Hill The Future of Foreign Policy Analysis

The Future of Foreign Policy Analysis
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International

Studies
Christopher Hill
Print Publication Date: Mar 2010 Subject: Foreign Policy Online Publication Date: Jan 2018
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.329
Summary and Keywords
Foreign policy analysis (FPA) occupies a central place in the study of international
relations. FPA has produced a substantial amount of scholarship dealing with subjects
from the micro and geographically particular to the macro relationship of foreign policy
to globalization. It brings together many different subject areas, indeed disciplines, as
between international relations and comparative politics or political theory, or history and
political science. FPA generates case studies of major world events, and the information
that probes behind the surface of things, to make it more possible to hold politicians
accountable. Meanwhile, officials themselves are ever more aware that they need
assistance, conceptual and empirical, in making sense of how those in other countries
conduct themselves and what can feasibly be achieved at the international level.
However, each subject under FPA needs to be revitalized through the development of new
lines of enquiry and through the struggle with difficult problems. Work is either already
under way or should be pursued in eight important areas. These are (i) foreign policy as a
site of agency, (ii) foreign policy and state-building, (iii) foreign policy and the domestic,
(iv) foreign policy and identity, (v) foreign policy and multilateralism, (vi) foreign policy
and power, (vii) foreign policy and transnationalism, and (viii) foreign policy and ethics.
Keywords: foreign policy analysis, international relations, agency, state-building, multilateralism,

transnationalism, ethics
Introduction
Foreign policy analysis (FPA) will have a future, whatever it may be termed. So long as
foreign policies exist in the world – and they show no signs of disappearing – there will
and should be people keen to analyze and evaluate them. It will be done, however, in a
wide range of ways, not all of which will bear more than a passing resemblance to
academic FPA. This essay sets out to analyze the “analysis,” and to relate the various
manifestations of the subject to each other. On the basis of that survey, it then suggests
the main lines of enquiry which, from both intellectual and political points of view, FPA
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needs to pursue in the coming decades. For, like any area of research and debate, the
subject needs constantly to be reframed and reconfigured, as events, philosophical
currents, and generational change pose constant challenges.
Taking Stock Before Moving Forward

The ghost of FPA past hangs over the present. Since modern academic life pays lip
service to cumulative knowledge but in fact privileges new fashions, FPA is sometimes
seen as having had its day. That day was between around 1954 and the early 1980s, when
it was an important, indeed leading-edge field, focusing on decision making, bureaucratic
politics, alliance politics, crises, and such instruments of foreign policy as coercive
diplomacy (Snyder et al. 1962; Hill and Light 1978; Hudson 1995, 2002). Thereafter it
became sidelined, both in the journals and in degree courses, as more structural
approaches to international politics took over – to say nothing of the hegemony of high
theory, in its multifarious guises. It has, however, never gone away, not just because there
is a generation of teachers and researchers still in post who continue to work at it, but
also because it is an inherently important subject. What is more, since 9/11 there has
been a distinct recovery, in that few now take much convincing that foreign policy is a
human activity of potentially momentous consequence (Hill 2003A). This has led to a
revival of academic interest in who takes key decisions, and in the interplay between
international, domestic, and transnational forces. It now seems possible that the
pendulum will settle in the middle, with FPA established as “normal science” or, at the
least, as a central, sober, and illuminating part of the social science known as
International Relations (IR). The limits of abstract generalization, epitomized in the
individualism of rational choice and neorealism, but also in the ahistoricism of
globalization theory, have now been thoroughly exposed (Wendt 1999; Rosenberg 2000;
Hill 2003B).
It was the “foreign” in “foreign policy analysis” that caused most of the trouble, leading
the subject to be rejected by all too many in the late 1980s and 1990s. There was a
mistaken tendency to associate FPA with realism, because the very notion of the foreign
seemed to inscribe a strict separation between home and abroad, to validate the all too
obviously wrong idea that “politics stopped at the water’s edge.” In the rush to embrace
ideas of common humanity, and ethical obligations that made no distinctions on the basis
of polity or nation (to say nothing of empirical views of the state as in terminal decline)
the term “foreign” had all the wrong connotations. No matter that it merely refers to the
difference between inside and outside; that distinction too had come under attack for
apparently being constitutive of differences that set human beings against each other,
through the very existence and representation of separate communities (Walker 1993).
There had been, it is true, a strong and legitimate reaction against the close-focus of
decision making studies, on the grounds that they placed too much stress on individual
choice, and privileged the activities of political elites. But this did not prevent the
flourishing of policy analysis in general, outside the special category associated with
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diplomats and foreign ministries. For those working on poverty, education, crime, or
energy, policy analysis seemed both indispensable and exciting. It drew on the insights of
organization theory, psychology, public administration and – increasingly – economics, to
go beyond the generally lurid picture of political life painted in the media (Wildavsky
1987). Continuities, processes, power structures, all could be brought into the light by
skillful policy analysts working with academic detachment. At the same time, they
fostered a demi-monde of think-tanks and policy institutes where administrators,
politicians, journalists, and scholars could come together to look at policy in a slightly
longer perspective than that allowed by daily decision making. For some time foreign
policy had been more or less excluded from this world, being the preserve of its own
specialist and rather dignified institutions, such as the Council of Foreign Relations in
New York, or Chatham House in London. But as it became evident that domestic policies
increasingly had an international dimension, so both worlds began to change. Policy
analysis in general now has no limits on its scope, geographic or functional, while new
institutions have grown up to focus on foreign policy, such as New Labour’s Foreign
Policy Centre in London, and the International Crisis Group in Brussels. This has also
forced the traditional international relations institutes to modernize, and to attempt to
reach wider audiences. Given the great increase in the number of graduates in IR pouring
forth from universities worldwide, this has led to the term “foreign policy analyst”
passing into normal usage, at least in serious media outlets and in those on the fringes of
official circles, whether at the national level or at that of international organizations.
This does not mean that the by now rich and extensive literature of FPA is much used by
the policy analysts, foreign and otherwise, who now form a new class, halfway between
officialdom and the academy. For every Charles Grant (Centre for European Reform,
London) or Dominique Moïsi (Institut Français des Relations Internationals, IFRI), there
are 20 analysts who take no interest in academic work except to pilfer the occasional
striking idea, such as “soft power” (Nye 2004). Indeed, more common than professional
policy analysts attempting to apply academic insights, are scholars who have turned their
hands to policy advice. In the USA Charles Kupchan is a prominent contemporary
example (Kupchan 2003). In France Pierre Hassner has continued the tradition associated
indelibly with Raymond Aron (1962). In Italy Angelo Panebianco and, for the new
generation, Filippo Andreatta, are notable cases in point. Journalist-academics, or
academic-journalists, such as Andrés Ortega in Spain (writing for example now in the
Spanish edition of Foreign Policy, begun in 2004), Josef Joffe in Germany, and Timothy
Garton Ash in the UK all do much to link the two worlds of thought about foreign policy.
This pattern will no doubt continue, and become more extensive. Concepts from the more
theoretical literature may even find their way into public use, as has been the case with
“groupthink,” “misperception,” and “bureaucratic politics.” But it is unlikely that busy
policy analysts, preoccupied with the flood of daily events, will spare much of their time
to read more than second-hand summaries of the academic literature in FPA. Thus the
accessible writing style of journals like Foreign Affairs and Survival will continue to have
a key bridging function, together what might be called pithy Op-Ed books, such as those
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written in recent years by scholar-practitioners such as Robert Cooper, Robert Kagan,

and Kishore Mahbubani (Cooper 1996; Kagan 2003; Mahbubani 2008).
It might, nonetheless, be argued that it does not matter if policy makers are barely in
touch with academic work, because all the breakthroughs of FPA have already happened;
as its period of theoretical innovation has passed, what is now happening is the (mere)
application of its theories and concepts to an ever-changing empirical landscape. Yet
none the worse for that, one might respond, given that there is a vital need for a more
sophisticated understanding of how foreign policy decisions are taken than that provided
by the barefoot empiricists of the press and political debate, which serves mostly to
obscure genuine public understanding of what is being enacted in their name. The Iraq
war is a case in point: both the Bush and the Blair administrations displayed some of the
classic symptoms of groupthink, and of the lack of any devil’s advocacy inside the policy
making system. Had analysts had better information, or perhaps more drive to uncover
that information, it might have revealed to an already concerned public the narrowness of
the options being concerned and the lack of serious interest in alternative courses of
action to the invasion of Iraq.
Even if we accept that the innovative phase of FPA is past, therefore, this need not lead
us to move on to other intellectual ventures. FPA represents an intensely useful, indeed
an indispensable, set of tools for any halfway sophisticated political system. Yet, as it
happens, innovation and creativity are far from dead in the subject (Hudson 2005, 2007).
A new journal, indeed, carrying the title Foreign Policy Analysis, was launched in 2005.
Just as the last 15 years or so has seen the emergence of constructivism as a major
approach to IR, so foreign policy has attracted the interest of a new generation of
thinkers, with a distinctive set of concerns (Houghton 2007). That is, they are interested
in showing how a national foreign policy is framed, the roles of language and of discourse
in so doing, and (in particular) the importance of ideas in shaping a country’s orientation
toward outsiders. Indeed, picking up on Walker and other post-positivists, some have
argued that Foreign Policy (at least, as capitalized) has constitutive effects, by inscribing
that very sense of separateness and Otherness which it epitomizes in the life of a given
community (Campbell 1992, 1998).
Associated with this new focus on foreign policy as representative of a set of ideas,
speech-acts (and values) is the revival of interest in the foreign policies of particular
countries, as in the varying kinds of statehood associated with them. It is, for example,
striking how much has been written on German foreign policy since the end of the Cold
War, given that the Berlin Republic is still extremely cautious in its external activities.
And much of this work has been from a constructivist viewpoint, emphasizing the
importance of ideas, identity, and domestic culture both in limiting the country’s ability to
behave as “an ordinary country” and in pushing it toward making a greater contribution
to international society (Katzenstein 1997; Maull 2000). Germany is undoubtedly a special
case, given the extreme sensitivity, at home and abroad, over its foreign policy. But many
other countries’ international behavior has also been interpreted, influentially, in terms of
the language and ideas of foreign policy – examples are the United States (Campbell
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1992; Doty 1993), Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine (Prizel 1998; Hopf 2002), Britain,
France, and Denmark (Larsen 1997, 2005), and the European Union (Bretherton and
Vogler 2006).
Even those writers who would not characterize themselves as constructivists have been
influenced by the constructivist turn. The English School had always been interested in
ideas in history, but it was so obsessed with the concept of international society that it
had nothing to say about foreign policy formation, even tending to see diplomacy
primarily in terms of its role as an institution of that society. As usual Robert Keohane
was amongst the first to sense the way the wind was blowing. His book with Judith
Goldstein on Ideas and Foreign Policy (Goldstein and Keohane 1993) saw ideas as
variables more than with constitutive functions, but it did at least represent a move away
from materialist realism. Since that point it has been rare for any treatment of foreign
policy not to allow that foreign policy is subject to important influences from the ways in
which a society sees itself, and interprets its relationship with the outside world. Indeed,
it is one crucial way in which a society comes to define its own identity. But in this it not
only reflects the influence of constructivism, but also the well-established tradition in FPA
of paying attention to domestic society and politics, and the complex processes of policy
formulation. FPA grew up precisely to throw doubt on objectivist notions of national
interest, and on parsimonious views of unitary, rational, actors. It has benefited from
constructivism’s rebalancing of the subject in the direction of the ideational, and indeed
from the latter’s focus on agents more than structures, but it is also true that FPA’s very
taxonomic approach made it open to a wide range of factors involved in the shaping of
policy. It is also only fair to point out that writings on foreign policy “traditions” and
“moods” pre-dated the emergence of FPA, which in its early years tended to be rather
dismissive of such unscientific work. But there is certainly a connection to be traced
between current concerns with identity and writers such as Charles Beard, who at times
wrote about domestic values and political culture, even if not using that vocabulary
(Beard 1942). Lippmann, Kennan, and Morgenthau also stressed the importance of
competing traditions in US foreign policy (Lippmann 1943; Kennan 1951; Morgenthau
1951). A key bridging figure from this kind of writing into FPA was Gabriel Almond,
whose interest in national character and public moods led him to develop a theoretical
approach toward political culture (Almond 1950, 1963).
In any case, as a result of various factors, including constructivism, 9/11, and the
paradoxical effect of multilateralism in giving individual countries the confidence to seek
a higher profile, national foreign policies have attracted new intellectual attention. From
Singapore (Leifer 2000), to Nigeria (Adebayo 2008), Australia (Gyngell and Wesley 2003;
Jones and Windybank 2005), to Japan (Inoguchi and Jain 2000; Hook et al. 2001; Sato and
Hirata 2008) and Brazil (Pinheiro 2004) many more countries are attracting the interests
of foreign policy analysts – in a comparative spirit, but still discussed in their own
particular terms. The rise of China and India has naturally led to a notable increase in the
number of books and articles devoted to the foreign policies of “emerging powers” (Hook
2002; Hurrell et al. 2006).
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Future Avenues of Enquiry

We may thus conclude that in its various different guises, some more academic and
theoretical than others, and some close to policy making itself, foreign policy analysis has
regained a central place in the canon of approaches to the study of international
relations. Its established literature has many insights to offer, and its concepts can be
applied, with due allowance for context, to any state in the world system. Every subject,
however, needs to be more than merely applied; it needs invigorating through the
development of new lines of enquiry and through the struggle with difficult problems. In
what follows we identify eight important such areas, in which work is either already
under way or should be pursued. Some of these arise naturally out of FPA’s own logic,
while others require bridges to be built with other fields, even other disciplines.
Foreign Policy as a Site of Agency
While there are many important sites of political agency in human life, we are long past
the time when foreign policy could be viewed (as at times it was, by self-interested elites)
as a technical matter outside politics, to be conducted by those with expertise in the
rarefied atmosphere of international politics. Equally, we have survived the period in
which some would have us believe that states and their various strategies were of fast
declining consequence by comparison to those of the globalizing market economy. It
should be clear that just as foreign policy has always been constrained by the existence of
other actors and the intractability of the system as a whole, so even small states have
some capacity to shape their own fates through managing external relationships. Kuwait
survived invasion in 1990 through an alliance. Switzerland negotiates with its EU
neighbors so as to take some features of the Single European Market, but not all. Cuba
under Castro has managed to defy its all-powerful neighbor for half a century, despite its
own sometimes provocative behavior far from its own shores. Depending on the internal
conformation of a polity, a government acting for its own selfish interests (as in Burma) or
a government acting as agent of society (or some part of it) will determine the main lines
of foreign policy. Either way, it will be making some important political choices about the
country’s orientation and external relations. Even if most of those choices are likely to be
routine, they will have consequences for trade, tax, and migration regimes, and some will
literally be of a life and death character, involving war and peace. Yet others, as with
Finland during the Cold War, end up in a circular set of mutually shaping interactions
with domestic politics, as with Greek anti-Americanism in the 1980s and 1990s or
Ukrainian–Russian relations since the Orange Revolution.
Under the heading of agency, to some extent a synonym for all FPA, fall a number of
fascinating issues. The role of personality, for example, particularly in relation to the
making of key decisions (as with Bush and Blair over Iraq, 2002–3) will always be central,
even if we discount a good deal of the personalizing treatment so beloved of the mass
media. Some systems tend explicitly to resist the cult of personality, as in post-Deng
China, but even here we see that foreign policy inherently encourages a prominent role
for heads of government. Another key aspect of agency is how leadership is, and should
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be, conducted. Joseph Nye has recently revived the subject, neglected in relation to
foreign policy even in James MacGregor Burns’ classic book (Burns 1979). He has also
focused on the significance of leaders being able to use the right foreign policy
instrument for the right purpose – or knowing how to combine them (Chong 2007; Nye
2008). The use and abuse of hard and soft power can have the most serious consequences
both for the intended target and for the wielder.
Political psychology has developed considerably over recent decades, and has much to
contribute to the study of foreign policy, at the levels of both individuals and groups. The
IR literature more generally is coming to realize what foreign policy analysts have always
known, namely that emotion plays an important part in attitudes and decisions (Bleiker
and Hutchison 2008). Political psychology has fed into IR through FPA (Janis 1982; ’t Hart
et al. 1997), and is now coming to focus on the interface between the neurological and
the psychological, which allows new links to the natural sciences and to medicine (Stein
2008). This means going beyond the traditional, but artificial, separation between the
rational and the emotional (Brecher 1999; Bueno de Mesquita and McDermott 2004).
Multifaceted cognitive approaches, which look at how information is processed and
choices framed, hold promise for the future. In this sense behavioralism is making a
comeback, as a reaction to the abstractions of rational choice theory (Mintz et al. 2007).
“Political” criteria always involve initial preferences (i.e., biases) as well as attempts to
calculate consequences, which may or may not operate in a clear two-step process (Mintz
2002). All this means that FPA, psychology, and constructivism are beginning to pull in
the same direction in trying to make sense of decision making, which is an exciting
development given that it is a field that was sidelined within IR for so long. Perhaps at
last there is a more widespread recognition that to understand the world we need to
understand actions, and that to understand actions we must look at human beings, and
the ways in which they relate to each other.
The agency dimension, however, also goes beyond individuals and leadership groups.
Indeed, studying foreign policy provides us with something of a laboratory for examining
the competition between elites that exists in every state, and its manifestations at the
levels of bureaucracy, political parties, and interest groups. Most are now focused as
much on the outside world as on their internal politics, as they are aware that “who gets
what, when, and how” may be profoundly shaped by international treaties, special
relationships, and the condition of the international political economy. Even in the most
unpromising of circumstances they can see openings that their own state can exploit,
perhaps to the benefit of their special interests. One way in which the state can be
captured by a particular elite, indeed, is by using the foreign policy dimension. General
Pinochet overturned the Allende government in Chile through secret assistance from the
United States (Haslam 2005), while in a more democratic context Zapatero came to
power in Spain in 2004 partly because of his promise to withdraw Spanish troops from
Iraq.
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Foreign Policy and State-Building
Over a longer period of time, and at a more profound level than either coups or election
victories, is another dimension of the same “second image reversed” observed by Peter
Gourevitch over 30 years ago (Gourevitch 1978). This is the way in which foreign policy
can be used to consolidate, perhaps even create, a sense of nationhood. This is not far
removed from constructivism in that it allows for the possibility that by “othering”
external groups a sense of historic community might be fostered. In turn this is akin to a
phenomenon long talked about by historians – that is, the use of external enemies to unite
a people behind a particular leader or an idea of the state. More subtly, it can be argued
that the emergence of a new nation-state entails strong activity in foreign policy as much
as internal politics, in order to protect against possible interference and to identify the
very demarcation line between inside and outside (Gol 2001). This is a particularly
relevant perspective in Africa, where the plethora of artificial boundaries bequeathed by
colonialism means that leaders have little option – assuming that pan-Africanism is not an
option – but to develop a foreign policy that provides a key point of reference for their
evolving polity, without exposing it to strain through excessive ambitions (Adebajo et al.
2007). In this respect Paul Kagame has recently followed a shrewd path in attempting to
rebuild Rwanda with the help of an active and multidirectional diplomacy, seeking
assistance from many quarters but becoming dependent on none. South Africa under
Thabo Mbeki, on the other hand, put at risk some of the gains made by Nelson Mandela
in relation to the delicately balanced “rainbow nation,” by allowing the Zimbabwean crisis
to fester on his northern border to the extent that the subsequent flood of refugees
provoked angry domestic divisions.
New states have little option but to use foreign policy as part of their development, in
both economic and political terms, which means, given the 140 plus states created since
1945, that there is a great deal for foreign policy analysts to study. But new light can also
be thrown on some long-established units by this kind of approach. The United Kingdom,
for example, has been held together in part by geography, in part by a history of
gradualist parliamentary change, and in part by its own foreign policy activism over the
last 200 years. Historians such as Linda Colley and Brendan Simms have variously shown
how foreign and imperial policy achievements, as much as the industrial revolution,
fashioned the British state in the eighteenth century, whether “shaped or counterfeited,”
in Simms phrase, and ultimately against a French “other” (Colley 1992; Simms 2007,
especially 2007:675). Britain has always contained several fault-lines of potential
fracture, and even now Scottish desires for independence are inhibited by a sense of the
foreign policy consequences (for the complexities of the nuclear deterrent reliance on
Scottish bases, see Chalmers and Walker 2001). Canada, likewise, has had its internal
division over Quebec papered over by the need to be united in the face of its powerful
neighbor, and by a shared sense of a progressive international identity (Potter 2008).
Finally, among many possible examples, President (now Prime Minister) Putin has clearly
used foreign policy to bolster nationalism, and to recentralize the Russian state after
what many perceived as the chaos and external interference of the Yeltsin years. His
assertiveness toward the West and tough tactics over oil and gas sales toward dependent
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neighbors have elicited popular support at home in inverse proportion to the criticisms
that have poured in from abroad.
In short, the triangular relationship between foreign policy, nationalism, and state-
building, should be rich soil for FPA. It opens up much wider questions than those
traditionally associated with diplomacy, while allowing new connections between
comparative politics, historical sociology, and IR. The analysis can also flow both ways,
with foreign policy being seen as a way of shaping, even constituting domestic political
life, as much as the reverse. In fact, rather than this dualistic model, there is a lot of
potential in what Brighi (drawing on Hay 2002) calls a strategic-relational approach,
which would allow us to see actions and context, both domestic and international, as
mutually dependent, as well as subject to certain common, simultaneous forces (Brighi
2005; Brighi and Hill 2008:119–20).
Foreign Policy and the Domestic
This brings us to one of the most central areas of work in FPA research, the role of
domestic factors in shaping external behavior. There is still huge scope for innovation
here, not least because at the public level there is a growing interest in foreign policy, a
wish to shape it, and an assumption that domestic change in other states can have
significant international consequences – whether it is the election of Barack Obama in the
USA, or religious riots in India. Despite 50 years of deconstructing realism there is still
too little appreciation in the worlds of both policy and theory of how distinctive historical
experiences can lead to what can seem to outsiders (especially on rationalist
assumptions) to be bizarre and dangerous attitudes. The best contemporary example of
this Iran, whose mix of a powerful sense of its own great past with angry memories of
recent humiliations by the West produces much aggressive-defensive behavior. This in
turn can be (mis)perceived by outsiders as either irretrievably hostile or simply
untrustworthy. Either way, it is clear that to understand Iranian foreign policy we must
understand its society; and not just the Islamic revolution of 1979, but the history that
preceded it, ancient and modern. We may also then use the tools of FPA to make sense of
the various factions within the Iranian regime, and the Iranians own tendency to
stereotype outsiders (Halliday 1999:49–51).
No foreign policy can be written out de novo. Even revolutionary regimes with an initial
disposition to defy the world soon learn the limits on their freedom of maneuver. Even so,
there is a range of ways in which decision makers can interpret their situation, and
choices to be made about the trade-offs between satisfying domestic and external
demands. It is a challenging task to analyze these margins of action, and to relate them to
the activities of the various actors that populate the domestic environment. These include
the media, pressure groups, and public opinion – attentive and mass. It is surprising how
little work has been produced on domestic players of this kind, even in relation to the
major democratic states. The pioneering work of Bernard C. Cohen has been
insufficiently built upon (Cohen 1963, 1973). Occasional assessments of “the CNN effect”
and the role of the media in relation to war are useful, but detailed accounts of the roles
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of key journalists or particular media outlets tend to be lacking (Robinson 2002). A longer
perspective on the nature of domestic debates about foreign policy, raising issues of
agenda-setting and what becomes routinized, and thus unquestioned, is badly needed in
relation to most countries. The United States is better studied than most, because its
academy is the biggest in the world, and it naturally focuses for the most part on US
foreign policy. But the British IR community is also large, and yet books on the domestic
sources of UK foreign policy are thin on the ground. The situation is worse in relation to
France, although rather better in relation to Germany, for the particular reasons
explained above. The domestic environments of the Soviet Union and China were always
the focus for some scholars, attracted by the sheer challenge of Kremlinology or its
equivalent. Their foundations are now being built upon by more scholars, as societies and
sources open up. But the linguistic solipsism of too many in the English-speaking world
places limits on what can be done. We need urgently to train a generation of foreign
policy analysts with skills in Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, Hindi and the rest so as to
be able to understand the springs of diverse societies without relying on those who are
already part of our own world by virtue of their ability to write in English.
The domestic springs of foreign policy will continue to be central to FPA, as to the world
of policy making itself. Much work needs doing outside the most familiar country
subjects, but also on some neglected aspects within them. Among the latter is the
constitutional problem: how to design law and institutions that enable democratic
accountability and legitimacy without hobbling the executive’s capacity to make policy
efficiently. This is an old but still unresolved problem, which has now become complicated
by the extension of legal obligations into the international realm, through trade
agreements and human rights conventions. The balance of obligations on decision makers
between the realm of domestic sovereignty and that of international society – to say
nothing of world society – is a complex one that needs dissecting by policy analysts,
lawyers, and political philosophers in conjunction. Ultimately the issue is about who and
what foreign policy is for – of which more below.
Foreign Policy and Identity
The arrival of constructivist insights, which we have already touched on, has placed the
issue of identity at the center of FPA, as of many other areas of social science. At the most
straightforward level this has meant that we can explain some behavior in terms of a
country’s (and by extension its decision makers’) particular concerns, arising from its
sense of itself, which will be in turn connected to its history, its values, and even its
attitude to honor (Donelan 2007; Lebow 2008). Conversely, foreign policy behavior will
often shape that very sense of self, fueling feelings of both pride and humiliation. The
former is clear in relation to the British trope of having stood alone against Nazism in
1940, and the latter in relation to Egypt’s devastating defeat in the Six Day War of 1967.
Identity is also closely related to the question of state and nation-building already
surveyed. But there is a further set of issues at stake: what is the place of both foreign
policy and national identity in an era of globalization? We may have passed the high-
water mark of globalization, in that the state has “brought itself back in” with a
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vengeance to real-world politics and to academic analysis. But it would be foolish to deny
the main forms of international interdependence fostered by trade, migration, and in
particular the dramatic acceleration of information technologies over the last 30 years.
These cannot be disinvented. At the very least, therefore, the impulses for cosmopolitan
politics will continue to compete with those of a more communitarian nature (Brown 1992).
By the former in this context is meant the various forms of cross-national loyalty (ethnic,
religious, economic) that can undermine attachment to the nation-state, and indeed any
significant identification with that state. This is especially true when its foreign policy
seems to be radically at odds with a subgroup’s beliefs and ties to fellow religionists, as
happened in Britain and Spain over the Iraq war (Hill 2007; Aggestam and Hill 2008).
Foreign Policy and Multilateralism
Short of such dramatic antagonisms, there is the issue of international cooperation. Some
degree of loss of faith in the utility of national strategies is inevitable when leaders
continually talk the language of interdependence, stressing that benefits can only flow
from actions in a multilateral context, which may then restrict a country’s freedoms
through binding treaties – as with Kyoto, or the EU’s Common Commercial Policy. If this
trend continues, then it is possible, in Bagehot’s terms, that national foreign policy would
become a “dignified” rather than an efficient political institution. That is to say, it would
have more form than substance, with the real negotiations and decisions taking place in
various forms of international organization – informal, regional, global. Leaving aside the
fact that foreign policy has an important function inside international organizations, as
states bargain and make coalitions in order to get a desired outcome – in other words
that multilateralism is not to be seen as the opposite of foreign policy – it is possible to
imagine that the distinctiveness of “foreign” policy will be lost as most domestic players
move in and out of discussions with their equivalents in other states, settling specific
functional issues without reference to any overall national identity or coherent strategy.
As a dominant scenario this is still remote, but we certainly live in a mixed world, where
foreign ministries have to work with their domestic colleagues in many international fora,
and where talk of a distinctive national “role in the world,” while still common, is an
uneasy fit with the reality of complex, multilevel, diplomacy. This places the two issues of
cooperation and identity in an uneasy relationship. It may be that the wave of
constructivist interest in national identity has happened at the precise moment when the
latter is in tension with forces that might lead to its dissolution.
International cooperation can lead less to the disappearance of foreign policy than to its
reconfiguration at a higher level. For instance while there is as yet no single European
foreign policy, let alone a European state, there have been important developments in
that direction, with an international identity for the EU sitting alongside, and not so
uneasily, the foreign policies of the separate Member States. In general regional
groupings are increasingly important within the UN structures, with ASEAN, the African
Union, and the Gulf Cooperation Council all encouraging the production of collective
foreign policy, or what might be termed “diplomatic alliances.”
Page 11 of 24


Back at the national level, rising powers like India and China have few of the doubts
about national identity seen in “postmodern” Europe (Cooper 1996). Here the state is
more a vital expression of political community than a mere device for maximizing the
utilities of a people thrown together by history in a particular territory. While this does
not mean that we are doomed to revert to nationalism and cut-throat competition
between states, nor does it mean that a sense of common identity can be easily expunged
or dispensed with at the level of the state, especially for those who have only just gained
statehood or independence from colonial masters. If this is true, moreover, then such
states and the political communities they embody will continue to make much of foreign
policy as a means of expressing themselves in the world. Foreign policy analysts will
therefore have work of compelling interest to do in understanding both how foreign
policy relates to identity, in a world of swirling, cross-cutting pressures, and how decision
makers handle the complex layers of multilateral governance.
Foreign Policy and Power
All states are now embedded in a set of multilateral arrangements, and understanding the
way they behave within them is an important analytical challenge. Nonetheless, some are
in a much stronger position than others to assert their own interests and views about how
the international system should be ordered. We should not allow a proper skepticism
about realism, let alone a misplaced sense of egalitarianism, to distract us from the
obligation to make sense of the roles of the world’s major powers. On the face of it this
means the P5+1 of the UN’s Security Council, namely Britain, China, France, Russia, and
the USA (plus Germany as a de facto permanent member), but we must now also focus
on, at the least, Brazil, India, and Japan, and probably also Italy, Spain, Indonesia, South
Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Argentina, Canada, Mexico, and
Australia, as countries with foreign policies that “count” in various contexts. Power is a
difficult phenomenon to analyze, viewed with distaste in liberal intellectual quarters, but
to ignore its existence – and here to overlook the fact that certain states are “powers” in
that their behavior usually has significant consequences for others – would be a real
trahison des clercs for IR specialists.
What questions should foreign policy analysts ask about these great, middle and rising
powers? The full range of normal tools deriving from decision making analysis, domestic–
foreign interactions, and constructivism may and should be brought into play, as with any
state. But we should also draw on the realist tradition to interrogate the nature of power,
the relationship between ends and means (including what means are most effective, for
which purposes?), and the calculation of how to achieve tactical as well as strategic
advantages. For the latter, game theory and rational choice may well prove useful, with
their greater theoretical sophistication than standard realism, albeit at the expense of
contextual richness (Maoz and Mor 2002). Yet we may also take great benefit from the
wisdom of traditional realists. Even the much stereotyped Machiavelli has lessons of
prudence to teach modern princes, while the twentieth century writers who grew up
during the “tragedy of great power politics” (Mearsheimer 2001), such as Kennan,
Morgenthau, Wolfers, Aron, and Hoffmann are far more than icons of a particular school
Page 12 of 24


of thought about IR. They were foreign policy analysts of the highest order,
understanding the subtle relations between domestic and international politics, the role
of personality and leadership, and the limits of power as much as its potential. That is why
they were generally cautious about foreign policy in the nuclear age, about the Vietnam
War, and about the ideological tendency in foreign policy. Their historical and
philosophical sensitivity made them acute observers of foreign policy, even if their realism
may have made them unnecessarily pessimistic about the possibilities of progressive
change.
Historians may also contribute much to FPA. Paul Kennedy’s famous thesis of imperial
overstretch has provided us with one of the two main generalizations about actual foreign
policy behavior – the other being the now exhausted democratic peace hypothesis
(Kennedy 1988). Ernest May’s “lessons of the past,” and A.J.P. Taylor’s concept of “the
troublemakers,” have also shown that a comparative historical approach, handled with
scholarly expertise and a sensitivity to context, can be of immense heuristic benefit to the
policy analyst seeking to sift the elements of change from those of continuity (Taylor
1957; May 1973). We should continue to be alert to historical work, and not regard it
simply as a resource from which examples can be pulled to illustrate a priori propositions.
Fortunately the old disciplinary suspicions seem to have faded, and there are now
established patterns of collaboration between modern historians and IR. In these FPA has
a crucial place because of its tradition of work on decision making, which attracted many
scholars left beached by the sudden unfashionability of diplomatic history in the age of
Foucauld. The work of May, Alexander George, Donald Cameron Watt, and more recently
Colin and Miriam Elman, as well as the founding of the Commission for the Study of the
History of International Relations, is testimony to this interdisciplinary flourishing (see
for example, Watt 1965; Elman and Fendius Elman 2001; George 2006; www.cish.org/GB/
introgb.htm, accessed May 5, 2009).
Foreign Policy and Transnationalism
Since Al Qaeda’s murderous and carefully engineered “spectacle” of September 11, 2001
it has been evident that currents in the international system are at work – to which even a
superpower is subject. But it was Guy Debord in the 1960s who first theorized the
concept of mediatic “spectacles,” through which mass attention was captured (Debord
1967). The modern age, with its industrial and post-industrial society, to say nothing of
the creation of a single political system covering the whole surface of the globe, has
evidently generated forces that cut across state boundaries, indeed forces for which such
boundaries are an irrelevance. These forces take many forms – ideological, educational,
scientific, technological, commercial, artistic, and religious. The economic dimension,
deriving from the powerful impact of trade and money liberalization, was summed up by
Susan Strange with the antinomy “states and markets” – the two forces she saw as
explaining the shape of international relations (Strange 1988). Samuel Huntington had
earlier talked about transnationalism “transcending” interstate relations (Huntington
1973).
Page 13 of 24


Yet it was not simply impersonal forces that characterized transnationalism. As Keohane
and Nye demonstrated, also in the early 1970s, it has produced some very significant
transnational actors, which have steadily grown in importance and will inevitably
command our political and scholarly attention in the future (Keohane and Nye 1973). Al
Qaeda is the best known of these actors, but it is arguably more effective as a brand than
as an actual organization. Most terrorist groups have a transnational quality, as without it
they could hardly survive. The IRA, for example, mounted a significant threat to the
British Army in part because it was receiving arms from Libya. Perfectly legal political
groups also attempt to benefit from networks across borders, as with the German party
foundations or the No-Global movement. Most prominent of all at the transnational level
are churches, in their various manifestations, and pressure groups such as Oxfam. All
such actors, well-known or not, operate both directly on governments, and in the
interstices of the international system, being expert at exploiting the blind spots of official
power and at appealing directly to civil society.
The interplay of societies, states, and transnational actors/forces will prove one of the
most important focal points for future foreign policy analysts, even allowing for the fact
that we shall emerge sooner rather than later from the current period of obsession with
“international terrorism” – which is hardly a homogeneous force. It is possible that the
serious economic downturn of 2008 will lead to some revival of protectionism; it has
already brought governments, and states, right back to the center of economic decision
making. But this cannot seriously interrupt the flow of transnational activity, now running
down the multiple highways of the Internet. Governments in China, Burma, and Iran
manage to control some of the material thus generated, but they cannot stop knowledge
spreading or most of the other multiple linkages that occur through private human
activity.
Conversely, transnationalism will not lead to the disappearance of states. As we

discovered in the 1960s during the debate over functionalism, ties that bind people
together through particular common interests or attitudes do not automatically create the
communities in which they live on a daily basis. These have an unavoidably territorial,
and bounded, character, however permeable and sophisticated they might be. Thus,
whatever changes in nomenclature might occur in the future, a perpetual tension is likely
to remain between the territorial and the transnational dimensions of international
politics – a tension that has a particular manifestation in the interplay between official
and private foreign policies. FPA was sometimes misrepresented by skeptics as being so
wedded to states that it amounted to a version of realism. This was never true, given its
rationale of opening up the black box of the state, but it was always vulnerable to the
view that to the extent that national foreign policy could deliver fewer and fewer public
goods for citizens, so there would be less and less to analyze. The transnational
dimension, however, which itself exists largely in a contrapuntal relationship to states,
has created a whole new set of events and interactions to explain, and this will be a main
current of FPA in the future.
Page 14 of 24


Foreign Policy and Ethics
The study of ethics and foreign policy has developed significantly over the last two
decades, thanks to two factors: first, pressure from citizens at the political level and from
such informed groups as the Carnegie Council; and second, the growth of international
political theory in the subject of IR, linking up with trends in traditional political
philosophy. Together they have meant that the idea of the good life at the international
level is now at the center of political and intellectual concerns. FPA itself has not played a
direct part in this move, but when the issue of agency arises, that is, who is supposed to
act to achieve a better set of international arrangements, foreign policy must come
immediately to the fore. Although not conventionally catalogued under foreign policy
analysis, major books such as Stanley Hoffmann’s Duties beyond Borders, Michael
Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, and even John Rawls’ Law of Peoples all have much to say
about how states do and might behave in relation to each other, and to each other’s
citizens (Walzer 1977, 1994; Hoffmann 1981; Rawls 1999). Indeed, one might suggest that
FPA courses and scholarship should do more to integrate this tradition of writing – just as
political philosophers might do more to relate their ideas to the corpus of knowledge that
now exists about foreign policy behavior.
Mainstream IR writers have done a good deal to bridge the above gap, following
particularly in Hoffmann’s footsteps and in those of R.J. Vincent’s early discussion of
human rights and foreign policy (Vincent 1986). Chris Brown often produces de facto
foreign policy analysis, when relating theory to contemporary dilemmas (e.g., Brown
2003), while Tim Dunne and Nicholas Wheeler have given a serious analytical basis to
New Labour’s discourse of an ethical dimension to foreign policy practice (see, for
example, Wheeler and Dunne 1998). Wheeler’s book on humanitarian interventionism is a
model of how to bring together agency (i.e., foreign policy concerns) with structure (the
shape of international society) in the context of ethics (Wheeler 2000). Most recently,
Michael Barnett et al. have provided some interesting suggestions as to why states have
come in recent years to have a stronger sense of obligations to those who are not their
own citizens (Barnett and Weiss 2008).
These developments are not only welcome, but overdue in the context of the history of
FPA. It was perhaps understandable, given the conjunction of Cold War events and the
“scientific” turn in social science (not completely unconnected developments, of course),
that FPA should have kept its moral distance and/or assumed that it was enough to
explain how decision makers came to enact the crazy things they were often inclined to
do. But the effect of this detachment was to leave the moral ground on the one hand to
the realists, who tended to stress the determining effects of power, and on the other to
idealists who tended to view foreign policy as an exercise in cynical realism. This was not
a fruitful dichotomy in which to be caught. One of the central issues arising out of the
study of foreign policy should be an interest in how and why decision makers’ choices get
widened, or narrowed, and by what (or whom). This implies that while action is always
constrained by a range of factors, the latter range from the immoveable to the
contingent, from the wholly external to the literally domestic, and from the material to
Page 15 of 24


the ideational and psychological. In this matrix there is then the potential for debate over
preferred courses of action, and for free moral choices over the position to stand on. FPA
should be the intelligent middle way between grim historical determinism and the heroic
moralizing of liberal crusaders. It must face up to ethical questions, while also locating
them in an explanatory framework derived from the close study of how actual decisions
are made.
In Conclusion
Foreign policy analysis has shown itself to have an intellectual pedigree and important
real-world relevance, however subject it might be to the vagaries of academic fashion. It
has produced a substantial amount of scholarship dealing with subjects from the micro
and geographically particular to the macro relationship of foreign policy to globalization.
It provides bridges between many different subject areas, indeed disciplines, as between
IR and comparative politics or political theory, or history and political science. It is itself
often interdisciplinary. FPA thus has much to offer students, professional social scientists,
decision makers, and citizens. Indeed, for this last and most important category it is one
of the most accessible areas of writing in IR, given that it generates case studies of major
world events, and the information that probes behind the surface of things, to make it
more possible to hold politicians accountable. Meanwhile officials themselves are ever
more aware that they need assistance, conceptual and empirical, in making sense of how
those in other countries conduct themselves and what can feasibly be achieved at the
international level.
Such a record means that foreign policy analysis has an important future. With 192 states
in the international system and vastly more actors on the world stage there is no shortage
of work to do, even if we confine ourselves to the contemporary sphere and leave the rich
records of past decisions to the historians. The work may be divided into three broad
categories – actors, areas, and contexts. In the first, that of actors, agency can be studied
at the level of the state as a whole, at various sub-state levels, including political,
bureaucratic, and social groups, or at that of the external actors impacting upon any
given society and affecting its international relations. The latter include other states, and
parts of states, as well as transnational actors of multiple kinds, including
transgovernmental alliances.
In the second category, that of areas, foreign policy may be analyzed, compared, and
contrasted according to the geographic region, or subregion, in which it occurs. It is
possible that over the next half-century many smaller states will be swept up into larger
units, in which case the focus will be on the foreign relations of regions or bigger powers
(while not forgetting that intra-federal relations do not always work as they
constitutionally should, and may thus verge on becoming foreign policy). But this is not
inevitable, in which case the smaller UN members will have to develop ever more active
and sophisticated strategies to ensure their survival. This will be a fascinating subject for
analysis and commentary.
Page 16 of 24


The third category is that of contexts, by which is meant the range of possible
environments in which foreign policy makers exist, beyond the geographic. That is, levels
of socioeconomic development and political orientations inside the state, but also alliance
systems, special relationships, and multilateral frameworks outside it. Using, and coping
with, the ever-growing forms of multilateralism is a major challenge for future
practitioners, wherever they are located, and whatever increment of power they enjoy.
The problems of climate change and weapons proliferation are only two examples of how
even the most significant states (will “superpower” still be a relevant term in the decades
to come?) have no option but to treat with others, adversaries as well as friends.
Accordingly, we as analysts must observe and deconstruct what they do, in the hope of
being able to clarify policy choices and to inform the citizenry of where responsibility lies
for given outcomes.
The terms “foreign policy analysis” and “comparative foreign policy” have had different
meanings in different places, according to the methodologies and aspirations employed
(Hill 2003B:10). In particular it is has been evident, as in much of social science, that
there has been an historical divide between FPA in the United States (as where US
influence has been especially felt) and FPA elsewhere (including where there has been an
explicit reaction against IR as the “American social science” [Hoffmann 1977]). But this is
no longer of such importance. Big-scale aggregate studies of foreign policy “events,” and
strictly positivist work in general, are less prominent even in the United States, where
constructivism has made significant headway (although it should be noted that there are
still some sophisticated exponents at work – King 1989; King and Murray 2002). For their
part Europeans, and other centers of FPA, have been keen to use the excellent theoretical
work so far largely generated in US universities and to add more rigor to their
traditionally discursive approaches. This moving beyond dualisms is a sign of maturity;
we should all benefit from intellectual cross-overs and from a wider range of empirical
cases in the future. The intellectual and political excitement of the subject remains,
perhaps centering in the next phase on the interface between constructivism and neuro-
psychology, on the one hand, and on issues of accountability and domestic involvement in
foreign policy on the other. But there will always be new avenues to explore and issues to
dissect, in the world of foreign policy. We have a common responsibility not to let the
pace drop.
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and independent news stories on international affairs.
Page 23 of 24


Council on Foreign Relations. At www.cfr.org, accessed May 5, 2009. Wide-ranging

policy-related discussion of the US role in the world.
European Foreign Policy Research Network and EU-CONSENT Project. At

www.fornet.info and www.eu-consent.net, accessed May 5, 2009. Useful collections of
material on the EU and its Member States. Attempts at building new forms of foreign
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∼sredd/fpa/resources.html, accessed May 5, 2009. Indispensable ISA-organized
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Acknowledgments
In the writing of this essay I have been most grateful for the advice of Patrick James,
Elisabetta Brighi, Geraldo Filho Zahran, and an anonymous referee.
Christopher Hill
SAIS Europe, Johns Hopkins University
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Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International

Summary and Keywords

Keywords: foreign policy analysis, international relations, agency, state-building, multilateralism,

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Taking Stock Before Moving Forward

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written in recent years by scholar-practitioners such as Robert Cooper, Robert Kagan,

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Future Avenues of Enquiry

Foreign Policy as a Site of Agency

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Foreign Policy and State-Building

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Foreign Policy and the Domestic

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Foreign Policy and Identity

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Foreign Policy and Multilateralism

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Foreign Policy and Power

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Foreign Policy and Transnationalism

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Conversely, transnationalism will not lead to the disappearance of states. As we

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Foreign Policy and Ethics

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Aron, R. (1962) Paix et Guerre Entre les Nations. Paris: Calman-Lévy.

Brown, C. (1992) International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches. Hemel

Burns, J.M. (1979) Leadership. New York: Harper and Row.

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Debord, G. (1967) La Société du Spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chastel.

Doty, R. (1993) Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of US

George, A. (2006) On Foreign Policy: Unfinished Business. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Hay, C. (2002) Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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Hoffmann, S. (1977) An American Social Science: International Relations. Daedalus 106

Hopf, T. (2002) Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign