Recent events in Europe—the rise of nationalist/populist governments and movements (some of which harbor xenophobic and anti-Semitic elements), the reaction to the refugee crisis, the Turkish government’s response to a failed coup attempt—highlight the continent’s deficiencies and backsliding on human rights. Somewhat paradoxically, these events have played out against a backdrop of European regional protections for rights that have perhaps never been stronger. Most notably, alongside the institutions and human rights law of the Council of Europe, the European Union has moved to give itself the juridical (Charter of Fundamental Rights) and institutional (Fundamental Rights Agency) means for addressing human rights as well.
The two books under review—both new additions to the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series—address this institutional complexity in largely complementary ways. In European Civil Society and Human Rights Advocacy, Markus Thiel examines civil society and human rights as applied to the EU and its rights institutions; theorizes in an eclectic way that brings together insights from normative, democratic, and international relations (IR) theory; and with a stress on critical analysis, legitimacy, and his “own positionality in the process” (Preface), grounds the book in an interpretive ethos. Andreas von Staden, in Strategies of Compliance with the European Court of Human Rights, considers the Council of Europe and its Court; advances a tightly theorized rational-choice/constructivist IR argument; and with an emphasis on data sets, causality, and considering alternative explanations, grounds his work in positivism. In addition and on a more critical note, both books share a structure and design—where theory and data are kept largely separate—that makes it difficult for readers to assess the plausibility of their core analytic claims.
To begin with Thiel’s exploration of civil society and the EU’s rights institutions, this is an important, bottom-up (social actors shaping regional dynamics) view on rights promotion, governance, and democratic legitimacy in Europe. The focus is on how, by purposeful design, the Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA)—founded in 2007 as a result of the Lisbon Treaty—seeks to empower civil society actors in the promotion of human rights. The book’s core provides one-stop shopping on the FRA: Chapter 3 is a nice overview of the agency and how it functions, while chapters 4 (interviews) and 5 (survey) present fascinating data on how civil society actors both experience and use the FRA for rights promotion.
If these chapters are easy and insightful reading, the same unfortunately does not hold for the analytic sections (Chapter 2, Conclusion), with two factors limiting the theoretical power of Thiel’s book. First, the theory chapter (“Theorizing Rights Advocacy through European CSOs”) will be heavy-going for most readers. Partly, and to the author’s credit, this is a function of the richness of the theory on offer, combing insights from literatures—IR theory, political sociology of the EU—that often tend to ignore one another. However, the main problem with the theorizing is that it leads to “three legitimacy-centered research propositions” (pp. 41–44) that are so broad and poorly specified that one is left wondering how they will inform the subsequent analysis. The first proposition, for example, is that “the insertion of CSOs [civil-society organizations] will have a transformative impact on agenda-setting in the EU Fundamental Rights Agency” (p. 42). This leaves the reader asking for more: How will “insertion” and “transformative impact” be operationalized and measured?
Second, despite claims (pp. 44, 69) that these research propositions will be probed and tested in the book’s empirical core, this never happens. Instead, the propositions only reappear in the concluding chapter (pp. 159–64), where it is asserted, but not shown, that the empirical chapters provide evidence for them. Put differently, the book—apparently by design—exhibits a disconnect between theory and data. Readers thus cannot tell what work the theory actually does.
Turning to Strategies of Compliance with the European Court of Human Rights, von Staden develops a theory to explain why liberal democracies in Europe might comply with judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The theorizing and data collection—“an ambitious data set that covers the compliance status of all European Court of Human Rights judgments rendered until 2015” (dust cover)—are the main strengths of the book. The theory chapter, in particular, is a model of how to develop a plural (rational choice + constructivist), top-down (Court to national-level) argument on compliance that is then operationalized in the specific context of European liberal democracies. Readers will finish the chapter saying “Aha, so that’s what the argument will look like when applied to his empirics.”
Those empirics are two extended case studies—six chapters on the United Kingdom, followed by four chapters on Germany—in each instance, exploring the country’s compliance record. While these 10 chapters make for a nuanced and detailed analysis of ECtHR rulings and national-level compliance, they share a frustrating trait with European Civil Society: The theory largely goes missing. There are some weak reconnects to the theory in Chapter 7 (for the UK), Chapter 11 (Germany), and in the concluding chapter. However, these key analytic sections are simply too short (three pages each) to demonstrate clear linkages between the theory and the data.
Another challenge when it comes to testing von Staden’s compliance theory is the missing process-level data and methods that are needed to assess its plausibility. As a result, the extended case studies basically document correlations between compliance and the normative and rational-choice elements to his argument. Indeed, he is on particularly weak ground in claiming that normative motivations for compliance cannot be measured and observed (p. 44)—an assertion disproved by any number of constructivist studies utilizing fieldwork and interview/textual/process-tracing methods (e.g., see Alastair Iain Johnston, Social States: China in International Institutions, 1980–2000, 2008).
To criticize von Staden in this way is, in fact, a testimony to the clarity of both his theory and design. The theory chapter (Chapter 1) is so clear and operational that a reader will finish it knowing exactly what to look for in the case studies. When the latter end up falling short on the actual theory testing, that same reader will quickly see and understand the limitations of the analysis.
Taken together, the two books are a welcome addition to the growing body of work on compliance and human rights in Europe. Readers will learn much about the two main human rights actors on the continent—the Council of Europe and the European Union—and the tools they use to promote and defend those rights: the European Court of Human Rights and the Fundamental Rights Agency. While neither book is perfect, which is anyway rarely the case, they provide both new theory and data from which others working in this area can only profit.
At a deeper level, each book demonstrates the power and limitations of its epistemological priors. Thiel, the interpretivist, weaves together a rich and deep theoretical argument and is quite conscious of his own role in shaping what he studies, but he is weak on operationalization and measurement. In contrast, von Staden’s positivist study theorizes narrowly (pulling existing theory off the shelf and tweaking it)but does not know how to measure what it cannot see (constructivist/normative compliance pull), yet it does a superb job at operationalization and data collection.
These offsetting strengths and weaknesses suggest that we might learn more—in this case, on human rights and compliance—if researchers moved outside their comfort zones and worked across epistemological boundaries. For many reasons, the latter is not easy, but when done well, the payoff is high (e.g., see Ted Hopf and Bentley B. Allan, eds., Making Identity Count: Building a National Identity Database, 2016). However, recognizing that this will likely be an (epistemological) step too far for most scholars, we should thus commend Thiel and von Staden for what they do—providing contrasting (political-sociology/interpretive, mainstream-IR/positivist) takes on the institutional and social bases of human rights in Europe.
