New troubles for the West: Debt relief, climate change, and comparative foreign policy in the post-Cold War era (England, Germany, United States, Japan)

In the post-Cold War era, a number of issues emerged on the policy landscape to re-shape the agenda of decision-makers in the advanced industrialized world. Many of them were related to the process of globalization and involved moral or "normative" concerns, if ultimately related to traditional security and economic issues. What distinguishes these issues is that the primary actors backing such advocacy efforts were motivated by normative or moral beliefs about right and wrong, as opposed to utilitarian self-interest. Not all issues achieved equal attention or support, and this raises the more general question and empirical puzzle, why do some normative issues "succeed" where others fail? Related to this is the sense that in different countries, these new "normative" issues mattered differently and, in some cases, contributed to disputes between the U.S. and its main allies. Along with other developments in the international system, conflicts over issues like climate change brought into question whether or not the Western alliance would survive.; Through the study of two cases (developing country debt relief and climate change) in four countries (the UK, Germany, the U.S., and Japan), this dissertation sheds light on why some states supported new issues while others were more reluctant or failed to do so and how some cases became bound up in wider disputes in international relations between the great powers. To explain these dynamics, I unpack a "strategic framing" argument, emphasizing the ways in which successful norm entrepreneurs use rhetoric to tap into the main ideological currents in the polities where they operate. My argument focuses on how successful advocates induce "attention shifts" by decision-makers. Thus, advocates succeed minimally when they persuade decision-makers to embrace their definition of the problem and maximally when they endorse advocates' preferred policies. However, whether those framing efforts are successful often depends upon how those messages are received by domestic veto players, gatekeepers whose approval is necessary for a policy change to occur. Because veto players vary by country and issue area, understanding who the gatekeepers are and what they want is crucial to this analysis.