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influences in developing domestic policies in Chile and Mexico. Within the framework of European foreign affairs, the political dialogue component has constituted a differentiating element that the EU maintains at bi-regional stages. The political dialogue has approached with LAC diverse topics such as political stability, the consolidation of the rule of law, respect for human rights, regional integration, fight against drugs and related crimes, and the trafficking of arms and people, among other things
This book contributes to the construction of an integrated analysis of Brazilian foreign policy by focusing on the country's insertion into both the regional and global system over the roughly twenty-five years through to the end of Dilma's first term as president in 2014. An attempt is made to order the discussion through exploration of a series of themes, which are further broken down into key component parts. The first section presents the context, with chapters on institutional structures and the tactical behaviours exhibited by the country's diplomacy, which will be used to guide the analysis in subsequent chapters. The second focuses on issues, taking in trade policies, the rise of Brazilian foreign direct investment, security policy and multilateralism. Key relationships are covered in the final section, encompassing Latin America, the Global South, the US and China. A central contradiction is the clear sense that Brazilian foreign policy makers want to position their country as leader, but are almost pathologically averse to explicitly stating this role or accepting the implicit responsibilities. The recurrent theme is the rising confusion about what Brazil's international identity is, what it should be, and what this means Brazil can and should do. A repeated point made is that foreign policy is an important and often overloooked aspect of domestic policies. The Dilma presidency does hold an important place in the analytical narrative of this book, particularly with respect to the chapters on trade, Brazil Inc., security policy and bilateral relations with the US and China.
, however, gives us little insight into what the nature of this international influence might be or how it shapes domestic policy processes. Indeed it is perhaps because international influence is often subtle and difficult to substantiate empirically that scholars of LGBT politics have paid it surprisingly little attention. It is here that international relations theory can be of help. Over the past two decades IR scholars have developed a vibrant set of literatures on international policy diffusion that describe and explain how international norms, ideas and policy
Kollman 05_Tonra 01 03/12/2012 12:44 Page 103 5 Same-sex unions in the Netherlands and Germany: common norms, diverse policy models 1 Having examined the effects that the creation and dissemination of a rights-based European norm for same-sex relationship recognition has had on general SSU policy outcomes in western democracies in the last chapter, this chapter turns its attention to fleshing out the precise mechanisms by which the norm is translated into often variable domestic policy models. The chapter uses an in-depth comparative case study of SSU policy
as well as the partial incorporation of sexual orientation into the European human rights regime. The study’s three empirical chapters demonstrated that the emergence of this rights-based norm in the mid 1990s forced governments in other western democracies to confront the argument that relationship recognition is a human right that liberal democracies should uphold. Although most governments and publics in the early 1990s did not consider such claims legitimate, national LGBT movements’ incorporation of the increasingly powerful norm into domestic policy
recognition and models of recognition, this study will unravel the complex ways in which international norms shape (or fail to shape) domestic policy outcomes. To develop this argument and address the three questions outlined above I examine LGBT human rights policy since the 1980s at the international and European levels, as well as within eighteen western democracies.4 This broadbased examination reveals that processes of international socialisation and social learning have strongly influenced SSU adoption in most but not all the adopter countries. It also reveals that
presented a catalyst for adjustment of domestic policy-making processes and institutional innovation. Membership of such a complex political system as the EU confronts governments with particularly testing challenges (Kassim, 2003; Laffan, 2001) and participation in its policy-making process is extremely demanding. Studies on the impact of the EU on national structure emphasise that there is little evidence of Europeanisation leading to a convergence between member states but rather national systems have retained their distinctive structures and operating procedures
about whether or how Muslim Americans belong in the cultural and political landscape, resonates across the ideological spectrum, resulting in support both for aggressive military incursions in Muslim-majority regions and for domestic policies that treat Muslims as national security threats. It also reflects the continuation of the historic racialisation of Muslims that has functioned as an extension of the US settler colonial project dating back centuries. This chapter analyses four key episodes or events since 9/11 that have fuelled the
. It might also be argued that Congress is structurally ill-placed to determine or even influence the character of US foreign and defence policy, particularly in the years after 1945 when the nature of war was transformed by the stationing of American forces around different parts of the world and the development of nuclear missile technology. The national legislature is a slow, unwieldy, and bureaucratic institution. It focuses on domestic policy issues (the terrain, it is said, on which elections are won or lost) and
values also appear to influence the particular type of SSU that individual countries implement, but its influence on SSU model type is both weaker and rapidly waning. Other factors clearly affect how governments and publics choose to recognise same-sex couples. Given the large number of countries examined in the chapter, the analysis offered here can neither fully illuminate the exact mechanisms by which international socialisation processes influence domestic policy nor can it fully explain why individual countries adopt different forms of same-sex relationship