| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Recent developments in international relations and international security scholarship emphasize the need to consider emotions in explaining interstate behaviour. Less work has been done exploring the difference between emotions - or emotional reactions - and the longer-term affective dispositions they can trigger, affecting foreign and security policy. Affective dispositions towards objects, it is argued here, provoke different emotional reactions towards events affecting this object, even though the observed emotions might be labelled the same. Hence, an interstate dispute will elicit different anger expressions and related behaviours if the countries concerned are friends (with positive affective dispositions) or enemies (with negative affective dispositions towards each other). This article shows that state behaviours that otherwise would seem inconsistent or contradictory are explained by their affective dispositions. Countries tend to be more restrained in their anger-related behaviours towards friends than towards enemies. The argument is illustrated by America's emotional reaction to the behaviour of Britain during the 1956 Suez crisis, compared to its reaction to the Soviet Union following the 1979-1980 invasion of Afghanistan. The emotional reactions in these cases are not specific to Washington. Other countries, such as the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, and Poland, displayed similar tendencies during the Iraq crisis of 2003, as did Britain, France, and Germany over intervention in Libya in 2011, in which anger and anger-related behaviours were influenced by the affective dispositions.
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