ABSTRACT
How should we conceptualize and evaluate the extent and nature of international influence, if any, on democratic rule of law (DRoL) developments in domestic systems? Throughout history, most studies in democratization have been characterized by a puzzling lack of systematic thinking about these fundamental questions. From the inception of modern democratization studies in the 1960s until the end of the Cold War, scholars of democratic transitions and consolidation largely conceived the outcomes of domestic political processes as being driven by national forces and calculations, at both elite and mass levels, and were reluctant to venture beyond the demos in search of the causes of democratization. What was true of studies regarding the development of democracy reflected a broader malaise in which research into international impact on domestic change was largely neglected for many decades by historians, political scientists and lawyers. The dominant paradigm of political sociology from Marx to Barrington Moore, for one, has stressed the importance of internal social structure and culture in the shaping of politics and the state, sidelining the calls of such eminent scholars as John Robert Seeley, in the late nineteenth century, and Otto Hintze, in the 1960s, to remedy the neglect of international factors in the explanation of domestic political developments (Almond 1989, 239-41). Indeed, the intellectual progeny of the same tradition continues to wield considerable influence (and yield meaningful insights) by emphasizing the importance of inherited cultural, ideological, socioeconomic, and institutional legacies to defining post-transition outcomes of democracy, attitudes to liberal values, as well as national and ethnic identities (Ekiert and Hanson 2003).
