Reshaping Regions: Norms, Arguing and the Limits of Persuasion in the Middle East.

Normative influence in the international environment is not power free, nor does it always flow from transnational actors acting in apolitical ways. Powerful state actors are often in the business of norm promotion in efforts to reshape regions in ways that favor their interests and beliefs. Drawing on the empirical example of US efforts to promote a new set of regional norms in the Middle East in the 1990s (Israeli inclusion in regional relations, cooperative security concepts, and liberal economic cooperation), I argue that attempts to project norms on to regional settings are difficult and often fail. The American failure to reshape the regional order suggests important lessons for how norms are created and promoted and why they are not accepted evenly across the international system. To account for both norm resistance and varied responses to American-backed norms in the Middle East, the paper considers a variety of scope conditions drawn from the social psychology literature on persuasion and political science work on socialization. While existing explanations can largely account for the general pattern of failure, additional factors based on national identity, role conceptions and leadership beliefs must be introduced to better account for variation in how actors respond to normative persuasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]