Has Covid-19 turned the Dutch into critics of globalisation?

The travel restrictions implemented across the world to tackle Covid-19 have led some observers to ask whether the era of globalisation might be coming to an end. Michal Onderco and Wolfgang Wagner present evidence from a new survey of the views of Dutch citizens on Covid-19 and globalisation. They find that while many citizens believe globalisation has gone too far, there remains strong demand for effective international governance

States, firms, and security:How private actors implement sanctions, lessons learned from the Netherlands

While the current practice of the United Nations Security Council, the European Union, and the United States leans towards imposing only targeted sanctions in most of the cases, private actors often complain about inability to process financial transactions, ship goods, or deliver services in countries where sanctions targets are located. The impact of sanctions often ends up being widespread and indiscriminate because sanctions are implemented by for-profit actors. This article investigates how for-profit actors relate to the imposition of sanctions, how they reflect them in their decisions, and how they interact with the public authorities. The findings of our research show that for-profit actors, with the possible exception of the largest multinationals, do not engage with public authorities before the imposition of sanctions. The behaviour of for-profit actors in the implementation phase is in line with the assumption of firms and business as profit-maximisers. Weighting th

Ideology and the Red Button:How Ideology Shapes Nuclear Weapons’ Use Preferences in Europe

Does partisan ideology influence whether Europeans are willing to use nuclear weapons, and if so, how? The US nuclear weapons stationed in Europe have been at the core of European security since the Cold War, but we have still yet to learn what would make Europeans be willing to support their use. In this paper, we present the results of a survey, in which we asked citizens in Germany and the Netherlands about their views on the use of the US nuclear weapons stationed on their territory in four distinct scenarios. Our results indicate that voters of right-wing parties are more likely to approve of the use of nuclear weapons in both countries. There are, however, important differences between the two countries in terms of the degree to which the participants oppose the use of nuclear weapons. These results have implications for NATO’s nuclear deterrence posture.</p

Sponsorship behaviour of the BRICS in the United Nations General Assembly

The formation of informal groupings of states is a manifestation of the global shift in economic power. One such a grouping is the BRICS, consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which stands out for its importance due to its economic weight, its coverage across continents and the numerous internal differences. The BRICS have collectively flexed their muscle and expressed their intentions to extend their cooperation at the United Nations (UN). Proposals in the United Nations General Assembly (UN GA) take the form of resolutions, which can be written and co-written by the UN member states. This so-called sponsoring of resolutions is a way to push agenda items forward. Using a large-N network analysis, we examine the patterns of co-sponsorship of the BRICS of resolutions adopted in the UN GA plenary sessions. We find that the BRICS cooperate on fields such as economic issues, however, they do not form a coherent bloc when it comes to resolution sponsorship. These results raise the question in what way the BRICS actually cooperate at the UN level

Variation in Delegation Size in Multilateral Diplomacy

Why do some countries send big delegations to multilateral negotiations, whereas others send very small ones? This article looks at both the causes of variation in state delegations to multilateral conferences but also at the consequences of such variation at both micro- and macrolevel. It tests the arguments derived from liberal theory of international regimes, using the case of the NPT Review Process. The results suggest that economic and security interests drive states’ participation in the multilateral settings; normative concerns about global public goods matter less. The article also argues that while countries which are more abundantly present in the negotiations do not tend to get more from international organisations; countries which have been less present during the negotiations tended to be more interested in alternative forum shopping in the form of ‘nuclear ban treaty’ negotiations

Birth of a norm champion: How South Africa came to support the NPT’s Indefinite Extension

In 1995, South Africa was in a special position. It was: a new party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the first country to voluntarily renounce nuclear weapons, led by a charismatic leader, and seen as a champion of disarmament principles. Yet South Africa’s new leaders were also interested in affirming their position within the Non-Aligned Movement, which was adamantly opposed to the NPT’s indefinite extension. Why, then, did South Africa decide to support the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995? Existing scholarship has ascribed too much credit to pressure from the United States, overlooking domestic debates in South Africa and the bifurcation between professional diplomats and political elites. This article, building on new archival sources and in-depth oral-history interviews with major actors, demonstrates that South African diplomats opposed indefinite extension while South African policy elites allocated little attention to the topic until late in the game. The findings c

The Programme for Promoting Nuclear Non-Proliferation and the NPT extension in 1995

In this paper, I study the Programme for Promoting Nuclear NonProliferation (PPNN), which provided the prime platform for discussing matters of nuclear non-proliferation starting from the 1980s up until the late 1990s. Using newly available archival materials, as well as private papers from the group’s key participants, the paper illuminates the case of the PPNN as a specific platform for the creation and spread of non-proliferation knowledge. The paper also analyses methods for spreading such knowledge, and demonstrates how the group functioned from within

Partisan views of Russia: Analyzing European party electoral manifestos since 1991

The connection between Russia and European political parties has been in the scholarly and popular spotlight recently. While scholars focus on the connection between the far right (and populist) parties and Russia, they have all but ignored the rapidly increasing literature on the role of political parties in foreign policy. This article provides an attempt to bridge these literatures. After analyzing a corpus of party manifestos, the results suggest that there is temporal variation in how European parties have seen Russia since the end of the Cold War. European parties tended to be mostly positive in their views of Russia prior to 2015. Geography and ideology were much less important as a factor in explaining party positions. While some ideological groups share attitudes across different borders, the overall influence of ideology on attitudes toward Russia is minimal

External drivers of EU differentiated cooperation: how change in the nuclear nonproliferation regimeaffects member states alignment

Since its establishment, the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) hasstrived to increase convergence among EU member states. Yet, convergenceremains elusive and scholars have started to explain the emergence ofdifferentiated cooperation resulting from multiple internal EU crises. We positthat the convergence in the EU member states with respect to nuclearweapons has been fundamentally altered by the humanitarian turn tonuclear disarmament. This has led to a crystallization of differentiatedsubgroups among the member states, whose membership coincides withthat of informal groupings active in the broader nuclear nonproliferationregime. Combining quantitative data on resolution sponsorship at the Non-Proliferation Treaty review process and voting at the UN General Assembly,we show that significant change in the international nuclear nonproliferationregime led to differentiated cooperation within the CFSP, resulting in twocohesive subgroups of member state