Foreign Policy Analysis
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Foreign Policy Analysis

New approaches

Chris Alden, Amnon Arran

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eBook - ePub

Foreign Policy Analysis

New approaches

Chris Alden, Amnon Arran

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About This Book

Building on the success of the first edition, this revised volume re-invigorates the conversation between foreign policy analysis and international relations. It opens up the discussion, situating existing debates in foreign policy in relation to contemporary concerns in international relations, and provides a concise and accessible account of key areas in foreign policy analysis that are often ignored. Focusing on how foreign policy decision making affects the conduct of states in the international system, and analysing the relationship between policy, agency and actors, the volume examines:

  • foreign policy and bureaucracies
  • domestic sources of foreign policy
  • foreign policy and the state
  • foreign policy and globalization
  • foreign policy and change.

Features of the second edition include:

  • a wider range of contemporary case studies and examples from around the globe
  • analysis of new directions in foreign policy analysis including foreign policy implementation and the changing media landscape
  • fully updated material across all chapters to reflect the evolving research agenda in the area.

This second edition builds on and expands the theoretical canvas of foreign policy analysis, shaping its ongoing dialogue with international relations and offering an important introduction to the field. It is essential reading for all students of foreign policy and international relations.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781315442464

1
Foreign policy analysis

An overview
The study of foreign policy is an ever-changing story of how states, institutions and peoples engage with one another within a dynamic international system. Shaped by history and institutional practices, foreign policy makers navigate the increasingly blurred lines between domestic politics and external environments using instruments as varied as diplomacy, sanctions and new media to produce policies that further state interests. A dizzying array of characters – leaders, bureaucracies, militaries, lobbyists, think tanks, United Nations (UN) agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), terrorist and criminal organizations, as well as ordinary citizens – operate within this complex environment, exercising influences over foreign policy that results in vital decisions on war, peace and prosperity. To understand foreign policy, it is necessary to develop an appreciation for this layered complexity of international politics and to grapple with competing sources of influence. This includes the following questions:
  • Do ideas, identity and history matter as much as material power in foreign policy?
  • How important is the leader’s personal experience in shaping foreign policy choices?
  • Can bureaucracies drive foreign policy decisions?
  • Are democracies more apt to engage in military intervention than authoritarian states?
These questions and others are reflected in a snapshot of Russian foreign policy below. It gives us a sense of the diversity of experiences, outlooks and influences which shape the conduct of states in our changing international system.
The foreign policy of contemporary Russia is shaped by the shadow of the Soviet past, weighing heavily on the identity, institutions and ambitions of the world’s largest territory. Under Vladimir Putin, himself a product of the Soviet security apparatus, Russian foreign policy employs coercive instruments like the military and its energy resources to wield power over neighbouring states and court friends. A brutal campaign against Chechnyan separatists in the Caucasus region of the Russian Federation spawned a wave of domestic terrorism that not only aligned itself with radical Islamist groups like Al-Qaida and later ISIS, but has come to play a significant role in supplying distinctively aggressive fighters to campaigns in Iraq and Syria. Increasingly, Moscow has demonstrated its willingness to push back at what it perceived to be Western encroachment into its ‘near abroad’ by launching military intervention in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2013. At the same time, the Putin government reacted to criticism by Russian civil society and its opponents by tightening their legal space for action, while developing ‘soft power’ instruments such as Russia Today to communicate its message to a global audience. Ejected from the G7 and subject to Western-led sanctions campaign after the takeover of Crimea, Putin’s Russia has become more anti-Western in its rhetoric and conduct as the pressure from the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) has mounted with each passing crisis. Most recently, Moscow’s intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2015 aimed at supporting the Assad regime and frustrating Western attempts to support opposition forces reflects this continuing effort to regain its past superpower status.
Each of these elements of Russia’s contemporary foreign policy presents a different picture of the foreign policy process, the significance of which helps to explain varied sources of Russian conduct in international affairs. For instance, the influence of the leader and his pre-conceptions about Russia’s identity and place in global politics clearly shapes both Putin’s understanding of his country’s foreign policy challenges and the nature of decisions taken. The strength of foreign policy instruments such as the military and the dominance of its energy resources in international markets are suggestive of the material sources of Russian foreign policy activism. And the ability of societal forces to operate as repositories of liberal values and alternative perspectives on foreign (and domestic) policy issues, as well as the government efforts to constrain these, underscores the influence of state–society relations and regime type for the foreign policy process.

Understanding foreign policy analysis

Foreign policy analysts have sought to discern patterns from the study of cases like Russia to develop generalizable theories and concepts to unpick the sources of conduct of states in international affairs, the significance of foreign policy decision making, the role that state and non-states actors have within the overall distinctive process, as well as the influence of institutional and societal factors in shaping foreign policy. In a nutshell, foreign policy analysis (FPA) is the study of the conduct and practice of relations between different actors, primarily states, in the international system. Diplomacy, intelligence, trade negotiations and cultural exchanges all form part of the substance of foreign policy between international actors. At the heart of the field is an investigation into decision making, the individual decision makers, processes and conditions that affect foreign policy and the outcomes of these decisions. By adopting this approach, FPA is necessarily concerned not only with the actors involved in the state’s formal decision-making apparatus, but also with the variety of sub-national sources of influence upon state foreign policy. Moreover, in seeking to provide a fuller explanation for foreign policy choice, scholars have had to take account of the boundaries between the state’s internal or domestic environment and the external environment.
FPA developed as a separate area of enquiry within the discipline of international relations (IR), due both to its initially exclusive focus on the actual conduct of inter-state relations and to its normative impulse. While IR scholars understood their role as being to interpret the broad features of the international system, FPA specialists saw their mandate as being a concentration on actual state conduct and the sources of decisions. The FPA focus on the foreign policy process, as opposed to foreign policy outcomes, is predicated on the belief that closer scrutiny of the actors, their motivations, the structures of decision making and the broader context within which foreign policy choices are formulated would provide greater analytical purchase than could be found in utilising an IR approach. Moreover, scholars working within FPA saw their task as normative, that is to say, as aimed at improving foreign policy decision making to enable states to achieve better outcomes and, in some instances, even to enhance the possibility of peaceful relations between states.
In the context of David Singer’s well-known schema of IR, in grappling with world politics, one necessarily focuses on studying the phenomena at the international system level, the state (or national) level, or the individual level.1 FPA has traditionally emphasized the state and individual levels as the key areas for understanding the nature of the international system. At the same time, as the rise in the number and density of transnational actors (TNAs) has transformed the international system, making interconnectivity outside of traditional state-to-state conduct more likely. Thus FPA has had to expand its own outlook to account for an increasingly diverse range of non-state actors, such as global environmental activists or multinational corporations (MNCs).
An underlying theme within the study of FPA is the ‘structure–agency’ debate.2 As in other branches of the social sciences, FPA scholars are divided as to the degree of influence to accord to structural factors (the constraints imposed by the international system) and human agency (the role of individual choice in shaping the international system) when analysing foreign policy decisions and decision-making environments. However, the FPA focus on the process of foreign policy formulation, the role of decision makers and the nature of foreign policy choice has tended to produce a stronger emphasis on agency than is found in IR (at least until the advent of the ‘constructivism turn’ in the 1990s). Thus, early analyses of foreign policy decision making recognized from the outset the centrality of subjective factors in shaping and interpreting events, actors and foreign policy choices. Writing in 1962, Richard Snyder and colleagues pointed out that ‘information is selectively perceived and evaluated in terms of the decision maker’s frame of reference. Choices are made in the basis of preferences which are in part situationally and in part biographically determined’.3 Indeed, as the chapters in this book show, in many respects, FPA anticipates key insights and concerns associated with the reflexivist or constructivist tradition.4
FPA has much in common with other policy-oriented fields that seek to employ scientific means to understand phenomena. Debate within FPA over the utility of different methodological approaches, including rational choice, human psychology and organizational studies, has encouraged the development of a diversity of material and outlooks on foreign policy. This apparently eclectic borrowing from other fields, at least as seen by other IR scholars, in fact reflects this intellectual proximity to the changing currents of thinking within the various domains of the policy sciences.5 At the same time, there remains a significant strand of FPA which, like diplomatic studies, owes a great debt to historical method. Accounting for the role of history in shaping foreign policy – be it the identity of a particular nation-state, conflicting definitions of a specific foreign policy issue or their use (and misuse) as analogous in foreign policy decision making – is a rich area of study in FPA.
Set within this context, our book aims to revisit the key question motivating foreign policy analysts, that is, how the process of foreign policy decision making affects the conduct of states in the international system and the relationship between agency, actors and foreign policy, which is crucial for a reinvigoration of the conversation between FPA and IR. Our book seeks to open up this discussion by situating existing debates in FPA in relation to contemporary concerns in IR and providing an account of areas that for the most part in FPA have been studiously ignored. What follows is a brief summary of some of the key theoretical approaches and innovations that have featured in FPA as scholars have attempted to address the questions of who makes foreign policy, how is it made and what influences the process. We refer to this body of literature as Classical FPA. We explore the main features of Classical FPA and identify three areas that have been overlooked by scholars. For instance, in FPA, there is no theory of the state, no meaningful incorporation of the systemic changes provoked by globalization and no comprehensive accounting for change in foreign policy. Moreover, the core insights that FPA offers through recourse to the decision-making process are compromised by the field’s systematic neglect of its integration with foreign policy implementation. This is followed by a brief elaboration on these shortcomings through our presentation of three critiques of FPA.

Realism: the state, national interest and foreign policy

The roots of FPA lie in its reaction to the dominance of realism and its depiction of the state and its interactions with other states, whether through direct bilateral relations or through multilateral institutions such as the UN, and a general dissatisfaction with realism’s ability to provide credible explanations of foreign policy outcomes. In keeping with the realist paradigm, the state is seen as a unitary and rational actor, rendering it unnecessary to analyse the role of the discrete components of government (either the executive or the legislature) in order to assess state foreign policy. In this context, a key concept in the traditional realist canon is ‘national interest’. Although a much-disputed term, national interest remains a central preoccupation of foreign policy decision makers and a reference point for realist scholars seeking to interpret state action. Hans Morgenthau defines national interest as synonymous with power and, therefore, both the proper object of a state’s foreign policy and the best measure of its capacity to achieve its aims.6
What constitutes national interest, how it is determined and ultimately implemented are crucial to understanding the choices and responses pursued by states in international affairs. Realists assert that the character of the international system, that is, its fundamentally anarchic nature, is the most important guide to interpreting foreign policy. The pursuit of security and the efforts to enhance material wealth place states in competition with other states, limiting the scope for cooperation to a series of selective, self-interested strategies. In this setting, the centrality of power – especially manifested as military power – is seen to be the key determinant of a state’s ability to sustain a successful foreign policy. Geographic position, material resources and demography are other important components of this equation.
Realists believe that all states’ foreign policies conform to these basic parameters and that scholars above all need to investigate the influences of the structure of the international system and the relative power of states in order to understand the outcomes of foreign policy decisions. Calculation of national interest is self-evident; it can be arrived at rationally through careful analysis of the material conditions of states as well as the particulars of a given foreign policy dilemma confronting states.
Scholars such as Richard Snyder and his colleagues, frustrated by the facile rendering of international events in established IR circles, issued a call to move beyond this systemic orientation and ‘open the black box’ of foreign policy decision making. Rather than producing a normative critique of realism (something that later would become commonplace in academia), Snyder, Rosenau and others were intent primarily on finding an improved methodological approach to assessing interactions between states.7 And, while in creating the field of FPA these scholars accepted key tenets of realism such as the centrality of the state in IR, they also set in motion a series of investigative strands that ultimately would contribute to an expansion of the knowledge and understanding about the relationship between foreign policy and IR.

Behaviourism and rationalism

The original studies by FPA scholars in the 1950s and 1960s posed some explicit challenges to the realist assumptions in ascendancy in the field of IR at that time. Instead of examining the outcomes of foreign policy decisions...

Table of contents