Green-Bogard, THE MAKING OF FRIENDS AND ENEMIES PDF

Democracy and Security
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The Making of Friends and Enemies: Assessing

the Determinants of International Identity
Construction
David Michael Green & Cynthia J. Bogard
To cite this article: David Michael Green & Cynthia J. Bogard (2012) The Making of Friends and
Enemies: Assessing the Determinants of International Identity Construction, Democracy and
Security, 8:3, 277-314, DOI: 10.1080/17419166.2012.715469
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Democracy and Security, 8: 277314, 2012
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ISSN: 1741-9166 print/1555-5860 online
DOI: 10.1080/17419166.2012.715469
The Making of Friends

and Enemies: Assessing
the Determinants of
Downloaded by [American University Library] at 18:09 09 September 2015
International Identity
Construction
David Michael Green1 and Cynthia J. Bogard2
1
Department of Political Science, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY
2
Department of Sociology, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY
As constructivists correctly argue, identities are key to understanding international
relations. In this analysis, we examine three historical cases in order to develop a model
addressing the question of when elites are able to successfully market a redefinition of
both an external actor and themselves to their national publics. All three cases in this
pilot study involve the American public being asked to reconceive the identity of, respec-
tively, the Soviet Union following World War II, Germany during the same period, and
Europeans at the time of the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion. We examine the history
of each of these cases along with the associated elite rhetoric. We then identify five fac-
tors that explain why the first two cases turned out to be largely successful efforts at
reframing, and why the latter largely did not.
Keywords: Constructivism, Constructivist Theory, Foreign Policy Theory, Identity
Construction, International Relations Identities, International Relations Theory, Mass
Behavior, Political Identity, Public Opinion, Social Constructivism
The character of interactions between global actors is determined in part by

how they conceive of one anotherwhether as friend, foe, rival, or irrelevancy.
These fundamental ways in which states frame each others identities
and their ownare subject to change, sometimes quite suddenly, sometimes
incrementally, and such changes may profoundly shape the landscape of
international politics.
The authors gratefully acknowledge the comments provided on an earlier draft of this
study by Paul Fritz, Annulla Linders, Carolyn Eisenberg, and Massoud Fazeli and his
study group at Hofstra University. We are much indebted to them for their helpful
suggestions.
Address correspondence to David Michael Green, Department of Political
Science, Hofstra University, 205 Barnard Hall, Hempstead, NY 11549. E-mail:
david.green@hofstra.edu
278 D. M. Green and C. J. Bogard
In 1947, for example, General George Marshall, one of the architects of the
American victory in World War II, stated in a speech, I think it was a fact [at
the end of the war] that the people of the United States had as high a regard,
or I might better put it, appreciation, for the Soviet people and their sacrifices,
and for the Soviet Army and its leaders, as they held for any other people in the
world. But today, only two years later, we are charged with a definite hostility
toward the Soviet Union. . . .1 Likewise, in a similarly short period, Americas
two-time world war enemy, Germany, was on the way to becoming part of the
Western Alliance and a trusted friend of the United States.2
These realignments of identities and relationships between international

relations actors did not just happen, nor were they the inevitable result of
material conditions. Instead, we argue, employing a constructivist logic, that
reconstituting a basic international relationship involves discursive persuasion
by salient social actorsthat is, the new relationship and the reconstituted
identities between the parties involved have to be talked into being in a socio-
cultural context conducive to such persuasive efforts.3
The way actors represent Self and Other is the most important thing in
social life, argues Alexander Wendt, because it is the starting point for inter-
action. How states represent themselves and others is the medium by which
they determine who they are, what they want and how they should behave.4
Indeed, stable relations under anarchy depend on states identifying self and
other in consistent terms, while structural change occurs when actors rede-
fine who they are and what they want.5 We extend this claim by showing that
redefining self is only one aspect of enabling structural change in international
relations. Those desiring change also often seek to redefine the Other in a
relationship. We posit that how the citizenry of one state thinks about another
is the result of successful discursive persuasion, typically led by elite domes-
tic actors, and, when change is sought, this often invokes what Ivie and Giner
term the mythos of cultural transformation.6 Political persuasion is most suc-
cessful with a domestic audience if it is both easy to understand and takes a
clear position on an issue or entity.7
In all politics, but perhaps especially in states with democratic systems,
winning the rhetorical game and persuading citizens to think about social con-
ditions in new ways or within new frames, is essential to enabling major shifts,
whether in domestic or foreign policy domains. Indeed, as linguist George
Lakoff notes, reframing is social change.8 Framing, as he also notes, shapes
both our social policies and the institutions we develop to carry them out. Those
who would change the playing field of international relations must of necessity
attend to restructuring the language with which international relationships
are thought about.9
In this exploratory study we examine three instances when elites sought to
encourage a domestic audience to imbue an Other global actor with a revised
identity. We seek to provisionally identify generalizable factors that enable or
The Making of Friends and Enemies 279
discourage acceptance by domestic audiences of elite-proposed frames for the

identity of an outside actor. To explicate and illuminate these factors, we con-
trast two successful and familiar cases of dramatic shifts in how the American
public viewed the Soviet Union and Germany after World War II with the
unsuccessful early twenty-first century attempt by neoconservative elites and
their supporters in the media to recast how Europe was conceptualized in the
American imagination.
THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS
In realist as well as everyday conceptions of the social world, human-created
entities such as states are treated as givens or natural facts, a form of mis-
apprehension constructivists refer to as reification.10 Constructivists instead
focus on the role that interaction plays in constituting and holding together
the social world. Though human-made structures such as states really are
agents11 and have powers to act and be able to forge relationships, it is impos-
sible for structures to have effects apart from the attributes and interactions
of agents.12 Thus, the rhetoric and actions of presidents, cabinet members,
and other recognized national-level policy makers are the conduits by which
the agency of a structure such as a state is realized because they have been
granted the rational-legal authority to speak on behalf of structures.13 In the
constructivist framework, both social stability and social change are products
of social interaction.14 Meaning-making through social interaction is a com-
plex process that begins with efforts by actors to typify a phenomenon in
the worldin other words to attach a specific meaning or interpretation to
language, objects, or events that is then communicated to others.15 Ringmar
further explicates this process: First we see something as some-thing . . . and
then we construct a narrative about this something.16 A successful typifica-
tion is one that is repeated enough to others that it comes to be held in the
collective memories of many individuals.17 Alfred Schutz refers to this pro-
cess as sedimentation.18 Sedimentation may be thought of as the accretion that
occurs when a certain typification is repeated in social interaction situations in
a similar or identical form to a point where the phenomenon takes on a widely
recognizable and agreed-upon meaning or collective understanding. Adler
further explains that Constructivism shows that even our most enduring insti-
tutions are based on collective understandings . . . collective understandings
provide people with reasons why things are as they are and indications as to
how they should use their material abilities and power.19 In the constructivist
view, the social world is a product of these interactive processes.
The sedimentation of a social construct, however stable it might appear,
only continues to operate in so long as actors in the present continue to
typify it in the same or at least a similar manner. Thus concepts, institutions,
andimportantly for this analysisrelationships and identities, can change.

This metamorphosis can take many formsit can occur through inattentive-
ness and the gradual demise of a typification, through a dramatic change in the
socio-political context that may throw into contention many long-held typifica-
tions, through concerted efforts to persuade others along a new line of thinking,
or even by coercion.
Adler and Barnett,20 for example, cite the process of social learning,
wherein social actors purposefully manage and transform their interpretation
of the material and social world. In the world of international relations, cen-
tral political figures from secure and powerful states often model their new
interpretations to others in an effort to change the sedimented typifications.21
In explaining how postwar West Germany was civilized, Jackson22 focuses
on the socially embedded practical activities or transactions that occurred
between state actors and their publics as policies were selected, legitimated,
and pursued. These processes eventually led to new social constructs about
what Germany meant and what relationships it could have. Even the content
of a core and sedimented conceptual framework such as the idea of friendship
itself can change, as Roschin23 argues, noting how friendship between states
evolved from a contractual notion of the term to one that was normative and
naturalistic as modern conceptions of the sovereign state were theorized and
debated.
On the other hand, sedimented typifications have a tendency to be obdu-
rate and durable, such that creating social change at times requires Herculean
efforts.24 For example, thinking about international relations between states
is so grounded in liberal conceptions of the autonomous self and Hobbesean
assumptions of the human condition that, as Berenskoetter argues,25 there is
only a narrow conceptual space in IR for imagining friendship among nations.
Wendt agrees that when it comes to changing the identity of self or other,
change can be held hostage to history. The evolution of identities, he notes, is
a dialectic of actual and possible selves, and there are no guarantees that the
weight of the past will be overcome.26 Moreover, those constructing a new iden-
tity for an entity such as Germany or Europe, as Hopf correctly notes, are
not in control of what it ultimately means to others.27 Instead, as he argues, it
is the interpretive process itself that is the final arbiter of meaning. This view
of the constituent elements of social change is concerned with both longstand-
ing, highly sedimented patterns and specific, sometimes sudden or unexpected
occurrences that are likely to present opportunities for social actors to construct
new typifications.
Mutually understood identities are necessary if two entitieswhether indi-
vidual people, corporations or politiesare to deal with one another. Durable
expectations between states require intersubjective identities that are suffi-
ciently stable to ensure predictable patterns of behavior, as Hopf states.28
Identities establish Who are we? and Who are they? Both are necessary
ingredients if a world of chaos and pervasive and irremediable uncertainty

is to be avoided. Such a world, as Hopf notes, is much more dangerous
than anarchy.29 Campbell refers to this process as the impulse to discipline
ambiguity.30 Indeed, as Wendt argues, [t]he daily life of international politics
is an ongoing process of states taking identities in relation to Others, casting
them into corresponding counter-identities, and playing out the result. These
identities may be hard to change, but they are not carved in stone, and indeed
sometimes are the only variable actors can manipulate in a situation.31
Identities are forged and maintained through actors repeating stories
about the entities, the boundaries between entities, whether the enti-
ties are members of the in-group or out-group, and their cross-boundary
relationships.32 Together, these stories make up collective identities.33 States
seek what Jennifer Mitzen has referred to as ontological securityto know
who they are in relation to other states.34 Identities determine what relations
are possible between polities and therefore the fight over definition is a crucial
site of political struggle.35
Additionally, a change in how one actor perceives the collective identity of
another reverberates along the rest of the identity equationthe definition of
the first actor will change along with the relationship between the two. The
response of the other to an attempt at reformulating its identityfor instance,
whether it cooperates or resists the new identitywill also factor into the
process. Identity, argues Krebs, is usefully conceptualized as a property of
social relationships . . . not subjective and universal but intersubjective and
hence contextual.36 Successful claims making resulting in changing the iden-
tity of one entity in the relationship changes the discursive boundary between
us and them. With these transformed identities come the potential for the
breaking of old ties and the forging of new relationships and understandings.
As many have noted, the European Union, particularly its englargement to
include former Soviet bloc states, is perhaps the most outstanding example of a
desecuritization process that resulted in tremendous reordering of state iden-
tities and relationships.37 In this case, as Higashino38 points out, proponents
of EU enlargement successfully argued that the enemy other was not some
other state against which EU members propose a collective identity, but rather
Europes history of nationalism, conflict, and war.
If successful, refashioning the identities of foreign polities leads to the pro-
duction and reproduction of new boundaries of actionwhat Jackson refers
to as a Weberian legitimation process.39 A legitimation process constructs
spheres within which certain actions can be performed, and it cordons off oth-
ers as falling beyond the pale, notes Jackson.40 Legitimation, as he defines
it, is the process of drawing and (re)establishing boundaries, ruling some
courses of action acceptable and others unacceptable, contingently stabiliz-
ing the boundaries of action, which makes it possible for certain policies to be
enacted.41
For democracies, the legitimation process is especially crucial because gov-

ernments are chosen by citizens casting ballots on the basis of certain beliefs
and understandings about the world. While authoritarian regimes can impose
a construction of reality on their populationsat least overtly and temporarily,
in a fashion akin to the emperors new clothesin democracies, public opinion
is (at least nominally) openly debated in the press and the public square. Once
in power, governments are likewise constrained by public opinion. Violating
the body politics broad constructions or worldviews can only be done at peril of
potentially being turned out of office.
A realist explanation implicitly presumes that realigned identities among

global powers are an ex-post facto and epiphenomenal artifact of changing
material and security circumstances, to the extent that realism grapples with
identity at all. In the constructivist view, in contrast, actions continually pro-
duce and reproduce conceptions of Self and Other, and as such identities and
interests are always in process, even if these processes are sometimes stable
enough that, for certain purposes, we plausibly can take them as given.42
New actor identities are, in the constructivist conception, argued into being by
salient national elites and supporters who publicly echo their views and require
identity work,43 with elites acting as norm entrepreneurs44 in a sociopo-
litical context amenable to such transformation. But material and security
conditions do matter. Both realists and constructivists have a useful analytical
contribution to make toward understanding identity formation. The resocial-
ization process contemplated by constructivists is made more likely under
certain conditions.45 When the environmental context is unstable, there is an
increase in motivation to analyze new information, a conceptual opening that
Flockhart terms an ideational vacuum.46 Adoption of new ways of thinking
is also more likely when what is being promulgated aligns with beliefs already
present in the target audience and when those arguing for new conceptions are
perceived as authoritative.47 A systematic and unified approach across relevant
elite actors also promotes the process of re-socialization.48
As they attempt to foster a certain conception of another polity to their
domestic citizenry, the implications of the constructivist view of agency and
structure described above puts the identity work conducted by elite actors at
the center of international relations analysis.
Drawing from these prior analyses, our own observations, and especially
from well-developed concepts in the constructivist literature on social move-
ments and social problems, we hypothesize that five factors are especially
crucial in determining whether elite attempts at shifting foreign and domestic
identities will succeed.
First is historical opportunity, in which periods of rapid change such as
wars open windows of opportunity by punctuating equilibria of cemented
identities. McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald point to the importance of politi-
cal opportunity, or changes in the institutional structure or informal power
relations of a given national political system,49 as a necessary condition for

social movement success. Davies likewise argues that revolutions tend to break
out when a period of social gains is punctuated by a time of reversals.50
The destabilizing effects rapid change brings may also be seen to allow for
abnormally higher receptivity among the public to the recharacterization of
identities and international relationships.
Second is empirical credibility, by which proposed frames are more likely
to prosper when there is an apparent fit between the framings and the events
in the world.51 Benford and Snow further explain that for a frame to res-
onate with an audience, claims must be culturally believable and that the
more evidence that can be marshaled in support of a claim, the broader its
potential appeal.52 Feelings of cultural similarity or difference (and therefore
possibly feelings of trust or distrust) between citizens of different nations may
be particularly salient when attempts are made to reconstruct international
identities.53 Finally, a proposed construction will be more likely to be believed
if it conforms to longstanding beliefs held by audience members, what Maney,
Coy, and Woehrle term narrative fidelity.54
Third, such posited identities will also have a greater tendency to succeed
when they are up against weaker frame competition from rival ideas. For exam-
ple, Ivie55 analyzes three Cold War idealists, including Henry Wallace, whose
framing of the Soviet Union postWorld War II proved less attractive to the
public than a Cold War frame. Hilgartner and Bosk56 also note in their public
arenas model of social problem competition that a frame is more likely to be
accepted when it is the most prominent in the public view. Finally, frame com-
petition will be lessened if the Other can be seen to cooperate either actively
or through nonresponse in the new representation of itself.
Fourth, the greater the prominence and credibility of frame proponents, the
more likely the frame will succeed. Benford and Snow argue that the greater
the status and/or the perceived expertise of the frame articulator and/or the
organization they represent from the vantage point of potential adherents
and constituents, the more plausible and resonant the framings or claims.57
Beyond expertise and status, elected or appointed leaders who attempt to per-
suade their constituencies to view an Other differently, are also imbued with
what Weber long ago identified as a legitimate form of dominationthey hold
the rational-legal authority that comes with their rank. Thus, they are in an
advantaged position to persuade a domestic audience to change its views.58
Finally, frames are more likely to succeed when they posit a more flat-
tering audience representationwhen there is frame resonance between an
audiences image of itself and the proffered frame.59 For example, Ivie and
Giner point out how the 2008 Obama campaign was able to reframe American
exceptionalism and democracy as something Americans could pursue through
interdependency and depoliticized collaboration. After the aggressiveness of
the Bush years, this proved to be a winning revitalization of the American
character.60 In discussing frame success in social movements-related acts of

persuasion, Maney, Coy and Woehrle refer to the related concept of identity
appeal. 61
Our purpose in this study is to posit a potentially widely applicable
framework for understanding the phenomenon of elite-driven public identity
migration. We have thus drawn upon the existing literature and our own
knowledge of historical cases to identify those factors that seem most likely to
be most consequential in most scenarios. We theorize that these five factors are
largely additive in their impact, such that the causal relationship is ultimately
determined by the sum of the values of the respective factors in any given case,
and such that high levels found for a certain factor might compensate for lower
indications on another. Thus, our sense is that none of the individual factors are
either necessary or sufficient to produce wholesale public attitudinal change.
As an initial articulation of a theory for this phenomenon, we fully expect the
model to be revised and developed on the basis of the larger N empirical testing
we hope will follow the present study.
CASES AND METHODS

For this pilot study we chose familiar cases from the immediate postWorld
War II era that can be considered successful instances of elite efforts to reframe
the identities of two global actorsthe Soviet Union and Germany. The third,
more recent, casethat of neoconservative elites mostly failed attempt to
downgrade Europe in the American imaginationwill be familiar to anyone
who followed the run up to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In all three
cases, the domestic audience of interest was American.
Confining our analysis to a single target audience allowed us to control for
many potential domestic factors such as government type, level of economic
development, elitepress relations, and general collective identity (though,
obviously, some shift has occurred between our early cases and our recent one).
In addition, liberal democracies are not all structured similarly, and their inter-
nal forms also play a role in determining what sort of claims making will be
effective, who must be persuaded, and what policy restructuring might result.62
We focus on identifying factors that we believe may be generalizable to other
instances of elite actors attempting to construct the identity of a foreign entity
to a domestic audience.
In the first two postWorld War II cases, our data consists of discourse by
political leaders and elite policymakers, speeches that were reprinted promi-
nently in the national press of the day, and articles that were read by educated
members of the public interested in foreign policy. In the more recent case we
also include some media representations that are not directly derived from
elite discourse but rather echo its sentiments in venues accessible to the polit-
ically interested public, such as editorial pages in popular newspapers and
political websites and blogs. These have become widespread sources of public
impressions in the aftermath of the Internets development, especially follow-
ing the dispersion of media sources that has proliferated over the prior several
decades. There are no analogues to this method of information dispersal in
the pre-television, pre-Internet period, when political elites arguably had more
control over what impressions were portrayed to a broad audience. Blogs and
nonelite commentary circulated via the Internet that echoes elites attempts
at reconceiving international identities can be seen as evidence that at least
some segment of a domestic audience supports the proposed new framing of
identities. We also note that explicit efforts at coordinating all entities involved
(politicians, think tank and interest group spokespeople, editorial writers, radio
and television talk show hosts, bloggers, etc.) with a proposed framing of a polit-
ical issue or identity have become standard practice in the current political
context.63
We argue that the shaping of other global actors identities is a sustained
discursive process carried out in public, one generally orchestrated by elite
actors. In past decades, both elected and appointed leaders and important pol-
icy advocates participated in this process, the leaders focusing on changing
the minds of the general citizenry, the advocates on the nations intelligentsia.
In the Internet and cable television era, this process is augmented by other
sympathetic actors that have access to the public through these new venues.
Our data then highlights exemplary public discourseimportant speeches and
comments, articles, and booksby such elites, as they attempted to encourage
Americans to think in new ways about the identity of another global actor and,
in the third case, by other exemplary discourse widely disseminated to the pub-
lic. We focused particularly on the early stages of the attempted reframing of
the Soviet Union and Germany after the wars end and on a similar stage in
the attempt to reconfigure how Americans thought about Europe during the
early stages of the US invasion of Iraq.
Our project was specifically designed to serve as a pilot study, with
conceptual clarification64 as its chief aim.
CASE HISTORIES
Constructing the Soviet Threat

At World War IIs end, the Soviets were largely perceived by Americans as a
solid ally in the joint enterprise of resisting and then destroying Nazi Germany.
Five years later, the Soviets represented an international threat of a similar
quality as that which the Nazis had embodied. How did this remarkable and
remarkably swift transition occur?
A realist analysis would point to diverging material and security inter-
ests on the part of the two emergent superpowers and the fact that Soviet
communism was committed to the destruction of American capitalism.65

Realist scholars might also point to Soviet behavior immediately following the
war. Stalin had not permitted self-determination for Eastern Europe, nor were
the Soviets cooperating with the Western powers in the joint administration
of occupied Germany. Added to Soviet aid to the communist revolutionary Mao
Zedong in China, these developments made the attribution of expansionary
ambitions to the Soviets an entirely plausible conclusion in the mid- and late
1940s.
However, such an interpretation of Soviet behavior was not inevitable.
Given its history of being invaded multiple times and the terrible price the
Soviet Union paid during WWII, Americans might instead have interpreted
post-war Soviet behavior as an expression of the need for a buffer zone com-
prised of Central and Eastern Europe, as a conservative power seeking only to
maximize its defensive posture along a vulnerable western frontier, a minor-
ity position held by Henry Wallace, Roosevelts former vice president. Material
conditions did not require the transformation of the Soviets from World War II
friend to Cold War foe.
Although many actors participated in this act of reframing, three were
especially key: two politicians of global statureWinston Churchill and
Harry Trumanand one noted public intellectual and policy analystGeorge
Kennanwriting in the nations most widely read and respected foreign
relations journal, Foreign Affairs. Their rhetoric was highly instrumental in
reshaping the place of the Soviet Union in the American mind and, with that
reconstruction, American identity and the relationship between the two powers
as well.
On March 5, 1946, in a now famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, Winston
Churchill brought into public conversation the powerful image of an iron
curtain, cutting off the capitals of Eastern Europe, marked by an increas-
ing measure of control from Moscow. In the speech, Churchill informed his
American audience of 40,000 of a growing challenge and peril to Christian
civilisation.
This claim was amplified in import by its source and by its timing.
Churchill had previously called out the dangers of European security with pre-
cociousness and tenacity, and had led Britain, alone and cornered, into battle
against the Nazi menace while other world powers were ignoring Hitler, mak-
ing deals with him, or already on the list of his victims. Now, in 1946, here
was Churchill doing it again, sounding the early warning of a new threat,
using the example of Nazi appeasement as a direct analogue for the current
menace. Churchills moral force and credibility were unassailable, for he had
gotten right, before anyone else, the question of the century and had prevailed
against long odds in the ensuing conflict. Americas close wartime kinship
with Great Britain also made this messenger particularly persuasive to the
American citizenry.
In addition to recharacterizing the USSR to his audience, Churchill also

proposed solidifying an emergent identity for the United States. With sub-
tly, Churchill used the speech to confirm that the US stands at this time at
the pinnacle of world power and also reminded its citizens of the elements of
their government in which they should rightfully take great prideelements,
he was quick to assert, which Americans share with English-speaking peo-
ples. Of American values he states, . . . we must never cease to proclaim in
fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are
the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna
Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English
common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration
of Independence. Churchill thus sought to typify a great nation that, while
the premier world power, also could be counted on to uphold the principles of
democracy and idealism.
This sentiment was echoed a year later in the speech delivered by President
Harry Truman to a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947, whose content
later became widely known as the Truman Doctrine. In it, Truman makes
the case for additional American-provided assistance to Greece and, to a lesser
extent, Turkey, to keep those countries from destabilization, chaos, and com-
munism. While Truman never mentioned the USSR by name, he reminded
Congress of it by stating that The peoples of a number of countries of the
world have recently had totalitarian regimes forced upon them against their
will and then cited the countries of Eastern Europe. The very existence of the
Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand
armed men, led by Communists, who defy the governments authority . . . ,
Truman argued. Americas status as the worlds preeminent democracy, with
all the duties so implied, was reinforced with his claim that One of the primary
objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions
in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from
coercion. And, additionally, No other nation is willing and able to provide
the necessary support for a democratic Greek government. At the end of the
speech, he stated, This is an investment in world freedom and world peace.
But it was American diplomat, foreign policy intellectual, and presi-
dential advisor George Kennan who perhaps most inspired a redrawing of
the American and Soviet relationship, first for policymakers in the Long
Telegram,66 and later for the chattering classes in the Mr. X article in Foreign
Affairs.67 Kennans typification was of an aggressive Soviet Union seeking
everywhere to expand its influence, if not its territorial hegemony. Americas
response, he continued, . . . must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and
vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.
Soviet ideologythe source of Soviet powerKennan began his article, had
not changed since the Russian revolution. Belief is maintained in the basic
badness of capitalism, in the inevitability of its destruction, in the obligation
of the proletariat to assist in that destruction and to take power into its
own hands, he summarized. The innate antagonism between capitalism and
socialism has profound implications for Russias conduct as a member of inter-
national society. The Kremlins main concern is to make sure that it has
filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power. But,
Kennan argued, Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the western
world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application
of counter-force. Americans must continue to regard the Soviet Union as a
rival, not a partner. Americans have an implacable challenge, he concluded,
to shoulder the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history

plainly intended them to bear.
These successful attempts at typification by credible actors identified the
USSR as an entity bent on domination of other nations, global ideological
hegemony, and the destruction of capitalism and democracy. In redefining the
USSR, American identity was also redefined. Drawing on its World War II self-
image as heroic defender of the free world, post-war Americas identity was
altered from passive isolationist to that of vigilant global defender of democ-
racy and freedom to the point that it seemed simply understood in the political
discourse of the Cold War era. World War II had indeed changed everything,
destabilizing many constructions of Self, Other, order, and the way things are
that were previously considered at least somewhat fixed. This provided a con-
text of opportunity for a radical reshaping of the political world. The Cold War
was the result.
Constructing Western Germany

As Patrick Jackson argues in his constructivist analysis of post-war
Germany, German reconstruction was of two sortsmaterial and rhetorical.68
In May 1945, Germany was the defeated enemy nation responsible for the
worst war the world had ever known. Ten years later, Konrad Adenauer was
the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, a new democracy in a land
once ruled by Nazi fascists. He had just signed documents on behalf of his
nation, making it a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and
the Allied occupation was over. In reflecting on that occasion in his memoirs,
he commented that We had won the friendship of our former opponents. . . .
and had come to a firm friendly relationship with the nations of the West.69
Despite a constant barrage of vitriol against the Nazi scourge promulgated by
both American politicians and the US press for the better part of a decade and
the Nuremberg trials and their public revelations of Nazi death camps, there
occurred a rapid transformation in American public perceptions of Germany
that brought that country back into the fold of Western Civilization, as Jackson
documents.70
The roots of this transformation are many, and the legitimation processes
that reconfigured what Germany meant to the American public arguably were
not solidified until the Berlin Airlift began in 1948.71 Several exemplary discur-
sive moments early in the typification process, however, illustrate this shift in
identity: the Stuttgart speech delivered by American Secretary of State J. F.
Byrnes in that German city on September 6, 1946; a January 18, 1947 speech
delivered by John Foster Dulles, an attorney and former Hitler supporter
and advisor to 1948 Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey (Dulles
would later become Dwight Eisenhowers Secretary of State); and an article
written by Fosters brother Allen, who was then the president of the Council on
Foreign Relations and chair of its Study Group on the Problem of Germany.
In what is often referred to as the speech of hope for the effect it had on
the devastated Germans, Secretary of State Byrnes lauded the Potsdam agree-
ment and its wisdom in demanding that the occupying powers start building a
political democracy from the ground up in Germany. The Allies, Byrnes stated,
intended to prevent establishment of a strong central government dominat-
ing the German people instead of being responsible to their democratic will.
Again emphasizing the difference between the public and their reviled leaders,
Byrnes continued, The German people must realize that it was Hitler and his
minions who tortured and exterminated innocent men, women, and children
and sought with German arms to dominate and degrade the world. Secretary
Byrnes also made it clear that official US policy no longer included the more
extreme elements of the Morgenthau plan.72 Instead, he argued, it never was
the intention of the American Government to deny to the German people the
right to manage their own internal affairs as soon as they were able to do so
in a democratic way, with genuine respect for human rights and fundamen-
tal freedoms. He expressed American public sentiment thusly: The American
people hope to see peaceful, democratic Germans become and remain free and
independent. Americans who fought for freedom have no desire to enslave
the German people. The American people, concluded Byrnes, . . . want to help
the German people to win their way back to an honorable place among the free
and peace-loving nations of the world.
Jackson terms the next two years (194748) the extended turning point
period in German reconstruction, politically, materially, and conceptually.
Before 1947, Jackson argues, several trajectories were socially plausible;
after 1948, that number had been reduced. . . .73 It was during this period
that the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan, was
publicly debated and American political resources were mobilized to sell it at
home and abroad. After the severe winter of 194647, many American policy
analysts came to the conclusion that reconstructing the war-torn economies of
Europe would require plenty of American-provided aid, an approach that fos-
tered integration of the continents economies and a central role for the Western
zones of occupied Germany, as they were rich in both coal and manufacturing
potential.74
John Foster Dulles, an attorney who often represented international busi-
ness interests, acted as an early defender of this view in a speech given before
the National Publishers Association entitled Europe Must Federate or Perish.

For a prosperous Europe to be possible, he argued, Germany must be a part of
redevelopment. The basin of the Rhine, with its coal and industrious man-
power, constitutes the natural economic heart of Europe. From that area ought
to flow vitality not merely for Germans but for Germanys western neighbors.
He then proceeded to argue against the Morgenthau plan, which called for pas-
toralization and excluded most industrial redevelopment of Germany. He also
condemned the idea that neighboring nations would annex pieces of Germany,
while recognizing fears of German remilitarization. Instead, he called for mod-
eling a new German government after Americas own federal system. Such a
society, we believe, provides the richness of diversity and of experimentation
and the stimulus of competition. He concluded by expressing confidence that
America could lead in creating an acceptable plan for Europe and Germany
and that if it did, in return, we shall receive fellowship.
A few months later, Allen Dulles followed up with a more detailed explica-
tion of these ideas in his Foreign Affairs article, Alternatives for Germany.75
This article is best thought of as the culmination, as of April 1947, of the
thoughts of the Foreign Relations Study Group on the Problem of Germany.76
The article details the study groups opinions as to what should be done in
the areas of security, economy, borders, and political structure. On this latter
issue, Dulles echoes his brothers opinion that decentralization is best because
Historically, the German people made their best contribution to western civ-
ilization in a decentralized federation. In contrast, When Germany was a
unitary Prussianized state, she repeatedly brought war and catastrophe to her-
self and Europe. He also returned to an economic argument, stating that there
is little basis for believing that democracy would take root in Germany under
present conditions of defeat, hunger, idleness and despair, but that it could
if the Allies give a hope of decent livelihood to the mass of Germans. He
then called for a program of denazification to help the Germans reeducate
themselves.
The Truman Doctrine speech that same month had set the stage for
American-provided aid as a means to rebuild economies and hold at bay the
forces of communism. By then Truman had tapped George Marshall, Americas
WWII Army Chief of Staff, for the Secretary of State position. It was in
that capacity that Marshall introduced the plan for the economic recovery of
Europe in a June 5, 1947 commencement speech at Harvard. Legitimating
the European Recovery Program and its central role for Germany, however,
depended on making the case that Germany belonged to a larger cultural com-
munity and could therefore be trusted to use its enhanced economic strength
for the right purposes.77
All these actors sought to establish that, with sufficient oversight,
Germany could be economically rehabilitated, demilitarized, and democratized.
Constructing Europe as an Irritating Irrelevancy

During the first years of the twenty-first century, an effort was made by
neoconservatives and their supporters to reconstruct the place of Europe, espe-
cially France and to some extent Germany, in the American imagination.78 By
no less than the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Europe was rebuked
with that most shriveling of American epithets, that of being old, while
the House of Representatives cafeterias, operating under instructions from
Republican Representatives Bob Ney (using his power as Chairman of the
Committee on House Administration) and Walter Jones, saw fit to symboli-
cally insult the originators of the mainstay of the American diet, as French
fries were rechristened freedom fries.79 In perhaps the supreme outrage
to our longtime allies, Europeans (with special opprobrium by insinuation
again reserved for the brie-loving French) became cheese-eating surrender
monkeys, according to a popular conservative blogger.80 The intelligentsia
was similarly assailed with less vitriolic and more eloquent arguments about
why Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venusespecially
by Robert Kagan, one of the chief intellectual powerhouses of the American
neoconservative movement.81
In the months before the Iraq War began on March 19, 2003, Euro-bashing
reached a fever pitch. In the blogosphere and in the mainstream media, old
Europe became the axis of weasels, and a chorus of cowards, while the
French were labeled as ingrates who had forgotten what Americans had done
for them during World War II.
The tabloid cover of Ruppert Murdochs New York Post on February 10,
2003, for example, showed the graves of Normandy with the headline, They
died for France but France has forgotten. Inside, columnist Steve Dunleavy
asked, Where are the French now, as Americans prepare to put their soldiers
on the line to fight todays Hitler, Saddam Hussein? His answer: Talking
appeasement. Wimping out. How can they have forgotten?82 The following
week, Secretary of State Condolezza Rice also charged that France (and by
implication, Germany) was appeasing Saddam Hussein on NBCs Sunday
interview program Meet the Press. We need to remind everybody that tyrants
dont respond to any kind of appeasement, she said. Tyrants respond to tough-
ness. And that was true in the 1930s and 1940s when we failed to respond to
tyranny and it is true today, she said.83
The barrage of insult and invective as the UKs Guardian put it, ranged
from the basest tabloid rants to the loftiest columnists on the most respected
newspapers, and all concluded that Europeans were fearful and reluctant
to fight wars. In February, 2003 Washington Post columnist George Will said
France was in retreatthis time, into incoherence, while New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman opined, France is so caught up with its need to
differentiate itself from America to feel important, its become silly.
Historian and public intellectual Robert Kagan was a central intellectual

force in this attempt to minimize Europe in the American mind. A cofounder
in 1997 of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and listed as
one of Americas Top 100 Public Intellectuals in 2008 by Foreign Policy and
Prospect magazines, Kagan was at the center of the neoconservative movement
in American foreign policy and was one of the creators of the neoconserva-
tive philosophy championed by the George W. Bush Administration.84 PNAC
promoted an interventionist and, if necessary, unilateral military policy, an
America willing to perform the constabulary duties associated with shaping
the security environment in critical regions and a military force able to fight
and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars and defend the
American homeland.85
During frequent cable television interviews and in an essay and a widely
read book, Kagan86 proposed a new understanding of the relationship between
Europe and America. For a time during the early years of the new century,
Kagans ideas seemed ubiquitous in any public discussion remotely related
to this topic, and Kagan himself was often in the media representing his
reconceptualization. A New York Times discussion of the impact of these ideas
made explicit reference to Kagan as a possible heir to Kennan, and noted that
Mr. Kagans thesis has supplied talking points for national security analysts,
as well as White House speechwriters.87 The overarching metaphor empha-
sized in both his 2002 essay and 2003 book was that the two principal halves
of The West were from two different planets, a metaphor popularized by self-
help author John Gray in his best-selling marital advice book, Men are from
Mars, Women are from Venus.88
In his book, Kagan argued the following:
It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common

view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important
question of powerthe efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability
of powerAmerican and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning
away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into
a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and coop-
eration. . . . Meanwhile, the United States remains mired in history, exercising
power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are
unreliable, and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal
order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on
major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and
Europeans are from Venus: they agree on little and understand one another less
and less. And this state of affairs is not transitorythe product of one American
election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are
deep, long in development, and likely to endure.89
Kagan further asserted that Europes military weakness has produced a

perfectly understandable aversion to the exercise of military power.90 Because
they lack military might, Europeans want to believe that they inhabit a far
less threatening world than in fact actually exists, according to Kagan. The
incapacity to respond to threats leads not only to tolerance. It can also lead
to denial. It is normal to try to put out of ones mind that which one can do
nothing about.91 When the European great powers were strong, Kagan wrote
in 2002, they believed in strength and martial glory. Now, they see the world
through the eyes of weaker powers. These very different points of view, weak
versus strong, have naturally produced differing strategic judgments, differing
assessments of threats and of the proper means of addressing threats, and even
differing calculations of interest.92

Toward the very end of Power and Weakness, Kagan most overtly reveals
his goal for a Europe transformed in the American imagination. If Americans
were to decide that Europe was no more than an irritating irrelevancy, he pon-
dered, would American society gradually become unmoored from what we now
call the West? America should be encouraging a European military build-up,
Kagan states, so that those states might assist the US, if only in a marginal
fashion, with its mission of protecting the world, and particularly themselves,
from being overrun by undemocratic menaces. Europeans should move beyond
fear and anger at the rogue colossus and remember the vital necessity of
having a strong Americafor the world and especially for Europe.93
Kagans America is noble, willing to do what it takes to preserve freedom,
not only for itself but for its weak co-Western civilizationists as well.
. . . Americans can still sometimes see themselves in heroic termsas Gary

Cooper at high noon. They will defend the townspeople, whether the townspeo-
ple want them to or not. . . . Americans are cowboys, Europeans love to say.
And there is truth in this. The United States does act as an international sheriff,
self-appointed perhaps but widely welcomed nevertheless, trying to enforce some
peace and justice in what Americans see as a lawless world where outlaws need
to be deterred or destroyed, and often through the muzzle of a gun.94
These rhetorical acts of Kagan, Rumsfeld, Rice, and others, while not
comprised of major policy speeches devoted to transforming the US-Europe
relationship, were united in their attempt to inspire a diminished regard
for Americas traditional European allies, particularly France and Germany.
In doing so, these American policy strategists and their supporters hoped to
lessen the importance of these post-WWII friends and thus minimize the
impact on the American public of their opposition to US plans to invade Iraq.
But to these and other supporters of PNACs plan to refashion the US as the
sole global hegemon, these rhetorical acts were also the opening salvos in an
attempt to reframe Europe as essentially inconsequential to American foreign
policy decisions and thus Europes complaints about American intervention in
world affairs as no more than irritating and irrelevant.
By the end of the decade, however, Americans were again eating French
fries and French toast, and Americans overwhelmingly favored closer relations
with Europe (91 percent said this is what they preferred, according to a poll
conducted by the UKs British Council in January 2008).95 The relationship
forged in the cauldron of the Cold War and strengthened in its Marshall Plan
aftermath seemingly survived the Bush administration.
PRELIMINARY EVIDENCE: SURVEY DATA AND AMERICAN

PUBLIC PERCEPTION
Though the intentions of elites and their supporters in each of our cases is evi-
dent in their attempts at discursive persuasion, whether the domestic audience
was convinced by such arguments and tactics is so far unclear, though such a
posited relationship is fundamental to the thesis of this study. Ideally, even if a
causal relationship cannot be fully demonstrated, the historical record should
at least show a temporal correlation between stimulus and response in those
cases where we expect the pairing to exist. However, accurate measurement
of swings in public opinion in these cases is hindered by three problems with
available data. First, public polling was literally in its infancy at the time of
two of our three example cases, with all that condition implies for both scarcity
of data and quality of technique. Second, even where relevant questions were
asked, they may or may not fit the specific concepts tapped by this study. And,
finally, it is rare to find repeated iterations of certain questions, properly timed
so as to permit a longitudinal analysis across the moments of respective elite
stimuli.
With those caveats duly noted, however, we do have a substantial degree
of helpful poll data that can be marshaled toward gaining further insights into
these three cases.
Soviet Case
While its probably fair to say that Americans were never very warm toward
the communist, totalitarian Soviet Union prior to becoming allies with the
country against the Axis powers, we do not have poll data to confirm that
directly, though we might make inferences from what we do have. One ques-
tion format employed by Gallup asked Americans to choose their most and
least liked European countries (which, importantly, is not the same as asking
whether one likes or dislikes a country). From 1937 to 1939, only 1 or 2 percent
of Americans chose Russia in response to the first question, while 8 percent
identified it as their least liked European country in 1939.96
However, it would seem that attitudes thawed considerably during the
wartime alliance, though that finding also has to be inferred somewhat indi-
rectly from the question formats employed. In 1943, Americans were asked
whether the US and Russia should form a permanent defensive military

alliance, and 39 percent said yes, while 37 percent disagreed. The same ques-
tion was asked again in late March of 1945, just weeks before the wars end
in the European theater, and the favorable response was now up to 49 per-
cent, with 36 percent opposing. Similarly, Gallup repeatedly asked Americans
whether Russians could be trusted to cooperate with the US when the war was
over, and from 1943 to 1945, the percentage of yes responses were always in
the mid-forties, except for two 1945 iterations of the question, when they were
in the mid-fifties. Negative responses to the question during the same period
ranged from 27 to 38 percent.97

These data suggest a solid working relationship with Russia, if not neces-
sarily a warm and collegial one, in the minds of the American public. Its fair
to assume that respondents would not have favored a permanent alliance or
trusted in continued cooperation with a country should they have held that
nation in hostility and contempt.
But that latter description seems to well suit the American national
mood just months later, as the former allies began to engage in a cold war.
In September of 1946, Gallup asked whether respondents felt more friendly or
less friendly toward Russia than a year ago, a very useful measure for pur-
poses of the present study. Sixty-two percent answered less friendly, with only
2 percent saying more friendly, and 28 percent responding that their feelings
had not changed. Gallup also asked twice in 1946 whether people approved or
disapproved of the policy Russia was following in world affairs. In both cases,
only 7 percent approved, while 71 percent did not. Finally, Americans were
asked whether they thought Russia wanted to rule the world or was just trying
to protect itself. In both 1946 survey iterations, twice the number of respon-
dents or more opted for the first choice over the second (58 versus 29 percent
in May, 60 versus 26 percent in July). By July of 1953, that ratio was up to
79 versus 10.98
All of these figures strongly suggest that a massive sea change in American
attitudes toward the Soviet Union occurred almost immediately with the end
of the European war in May of 1945. Such attitudinal shifts correlate with
temporal precision against changes in elite rhetoric, and therefore they fit the
theoretical ideas of this study.
German Case
Less polling data is available for Germany than for the other two cases
examined in this study, but there is some. The aforementioned question prompt
that asked American respondents to identify their best liked European country
provides some telling data. Germany is third on the list (behind the UK and
France) in each fielding of the question, but fell fast as war approached, from
1937, with 8 percent who chose it, to 1938 when it was down to 4 percent,
to 1939 when only 3 percent chose the country. Asked in 1939 to identify
their least liked European country, 58 percent chose Germany (and 8 per-
cent Russia). And, interestingly, when Americans were asked in 1938 who they
would like to see win if there were to be a war between Germany and Russia,
83 percent chose Russia, and 17 percent picked Germany.99
Though the measures are imperfect, there seems to be a fairly clear pivot
in attitude following the war. Despite the fact that Americans hated Germany
during the just-concluded world war, and despite the fact that 58 percent
believed in a January 1947 survey that Germany would someday be an aggres-
sor nation again, nevertheless when asked in the same survey whether they
felt friendly or unfriendly toward Germany, 45 percent chose the former and
only 28 percent the latter.100
Again, this thawing represents what appears to be a remarkable pivot
in public attitudes that well tracks a benevolent elite disposition toward the
defeated country. The data cannot prove the causal relationship specified in
our model, but the correlation gives support for the possibility of its existence.
European Case
We do not have public opinion data measuring how Americans felt toward
Europeans during the time of the 2003 Iraq war, but it is perhaps as well
that we do not since, in a very real sense, there was no such thing as a singular
European policy on Iraq. Rightly or wrongly, France was identified in the US at
the time as the chief obstacle to the Bush administrations march to war, and
it is therefore highly useful that we have appropriate measures of American
attitudes toward France, measures that are, moreover, arrayed longitudinally
over exactly the time period most applicable to this study.
From 1991 until 2002, the American public held a favorable opinion of
France, by margins of between 70 and 79 percent over that time period. Then,
the bottom dropped out, perfectly coincident with the Bush administrations
roll-up to war in Iraq and Frances resistance to that effort. From a favorability
rating of 79 percent in February 2002, the figure for France falls to 59 per-
cent a year later, then to 34 percent (with 64 percent now unfavorable) just
another month later, in March 2003. At this time, a full 54 percent of Americans
believed that France was stabbing the US in the back because of its opposition
to the war.101
Similarly, in 2000, 50 percent of Americans described France as an ally.
In 2003 that number had fallen to 18 percent, while for the United Kingdom
(which, of course, backed the US invasion under Prime Minister Tony Blair),
the number went up over the same period, from 65 percent to 79 percent.
Meanwhile, the number of Americans calling France an enemy of the United
States rose during the same time frame, from 1 percent to 9 percent. In 2000,
4 percent of Americans described France as unfriendly, while 32 percent did in
2003.102 Equally of note, as 2003 unfolded and the Iraq war turned from smash-
ing victory to quagmire, opinion of France began to rehabilitate. In April,
58 percent of Americans had described France as either an ally or friendly
nation, but that number climbed to 66 percent by September. Likewise, dur-
ing the same period, the number calling France either an enemy or unfriendly
nation fell from 40 to 31 percent.103
These data make a strong argument for the model posited in this study.
It defies credibility to imagine that such radical swings of long-held opinion
could have happened spontaneously, or that they were caused by factors beyond
the highly inflammatory and derogatory elite rhetoric directed toward France
precisely at the time heretofore solid public opinion was shifting precipitously.
ANALYSIS
In this section of the study, we seek to explore the role of our five key explana-
tory factors in producing the outcomes generated in each of the three cases
examined.
Table 1 summarizes in matrix form the following discussion of our findings.
Historical Opportunity
On the heels of a political, economic, or other development of major
proportions, we positfollowing McAdam, McCarthy and Zalds104 notion of
political opportunitythat the public is inherently more receptive to the
acceptance of articulated new frames. During times of great social upheaval,
longstanding, seemingly durable, collective understandings are most vulnera-
ble to retypification.105 The several years following 1945 and 2001 both fall into
this category, but not at all equally.
The earth-shattering developments emerging from World War II were both
profound and multiple, with perhaps 50 million peoplefully 2 percent of the
worlds populationannihilated, large portions of the European and Asian
landscape reduced to rubble, and the moral earthquakes of the Holocaust and
the newly created atomic bomb. World War II caused widespread lack of onto-
logical security106 as the ground shifted dramatically in the configuration of
world politics, moving rapidly from the centuries-old multipolar system to a
new bipolar world order. American politicians or policy analysts seeking to
reshape the identities of other global players and therefore of America itself
were thus in an ideal position to do so, by, as Adler and Barnett107 posit,
purposefully managing their public descriptions of the world and its relation-
ships. This moment of historical opportunity, perhaps greater than any other in
modern history, would be well exploited by strategic actors such as Churchill,
Truman, and Kennan to argue for a new definition of the Soviet Union.
The rehabilitation of Germany, at the core of Marshall Plan rebuilding, was
Table 1: Summary of explanatory factors and outcomes across three examined cases of attempted grand IR constructions.
Explanatory Success Factors

Proponent
Historical Empirical Frame Prominence/ Audience
Cases Opportunity Credibility Competition Credibility Representation Outcomes
Soviet Threat Very Favorable: Very Favorable: Very Favorable: Highly Favorable: Highly Favorable: Succeeded
Effects of World Soviet Little serious Truman, Americans
War II disaster behavior in competition Churchill, and flatteringly
were profound Europe and from others, were portrayed as
beyond alternative highly protectors of
confirmed frames prominent and freedom
frame credible
German Very Favorable: Moderately Moderately Moderately Moderately Succeeded
Rehabilitation Effects of World Favorable: Favorable: Favorable: Favorable:
298
War II disaster German Little Foreign policy Americans
were profound behavior competition establishment flatteringly
confirmed other than substantially portrayed as
frame, but from residual prominent and generous and
quietly WWII-era credible peace-loving
frame victors
European Moderately Moderately Moderately Mixed Mixed Mostly Failed
Irritating Favorable: Unfavorable: Unfavorable: Favorability: Favorability: US
Irrelevancy 9/11 changed Europeans Long-standing Bush officials not portrayed as
much, but not were longtime residual as prominent guardian sentry,
everything allies, alliance frame and less but also
supported US remained credible than unilateralist,
in Afghanistan, competitive Truman, nonidealistic
split on Iraq (as Marshall, and and belligerent
did US public) others
similarly pursued by the likes of Byrnes and the Dulles brothers, who spoke
with well-coordinated rhetoric aimed at convincing an American audience.
In contrast, the events of September 11, 2001, though certainly witnessed
around the world, were not global in their direct impact. Indeed, despite the
horror of this attack and the significant carnage produced, even the direct
domestic impact in America was relatively muted compared to the toll of World
War II or even, say, the Vietnam War. Many Americans were fond of saying that
everything changed on that day, but in fact such a conclusion was a forgivable
case of historical myopia. Whether the measure is the speed of recovery, the
loss of life, the subsequent sacrifices demanded, or the redistribution of power

within the world order, in fact, relatively little changed on 9/11 in a direct
and tangible sense. However, nothing like this had happened before, and we
argue that 9/11 did leave Americans open to new conceptions of the world and
themselves, though not nearly to the degree that the immediate post-WWII
era had done. Neoconservatives and would-be norm entrepreneurs108 such as
Robert Kagan and Donald Rumsfeld may have concluded that history had pro-
vided another opportune moment for persuasive rhetoric to reconfigure another
global entity, in this case, Europe, but they were only partially correct. In pre-
suming that 9/11 had changed everything, neoconservatives overplayed their
hand.109
Thus, one reason why the Soviet and German frames succeeded but the
European one failed is that 1945 opened a yawning possibility for shaping
American public opinion, while 2001 did so to a far lesser degree. This was
reflected in Americans change in feelings toward France, which fell in tan-
dem with the go-it-alone bravado prior to the Iraq invasion and rebounded as
Frances cautions were proven correct. This differential between the first two
cases and the third when it comes to the condition of the historical opportunity
factor likely helps to account for the resilience of public opinion change in the
former instances and the absence of same in the latter, as shown in the polling
data above.
Empirical Credibility
As Snow et al.110 and Benford and Snow111 have noted in their discussion
of culturally believable tropes, any given constructions prospects for success
may be expected to improve dramatically to the extent that the ideas corre-
spond to observed facts on the ground, both retrospectively and prospectively
from the time of their articulation, and to the extent that governmental poli-
cies rooted in such frames prove successful.112 Maney, Coy, and Woehrle make
a similar argument with respect to the idea of narrative fidelity.113
Did the three grand international relations constructions surveyed herein
benefit from empirical credibility? The short answers are as follows: broadly
yes for the case of the Soviet menace; mostly yes, but a bit more ambiguously,
for the German rehabilitation; and largely no for the would-be reconstruction
of Europe as irrelevant irritant.
The Soviet Union provided a bit of a retrospective roller-coaster for the
American public imagination in the years prior to 1945. Prior to the Bolshevik
Revolution, Russia was just another European great power, with whom the
isolationist United States had commercial and diplomatic relations, but little
interaction within the domain of high politics. Subsequently, in the inter-
war years, there developed a general antipathy to the communist Soviet
Union, including a feeble American participation in an attempt to reverse the
Bolshevik Revolution. Attitudes toward the Soviet Union, as our poll data indi-
cate, changed dramatically during the war years, however, when the Soviets
were cast as good and faithful allies, not least because of the enormously
heavy burden they carried in the death-match struggle against global fas-
cism. But in the months following V-E Day, Stalins actions contributed to
evolving perceptions of a Soviet threat. Evidence included occupying Eastern
European countries, installing puppet governments there, displaying intran-
sigence in the cooperative management of occupied Berlin, and supporting
communist parties in the West.114 Once the new frame was articulated by
Churchill, Truman, Kennan, and others, subsequent Soviet acts would con-
tribute additional empirical support for the construction of Russia as Americas
enemy. From an American standpoint, these ranged from threatening Greece
and Turkey to the Korean War; two Berlin crises; repeated threats related to
Cuba; meddling in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Mid-East; and wars in
Vietnam and Afghanistan, among others. Public opinion toward their former
ally, as reported above, likewise plummeted during this period, with nearly
two thirds of Americans feeling less friendly toward Russia in the year follow-
ing the war and 71 percent expressing disapproval of Russias actions in world
affairs. Whatever the moral or policy-oriented merits of the Soviets-as-threat
construction, the point here is that the pitch to the American people rarely
lacked for corroborating evidence on the ground.
Meanwhile, the place of Germany in the American publics imagination
was moving in precisely the opposite direction. The country had provided
ample evidence of its menace in the First and, especially, the Second World
War. That would prove no small stumbling block to reconstructing the coun-
trys image as not only no longer a threat, but actually a brethren member of
Western Civilization. Too much blood had been spilled and too much propa-
ganda fomented for attitudes to change readily. Moreover, it is much easier to
take actions ruining ones own image, as the Soviets did, than to adopt positive,
rehabilitative policies. One thing the country could and did do, however, was to
participate in the greatest project animating American political consciousness
at the time, the Cold War, by hosting American forces as well as providing its
own in the prosecution of that confrontation. A defeated Germany also accepted
the terms of the American-proffered European Recovery Program, or Marshall
Plan, thus aligning itself with American policymakers vision for the destroyed
continents future.115 Meanwhile, the other thing that Germany could do was
to hunker down in terms of the shadow it cast in international relations. This
the country also did, even considerably still to this day, becoming essentially
a nonactor on issues of high politics other than to take on the role of one
of Americas most reliable allies. Germanys utter devastation after the war
additionally fostered sympathy while also demonstrating decisively that the
Germans were no longer a threat to anyone. All of this helped to make a benign-
if-not-friendly Germany a plausible notion for the targeted American audience
Thus arose from the Reichs utter defeat the opportunity for the countrys
ideational reconstruction in the American publics mind, in this case through
a gradual replenishment of longstanding and durable notions of Germany as
part of the Christian West.116
The subsequent reconstruction of Europe as an unreliable and feeble for-
mer partner was by far the most difficult pitch to make with respect to
compliance with empirical observations, and this cognitive dissonance played
no small role in the failure of the frame to take. Moreover, that problem applied
both retrospectively and prospectively. With regard to the former, there was
ample history pointing in the other direction. Absent Americas alliance with
France stretching across more than two centuries, for example, there might
very well never even have been a United States of America. Relations with
Britain had been strong for at least a century, and even those with two-time
world war adversaries Germany and Italy were also robust, not to mention
six decades old by this point. Meanwhile, Kagans thesis that the scars of
earlier wars and the process of European integration led to a pacifist contem-
porary Europea Europe turning away from power117 made little empirical
sense considering widespread participation by those countries in NATO and
the Cold War, and the substantial military forces and arsenals maintained
by at least several key European statesincluding, of course, the indepen-
dent French and British nuclear stockpiles. Nor could this frame account for
the military conflicts of the postwar era involving European powers, includ-
ing multiple colonial wars, the Suez invasion, and the Falklands and Persian
Gulf Wars. Oddest of all was the notion of Europeans as a continent full of
free-riding pacifists, given their near-unanimous agreement with, and eager
support for, the late-2001 military invasion of Afghanistan in response to the
9/11 attack on the USthis a mere one year prior to the effort to reconstruct
Americas longtime allies as weak-kneed wimps. Half a century of Cold War,
especially, had ingrained in the public a sense of alliance and kinship with
Western Europe. Europe may well have been perceived by Americans as a
junior partner to decisive American military power, from World War I through
the Afghanistan invasion, but it was still perceived as a partner. Europe as
friend to America was a quite cemented typification, and therefore difficult to
dislodge.118
Prospectively, the proffered frame also did poorly in its struggle with the
real world after its enunciation. First, because many if not most European
states actually did participate in George Bushs 2003 invasion of Iraq, a con-
flagration whose wisdom was not at all self-evident even to Americans at the
time. France and Germany were the obvious key exceptions, but the other four
of Europes six largest countriesBritain, Italy, Spain, and Polandas well as
many smaller states were eager participants in the war, hardly what one would
expect of Venusian cowards. But the frame also suffered profoundly because
the first test of policy associated with itinvading Iraqfailed dramatically.
Several years later, two thirds of Americans thought that the war was not
worth it, basically confirming that the Europeans (i.e., the Germans and the
cheese-eating French) were effectively right after all, far more so than the neo-
conservative elites of 200203 trying to sell the notion that these longtime
allies were simply hiding from the hard work of maintaining freedom.119 Thus,
to sum, both sets of conditions on the groundthose from before the frame was
enunciated and then from afterwere highly unfavorable to its adoption, and
hence go a long distance toward explaining its failure.
In all three of our cases, empirical credibilitythat is, the degree to
which the articulated elite frame seems to correspond with publicly perceived
realitytracks as our model predicts with respect to the long-term acceptance
of newly posited characterizations of foreign actors.
Frame Competition
As Hilgartner and Bosk120 did in their research on ideational competition
within public arenas, we have also argued that new identity constructions
of foreign actors should be expected to be more successful when the num-
ber of competing frames is lower and when those alternative frames are less
compelling.
In our Soviet case, the new frame had to compete against the existing
one, wherein the Soviets were Americas steadfast wartime allies. It helped
that before the Soviets were Americas allies they were its ideological adver-
saries, and even during World War II they were not portrayed to the American
public as brothers so much as brothers-in-arms. Most importantly, there
was little competition offered to the American public for the Soviet menace
frame other than from some short-lived residual good feelings related to the
war effort. The most prominent proponent of a more accommodating posi-
tion toward the Soviets, Henry Wallace, Roosevelts former vice president and
Trumans Secretary of Commerce, was fired in 1946 for his pro-Soviet stance,
and other American proponents of peaceful coexistence with the Soviets were
increasingly sidelined by Cold War hardliners.121 As 1946 became 1947, and
1947 became 1948, the Soviet threat construction increasingly lacked a credible
competitor.
The new German construction faced the same predicament of competition

emerging chiefly from the extant historical frame, but in this case running in
just the opposite direction. To most Americans, Germans had previously been
characterized as fascist totalitarian genocidal barbarians whose expansion-
ist predations had twice drawn the country into unnecessary wars that had
claimed tens of thousands of American lives. That narrative continued to exist
in the immediate postwar period, but dissipated over time, particularly in the
near-complete absence of elite advocacy for its continuation. The Germans had
submitted to total surrender in the wake of total defeat, and thus no new anti-
German frame was articulated concerning a country now key to Americas more
pressing Cold War project, and the existing alternative frame from the war era
therefore simply faded from consciousness.122 This allowed what Jackson has
termed a Weberian legitimation processin this case rhetoric about what a
reconstructed concept of Germany might mean, such as that promulgated by
John Foster Dullesto proceed.123
The early 21st century attempt to reframe Europe as an irritating irrel-
evancy faced the same competition from an extant frame as the other
two did, but the existing relationship was older, more established, more
institutionalizedmore cementedthan prior Soviet and German construc-
tions, and the new challenger for a European identity had less time because
of events (see above discussion of empirical credibility) to make its case in the
marketplace of ideas. The problem for the neoconservative project advanced by
the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Kagan in 200203 was not so much
that there were prominent opinion makers out in the media talking up a coun-
ternarrative extolling the virtues of Europe as it was that a long history of a
highly positive and durable rendering of the continent was suddenly being chal-
lenged for dubious reasons, against a dubious fact set, by dubious actors, and
then almost equally quickly, was swept away by events and the further dimin-
ishing of credibility those events brought upon the frame and its proponents.
In short, this frame suffered from competition against a powerfully articulated
alternative with long and deep roots in the American consciousness, as well
as from the political gravity exerted by subsequent events. Nevertheless, the
frame did have some success in changing American attitudes toward Europe,
but these were relatively weak, certainly compared to our other two examples,
and in any case were mostly short-lived.
Our model suggests that the expected success of promulgated frames must
not be estimated in a vacuum, but must also account for any competition that
might exist in the marketplace of ideas in order to be accurate. In the two
former cases examined in this study, there was an almost complete absence
of frame competition, while in the third one a latent, inertial frame remained.
These differences help explain the differing long-term outcomes revealed in the
aforementioned survey data.
Proponent Prominence/Credibility
We argue the commonsensical notion that any proposed grand interna-
tional relations construction will have a greater likelihood of success, ceteris
paribus, when those who advocate on its behalf are both highly visible and cred-
ible to the public. This idea is similar to that which was developed by Benford
and Snow in their discussion of the status of the frame articulator,124 as well
as Max Webers early promulgation of the concept with respect to the power
of rational-legal authority.125 In the Soviet case, anyone in 1946 desiring to
see that country demonized as an adversary of the United States could prob-
ably not have asked for a better group of exponents promulgating that idea.
Churchill, Truman, Kennan, and other proponents of the new Soviet frame ben-
efitted from high degrees of public prominence and authoritative credibility to
a degree that was perhaps only possible in those pre-Watergate, pre-Vietnam,
pre-media proliferation days, when top political figures, imbued with rational-
legal authority, commanded ample public esteem and a concomitant degree of
default credibility and trust.
The German case provides a similar story. Few figures were as prominent
in America at the time as were Marshall, Byrnes, and the Dulles broth-
ers, all of whom were casting Germany and the Germans in the same light.
Comparatively speaking, their task was a lesser one, but they did accomplish
what they sought to, in part because they were both prominent and credible
advocates in the public eye. They were thus in a good position to promote strate-
gic social learning, in which views of the social world are purposefully managed
and interpreted to a larger public by leaders, in order to foster social change.126
The case of the European reconstruction frame is trickier. As noted above,
it comes during an era in which the attitude of the American body politic
toward its government was considerably less benign or charitable than that
of the pre-Watergate/pre-Vietnam era of relative public acquiescence to, and
naivet about, government. On the other hand, it also almost directly follows
the 9/11 attack, which fostered an immediate and powerful rally-round-the-
flag effect. Those articulating the new frame, however, were not at the very
highest level of political prominence, though they were from the next tier down.
Rumsfeld and Rice, moreover, were already somewhat diminished in public
opinion from rhetoric and policies promulgated prior to 9/11. Though they were
at this time still relatively credible, these individuals were hardly the giants
of the earlier era, like Marshall or Churchill. For the intelligentsia, Kagan was
attempting to play the role of George Kennan, though also without either the
same gravitas or reputation for objectivity. In short, the proponents of the new
European frame might be said to have had moderately strong levels of visibility
and credibility, but certainly not the same as their earlier counterparts. These
actors rhetoric was echoed by supporters in the House of Representatives and
in the print media and Internet, but often in an over-the-top fashion (freedom
fries, surrender monkeys) that in the end may have done more to undermine
the seriousness of the frame than to support it. That this frame was ultimately
not successfully pitched to the American public, as confirmed by poll data cited
above, is partly explained by this factor.
Audience Representation
As Tilly127 notes, in a two-party relationship, any reidentification of Them
also redefines Us. A final causal factor explaining the relative success of a
given, proposed, grand international relations construction argues that a frame
well harmonizing with the existing national mythology of the target audience,
and flattering that audiences sense of self, will have relatively greater oppor-
tunity to gain traction in the national consciousness. In this regard, our model
reflects Snow and Benfords concept of frame resonance128 and Maney, Coy,
and Woehrles idea of identity appeal.129
In the case of the Soviet reconstruction, one could hardly have done better
on this score. Yesterday, so the story was told by the likes of American presi-
dents, British prime ministers, and other giants of the just-completed epochal
war, Americans were saving the world from totalitarian threat, and today they
are being called upon to do the same. Only the name of the menacing actor and
the flavor of its extremist ideology had changed. Otherwise, however, Americas
national identity as global champion of freedom and democracy and protector of
the weak remained as unchanged in content according to this frame as did the
degree to which it continued to flatter Americans heroic sense of themselves.
Without question, these sympathetic and laudatory qualities of the proffered
construction heightened its prospects for national adoption.
The German case also benefitted from compliance with existing tropes and
the use of self-flattery. Here, according to Truman, Churchill, Marshall, Byrnes,
and both Dulles brothers, among other prominent voices, Americans could look
upon themselves once again as protectors, but even more importantly as gen-
erous victors and, especially, as a peace-loving people. That is, despite even
Germanys enormously costly wartime aggressions and other depredations,
because of the appealing characteristics associated with the national identity,
the US would graciously and generously save its former enemy and would work
with it to advance the cause of peace in the world. In both of the post-WWII
cases, elite actors successfully invoked the mythos of cultural transforma-
tion to argue that a democratic and newly heroic America should take an
expansionary leadership role in postwar global politics.130
When it came to marketing the new European frame in the early 21st
century, the implications of that package for American identity were more
complicated and contradictory. On the one hand, the new picture drawn by
such advocates as Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Kagan, and other neoconservatives
both inside and out of the Bush administration, invoked themes of the steely
American sentry, standing guard at the gates of freedom, even when no one
else would take watch duty alongside the US. But the unilateral element of
this image was new, foreign, and uncomfortable. Moreover, what had happened
to the country whose historical rhetoric and actions had prominently embraced
(if intermittently and unevenly) the importance of global human rights and
international law, and which was more responsible than any other for the cre-
ation of institutions of international governance such as the League of Nations,
the United Nations, the Bretton Woods organizations, and well beyond? This
unilateral aspect of the proposed new identity was clearly not a good fit with
existing American mythology, and it was not so flattering. Kagan, in particular,
was telling Americans that the era of idealism was over, but idealism is core to
the American image of itself.
Thus, one of the fatal obstacles to the neoconservative bid for a new
American construction of Europe was that it didnt fit with the countrys exist-
ing view of itself, even in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Nor did it flatter
Americans entirely. Turning the Europeans into wimpy Venusians also meant
turning the US into aggressive and unilateral Martians, and that was not a
comfortable identity for the American psyche. However America had seen itself
throughout the countrys history, it was never as Sparta.
As the above-cited public opinion data confirm, pitching a new national
identity for both Self and Other is easier when one is cast in heroic terms,
such as those of the idealistic nonaggressor. Selling something less attractive
is, obviously, a more daunting project. Hence we see further explanation for
why elite visions of the new Russia and the new Germany stuck, while a similar
attempt to recreate Europe in the American publics mind ultimately did not.
IMPLICATIONS
The purpose of this study has been to consider which factors account for the
successful identity framing of foreign (and domestic) polities to a home audi-
ence. Though this is a pilot study, we hope to have proposed a useful framework
that can serve as a foundation for any further work in this domain seeking to
apply and test such ideas.
One obvious tack going forward would involve an expansion of the universe
of cases examined. Further study on this topic could benefit from an increase
in the number of cases in the data set. Moreover, the types of cases examined
could and should be diversified over multiple dimensions. It would be useful, for
example, to include many countries in examining sales pitches to target popu-
lations, not just the United States. And, it would be helpful to look at cases from
other eras, rather than focusing exclusively on the post-WWII period, as well
as those concerning issues beyond high politics, such as trade or human rights.
Most importantly, however, a more thorough analysis of this phenomenon
will require greater diversity in the combinations of factor states examined.
In this study, we had variance on the causal factors and variance on the case
outcomes, but considerably less variance in combinations of factor states, leav-
ing us unable to isolate the impact of individual factors, since they were more
or less all favorable or all unfavorable in each of our three cases. Nor were
we able to consider how different combinations of causal factor values might
produce interactive effects on case outcomes.
We also believe that subsequent analyses of this research question would
benefit from more defined operationalizations of factors and case outcomes, and
greater precision in the measurement of their value states, notwithstanding all
the difficulties always inherent to applying more formal and rigorous processes
to complex and recondite social phenomena.
We hope that this study will have felicitous implications for integrating the
realist and constructivist approaches to the study of international relations,131
just as we have sought to do herein. We see these paradigms as more com-
plementary than oppositional, though to the extent that realists reject any
nonmaterialist explanations for changes in public opinion, the paradigms are
ultimately incompatible. Our model seeks to reconcile the two approaches.
We note the significance, for example, of compliance with empirical observa-
tion as one of our five explanatory factorsa notion that leans rather heavily
on the material. But just as rejecting material conditions would produce an
impoverished and inaccurate model, so too would the omission of ideational
factors. Our Soviet case is but one example. Neither the countrys power nor
its intentions changed significantly from 1945 to 1946, but its place in the
American publics imagination certainly did, and quite dramatically. There are
plenty of other examples like this one, in which material conditions alone are
manifestly insufficient for explaining change in public opinion. Ultimately, we
believe international relations scholarship can continue to profit from further
such crossdisciplinary theory development.132
Finally, while the topic of this studyunderstanding why proposed grand
international relations frames succeed and why they failwould seem of inher-
ent interest to social scientists, we believe it might have important social
ramifications as well. Certainly, the real world consequences of whether or not
such constructions are adopted are huge. This is, after all, largely a story of
war and peace. Thus we would hope that the study of this domain might also
have implications for the publics consideration of proffered international rela-
tions frames, perhaps helping to introduce a degree of healthy skepticism in
reviewing what is on offer and a degree of consciousness with respect to the
consideration process as it is occurring.
NOTES
1. George Marshall, European Recovery and Peace Treaties: Time to Call a Halt to
Inflammatory Practices, Vital Speeches of the Day 14, no. 4 (1947): 98101.
2. Patrick T. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention
of the West (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).
3. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Mens Attitudes (New York: Vintage,
1973).
4. Alexander. E. Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 332.
5. Ibid., 33637.
6. Robert L. Ivie and Oscar Giner, American Exceptionalism in a Democratic Idiom:
Transacting the Mythos of Change in the 2008 Presidential Campaign, Communication
Studies 60, no. 4 (2009): 35975, 360.

7. Michael D. Cobb and James H. Kuklinski, Changing Minds: Political Arguments
and Political Persuasion, American Journal of Political Science 41, no. 1 (1997): 88121.
8. George Lakoff, Dont Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
(White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004), xv; italics in original.
9. Geoffrey Nunberg, Talking Right; How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into A Tax-
Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-
Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show (New York: Public Affairs, 2006).
10. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: Treatise
on the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966).
11. Wendt, Social Theory, 10; italics in original.
12. Ibid., 12.
13. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Volume 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1978 [1922]).
14. Joseph Jupile, James Caporaso, and Jeffrey Checkel, Integrating Institutions:
Rationalism, Constructivism, and the Study of the European Union, Comparative
Political Studies 36, nos. 1/2 (2003): 741.
15. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Volume 1: The Problem of Social Reality (The
Hague, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962); Joel Best, Images of Issues: Typifying
Contemporary Social Problems (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995).
16. Erik Ringmar, Identity, Interest and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 451; italics in original.
17. Wendt, Social Theory.
18. Schutz, Collected Papers.
19. Emmanuel Adler, Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics,
European Journal of International Relations 3 (1997): 31963, 320.
20. Emmanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, A Framework for the Study of Security
Communities in Security Communities, ed. Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2966.
21. See Emmanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, Taking Identity and Our Critics
Seriously, Cooperation and Conflict 35 (2000): 32129.
22. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy.
23. Evgeny Roschin, From Contract to Normative Prescription: Friendship in the Early
Modern Law of Nations (paper presented at the Political Studies Association Annual
International Conference, Edinburgh, UK, 2010).
24. Schutz, Collected Papers; Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998).
25. Felix Berenskoetter, Friends, There Are No Friends? An Intimate Reframing of the
International,Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35, no. 3 (2007): 64776.
26. Wendt, Social Theory, 340.
27. Ted Hopf, The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory,
International Security 23, no. 1 (1998): 171200, 175.
28. Ibid., 174.
29. Ibid., 175.
30. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of
Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 16.
31. Wendt, Social Theory, 20.
32. David Rousseau, Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities: The Social
Construction of Realism and Liberalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2006).
33. Charles Tilly, Identities, Boundaries and Social Ties (Boulder, CO: Paradigm
Publishers, 2006).
34. Jennifer Mitzen, Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the
Security Dilemma, European Journal of International Relations 12, no. 3 (2006):
34170.
35. Tilly, Identities, Boundaries.
36. Ronald R. Krebs, A School for the Nation? How Military Service Does Not Build
Nations, and How it Might, International Security 28, no. 4 (2004): 85124, 88.
37. John OBrennan, Bringing the Geopolitics Back In: Exploring the Security
Dimension of the 2004 Eastern Enlargement of the European Union, Cambridge
Review of International Affairs 19(1): 15569 (2006).
38. Atsuko Higashino, For the Sake of Peace and Security? The Role of Security in
European Union Enlargement Eastwards, Cooperation and Conflict 39, no. 4 (2004):
34768.
40. Ibid., 25.
41. Ibid., 16; see also, Stacie Goddard, When Right Makes Might: How Prussia
Overturned the European Balance of Power, International Security 33, no. 3 (2008):
11042.
42. Wendt, Social Theory, 36; see also Jutta Weldes, Constructing National Interests,
European Journal of International Relations 2 (1996): 275318.
43. David A. Snow and Doug McAdam, Identity Work Processes in the Context of Social
Movements: Clarifying the Identity/Movement Nexus, in Self, Identity and Social
Movements, ed. Sheldon Stryker, Timothy J. Owens, and Robert W. White (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 4157.
44. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy
Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
45. See special issue of International Organization 59, no. 4 (2005) for views on
resocialization processes among elites.
46. Trine Flockhart, Masters and Novices: Socialization and Social Learning through
the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, International Relations 18, no. 3 (2004): 36180,
362.
47. Jeffrey T. Checkel, International Institutions and Socialization in Europe:
Introduction and Framework, International Organization 59 (2005): 80126.
48. Alexandra Gheciu, Security Institutions as Agents of Socialization? NATO and the
New Europe, International Organization 59 (2005): 9731012.
49. Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald (eds.), Comparative
Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures and
Cultural Framings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3.
50. James C. Davies, Toward a Theory of Revolution, American Sociological Review

27, no. 1 (1962): 519.
51. David A. Snow et al., Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and
Movement Participation, American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 46481.
52. Robert D. Benford and David A. Snow, Framing Processes and Social Movements,
Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 61139, 620.
53. Rousseau, Identifying Threats.
54. Greg M. Maney, Patrick G. Coy, and Lynne M. Woehrle, Pursuing Political
Persuasion: War and Peace Frames in the United States After September 11, Social
Movement Studies 8, no. 4 (2009): 299322.
55. Robert L. Ivie, Metaphor and the Rhetorical Invention of Cold War Idealists,
Communication Monographs 54 (1987): 16582.
56. Stephen Hilgartner and Charles L. Bosk, The Rise and Fall of Social Problems: A
Public Arenas Model, American Journal of Sociology 94, no. 1 (1988): 5378.
57. Benford and Snow, Framing Processes, 621.
58. Weber, Economy and Society.
59. David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, Ideology, Frame Resonance and Participant
Mobilization, International Social Movement Research 1 (1988): 97218; Tilly,
Identities, Boundaries.
60. Ivie and Giner, American Exceptionalism.
61. Maney, Coy, and Woehrle, Pursuing Political Persuasion.
62. Thomas Risse-Kappen, Public Opinion, Domestic Structure, and Foreign Policy in
Liberal Democracies, World Politics 43, no. 4 (1991): 479512.
63. Esther Kaplan, With God on Their Side: How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled
Science, Policy and Democracy in George W. Bushs White House (New York: New Press,
2006).
64. Robert K. Yin, Case Study Research (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1989),
80.
65. Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 6th
ed., rev. Kenneth Thompson (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985); Jack Donnelly, Realism
and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
66. George Kennan, The Charge in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of
State, Moscow, February 22, 1946, 9:00 p.m. [Received February 22, 3:52 p.m.], http://
www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm (accessed June 21,
2009).
67. George Kennan [Mr. X], The Sources of Soviet Conduct, Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4
(1947): 56682.
69. Konrad Adenauer, Memoirs 194553, trans. Beate Ruhm von Open (Chicago: Henry
Regnery, 1966).
71. Carolyn Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany,
19441949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Carolyn Eisenberg, per-
sonal communication, 2009.
72. Henry Morgenthau, Germany is Our Problem (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1945).
73. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy, 149.
74. Scott Jackson, Prologue to the Marshall Plan: The Origins of the American
Commitment for a European Recovery Program, Journal of American History 65, no. 4
(1979): 10431068.
75. Allen Dulles, Alternatives for Germany Foreign Affairs, April 1947, http://www.
foreignaffairs.com/archive (accessed 7 November 2009).
76. Michael Wala, The Council on Foreign Relations and American Foreign Policy in the
Early Cold War (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1994).
77. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy, 158; italics in original.
78. The object of the reconstruction we examine in this case is variously presented as
Europe, Old Europe, and France. The real target, of course, was any country
especially one formerly close to the United States and therefore one not readily
dismissed a priorithat opposed the war program in the short run, and the US as
global hegemon in the longer term (PNAC 2000). This became a complicated problem for
agents of the new narrative, however, because Europe was deeply divided on Americas
plan to invade Iraq. While France and Germany were notable opponents to the invasion
of Iraq, others such as Britain, Spain, Poland, Italy, and many other lesser states were
supporters and participants, in some cases with the considerable enthusiasm of their
governments. The new versus old dichotomy was thus a categorization lacking any
meaningful defining criteria distinguishing the countries in question (East versus West,
new democracy versus old, etc.) and serving only as a blithe cover for the attempted dis-
missal of dissenters to hegemony. If more evidence of this claim is required, the logical
fallacy of the supposed distinction can clearly be seen in the case of Spain, a New
European country for Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 as it marched to war with the United
States, only to elect an antiwar government the next year, which immediately withdrew
its forces from the theater. Are we to imagine that it then suddenly aged to become Old
Europe, as Rumsfelds distinction would suggest? As for France, the irony here (and
an important clue) is that the country was actually not the most vociferous opponent
to the US-led invasion initiative. The French position at the UN was that a legal basis
for the war had never been established, suggestingtheoretically, at leastthat France
could conceivably come on board were the whole thing just done properly. Germany, on
the other hand, flat-out opposed the invasion on fundamental moral grounds, regard-
less of any legal, procedural, or other concerns. So why was France the special object
of the neoconservatives public vitriol in its reconstruction efforts? Probably because
the French, with their series of martial defeats (at the hands of the Germans, no less,
to be rescued by the Americans, still better) and their purported arrogance, were an
easier object for American ridicule, and because using France as a stand-in for dis-
senting Europe put a face on the target, making public digestion of the new frame all
that much easier. In any case, the basis for the confusion as to the actual object of this
reconstruction effort is rooted in the utility such malleability offered to those doing the
framing, and the fact that an accurate specification of the target countries might well
have revealed the logical conundrums of their argument to an uncomfortable degree.
Neoconservatives assumed that no one would parse the discourse sufficiently enough
to thwart their efforts to change public consciousness leading up to the invasion, and
indeed no one did.
79. US Department of Defense, Secretary Rumsfeld Briefs at the Foreign Press
Center, News Transcript, January 22, 2003, http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/
transcript.aspx?transcriptid=1330 (accessed June 20, 2009); Sean Loughlin, House
Cafeterias Change Names for French Fries and French Toast, CNN.com, March 12,
2003, http://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/11/sprj.irq.fries/ (accessed June 21,
2009).
80. Jonah Goldberg, Frogs in Our Midst, National Review Online, July 16,
2002, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/205247/frogs-our-midst/jonah-goldberg
(accessed June 21, 2009).
81. Robert Kagan, Power and Weakness: Why the United States and Europe See the
World Differently, Hoover InstitutionPolicy Review, no. 113 (June and July 2002); in
contrast, nations of the continent sending token numbers of troops to assist with the US
invasion of Iraq, such as Denmark, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic were portrayed as
refreshingly forward looking by several of these same actors.
82. New York Post, February 10, 2003; as reported in Gary Younge and Jon
Henley, Wimps, Weasels and Monkeysthe U.S. Media View of Perfidious
France, The Guardian, February 11, 2003, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/feb/
11/pressandpublishing.usa (accessed June 21, 2009).
83. Meet the Press, February 16, 2003, as reported in Karen de Younge, Rice Calls
Security Councils Actions Appeasement. Washington Post, February 17, 2003, A26.
84. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, biographical sketch of Robert Kagan,
http://carnegieendowment.org/experts/?fa=expert_view&expert_id=16 (accessed
July 18, 2009).
85. Project for a New American Century, Rebuilding Americas Defenses: Strategy,
Forces and Resources for a New Century, 2000, http://www.newamericancentury.org/
RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf (accessed June 20, 2009).
86. Kagan, Power and Weakness; Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and
Europe in the New World Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).
87. Sam Tanenhaus, Foreign Policys Big Moment Looks for a Big Idea, New York
Times, February 23, 2003, A12.
88. John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: The Classic Guide to
Understanding the Opposite Sex (New York: Harper, 1992).
89. Kagan, Of Paradise and Power, 34.
90. Kagan, Power and Weakness, 6.
92. Kagan, Power and Weakness.
93. Ibid.
94. Kagan, Of Paradise and Power. Careful readers will note the intellectual sleight of
hand here. Kagan has turned cowboys into sheriffs. Not only are these not the same
thing, but the meanings of these two terms are opposites in this case. When Europeans
refer to Americans as cowboys in this context, they do not mean providers of law and
order, but instead refer precisely to those who recklessly undermine those qualities.
95. British Council, Nine Country Poll Finds Europeans and Americans Desire Closer
Relations, WorldPublicOpinion.org., March 18, 2008, http://www.worldpublicopinion.
org/pipa/pdf/mar08/BritCouncil_Mar08_rpt.pdf (accessed 21 June 2009).
96. George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 193571 (New York: Random
House, 1972).
97. Ibid.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid.
100. Ibid.
101. David W. Moore, Majority of Americans View France as Ally or Friend, The
Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing: 2930, March 20, 2003.
102. Frank Newport and Joseph Carroll, Political Affiliation Colors Views of France,
The Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing: 1114, May 6, 2003.
103. Lydia Saad, Americans Still Reluctant to Call France an Ally, The Gallup Poll:
Tuesday Briefing: 3537, September 26, 2003.
104. Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald (eds.), Comparative
Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures and
Cultural Framings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
105. Tilly, Durable Inequality; Schutz, Collected Papers.
106. Mitzen, Ontological Security.
107. Adler and Barnett, A Framework.
108. Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders.
109. See also Brian Frederking, Constructing Post-Cold War Collective Security, The
American Political Science Review 97, no. 3 (2003): 36378.
110. Snow et al., Frame Alignment Processes.
111. Benford and Snow, Framing Processes.
112. Appreciating, as we fully do, the merits of constructivist analysis, we recognize a
certain circularity here. Observed facts are themselves often the product of interpre-
tive frames, before they can then be employed to validate or vitiate another proposed
construction. That said, however, some empirical observations are more intransigent
than others. That Germany lost World War II, for example, is an historical fact so
firmly anchored that anyone believing otherwise would, almost by definition, likely be
considered fully detached from reality.
114. Vladistav Zubok, Soviet Activities in Europe after World War II, Problems of Post-
Communism 42, no. 5 (1995): 38; of course, though far less recognized by the American
public, American policy was also actively antagonizing the Russians at this point, for
example, during the Berlin currency crisis.
115. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy; John Gimbel, The American Occupation of
Germany: Politics and the Military 19451949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1968).
116. Flockhart, Masters and Novices; Tilly, Durable Inequalities.
118. Schutz, Collected Papers.
119. Elaine Sciolino, France and Germany Call for Long Inspections, New York Times,
February 25, 2003: A1.
120. Hilgartner and Bosk, The Rise and Fall of Social Problems.
121. Ivie, Metaphor and the Rhetorical Invention; Wala, The Council on Foreign
Relations.
122. Indeed, as time went on, the old frame continued to exist as little more than a
humorous referent. When columnist Molly Ivins quipped that Pat Buchanans inflam-
matory culture war speech to the 1992 Republican convention sounded better in the
original German, nobody imagined that she was referring to Helmut Kohls country, for
the line would have been puzzling rather than humorous if they had.
123. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy, 25.

124. Benford and Snow, Framing Processes.
125. Weber, Economy and Society.
126. Adler and Barnett, A Framework.
127. Tilly, Identities, Boundaries.
128. Snow and Benford, Ideology, Frame Resonance.
130. Ivie and Giner, American Exceptionalism.
131. Samuel Barkin, Realist Constructivism, International Studies Review 5, no. 3
(2003): 32542; Jennifer Sterling-Folker, Realism and the Constructivist Challenge:
Rejecting, Reconstructing, or Rereading, International Studies Review 4, no. 1 (2002):
7397.
132. Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1996).

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Democracy and Security

ISSN: 1741-9166 (Print) 1555-5860 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fdas20

The Making of Friends and Enemies: Assessing

David Michael Green & Cynthia J. Bogard

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The Making of Friends

The character of interactions between global actors is determined in part by

These realignments of identities and relationships between international

discourage acceptance by domestic audiences of elite-proposed frames for the

andimportantly for this analysisrelationships and identities, can change.

ingredients if a world of chaos and pervasive and irremediable uncertainty

For democracies, the legitimation process is especially crucial because gov-

A realist explanation implicitly presumes that realigned identities among

relations of a given national political system,49 as a necessary condition for

character.60 In discussing frame success in social movements-related acts of

CASES AND METHODS

Constructing the Soviet Threat

communism was committed to the destruction of American capitalism.65

In addition to recharacterizing the USSR to his audience, Churchill also

to shoulder the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history

Constructing Western Germany

the National Publishers Association entitled Europe Must Federate or Perish.

Constructing Europe as an Irritating Irrelevancy

Historian and public intellectual Robert Kagan was a central intellectual

It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common

Kagan further asserted that Europes military weakness has produced a

differing calculations of interest.92

. . . Americans can still sometimes see themselves in heroic termsas Gary

PRELIMINARY EVIDENCE: SURVEY DATA AND AMERICAN

whether the US and Russia should form a permanent defensive military

ranged from 27 to 38 percent.97

Explanatory Success Factors

loss of life, the subsequent sacrifices demanded, or the redistribution of power

The new German construction faced the same predicament of competition

Studies 60, no. 4 (2009): 35975, 360.

50. James C. Davies, Toward a Theory of Revolution, American Sociological Review

123. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy, 25.

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