Foreign policy analysis (FPA) is very appealing to students, irrespective of age or caliber. Some people expect to find a field of study that is more concrete and practical than international relations theories. Others are fascinated by great historical figures, from Otto von Bismarck to Winston Churchill, or are drawn, without always wanting to admit it, by the apparent romanticism of diplomacy.
These are, of course, only lures. The novice soon realizes that the theoretical models in FPA are just as complex as those in other fields of international relations. They also realize that most foreign policy decisions, far from being clinched in padded embassy drawing rooms, between a cigar and a martini, are the result of bureaucratic processes similar to those in other areas of public policy.
As the complexity unfolds and diplomacy loses its aura, other attractions come into play. First and foremost, FPA provides a unique opportunity to integrate analysis at different levels. At the crossroads between the theories of international relations and public policy analysis, FPA is not limited to the study of the international system that fails to take account of its component parts, or to the study of one-off decision-making processes in the international context.
Instead, FPA focuses on the continuous interaction between actors and their environment. To understand and explain foreign policy, the international context must be taken into account. The distribution of power between countries and the influence of transnational stakeholders and intergovernmental organizations partially determine foreign policy. Governments that adopt foreign policies perceive the international system through their own filters, which may be cultural, organizational or cognitive. Therefore, to understand and explain a foreign policy, it is also essential to study the state’s domestic dynamics and decision-making processes (Sprout and Sprout 1965).
Although FPA does not have its own specific level of analysis, it can be defined by its dependent variable, namely, foreign policy itself. Most research in FPA seeks to explain how one or more public authorities adopt a given policy in certain conditions. Why do great powers actively try to forge alliances with small countries despite their limited military resources (Fordham 2011)? Why did Jordan drop its territorial claims on Palestine (Legrand 2009)? Why did members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) sign the Kyoto agreement, even though it aims to reduce the consumption of their main export (Depledge 2008)? Why does France concentrate more of its official development assistance in its former colonies than does the United Kingdom (Alesina and Dollar 2000)? Why did Norway join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO ) but refuse to join the European Union (EU), whereas Sweden chose to do the opposite (Reiter 1996)? The questions are endless, but the starting point is always the same: identify a foreign policy, which is often puzzling or counter-intuitive, and then try to explain it.
What Is a Policy?
Despite the fact that foreign policy is the focal point of FPA, or perhaps for that very reason, there is no consensual definition of what a foreign policy actually is. The truth is that the question is hardly ever discussed in the literature. Most analysts quite simply avoid tackling the concept directly, even though it is central to their work. Other fields of international relations are organized around definitions, which act as reference points for theoretical debates, as well as for operationalizing variables. But FPA has no equivalent.
After all, the concept of foreign policy adopted by analysts is in constant mutation, as a function of the changes in practices and theories. It would be illusory to freeze foreign policy within a specific empirical reality that is timeless and universal. Indeed, what is considered to be a foreign policy today may not have been so yesterday and may not be tomorrow. As a result, every definition remains more or less dependent on its context.
This book, which seeks to reflect the field of study overall and its evolution over the past few decades, adopts a broad definition of foreign policy: a set of actions or rules governing the actions of an independent political authority deployed in the international environment.
Our definition emphasizes that foreign policy is the “actions of an independent political authority” because it is reserved to sovereign states. The Canadian, the German or the Spanish governments, for example, are the legal custodian of their states’ sovereignty and the representatives of the international personality of their respective states. Hence, sub-national states such as Quebec, Bavaria or Catalonia are not conducting foreign policy. They can conduct international relations according to their constitutional jurisdictions, but they cannot deploy a foreign policy on the international scene because they are not sovereign and independent entities (Vengroff and Jason Rich 2006). Of course, there are exceptions—in Belgium , for instance, federalism is quite decentralized and gives several exclusive constitutional jurisdictions to Wallonia and Flanders as well as the right to sign international legal agreements (treaties) in their jurisdictions (Criekemans 2010).
Our definition of foreign policy also refers to “actions or rules governing the actions” because the notion of policy is polysemic. Some scholars consider that a foreign policy comprises actions, reactions or inaction, which may be ad hoc or repeated (Frankel 1963). From this perspective, France’s decision to withdraw from the negotiations for the Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1998, or the repeated practice of providing emergency assistance to a neighboring country in the event of a major natural disaster, would be considered examples of foreign policy.
Other scholars view foreign policy not as the action itself but as the underlying vision—in other words, the specific conception that a state has regarding its place in the world, its national interests and the key principles that allow it to defend them. According to this view, the American policy to contain communism during the Cold War or Beijing’s “one China ” policy concerning Taiwan would be examples of foreign policy.
A third option places foreign policy between these two extremes. This is the middle path, favored, notably, by James Rosenau, who considers that doctrines are too country-specific, which rules out the study of their variation, and that the decisions are too irregular and idiosyncratic to allow for generalizations (1980: 53).
The definition of foreign policy proposed in this book does not settle this debate. Some research, which clearly comes within the FPA framework, focuses on well-defined decisions, while other research focuses on practices that are repeated so often that they are taken for granted. Some researchers concentrate on what states do materially, while others consider what states declare verbally. Given this diversity, there is a priori no need to limit the field of FPA to a narrow definition of policy, whatever it may be (Snyder et al. 2002 [1962]: 74).
When a Policy Becomes Foreign
Are foreign policy and public policy different? Research show that there is a substantial amount of overlap between these two fields of research. However, scholars differentiate foreign policy because it is located at the junction between international politics and domestic public policy (Rosenau 1971). On the one hand, as Lentner explains, “(t)here are foreign policy writers who concentrate on exactly the type of analysis that most public policy analysts do” (2006: 172). Authors like Richard Neustadt (1960), Graham Allison (1969) and Alexander George (1980) are good examples. On the other hand, several FPA experts belong to the discipline of international relations and are directly influenced by research paradigms such as realism or liberalism, which try to explain states’ behavior in the international system. What differentiates these two traditions of FPA from the study of domestic public policy, however, is that they must somehow take into account the international system as they deal with problems arising outside state borders. This is the reason why this book defines foreign policy as being “deployed in the international environment”.
Nonetheless, we cannot hide the fact that the boundary between foreign and domestic policies is increasingly porous in today’s world. Several issues that were previously considered strictly international now include domestic policy. Homegrown terrorism in Western democracies where citizens perpetrate terrorist acts on behalf of international terrorist organizations such as the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or al-Qaeda is a case in point. It led governments to adopt public policies to prevent and to tackle citizens’ radicalization. Conversely, other issues traditionally perceived as domestic public policy now have obvious international ramifications, Chinese environmental policies on greenhouse gas emission being an obvious example.
During the Cold War , some observers assimilated the distinction between external and internal policies to that between high politics and low politics. From ...