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Wolfgang Wagner, "The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions" (Oxford UP, 2020)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Leo Bader and my guest today is Wolfgang Wagner, professor of International Security at the Vrija Universitat Amsterdam. Wolfgang's book, the Democratic Politics of Military Interventions, Political Parties, Contestation and Decisions to Use Force Abroad fills an important gap in understanding how states form their foreign and security policy, namely the parties that actually discuss and create that policy. By examining party level contestation of military deployments across a variety of countries and time periods, Wolfgang proposes that foreign affairs are subject to systematic and structured debate across parties. Wolfgang, thanks for joining me today.
- [01:48]
C
Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.
- [01:51]
B
So, to start off, tell me why it's important that we look at the party politics of foreign affairs.
- [01:58]
C
Well, it's important to understand foreign policy. It does matter. It has an influence on what states do, what governments do. Governments are executives and they have executive responsibilities, but they are also party politicians and they differ in the vision they have of the international system, in the ideas and the justifications they find legitimate, for example, when it comes to the use of force. And they are not entirely free when entering government. So there will always be all kinds of constraints. And yet it makes a difference. Who's in charge of foreign policy?
- [02:39]
B
Before writing your book, what kinds of discussions were there around how parties are involved in foreign policy and what disagreements were there? In existing research, there's always been a.
- [02:53]
C
Little bit of research on party politics and foreign policy. There have been some attempts to find systematic differences between left parties, right parties in initiating conflicts, in escalating conflicts, stuff like this, but the findings were not entirely conclusive. So there seemed to be an influence, but it was not entirely clear which way that would work. There have been some pioneering studies. I really like the book by Brian Ruthbun a lot on military interventions, partisan interventions it's called, by Stephanie Hoffman. It's another book, but both of them analyzed three countries, compared them and kind of traced the influence of party politics. And what I found important is to look into bigger patterns, larger groups of countries, and thus also parties. And to go beyond just distinguishing left and right, because the radical left is very different from the moderate left, theoretical right is different from conservative parties and so forth. And this is where I took over from others who pioneered this kind of work. And yeah, I hope I added something to the discussion.
- [04:21]
B
You write in your book that there's a long line of research about so called democratic peace, the observation that democracies rarely fight with each other. I'm curious about what, looking at party level contestation sort of contributes to this discussion.
- [04:40]
C
Democratic peace is very institution centered. I think the main idea is that democratic institutions, accountability of the government to a people, to citizens and so forth, is responsible for constraining democratic governments in decision making. Parliaments play a huge role in this. So they are supposed to be the intermediaries who are controlling and ultimately constraining governments. And the blind spot in all of this is that all these institutions are interesting and great, but they are as good as the actors that fill them with life. And then we are back at politics in democracies, which is always party politics. So there's no democratic politics without political parties. And then again, these ideologies matter a lot. Again, there have also been great pioneering studies by David Owenswald, by Miriam Elman, who tried to combine political parties and institutions. And I think only if both are taken into account, the institutional setting, but then also the ideologies of the actors that populate them and fill them with life. Only then do we get a more complete understanding of the democratic peace, or I would say democratic politics of using military force, because it's always, and that's also part of democratic peace debate, the idea that there's some constraint, but there's also this. There are also the so called democratic wars, so use of force, where democracies are Quite prone to. And again, this is justified and is motivated by ideologies. And these ideologies are again tied to political parties and their traditions.
- [06:56]
B
There's also a normative debate. You write about whether it's desirable that political parties are involved in a country's foreign affairs. So your book doesn't directly take a position on this, but I'm curious about how you think observing how political parties contest foreign affairs is important to thinking about whether or not it's desirable.
- [07:18]
C
Yeah, yeah. Really, the parties are not particularly popular. If you ask citizens who they trust, it's usually not political parties. And there's a lot of, yeah, contempt for party politics. It's seen as very egotistic, very unnecessarily competitive. And I think on the contrary, that without political parties you do not have any meaningful democratic decision making process. And also studies that emphasize the role of public opinion also as a constraint. So is the public, for example, against a certain military intervention and do we expect government to pay attention to this? The public is also not entirely independent of the cues they get from politicians. And if you only have one party and this party is governing, there is simply no room for alternative visions of how foreign policy could be done. So without part political contestation, there's no meaningful democratic control because there's not much choice for citizens to make. And in that sense, political parties again are very, very important. You have this normative appeal to unity, especially if there is an external threat. The idea that if society or the state is under threat from the outside would be good to go beyond the above party politics to realize that there is something bigger and national interest. So you always find these appeals and you also see the effects that for example, after 911 in the United States, the congressional majorities favoring, condoning, supporting, the use of force were enormous. But these are also not great moments of democratic control. So I think these appeals are normal and they are understandable. But we should be careful and realize that these appeals are not meant to increase democratic control and to fool democratic politics with bit of life. Right.
- [09:52]
B
I suppose there's a sort of tension between what people might think about as effective in conducting foreign policy, but then with what's desirable in terms of how it's created. I think most people would agree that we want some sort of democratic input.
- [10:11]
C
At least in the abstract. I think most people would always agree that democratic input is great. But of course it is also the case that if a country is terribly divided, it might not help them in negotiating with the third party. So for example, Right now, it's interesting to see that part of Vladimir Putin's strategy in Russian foreign policy is to divide the west and to increase tensions within Western societies via fake news. And all of this because there's also, rightly, the idea that there's some strength in unity, but then at the same time, there's more stability if decisions are properly discussed, if alternatives are explored, and ultimately, after a process of transparent and open deliberation, a decision has been made. So be the democratic quality, I think, in the long run really pays out because the quality of the decision is ultimately a better one.
- [11:28]
B
Absolutely. I want to talk about your findings, but maybe before we move into those, you can explain a little bit about the approach you took to researching your question, what cases you selected and what sorts of evidence you used.
- [11:42]
C
Yeah, I've been looking a lot into data that, well, data that are related to voting in parliaments. I also looked into some data that have already been available, expert survey data and other databases that look into manifestos. But some of the data I also gathered myself and in collaboration with colleagues, adjust some voting data, because I think this is when you see in Parliament how every party, every single party positions themselves towards a very specific policy question. So other than, let's say, party manifesto, where you can promise all kinds of things, a vote means that you can't dodge the question, you can't rephrase it in a way that you prefer, but you have to either support or oppose a certain measure. So I've been looking into this, and then one chapter is about voting in the United States. And this is partly because the available data is just fantastic. So from 1789 to today, you have every vote is recorded. What I did was to look into the degree of unity when it comes to foreign policy. And it's really interesting to see over a period of more than 200 years that you have fluctuations in not consensus, but more agreement, more division over foreign policy questions. And on other countries there are shorter time periods of interesting data. So I looked mostly into the period after the end of the Cold War and looked into voting on decisions to participate in military interventions. And finally, and this I only did for three states because it's very, very time consuming and research intense. I analyzed parliamentary debates and I had student assistance also helping me to code them in a coding scheme to see what kind of arguments are brought forward in support of or in opposition to using military force. And this then brings us to one of the findings. Similarities across countries are large when it's the same type of political Party. So the coherence of party families is larger than the coherence within countries. And this again, I think demonstrates that party politics is quite essential to fully understand foreign policy making.
- [14:44]
B
And how do you work with the fact that in different countries there are very different sort of formal mechanisms to actually contest foreign policy, that in the US there's especially now a lot more power concentrated in the executive, whereas in Germany you need frequent parliamentary votes to approve any sort of deployment, etc.
- [15:05]
C
Yeah, yeah, it is a bit of a challenge. And this is also why some countries simply don't show up in the book, because the parliaments leave next to no paper trail on how political parties voted. Poland, for example, is a country where you have essentially no, no votes on military interventions. There are other countries as well where this is purely an executive matter. So that's, that's one reason to, to select some countries over, over others. And then I would say these procedures usually also reflect an understanding of what should be, what would be the ideal balance between executive and legislative. So you mentioned Germany, which is also my, my home country. And their parliament indeed is very strong and it's meant to be very strong because the designers of the Constitution wanted the government to be constrained a lot, especially when it comes to, to the military and the use of force. So it's an interesting way of again, institutions and actors interacting because these institutions are at some point established by political actors with a anticipated effect in mind. And then this leaves a long path dependency. And in the German case, The constitution is 70 plus years old, I guess 49 established. And the idea that the government should be constrained is still very much alive. And that then also produces a lot of the data that I can then analyze to look into how the, what is the grammar of contestation when it comes to the use of military force?
- [17:12]
B
So what then broadly are your findings? What kind of systematic contestation is there between parties?
- [17:21]
C
There's one finding about developments over time which is based on the analysis of congressional voting data from the United States that essentially says that it's always been contested. And that goes a bit counter to a narrative that you sometimes hear that it was quite harmonious until Vietnam and then it became more and more polarized to the extent that it's almost ungovernable. But if you look into these 200 plus years of voting data, the 50s, 60s are just an exception. So this is an unusually low level of contestation in the early years of the Cold War. But by historical standards, what we had in the 1990s, 2000s that's just very normal politics. So one finding over time is that military interventions, foreign policies is not exempted from democratic politics. And then zooming in on the drama of party political contestation that's then based mostly on European data, where you have a broader spectrum of political parties in Parliament due to the electoral system, is that you have these inverted U curves when it comes to support. So if you move from the left to the right of the political spectrum, it starts with pretty consistent opposition against any use of the military. That's the radical left. And then moving a bit to the center, the Green Party, Social Democrats, they're usually skeptic, reluctant, but they do support various missions. The support is almost always at the highest, at the center right, so amongst Conservative or the Christian Democratic parties. And then it becomes a bit ambivalent. So the radical right, on the one hand, they sympathize with military. They don't feel constrained as much by international law, but they're also often isolationist, and that makes their voting behavior more the right than the other party groups. So it's this inverted U curve that you or that I found in the data for many countries, there's some exceptions, but mostly this is the pattern that's remarkably stable. So you find it in France, in the uk, in Germany, in Italy, but also in South Korea and Japan. But I found interesting that apparently there is something to these ideologies that binds them together across all these borders. And green parties apparently share something with their sister parties that puts them apart from other parties in their own country. And then this transnational space emerges where you have all these various parties from various countries clustering when it comes to questions of foreign policy. I keep saying foreign policy because I think it goes beyond military interventions. But the book is mostly about military interventions and some of the other foreign policy questions like arms exports or international institutions, etc. That's for subsequent research.
- [21:12]
B
You also discuss this sort of alternative characterization of parties that's not along a left right axis, but instead divides between Green, alternative and libertarian parties on one end, and then traditional authoritarian and nationalist parties on the other. How do you find this matches up with the left right axis in terms of differentiating between foreign policy circumstances?
- [21:38]
C
This is also a finding of the book that up to now, the left right axis is the best guide to understanding party politics or foreign policy. So if you just have one piece of information, we just can have one piece of information to predict what the party is going to do. Its position on the left right axis is the best predictor. I Was interesting to what extent this second dimension could play a role, because the colleagues in party politics all highlight that since the 70s this political space does become two dimensional. So there's left right, but that there's also something you mentioned, the terminology that is about the environment and civil rights and migration and so forth, globalization maybe. And this is no longer loads completely on left right. So you have left parties who are pro migration or more supportive of migration than others. And on theoretical right you have less ambivalence about migration maybe, but ambivalence on other questions. But as far as the data in the book are concerned, you can find again such a inverted U curve. But the correlations are not as strong as they are for left right. And I still wonder to what extent this might still change. And I think another foreign policy questions this second dimension. So the sociocultural dimension, as it's also called, is probably quite important when it comes to positions of political parties towards the Ukraine and Vladimir Putin's Russia. I think this is a lot about positions on gender relations, on feminism, anti feminism, on respect for international law and all of this. So I think this remains an interesting field to see that there are different ways of organizing politicization, contestation. And left right doesn't necessarily have a monopoly for the future to be the best predictor. But that was an ongoing process. And again for the book it's mostly left and right. But I think for the future I wouldn't rule out that this is also changing and it depends a bit on the foreign policy in question.
- [24:34]
B
Yeah, I mean, thinking again about Germany, where these past elections there was the new Bundesara Wagenecht party, which is, I'd say very, very hard to sort of place on a left right axis, I would imagine, as you say, in the future.
- [24:49]
C
It's also what Sarabhaknesh tries herself to say. I'm neither left or right and so forth. So that you also find a lot. And of course she, she split from the Radical Left party partly over disagreement on Ukraine. And today we have elections here in the Netherlands. And because there's no electoral threshold in the Netherlands you have a lot of parties, a lot of small parties, also quite a few party splits. And even a small party like the animal rights party just split over the question that the defense spending should be increased or not. Now you have an animal rights party in favor and one against, which makes the Netherlands a very interesting laboratory to study party politics of foreign policy, because I don't think anywhere else you have as many parties and such a low level threshold of entering Parliament and has no incentive or few incentives not to split and merge and create something new. And yeah, these are indications also that left right is a bit too simple to fully explain the dynamics.
- [26:12]
B
When we look then at the grammar, the sort of justifications actually used by parties when debating foreign deployments, what sort of differences are there? Do we see left parties and right parties, even if they both support and intervention, justifying it in different ways?
- [26:33]
C
Yeah, there are real differences and I think maybe two striking ones is that enemy images, you find more on the right side of the political spectrum, so the demonification of Saddam Hussein, maybe of Vladimir Putin and so forth. The. Yeah, the sometimes very visible description of atrocities to mobilize in favor of using force that you find more on the right side of the spectrum. And on the left side you find something that is called spiral model thinking, which essentially means to emphasize with the opponent adversary. So to wonder why are they doing what they are doing? Can we maybe take away the reason for them to escalate? Can we find a negotiat negotiated solution instead of escalating this? So this attempt and this commitment to emphasize is very strong on the left, theoretical left. And then there are other types of arguments that are less pronounced in terms of differences. I remember liberal parties are pretty strong when it comes to arguing about alliance solidarity. So for centrist parties, this is very important. So you do have differences in justifying the use of force. And then I also think one reason why I find this interesting is that for governments to prepare a decision for the use of force, they do try to build these coalitions and frame a mission in respective terms, like the intervention in Afghanistan, then would be the national interest. And this caters to the more conservative parties, but it's then also to improve the lives of women and girls in Afghanistan, which caters more to the maybe Green parties and to the Green and Social Democratic parties, maybe. So usually you have interesting coalitions of justifications and arguments to build coalition in support of a military intervention.
- [29:02]
B
And how do you think strategic considerations of parties might sort of play a role in the decision to actively contest a foreign policy? Do you think that, for instance, even if a party sort of has a strong opinion on something but is worried that it might be electorally harmful or harmful trying to form a coalition, that they might choose to maintain their ideological stance, but sort of not push it too far in a sense?
- [29:32]
C
No. It's good that you bring this up, because political parties, I've mainly analyzed them as carriers of ideology and they certainly are Carriers of ideology, but they're also either in government or in opposition. And if in opposition, there are huge incentives to just be critical of the government. And they are. So especially also when you look into voting data, the simplest explanation of why a member of parliament would vote in favor of a motion, a proposal, is that his party is part of the government coalition. So that plays a huge role. And then it's very interesting to see partisan opposition that either have very little ambition to ever become part of government coalition. The radical left is partly Ladakh this, which is also why they vote consistently against, for example, interventions, various others also strategically then anticipate new elections. A possible ambition to become part of the governing coalition. And they know that foreign policy, and again, military policy, defense policy, can be a breaking point for coalition negotiations. I think a nice example from recent years is Giorgio Meloni in Italy, who I think very strategically and very, very successfully recalibrated to a position towards Russia and the war in Ukraine to say that, look, I'm not going to disturb the consensus of supporting Ukraine against Russia. It wasn't her initial agenda, not the initial agenda of her government or party, but I think she understood that strategically, in order to be governable, that might be a price worth paying. And then she has more freedom in implementing her domestic agenda because she's not under constant pressure to. To adjust her foreign policy. So there is a lot of strategy involved here, certainly.
- [31:58]
B
Yeah. And there's a way in that they can sort of coexist, that a party might sort of vote in agreement and kind of maintain their disagreement ideologically and wait for a more opportune time. Or also, perhaps they agree ideologically with the government or the opposition, but they try to sort of play up small differences in action.
- [32:24]
C
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if you read parliamentary debates, you sometimes find these little differences that are also significant, that, for example, again, the German context, the radical right AFD the alternative for Germany, then votes against a deployment of armed forces, but on formal grounds, because they think that the documents were circulated too late and justification is not really in order, and you don't really find a strong statement that they are against the mission. And this leaves also some discretion later to, you know, blame that never been against. And of course, they can enter a coalition and do that without disrupting foreign policy commitments. So these little nuances are certainly very, very important and interesting. If parts are in government, they have of course, also the opportunity to influence the mandate itself and to draft a motion in a way that makes it easy for them to support or to take out elements that might upset their own constituency. So that also complicates the analysis of voting data and so forth, because parliaments, even if they vote on the same mission, often vote on different types of mandates depending on what the government decided their armed forces should be doing. Right.
- [34:12]
B
Well, to finish, you already mentioned this, but your book focuses on military interventions. But as you said, this idea of party political contestation can go further to encompass all different sorts of foreign policy. So how might you see research building on what you have written to do that?
- [34:35]
C
Yeah, I'm currently also working on a project where we collect data on treaty ratifications. So in my view, this is a different field that's also highly interesting to just see how OIF parties voted when it comes to the ratification of treaties and multilateral treaties on international organizations. And thus far we can see that we find similar patterns. I think arms exports, arms control would be really interesting of the field. So there's a lot also, you know, development aid could be another one. The entire spectrum of foreign policy would be, would be interesting to analyze and it would also be interesting to do this in additional countries and additional types of countries. So currently I work with three PhD students and they work on Eastern Europe and East Asia. But for example, I've never had the chance the time thus far to really look into South American countries, African countries, and so forth. So there's a lot to be explored still. And it would be really interesting to see how some of the concepts and findings that are very much inspired from North America and Western Europe, to what extent they can be found in some other countries or to what extent party politics just works very differently.
- [36:20]
B
Definitely. Well, we should wrap it up there. Wolfgang's book, the Democratic Politics of Military Interventions, Political Parties, Contestation, and Decisions to Use Force Abroad can be purchased through the link on the New Books Network web page. Wife Gang, thanks for joining me today.
- [36:35]
C
Thanks so much, Liu. Thanks.