| This dissertation attempts to explain the persistent robustness of the Atlantic Community despite ongoing tensions and crises in the community. Conventional realist theories for explaining change are inadequate for studying the Atlantic Community because they posit that change occurs through hegemonic war, coercion, and bargaining. The Atlantic Community, however, is a transformed anarchy where the security dilemma has been solved. This means that its members solve all of their disputes short of war, and maintain a reflexive sense of the normative value of the community and an interest in preserving the community. The study of the Atlantic (security) Community requires instead a discursive approach focusing on identity and public argument. Drawing on Lene Hansen's method for the study of discourse, I undertake a discourse analysis of public statements made by policy elites about alliance relations and policy. I study the allied debates over out-of-area intervention in Suez in 1956, Vietnam in 1965, Bosnia in the early 1990s and Iraq in 2003, to show how the definitions of out-of-area, threat, and responsibility have changed over time, and undertake a broader cross-time analysis of arguments about the meaning of Atlanticism to show that evidence for the consolidation of the security community can be seen in discourse. I use a three-tiered theoretical framework which focuses on the contextual identity of the Atlantic community and its changing meaning; on the implementation of that identity through arguments about allies' expectations of each other; and on the argumentative processes the allies use to change or preserve their community in times of discord. This framework focuses attention on the useful vagueness of identity, which allows the allies to interpret it in ways that help maintain the community. It also refocuses attention on the importance of agents in the construction of identity by showing how the allies actively bound themselves together through their arguments. I conclude that while the Atlantic Community has seen significant change in discourse, where much of the basis and meaning of Atlanticism has changed, it has not endured a change of discourse, such that it is not recognizable to itself. |
