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Why do agents comply with the norms embedded in regimes and international institutions? Scholars have proposed two competing answers to this compliance puzzle, one rationalist, the other constructivist. Rationalists emphasize coercion, cost/benefit calculations, and material incentives; constructivists stress social learning, socialization, and social norms. Both schools, however, explain important aspects of compliance. To build a bridge between them, I examine the role of argumentative persuasion and social learning. This makes explicit the theory of social choice and interaction implicit in many constructivist compliance studies, and it broadens rationalist arguments about the instrumental and noninstrumental processes through which actors comply. I argue that domestic politics—in particular, institutional and historical contexts—delimit the causal role of persuasion/social learning, thus helping both rationalists and constructivists to refine the scope of their compliance claims. To assess the plausibility of these arguments, I examine why states comply with new citizenship/membership norms promoted by European regional organizations.

In recent years, constructivist thinking about global politics has brought a breath of fresh auto international relations. By exploring questions of identity and interest, constructivist scholars have articulated an important corrective to the methodological individualism and materialism that have come to dominate much of IR. As the books under review indicate, constructivism has also succeeded in demonstrating its empirical value—documenting a new and important causal role for norms and social structure in global politics. Theoretically, however, the approach remains underspecified. In particular, constructivists typically fail to explain the origins of such structures, how they change over time, how their effects vary cross nationally, or the mechanisms through which they constitute states and individuals. Missing is the substantive theory and attention to agency that will provide answers to such puzzles, as well as ensure the development of a productive research program.

The constructivist study of norms faces two central challenges—reintegrating agency into its largely structural accounts and unpacking its arguments at the national level. This article addresses these issues, and does so in four parts. First, I briefly review the burgeoning constructivist literature, exploring the ontological and theoretical reasons for its neglect of agency. Second, by adding social content to the concept ofdiffusion, the transmission mechanism linking international norms to domestic change, I explain the motivation of domestic actors to accept new normative prescriptions, thus making a start at restoring agency to constructivist accounts. Third, I argue these key actors will vary cross‐nationally as a function of state‐society relations (“domestic structure”).Fourth, the argument is applied to the politics of national identity in post—Cold War Europe. In particular, I examine the degree to which international norms are affecting debates over citizenship and national minorities in contemporary Germany, with empirical data drawn from the European human rights regime centered on the Council of Europe.

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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+ As a scientific term, the concept of socialization originated more than 100 years ago-in the first issue of the American Journal of Sociology+ 1 It later became a central term in sociology through the work of Durkheim, who saw it as the process through which individuals develop from the stage of being driven by instinct to being a sociable human being+ 2 Socialization research in general has, since then, been marked by a definitional paradox+ The closer the definition gets to the common-sense meaning of socialization-actors internalize norms and standards of behavior by acting in social structures-the more it runs into operational prob-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+ 1+ Ross 1896+

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