Proactivism and State Identity: Irish and Canadian Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Policy

In her dissertation, Una Becker-Jakob analysed why some states commit themselves consistently and at times proactively to constructing and strengthening multilateral institutions for cooperative arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament. Case studies comprised Ireland’s and Canada’s policies regarding nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, biological weapons control and the ban on anti-personnel mines. She employed longitudinal studies of the international activities as well as process-tracing of domestic decision-making and qualitative content analyses of the pertinent discourses to explore whether a social psychological-social constructivist concept of state identity can help understand the phenomenon under scrutiny.

The empirical results showed that the observed policies can indeed be plausibly traced to the respective state identities. Translated into conceptual considerations, the results also showed that state identity as analytical construct is particularly valuable for foreign policy analysis when it takes into account the bureaucratic culture of foreign ministries as that mechanism which translates state identity into policy.