorities. Although the intervening states refrained from state- or nationbuilding, they also trained local allies, such as Kurdish forces. The multipurpose character of both missions implies that justifications can range from (collective) self-defence to humanitarian considerations.

5.1.1.1 The Military Intervention in Afghanistan The day after the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York on 11 September 2001, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1368 in which it condemned ‘in the strongest terms the horrifying terrorist attacks’ and declared that it regards them ‘as a threat to international peace and security’. This wording suggested the possibility of coercive action, based on chapter VII of the UN Charter, but the Security Council decided against mandating such action. Instead it recognized ‘the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence in accordance with the Charter’.² On the same day, the North Atlantic Council of NATO decided that the attacks ‘shall be regarded as an action covered by Article 5’³ in case they were directed from outside the USA. On 2 October, the North Atlantic Council noted that this was indeed the case and the attacks therefore were considered an attack against all ¹ UN SC Res 1386 (2001). ² UN SC Res 1368 (2001). ³ Quoted from Murphy 2002: 244.

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members of NATO. Evidence had been mounting that al-Qaida and its mastermind Osama bin Laden, who was assumed to reside in Afghanistan, were responsible for the attacks. On 18 September Congress authorized the US president ‘to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on 11 September 2001, or harboured such organizations or persons’.⁴ On 20 September, US President Bush delivered an ultimatum to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to hand over the leadership of al-Qaida. The Taliban refused to do so, and on 6 October, Bush announced that military action would be taken the next day. The military action that began on 7 October 2001 was codenamed Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and was legitimized as self-defence after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. Wrapped in the rhetoric of a ‘global war on terror’, OEF in principle had no geographical boundaries. Next to Afghanistan, which clearly was OEF’s priority, military action took also place at the Horn of Africa, in the Philippines, and in the Sahara/Sahel region. Although NATO had declared a state of ‘collective defence’, OEF was not a NATO mission but carried out outside NATO structure, led by the US. Nevertheless, most NATO members participated in OEF⁵ and were joined by (then) nonNATO states such as Australia, New Zealand, Romania, and Lithuania. In Afghanistan, the USA was eager to eschew state- or nation-building and to test a new military approach. The Bush administration relied on proxy forces, especially the so-called Northern Alliance, on special forces, and on air power. Amongst NATO members, the UK stood out for contributing military from the very beginning. Over the next weeks, other countries joined and contributed in various ways: Canada, Romania, and France sent ground troops, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands contributed combat aircraft; Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Lithuania sent special forces (Mello 2014: 116). While the Taliban fled to neighbouring countries, mostly Pakistan, representatives of local forces met in Bonn under the auspices of the UN to discuss Afghanistan’s future after the defeat of the Taliban. The resulting Bonn Agreement envisioned an ISAF, which was subsequently established by UN Security Council resolution 1386. Initially, ISAF only had the limited task of assisting the Afghan Interim Authority in the maintenance of security in Kabul and surroundings. After 2003, however, ISAF’s area of operation was progressively broadened to the entire country. At the same time, the invasion of Iraq consumed a lot of resources and attention at the expense of Afghanistan. ⁴ Joint Resolution to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States (PUBLIC LAW 107–40—SEPT. 18, 2001). ⁵ Hungary did not participate and Belgium and Portugal only sent liaison officers (Mello 2014: 116).

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     

After the United Kingdom, Turkey and Germany (together with the Netherlands) had provided headquarters, NATO took over command of ISAF in August 2003. ISAF was sustained by a coalition of around fifty states, including many members of NATO as well as Bahrain, Jordan, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, and Ukraine. Initially, military tactics were primarily geared towards killing terrorists, not protecting civilians, with high numbers of civilian casualties, mostly from air strikes, as a result (Friesendorf 2018: 175ff.). In contrast, the Obama administration and commanders McCrystal and Petraeus followed a population-centred counter-insurgency doctrine that considered civilian casualties as a major factor undermining the success of the mission. Rules of engagement were adjusted and higher risks for their own troops accepted in order to protect civilians and thereby attain popular legitimacy. ISAF established a civilian casualty tracking cell and observed a decline of civilian deaths caused by ISAF from more than 200 in 2010 to thirty-one in 2013 (Shortland et al. 2019).⁶ Provincial Reconstruction Teams engaged in state- and nation-building, with presidential and parliamentary elections as focal points. Some, but not all participating states made efforts to squash the flourishing drug economy that was also a source of income for the insurgents. Especially in the southern provinces where the Taliban remained strong, NATO counter-insurgency operations lead to high numbers of casualties, particularly among American (2,313), British (456), Canadian (157), French (88), and German (57) troops. Whereas the initial decisions to participate in OEF and ISAF was supported by majorities in many NATO countries (Mello 2014: 122), public support plummeted after 2006 when ISAF expanded to the south of the country and the Taliban insurgency led to an increase in fatalities (Kreps 2010). In 2009, US President Obama announced a surge that was modelled on a similar increase in efforts in Iraq in previous years. At the same time, however, Obama promised to start withdrawal from Afghanistan and to hand over responsibility to the Afghan forces, starting in 2011. With 132,000 troops, NATO forces reached a peak in 2011. At that time, the Netherlands had already unilaterally withdrawn its combat troops from Afghanistan, soon to be followed by Canada. ISAF came to an official end in December 2014 and the Afghan Defence and Security forces assumed responsibility for security and stability in Afghanistan. Some 17,000 troops from NATO and associated states remained in Afghanistan to train, advise, and assist the Afghan National Army. With more than 8,000 troops, the US makes by far the largest contribution, followed by Germany (1,300) and the UK (1,100).

⁶ The overall death toll of Afghan civilians is much higher as c.80 per cent of the total civilian casualties are caused by insurgent groups (Shortland et al. 2019: 123).

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At the time of writing, the efforts of the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces to stabilize the country have been far from successful. In 2018, there were more than 13,000 armed clashes, and the Taliban controlled more territory than at any moment since the 2001 intervention,⁷ even though the Afghan forces suffered high numbers of casualties.⁸ With the prospects of a victorious end of the mission fading, efforts to reach a negotiated settlement, both between the USA and the Taliban and between the Afghani government and the insurgents, increased.

5.1.1.2 Fighting Daesh in Iraq and Syria In the course of 2013 and 2014, Daesh, a militant jihadists organization that calls itself ‘Islamic State’,⁹ booked a series of military victories and quickly extended the territory under its control in Iraq and in Syria. The group was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and had been active in Iraq since the 2003 war. With al-Qaida, Daesh shared a hostility to the liberal West as well as to Shia Islam, whose followers they consider ‘infidels’. However, whereas al-Qaida prioritized the fight against the Western ‘occupying powers’, Daesh also attacked Shias. Although Daesh had initially pledged allegiance to al-Qaida, relations between the two groups remained tense and ultimately the two groups parted ways. Daesh benefited enormously from the frustration of many Sunnis with the Shia-dominated Iraqi government that discriminated against Sunni and other minorities. Many Sunni generals of Saddam Hussein’s army who lost their positions after 2003 joined Daesh and contributed to its military strength. After the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, Daesh joined the insurgents in fighting the Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad but also turned against other rebel groups, such as the Free Syrian Army. Where Daesh gained control, it committed atrocities among the civilian population and deliberately attacked other religious groups, claiming to cleanse the lands from ‘infidels’. In January 2014, Daesh captured Fallujah, in June it overran oil-rich Mosul and Tikrit. Soon afterwards, Daesh declared a ‘caliphate’ and thus a leadership role among the various Sunni rebel groups. In early August 2014, Daesh besieged Mount Sinjar in north-western Iraq where thousands of religious-minority Iraqis had fled, among them c.40,000 Yazidis. US President Obama had threatened targeted military action against Daesh already in June. On 7 August 2014, he authorized air strikes to protect American personnel in Erbil, on the one hand, and to help save the civilians in the ⁷ International Crisis Group (https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-asia/afghanistan; accessed 12 April 2019). ⁸ According to Afghan government sources, 29,000 Afghan soldiers died between the assumption of responsibility in 2015 and the end of 2018 (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 December 2018). ⁹ The group has used several names including ‘Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’ (ISIL), ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’ (ISIS), and ‘Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham’ (ISIS).

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Sinjar mountains. These air strikes were carried out the next day. In the following weeks, the US was joined by France (beginning 19 September), the UK (beginning 30 September), Belgium (from 5 October on), Australia (starting 6 October), the Netherlands (beginning 7 October), Canada (from 2 November on), and Denmark, all of which targeted IS in Iraq,¹⁰ while Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates cooperated with the USA in air strikes in Syria, but not Iraq (Ruys and Verlinden 2015: 139). Germany and Spain decided to refrain from air strikes but to contribute by training and arming Iraqi armed forces.¹¹ Because the air strikes in northern Iraq followed a request of the Iraqi government, they are easy to justify under international law. In contrast, any use of force in Syria raises more complicated questions under international law because there is neither a request by the Syrian government nor a mandate from the UN Security Council. However, it is also clear that Daesh will be hard to defeat if air strikes are limited to Iraq and exclude targets in Syria. President Obama evoked self-defence to justify military action against Daesh in Syria. On 26 August 2014, the US began reconnaissance flights over Syria, and on 22 September the US Air Force targeted Daesh in Syria for the first time. In a letter to the UN Security Council on the next day, the US Ambassador to the UN refered to a request from the Iraqi government to strike Daesh sites and military strongholds in Syria. In addition, a threat from ISIL to the USA itself was noted. Finally, the Syrian regime was said to have ‘shown that it cannot and will not confront the safe havens effectively itself ’. For these reasons, the US had ‘initiated necessary and proportionate actions in Syria’.¹² Amongst the US’s allies, the extension to Syria has been highly contested. The lawfulness of such action was particularly controversial. For example, the Dutch government noted that there is no international consensus about the legitimacy of air strikes against targets in Syria. Although the interpretation by the US is respected, the Netherlands decided to limit its action to Iraq and to follow developments closely.¹³ The lawfulness of strikes in Syria was also contested within the French government. Whereas President Holland ‘was concerned with the aspects of international law in the absence of the consent of the Syrian government’ (quoted from Henderson 2014: 212), Foreign Minister Fabius stated that he saw ‘no legal

¹⁰ Military Balance 2015: 304; US Department of Defense (http://www.defense.gov/News/Special / Reports/0814_Inherent / Resolve; accessed 16 November 2015). ¹¹ The German mission explicitly also mentions training of the armed forces of the Kurdish government in Iraq; see Antrag der Bundesregierung: Ausbildungsunterstützung der Sicherheitskräfte der Regierung der Region Kurdistan/Irak und der irakischen Streitkräfte, Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 18/3561, 17 December 2014. ¹² Letter dated 23 September 2014 from the Permanent Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General, S/2014/695. ¹³ Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, Artikel 100-brief deelneming aan internationale strijd tegen ISIS, 24 September 2014, DVB/CV/178/2014.

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obstacles’ against striking in Syria (quoted from Ruys and Verlinden 2015: 140). Mixed signals also came from the United Kingdom, where a spokesman of the prime minister emphasized that air strikes in Syria have not been ruled out whereas the Foreign Minister stated that the policy not to strike in Syria, which had been established after the 2013 House of Commons vote, would not be changed (Ruys and Verlinden 2015: 135). Over the course of 2015 and 2016, several countries decided to extend their air strikes to targets in Syria, even though the number of sorties flown was generally very small, leaving the overwhelming majority of air strikes to the USA. On 31 March 2015, Canada notified the UN Security Council that it started striking in Syria, invoking individual and collective self-defence.¹⁴ Canada was followed by Turkey (24 July),¹⁵ France (8 September), Australia (9 September), Denmark (January 2016), the Netherlands (February 2016), Norway and Belgium (both June 2016) (Ruys et al. 2016b: 146–8; Ruys et al. 2016a: 304). In September 2015, the British government also notified the Security Council that it has carried out a precision air strike in Syria ‘against an ISIL vehicle in which a target known to be actively engaged in planning and directing imminent armed attacks against the United Kingdom was travelling’.¹⁶ After the terrorist attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015, France intensified its strikes against Daesh in Syria. Two days after the attacks, the French air force bombed targets in Raqqa. France also drafted a resolution, which the UN Security Council unanimously adopted on 20 November. The resolution refered to ISIL as a ‘global and unprecedented threat to international peace and security’ and indicates its determination to combat it ‘by all means’. Moreover, it called upon ‘Member States that have the capacity to do so to take all necessary measures, in compliance with international law, in particular with the United Nations Charter’. Although the resolution evokes language that is typically used when the UN Security Council authorizes the use of force, the text refrains from using exactly this language. For example, ‘all necessary means’ has become the code phrase for the use of force, but instead of ‘means’, resolution 2249 talks about ‘measures’. What is more, the UN Security Council refrains from references to chapter VII. Taken together, the resolution’s ambiguity ‘allows the major players in Syria to politically move closer together without departing from the legal positions that they had previously adopted, and without compromising their essential interests’ (Akande and Milanovic 2015). ¹⁴ Letter dated 31 March 2015 from the Chargé d’affaires a.i. of the Permanent Mission of Canada to the United Nations addressed to the President of the Security Council, S/2015/221. ¹⁵ S/2015/563. Although Turkey has framed its air strikes as a contribution against the so-called Islamic State, it has mostly targeted ‘the coalition’s ally—the Kurds—rather than the Islamic State’ (Saideman 2016b: 302). ¹⁶ Letter dated 7 September 2015 from the Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the United Nations addressed to the President of the Security Council, S/2015/688.

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Four days after the Paris attacks, the European Union invoked article 42.7 of the Treaty on European Union that obliges all member states to aid and assist a member that is the victim of an armed aggression on its territory (Neuwahl 2016: 5). This provision goes back to the mutual assistance clause of the Western European Union that had merged with the EU after the end of the Cold War. With a view to using military force, however, this provision adds very little as member states are obliged to act ‘in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter’ and ‘the specific character of the security and defence policy of certain Member States’ (read: the (post-)neutral countries) had to be respected as well. In contrast to article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which was invoked by the USA after 9/11, article 42(7) does not even mention military force. In the United Kingdom, the bombing of targets in Syria had already been discussed in August 2013 after chemical weapons had been used in a suburb of Damascus. Prime Minister David Cameron then argued that the Assad regime had crossed a red line and a military response was required. Because the House of Commons voted against such strikes, however, no action was taken. Although calls for military action in Syria had never fully disappeared, they gained new momentum after the Paris attacks. On 2 December 2015 the House of Commons voted in favour of air strikes against Daesh in Syria, and the British air force started striking only hours thereafter. However, the Paris attacks did not change policy in all Western democracies: concerned about Libya, rather than Syria or Iraq, Italy confirmed its decision not to participate in any bombing campaign against Daesh. In Spain, thousands went to the streets to demonstrate against any military action in Syria. The Spanish government decided to refrain from any actions against Daesh in Syria. The Belgian government did the same. Canada announced its withdrawal from the air strikes after the election victory of Justin Trudeau. Some of the countries that decided to refrain from air strikes decided instead to contribute to the training of Iraqi and Kurdish security forces. These countries included Italy (300), Spain (300) Germany (150), Norway (120), Finland (50), Sweden (35), and Portugal (30).¹⁷ In addition, Germany deployed one frigate and six reconnaissance Tornado aircrafts (with up to 1,200 troops) to support the campaign.¹⁸ According to the US Central Command, almost 35,000 sorties have been flown in Iraq and Syria by the US-led coalition between August 2014 and June 2019 (Butchard 2019: 17), leading to a substantial degradation of Daesh. Whereas the Central Command reports at least 1,300 unintentionally killed civilians (Butchard ¹⁷ Numbers in brackets refer to the approximate number of personnel. Figures are derived from McInnes 2016. ¹⁸ See also letter dated 10 December 2015 from the Chargé d’affaires a.i. of the Permanent Mission of Germany to the United Nations addressed to the President of the Security Council S/2015/946, which reports the initiation of military measures.

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2019: 17), the British NGO ‘airwars’ estimates the number of civilian casualties at 7,500 to 12,500. The US Department of Defense also reports seventeen US soldiers killed in action and sixty-nine further deaths.¹⁹

5.1.2 Selecting Countries The countries under study need to be selected from among the participants in the missions in Afghanistan and against Daesh. This excludes many countries from the Global South, which abstained from participation in these missions. What is more, the countries under study should be comparable with a view to the party systems to allow meaningful comparison across countries. For this reason, I decided against the selection of countries from post-communist Eastern Europe and against the US. The countries under study should include ‘militant’ and ‘pacifist’ democracies (Müller 2004) in order to cover the full spectrum of political cultures as identified by Geis et al. (2013). Otherwise, findings on possible clusters of arguments among parties could not be generalized beyond a very homogeneous group of likeminded democracies. Based on these criteria, I decided to study the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany in-depth. All three are wealthy, industrialized democracies. What is more, all three are members of NATO and thus face the same pressure from their allies to contribute to military interventions, especially in Afghanistan where NATO took over the command in 2003. At the same time, the UK is a typical militant democracy with a long history of interventionism whereas Germany is a typical pacifist democracy with a culture of reticence (Berger 1998; Duffield 1998) when it comes to the use of force; Canada occupies a ‘middle ground’ (Geis et al. 2013: 327) as it has a long tradition of fighting alongside the US and the UK (e.g. in both World Wars, the Korean War, the 1991 Gulf War, and the 1999 Kosovo campaign) but has been more selective in its participations than the UK, e.g. when refraining from fighting in the Vietnam War or from joining the ‘coalition of the willing’ in Iraq 2003. The three countries all have major parties on the right and on the left of the political spectrum. On the right side of the political spectrum, the Conservative Party (CP) has been by and large unchallenged in the United Kingdom as the largest party since the 1830s. In contrast, the position of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (PC) was challenged in the early 1990s by the Reform Party that was particularly popular in the Western provinces Alberta and British Columbia. After having won the 1984 and 1988 federal elections by landslides, the PC lost all but two seats in the 1993 elections while the Reform

¹⁹ https://dod.defense.gov/News/Casualty-Status/ (accessed October 2019).

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Party gained fifty-two out of 295 seats. Despite morphing into the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance (‘the Canadian Alliance’) in 2000, it did not succeed in winning seats beyond its Western strongholds. Because none of the two parties stood a good chance of winning federal elections under the majoritarian electoral system, CA and PC decided to merge into the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) in 2003. The leader of the Canadian Alliance, Stephen Harper, became the leader of the new CPC and prime minister from 2006 to 2015. In the period under study, the CP in the UK has been in government after 2010 with David Cameron (2010–16) and Theresa May (2016–19) as prime ministers. As in many Continental European countries where the relation between the state and the church had been a major cleavage in the nineteenth century, the right side of the German political spectrum has been dominated by Christian Democratic parties, namely the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sibling, the Christian Social Union (CSU). Although distinct parties, they form a single faction in the Bundestag and will subsequently be treated as one entity (CDU/CSU). Since 2005, the Christian Democrats, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, were the senior partner in coalitions with the Social Democrats (2005–9), the Liberals (2009–13) and again Social Democrats (since 2013). For most of the period under study here, no political party to the right of the main conservative or Christian-democratic parties succeeded in winning seats in (federal) parliament. In Canada and in the UK, the majoritarian electoral system poses a major obstacle against challenger parties gaining representation. In the UK, the United Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP) gained two seats in the House of Commons only when two Conservative MPs changed allegiance and won by-elections as UKIP candidates in 2014. However, only one of these two seats was successfully defended in the 2015 general election—even though UKIP won 12.6 per cent of the popular vote.²⁰ In Canada, the traditional Conservative Party was challenged by the populist Reform Party that became the Canadian Alliance, as described above. However, the electoral system created strong incentives against a permanent competitor to the CP and instead to merge the two right-wing parties. As a result, the CPC has been the unchallenged party on the right side of the political spectrum since 2003. In Germany, new and small parties benefit from proportional representation although they have to gain at least 5 per cent of the popular vote to enter parliament. The first far-right party to achieve that is the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in 2017 when the party won 12.6 per cent of the popular vote and gained ninety-four seats in the Bundestag. In Germany and the UK, social democratic parties have been the main parties on the left of the political spectrum. The Social Democratic Party of Germany

²⁰ The effect of the electoral system became visible in the 2014 European Parliament elections, when UKIP won 27.5 per cent of the popular vote and gained twenty-four out of the seventy-three British seats.

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(SPD) is the oldest party in Germany, founded in 1863. In the period under study here, it was in government most of time, first as the senior partner, led by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, in a coalition with the Green party (1998–2005), then as a junior partner in coalitions with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (2005–9 and since 2013). In the UK, the Labour Party had won the 1997 elections by a landslide and governed until 2010 with Tony Blair (until 2007) and Gordon Brown (2007–10) as prime ministers. Whereas social democratic parties in the UK and Germany have been either the main governing or the largest opposition party for the last couple of decades, the Canadian equivalent, the New Democratic Party (NDP), has never been in government and formed the official opposition only between 2011 and 2015. Before and after, it was the third or fourth party with as few as thirteen seats after the 2000 federal election. The major centre-left alternative to a conservative party in Canada has been the Liberal Party of Canada, which is also the oldest political party in Canada. It has dominated Canadian politics in the twentieth century and, in the period under study here, was in government until 2006 with Jean Chrétien (1993–2003) and Paul Martin (2003–6) as prime ministers and again after 2015 with Justin Trudeau as head of government. In contrast to the NDP, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in Germany and the Liberal Democrats in the UK never held the prime minister’s office. However, in the period under study, they were junior partners in coalitions with major parties to their right: the Liberal Democrats with the Conservative Party between 2010 and 2015 and the FDP with the CDU/CSU between 2009 and 2013. However, these liberal parties’ position at the centre of the political spectrum is underlined by their previous coalescence with social democratic parties: the FDP during the coalition with the SPD between 1969 and 1982 and the Liberal Democrats during the ‘Lib–Lab pact’ in 1977/78. Parties at the extreme left found it as difficult to gain representation in parliament as their counterparts at the extreme right. An exception is the German party ‘The Left’ and its predecessor until 2007, the ‘Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), which in turn is the legal successor to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany that ruled the German Democratic Republic as a one-party state until 1990. The PDS thus represented the former East German ruling class and positioned itself at the far-left end of the political spectrum. In 2007, the PDS merged with the WASG party²¹ that had been founded by social democrats who disliked their party’s movement to the right. With strongholds in the Eastern Länder, The Left has gained around 10 per cent of the popular vote in federal elections. In Canada, no party left of the NDP had won seats in the House of Commons in the period under study. In the UK, George Galloway represented the radical left ²¹ WASG stands for Arbeit und soziale Gerechtigkeit—die Wahlalternative (Labour and Social Justice—The Electoral Alternative).

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Respect Party in the British House of Commons between 2012 and 2015. The party had emerged out of the opposition against the 2003 Iraq War but dissolved in 2016. The majoritarian electoral system in Canada and the UK also worked against the Green Party in both countries. In the UK, Caroline Lucas has been their only MP since 2010 and in Canada, Elizabeth May held a seat between 2011 and 2019 (joined by Bruce Hyer, who had defected from the NDP in 2012 but lost his seat again in 2015). In contrast, the German Greens are firmly established in the Bundestag and formed part of the red–green coalition between 1998 and 2005 with Joschka Fischer as Foreign Minister. Both Canada and the UK have a number of ethnic and regionalist parties: The Bloc Quebecois held between ten and fifty-one seats in the Canadian House of Commons. In the UK, the Scottish National Party (SNP), the Northern Irish Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), and the Welsh Plaid Cymru were presented in the Westminster parliament throughout the period under study. However, I decided to exclude these ethnic and regionalist parties in the analyses below because there is no equivalent in Germany (where the CSU is best understood as a Christian Democratic, rather than an ethnic or regionalist party).²²

5.1.2.1 United Kingdom The United Kingdom is a typical ‘militant democracy’ that is involved in wars and militarized disputes short of war far more frequently than the vast majority of democracies (Müller 2004; Fey 2013). In contrast to Canada and Germany, it joined the coalition of the willing to intervene in Iraq in 2003. Although its enormous empire dissolved after the end of World War II, its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and its nuclear force still signal the global ambitions of a great power. It consequently also spends a higher percentage of its GDP on defence than Canada or Germany. Of the three countries under study, the UK contributed most to the intervention in Afghanistan: it provided combat forces from the very beginning and it was the first country to volunteer for taking the command of ISAF in late 2001. The British also embraced the idea to extend ISAF to the whole country and, starting in 2006, took a lead role in the southern province of Helmand. It soon turned out that Helmand was a centre of the Taliban insurgency that began around the time of the British deployment. The high number of fatalities that the British suffered in Afghanistan—more than 450 and thus more than any other allied country except ²² Ethnic and regionalist parties warrant a treatment in their own right, as different ethnic groups in a multi-ethnic state often differ in their sympathies for third states and thus in their support for assisting them militarily. Declarations of war and decisions to introduce conscription can thus lead to heightened tensions or even ‘draft riots’—as, for example, in 1917/18 when Franco-Canadians and Irish nationalists resisted decisions made in Ottawa and London respectively to send conscripts to the Western Front in World War I.

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the USA—mostly resulted from the major combat operations that the Taliban engaged the British in Helmand. Tony Blair endorsed George Bush’s ‘(global) war on terror’ rhetoric, which was accompanied by an enemy-centric approach that focused on the killing of terrorists, rather than ‘winning hearts and minds’ of the population. In addition, Blair asked British troops to engage in counter-narcotics operations in order to destroy the local war economy and to tackle drug consumption at home. Soon after the start of OEF, however, Blair’s attention was absorbed by the Iraq War. The British participation in Operation Iraqi Freedom had several effects on the Afghanistan mission: most importantly, troops and equipment that had been earmarked for a pivot from Iraq to Afghanistan did not become available as the Iraq War was dragging on. British commanders frequently complained about insufficient troop numbers and capabilities (Auerswald and Saideman 2014: 117ff.), especially with a view to the deployment in Helmand. Furthermore, British commanders in Afghanistan enjoyed significant discretion as attention was mostly directed at developments in Iraq. Frequently, British forces built on their experiences with the Northern Irish ‘troubles’ and adopted a population-centric approach to counter-insurgency. They decided against isolating themselves from the local population and instead to patrol on foot and engage with locals (Friesendorf 2018: 198ff.). When Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair as prime minister in 2007, the British strategy fully embraced and reinforced the population-centric approach (Auerswald and Saideman 2014: 116). This change of course particularly applied to Helmand, where the Taliban insurgency was at its high point. New rules of engagement no longer allowed the indiscriminate use of artillery and air power in support of planned operations. Instead, the use of deadly force was only permitted when no other way to prevent targets from endangering life exists (Farrell 2017: 206). Throughout the lifespan of the British Afghanistan deployment, there was a remarkable degree of elite consensus that the mission was necessary (Jensen 2015). In contrast, ‘majorities or large pluralities in all age, ethnic, gender and social class groupings reported that they either disapproved or strongly disapproved’ of the British involvement in the Afghanistan war (Reifler et al. 2014: 36). The House of Commons was recalled for special sessions on 14 September, 4 October, and 8 October to debate the attacks in New York and Washington and the British government’s reaction. On 4 October, the government informed parliament about evidence linking Osama bin Laden to the Taliban and about preparations to use armed force against the Taliban; on 8 October, government informed parliament about the military action taken the day before. In line with British constitutional practice, Prime Minister Blair did not put the use of armed force to a vote in parliament. In September 2010, however, the backbench Business Committee organized a debate and vote on Britain’s military contribution in Afghanistan. Majorities of the Conservative Party, Labour Party, and the

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Liberal Democrats voted in favour of the motion that ‘this House supports the continued deployment of UK armed forces in Afghanistan’²³ and rejected an amendment that would have made support conditional on a change to military strategy designed to reduce loss of life, injuries, and costs. In line with an emerging new practice to consult parliament before a military intervention (Mello 2017; Strong 2018), the Cameron government asked the House of Commons for support for air strikes against Daesh in Iraq. The government motion explicitly ruled out ground combat troops. After six and a half hours of debate on 26 September 2014, the motion was carried with an overwhelming majority of 523 to forty-two (with twenty-three Labour, six Conservatives, one Liberal, the only Green, the only radical left and several regionalist MPs voting against). More than a year later and after a general election that brought a majority for the Conservative Party, the Cameron II government asked parliament to support its decision to extend air strikes against Daesh to targets in Syria, while ruling out ground combat troops. This time, the majority in the House of Commons was much smaller: After eight and a half hours of debate, 397 MPs votes in favour while 223 (153 Labour and fifty-eight MPs from regionalist parties) voted against. In addition to air strikes, some 400 British soldiers have been training Iraqi security forces.

5.1.2.2 Canada Canada is known for its liberal-internationalist identity (Becker-Jacob 2013: 162): it has been emphasizing the importance of human rights and security and it has been supportive of international law and international institutions, especially of the United Nations and its peacekeeping missions that owe a lot to Canadian Prime Minister Pearson. As a federal and multicultural country, Canada has a reputation for respecting other cultures and identities, which reportedly translates into a reluctance to construct strong enemy images (Becker-Jacob 2013: 162f.). While support for international institutions is common for a middle power, Canada’s liberal internationalism has also served to distinguish it from its large neighbour to the south. At the same time, Canada has been ‘often considered, alongside Denmark and the Netherlands, among NATO’s “core group” of allies advocating for a greater role for the alliance in providing collective security in addition to its traditional collective defence mandate’ (Massie 2015: 100). The liberal-internationalist thrust of Canadian foreign policy as well as the strong commitment to NATO have been based on a broad consensus amongst the main political forces and Canadian society more broadly, even though the Frenchspeaking Quebeckers tend to be more reluctant to endorse the use of armed force than their English-speaking compatriots (Massie 2015: 103). ²³ The only MP of the ‘Green Party’ had voted against, as did eleven Labour, two Lib Dems, and one Conservative Party MP.

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Canada participated in the Afghanistan mission and in the fight against Daesh. Only weeks after the beginning of the Afghanistan mission, Canada sent Special Operations Forces. From early 2002 on, Canada also deployed a battalion to Kandahar, first as part of OEF, later as a part of the ISAF. According to Stephen Saideman, this ‘deployment was largely uncontroversial as it seemed the least the Canadians could do in the aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington’ (Saideman 2016a: 7). The Canadian government is not obliged to consult parliament before deploying armed forces. Nevertheless, the House of Commons extensively debated Canada’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks and its contribution to the US-led campaign in Afghanistan. At that time, the Liberal Party was in control of both Houses of Parliament and thus in government with Jean Chrétien as prime minister. In December 2003, Chrétien resigned and handed over power to Paul Martin. In June 2004, the Liberal Party secured a plurality of votes but had to form a minority government that lasted until 2006 when the Conservative Party took office for almost a decade with Stephen Harper as prime minister. With the exception of his last cabinet (2011–15), Harper also presided over minority governments. Both Chrétien and Martin had considered deployment decisions to be strictly executive decisions with no need for parliamentary approval (Hillmer and Lagassé 2016: 334). This prompted the Conservative Party to pledge stronger parliamentary oversight over the military interventions. When in power, Harper decided to have the House of Commons vote on the extension of the Afghanistan mission until 2009. This vote took place on 17 May 2006 and narrowly passed 149 to 145 (Lagassé and Mello 2018: 140f.). While the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP voted against the government, the liberals were split (and free to vote their conscience) with thirty voting in favour and seventy-three against the mission. Two years later, on 13 March 2008, a second extension vote passed with 197 to seventy-seven. The broader majority resulted from negotiations between the Conservatives in government and the Liberals that Canada would withdraw its combat troops by 2011 (Boucher and Nossal 2017: 88). The deployment fatigue in parliament reflected Canadian public opinion, which had become progressively less supportive of the military intervention in Afghanistan, with a majority turning against the mission in 2010 (Massie 2016: 102; Boucher and Nossal 2017: 152–62). Canada indeed withdrew all combat forces in 2011. It kept several hundred troops to train Afghan forces until 2014. Canada resisted all pressures to contribute to ISAF’s successor mission ‘Operation Resolute Support’ from 2014 onwards and completely withdrew from Afghanistan in March 2014. Over the entire period of its deployment the Canadian Forces had suffered 158 casualties—in terms of casualties per head of population, only Denmark and Estonia endured higher losses (Auerswald and Saideman 2014: 4; Kreps 2010: 201).

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Canada joined the air campaign against Daesh in Iraq shortly after its start in 2014 but initially refrained from bombing any targets in Syria. Canadian Prime Minister Harper explained that his country would strike Daesh only where it had the clear support of the government of that country, which is only the case in Iraq. Without the consent of the Syrian government, Canada would not participate in air strikes against Daesh in Syria (Ruys and Verlinden 2015: 141). The Liberals disapproved nevertheless of Canada’s combat role and voted against the mission (Pelletier and Massie 2017: 307). Half a year later, however, Harper announced his intention to include targets in Syria in the air campaign.²⁴ In the meantime, it also had become clear that—notwithstanding government assurances that there would be no combat troops on the ground—Canadian forces that were deployed to train and advise Kurdish Peshmerga forces came close enough to the front to be attacked, leading to one Canadian fatality (Ruys and Verlinden 2015: 25). A respective motion asked parliament to support the extension of air strikes and ground combat troops for another year and to allow targeting Daesh in Syria.²⁵ After four hours of debate on 26 March and another five on 30 March, the motion was carried by 142 to 129. In October 2015, the Liberal Party won almost 40 per cent of the popular vote and a clear majority of the seats in the House of Commons. Ending the Canadian air strikes had been a campaign promise of the Liberal Party’s new leader, Justin Trudeau, who withdrew Canadian fighter-bombers four months after entering office (Pelletier and Massie 2017: 312). However, Canada continued to participate in fighting Daesh through reconnaissance missions and refuelling sorties (Ruys et al. 2016a: 306). Furthermore, it tripled the number of Canadian trainers that accompanied and assisted Iraqi forces. Although Canada put an end to its combat role in Inherent Resolve, it actually increased the risk for its special forces that operated with their Iraqi peers at the front line.

5.1.2.3 Germany World War II and the Holocaust had imbued the German population with a deep scepticism of military force and of unilateralism (Duffield 1998). During the Cold War, this ‘culture of antimilitarism’ (Berger 1998) was compatible with membership in NATO because the alliance had no ambitions beyond self-defence.²⁶ After the end of the Cold War, however, Germany’s culture of reticence and its multilateralism led to frequent tensions as its allies expected Germany to contribute to ‘out of area’ missions, for example in the Balkans. A 1994 Federal ²⁴ House of Commons (Canada), Official Report (Hansard), vol. 147, no. 188 (24 March 2015), 12207ff. ²⁵ House of Commons (Canada), Official Report (Hansard), vol. 147, no. 190 (26 March 2015), 12341. ²⁶ The US had approached the German government to contribute to the war in Vietnam but had accepted that Germany declined.

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Constitutional Court ruling gave a green light for the deployment of the Bundeswehr ‘out of area’ but also obliged the government to obtain prior approval from the Bundestag. Throughout the 1990s, coalitions of Christian Democrats and Liberals under the chancellorship of Helmut Kohl voted for a series of deployments that, in a piecemeal fashion, moved the Bundeswehr from a peacekeeping to an intervention force (Baumann/Hellmann 2001). Majorities of the SPD, the Greens, and the PDS voted against most of these deployments. The coming to power of a red–green coalition with Gerhard Schröder (SPD) as Chancellor and Joschka Fischer (greens) as Foreign Minister in 1998 coincided with the Kosovo crisis and the request of NATO allies to contribute to the bombing campaign. After very controversial debates, the new government decided in favour of participation. One day after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Chancellor Schröder declared Germany’s ‘unqualified solidarity’ with the United States in parliament. Minorities in the SPD and especially in the Green Party, however, opposed a military contribution. Their resistance could only be overcome because Schröder linked the vote on Germany’s participation in Operation Enduring Freedom to a confidence vote, which he won narrowly 336 to 326 on 16 November 2001. In contrast to OEF, the International Stabilization Force ISAF was much less controversial and passed with a large majority of 538 to thirty-five. In the subsequent nine years, until the end of Germany’s contribution to OEF in 2010, the Bundestag held separate annual extension votes on the Bundeswehr contribution to OEF, on the one hand, and to ISAF, on the other hand. While the CDU/CSU consistently supported both missions, ‘The Left’ opposed them. Greens and, to a lesser extent, Social Democrats and Liberals, had minorities voting against. Germany contributed up to c.5,000 troops to the intervention in Afghanistan, including up to one hundred special forces, with an increasing shift from OEF to ISAF, which was far more popular in Germany. In 2003, Germany took over the ISAF command from Turkey. At that time, it also pushed for the expansion of ISAF beyond Kabul and for the establishment of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) throughout the country (Farrell 2017: 139). Germany assumed responsibility for PRTs in Kunduz and Faizabad in the north of Afghanistan ‘because it was the most peaceful region’ (Friesendorf 2018: 211). What is more, it became the lead nation for the training of the new Afghan National Police (ANP) force. Especially during the early years, Germany’s culture of reticence remained visible in restrictive rules of engagement and corresponding caveats that prioritized minimizing risks over the protection of civilians (Friesendorf 2018: 210ff.). Much to the frustration of Germany’s allies, Bundeswehr troops were not allowed to support offensive operations of partner countries, i.e., they were not allowed to use lethal force unless an attack is taking place or is imminent (Saideman/ Auerswald 2012: 76). Furthermore, they were prevented from searching houses, pursuing terrorists, or combating the production of drugs (Bierling 2014: 158).

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Only gradually were the rules of engagement adjusted to allow more proactive counter-insurgency operations. From 2009 onwards, ‘new instructions allowed the soldiers to shoot at fleeing attackers. Moreover, the use of force no longer had to be announced, if the situation did not allow it’ (Hilpert 2014: 117). Already in 2007, in response to pressure by its allies to increase its contribution, the German government also agreed to provide six Recce Tornado aircrafts for air reconnaissance and surveillance. However, social democrats who were the junior partner in Merkel’s first cabinet were concerned that ISAF was undermined by the American antiterrorism strategy. A caveat was therefore attached to the deployment, namely that information would be shared only with ISAF and not with OEF. The aircrafts would not be used for ‘close air support’ but only for the protection of civilians in the context of the ISAF mission (Johnston 2011: 167f.). In 2009, a fierce discussion followed an air strike that Colonel Klein had ordered after the Taliban hijacked two fuel tankers and forced local villagers to salvage the trucks that got stuck in the Kunduz river. The air strikes caused the death of c.140 Afghans, most of them civilians. In March 2010, Minister of Defence Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg broke with the taboo to call the mission a ‘war’. All in all, more than fifty soldiers lost their lives in Afghanistan. Since 2015, Germany contributes around 1,000 troops to Operation Resolute Support. When a US-led coalition started air strikes against Daesh in August 2014, the German government decided against a combat role. Instead, Germany sent c.100 soldiers to train Iraqi and Kurdish forces and supplied them with weapons and ammunition. The mandate allowed the use of force only for self-defence and the defence of partner countries in the training mission. After the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Germany decided to ‘provide a solidarity package based around reconnaissance missions with six Tornados for the air forces already fighting over Syria, a frigate to join the French carrier group in the eastern Mediterranean and an increased deployment to Mali in order to provide relief for French forces on operations there’ (Giegerich and Terhalle 2016: 160). In addition, Germany provided air-to-air refuelling capabilities to allied air forces over Syria. All in all, up to 1,200 troops have been deployed to this mission. In the Bundestag, the mission has been amongst the most contested ones with majorities of ‘The Left’, ‘Greens’, and the ‘Alternative for Germany’ voting against and the Liberals either abstaining or opposing.

5.2 Method Whether justifications for the use of armed force systematically differ across political parties is best examined by way of a content analysis of speeches in parliament. The expression of arguments in favour of or opposed to government

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policy is a key function of parliament. In contrast to election manifestos, parliamentary debates generally revolve around a specific measure and thus do not remain in the abstract. My dataset includes 1,065 parliamentary speeches between 2001 and 2017 (see the technical appendix below for details). I have clustered arguments made by MPs in eight different frames. To examine whether political parties differ systematically in arguing about the use of force, it is not relevant whether arguments are brought forward in favour of a military mission or as a critique thereof. What counts is whether parties differ in the ways they frame the issue under study, i.e., whether they use different parameters in assessing the use of force. The starting point for the eight frames were the findings from the literature on political parties and foreign policy (see chapters 2 and 4). ‘Spiral model thinking’, ‘international law’, ‘universalism/humanitarianism’, and ‘national interest and security’ are all derived from this literature with a clear expectation that the first three should be prominent amongst left parties and the latter amongst those of the right. ‘Multilateralism and alliances’, ‘enemy image’, ‘national identity/role conception’, and ‘democratic norms and procedures’ have been taken from the Geis/ Müller/Schörnig project. 1) Universalism/humanitarianism includes all references to the protection and well-being of non-nationals in conflict zones. Such references indicate a broad sense of community, which has been identified as a typical feature of left parties. References to human suffering, displacements, enslavement, and genocidal atrocities in the conflict zones under discussion, justifications to use force in order to protect the local population and to support them in their right to self-determination as well as concerns about civilian casualties and collateral damage all belong in this category. 2) National interest and security is the counterpart to the universalism/ humanitarianism frame because the national community replaces the international community as a reference point for the justification of using force. Arguments that a military intervention is in a country’s national interest or contributes to its national security belong in this category. If an argument explicitly mentions the term ‘national interest’, it clearly belongs in this category. However, references to nationals being threatened if military force is not used also apply. Often, it remains unspecified what the national interest is and why using force contributes to national security. Since 2015, the argument is occasionally made that a military intervention helps to keep refugees away from Europe (and to a lesser extent Canada). 3) International law includes all arguments that explicitly refer to the jus ad bellum, i.e. to provisions in international treaties, customary law, and jurisprudence that allow the use of armed force. The presence or absence of a United Nations Security Council mandate and its interpretation is of

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4)

5)

6)

7)

      particular importance because such a mandate is one of two accepted exemptions to the general prohibition of using force. The other exemption is self-defence, which therefore also belongs in this category. Although arguments that a local government has demanded the intervention are relevant under international law, I have excluded them from this category because they are almost always made without any explicit reference to international law. Haesebrouck, Reykers, and Fonck (2018) argued that international law arguments should be used especially by MPs from left parties because it resonates with the cosmopolitan notion of community. Spiral model thinking draws on Brian Rathbun’s (2004: 19) finding that some parties believe in what Robert Jervis dubbed the ‘spiral’ model of international politics, whereas others subscribe to the ‘deterrence model’. The spiral model holds that international conflict results from the security dilemma according to which arms and armaments are inherently ambiguous and, as a result, defensively intended actions are often taken as offensive measures by an adversary. The key to preventing violent conflict in this line of thinking is empathy with the adversary and ‘security dilemma sensitivity’ (Jervis 1976), i.e., a critical reflection of one’s own posture and its effects on an adversary. Arguments suggesting that the use of force contributes to or even creates the problem it is meant to address belong in this category. Democratic accountability refers to all arguments that treat governments as agents of the people and thus judge the use of force against the yardstick of citizens’ interests and opinions. Most frequently, this is done in references to public opinion. Often, a military mission is criticized for its lack of popular support, but sometimes public opinion is also invoked in support of a mission. A less frequently made but related argument is that the costs for a mission come at the expense of more important policies, especially social policies. Finally, this frame also includes arguments that a government has a particular responsibility for its citizens in the armed forces and should therefore do everything in its power to avoid casualties amongst its own troops. This frame has a strong affinity to the theories of the Democratic Peace. Creating a strong enemy image is an established strategy to mobilize the public for the use of force. This frame includes arguments demonizing the adversary as well as those that question and criticize this. Multilateralism and alliances include all references to alliance obligations, allies, and coalitions responsible for a military mission. Alliance obligations are understood broadly to include formal obligations (e.g. once NATO article 5 had been invoked after the 9/11 attacks) as well as informal commitments. Multilateralism refers to arguments that other states have taken a positive stance on an intervention, which would isolate a country which refuses to go along.

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8) National identity and role conception include all references to a country’s particular history, tradition, reputation, and identity if they are invoked in favour of or in opposition to a military intervention. National identity and role conception arguments include pleas to honour a country’s tradition as well as those to learn from its troubled past and possibly failures. Such arguments are often framed as moral obligations that result from ‘who we are’, suggesting that the participation or non-participation in an intervention impacts on a country’s identity. It is important to note that a country’s national identity and role conception is by no means uncontested but instead is frequently questioned, challenged, or reinterpreted. If human rights are invoked, national identity arguments may overlap with humanitarian arguments. If references are made to (significant) others’ expectations, there may be an overlap with arguments about multilateralism and alliances. What distinguishes a national identity and role conception argument are references to a country’s particular history, tradition, reputation, and identity. In some democracies, majoritarian electoral systems pose an obstacle to the representation of smaller parties who can only enter parliament when winning a plurality of votes in a district. Indeed, the only parties who have a substantial representation in all three countries in the dataset are the social democrats, the conservatives and the liberals. There is only one green MP from Canada and from the UK, no radical left MP from Canada (and only one from the UK) and no radical right MPs from either Canada or the UK in the dataset. Meaningful crosscountry comparisons for Green, radical left and radical right parties are thus not possible.

5.3 Findings Although this chapter’s prime interest lies in the detection of party-political patterns of arguing about the use of armed force, I will first examine to what extent there are country-specific patterns. Figure 5.1 shows the argumentative maps for the three countries under study. The figures indicate the percentage of a certain type of frame being used in relation to all frames being used by all MPs in a particular country.²⁷ The figure visualizes three interesting differences between the three countries’ argumentative maps. First, arguments about national identity and role

²⁷ This implies that different numbers or lengths of speeches per country in the dataset does not influence the result. Furthermore, it implies that an elaborate argument weighs heavier than a short reference.

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      democratic accountability 25% universalism and humanitarianism

20%

enemy image

15% 10% 5%

spiral model thinking

international law

0%

national interest and security

multilateralism and alliances

national identity/role conception 1 : UK

2 : Germany

3 : Canada

Figure 5.1 Argumentative maps of Canada, Germany and the UK

conceptions are particularly frequent in Canada. Liberals and Conservatives alike refer to ‘the proud tradition of Canadian missions’²⁸ and ‘the long and proud history of helping the global community to defend peace, freedom and democracy’.²⁹ The two World Wars, the Korean War, the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and peacekeeping are regularly mentioned to illustrate this tradition.³⁰ MPs present the purpose of the missions as a defence of ‘basic Canadian values’³¹ because ‘Canada stands for democracy, for human rights, for generosity and for courage, values that the Afghan people so desperately need and want to embrace.’³² Therefore, participation in the military mission is considered a reaffirmation of ‘the values that define us as a country and as a community’³³ and ‘a deep responsibility for me as a Canadian’.³⁴ Because ‘the values we hold ²⁸ Steven Blaney (conservatives), 10 April 2006. See also Prime Minister Stephen Harper (conservatives), 17 May 2006; Tony Clement (conservatives), 30 March 2015; Peter MacKay (conservatives), 30 March 2015 refers to the national anthem as proof of ‘what we are fighting for’. ²⁹ Sarmite Bulte (liberals), 25 September 2001; see also Russ Hiebert (conservatives), 17 May 2006; Julian Fantino (conservatives), 26 March 2015; Laurie Hawn (conservatives), 30 March 2015; Jason Kenney (conservatives), 26 March 2015. ³⁰ Larry Bagnell (liberals) and Bill Blaikie (‘New Democratic Party’), 15 November 2005; Deepak Obhrai (conservatives), 7 October 2014. ³¹ Minister of National Defence Bill Graham (liberals) on 15 November 2005; see also Lois Brown (conservatives) on 26 March 2015, John Duncan (conservatives) on 30 March 2015; Joyce Murray (liberals) and Minister of Foreign Affairs Rob Nicholson (conservatives) on 26 March 2015. ³² Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter MacKay (conservatives) on 17 May 2006. ³³ Marlene Jennings (liberals) on 15 October 2001. ³⁴ Erin O’Toole (conservatives) on 7 October 2014.

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dearly as Canadian, freedom, democracy and human rights, urge us to respond’,³⁵ ‘anything less [than participation in the Afghanistan mission, W.W.] diminishes all of us.’³⁶ The invocation of national identity often comes with an appeal to transcend party politics.³⁷ The prominence of national identity arguments is underlined by their frequent use by opponents to the mission who frame it as un-Canadian because Canada ‘is a nation of facilitators, not occupiers’,³⁸ an ‘honest broker on the world stage’,³⁹ or because ‘we are sacrificing a Canadian tradition with respect to international law.’⁴⁰ Compared to Canada, national identity and role conceptions are far less frequently invoked in Britain and in Germany. In the German debate, a German Sonderweg is only mentioned in a pejorative way as an undesirable self-isolation.⁴¹ In the Bundestag, references to national identity and role conceptions are often about the appropriate lessons learnt from German history and the obligations arising from that. Whereas to critics, German history should have made fighting in Afghanistan impossible,⁴² for supporters, German fascism has led to an obligation to show presence when people are humiliated and tortured.⁴³ When human rights are brought forward as arguments for military intervention, they are almost always not presented as German but as universal ones.⁴⁴ In the UK, there is an occasional reference to Britain’s ‘unique role—standing as it does at the centre of the Commonwealth, the G8 and the Security Council’⁴⁵ and to ‘a political responsibility to do what this country has always done’,⁴⁶ but such references are far less numerous than in Canada. Second, references to universalism and humanitarianism are particularly frequent in Germany whereas in Canada, the importance of this category ranks behind international law, enemy images, multilateralism/alliances, national identity, and national role conception (the UK occupies a position between Germany and Canada). To be sure, in all three countries, the situations in Afghanistan and in the territories occupied and threatened by Daesh are portrayed as humanitarian catastrophes resulting from massive human rights violations, in the case of the

³⁵ Joy Smith (conservatives) on 13 March 2008. ³⁶ Judy Sgro (liberals) on 17 September 2001. ³⁷ See ‘This motion is not a liberal or a Conservative motion. It is a Canadian motion.’ (Blaine Calkins (conservatives) on 13 March 2008). ³⁸ Jack Layton (social democrats) on 17 May 2006. ³⁹ Don Davies (social democrats) on 26 March 2015; see also Paul Dewar (social democrat) on 26 March 2015. ⁴⁰ Bill Blaikie (social democrats) on 15 November 2005. ⁴¹ See Gernot Erler (German social democrats) on 23 March 2011. ⁴² Wolfgang Gehrcke (radical left) on 5 December 2014; Alexander Neu (radical left) on 10 November 2016. ⁴³ Marieluise Beck (greens) on 15 December 2016. ⁴⁴ However, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) argues that it characterizes ‘us Germans’ to be ‘on the right side, on the side of freedom and human rights’ (21 November 2017). ⁴⁵ Nicholas Soames (British conservatives) on 4 October 2001. ⁴⁶ Chris Grayling (British conservatives) on 4 October 2001.

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Yazidis bordering on genocide,⁴⁷ displacements, and low levels of development. In all three countries, but most frequently in Germany, the military missions are often presented as a way of standing by the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria,⁴⁸ particularly religious minorities⁴⁹ and ‘innocent women and children’.⁵⁰ With a view to Afghanistan, a widely shared assessment holds that a withdrawal would lead to a return of the Taliban and thus to large-scale human rights violations, chaos, anarchy, terror, civil war, and a humanitarian catastrophe.⁵¹ According to Collins, years of Western presence have led to ‘obligations to the Afghan people’.⁵² The humanitarian frame is not only used to justify the use of armed force but also often comes with concerns about civilian casualties. Critics of the military missions refer to so-called collateral damage of air strikes and conclude that terror cannot be fought with military means because the use of force adds to the population’s misery, rather than its protection.⁵³ In response, advocates of the interventions highlight the multiple ways in which the intervening forces have worked to minimize casualties. British MPs in particular pride themselves for having ‘carried out airstrikes [ . . . ] with no civilian casualties’.⁵⁴ In their view, this achievement results from technology such as ‘the Brimstone precision missile, ⁴⁷ David Burrowes (British conservatives) on 2 December 2015, James Bezan, Tony Clement, Ted Opitz and Stephen Woodworth (all Canadian conservatives), all 7 October 2014 all use the term ‘genocide/genocidal’ to describe the threat to Yazidis from Daesh. ⁴⁸ Niels Annen (German social democrats) on 17 December 2015; Rainer Arnold (German social democrats) on 8 November 2005; Ralf Brauksiepe (German conservatives) on 9 March 2004; KarlHeinz Brunner (German social democrats) on 22 March 2018; Rob Nicholson (Canadian conservatives) on 26 March 2015; Omid Nouripour (German greens) on 25 December 2016; Bernd Schmidbauer (German conservatives) on 12 October 2007; Tony Blair (British social democrats) on 8 October 2001. ⁴⁹ David Anderson (Canadian conservatives) on 7 October 2014. ⁵⁰ Joschka Fischer (German greens) on 22 December 2001; Sigmar Gabriel (German social democrats) on 28 January 2011; Sybille Pfeiffer (German conservatives) on 20 February 2014; Stefan Rebmann (German social democrats) on 31 January 2013; Stephen Woodworth (Canadian conservatives) on 7 October 2014; see also Raymond Simard (Canadian liberals) on 13 March 2008; Ted Opitz and Lisa Raitt (both Canadian conservatives), both 7 October 2014. ⁵¹ Rainer Arnold (German social democrats) on 20 September 2007; Bijan Djir-Sarai (German liberals) on 25 March 2011, 25 December 2011 and 22 March 2018; Joschka Fischer (German greens) on 14 June 2002; Hans Peter Friedrich (German conservatives) on 21 January 2011; Florian Hahn (German conservatives) on 3 December 2009; Jürgen Hardt (German conservatives) on 26 February 2010; Elke Hoff (German liberals) on 26 November 2009; Birgit Homburger (German liberals) on 28 September 2006; Henning Otte (German conservatives) on 28 January 2011; Stefan Rebmann (German social democrats) on 26 January 2012; Frithjof Schmidt (German greens) on 21 January 2011; Walter Steinmeier on 7 October 2008; Jürgen Trittin (German greens) on 16 October 2008; Gerry Byrne (Canadian liberals) on 13 March 2008. ⁵² Damian Collins (British conservatives) on 9 September 2010; see also Johannes Pflug (German social democrats) on 26 November 2009. ⁵³ Heike Hänsel claims that cluster bombs, white phosphor, night raids, and targeted killings, all of which she attributes to NATO policy, is experienced as terror by the local population in Afghanistan (Heike Hänsel, German radical left on 28 January 2011). For similar arguments see Christine Buchholz on 15 December 2011; Oscar Lafontaine on 8 November 2005 and Steffi Lemke on 16 November 2001; Sahra Wagenknecht on 4 December 2015 (all German radical left). ⁵⁴ Mary Creagh (British social democrats) on 2 December 2015.

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which minimises the risk of civilian casualties and which even the United States does not have’⁵⁵ as well as from policy: according to former Minister of Defence and then Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond Rules of engagement are classified, but I can tell him that the UK’s rules of engagement are among the most restrictive in the world. Bringing British discipline, British skills and British precision weapons to bear will save lives as we prosecute this campaign. We will minimise civilian casualties.⁵⁶

Finally, German MPs stand out for refraining from evoking strong enemy images when portraying the Taliban or the fighters of the so-called Islamic State, confirming what Geis, Müller, and Schörnig found in their analyses of the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 Kosovo War, and the 2003 Iraq War. In contrast, Canadian and British MPs often refer to the Taliban as well as to Daesh as an ‘enemy’⁵⁷, as ‘evil’⁵⁸, as a ‘death cult’,⁵⁹ and as ‘murderers’.⁶⁰ Daesh is also framed as ‘fascist’,⁶¹ and MPs remind the audience of the torture, rapings, enslavements, beheadings, and crucifixions carried out by Daesh.⁶² MPs highlight the enemy’s disrespect for human life and the impossibility of negotiating with it. With a view to the importance of multilateralism and alliances, international law, democratic accountability, and national interest/security, differences between countries are small. An interpretation of the conflicts in terms of the spiral model is more frequently done in Germany, but this is mostly an effect of the strong ⁵⁵ David Cameron (British conservatives) on 26 September 2014. See also Johnny Mercer (British conservatives) on 2 December 2015. ⁵⁶ Philip Hammond (British conservatives) on 2 December 2015. ⁵⁷ Chris Grayling (conservatives) on 4 October 2001; Steve Double, John Glen, Sarah Wollaston (all conservatives; all on 2 December 2015) in the UK and John Cummins, Brian Fitzpatrick, Art Hanger, Howard Hilstrom (all conservatives), John Harvard (liberals) all on 15 October 2001 and Jason Kenney (conservatives) on 26 March 2015, all in Canada. ⁵⁸ Prime Minister David Cameron, Fiona Bruce, John Glen, Antoinette Sandbach (all conservatives); Hilary Benn and Ruth Smeeth (both social democrats), all on 2 December 2015; Iain Duncan Smith (conservative) on 4 October 2001, Charles Kennedy (liberals) on 8 October 2001 in the UK; Minister of Foreign Affairs John Malney on 17 September 2001; Leon Benoit, Stockwell Day, Brian Fitzpatrick, Howard Hilstrom (all conservatives), all on 15 October 2001; Peter MacKay (conservatives) on 7 October 2014; Minister of National Defence Jason Kenney and Minister of Foreign Affairs Rob Nicholson (both conservatives) on 26 March 2015; and Cheryl Gallant, Laurie Hawn, and Peter MacKay (all conservatives) on 30 March 2015 in Canada. ⁵⁹ With a view to the Taliban, see Iain Duncan Smith (conservatives) and Jim Knight (social democrats), both on 8 October 2001; with a view to Daesh see Prime Minister David Cameron, John Glen, Andrew Murrison, Tom Tugendhat (all conservatives) all on 2 December 2015 in the UK and Julian Fantino (conservatives) on 26 March 2015 and Cheryl Gallant (conservatives) on 30 March 2015 in Canada. ⁶⁰ Michal Ancram (British conservatives), Mike O’Brien (British social democrats), both on 4 October 2001; Larry Bagnell (Canadian liberals) on 15 October 2001. ⁶¹ Hilary Benn, Dan Jarvis, Ivan Lewis (all British social democrats), all on 2 December 2015; Tom Tugendhat (British conservatives) on 2 December 2015. ⁶² Minister of Foreign Affairs Rob Nicholson (Canadian conservatives) on 26 March 2015; David Anderson, John Duncan, and Peter MacKay (all Canadian conservatives), all on 30 March 2015.

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     

national interest and security

enemy image

universalism and humanitarianism 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

spiral model thinking

democratic accountability

national identity/role conception

multilateralism and alliances

international law radical left

greens

social democrats

liberals

conservatives

Figure 5.2 Argumentative map for party families

presentation of the far left in the Bundestag and its (near) absence in Canada and the UK.⁶³ Figure 5.2 shows the argumentative maps for conservatives, social democrats, liberals, greens, and the radical left.⁶⁴ The percentages indicate the share of the eight types of arguments in the total of arguments brought forward in the parliamentary debates. The argumentative map for the radical left is almost exclusively driven by German MPs, as George Galloway (Respect Party) in the British House of Commons was the only non-German speaker from a radical left party in the dataset. Clearly, spiral model arguments make the core of the radical left opposition to the military interventions. Regarding both Afghanistan and Daesh, radical left MPs argue that the use of force, especially aerial bombing and the use of armed drones, has been sowing hatred, which in turn drives up the number of insurgents.⁶⁵ ⁶³ Although exact comparisons are difficult as the definition of frames is not identical, it is worth noting that a couple of patterns that Geis, Müller, and Schörnig detected in their study seem absent in this study of the missions in Afghanistan and against Daesh. For example, neither humanitarian arguments in the UK nor international legal argument in Germany score particularly high. Whereas Geis, Müller, and Schörnig found that ‘all arguments related to power score below average’ (2013: 335) in Germany, the argumentative map here has Germany score higher on national interest and security than Canada and the UK. ⁶⁴ I excluded speeches from the radical right because there are only six speeches from five MPs of the AfD in the entire dataset. ⁶⁵ On Afghanistan see Lothar Bisky 12 October 2007; Roland Claus on 8 November 2001; Heike Hänsel on 1 December 2016, Monika Knoche on 28 February 2007 and 7 October 2008; Oskar Lafontaine on 8 November 2005 and 9 March 2007; Stefan Liebich on 15 March 2018; Gesine

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In Afghanistan, the alliance with a corrupt government and corrupt security forces also contributes to the local population’s support for the insurgents.⁶⁶ As Wolfgang Gehrcke puts it: ‘If you cannot escape the logic of militarism, then another logic steps in. There is a spiral: more military, more impression of occupation in Afghanistan, more resistance, and then you will ask for more military.’⁶⁷ As a consequence, the best way to deal with it would be to withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq.⁶⁸ Closely related to the prominence of spiral model thinking is the vast attention paid to civilian casualties. Although humanitarian arguments are brought forward by speakers from many political parties (and none makes more frequent use of them than the greens), almost half of all statements voicing concerns for civilian casualties come from the radical left. To some extent, such concerns are brought forward to buttress the spiral model. In addition, many statements show a cosmopolitan understanding of human suffering that explicitly puts Afghan, Syrian, and Iraqi civilians on a par with one’s own troops: Christine Buchholz, for example, emphasizes that ‘we do not apply double-standards. We mourn our own troops in the same way as we mourn Afghan civilians who were killed by ISAF, by the Bundeswehr.’⁶⁹ Along these lines, Lothar Bisky finds Germany complicit in the humanitarian catastrophe and Wolfgang Gehrcke asks the Bundestag to apologize for the Afghan casualties for whom it is co-responsible.⁷⁰ According to Oscar Lafontaine, the many civilian casualties constitute a violation of the Geneva Conventions and therefore make the war in Afghanistan unlawful.⁷¹ A final feature of the radical left’s argumentative map is the near absence of enemy images. George Galloway’s characterization of Daesh as a ‘death cult’ and a ‘gang of terrorist murderers’⁷² is the only statement in this category. The greens have a similar argumentative map as the radical left. Spiral model thinking and humanitarian considerations account for half of all arguments made; a further 20 per cent of all arguments made are about international law. What is more, enemy images are almost entirely absent.⁷³ Akin to the radical left, concerns about civilian casualties are the most frequent humanitarian argument. Particularly MPs of the German Green’s left wing, such as Frithjof Schmidt and Lötzsch on 28 September 2005; Norman Paech on 9 March 2007; Paul Schäfer on 28 February 2007, Jan van Aken on 18 December 2014; Sahra Wagenknecht on 4 December 2015. On Daesh see Dietmar Bartsch on 2 December 2015; Sevim Dagdelen on 20 October 2016; all German radical left. ⁶⁶ Christine Buchholtz on 5 December 2015 and 17 December 2015; Friedbert Pflüger on 12 December 2017. ⁶⁷ Wolfgang Gehrcke on 16 October 2016, my translation. ⁶⁸ Monika Knoche on 2 July 2009. ⁶⁹ Christine Buchholz on 20 February 2014. For a similar statement on the fight against Daesh see Christine Buchholz on 4 December 2015. ⁷⁰ Lothar Bisky on 12 October 2007; Wolfgang Gehrcke on 13 December 2012. See also Jan van Aken on 18 December 2014. ⁷¹ Oscar Lafontaine on 9 March 2007. ⁷² George Galloway (British radical left) on 26 September 2014. ⁷³ For exceptions see Kerstin Mueller on 16 November 2001; Omid Nouripour on 10 November 2016.

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Hans-Christian Ströbele, highlight that Western strategy inevitably causes many innocent deaths as it relies on drone and air strikes and ‘capture-or-kill’ commands. Germany is portrayed as complicit in the deaths of civilians also because it provides relevant intelligence.⁷⁴ In contrast to the radical left, however, green MPs also acknowledge that armed force is used to protect the local population. While in government, green politicians also highlight caveats in the mandate of the Bundeswehr that are designed to prevent civilian casualties, such as nonparticipation in air strikes or ground combat.⁷⁵ In a similar vein, Winfried Nachtwei emphasizes the change in US military strategy from fighting an enemy to protecting the local population.⁷⁶ Interestingly, legal arguments are advanced in favour⁷⁷ and in opposition⁷⁸ to a military intervention, with the former dominating while in government and the latter more numerous while in opposition and with a view to fighting Daesh. The presence of a UN Security Council mandate for the Afghanistan mission is frequently cited as an argument in favour of the mission. In a similar vein, the absence of such a mandate is a prominent reason to oppose the fight against Daesh, as the request from the Iraqi government to assist in an act of self-defence deemed insufficient. As with the radical left, the data come almost exclusively from the Bundestag, as Caroline Lucas in the UK and Elizabeth May in Canada are the only two non-German green MPs in the dataset. The social democratic map is characterized by the relatively even spread of arguments across most of the frames, with the notable exception of enemy images. The social democrats stand out, however, for their emphasis on international law. Whether legal arguments are brought forward in favour of or in opposition to a military mission depends to a large extent on whether social democrats are in government or in opposition: In the latter case, international law is the main reason cited to criticize a military intervention as unlawful. Not surprisingly, such critique fades away when in government.⁷⁹ When in government, social

⁷⁴ See Frithjof Schmidt on 25 December 2011, 26 January 2010, 25 December 2014, 12 May 2014; and Hans-Christian Ströbele on 26 November 2009, 3 December 2009, 10 February 2010, 28 January 2011, 25 December 2011, 26 January 2012, 31 January 2013, 20 February 2014, and 17 December 2015. ⁷⁵ Kerstin Müller on 16 November 2001. ⁷⁶ Winfried Nachtwei on 7 October 2008. ⁷⁷ Joschka Fischer on 8 November 2011, 22 December 2001, 20 December 2002, 24 October 2003, 28 September 2005; Winfried Nachtwei on 8 November 2005, 21 September 2006; Rezzo Schlauch on 22 December 2001; Hans-Christian Ströbele on 22 December 2001; Jürgen Trittin on 3 December 2009 and 28 January 2010. ⁷⁸ On Afghanistan Frithjof Schmidt on 25 December 2011 (criticizing violations of international humanitarian law), Hans-Christian Ströbele on 15 December 2011, 20 February 2014, and 5 December 2014; on Daesh see Agnieszka Brugger on 20 October 2016, 21 November 2017; Katrin GöringEckhardt on 2 December 2015; Anton Hofreiter on 4 December 2015; Katja Keul on 4 December 2015; Omid Nouripour on 10 November 2016; and Jürgen Trittin on 12 December 2017. ⁷⁹ It should be noted that this does not necessarily imply a change in substantive position but also reflects a selection effect as the government is unlikely to participate in military action, which it considers a violation of international law.

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democrats often go beyond asserting the lawfulness of a mission and present it as a way to strengthen the system of the United Nations as the ‘bearer of the international monopoly of force’⁸⁰ and to enforce, rather than only comply with international law.⁸¹ A mandate by the United Nations Security Council is the most important legal argument brought forward by social democrats. In contrast, references to self-defence or to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) are more infrequent and often come with qualifications. For example, the Canadian social democrats reminded the liberal government that the International Court of Justice had declared collective self-defence against non-state actors on the territory of another state unlawful and that such a justification would at a minimum require an official request from the Iraqi government if Daesh was to be targeted in Syria as well as a notification of the UN Security Council.⁸² With a view to R2P, Hélène Laverdière pointed out that to ‘be put into action, we need a UN Security Council resolution, which we do not have’.⁸³ Because there are fewer than a dozen British liberals in the dataset, the map is heavily influenced by liberals in Canada, where they have been the dominant political party for many years, and Germany, where they were the junior coalition partner between 2009 and 2013. With this caveat in mind, the liberal map stands out for the prominence of arguments about multilateralism and alliances. Canadian and German liberals in particular attribute a high value to multilateralism and alliances; in contrast, British liberals use this frame less frequently. For liberals in both Canada and Germany, alliance-related arguments are made far more frequently than those related to multilateralism in general. Many references are made to the USA, who are presented as ‘neighbours, as friends, as family (and) our allies’.⁸⁴ The terrorist attack on the USA is understood as ‘an attack on us’.⁸⁵ German liberals also point to France and the invocation of the European Union’s mutual defence clause in fighting Daesh (see section 5.1.1.2 above).⁸⁶ A German peculiarity is also the argument that NATO’s AWACS fleet cannot properly operate without German personnel.⁸⁷

⁸⁰ Walter Kolbow (German social democrat) on 28 February 2007. ⁸¹ See Niels Annen (German social democrats) on 18 December 2014; Gernot Erler (German social democrats) on 25 March 2011; Pat MacFadden (British social democrats) on 2 December 2015; and Peter Struck (German social democrats) on 16 November 2001. ⁸² See Alexa McDonough on 28 January 2002 as well as Paul Dewar and Craig Scott (all Canadian social democrats) on 26 March 2015. ⁸³ Hélène Laverdière (Canadian social democrats) on 30 March 2015. ⁸⁴ Reg Alcock (Canadian liberals) on 17 September 2001. ⁸⁵ Werner Hoyer (German liberals) on 8 November 2005. ⁸⁶ Michael Georg Link on 21 November 2017 and 12 December 2017. ⁸⁷ Bijan Djir-Sarai on 25 March 2011; Elke Hoff on 25 March 2011.

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Especially in Canada, numerous parliamentarians point affirmatively to the invocation of NATO’s article 5 for the first time in its history and support the consideration of the 9/11 attacks to be attacks against all NATO members.⁸⁸ For German MP Werner Hoyer, NATO is part of Germany’s raison d’etre (Staatsraison),⁸⁹ and the continued presence in Afghanistan is understood as an important and welcome signal of reliability as an ally. With a view to Afghanistan, arguments for solidarity with the US are still made years after the initial decision to participate in 2001. When the extension of the German deployment was debated in the Bundestag, FDP Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle appealed to the opposition to vote in favour because a broad majority would be an important signal to Germany’s allies. In contrast to the many references to NATO and to allies, references to multilateralism in a broader sense are less numerous. However, the number of countries that contribute to ISAF is sometimes mentioned in support of the mission⁹⁰ as is the inclusiveness of the coalition in the fight against terrorism that transcends formerly antagonistic relations.⁹¹ Canadian liberal Bill Graham thus concludes that ‘we have world opinion with us.’⁹² Conservative MPs in all three countries prefer to frame their arguments in terms of national security and the national interest much more than MPs from any other party family, and they are also leading in picturing the Taliban or Daesh in demonic terms. Around two-thirds of all explicit references to national security are made by conservative MPs, although they only account for less than 40 per cent of all speeches. Typically, national interest arguments have an educative spin, as they appeal to an audience that prefers a national over a cosmopolitan definition of interest and explain why addressing ‘this threat at its source ( . . . ) is in our national interest’.⁹³ Since 2015, German conservatives in particular sometimes add that the military missions help to keep refugees away.⁹⁴

⁸⁸ Minister of National Defence Art Eggleton and David Pratt, both on 17 September 2001, Minister of Foreign Affairs John Manley on 17 September 2001 and 15 October 2001; Andy Mitchell on 15 October 2001; Sarmite Bulte and Lynn Myers, both on 25 September 2001. ⁸⁹ Werner Hoyer (German liberals) on 9 March 2007. ⁹⁰ Günther Friedrich Nolting (German liberals) on 28 September 2005; Guido Westerwelle (German liberals) on 26 November 2009, 10 February 2010, and 15 December 2011. Canadian liberal Larry Bagnell talks about ‘one of the largest coalitions in the world’ on 15 October 2001. ⁹¹ See Jean Chrétien on 15 October 2001 who talks about ‘the rapid formation of an unprecedented multinational and multi-ethnic coalition, a coalition in which the principal adversaries in the cold war, the United States, Russia and China, are now making common cause.’ ⁹² Bill Graham on 15 October 2001. ⁹³ James Bezan (Canadian conservatives) on 7 October 2014. ⁹⁴ See Reinhard Brandl (German conservatives) on 3 December 2015; Thorsten Frei (German conservatives) on 15 December 2016; Jürgen Hardt (German conservatives) on 17 December 2015; Henning Otte (German conservatives) on 4 December 2015, 12 December 2017, and 22 March 2018; and, last not least, Minister of Defence Ursula von der Leyen (German conservatives) on 17 December 2015 and 21 November 2017.

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For all parties, humanitarian arguments play a prominent role. General evocations of human suffering are made, especially in debates about fighting Daesh, where they account for a third of all humanitarian arguments: not only ‘mass displacement’⁹⁵, murders, rapes, and enslavement⁹⁶ are mentioned but the atrocities against civilians, especially Yazidis, are presented as an ‘ongoing genocide’,⁹⁷ which implies a responsibility to protect.⁹⁸ In contrast, references to the people’s right to self-determination and freedom make up almost 20 per cent of arguments when debating the missions in Afghanistan. The most frequently used categories, however, are the protection of the local population and concerns about civilian casualties. Particularly parties in government argue that the use of armed force will contribute to the protection of the local population— in debates about Afghanistan, these arguments account for around half of all references to universal and humanitarian values (regarding Daesh, the percentage is around 40 per cent). In contrast, parties in the opposition voice their concern about civilian casualties, especially in debates about fighting Daesh, where four out of five humanitarian arguments are about civilian casualties. Because Western democracies fight Daesh almost exclusively from the air and because Daesh is known for using human shields, MPs are very concerned about so-called ‘collateral damage’. When making this argument, humanitarian concerns blend with functional considerations (such as increasing support for Daesh as a result of civilian casualties). In turn, MPs of governing parties frequently argue that their country’s participation will help avoid casualties. In Germany, this argument was often made with a view to the reconnaissance Tornados on whose availability the Bundestag had to decide. Figure 5.3 builds on figure 5.2, but clusters parties into two main groups, namely parties on the left (social democrats, greens and radical left) and on the right (conservatives and radical right). Because the liberal party family is positioned between social democrats and Christian democrats/conservatives and because indeed the three liberal parties in Canada, Germany, and the UK oscillate between centre-left and centre-right positions, they are excluded from Figure 5.3. The figure shows that differences as regards universalism/humanitarianism, multilateralism/alliances, and national identity are small. Furthermore, the figure

⁹⁵ James Bezan (Canadian conservatives) on 7 October 2014; see also Mary Creagh (British social democrats) on 2 December 2015; Liam Fox (British conservatives) on 2 December 2015; Thorsten Frei (German conservatives) on 10 November 2016. ⁹⁶ Ted Opitz, Tony Clement, and Royal Galipeau (all Canadian conservatives), all on 7 October 2014. ⁹⁷ Stephen Woodworth (Canadian conservatives) on 7 October 2014; see also Kevin Foster (British conservatives) on 2 December 2015; Gisela Manderla (German conservatives) on 10 November 2016. ⁹⁸ Rainer Arnold (German social democrats) on 2 December 2015; Stephen Woodworth (Canadian conservatives) on 7 October 2014.

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      universalism and humanitarianism 25% international law

20%

national Identity/role conception

15% 10% 5% democratic accountability

0%

enemy image

spiral model thinking

national interest and security multilateralism and alliances left

right

Figure 5.3 Argumentative map for left and right parties

confirms the main findings from the previous paragraphs: What first and foremost distinguishes a left from a right way of arguing is the right’s emphasis on national interests and security and the prominence of spiral model thinking amongst left MPs. In addition, Figure 5.3 shows much more clearly than Figure 5.2 that references to democratic norms and procedures are much more frequent among left MPs than among right MPs. Speakers from the radical left and the social democrats point to a imbalance between welfare state cuts and spending on military interventions. In the words of Canadian Social Democrat Djaouida Sellah: The government cuts public services, but manages to find money for a war. How much will this war cost Canadians? If the government was truly concerned about Canadians, it would have invested this money where the people need it most. It would invest in health, where there have been many cuts this year once again. It would invest in programs for veterans and for members of the Canadian Armed Forces, who saw nine offices being closed. Finally, it would invest in job creation.⁹⁹

⁹⁹ Djaouida Sellah (Canadian social democrats) on 7 October 2014. For very similar statements see Judy Wasylycia-Leis (Canadian social democrats) on 13 March 2008; Andrew Cash (Canadian social democrats) on 7 October 2014; Petra Pau (German radical left) on 7 November 2003. The British green MP Caroline Lucas does not explicitly mention the welfare state but on 9 September 2010 suggests ‘If the Chancellor is looking for places to make cuts, he should start right here and bring the troops home.’

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In addition, speakers from the radical left and the social democrats argue that the immense costs for the military interventions would be better invested in development aid¹⁰⁰ or ‘important missions elsewhere’.¹⁰¹ More frequent than ‘guns versus butter’ arguments, however, are references to the public and public opinion. Whereas references to opinion polls are made in Germany and the UK,¹⁰² Canadian and British MPs refer significantly to personal communication with their constituencies by way of letters, phone calls, messages, or meetings.¹⁰³ ‘Guns vs butter’ arguments and references to public opinion are entirely absent among MPs from right parties.¹⁰⁴ In contrast, concerns about casualties amongst a country’s own troops are voiced by parties across the entire political spectrum. With a view to the militarism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the total absence of any glorification of the death of soldiers is remarkable. Instead, and again across all parties, MPs share the goal to keep their own troops out of harm’s way as much as possible. In all three countries, MPs share a sense of being (co-)responsible for risking soldiers’ lives. In Germany, this notion is linked to the Bundeswehr as a ‘parliamentary army’, which gives MPs the prime responsibility over military deployments.¹⁰⁵ However, in Canada and the UK, where the deployment of troops has been a royal prerogative, MPs interpret as their ‘duty in the House . . . to ensure that we never put our troops in harm’s way unnecessarily or irresponsibly’.¹⁰⁶ They assume responsibility by stating that ‘those deaths were avoidable and the fact that this House did not oppose the expedition into Helmand province in 2006 is responsible for them; this is not down to anybody else.’¹⁰⁷ Concerns for their own casualties still come with party-specific spins: radical left MPs emphasize that the loss of civilian non-nationals is as terrible as the loss of their own troops.¹⁰⁸ At the other extreme, radical right MPs adopt a

¹⁰⁰ Monika Knoche (German radical left) on 21 September 2006 and 28 September 2006; Gesine Lötzsch (German radical left) on 12 November 2004; Petra Pau (German radical left) on 15 November 2002. ¹⁰¹ Dawn Black (Canadian social democrats) on 10 April 2006 with reference to Darfur. ¹⁰² Christine Buchholz (German radical left) on 3 December 2009; Gregor Gysi (German radical left) on 28 January 2011; Gesine Lötzsch (German radical left) on 24 October 2003; Katy Clark and Jeremy Corbyn (both British social democrats) on 9 September 2010. ¹⁰³ Robert Aubin and Andrew Cash (bother Canadian social democrats) both on 7 October 2014; Rachael Maskell (British social democrats) on 2 December 2015; Alexa McDonough (Canadian social democrats) on 15 October 2001; Peggy Nash (Canadian social democrats) on 7 October 2014. ¹⁰⁴ The only liberal MP who criticizes the costs for the military at the expense of humanitarian and development aid is Canadian MP and former Minister of National Defence John McCallum on 7 October 2014. ¹⁰⁵ Anton Hofreiter (German greens) on 4 December 2015; Hans-Christian Ströbele (German greens) on 20 February 2014. ¹⁰⁶ John McDonnell (British social democrats) on 9 September 2010; see also Paul Flynn (British social democrats) on 2 December 2015. ¹⁰⁷ Paul Flynn (British social democrats) on 9 September 2010. ¹⁰⁸ Christine Buchholz (German radical left) on 20 February 2014; Wolfgang Gehrcke (German radical left) on 16 October 2008 and 13 December 2012.

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nationalist tone when arguing that Afghanistan is not worth the bones of a single German soldier.¹⁰⁹ Conservative MPs often link concerns about casualties with questions of proper equipment, either defending what is available or asking for additional investments. The three figures above show differences across countries (5.1) and political parties (5.2 and 5.3). At face value, the differences between parties appear more pronounced than between countries. However, eyeballing figures might be deceptive as the number of cases per country and even more so per party group is uneven. What is more, the argumentative maps above do not capture that some speeches were made by MPs of the governing coalition who are thus inclined to defend ‘their’ government’s decision to use force, whereas others were made by MPs of opposition parties whose main task is to criticize the government. To quantify the effects of MPs’ party affiliation and nationality on the arguments made, I have therefore run a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) with party family and nationality as predictors. As a control, I have added a government/opposition variable because whether or not a speaker is part of the governing coalition or the opposition may also have an influence on the types of arguments being used. The unit of analysis is an individual MP’s speech (n = 1059 because the six MPs from radical right parties are excluded from the analysis). There are eight dependent variables, namely the proportion of arguments in any of the eight frames to all arguments in all eight frames. For example, in the debate on fighting Daesh in the Canadian House of Commons on 7 October 2014, enemy images accounted for 46.7 per cent of David Anderson’s arguments that belong to one of the eight frames, whereas national identity arguments account for 22.25 per cent and humanitarian ones for 31.05 per cent; the remaining five frames have not been used by Anderson. The results from the MANOVA multivariate tests show that party family, nationality, and government/opposition all impact on the types of frames that MPs use in their speeches (Wilks’s λ is significant at 0.008 for government/ opposition and below 0.001 for party family and nationality). The main effects are rather small, however: the partial η² is 0.024 for nationality, 0.038 for party family, and 0.02 for government/opposition. The three variables thus each explain between 2 per cent and 3.8 per cent of the variance in the frames being used by the speakers. Most importantly in the context of this chapter, the MANOVA shows that party family is a stronger predictor of the frames being used than nationality or government/opposition, which re-emphasizes the importance of party ideology for understanding the democratic politics of military interventions.

¹⁰⁹ René Springer (German radical right) on 15 March 2018 with a reference to nineteenth-century Chancellor Bismarck.

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Table 5.1 Tests of between-subjects effects

democratic accountability enemy image international law multilateralism/ alliances national identity/role conception national interest and security spiral model thinking universalism and humanitarianism

partial η² for party family

partial η² for nationality

partial η² for government/opposition

0.021***

0.000

0.002

0.009 0.025*** 0.001

0.003 0.01** 0.002

0.000 0.001 0.008**

0.002

0.000

0.001

0.029***

0.002

0.000

0.060*** 0.004

0.029*** 0.002

0.003 0.003

***=p