ABSTRACT

The compliance and respect extended to these norms can be seen in various examples throughout this book and provide these supposedly elusive norms with a tangibility that demonstrates them to be more than exogenously given preferences of policy-making agents. Kratochwil’s definition and clarification of norms in Chapter 2 as ‘guidance devices’ that facilitate the development of intersubjective understandings is supported by the case study of Japan’s developing peacekeeping policy. Through the numerous examples elucidated in this book, we can see that norms of international behaviour do exist and are borne of internal and external sources, promoted by a norm entrepreneur, which can both constrain and liberate the decisions of Japanese policy-making agents. Particularly the sense of ‘ought-to-ness’ has been demonstrated on the part of government, bureaucratic and civil societal actors to contribute something to international society in the security field consummate with Japan’s international economic standing. With the evidence offered in this book in mind, a tentative definition of a norm can be proffered:

an intersubjectively understood standard of behaviour rooted either (or both) in domestic or international society. Championed and promoted by an individual or organisation, it is often (but not by necessity) embodied in the form of a treaty, charter, Constitution, and so on, and upon gaining a degree of legitimacy frames the gamut of decisions and actions available to individual decisionmakers in both a constraining and encouraging sense.