Norm Diffusion in Emerging Democracies: Accounting for Cross-national Variation in the Diffusion of norms of Democratic Control of Armed Forces in Turkey and Indonesia

Since the advent of the ‘third wave’ of democratisation in the 1970s, a large number of military and authoritarian regimes across the globe have transitioned to democracy. In Turkey and Indonesia in particular, overt military exercise of political power has diminished greatly. Yet, despite this broad normative consensus in favour of democratic norms, and the apparent empirical convergence in military practise towards a retreat from politics, significant variation exists in the pace, extent and scope of the diffusion and adoption of international norms of democratic control of armed forces in the world’s two largest non-Arab Muslim democracies. Neither of the traditional theoretical approaches – neorealism or neoliberal institutionalism – has provided a sufficient account of how this cross-national variation in the diffusion and adoption of the norms of democratic control occurs, and thus further research to address the question is warranted. Constructivism, by way of contrast, is deeply concerned with the role of norms in international security. Recent constructivist scholarship, combining the study of international systemic norms with specific analysis of adopter populations’ own normative and cultural characteristics provides the theoretical framework in which I address the question. In particular I argue that the degree of extent and pace of norm diffusion in the two countries is a function of the ‘cultural match’ of the norm of democratic control of armed forces and that the scope of norm diffusion is a function of the particular diffusion mechanism that prevails in the domestic setting – “bottom up” or “top down”, which is itself a product of the domestic structure of the state in question – in Indonesia’s case corporatist, and Turkey’s, state-above-society.