Cultures of Order: Leadership, Language, and Social Reconstruction in Germany and Japan

Cultures of Order explores how Germany and Japan each struggled to define an appropriate role for themselves in the postwar international order. In Germany, proponents of institutional constraint fought and generally prevailed over those who stressed national rights. This pattern continued even as Germany achieved unification at the end of the Cold War. In Japan, however, the national rights strategy was more successful, and Japanese leaders have been less willing than their German counterparts to predicate international order on commitment to an emergent institutional framework. In both cases, the choices made by leaders were critical, despite the constraints under which they operated. In this book the authors utilize a constructivist theory of order, emphasizing the distinctive ways language works to normative effect, to explain these debates and how they have contributed to two very different "cultures of order."

Katja Weber is Associate Professor of International Affairs at Georgia Institute of Technology and author of Hierarchy amidst Anarchy: Transaction Costs and Institutional Choice, also published by SUNY Press. Paul A. Kowert is Associate Professor of International Relations at Florida International University. He is the author of Groupthink or Deadlock: When Do Leaders Learn from Their Advisors?, also published by SUNY Press, and the coeditor (with Vendulka Kubálková and Nicholas Onuf) of International Relations in a Constructed World.