Constitutive processes

Primary institutions are constitutive by defining who can count as an actor, how such actorness is acquired, and the basic nature of the relations between those actors. Here, a community of equally sovereign states is only one of various possible configurations. Colonial international societies, for example, are based on a dualistic, hierarchical, and divisible conception of sovereignty.Footnote ⁴³ Besides states, primary institutions can also endow nonstate actors and secondary institutions with actor quality.Footnote ⁴⁴ For example, it has been argued that, in the European regional international society, institutions such as ‘pooled sovereignty’ empower the bodies of the European Union while challenging the role of member states.Footnote ⁴⁵ Apart from informing its basic composition, primary institutions can also constitute the scope of an international society as such, and change in primary institutions can lead to an expansion or contraction of established societies, or the emergence of new ones. Again, the example of colonial rule is insightful: As long as the primary institution of colonialism was upheld, the European centre and the colonised peripheries were so intricately linked that it is hard to speak of these regional sub-entities as international societies in their own right. Only with the period of decolonisation came the emergence of autonomous regional international societies in places such as Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Primary institutions also influence the basic interests of actors and, more fundamentally, the kind of rationality actors pursue.Footnote ⁴⁶ The institutional framework can encourage ‘maximising’ as well as ‘satisficing’ behaviour, and it is quite likely that elements of both will be present in an international society.

At the same time, however, secondary institutions are constitutive as well, namely by ascribing differentiated roles to actors and by empowering them to engage in specific forms of interaction that would not be possible without the existence of those institutions.Footnote ⁴⁷ As an obvious example, membership in international organisations or regimes has a profound impact on who is perceived as a member of international society. Membership can signal the political relevance of an actor, as in the case of the EU's eagerness to take part in fora such as the G20 and the East Asia Summit, the rehabilitation of former pariahs, as in the accession of Myanmar in ASEAN, and even the status as an actor as such, as in the case of Palestine's struggle for formal representation in the UN framework. Apart from multilateral formats, it seems to be conclusive to also include bilateral treaties and agreements in this category. These different kinds of institutions can affect members' relations by constituting hierarchies, rights, and duties. They are also constitutive by distributing material resources, defining preference structures and sanctioning behaviour with a wide range of instruments, including ‘shaming’, conditionality, and formal jurisdiction.Footnote ⁴⁸ In this, they privilege certain actors while disempowering others. For example, aspiring EU members face the condition to accept the Copenhagen Criteria set by existing members in a ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ situation, which in effect gives the existing members a powerful tool in defining the conditions of membership in the international society. This is not to say that accession to secondary institutions is a necessary condition for membership in an international society.Footnote ⁴⁹ Still, secondary institutions define to a considerable extent and in more detail than primary ones the identities, interests, and capabilities of the actors, and thus open up possibilities for meaningful interaction.Footnote ⁵⁰

It follows from these considerations that international actors are embedded in a double-layered constitutive framework of primary and secondary institutions, and it can hardly be said that their actorness and behaviour is influenced any less by secondary institutions than by primary institutions, or that the primary level dominates, let alone determines, developments on the secondary one, as the ‘embeddedness’ argument of classical regime theory suggests.Footnote ⁵¹ This might be a plausible interpretation of some instances, such as the negotiation for a postwar international order after 1945, where new secondary institutions had to be created to conform to the changed understandings of sovereignty and the legitimate use of force, but in other cases, the original momentum for change is more plausibly looked for in the evolution of secondary institutions – think of the neofunctional theories of European integration. In any case, an inquiry into the conditions under which any of these logics prevails needs to take into account the role of agency.

Processes of institutionalisation

For the constitution of practice by intersubjective meanings is only one part of the story. As Dunne has pointed out, the English School must not overemphasise structure to the detriment of agency in its analysis of international society.Footnote ⁵² In a process parallel to constitution, therefore, practice feeds back into primary and secondary institutions in distinctive ways of institutionalisation. By institutionalisation, I mean the emergence of permanent patterns of intersubjective meanings through social, particularly discursive, practice.

Primary institutions are institutionalised via learning processes.Footnote ⁵³ An important mechanism in these processes is the iteration of practice, especially the repeated uttering of complementary speech acts, which gives them normative character and leads to convergent expectations about behaviour. It is only when meanings are assumed by actors as something that does not need to be agreed upon in every single social encounter that they become effective as institutions.Footnote ⁵⁴ Primary institutionalisation is shaped by distinctive forms of knowledge production, which can be more or less inclusive and shaped by a variety of actors including political leaders, influential media and civil-society representatives, who found their participation upon different bases of authority and legitimacy.Footnote ⁵⁵ These discursive processes are not limited to a specific time and place but are rather permanently carried out in a diffuse, semi-public realm, although they sometimes crystallise in specific formats such as conferences or commissions. For example, the International Commission on State Intervention and Sovereignty, which formulated the Responsibility to Protect as a new international norm, operated as a focal point of a broader discourse about the relation of sovereignty and human rights. The more actors with credible authority claims are included in such discourses and the less hierarchical they are organised, the more likely it is that meanings are contested and that discursive struggles impede institutionalisation. On the other hand, however, inclusiveness also promises to strengthen the legitimacy of an institution once consensus is found.

For secondary institutions, institutionalisation takes place primarily by means of institution-building, that is, the conscious creation, reform, or dissolving of international organisations, regimes, treaties, networks, and the like. While institution-building is also a discursive practice, it takes place in more discrete situations and among a smaller group of authorised actors. Potential mechanisms here are the differentiation of specific roles, the establishment of standard procedures and the formalisation of rules, for example by means of declarative speech acts or legal codification.Footnote ⁵⁶ I refrain from using the term of ‘institutional design’ because it evokes a one-sided view of institution-building as being driven only by a instrumental logic of action. Considerations of legitimacy, coercion, and argumentative rationality play equally important roles in the creation of institutions, as Friedrich Kratochwil and John Gerard Ruggie, Adler, and Thomas Risse have respectively pointed out.Footnote ⁵⁷

A question I have deliberately left unanswered so far was how exactly primary and secondary institutions should be defined so as to allow for a clear empirical identification. The preceding account of the mechanisms of constitution and institutionalisation offers a good foundation for such a definition. In accordance with the conceptual framework outlined above, the definitions must locate both primary and secondary institutions in an intersubjective ontology. From the literature on institutional layers, two criteria for such a differentiation can be derived: the degree of formalisation and the degree of specificity.Footnote ⁵⁸ The former seems an expedient choice; however, there are some problems with it. While formalisation in fact seems to be an important mechanism of institutionalisation of secondary institutions, it is not the only one. In the case of international organisations, for example, informal procedures can assume a highly binding character without being explicitly codified. At the same time, it does not seem plausible that fundamental frames of thought in International Relations such as sovereignty or diplomacy, which are commonly seen as primary institutions, should be treated as secondary institutions as soon as they become enshrined in formal legal documents – after all, the type of practice they constitute does not change in the course of this process.Footnote ⁵⁹

I therefore suggest using the criterion of specificity to differentiate primary and secondary institutions, as it provides for a distinction that is substantial rather than formal. In this sense, primary institutions should be seen as sets of discursively formulated expectations about an aspect of international relations without regard to specific situations or actors. To facilitate exchange with other strands of institutionalist literature, these general expectations can be called principles and norms. Secondary institutions are also sets of discursively formulated expectations, but they are more specific in that they refer to temporally and spatially discrete sections of international reality and apply to a clearly defined set of actors. Complementary to the definition of primary institutions, the more specific expectations can be called rules and decision-making procedures. These definitions imply that regimes in the classical conception as principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures actually contain elements of both primary and secondary institutions.

Applying it to an empirical phenomenon helps to illustrate this distinction. The European Political Cooperation (EPC) was a set of understandings about legitimate action with respect to foreign and security policy in the European Community (EC). As such, it specified obligations and regular courses of action for a specific set of actors, mainly the member states as represented by the foreign ministers and, eventually, the Commission, in a specific policy field. In so doing, the EPC was in line with more general ideas about the conduct of international affairs in European international society, such as multilateralism and a sense of bounded hegemony, that is, the acceptance by the smaller states of a dominant status of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom within an institutional framework granting formal equality to all members. However, multilateralism and bounded hegemony applied not only to the kind of practice specified in the EPC but to all kinds of interactions in the European international society at large. They should therefore be regarded as primary institutions and as such be separated from the more specific provisions of the EPC, which formed a secondary institution. They did so even before the formalisation of the EPC as an official EC policy with the Single European Act in 1986, which did not alter the substance of the practice constituted, although it certainly made the institution more binding. Formalisation was only one way of institutionalising the EPC and it generally succeeded rather than preceded the establishment of coordination practices. Another mechanism, equally if not more important, was social learning, which has been said to have instilled a ‘coordination reflex’ in EC/EU actors that makes dialogue on matters of foreign and security policy appear as the natural course of action.Footnote ⁶⁰

Empirical evidence for both kinds of institutions can be found in the practices – including, first and foremost, the discursive practices – which are constituted by and reproduce meaning structures pertaining to the conduct of international relations.Footnote ⁶¹ The researcher must interpret these discourses and practices in order to determine to what extent they reflect general or specific intersubjective understandings about the conduct of international relations. I am aware that the classification of an institution as primary or secondary will not always be clear-cut. Ultimately, the distinction is a heuristic tool, and as with all such tools, its application remains subject to the judgement of the analyst, just as its usefulness depends on the plausibility and theoretical expediency of the analyses it generates. While eventually, this utility will have to be proven by empirical application, the above makes a strong argument for defining primary and secondary institutions on the basis of specificity, rather than formalisation.

Explaining stability: Positive feedback in international institutions

What makes the system of constitution and institutionalisation outlined above so powerful with respect to international society is that, taken together, the mechanisms of constitution and institutionalisation tend to have a reproductive effect.Footnote ⁶² They are, in the language of historical institutionalism, positive feedback processes that lead to path dependence in institutional developments. The notion of path dependence helps us explain the relative stability of institutional set-ups, while at the same time allowing us to account for institutional change. One of the basic ideas of path dependence is that self-reinforcing processes lead to institutional stability so that change will usually happen incrementally, while fundamental transformations are only possible in response to external shocks. As a consequence of this emphasis on path dependence, the analytical focus in the study of the historical development of international societies is redirected to the social context and the mechanisms that lead to the emergence, the persistence and the change of international institutions. This is an approach towards the study of international institutions that suggests the use of ‘historical causal analysis’, an approach that comprises two explanatory components: first, a reconstruction of the processes that initiated particular institutional paths at critical moments, and second, an account of the mechanisms that lead to its reproduction ‘even though the original generating event or process does not recur’.Footnote ⁶³ Causal analysis understood in conventional, static terms can hardly paint the whole picture.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the context of international society, this means answering not only questions about the constitutive role of institutions and their emergence through initial institutionalisation, but also about their path-dependent interaction which leads to institutional stability and change.

In what follows, I will show in more specific terms how this might work. Starting with sources of stability, there are several sources of positive feedback surrounding the institutional configuration of an international society: First, through effects of learning and reification, institutions assume a taken-for-granted status for those whose lives are shaped so fundamentally by them. Institutions are unlikely to change ‘ultimately because they structure the very choices about reform that the individual is likely to make’.Footnote ⁶⁵ While contingency becomes obvious with the benefit of hindsight, those living in a historical international society have always tended to construct the principles of that society either as expressions of a natural or even divine order – think of the self-understanding of China as the Middle Kingdom in its imperial era and that of the Roman Church in pre-Westphalian times – or as a stage in a teleological process – an argument that served to justify Soviet imperialism during the Cold War. This is not to suggest that any institutional configuration has ever been accepted completely as given by everyone living in it. What can be asserted, however, is that reification makes it difficult for those opposing an institutional configuration to draw on existent meanings in order to claim legitimacy, or even invoke a common identity on the basis of which to act against established institutions. For example, indigenous anticolonial movements had a hard time establishing claims for self-determination because the institution of nationalism was originally constructed as pertaining only to Western states. The dominant construction of the relation between the colonial rulers and the colonised population as one between the civilised and the noncivilised world naturalised the racial difference, and made it hard for the latter to be heard.Footnote ⁶⁶

Second, positive feedback results from power effects. Processes of institutionalisation are heavily informed by permanent processes of political assertion and contestation.Footnote ⁶⁷ At the same time, the constitutive effects of institutions tend to increase the power of those with the most ability to influence their form – a point that has been stressed by both rationalist and constructivist authors.Footnote ⁶⁸ Even post-structuralists like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who emphasise that meanings are in permanent struggle and deny the possibility of a final consensus, have acknowledged the existence of such temporal stabilisations in discursive practice. ‘Any discourse’, they write, ‘is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Exactly which meanings become dominant and are institutionalised will depend to a great extent on the endowment with power resources and political authority of those who utter them. In International Relations, the very ability to claim discursive authority is highly unequally distributed among different actors. Government officials can claim the symbolic authority of being elected as representatives of their state, as well as the physical authority of being backed by a security apparatus. By contrast, attempts to establish an influential transnational public sphere are seriously complicated by language barriers and parochial political loyalties – even in a culturally relatively homogenous space such as Europe. However, even where such a public sphere, however rudimentary, can be discerned, only those who possess the necessary resources and infrastructure to influence its discourse will have a voice in the process of institutionalisation. Once established, therefore, primary institutions reflect the interests of privileged groups and reproduce the power relations that brought them into being in the first place.Footnote ⁷⁰

Third, certain institutional effects shift preference structures towards rule-consistent behaviour and inhibit institutional change. Actors feel that it is expedient to promote existing norms and play by established rules because they benefit from compliant behaviour. ‘Benefit’ in this context has to be understood in broad terms: It can mean to obtain material profit because coordination effects, adaptive expectations, and high start-up costs make it inefficient to choose other institutional frameworks.Footnote ⁷¹ However, benefits can also flow from an increase in legitimacy and status,Footnote ⁷² as is evidenced by the striving of newly independent polities for recognition as sovereign states. Such ambitions do not only reinforce the primary institution of sovereignty but also the role of international organisations as embodiments of the international community and as providers of legitimacy and status by means of accession.

Mutually reinforcing relations between primary and secondary institutions of this sort lead to a fourth source of institutional feedback, namely institutional linkages. This is connected to the argument that complex international societies normally consist of a web of mutually compatible institutions and consequentially, a single institution cannot be changed without additional change in or of a number of other institutions if excessive inconsistencies in the overall institutional set-up are to be avoided. Pierson has this in mind when he says that ‘[p]ath-dependent processes will often be evident not only at the level of individual organizations or institutions but at a more macro level that involves configurations of complementary organizations and institutions.’Footnote ⁷³ In an English School context, this means that institutional configurations, that is, sets of compatible and complementary institutions, are quite persistent once they have been established. This is not to say that there are no tensions between individual institutions at all, and we will see that they can be a powerful motor of institutional change. Yet, the very fact that international society has been so reluctant to accommodate new institutions, such as the notion of humanitarian intervention or environmental stewardship, into the established set of institutions is evidence that some norms and rules do not fit easily into the horizontally linked web of Westphalian-style institutions, which combine sovereignty, nationalism, nonintervention, and other institutions that can be seen as logically connected and intricately linked.

Krasner has introduced the term of ‘horizontal linkages’ for this phenomenon.Footnote ⁷⁴ Having established the idea of primary and secondary institutions as distinct constitutive layers of international society, it seems appropriate to supplement Krasner's concept with the idea of ‘vertical linkages’. In this sense, primary and secondary institutions form constitutive contexts for each other. Up to a certain extent, secondary institutions must reflect the meanings inherent in prevalent primary institutions because they are institutionalised on the basis of actors' identities and expectations which are constituted by the primary level.Footnote ⁷⁵ This effect limits the prospects for change in secondary institutions: In contrast to what functional and rational-choice accounts of institutions suggest, secondary institutions hardly ever adapt optimally to functional demands or coordination problemsFootnote ⁷⁶ because the positive feedback mechanisms that link them to the primary fabric of international society limit the range of included actors and what counts as a legitimate attempt at institutional reform. Moreover, it restricts the transferability of organisational forms from one regional setting to another. The supranational set-up of the European Union works well in the context of Europe's move towards post-Westphalian norms and principles after World War II, but it lends itself only partially as a model for organisations such as ASEAN or Mercosur, which are situated in primary institutional contexts that put a lot more emphasis on national sovereignty. Vice versa, primary institutions are unlikely to change drastically as long as the secondary constitutive context does not change because secondary institutions help to make primary ones more durable. As the literature on norm socialisation has pointed out, secondary institution-building can serve as a means to ‘lock in’ certain norms and principles because challenges to those primary institutions can be delegitimised as a violation of formal arrangements and codified law.Footnote ⁷⁷

Explaining change: Endogenous dynamics and shocks

Taking path dependence seriously means that an institutional configuration will be relatively stable once the social mechanisms of reproduction have been put into operation. Change will normally be incremental. However, exogenous shocks can induce more drastic transformations. I will look at both possibilities in turn.

An institutional configuration can be subject to incremental change as a result of endogenous dynamics. Incremental change occurs when discursive actors manage to partly overcome the stabilising structuration effects linking institutions to practice over a long period of time, thus gradually subverting their meaning. While this type of change is slow, it can in fact over time amount to far-reaching alterations in an institutional configuration. Institutionalist and constructivist literature is rich in suggestions for sources of such dynamics – unintended and spill-over effects, the reinterpretation and subversion of established meanings, contact with foreign institutions or societies and gradual power transformationsFootnote ⁷⁸ – and it is neither expedient nor necessary to discuss them in detail here. Suffice it to say that incremental dynamics can induce change not only in secondary institutions, as has been amply demonstrated in empirical studies in a variety of policy fields.Footnote ⁷⁹ To give an example for gradual change in primary institutions, when the principle of national self-determination emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its proponents did not anticipate that the notion would contribute to the collapse of their colonial empires beyond European borders because it was perceived to be obvious that the idea only applied to the ‘civilised’ nations of the West.Footnote ⁸⁰ However, over time, the paradoxical nature of this limitation was increasingly exposed in discourse, so that the notion eventually was universalised. Whatever the sources of incremental change and the level of impact, it is important to note that they only become effective if they are discursively articulated by the relevant actors.Footnote ⁸¹

More abrupt transformations are possible in response to external shocks. These are events that create discursive contexts in which contradictions become plainly apparent and can be openly addressed, private beliefs and grievances can be mobilised and actionable, and innovative ideas obtain sufficient space for their realisation. For example, Bull argues that the dynamics of contestation of the European colonial order were already conceivable in the interwar period but only came to fully play out and lead to a transformation of international society as a result of the radical power shifts in the course of the Second World War.Footnote ⁸²

The Historical Institutionalism literature has been criticised for failing to explain the exact processes through which shocks and critical junctures induce institutional change,Footnote ⁸³ but a focus on the mechanisms of constitution and institutionalisation allows us to overcome this shortcoming. To count as a shock, an event has to have a disturbing effect on the feedback processes of constitution and institutionalisation so that their reproductive impact on the institutional configuration is disrupted.Footnote ⁸⁴ Having identified the mechanisms of positive feedback in international society as outlined above, it follows that shocks are events that disturb learning effects by fundamentally altering established patterns of meaning production and lead to what Adler has called ‘cognitive evolution’,Footnote ⁸⁵ change the distribution of power among actors,Footnote ⁸⁶ or alter the preference structures in a way that is not consistent with the logic of the existing institutional configuration. It seems appropriate that to count as a shock, an event should affect more than just one of the feedback mechanisms because otherwise, the reproductive processes that remain intact can compensate the disturbance of a single mechanism. Major wars, crises and fundamental power shifts are likely candidates for such shocks. For regional international societies, external processes such as changes on the global level of international society need to be taken into account as well.

Shocks lead to ‘critical junctures’, meaning that practices promoting alternative meanings and institutional forms have better chances to succeed in the struggles surrounding the processes of institutionalisation than during ‘normal’ times, until the feedback mechanisms kick back in and institutions largely follow the adopted path.Footnote ⁸⁷ For a moment of contingency, possibilities for the adaption or dissolution of old institutions, or for the emergence of new ones, open up. However, such instances of openness are not simply a result of institutions releasing their constraints imposed upon actors so that the latter obtain a broader set of options for action, as has been argued elsewhere.Footnote ⁸⁸ An approach that stresses the constitutive nature of institutions has to look instead at the way in which, at critical junctures, meanings gain in relevance that provide legitimacy to new kinds of actors and forms of practice that were previously not considered as justifiable, or not considered possible at all.

The idea of critical junctures emphasises that timing and context are decisive for institutional development: When and in what institutional context critical shocks appear and how they are interpreted will greatly affect the forms secondary institutions will take. This notion of timing can not only refer to a simple point in a universal chronology, such as ‘in 1986’, but also to a particular stage in historical development that may occur at different chronological points in different regions, such as processes of state-building or industrialisation. For example, while the initiatives for region-building in Europe and Southeast Asia occurred roughly at the same time, in Europe the World War II experience led the long-established nation-states to adopt a regional project aimed at transcending state sovereignty and precluding war as a means of regional politics, while in Southeast Asia the processes of decolonisation and nation-building made it imperative for the fledging states to build institutions that strengthened sovereignty and territoriality.Footnote ⁸⁹

Some words of caution should be added. First, it should be noted that shocks and the ensuing critical junctures must not be equated with institutional changes. The former are merely a necessary condition for the latter, and the mere instance of a shock does not preclude the institutional configuration of an international society from continuing to move along the established path.Footnote ⁹⁰ Second, the notion of shocks seems to introduce some sort of materialism in the form of wars, power shifts, etc. back into an essentially ideational perspective. This is not my intention. While I acknowledge that historical events rely to some extent on material foundations such as spaces and objects, these become socially relevant only in the interpretation by actors in the context of existing intersubjectively shared and institutionalised meanings. Shocks, therefore, do not result in a simple adaption to a changed external context but are subject to political processes, as they become effective only in their discursive representations. Their disturbing effects on the reproductive mechanisms lie in the fact that references to them make powerful objections to particular hegemonic discourses possible – for example by claiming that the events contradict dominant lines of thought. If the dominant discourse cannot accommodate these tensions and fails to justify its own validity, paths for the institutionalisation of alternative meanings open up.Footnote ⁹¹

Both exogenous shocks and endogenous dynamics can result in inconsistencies in the institutional configuration. The English School has long recognised the role of horizontal tensions between primary institutions in institutional change, as the abundant debate on the dynamic relationship between sovereignty and human rights demonstrates.Footnote ⁹² However, logical incompatibilities of this sort can also occur between the primary and secondary level. In this regard, the problematic relation between human rights and sovereignty has a horizontal and a vertical dimension. While the ascendance of the human rights concept to a point where it can be considered a primary institution raised questions regarding its relation with the longstanding primary institution of state sovereignty, it was also in conflict with established rules and procedures of the collective security regime of the United Nations.

Both horizontal and vertical inconsistencies put strain on institutional linkages, as they lead to contradictory expectations about actor behaviour. Up to a certain point, tensions can be tolerated or suppressed in institutional arrangements, and it might well be that they are an intrinsic characteristic of any international society, as Buzan implies when he speaks of the ‘perennial and permanently necessary discussion of how order and justice relate to each other in an ever changing global system’.Footnote ⁹³ Therefore, the resulting institutional inconsistencies will not per se and automatically prompt adaption. On the other hand, logical incompatibilities of this sort also constitute a potential point of attack since discursive actors can point to contradictions in order to question the legitimacy of certain institutions. If such strategies succeed, the reform or transformation of existent institutions or, in extreme cases, their dissolution and the creation of new ones becomes likely. An additional and equally important dimension of change is the alteration of scope, that is, the expansion or diminishing of the geographical extension of an institution or an international society as a whole.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the case mentioned above, the primary institution of state sovereignty has increasingly come to be seen as linked to the ability of a state to grant protection to its population. The resulting vertical inconsistencies with the secondary layer were mitigated – though clearly not resolved – with the United Nations 2005 World Summit Outcome and subsequent resolutions, which specified criteria justifying intervention and established authorisation procedures that asserted the central role of the Security Council.

As enabling conditions, inconsistencies between institutions can thus provide additional momentum for change after initial shifts in the institutional set-up have occurred. Since, as indicated above, none of the institutional levels can be granted ontological primacy over the other, one cannot predict ex ante how inconsistencies will be processed. In practice, secondary institutions can be reformed so that they are more in line with new forms of thinking, as in the R2P example, or by adjusting beliefs and meanings on the primary level to ‘new realities’, or by a mixture of both, where the dynamic of institutional adaption oscillates between the two levels.Footnote ⁹⁵ Finally, it is also possible that tensions can be accommodated within the existing configuration in such a way that no further change results.

Three main lessons emanate from these observations: First, the two-layered structure of international society can at the same time catalyse and mediate momentum for institutional change. Second, how the dynamics of change play out is always dependent on the way in which agents deliberate the consequences of tensions, constructing pressure on primary or secondary institutions, or both. And finally, as a consequence, the discursive strategies and the power dynamics that inform these communicative processes become an important object of study.