Foreign Policy in a Constructed World

Vendulka Kubalkova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780765607881
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315291352
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume demonstrates the application of the constructivist approach to the analysis of foreign policy (i.e. states' actions in a world of states). Part I introduce constructivism for foreign policy studies. Part II presents five model case studies -- the Cold War, Francoism, the two Chinas, inter-American relations, and Islam in U.S. foreign policy. Part III reviews their results.

I
Frameworks

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1
Foreign Policy, International Politics, and Constructivism

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Vendulka Kubálková

The field of International Relations (IR) split in the 1950s into two parts: Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) and the study of International Politics (IP) as seen from a systemic point of view.¹ At the core of this split was the opening up of the state, previously regarded in IR as a black box whose contents were of interest only to Political Scientists. Foreign policy analysts opened up the box in order to explain state behavior. In a nutshell, FPA directs attention to the attributes of states as units in order to reach conclusions about their relations. In contrast, IP focuses its attention on the relations of states, as a system, in order to learn about the system’s attributes. One proceeds from the parts to the whole, the other from the whole to the parts. Once FPA had “moved inside the bo.”(Figure 1.1), scholars on each side saw little need for each other, and the two subfields began to grow apart.

The purpose of this chapter is to set the scene for the entire volume, to introduce and explain most of the terms (referring to those handled in chapter 2) and include enough information about each of them to enable the reader to follow the main theme of the book, which is the relevance of constructivism in IR to both FPA and IP subfields. Indeed, most constructivists believe that the FPA/IP split need not have occurred and that constructivism provides the tools for putting the two fields back together.

I divide this chapter into two parts so that I can go twice over the same ground, each time from a different angle. The first time around, I introduce the main elements of my argument by defining FPA and IP, and then by showing how they differ from each other and from other cognate fields and why they developed the way they did. I take this story to the point at which constructivism makes an entry into IR and discuss briefly how it has made its presence felt. The second part goes over the same ground and both simplifies and complicates the argument at the same time. I distill the main question that each of these approaches has tried to answer. This enables me to show in a much more practical way the differences among the different approaches, while at the same time adding more detail of the individual approaches and introducing such important concepts as rationality, identity, intersubjectivity, decision making, structure, and institutions. There are four tables in this chapter and I refer to them many times throughout the entire chapter. In fact, each follows from the one before, zooming in on a particular part of it. There are entire libraries devoted to FPA and to IP, and the constructivist literature is also growing rapidly. It is important for me to stress that the purpose of my brief walk through FPA and IP is not to make a contribution to their respective literatures or to suggest they ought to be skipped. On the contrary, the chapter and the volume are supposed to encourage the reader to go back to the IR literature, and to FPA in particular, to look at it with constructivist eyes.

Figure 1.1 Foreign Policy and International Politics

FPA and IP, Agent and Structure

To this day, FPA and IP continue to be separated,² intellectually disconnected, and even in some respects contradicting each other’s assumptions and conclusions (Light 1994,93). Their separation originally coincided with the “scientific.” or “behavioralist.” revolution in the social sciences, its controversial impact on IR studies having been played out in the course of what has been known as the Second Debate. Scholars on both sides of the FPA/IP divide stood together in this debate, since their common intention was to make IR more scientific. To do so, scholars on both sides agreed that they had to leave a great deal out of the picture. They were diametrically opposed, however, in what need not be studied. In effect, each ceded what it did not study to the other. Both claimed mutual complementarity of focus, and a primary connection to realism, the main source of wisdom in IR that had emerged victorious over “idealism.” In what is referred to in IR studies as the First Debate. Realism proved an ever more tenuous bond between FPA and IP, however. For half a century now scholars on each side of the divide have followed their own paths. They have drawn on different intellectual sources, they have developed separate journals and subsections of professional organizations, and they have offered different university courses and, in many cases, different fields for the examination of graduate students.

Before the split, the study of FPA and IP differed from each other largely in emphasis. IR scholars were engaged in the description and evaluation of dramatic events and self-dramatizing individuals. What became later two separate—FPA and IP—perspectives were still combined, with one the backdrop to the other. FPA lifted foreign policy out of its broader context. There was still a lot left. According to most definitions, FPA refers to a complex, multilayered process, consisting of the objectives that governments pursue in their relations with other governments and their choice of means to attain these objectives. Governments rely in this regard on professional staffs, including diplomats, trade negotiators, and military officials, but they draw on other resources as well. Thus foreign policy encompasses the complicated communications within governments and amongst its diverse agents, plus the perceptions and misperceptions, the images of other countries, and theideologies and personal dispositions of everyone involved. An important part of the study of foreign policy has been the nature and impact of domestic politics.³

During the formative first twenty years of FPA, a multitude of systematic (but not systemic) frameworks was developed for what became known as the comparative study of foreign policy making, for a long time one of the main approaches to FPA. Comparative studies of foreign policy were thought to increase the generalizing power of the sorts of explanations that lent themselves to scientific treatment. If the point was to develop theory that would substitute for IR theory, many scholars thought that such an undertaking sacrificed the descriptive richness that followed from concentrating analytic attention on particular governments, important decisions, and the complexities of domestic politics. FPA scholars either were guided by more modest or “middle-range.” theories, or they took a single state as a frame of reference, focusing on what was styled as the “internal setting of foreign policy.”or the study of “domestic sources of FP.” “Comparative studies of foreign policy.” “middle-range theories.” and “domestic sources of FP.” were for a long time the three main approaches to FPA.

As we shall discuss later, IR scholars had always treated states as “actors.” analogous to human individuals. FPA turned away from states as quasi-persotts to the actual people who constitute governments and act on behalf of states. As the term “behavioralism.” suggests, the focus on people’s “behavior.” and not their motives or mental processes, was seen as the key to making IR scientific. Behavior, it was argued, provided direct factual evidence that could be objectively measured and used to evaluate theoretically derived hypotheses. The goal of FPA as a science—namely, the search for regularities in the behavior across decision makers in different states, but also in distinct groups of states, categorizing and comparing them either by region, size, political system, or degree of development—was consistent with the positivist goals of the social sciences discussed in greater detail in chapter 2.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Comparative Foreign Policy practically vanished, at least in part because the enthusiasm for science waned in IR, and perhaps also because of new developments on the other side of the intellectual divide. In the years when FPA flourished in the name of behavioral science, IP had failed to provide a scientific account of the system. The turning point did not come until 1979 when Kenneth Waltz published his seminal work, Theory of International Politics. By this time the fortunes of FPA and realism, the doctrine underpinning both FPA and IP, had been flagging. The account of the system provided by Waltz, referred to as structural realism or neorealism, could claim to be scientific because it found a place for people—highly abstracted people—who behave, as rational maximizers, very much the way economists claim that people do in a market. Markets in economics are structures, and Waltz borrowed the idea. Waltz’s systematic effort to formulate a general realist theory of international politics was based on the use of the concept of structure, which gave this form of realism the adjective “structural.” Waltz used the concept of structure both to prop up the concept of system and to exclude all else from consideration. Waltz’s elegantly simple reformulation of realism abstracted from the picture everything internal to states: subjective influences, ideas, unique events—all of which affect actual foreign policies. Once the mantle of science had passed from FPA to IP, however, most foreign policy analysts have been content to describe, although with a high degree of sophistication and subtlety, the problems foreign-policy makers face and the ways they respond to those problems.

Constructivism into the Breach

Since the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when constructivism as a new approach was introduced to IR, constructivists found in the split between foreign policy and international politics an important point of departure. Superficially at least, the FPA/IP split appears to be a variation of a distinction extremely important to constructivists, namely, between the foreign-policy maker as agent on the one hand and the structure of the international system on the other.

The arrival of constructivism complicates a feature characteristic of approaches to IR, namely, that they borrow from other fields. As Figure 1.2illustrates, FPA and IP have drawn on different ideas from different disciplines. The arrival of constructivism has coincided with what has been known as the Third Debate in IR, a debate over the positivist assumptions of science and their relevance to social phenomena. Thanks to this debate, the range of intellectual influences has been significantly enlarged, as Steve Smith shows in the next chapter. The FPA/IP split literally begs to be explored through the concepts of agent and structure, as developed in sociology and adopted by constructivists. Constructivists applaud the tendency of FPA to look for the agent—the foreign-policy decision maker—wherever he/she might be found. The active mode of foreign policy expressed even in the term “making.” also resonates with the constructivists’ stress on processes of social construction. Constructivists, however, disapprove of the way the FP/IP split developed, since agent and structure should never be torn apart nor should one be given priority over the other.

Constructivists differ on what to do about the latter tendency (Figure 1.3). Their differences undoubtedly stem from the fact that the terms agent and structure are controversial in sociology, whence they were brought to IR, as well as among constructivists in IR.

Figure 1.2 Intellectual Influences On Fp/Ip

Despite appearances, the correspondence of the terms “agent.” and “structure.” with FPA and IP respectively is as partial and misleading as the other pair categories, or binary oppositions, used to separate FPA and IP—namely, “micro-macro.” and states as units versus the system of states. Looming over these pairs are the great binaries of Western thought: subjectivity and objectivity, atomism and holism, free will and determinism. To compound the confusion, the terms “agent.” and “structure.” came to IR already burdened by an abundance of other concrete meanings in ordinary language—“agent.” as in the KGB or CIA or as in “insurance agent.” and “structure.” as in architecture or a fixed, material inanimate object presumed always to have been there, primordial or given.

Figure 1.3 Agency and Structure and IP/FP Split

The origin of terms “agent.” and “structure.” gives some clues as to their abstract meanings in the service of constructivism. “Agent.” derives from the Latin verb agere—“to drive, to lead, to act, to do.”#x2014;and it means literally a “person doing something.” And “structure.” is derived from the past participle of the Latin verb struere—“to build.”#x2014;and it refers to something that is in the process of being built. Thus an agent is, or depends on, a human being who is capable of choosing, and acting on his choice, in some social setting. I say “depends on.” because human beings, as agents, can create fictional persons such as the state and grant these persons agency by authorizing some human being, as an agent, to act for them. The use of the term suggests that human action is not simply determined by circumstances. The key features of agents are intentionality and meaning.

In contrast, the term “structure.” does have a deterministic flavor. Here too, structure’s everyday meaning creates confusion. Social structure refers to recurring patterns of social behavior, and especially to those patterns that would seem to set limits on human agency. From the idea of the stability of patterned life conveyed by the term “structure.” there is but a short step to a determinism in which the efficacy of human agency is lost. Structure, whether observable patterns or underlying principles, is separated from agent, but it still motivates social action. The effort to overcome the tension between these terms is characteristic of constructivism. So is disagreement on how the overcoming should be done.

Social action in which agents take part is a complex phenomenon. It is loaded with diverse meaning for agents, who act with diverse intentions, many (perhaps most) of which have unintended consequences. In contrast to “actior.” or “agent.”the term “behavior.” which was the main focus in the behavioral revolution and of FPA, refers strictly to observable phenomena, exclusive of reflection, intention, and meaning. Agency thus has distinct “social.” connotations that IP scholars are disposed to view as structurally determined, if indeed they are aware of them at all. Constructivists say that FPA, and behavioralism in general, neglects the agent as a social being. FPA scholars neglect it when they make an assumption that behavior is a dependent variable, susceptible to objective assessment.

As I have suggested, the stress on agent and structure resonates with the philosophical question concerning the degree to which what happens in human affairs can be ascribed to free will and the degree to which it is determined by social or material constraints. Constructivists do not find a contradiction between human choices and material determination because they hold that international relations are social relations. By defining both foreign policy and international politics as social, they see that both must start with people interacting in, and wi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Introduction
• I Frameworks
• II Constructivists at Work
• III Reflections
• List of Contributors
• Index