The Making of Friends and Enemies: Assessing the Determinants of International Identity Construction

As constructivists correctly argue, identities are key to understanding international relations. In this analysis, we examine three historical cases in order to develop a model addressing the question of when elites are able to successfully market a redefinition of both an external actor and themselves to their national publics. All three cases in this pilot study involve the American public being asked to reconceive the identity of, respectively, the Soviet Union following World War II, Germany during the same period, and Europeans at the time of the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion. We examine the history of each of these cases along with the associated elite rhetoric. We then identify five factors that explain why the first two cases turned out to be largely successful efforts at reframing, and why the latter largely did not.