Analyzing pathways in the development of regional organizations

What are the lessons of these theoretical considerations for the analysis of how regional secondary institutions develop over time? Four points can be highlighted:

 First, the mechanisms surrounding the reproduction of regional institutions have stabilizing effects. To overcome these effects, actors can use endogenous and exogenous processes as sources to question the legitimacy of existing institutions.

 Second, primary and secondary institutions mutually form constitutive contexts for their reproduction. The institutionalization of secondary institutions takes place in the context constituted by a region’s primary institutions, and vice

18 These interpretations are, of course, influenced by the existing institutional-ideational framework.

Based on a similar argument, Guzzini (2012a: 4) argues that trigger events induce change in intersubjective meanings only through the lens of “pre-existing interpretive dispositions,” therefore “a kind of classical outside-in process tracing, where the same international event might trigger different responses depending on the domestic [or, in my case, regional] process variables, is not possible.

Rather, the very meaning of the event is part of the analysis and needs to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.”

59 versa, so that each institutional level informs the shape of the respective other.

This leads to a logical connection between primary and secondary institutions.

 Third, as primary and secondary institutions are coupled, change on one institutional level can catalyze change on the other (Wendt and Duvall 1989:

65).

 Fourth, the above notwithstanding, the two institutional levels do not necessarily have to be coherent (Krasner 1983: 5). To the contrary, in times of institutional dynamic, it is quite likely that principles and norms come into tension with rules and decision-making procedures, leading to contradictions between primary and secondary institutional levels and potentially pressure for institutional change.

The way in which such vertical tensions are resolved (or not) depends on how the struggles between the actors involved in the discourses surrounding regional institutions play out.

In contrast to conventional Comparative Regionalism, this framework emphasizes the way in which actors engage in normative arguing in order to promote certain ideas about the rules and procedures of regional organizations. It goes beyond existing explanations of difference between regional organizations with a normative focus in several ways:

First, it confirms the connection between regionally specific norms and differences between regional organizations but offers a more complex picture than the embeddedness argument which implicitly underlies existing accounts. It does so by specifying the social mechanisms that link primary and secondary institutions.

Organizations do not directly reflect norms; instead, the way in which the primary institutional context translates to secondary institutions is mediated by discursive processes. These processes are informed by struggles between actors who hold differential power resources, interests and beliefs. Therefore, primary institutions do not determine the form of secondary institutions but merely constitute a context for their creation, reform or dissolution. Whether, when and how change in primary institutions will be followed by corresponding change in secondary institutions is therefore an open question to be answered by empirical analysis of the developments on both institutional levels.

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Second, by introducing the mediating mechanisms of constitution and institutionalization, the framework also enables researchers to account for ambiguities in the primary institutional context of regional organizations. Established perspectives implicitly assume that regional norms are consistent. They are thus ill-equipped to explain cases in which regional organizations exist in a normative context characterized by tensions between different normative claims. The framework developed here acknowledges that the institutionalization of secondary institutions may have to take into account competing legitimacy standards because the constitutive effects of primary institutions do not need to be consistent.

Third, it incorporates the idea of path dependence in a way that is true to the original concept as developed by historical institutionalists. It does not equal path dependence with institutional stasis, as some adoptions by Comparative Regionalist writings do, but as a heuristic that enables the researcher to identify the mechanisms leading to partial stability and conditional change in regional organizations. As such, it can also be used to analyze moments when regional primary and secondary institutions undergo transformation – something of a blind spot of the historically informed Comparative Regionalism approaches. At the same time, the framework goes beyond historical institutionalist concepts, which usually focus either on organizations or on the kind of broader institutional frameworks which the English School would call primary institutions. The links between primary and secondary institutions can provide additional sources for stability as well as change. This idea provides the basis for the argument that differences between regional organizations can be explained as the result of divergent institutional pathways, in which rules and procedures are connected to a dynamic normative context.

Finally, it acknowledges that, in the course of arguing about the shape of regional organizations, actors may – willingly or unwillingly – either reproduce or transform the very normative points of reference they employ to justify their demands.

Thus, regional organizations may help reproducing primary institutions but also act as drivers of change in international society (Ahrens and Diez 2015, Knudsen 2015a, 2015b). As norms have constitutive effects, such transformations can affect the chances of different actors to succeed in their legitimization efforts by changing their identities and their discursive authority. My analytical framework thus paints a more complex and dynamic picture of the relation between regional organizations and the social deep

61 structure of regions than those approaches that see regional organizations as mere expressions or epiphenomena of underlying norms, and thereby allows me to analyze the pathways of the institutional design of regional organizations in full depth.

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4 A methodology for analyzing change in primary and secondary institutions

The preceding chapter established that pathways of regional organizations – conceived of as the development of secondary institutions over time – are deeply intertwined with dynamics in the primary institutions of their regional international society. Accordingly, changes in the two institutional levels need to be studied in parallel. This chapter elaborates a methodological approach to this task and outlines the structure of the empirical chapters. The first two sections (4.1 and 4.2) deal with basic questions of methodology and epistemology. Like most English School authors, I endorse a perspective that is interpretivist and rejects the positivist notion of nomothetic explanations. My approach does not, however, shy away from explanatory and causal logic altogether, as it aims to account for change and continuity in the secondary institutions of specific regional international society by disclosing the mechanisms of constitution and institutionalization that made them possible.

To reach this objective, Section 4.3 presents the basic research design, which juxtaposes the regional international societies of Europe and Southeast Asia in three specific episodes of institutional change. The final part (4.4) develops a set of methods to put these ideas into practice. This ‘toolbox’ connects a two-level analysis of discursive practices with elements of constitutive analysis. This allows me to analyze the effects of endogenous dynamics and exogenous events on the feedback effects surrounding the regional international societiesʼ institutional structure, and thus account for the interrelated dynamics of primary and secondary institutions.