FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS
AN OVERVIEW
Why The need for foreign policy (FP)?
- States don’t exist in a vacuum
- There’s a trickle-down effect. Some policies effect other countries
- States need to decide how to engage with other states
- It’s a combination of diplomacy, intelligence, trade negotiations, and cultural exchange
- The issues driving foreign policy are age old:
• State security
• Economics
- An underlying theme within the study of FPA is the ‘structure-agency’ debate
• FPA scholars are divided as to the degree of influence to accord to structural factors and human agency
- Black box theory: The actions of political parties, lobbyists and other government players such as
legislators and state governors is most effectively studied by looking at the "inputs" and "outputs" of the
political system. The inputs are the pressures put on the system and on politicians while the outputs are
the results, such as new laws, changes in policies or the changing behaviours of legislators.
There are existential and systemic problems
- There’s an apparent reordering of international power balance. This is centred around Trump and where
he’s taking the international order
- Questions about the future of liberal, rules-based international order established under US hegemony post
WWII. Trump is moving away from this and towards a more polarised world order
- G7 couldn’t reach a final agreement last year because of Trump’s various fights with various leaders
- A general shift in states’ foreign policy orientation in line with geopolitical shifts
Foreign policy in SA
- Ramaphosa was in Tokyo for the Tokyo International Conference on African Development
- Cape Town hosted the World Economic Forum in 4-6 Sept. The same week as the xenophobic attacks in
Johannesburg
- UN General Assembly
The regular ‘trundle’ of South Africa’s foreign policy has interests in good relations with the global north and
south. SA is less of a rule maker, and more walking along with others
Current tendencies
- Era of ‘big-man’ politics
- Geopolitical shifts underway that prompt most states to adapt their foreign policy orientations
- Still, the regular course of state politics also maintained - cogs of state machinery turning
Foreign policy straddles numerous levels of actor-ship and decision-making
- ie state, non-state, governments individuals, firms
- As well as issues: climate, conventional security threats
Traditional channels of diplomacy are important (eg multilateral/bilateral summits), but increasingly too the
non-traditional
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,Everyday events can have massive impact on policies
As a research field, Foreign Policy Analysis tries to
- Explain how and why states conduct themselves the way they do in the international arena
- Make sense of the interplay between a state’s domestic and its external environments and relatively the
state’s international conduct
Why the need for foreign policy analysis?
- The study of the conduct and practice of relations between different actors, primarily states, in the
international system
- Separate to IR:
• IR exclusively focuses on the actual conduct of inter-state relations and it has a normative impulse
• IR interprets the broad features of the international system, whereas FPA specialists saw their mandate
as being a concentration on actual state conduct and the sources of decisions
• While the ‘mother’ is IR, foreign policy analysis has one main difference
• Lies in the prevailing levels of analysis
• Whereas IR mostly state-centric and focuses on state-level or systemic explanations
- FPA traditionally emphasises the state and individual levels as the key areas for understanding the nature
of the international system.
- States and other actors’ explicit articulation of their international goals and objectives addressed to others
in the international system
• Foreign policy White Papers
• Foreign policy strategy documents
• Statements by head of state or senior government officials.
• Communiques (eg BRICS summit or G20 summit agreements)
• Speeches
• Voting positions in multilateral forums
Diplomacy
- The practical articulation of an actor’s external aspirations, purposes and policies, and entails the official
practices through which actors (generally, but not exclusively states) interact with each other
- The more regular course of states interacting with each other: the day to day of politics
Traditionally, diplomacy and foreign policy were the preserve of state activities, but increasingly other actors
have foreign policy (transnational) impacts
- Non-state actors (Multinational Corporations Al Shabaab, ISIL, Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, NGO’s)
- Sub-state actors (provincial or city governments, trade missions, twin civil pacts)
We’re therefore seeing an increasing importance of:
- Economic diplomacy (both state and non-state)
- Track-two diplomacy (Eg NGOs lobbying governments)
- Track-three diplomacy (NGOs interacting with each other)
- Celebrity diplomacy (Bono, Rob Geldoff)
- Science diplomacy
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,THEORETICAL APPROACHES IN FPA
Foreign policy analysis is a sub-field of IR, therefore it reflects the intellectual
traditions and trends of IR
- Means we see the same kinds of theoretical frameworks dominating in the field of FPA
- Similar debates and issues concerning epistemology, methodology, and /or the role of values
- Can class approaches in terms of IR’s major perspectives
• Realism // liberalism-pluralism // critical perspectives
One key difference, however, lies in prevailing levels of analysis. Whereas IR is mostly state-centric and
focuses on state-level or systematic explanations, FPA encompasses analysis at the:
- Micro level (individual)
• Individual decision maker
• What motivated a specific decision maker?
• Typically president/prime minister
• Why did person A take this course of action, instead of this course of action?
• Eg psychology
- Meso level (domestic context)
• Domestic context and determinants of foreign policy
• Domestic or societal environment
• Eg sociology
• Domestic interest groups etc and how those constituents help us explain our foreign policy
• Are ministries of foreign affairs independent foreign policy actors?
- Macro level (systemic)
- Foreign policy as shaped by systematic factors
- Explains foreign policy as outcome of:
• Power distribution in international system
• State attributes
• State (national) interests
APPROACHES TO UNDERSTANDING FPA
- In chronological terms FPA was first dominated by insight from Realism and neo-realism (i.e. macro-
perspectives)
- Especially shaped by work of Hans J. Morgenthau (politics among nations); Kenneth Waltz (Man, the state
and war); Henry Kissinger (American Foreign Policy)
1. Realism: the state, national interest, and FP
- Power politics – how is power acquired and exercised
- State is seen as a unitary and rational actor
- National interest remains a central preoccupation of FP decision makers
- Morgenthau: national interest is synonymous with power
- As a state you have to fight your way in this order
- The character of the international system that is, its fundamentally anarchic nature, is the most important
guide to interpreting foreign policy
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, - Centrality of power - especially manifested as military power - is seen to be the key determinant of a
state’s ability to sustain a successful FP
- The pursuit of security, and efforts to enhance material wealth
- Foreign policy is determined by two main factors:
• Maintaining balance of power (especially under conditions of the Cold War and MAD)
• To always serve national interest first: ideology is important, but so too is pragmatism
Neo-realism:
- Power rivalries a function of the nature of the international system = anarchy
- State interests aren’t always determined by the state
- Therefore, foreign policy should accommodate relative distributions of power in the world
• States should strive to maximise their power vis-à-vis other states, and their foreign policy should reflect
this
Realism and Neo-realism show the Billiard view
2. Behaviourism and rationalism
- Behaviourists seek to understand the process of foreign policy as opposed to the outcomes of foreign
policy
- Behaviourist approach, with its focus on the ‘minds of men’ came at a time when those working on
decision making in the policy sciences were increasingly enamoured with the notion of applying a set of
fixed rules to understand the processes and outcomes of decision making
- The methodology (Rational choice theory) posited a unified decision-making body in the form of the state
and a pursuit of self-interest
- Rational choice strongly adhered to some of the key ideas of realism, therefore it was relatively easy for
realism and rationalism to find common cause in their assessment of the world of international politics
- Investigate the role of the individual decision maker and the accompanying influences on foreign policy
choice
- Focused on psychological and cognitive factors as explanatory sources of FP choice
- Foreign policy is a result of state actors’ deliberation of how they can maximise gains and minimise costs
(utility maximisation)
- What constitutes national interest: pursuit of security and the effort to enhance material wealth
• This sometimes places states in competition with one another, which can limit the scope for cooperation
and enhance self-interested strategies.
Later, other scholars began to criticise the assumptions and claims of Rationalism
1. But the behaviouralist approach does not give satisfactory explanations
• Behaviouralism focuses on measurable and observable things = foreign policy outputs (such as actions
or decisions)
• But what of things not accounted for by this?
- Intangibles in foreign policy decision-making?
- Role of individual leaders’ personality or psychology (eg JFK, Fidel Castro)
- Important also to study the process, not merely the output of foreign policy decisions
2. Critique of rationality/rational actor model
• Who’s to say that states are driven by rational actors
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