Description

In retrospect, NATO and EU enlargements can be viewed as easy politics; they admitted states that wanted membership and were lavishly rewarded. In contrast, far harder politics is waged by the much larger regional organizations of the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). These organizations lack material incentives or instruments of coercion, instead having to work on the basis of shared values. Worse still, they also face threats to their existence from recalcitrant members. Based on 200 interviews across post-Soviet states and in IOs, the presentation introduces the idea of internal conditionality to show how international organizations which lack powers of compulsion or incentivization can still respond – often surprisingly – to the threats from member-states and achieve greater compliance that otherwise conceivable. Case studies include the Chechen wars; the abolition of the death penalty; democratization and election observation; and the Kazakhstan Chairmanship of the OSCE. The presentation concludes with practical and more-broadly based lessons for the international promotion of norms.

Rick Fawn is a Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, UK. This presentation draws from his recent book International Organizations and Internal Conditionality: Making Norms Matter. Among other books, he has edited Globalising the Regional, Regionalising the Global; Georgia: War and Revolution; and co-authored Historical Dictionary of the Czech State. He works regularly in various post-communist countries, in both policy and academic capacities.