International Relations: summary of assigned readings part 2 (IR)
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International relations (73210027FY)
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Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
An in-depth summary of the assigned readings for the second part of the first year course international relations (ir). I had an end-grade of 8.1 in this course.
Good luck studying!
Chapter 9 (J/S/M): Foreign policy
The concept of foreign policy
● foreign policy analysis is the study of the management of external relations and
activities of nation-states, as distinguished from their domestic policies.
● governments wants to influence the goals and activities of other actors whom they
cannot completely control because they exist and operate beyond their sovereignty
● foreign policies consists of ams and measures that are intended to guide government
decision and actions with regard to external affairs
key arguments: Is foreign policy analysis → a separate toolbox?
● according to Waltz a theory of international politics cannot be used to make sense of
foreign policies, which are the product of domestic factors
● However, most scholars hold that a number of theories of IR have direct implications
for either the contrasts placed on foreign policy decision-makers or the way these
policies are formulated and that they therefore are a crucial part of the toolbox of
foreign policy analysis.
● for instance, the offensive neorealism of Mearsheimer can be used to make different
predictions about foreign policies than the defensive neorealism of Waltz
● FPA puts the interplay between human agents and structures into focus
key theories: approaches to foreign policy analysis
● Traditional approach: focus on the decision-maker
- comprehending the interests and concerns that drive the policies, and thinking
through the various ways of addressing and defending those interests and
concerns. that includes knowing the outcomes and consequences of past
foreign policy decisions
- exercise of judgment and common sense
- focus on actors and their decisions
- gaining insight based on experience
- historians, jurists, philosophers
- international society scholars and classical realists
● Comparative foreign policy: behaviouralism and pre-theory
- inspired by behaviorists
- ambition to build systemic theories by gathering large bodies of data
- James Rosenay “pre-theory” → identified relevant sources of foreign policy
decisions:
1. idiosyncratic variable
2. role variable
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, 3. governmental variable
4. societal variable
5. systemic variable
● The rational actor model (RAM)
- decision-makers implement rational policies that maximize gains at minimum
cost
- the actors are rational and have all the necessary information to make
informed choices
● Bureaucratic structures and processes: decision-making during crisis
- focuses on the organizational context of decision-making, which is seen to be
conditioned by the dictates and demands of the bureaucratic settings in which
decisions are made
- strength of this approach is empiricism: its detailed attention to the concrete
way policies are carried out in the bureaucratic milieus within which policy
makers work. the approach does not only seek to find out what happened but
also why it happened the way it did
● Cognitive processes and psychology
- attention to the psychological aspect of decision making such as perceptions of
actors
- reject the strong rationality assumption of RAM and instead see
decision-makers as, at most, acting rationally within certain constraints placed
by the limits of human cognition
- decisions can be guided by ingrained pre-existing beliefs or wishful thinking
● Multilevel, multidimensional: the general theories
- increasingly clear that there would never be one all-encompassing theory of
foreign policy → mix
● The constructivist turn: identities before interests
- focus is on the role of ideas, discourse, and identity
- sees policymaking as an intersubjective world, whose ideas and discourse can
be scrutinized in order to arrive at a better theoretical understanding of that
process
- “strategic culture” is an example of the influence of ideas. over time,
countries tend to develop a more lasting set of ideas about how they want to
go about using military force in conducting foreign affairs (Germany after
WWII)
Foreign policy analysis
- Ordinarily involves scrutinizing the external policies of states and placing them in a
broader context of academic knowledge.
- Liberals: Freedom and democracy are the core values
+ liberal democracies will support peaceful international cooperation based on
international institution
- Society scholars emphasize the values of order and justice
+ a rule-based and well-ordered international society is a major goal.
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, - IPE: emphasize the importance of socioeconomic wealth and welfare as a central goal
of foreign policy
+ the promotion of a stable international economic system that can support
economic growth and welfare progress is a major goal
How to conduct foreign policy: a level-of-analysis approach
● Introduced by Waltz
● Waltz searched for causes of war at three levels of analysis:
1. The systemic level
- distribution of power among states in the international system
- pointing to the conditions in the international system that compel or pressure
states towards acting in certain ways
- the various theories do not agree on the conditions of the international system
(realists: anarchy, liberals: cooperation, social constructivists:the goals of the
state are not decided beforehand: they are shaped by the ideas and values that
come forward in the process of discourse and interaction between states)
- different theories of the international system lead to different ideas about how
states will behave
- Realists will explain state behavior by the distribution of power among states
→ small powers are much more constrained by the international system than
great powers
- an important distinction is between defensive realists (Waltz) who take a
benign view of anarchy, where states seek security more than power and are
therefore normally status quo preserving, and between offensive realists
(Mearsheimer) who believe that states look for opportunities to gain power at
the expense of others
- there are two strands of liberal theory that operate solely at the systemic level:
interdependence liberalism, which note that IR is becoming more like
domestic politics where different issues generate different claition → anarchy
is domesticated, and neoliberal intentionalism which argues that a system
peppered by international organizations softens anarchy by easing cooperation
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, 2. The nation-state level
- the type of government amongst
- realists: the relationship between a country's state apparatus and domestic
society → this relationship is important because it assesses the ability of a
government to mobilize and manage the country's power resources
- for a long time, the US was a weak state, consequently, the government was
unable to conduct an expansive and more assertive foreign policy that matched
the actual power and resources of the country
- realists: it is necessary to examine the connection between a country's
government and its society in order to assess the government's ability to
mobilize and extract resources from society for foreign policy purposes
- liberals: believe that individuals, groups and organizations in society play an
important role in foreign policy (under balancing theory)
- genuine democracies decrease the risk of internal conflict by their ability to
deal with grievances via political inclusion and the provision of public goods:
genuine autocracies use co-optation and repression to achieve stability, while
partial democracies fall short in both respects → they are more likely to
experience internal conflict
- liberals believe that domestic politics influence foreign politics
- weak liberals: bottom-up processes of pluralist democracy affect the goals of
the state´s purpose
- strong liberals: holds that there can be a genuine transformation of the
international system as democracy and interdependence alter the identities and
interests of states
- The realist approach is state-centered whereas the liberal approach is
society-centered.
● The bureaucratic politics approach
- bureaucrats and bureaucracy are driven by agency interests in order to ensure
their survival
- agencies are involved in a constant competition for various stakes and prizes
- “where you stand depends on where you sit”
- bureaucracies have a number of advantages over elected officials: expertise,
responsibility for implementation, longevity → asymmetrical power and
dependence relationship between the professional bureaucrats and elected
officials
- bargaining, accommodation, and compromise
● “group think” approach
- when a group arrives at faulty or irrational decisions
- belief in the inherent morality of the group
- collective rationalization
- out-group stereotypes → others are framed as too evil/stupid to understand
- illusion of unanimity
- the direct pressure on dissenters
- a biased and alternative course of action not fully explored
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