National identities, international roles, and the legitimation of climate leadership: Germany and Norway compared

Abstract

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) confers an obligation on developed states to lead in mitigation. This obligation challenges traditional conceptions of the modern state by calling forth a more outward looking state that is able to serve both the national and international communities in the service of global climate protection. Yet, the more skeptical theories of the ecological state suggest that climate leaders will only emerge if they can connect their climate strategy to the traditional state imperatives of economic growth or national security. How the governments of Germany and Norway, both relative climate leaders with ongoing fossil-fuel dependencies, have legitimated their climate policies and diplomacy is examined through a comparative discourse analysis. While both governments rely heavily on discourses of Green growth, they also construct national identities and international role conceptions that serve purposes beyond themselves.

Keywords:

• climate leadership
• discourse analysis
• Germany
• international role conception
• national identity
• Norway

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the participants in the ECPR workshop on ‘Green Leviathan, ecological insurance agency, or capitalism’s agent? Revisiting the Ecological State in the Anthropocene’ held in 2013, and especially the convenors James Meadowcroft, Peter Feindt and Andreas Duit, for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. I also wish to thank Dina Hestad, Ben Leske and Kerry Wardlaw for their excellent research assistance in collecting primary texts for the discourse analysis, and a special thanks to Dina Hestad and Ben Leske for translating Norwegian and German texts into English.

Notes

1. See also Articles 3(2), 3(3), and 4(5) of the UNFCCC.

2. While all of the international-facing speeches were available in English, and most of the significant domestic-facing texts were also available in English translations, some of the domestic-facing texts were not available in English translation. In the case of Norway, the most significant Norwegian language texts were read, and excerpts were translated, by a Norwegian-speaking research assistant. In the case of Germany, the untranslated speeches and videos were read/viewed by a German-speaking research assistant to check whether the discourses that had been identified from the English texts by the author were also validated in the German texts. No adjustments were required.

3. The underlying research materials for this article can be made available upon request to the author.

4. Stoltenberg wrestles with these tensions in Paradokset: jens Stoltenberg om vår tids største utfordring, a book based on a long interview with the journalist Kjetil Alstadheim (2010).

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project funding scheme [DP0771697].