Theorizing Foreign Policy in a Globalized World

Knud Erik Jørgensen, Knud Erik Jørgensen, Kenneth A. Loparo, Knud Erik Jørgensen, Gunther Hellmann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137431912
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this collection of refreshing and provocative essays, the contributors to Theorizing Foreign Policy in a Globalized World reflect on the game-changing political impact of globalization, outlining the situation as it currently stands and suggesting strategies for analyzing foreign policy and global governance.

1

Introduction

Gunther Hellmann and Knud Erik Jørgensen

In an increasingly globalized world, classical images of foreign policy as a political practice conducted by sovereign states seem less and less adequate. However, rather than tackling the transformation of foreign policy as a process of both scholarly and immediate political interest, foreign policy analysis and International Relations (IR) theory have over the past decades become separate fields of study, yet in a state of mutual and more or less benign neglect.¹ This volume aims at systematically exploring the links among classical foreign policy analysis, IR theories and more recent approaches focusing on processes of global transformation. More specifically, the authors aim at establishing these linkages by offering answers to the question of how we – in the 21st century, that is to say, under increasingly globalized conditions – can or should understand and theorize the term as well as the field of political practice named ‘foreign policy’.

Since the ‘Peace of Westphalia’ in 1648 foreign policy has been defined in terms of the pursuit of external interests by sovereign states. In this sense sovereignty differentiates between the internal and external sphere of states along territorially defined borders and thus turns out to be a necessary condition for foreign policy (Wæver, 1994, 238–239). As more recent research has shown, however, the frontiers between the internal and the external have become ever more blurred (Bartelson, 1995, 2011; Krasner, 1999). In no other field are the consequences more apparent than in the field of European foreign policy (Jørgensen, 2004; Larsen, 2009). At the same time a global monopoly of force is considered ever more urgent (Deudney, 2006). Hence it doesn’t come as a surprise that foreign policy is increasingly portrayed as yesterday’s fad rather than as a constitutive practice of contemporary global politics. A transformation of the internal–external relationship modifies the idea of sovereignty and consequently alters our traditional ways of thinking about foreign policy as well. In particular, the ever more prominent global governance approaches are questioning the future relevance of foreign policies, the idea of the nation-state as such and the meaning of territorial boundaries (Bjola and Kornprobst, 2011). Altogether, one cannot help thinking that the spreading disinterest in foreign policy analysis (Carlsnaes, 2002, 331) goes hand in hand with a strengthening of global governance research, which attributes a minor role at best to foreign policy.

Where the erosion of national governance is assumed to be in favour of transnational governance, the decreasing interest in foreign policy analysis comes hardly as a surprise (Joerges, 2001, 2006). The same holds for approaches which describe the transformation from the ‘national towards the post-national constellation’ (Zürn, 1998; Zangl and Zürn, 2003; Leibfried and Zürn, 2006). All these theoretical considerations conceptually deviate from the image of global politics as a zero-sum game (Ruggie, 2004, 519; Sending and Neumann, 2006, 651; Neumann and Sending, 2007). In other words, explaining the rising influence of transnational non-governmental actors goes hand in hand with assuming both the nation-states’ loss of power and a decline in the importance of foreign policy (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Consequently, political authority is increasingly transferred from the nation-state to transnational policy networks understood as ‘spheres of authority’ in which states do have a share of impact but do not necessarily take on a dominant role (Rosenau, 1999). Globalization is taking place above and beyond the reach of states but it nevertheless changes the system’s units’ identities and interests (Cerny, 1995, 596; 1997, 253–273; Sassen, 1996; Bartelson, 2000, 188). Understood in this way, states and their foreign policies are considered as mere transmission belts of global dynamics which lie beyond their control. From such a perspective, globalization appears as a process driven forward by its own dynamics (Bartelson, 2000, 189).

Back in the early 1950s, IR as a discipline had already split into two schools of thought with different research foci (Kubálková, 2001, 15; Hudson, 2008, 12–17; Hill, 2011). The first group attended to international politics research on a systemic structural level, thereby focusing on single events in IR by means of the nomothetic-deductive model of explanation; the second group comprised comparative foreign policy and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), the latter turning towards the internal functioning of the system’s units and opening up the ‘black box’ in order to explain behaviour by the specific characteristics of the state. For whatever reason, the counter-intuitive belief took hold that theorizing foreign policy is inordinately more difficult and complex than theorizing international politics at the system’s level. While systemic theorists preached the blessings of parsimony (Waltz, 1975, 1979), foreign policy analysts laboured on mere ‘pre-theories’ (Rosenau, 1966, 1974).

Although good arguments have been urged on the question of why foreign policy analysis on the one hand and systemic explanations of international relations on the other hand do not necessarily embody irreconcilable endeavours (Elman, 1996a, 1996b; Baumann et al., 2001; Rittberger, 2004; Hellmann, 2009a), prominent voices have defended the view that ‘patterns of state behaviour at the aggregate or population level, i.e., the states system’ are to be distinguished from ‘the behaviour of individual states’ (Wendt, 1999, 11). In essence, Waltz and Wendt, two of the most influential IR theorists, joined forces in order to defend the view that foreign policy theorizing cannot be done in a meaningful and systematic fashion at the level of agency. Waltz, for instance, held that scholars interested in theories of foreign policy often

confuse analysis with theory. Neither realists nor anyone else believe that unit-level factors can be excluded from foreign-policy analysis. The question is not what should be excluded from one’s account of foreign policy, but what can be included in a theory of international politics. Much is included in an analysis; little is included in a theory. Theories are sparse in formulation and beautifully simple. Reality is complex and often ugly.

(Waltz, 1996, 56, emphasis added)

Accordingly, Walter Carlsnaes concluded that interest in IR theories has significantly increased over the past decades whereas the number of articles on foreign policy has dramatically declined (Carlsnaes, 2002, 331). The only exception seems to be the field of European foreign policy, that is, the foreign policy of the EU as well as the nexus with national foreign policies in Europe (Jørgensen, 2004, 2007; Larsen, 2009).

Foreign policy analysis in its classical (FPA) form focuses on the decision-making process and its conditions (for example, research on decision-making; group dynamics; bureaucratic politics; analogies to cybernetic processes; as well as research on perceptions and misperceptions). Due to its actor-centric focus of research (Allison and Zelikow, 1999; Hudson, 2005) it appears to lack a conceptual toolkit capable of addressing processes of global (or ‘systemic’) transformation. This assumption holds even after the post-behaviouristic turn (Holsti et al., 1968; Axelrod, 1976; Hermann, 1980). In a nutshell one might say that Foreign Policy Analysis has lost the intra-disciplinary race for attractiveness and attention against systemic IR theories and, more recently, global governance research.

The disciplinary trend to withdraw conceptual and empirical attention to foreign policy analysis stands, however, in stark contrast to actual political developments in world affairs. Even a cursory glance at three recent crises in world affairs – the end of the East–West conflict, the fight against terror(ism) and the world economic crisis that began in autumn 2008 – shows how misleading it would be to argue that foreign policy no longer matters. The quite sudden end of the East–West conflict created a grave crisis for most systemic IR theories. None of the predominant approaches had been able to even broadly project (not to mention ‘predict’) anything similar to what actually took place (Gaddis, 1992/1993; Lebow and Risse-Kappen, 1996). Instead, what happened in 1989/1990 quite plainly demonstrated the relevance of the foreign policy of individual states (in this case, the relevance of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, the United States and West Germany) and even individuals, like Mikhail Gorbachev (Zubok, 2002). In reaction to these events, a whole series of theoretical innovations were introduced which (at least ex post) tried to explain what had happened. Still, a major theoretical and/or conceptual advance in foreign policy analysis did not result from these events. However, one might argue that this particular combination of real-world events and (perceived) disciplinary ‘failure’ helped to bring about a wave of different ‘turns’ in IR (such as the ‘interpretative turn’, the ‘linguistic turn’, the ‘cultural turn’ and the ‘practice turn’) which propelled different new ‘-isms’ to the forefront of theorizing (Kratochwil, 2007; Lebow, 2008). The traditionally dominant external (or explanatory) perspective came under pressure from an internal perspective emphasizing the need to understand how individual and collective actors make sense of political occurrences (Kratochwil, 1989; Onuf, 1989; Wendt, 1992; Friedrichs and Kratochwil, 2009; Hellmann, 2009b).

One might even wonder whether the ‘structure–agency debate’ would have gained the prominence it did (Wendt, 1987; Dessler, 1989; Carlsnaes, 1992, 1993, 2008; Friedman and Starr, 1997; Wight, 1999) had there not been a whole series of events at the turn of 1990s which revealed the limitations of narrowly conceived agency- or structure-oriented theorizing as exemplified in the ‘neo-neo’ debate of the time. Yet none of this did, by and large, lead to a stronger theorization of foreign policy. Instead, models were pushed into the limelight which some might see as mere social constructivist updates (Wendt, 1999, 2003) of former IR system theories in the tradition of Waltz (1979), thus explaining world affairs once again almost exclusively in terms of macro-structural variables. This seems all the more surprising as Wendt’s proposal to understand international structure as a product of state action actually did open up a plausible entry point for foreign policy analysts (even though Wendt himself chose to stick with structural perspectives at the systemic level).

Two of the most recent crises in world affairs, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and subsequent ‘fight against terror(ism)’, and the world economic crisis starting in autumn 2008, did not alter the debate either. Prima facie these cases seem to lend further plausibility to the idea that foreign policy is, indeed, becoming ever less significant. Both originated from developments operating outside of what is traditionally considered as the sphere of foreign policy. While the first crisis resulted from the state’s limited ability to preserve its monopoly of force against globally operating terrorists, the second crisis indicates the unintended consequences of deregulating the global economic and financial system. However, if we focus on the political response to these crises, classical foreign policy channels and efforts at multilateral coordination never ceased to play a crucial role. Just recall the centrality of US foreign policy in initiating the ‘global war on terror’ – not to mention the not too far-fetched counterfactual of a US President Al Gore (cf. Review Symposium, 2013). What is more, one might say that both cases underline the continuing relevance of foreign policy – and render it ever more puzzling why it still remains largely marginalized in IR theories and global governance research – calls for theoretically informed projects to link the different co-existing bulks of knowledge within IR notwithstanding (Hill, 2003; Smith, Hadfield and Dunne, 2008; Keukeleire and Schunz, 2008). One might consider whether this state of affairs is due to the prominence of general theory theorizing or the relative lack of theorizing at the meso-level.

It is against this background that the contributors of this volume convened for a conference in 2010 in order to systematically explore the links among classical foreign policy analysis, IR theories and more recent approaches focusing on processes of global transformation. Getting the explanandum or subject matter (foreign policy) right seemed to us to be a precondition for adequate conceptualization and subsequent employments of various explanans, whether the objective is understanding or explaining the changing boundaries of foreign policy in an increasingly globalized world. In this fashion this volume aims at addressing and reconsidering the classical issue of defining the relationship between foreign policy analysis and IR theory. While previous attempts have contributed to improving our knowledge about trade-offs between emphasizing one or the other, they have not sufficiently explored a broader array of issues associated with the present conditions of globalization.

A second aim has been to unpack the problem, not least because the problem appears, on closer inspection, to be several problems in one basket. In the literature, at least three problems figure prominently. An important issue concerns the relationship between theories of foreign policy and IR theories, that is, the appropriate level of theorizing. Among others this involves the question of whether (and to what extent) it is appropriate to conceptualize the subject matters of foreign policy and/or IR in terms of dichotomous ‘systemic’ versus ‘state’ levels of analysis. Another important issue concerns the applicability of IR theory in foreign policy analysis and, vice versa, of foreign policy theory to the analysis of international relations. Clearly, this issue belongs to the standard repertoire of the encounter between theory and empirics. If it is appropriate to argue (as most IR/FPA scholars probably would) that the relationship between IR theory and foreign policy analysis is often conceived in such a way that the former is supposed to provide overarching conceptual and theoretical toolboxes which guide the empirical analysis of foreign policy why is it so difficult to imagine (and propagate) a reversal of roles according to which foreign policy theory may similarly guide the analysis of phenomena which we habitually tend to locate at the ‘systemic’ level of international relations? The final issue concerns the relationship between IR theory and/or foreign policy theory on the one hand and foreign policy on the other, the latter being understood as political or diplomatic practice. Here we are dealing with the relationship between explanans and explanandum, that is, ‘factors of explanation’ and ‘what we want to understand’ and therefore questions about how we theoretically can understand practice. To what extent is it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Linking Foreign Policy and Systemic Transformation in Global Politics: Methodized Inquiry in a Deweyan Tradition
• 3. Foreign Policy in an Age of Globalization
• 4. Analysing Foreign Policy in a Context of Global Governance
• 5. Actorhood in World Politics: The Dialectics of Agency/Structure within the World Polity
• 6. Do We Need 195 Theories of Foreign Policy?
• 7. ‘Identity’ in International Relations and Foreign Policy Theory
• 8. Feedback Loops as Links between Foreign Policy and International Relations: The US War on Terror
• 9. Beliefs and Loyalties in World Politics: A Pragmatist Framework for Analysis
• 10. Foreign Policy as Ethics: Towards a Re-evaluation of Values
• 11. First in Freedom: War-Making, American Liberal National Identity and the Liberty Gradient
• Index