A Theory of Foreign Policy
In the last decade or so, there has been a renewed interest in role theory that differs from earlier work in that it more clearly connects with psychological approaches to foreign policy analysis. It also takes more seriously the domestic sources of role theory through inquiry into horizontal and vertical role contestation.
Much of this new work intersects with constructivism, although it remains grounded in empiricism. As foreign policy analysis increasingly seeks to understand the foreign policies of a broader array of states—including smaller states that face significant constraints on their ability to act in the international arena—role theory provides an attractive framework.
Foreign policy
In essence, role theory allows foreign policy analysis to move beyond a U. Access to the complete content on Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription. If you are a student or academic complete our librarian recommendation form to recommend the Oxford Research Encyclopedias to your librarians for an institutional free trial. But he also brought with his conquests an era of constitutionalism, in which citizens had rights against their rulers.
Despite his defeat, the idea of rights within states remained.
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The question was the extent to which rights could become a trans-state, an international, norm. Before that question could be addressed, the Congress of Vienna, , was convened to ensure there could never be another Napoleon, and established the sense of a concert of power.
Marijke Breuning
There might be a congress of states, but the most powerful states would score the music and conduct its performance. Rogue performers could not be in the orchestra. Beautiful lyrics were fine, provided the conductor controlled the way they were sung. The idea of a concert was repeated after World War II, with the establishment of the United Nations — a congress for multilateral diplomacy — but it had a Security Council, a concert master. To Henry Kissinger, it seemed an ideal form of international relations.
His Harvard PhD was about the outcome of the Congress of Vienna, and he applied the idea of a concert, and concert master, to all his practice of diplomacy as US National Security adviser and Secretary of State. The sense of powerful states, with not only their sovereign interests, but their interests in projecting a control over the international relations of the state system, became the foundation concept of a new academic discipline established after World War I.
The carnage of that conflict, this time accomplished with a technology unheard of in the 30 Years War, prompted the US President to leave his country for a full six months to impose his sense of how the international system should be orchestrated.
A Theory of Foreign Policy
The Woodrow Wilson principles seemed to many so inspiring that the first Chair of what came to be called International Relations was endowed and established by Welsh millionaire and philanthropist, David Davies, at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, and called the Woodrow Wilson Chair. Essentially, those principles were concerned with diplomatic transparency and international cooperation. The League of Nations was established as a multilateral assembly for diplomatic cooperation.
His long absence also meant his leverage over his own Senate had waned.
The treaty that emerged from the European discussions was not ratified by the Senate; the US never joined the League of Nations, and this meant there was no concert master at the heart of a congress of states that proved ineffectual. Japan invaded China, Italy invaded Abyssinia now Ethiopia and, despite impassioned appeals to the League from the invaded countries, the League could do nothing to protect its own members from the projection of power by other members. While this was going on, the debates on International Relations as a new academic discipline established two principal schools of thought.
One was certainly what we now call Realism, with its centrality of the state and the projection of state power on behalf of state interests; the other was an Idealism or Utopianism that suggested a broader foundation for international cooperation in citizen organisations and multilateral diplomacy. The high moral tone that seemed to have emanated from Wilson was part of this Idealism, establishing the beginnings of a normative concern for International Relations — but Wilson had also boasted that it was the US, with its values and norms, that had shown it was leading the world.
Realist power has never, in any case, existed by itself, but always with a normative shadow shrouded in international law. It has always meant an International Relations as a discipline, as well as international politics as practice and policy, being divided, somewhat schizophrenic, but with one side of its concerns being unable to achieve freedom from the other. The entire assemblage also has to confront the decidedly atheoretical, and simply messy, phenomenon of foreign policy formulation. The nuts and bolts nature of this, its arguments and even pettiness — even in times of crisis — have meant no normative conceptualisation of foreign policy formulation.
One particular crisis, studied in some depth by Graham Allison, illustrates these points. As described below, Allison proposed three models of policy formulation. Each is discussed in turn in the next section. The Cuban missile crisis was a moment of grave jeopardy for the world, as nuclear confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union seemed inevitable. His policy was to arm Cuba with missiles capable of bearing nuclear warheads — pointed at the US. This alarmed the US as a genuine security threat and the warning went out to the Soviet Union that its ships, carrying such weapons to Cuba, would be stopped on the high seas by US naval vessels.
In international law this would have been illegal. Without a declaration of war, ships had freedom on the high seas. Also, a state, under the Westphalian doctrine, could acquire arms and another state could send them. But the determination to counter threats, particularly those launched or aided and abetted by European powers, had been a US concern since the Monroe doctrine of — which basically determined Latin America as a US sphere of influence, and a zone of exclusion for the great European powers.
In , the Soviet ships refused to turn back and sailed ever closer to Cuba and the US naval blockade. The question the watching world was asking was a simple one: Would the tough Soviet Chairman try to sail his ships through the blockade and, if so, would the US warships sink them? Waltz has been adamant that a theory of foreign policy can never be built due to the complexities involved.
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