Foreign Policy

Foreign Policy

Introduction

Foreign Policy refers to the authoritative actions and statements by a nation directed towards other nations and international organisations. Foreign policy has diplomatic, political, ideological, economic, humanitarian, cultural, and military dimensions. By foreign policy we mean the actions, strategies, and decisions directed at actors outside the borders of a domestic political system (i.e., a state). That the primary intended target of policy is external to the domestic sphere distinguishes foreign from domestic policy. In other words, as Breuning (2007) puts it, foreign policy is “the totality of a country's policies toward and interactions with the environment beyond its borders” (p. 5). A state's foreign policy covers a variety of issues ranging from the rather traditional security and economic areas to environmental and energy issues, foreign aid, migration, and human rights (Breuning, 2007). The actors that initiate foreign policy actions, and those who are the targets of the actions, are often states—but not always.

Discussion

Foreign Policy looks beyond the state as a single entity and includes the study of multiple actors within a state, both as individuals and as groups of individuals in their capacity to make or influence foreign policy. In other words, this inquiry goes further than governments and investigates the influence of individual leaders, bureaucracies, and institutions in foreign policy making.

Even if one thought government to be unnecessary or undesirable in domestic affairs, or that some form of minimal state is the most extensive government that could be justified, the existence of other, independent states not so persuaded, and possessed of burgeoning political and economic ambitions, implies the need for sufficient government at home to permit serious policy abroad. In practice this means a lot of government, since it is impossible to commit people to war, to an agreement concerning trade, or to economic sanctions, without exercising extensive domestic control. (The neglect of such issues may be responsible for the air of unreality surrounding some theories of anarchism, and of the minimal state.)

It is sometimes argued (for example by Machiavelli) that foreign policy is also a major instrument of domestic government, for example by creating fervent union between citizens united behind a common cause. The mutual dependence of domestic and foreign policy can be seen in the constitutional and political changes that have been precipitated in the UK by the loss of empire, and in the US by the entry into and exit from the Second World War, by the subsequent cold war in which traditional isolationism was cast aside, and by the current war on terror.

Foreign policy must therefore inevitably be affected by the structure of domestic government. Monarchy, which permits and indeed encourages alliance through marriage, has a peacemaking device which is not available to other forms of government; despotism, in which a single person holds power for life, or in which a single party holds power indefinitely, permits long-term foreign policy of a kind that is pursued only with great difficulty by governments whose leadership is regularly subjected to ...