Respekt, Missachtung und die Bereitschaft zur internationalen Kooperation

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Reinhard Wolf
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2010 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 187305435

Our planned research is based on an ongoing DFG project which analyses the significance of respect and disrespect for foreign policy cooperation. So far, its results indicate that such experiences frequently influence the short-term behavior of governments in ways that established theories can hardly explain. However, the long-term consequences of inadequate status recognition are still unclear. Against this backdrop, our new project will investigate if the repeated experience of disrespect stimulates the emergence of widely shared resentments, thereby inhibiting international cooperation in the long run. We derive pertinent hypotheses concerning the emergence, articulation, and implications of affective stereotypes from recent studies in social psychology. By conducting a discourse analysis of the two cases already explored in the ongoing project (German-British relations before World War I and Indian-American relations after World War II) we attempt to find out whether those psychological insights also apply to large groups, such as nations. Specifically, the project is meant to examine if subjectively experienced disrespect promoted negative stereotypes about the moral quality of Great Britain and the United States which, in turn, were used as arguments against cooperation with these states. The project is thus intended to yield new insights about the potential long-term consequences of cross-border incidents of disrespect and might also be useful for alerting political practitioners to such issues.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants