"Trust, don't verify" - Towards a theory of strong trust in International Relations

信任是一种有趣的现象，在国际关系学科中很少受到关注。在研究项目的第二阶段，信任，不要验证——走向国际关系中的强信任理论，我们将调查支持或抑制国家对其他国家建立信任的变量。在这项研究中，我们将重点放在州际安全领域，并回到项目第一阶段开发的概念和方法工具集。我们将此工具集用于分析德国对俄罗斯、法国和美国的外交政策。我们将因变量，即民族国家层面的信任，概念化为一种外交政策话语，其特征是对其他国家特征的一系列特定假设。为了捕捉这种信任话语并追踪其随时间的普遍性，我们利用了在项目第一阶段开发的内容分析类别。这种方法允许我们追踪信任水平随时间的变化。我们已经确定了几个可能以不同方式影响信任建立过程的独立变量：发送和接收代价高昂的信号，来自两个国家的决策者、官僚和公众之间的个人接触，成功互动的学习结果，最后是国际制度化的不同阶段和设计。为了对这些独立因素进行操作，我们结合了事件数据和其他定性属性。到项目结束时，我们希望更好地了解是什么有助于或阻碍了国家之间建立信任。该项目旨在为在外交政策中建立信任做出贡献。在此基础上，我们应该能够重新把州际信任作为一个真正的关系范畴来关注。

Trust is an interesting phenomenon which has found little attention in the discipline of international relations. In the second stage of the research project Trust, don`t verify - Towards a theory of strong trust in International Relations we will investigate variables which support or inhibit trust building by states towards other states. In this research, we focus on the field of interstate security and go back to the conceptual and methodological toolset that was developed in the first project stage. We apply this toolset to an analysis of German foreign policy towards Russia, France and the United States. We conceptualize our dependent variable, trust at the level of nation states, as a foreign policy discourse which is characterized by a specific set of assumptions about the character of the other state. In order to capture this trusting discourse and trace its pervasiveness over time, we utilize the content analytical categories that were developed in the first stage of the project. This method allows us to trace changing levels of trust over time. We have identified several candidates for independent variables which may influence the process of trust building in different ways: sending and receiving costly signals, individual contact between decision makers, bureaucrats and the general publics from two states, learning as a result of successful interactions, and finally different stages and designs of international institutionalization. To operationalize these independent factors, we employ a combination of event data and additional qualitative properties. By the end of the project, we hope to reach a better understanding of what helps or hinders trust building by states towards other states. The project is intended as a contribution to trust building in foreign policy. From there, we should be able to refocus on interstate trust as a genuinely relational category.