The previous chapter described the reservoir of ideas upon which West Germans drew to reason about European security. Building on this discussion, this chapter inquires into the mechanism through which ideas are selected as norms and whether such a mechanism can explain the FRG's forgoing of irredentism in the early 1970s.

I contend that the empirical findings lend evidence to dispute settlement through norm selection in general and the three-stage norm selection mechanism in particular. First, environmental change made actors embark on innovative argumentation in favour of the idea of a territorial status quo norm. The building of the Berlin Wall was the revolutionary event that made it clear to the advocates that the old ways of doing things had become obsolete and the changing repertoire of commonplaces, in particular the change from unequivocal demarcation from the East to the desire to form a Schicksalsgemeinschaft, provided the clues for what the new should look like.

Second, advocates who had already established a reputation for persistently supporting the topoi of their advocacy even outside of the advocacy succeeded in persuading large segments of the elites and the public. They accomplished this persuasive argumentation by linking the advocated idea of a territorial status quo norm to the nation's longing for unification and the Idea of Europe (abstract reasoning); to Germany's past crimes and the historical lesson of the need for reconciliation (comparative reasoning); and to the already established norms of peaceful resolution of disputes and national self-determination, including the episteme and the key events of the identity narrative that justified these norms (appropriateness reasoning).