Normative shift.

• Author: Bell, Coral
• Position: Inflluence on international relations

THE POPE's apologies to Muslims for the sins of 12th century Crusaders, the crises over Kosovo and East Timor, the prosecution of Augusto Pinochet, the rows in the International Whaling Commission, the harangues of Slobodan Milosevic from his dock at The Hague, the belated compensation to the victims of Nazism--all these phenomena are improbably connected by a single invisible thread: normative shift. In the Western world of the last few decades, the phenomenon of normative shift--by which I mean simply the social process of changing domestic or international rules about what is deemed acceptable or unacceptable behavior--has been a factor in decisions ranging right up to military action, and even the form such action has taken. One special case, normative conflict between the West and the Islamic world, has deeper roots--at least 300 if not 1,300 years deeper. But that conflict, too, has been sharpened to a murderous point by recent changes in Western norms, even so domestic and seemingly marginal a change a s the recruitment of women to combat forces.

How, then, to characterize normative shift? Why does it occur, and what factors account for its particular direction? How have the changes flowing from it been manifest in recent international crises? What is the relationship of changing norms to the structure of the international system, and what of the future? It is with these questions that this essay is concerned.

Norms, Laws and Consequences

LAWYERS TEND to equate norms with laws, moralists equate them with ethical standards, and religiously-oriented people equate them with the edicts of their respective deities. But the derivation of the word is very down-to-earth: from the Latin for a carpenter's set-square. The set-square tells the carpenter what a right-angle is "expected and required" to be. A social norm defines "expected and required" behavior in a particular society at a particular time. An international norm defines "expected and required" behavior in the society of states. The existence of a norm, at any level, thus does not imply permanence, still less divine edict, even though many norms are presumed to have that status.

Moreover, to get from a norm to a law is no simple matter. "Thou shalt not murder" is a moral norm, but the law is not identical to the norm: for one thing, laws always have escape clauses, allowing the state, for example, to engage in murderous behavior in war and sometimes in capital punishment--although the norm on that latter has changed recently in many countries. Understanding the difference between norms and laws is a prerequisite for grasping some recent international changes. Just as Prohibition was a law that never became a norm ("expected and required behavior") for most Americans, so too, on the international plane, have assorted idealists or liberals or "do-gooders" (according to one's point of view) promoted numerous UN conventions that have been duly signed and ratified by enough governments for them to have acquired the status of international law. But they have not necessarily become international norms, because governments have not seriously "expected and required" themselves and each other to abide by most of them--at least not until very recently.

The case of Augusto Pinochet is instructive here. Until the British Law Lords decided otherwise in 1998, almost everyone believed that the old norm of "sovereign immunity" protected him from prosecution for the actions of his minions in Chile after the 1973 coup. The British government itself had believed so only a few weeks earlier, providing him with the usual courtesies for a former head of state when he arrived. But it then suddenly arrested him when the Law Lords decided that the UN Convention against torture, ratified by Britain in 1988, trumped the old norm. Despite the final British decision to release the general on health grounds, and despite the Chilean government's protests at the time that Britain's behavior infringed upon Chilean sovereignty, that judgment became a precedent which, ironically enough, enabled the Chilean government itself to arrest Pinochet a few months after his return to Santiago.

The Pinochet incident stands as illustration of the fact that a confluence of developments that reached "critical mass" only in the last decade of the 20th century has induced a rapid shift from one more or less logically inclusive set of international norms to another. Note that I do not say that this shift is from old norms to new, for some of those norms now most vital to understanding world politics date back to the just war doctrine of the 5th century, and are to be found in Hugo Grotius. The shift is rather from "realist/nationalist" norms to alternatives that may in part be called "cosmopolitan" (as opposed to "internationalist"). But the shift toward cosmopolitan norms, which we will examine below, though rapid, is tentative and incomplete because it is related both to technologies and power structures that are still evolving. It may never be universal, and it is still potentially reversible.

A domestic analogy--but as we shall see, not just an analogy--may again be helpful in conveying the speed of change. Until the 1960s, most people in Western societies accepted traditional norms concerning relations between men and women. Men were expected to be the primary breadwinners, women were expected to stay home and raise children, most babies were expected to be born in wedlock, and homosexual relations were expected to be carefully concealed, being indeed illegal in many societies. Those were, in effect, the mainstream norms of the time; not everyone liked them, but mostly people went along without seriously questioning the existing order of things. In a mere ten years or so, starting from the late 1960s, all that changed (in Western societies) rather dramatically, giving us new norms that most Westerners now accept. Much of what once was "expected and required", like marriage, has become all but optional; some of what was "expected and required", concerning homosexual behavior in particular, has wit nessed a virtual normative reversal.

How shall we account for such a profound normative shift, affecting the most basic social sinews of Western societies (though not of most others)? A few factors, in their mutual interaction, are obvious: the coming of age of a very large cohort of young people; the alienation of that group from traditional authority structures and norms, accelerated and spread partly because of the Vietnam War; the long upturn in prosperity; the rapid expansion of higher education; the influence of feminist doctrines. Most important, probably, was a single technological factor: the advent of the contraceptive pill. Without reliable means of controlling how many children they would have and when, women's surge into the workplace--on which practically everything else of social normative significance depended--would hardly have been possible. But even allowing for all that, the speed of change still seems a little mysterious. The zeitgeist keeps some of its secrets.

Much the same is true of the somewhat later normative shift in the society of states. Even after the usual suspects have been rounded up for inspection, some mystery remains. But a technological factor seems likely again to prove the most vital of all, and it is one that is being universalized far more easily than the Western domestic norms sketched a moment ago. That factor is information and communications technology in its widest sense, and the reason it is being universalized so rapidly is its essential role in creating an efficient modern economy. Even a government like China's, which is so afraid of alternative social norms that it throws fairly harmless Falun Gong practitioners into dungeons, is neither willing nor effectively able to prevent the spread of computers and mobile phones and email, despite the fact that these devices have already proved how enormously useful they can be to political activists of every sort...