International institutions are a ubiquitous feature of daily life in many world regions, and nowhere more so than contemporary Europe. While virtually all would agree that such institutions matter, there is less agreement on exactly how they have effects. This special issue brings together European Union specialists and international relations theorists who address the latter issue. In particular, we explore the socializing role of institutions in Europe, with our central concern being to better specify the mechanisms of socialization and the conditions under which they are expected to lead to the internalization of new roles or interests. Drawing on a multifaceted understanding of human rationality, we consider three generic social mechanisms—strategic calculation, role playing, and normative suasion—and their ability to promote socialization outcomes within international institutions. This disaggregation exercise not only helps consolidate nascent socialization research programs in international relations theory and EU studies; it also highlights points of contact and potential synergies between rationalism and social constructivism.For comments on earlier versions, I am grateful to two anonymous referees, IO editors Lisa Martin and Thomas Risse, as well as to John Duffield, Alexandra Gheciu, Liesbet Hooghe, Peter Katzenstein, Ron Mitchell, Frank Schimmelfennig, Martha Snodgrass, and Michael Zürn. More generally, thanks are owed to all the project participants for numerous and valuable discussions on the themes addressed in this volume.

This article uses a rationalist approach to explain the international socialization of Central and Eastern Europe to liberal human rights and democracy norms. According to this approach, socialization consists in a process of reinforcement, and its effectiveness depends on the balance between the international and domestic costs and benefits of compliance over an extended period of time. EU and NATO accession conditionality has been a necessary condition of sustained compliance in those countries of Central and Eastern Europe that violated liberal norms initially. The pathways and long-term outcomes of international socialization, however, have varied with the constellations of major parties in the target states. Whereas conditionality has been effective with liberal and mixed party constellations, it has failed to produce compliance in antiliberal regimes. In the empirical part of the article, these propositions are substantiated with data on the development of liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe and case studies on Slovakia and Latvia.For useful comments on earlier versions, I thank the participants of the IDNET workshop seminars, especially Jeff Checkel, Matthew Evangelista, Judith Kelley, Thomas Risse, and Marianne van de Steeg. In addition, the anonymous reviewers and the editors of IO made excellent suggestions for improving and clarifying the argument. The research for this article was supported by a grant of the German Research Foundation (DFG), 2000–2002.

Can an international organization socialize those who work within it? The European Commission of the European Union is a crucial case because it is an autonomous international organization with a vocation to defend supranational norms. If this body cannot socialize its members, which international organization can? I develop theoretical expectations about how time, organizational structure, alternative processes of preference formation, and national socialization affect international socialization. To test these expectations for the European Commission, I use two surveys of top permanent Commission officials, conducted in 1996 and 2002. The analysis shows that support for supranational norms is relatively high, but that this is more because of national socialization than socialization in the Commission. National norms, originating in prior experiences in national ministries, loyalty to national political parties, or experience with one's country's organization of authority, decisively shape top officials' views on supranational norms. There are, then, several roads to international norms.For comments and advice, I am grateful to Jeffrey Checkel, Gary Marks, Donald Searing, and the editors and two anonymous reviewers for International Organization. An earlier draft was presented at the Center for European Studies of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This project received funding from the Center for European Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and from two grants by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (1996–99, 1999–2002). Gina Cosentino, Erica Edwards, Michael Harvey, and Moira Nelson provided research assistance.

Neofunctional, supranationalist, and constructivist scholars studying European integration hypothesize that social interactions cutting across national borders lead individual actors to shift their allegiance toward the European level. This strong socialization hypothesis presumes that, as a result of prolonged exposure and interactions, individuals adopt role conceptions that promote a sense of “we-ness” and that fit into a view of the European Union (EU) as an autonomous level primarily designed for finding policy solutions in the interest of a common, European, good. In contrast, this article offers an institutional understanding of role enactment that argues that socialization—that is, the adoption of role conceptions—is considerably shaped by actors' embeddedness in multiple European and domestic contexts. Based on quantitative interview data, I demonstrate that, in contrast to the strong socialization hypothesis, extensive exposure to the European level does not necessarily lead to supranational role playing. On the contrary, domestic factors, rather than European-level conditions, positively affect the adoption of supranational role conceptions.Thanks to Ambassador Frans Van Daele and Ambassador Philippe de Shoutheete de Tervarent, who allowed interviews on aspects of this article. I also express my gratitude toward the ISPO-team of the University of Leuven, Belgium, for their help in doing the fieldwork, and to Jan De Bock and Vincent Mertens de Wilmars for the crucial information they provided. Data collection was made possible by a grant from the Fund for Scientific Research–Flanders (Belgium) and was supervised by Guido Dierickx (University of Antwerp, Belgium). Special thanks go to the participants in the various IDNET-workshops and the ARENA research seminar (April 2002), to IO editors Thomas Risse and Lisa Martin, two anonymous reviewers, and Karen Anderson, Morten Egeberg, Jeff Checkel, Alexandra Gheciu, Jeffrey Lewis, Marianne van der Steeg, Mark Rhinard, Jarle Trondal, and Maarten Vink for their extensive and constructive comments.

This article examines the European Union's Committee of Permanent Representatives, or COREPER, a group composed of the EU permanent representatives (permreps) and responsible for preparing upcoming ministerial meetings of the Council. As the heart of everyday decision making in the EU, COREPER is a key laboratory to test whether and how national officials become socialized into a Brussels-based collective culture and what difference this makes for EU negotiations. The key scope conditions for COREPER socialization are high issue density/intensity and insulation from domestic politics. COREPER also displays a range of socialization mechanisms, including strategic calculation, role playing, and normative suasion. Based on extensive interview data and a detailed case study of negotiations for a controversial EU citizenship directive, this article documents a socialization pathway in COREPER marked by adherence to a set of norm-guided rules and principled beliefs in collectively legitimating arguments and making decisions. COREPER socialization does not indicate a pattern of national identities being replaced or subsumed; rather, the evidence points to a socialization process based on a “logic of appropriateness” and an expanded conception of the self.For feedback on earlier versions, I am grateful to the project participants and especially Jeffrey Checkel, Matthew Evangelista, Iain Johnston, and Michael Zürn. I thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for comments that greatly improved the final product. I also acknowledge generous support from the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and the American Political Science Association's Small Grant Program, which funded portions of field research associated with this project.

This article examines the dynamics and implications of practices of socialization enacted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in post–Cold War Central and Eastern Europe. With particular emphasis on the Czech Republic and Romania, I argue that NATO relied extensively on mechanisms of teaching and persuasion to project a particular set of liberal-democratic norms of security into the former Eastern bloc. Several interrelated conditions affected NATO's ability to teach new norms to Central and East European actors: the parties' mutual recognition of their respective roles as “teachers” and “students”; the socializees' identification with the Western security community that NATO claimed to embody; and systematic interactions between teachers and students. In teaching new liberal-democratic norms, NATO exercised significant power: the power to shape its socializees' interpretations of the world and ideas about proper ways of acting in that world. The shared ideational framework established via teaching also empowered subsequent persuasive appeals launched in the name of liberal-democratic norms. NATO conducted a socialization process that targeted—and often affected—not simply the behavior of Central and East European socializees, but also their definitions of national identity and interests.For extremely helpful comments on previous incarnations of this article, I am grateful to the editors of International Organization, two anonymous reviewers, Jeffrey Checkel, Michael Zürn, Alastair Iain Johnston, Michael C. Williams, and all the participants in the IDNET workshops.

This article reflects on three sets of issues raised by the research in this special issue. First it summarizes and critiques the core analytical claims and main scope conditions for socialization as developed by the authors. Then it examines how a critical socialization micro-process—persuasion—fits with a thin rationalist argument. I suggest that agents who are more deeply socialized may be more strategic in their behavior precisely because they are true believers. Thus the presence of strategic behavior does not undermine the possibility of persuasion. It may be an especially obvious consequence of persuasion. Finally, I examine how the authors understand socialization and identity change. Here I argue that the content of identity needs to be unpacked further into four dimensions—constitutive norms, social purpose, relational beliefs, and cognitive worldviews—in order to more fully test how much, and what type of, identity change occurs as a result of socialization. Finally, the article looks at how the findings in the European case might be extended to, and compared with, empirical evidence from other parts of the world, in particular Asia.Thanks to Jeff Checkel, Michael Glosny, and two anonymous referees for comments and criticisms.

Building on the empirical findings of the preceding articles, we advance three arguments. First, while socialization research has typically been construed as constructivism's home turf, this volume's emphasis on mechanisms and scope conditions reveals that rational choice has much to contribute here as well. We develop this claim by undertaking a “double interpretation” of each essay, which allows us to advance more fine-grained arguments connecting the two social theories. Second, while there are good conceptual reasons for expecting a predominance of international socialization in Europe, the empirical cases instead suggest that its effects are often weak and secondary to dynamics at the national level. We make sense of this puzzle by reasoning more explicitly in longitudinal terms, by drawing on work on European identity, and by noting that students of European socialization—as well as integration—have much to gain by “bringing the domestic back in.” Finally, while our collaborators have demonstrated the empirical and theoretical benefits of combining a social ontology with a positivist epistemology, this comes at a cost, with normative perspectives neglected. This matters—and all the more so in a Europe marked by supranational constitution- and polity building. Socialization dynamics may well take us beyond the nation-state, but their legitimacy and governance implications bring us back—forcefully—to it.We are grateful to the project participants and contributors to this volume for valuable discussions on the themes addressed here. For detailed comments on earlier versions of this essay, we thank two anonymous reviewers, the IO editors, Peter Katzenstein, and Ron Mitchell.