11 - The context of international norms

Summary

Late in the century [nineteenth] landlords and employers were urged to install running water toilets in their tenements or factories. The sales pitch was aimed less at the health of the labouring classes than at morality. The water closet was, among other things, intended as an architectural structure that would ensure the privacy of bodily functions, a natural extension of walls to separate the sleeping quarters of parents and children, a final material codification of the rules of the nuclear family. When combined with safe water disposal, however, it was also a significant health measure. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that morality and health were always combined in the utilitarian mind.

Ian Hacking (1990, pp. 119–20)

Introduction

An analysis of normative contexts forms a fitting conclusion to this book because all the modes of context and substantive contexts play important roles. Norms are usually quite stable and hence can explain behavioral consistency; they emphasize historical, temporal contexts. Norms are important when many people hold them; spatial contexts come into play. International regimes are system-level structures that influence state action. Norms are frequently referred to, particularly by economists (Koford and Miller 1991), as a constraint or barrier. Normative contexts help determine behavior (context as cause) and serve as a guide to interpreting behavior (context as changing meaning). Many of the contrasts between diffusion and rational actor models have analogues in the contrasts between norms and self-interest.