Foreign policy pdf download

Indeed, foreign policy is important pre- cisely because it reinforces undesirably, in the views of Campbell national and statist culture. If this approach can be linked more effec- tively to the analysis of choice, and can confront the problem of evi- dence, then it may yet reach out from beyond the circle of the converted to contribute more to our understanding of foreign policy. Language, whether official or private, rhetorical or observational, has a lot to tell us about both mind-sets and actions, and it is a relatively untapped resource.

Since the chapters which follow apply FPA in some detail, there is no need to describe its approach here in more than summary form. FPA enquires into the motives and other sources of the behaviour of international actors, particularly states. It does this by giving a good deal of attention to decision-making, initially so as to probe behind the formal self-descriptions and fictions of the processes of government and public administration.

In so doing it tests the plausible hypothesis that the outputs of foreign policy are to some degree determined by the nature of the decision-making process. As the language used here sug- gests, there was a strong behaviouralist impetus behind the rise of FPA, but the subject has subsequently developed in a much more open-ended way, particularly in Britain. They are already integrated in the sense that foreign policy analysis is underpinned by systems theory, even if there are still many creative interconnections to be explored.

It is time to move on. The Changing International Context The politics of foreign policy are perpetually changing, depending on the country or the region, and by no means always in the same direc- tions. This is why case and country-studies are so important. There is no point in lofty generalizations if they seem beside the point to experts on Guyana, or Germany, or Gabon. Yet as the result of imperial expansion, world war and economic integration we have had to get used to seeing the world, and the international political system, as a whole.

Changes in the whole are thus real and of great significance for the parts. Con- versely, changes in a particularly important part may lead to upheaval in the system as a whole. We have had a strong sense of this since the implosions of communism, the Cold War and the Soviet Union in the dramatic events of — Each of these great issues will be examined in turn, but only in terms of the implications for foreign policy.

The end of the Cold War with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in is seen by some as a revolution in international affairs in itself. The end of an empire always alters the outlook and calculations of the other members of the system, and not only at the end of major wars. The dismantling of the French and British empires between —64 created many new states and seemed to have weakened the two metro- pole powers.

Yet adjustment soon takes place. By it had become difficult to remember the world as it was before decolonization, while the position of France and Britain remained remarkably unchanged. Even to this day their permanent seats on the UN Security Council are not in real danger. On the other hand, both decolonization and the end of the Cold War signalled the death of a set of particular ideas, and the arrival of new possibilities.

The nature of a new order may not be imme- diately apparent, but it can be immanent. In the case of and after, what happened was not only the humiliation of a superpower, and the folding up of a set of international institutions, but also the destruction of a major transnational ideology.

This ideology, coupled with the power of the Soviet Union, had acted as a straitjacket for the foreign policies of many different states, not just those in eastern Europe. Poor states needing Soviet aid, or looking for reassurance against American power, all found themselves defined by it. Opponents, likewise, either turned directly to the US and its allies for fear of international communism, or self-consciously adopted a strategy of non-alignment in the hope of escaping the bipolar trap.

Some states found themselves the victims of various kinds of intervention in any case. Large resources were consumed by those who saw themselves rightly or wrongly as threatened by Soviet communism.

All this has now disappeared. There is no communist aid or interven- tionism. There is no anti-communist excuse for western interventionism. Resources are or should be released for other purposes, domestic and international. Internal politics have, in many cases, been reconfigured as the result of the ideological straitjacket being removed.

Indeed, for some states the very relationship between foreign and domestic politics has been cast into the melting pot. In some rather unpredictable states, politics has been shaken up by the removal of the old orthodoxy.

France has found it eas- ier to move into a working relationship with NATO, and Italy has begun to develop a more confident national foreign policy. In both countries the domestic environment has become more fluid as the result of the demoralization of what were previously strong communist parties. Globalization, by contrast, is seen by many as having rendered foreign policy redundant.

At least, the large numbers who write about global- ization give this impression by the simple fact of ignoring it. Globalization in its turn has been boosted by political change, notably the emergence of the confident states of east Asia in the wake of the Vietnam war, and the collapse of the communist bloc in Europe. It is always a bad mistake to assume that the present will resemble the past, but in the case of foreign policy and globalization there seem to be good reasons for supposing that the death of foreign policy has been forecast prema- turely.

Discounting the possibility of world government, this could conceivably come about by stealth, through the emergence of global governance in the form of a net of issue-based regimes, in which units took up positions on the merits of a problem, without concern for community-based link- ages.

Much more significant in terms of the impact of globalization is likely to be a reshuffled relationship between foreign policy and foreign economic policy. In times of stability, as the post period seemed at first likely to be, it is natural to expect that economics will occupy a central place in foreign policy. Modernity heightens this expectation. Although Europe at least seems to have exchanged a period of grim stability in the Cold War for one of mixed hope and turbulence, this trend need not be denied.

Much of foreign policy for modern states is about promoting prosperity as much as security, and indeed about blurring the two con- cepts together. Governments simply become subtle and varied in their strategies for protecting the welfare of their citizens, sometimes working together with other states, sometimes intervening indirectly even illegally to win contracts, and sometimes using tradi- tional means, such as defence expenditure, for reasons of economic policy.

This does not make any fundamental difference to the fact that states need some form of external strategy, and machinery, for managing their external environment. That it now contains many more events of impor- tance, which press directly onto the domestic, makes the conduct of foreign policy more important, not less.

The third major contemporary development in international relations could well in the long run turn out to be the most significant. The emer- gence of serious support for the idea that the right of a state to determine its own internal affairs should be qualified so as to prevent serious human rights abuses has the potential to precipitate moves towards a different kind of system, in which superordinate law and institutions set limits to both internal and external behaviour — in short, towards an embryonic international constitution.

Foreign policy has always, of course, been constrained from the outside, but the inhibitions have come from fear, or concerns about practicality, or from internal value- systems.

The United Nations Charter flagged the tension between human rights and sovereignty over 55 years ago, but left the issue hanging in the air. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in was little more than a hopeful signpost, with no capacity for enforcement. The move towards greater consensus on the value of human rights, and indeed liberal democracy, since means that if powerful states are prepared to sponsor change, it might begin to have more prac- tical meaning — as arguably it has already begun to do.

To some degree all states will have to take on board new considerations and obligations as they formulate foreign policy, but for many of them, having just become used to the notion of sovereignty, it will be disconcerting to see new principles introduced in parallel.

This is particularly true of regimes in new states, which are often the most passionate defenders of independence and non-intervention. In either case, domestic society would become more exposed to external developments, with potentially significant consequences for the citizenry. As the external environment becomes more complicated, with law, organizations and transnational human rights groups all protruding more into states, or engaging their support, so foreign policy will be a more critical site for political decision-making, not less.

The changes in the international context described above — themselves with longer roots than just the past ten years — represent the current challenges. As I have argued, none of them poses the kind of threat to the very purpose and existence of foreign policy which is often rather unthinkingly assumed.

Each of them, however, is having a significant impact on the nature of contemporary foreign policy, on its relationship with domestic society and on the means by which it is conducted. The details of these changes — and the elements of continuity — will become clear in the chapters which follow. Beneath the detail, however, lie certain key questions, theoretical and practical, which provide the rationale for the book as a whole. In theoretical terms the main issue FPA faces is whether foreign policy remains a key site of agency in international relations, or whether it is being steadily emptied of content.

This in turn depends on views about the nature of agency and its relationship to structures in world politics. Part of the answer may be given through theorizing the state, evidently still a major source of political life, but not all of it.

The state is one of a variety of different international actors, whose positions relative to each other and to structures need to be traced. If they do, then it follows that they will need some form of means of coping with the particularities of the foreign. But if the environments are blurring into each other so as to become functionally indistinguishable, do they not need to integrate policies and mechanisms accordingly? If we do con- clude that inside is not the same as outside, and in particular that policy-makers have to operate in differing kinds of environment, does this mean that everything which a system projects outwards is foreign policy?

Yet, as with other large political concepts such as democracy, analysis and definitions are in a constant dialectical relation with each other. This means that no position on the relationship of external relations to foreign policy will convince until the problem has been broken down into its component parts — as it will be in subsequent chapters through the discussions of bureaucratic politics, transnational relations and domestic society. Finally, Foreign Policy Analysis must also face the normative issues which its positivist roots have tended to obscure.

If it is an area of seri- ous enquiry then it must confront — if not be dominated by — the possi- bility that it might contain built-in normative biases. More prosaically, it just might not address certain important value-based questions. It is certainly true that many of the interesting questions about foreign policy are not technical but involve issues of value or principle.

One such is how far foreign policy may be effectively harnessed to an ethi- cal cause, without damaging other legitimate goals. Another is the long- debated issue of how far foreign policy can or should be accountable to citizens who are probably ignorant of the issues but who may ultimately be asked to die in its name. The tension between efficiency and democ- racy, and the need to trade them off, is particularly sharp here.

Although states vary in what they can do, and view the matter through the lens of self-interest, this is a perpetual ethical challenge for every foreign policy. This brings us to the practical questions facing Foreign Policy Analysis. The first links theory to practice by asking what expectations is it reasonable for citizens to have of policy-makers, and for policy- makers to have of themselves? How much of what may be deemed desirable is also feasible?

There are naturally limits to the extent to which a general answer can be given, but it must surely be the task of any analyst to clarify the nature of action in relation to the outside world by relating the complexity of the environment to the needs and circum- stances of particular actors.

On that basis realistic expectations may be constructed about both instrumental gains and shared responsibilities. Only by analysing actors and their milieux in conjunction can this be done. How far can we generalize about foreign policy?

The assumption of this book is that there are many common features and dilemmas which can be anatomized. Yet states clearly vary enormously in size, power and internal composition, to say nothing of non-state actors. Indeed, the United States shows few signs of angst about whether foreign policy exists or counts in the world, unlike the middle-range states. It is revealing that in the American study of International Relations, the state and its power is still a central theme, whether through the successful policy journals like Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, or through the dominant academic school of neo-realism.

Globalization theory, and constructivism, which tend to stress the impact of international structures, have made far less ground than in Europe, or neighbouring Canada.

Where you sit really does influence what you see. Even the USA has to cope with limitations on its freedom of action, despite its apparent hegemony after It is also just as subject to decision-making pathologies, and to ends—means problems as any other actor. What is more, the interpenetration of foreign with domestic politics is universal, and varies only in degree. Different soci- eties, perhaps different kinds of society, produce different sorts of domestic input into foreign policy, including conceptions of a desirable world and expectations about what can be done to improve it.

It is commonplace to observe that the United States, for example, has con- sistently believed that its own values should be exported, whereas China has never felt the need to proselytize, despite its own conviction of superiority. The nature of variation and the possible links to foreign pol- icy are themselves things to be charted, whether between democracies and autocracies, rich states and poor, ancient cultures and new states engaged in nation-building.

The principal practical challenge for any foreign policy analyst should be to make transparent and help spread to a wider public the often arcane processes of foreign policy-making.

In the present envi- ronment that means debating the evolving character of foreign policy — is it more than what foreign ministries do? As any specialist knows, the answers to these questions are by no means always close to those which even an intelligent reader of a good newspaper might infer. In particular, FPA has the capacity to indicate the extent to which the nature of the decision-making process deter- mines the outcomes of foreign policy, in terms of both the intrinsic qual- ity of a decision and its effective implementation.

Too often public discussion oscillates between fatalism about the impossibility of affect- ing international affairs, and the personalization of policy through the high expectations held of individual leaders.

Argument and Structure In summary, the study of foreign policy faces perpetual challenges of both an intellectual and practical kind, as with any branch of social science. Equally, the exponents of foreign policy have to cope with a confusing, mixed-actor international environment where obstacles and opportunities are by no means clearly delineated.

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