ABSTRACT
Cooperation Among Democracies established me as a scholar of the transatlantic affairs, for better or worse. The empirical evidence only supported the latter, while disconfirming that democracies were peaceful in general. The sudden and peaceful end of the division of Europe and of Germany challenged core assumptions of our prevailing IR theories, which simply led us to misperceive what was happening before our eyes. The “neo-neo” debate was over, and social constructivism had become a widely accepted paradigm in IR theories. The “governance in areas of limited statehood” program also marked my continued research collaboration with Tanja. The chapter provides an intellectual journey that started with research on the domestic fabric of German foreign and security policy in the 1980s and continued with studies on the transatlantic security community and the “democratic peace”; on transnational relations, international norms, and communicative action; and on the domestic impact of international human rights during the 1990s.
