It is widely recognized that trust is important in social and political life. It is also increasingly acknowledged that there are good reasons to pay attention to trust in international relations. Yet, our understanding of the role of trust in international order production remains unclear and underdeveloped. While trust is often assumed to matter, especially in international communities, there is too little knowledge about how it influences the stability and change of international orders. This basic problem is particularly pertinent in the context of the transatlantic community, characterized by recurrent crises that threaten the shared order as well as a complex configuration of power and identity relations.
Therefore, with transatlantic relations as the empirical focal point, this dissertation theorizes how trust among states can influence the production of international orders. It examines two interrelated questions: How does trust shape the interactions of states in crisis situations? How do trust-based interactions influence order production in complex international communities?
To address these questions, I conceptualize trust as a distinct type of relation among states characterized by suspension of uncertainty and vulnerability. Trust can be understood both as a relational feature of a given social structure, such as an international order, and as a relation that shapes interaction among specific actors representing states in concrete situations. It affects action spaces, entails a positive connectivity, and generates linkages among actors. Moreover, it should be understood through its co-existence with and connection to distrust, power, and identity.
On this basis, I theorize how trust influences international order production. Given its properties, trust shapes crisis interactions and thereby the stabilization processes through which orders are reproduced and changed. Particularly, in crisis situations, trust works through five mechanisms. It promotes efforts to overcome betrayals and preserve already established trust, reinforces and alters identities, underpins open and critical political engagements, facilitates cooperation, and influences the regulation of power. While contingent on contextual factors, these mechanisms imply that trusting states tend to interact in ways that moderate the conflict level, foster cohesion, advance legitimacy, and enable renewal through the adjustment of socio-political practices, collective identities, and power relations.
I illustrate and explore the arguments concerning trust-based interaction and order production with a focus on transatlantic relations: first, through a zoomed-in analysis of transatlantic interactions during the Suez crisis, and second, with a zoomed-out analysis that employs the Euromissiles and Iraq war crises to further examine the logics and nuances of the theoretical propositions.
Finally, I discuss what the implications of the overall argument are for our understanding of international trust more broadly and for our understanding of the transatlantic order as an enduring and complex macro-structure in world politics.