The Foreign Policies of the Global South: Rethinking Conceptual Frameworks 9781626373488

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The Foreign Policies of the Global South

The Foreign Policies of the Global South RETHINKING CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

EDITED BY

Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2003 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com

and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU

© 2003 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The foreign policies of the global south : rethinking conceptual frameworks / Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner, editor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-58826-175-1 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Developing countries—Foreign relations. 2. Developing countries—Foreign economic relations. 3. Globalization. 4. World politics—1989– 5. International relations. I. Braveboy-Wagner, Jacqueline Anne. D887 .F67 2003 327'.09172'4—dc21 2002036828

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

∞

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

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Contents

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Acknowledgments 1 The Foreign Polices of the Global South: An Introduction Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner

2 Assessing Current Conceptual and Empirical Approaches Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner and Michael T. Snarr 3 Postcoloniality in Global South Foreign Policy: A Perspective Siba N. Grovogui

4 Reconceptualizing the Global South’s Perspective: The End of the Bandung Spirit Randolph B. Persaud

5 Foreign Policy in the Arab World: The Promise of a State-Centered Approach Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou

6 African Foreign Policy: Integrating Political Economy and Decisionmaking Perspectives Paul G. Adogamhe

7 Latin American Foreign Policies: Incorporating Civil Society Perspectives Andrés Serbin v

1 13 31 49 65 79 99

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CONTENTS

8 Latin America’s Foreign Economic Policy: Toward a Global South Framework Rita Giacalone

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10 Modernization and Foreign Policy: An Alternative Approach to the Global South Howard H. Lentner

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9 Making Room for the Smallest States Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner

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11 Conclusion Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner

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References The Contributors Index About the Book

189 205 209 221

Acknowledgments

This work was facilitated by a grant from the International Studies Association (ISA), which underwrote an initial workshop held at the City University of New York. The goal of the grant and workshop was to facilitate an exchange of ideas among third world scholars specializing in different regions, third world scholars located in the global south and those located in the United States, and those scholars and third world diplomats. An exchange of ideas between the third world participants and North American academics and students also occurred during subsequent discussions in Minneapolis, Washington, and Panama City. We thank all those who participated in these discussions and, of course, the ISA and Ph.D. Program in Political Science at the City University of New York for their financial and logistical support. Finally, we would also like to express our appreciation to Shena Redmond at Lynne Rienner Publishers and Jon Howard for their help in editing the book and preparing it for publication.

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1 The Foreign Policies of the Global South: An Introduction Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner

The aim of this book is to refocus the attention of foreign policy scholars on the theoretical relevance of the states that together make up twothirds of the global community: “third world countries” or, more appropriately today, the “countries of the global south.” The avenue chosen for this refocusing is the field of foreign policy, which from its genesis as a separate subfield of international relations has arguably had an inherent bias toward the study of “developed Western states.” In the twenty-first century, the field itself is being reconceptualized in light of the decline of state power, the rise of nonstate actors, and the inexorable forces of globalization and transnationalization. Although many recognize that the third world is at the heart of various policy problematiques today (ranging from terrorism to trade), scholars are less likely than before to consider third world countries as having theoretical relevance to the foreign policy—if not the entire international relations—enterprise. But given the great global changes that have impacted the study of international relations and foreign policy, the time seems ripe for considering whether and in what way the external strategies of the majority of the world’s nations have changed—in other words, how these nations are dealing with globalization, liberalization, and the transnationalization of issues, society, and economies. Although in some ways third world nations still seem to cling to older perspectives on the role of the state and state power, as well as inequality and dependency, they have also had to modify their approaches to incorporate new realities. The contributors to this volume therefore wish to look back—at theoretical attempts to incorporate third world activity—as well as 1

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THE FOREIGN POLICIES OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH

forward to offer alternative theoretical paths to understanding third world foreign policy today. We assume that comparative theorizing (across varied groups of nations) is still accepted as the key to gaining a full understanding of foreign policy and foreign policy behavior. With this in mind, we concentrate on understanding the policies of African, Asian, and Latin American nations, melding the three contexts of global south, region, and nation. From Third World to Global South: Three Levels of Analysis

The 1970s were undoubtedly the heyday of the third world in terms of its perceived global importance. At that time, the North-South conflict, centered on issues of international social justice, was as much a focus of the global community as was the East-West ideological divide. This focus on the third world emerged as a result of the sheer number of nations that gained independence in the 1960s and 1970s; their opposition to East-West nuclear politics; their vocal demands for decolonization and development within global forums, including the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development; the contentious global discussions that accompanied the fight for a New International Economic Order; the dramatic actions of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1973, as well as less successful endeavors of other cartels; and the domestic nationalist and socialist postcolonial experiments and civil conflicts that so often led to, and were aggravated by, East-West rivalries. Matching the global policy attention that was forced in the direction of the third world was the emergence and strengthening of the academic field of third world studies within the social sciences. Up to the late 1960s, anthropology could be said to be the natural focus of those seeking to do research on “traditional” societies. But by the late 1960s, in sociology and political science, much useful research was being conducted on the phenomenon of modernization and social and political development (for an overview see the classic work of Bill and Hargrave 1973). A countermodernization elaboration of the dependency thesis also emerged, offering both theoretical and policy-relevant analyses (see Chilcote and Edelstein 1974 and Frank and Johnson 1972 for the former; Prébisch 1963 for the latter). Later, postdependency analysis criticized the constrained view of dependency itself, focusing on development options and strategies available to dependent states (Becker 1984; Muñoz 1981).

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In economics and political economy, the conventional diffusionist model of development was challenged by command economy, mixed economy, and/or “basic needs” approaches (for an overview see Wilber and Jamieson 1988). In security and conflict studies, the traditional approach viewed weak developing states as objects of great power rivalry, as neutralist, or as just plain unimportant (Singer 1972; Vital 1967). In the mid-1970s, however, this was counteracted by the expansion of the concept of security—pioneered by international organizations—to include economic dimensions and, later, an even more multifaceted political, economic, and social approach (see, e.g., United Nations 1974; Commonwealth Secretariat 1985). In the field of international relations, the realist view of international politics focusing on state pursuit of security goals was broadened in the 1970s to include approaches dealing with various types of structural inequities (Galtung 1971; Wallerstein 1979). Analyses focusing on the economic structure were central to this approach, leading to the development of international political economy as a separate legitimate subfield.1 Meanwhile, foreign policy theorists turned their attention to perspectives that could incorporate the many new nations that had emerged to independence beginning in the 1960s, in the process fostering the development of a comparative approach that later developed into the field of comparative foreign policy (CFP) (Rosenau 1968). CFP specialists sought to develop generalizations about (and, in the process, differentiate among) all types of states. Two offshoots of the literature appeared in the form of research on small-sized states (e.g., the work of Maurice East 1973a and 1973b) and on dependent states (e.g., Moon 1983). But by the mid-1980s most third world nations had entered economically into a “lost decade,” mired in debt as a result of higher oil prices, falling commodity prices, and economies hindered by excessive state control. New global norms of democratization and economic liberalization, pressed in large measure by new leadership in the United States, began to be diffused throughout the world. Strapped by structural adjustment policies imposed by the international lending institutions and stung by the limited developmental achievements of policies of nationalization, cartelization, and regional integration, third world countries turned somewhat inward to deal with the task of arresting individual economic decline. In the process they lost some of the cohesion displayed earlier in bargaining with the North. As globalization increased and liberalization norms became more entrenched in the 1990s, the “early bird” syndrome emerged, whereby those countries that could hopped proactively on the liberalization bandwagon while hesitant

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THE FOREIGN POLICIES OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH

or less able others were left to worry about being marginalized. The demise of the Soviet Union also served to take away the most important pillar of political leverage possessed by many developing countries. In tandem with these changes, academic interest in third world studies (by which I mean studies of the third world as a unit) declined. After all, the term third world, originally coined by Frenchman Alfred Sauvy in 1952, was supposed to refer to a bloc of countries that, even though they were recognized as diverse, shared enough common characteristics to merit being considered as a group. (These characteristics included a colonial background, economic underdevelopment vis-à-vis the “first [i.e., developed] world,” and multiethnic societies. See BraveboyWagner 1986.) More important, the international behavior of these countries in the 1970s and 1980s could in large degree be assessed through their participation in certain key organizations such as the NAM, the Group of 77, and the United Nations (UN), places where they sought bargaining solidarity vis-à-vis the developed nations. But in the 1990s the “second world” of Eastern Europe and Russia, no longer communist, was rechristened “countries/economies in transition” (signifying the transition to free-market democracies) and was seen by the main international institutions as sharing some of the characteristics of the developing nations. The third world itself, now more often referred to as the “south” (a term dating back, in UN parlance, to the 1970s) or its extension—the “global south”—lost much of its bargaining solidarity.2 Sharp economic divisions between primary producing nations and industrial nations, which had provided a basis for solid terms-of-trade arguments of the 1970s, became weaker in a world in which technological capabilities were more diffuse and tertiary and technical services were the main engines of almost all economies. The powerful NAM lost some of its raison d’être in a world with only one superpower, though social and economic issues remained on the agenda. As the ideology of liberalization spread around the globe and homogenized countries in varying degrees, developing countries (both individually and regionally and, of course, at different paces) began to embrace globalization and integrate into the world economy. In this scenario, it was and remains easy to lose sight of any criteria that the global south countries might hold in common. Of course, if they do not have anything in common, we cannot generalize about them and it makes little sense to focus on them in hopes of producing some theoretical advance. However, before giving in to that line of argument, we should first recognize that researchers have always employed at least three levels of analysis of third world action and activities: the nation, the region, and the third world (or the global south) itself. In order to understand these

INTRODUCTION

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diverse countries, we have had to accommodate all three levels. It is a fact that today the global south level is a less desirable starting point for analysis than in the past. Nevertheless, it would be erroneous to assume that the global south countries have nothing at all in common today. African, Asian, and Latin American nations still are relatively underdeveloped vis-à-vis the global north countries, and yet they come together to offer common proposals in UN bodies and to provide triangular support for regionally oriented proposals. A few major tricontinental organizational arrangements still exist in a healthy state, notably OPEC and the Group of 15 and Group of 77 economic caucuses. Developing countries have increased their technical, economic, and financial investment in one another, often across regions. As a group, developing nations continue to press for sustainable development (or, more recently, comprehensive development), for South-South economic and technical cooperation (known in UN parlance by the acronyms ECDC/TCDC), which they consider to be even more important within the context of globalization, and for debt reduction, poverty alleviation, and help in combating various major social ills (see, e.g., United Nations 1998).3 Politically, all developing nations express concern about the “democratic deficit” in organizations such as the United Nations, where the bulk of them do not participate in the highest level of decisionmaking on security issues and are marginalized on key financial decisions. Moreover, the very process of globalization has engendered commonality among many of these nations: even as the distinctions among them grow, they are all kept conscious of the continuing, expanding North-South divide—political, economic, social, and now digital. Still, it is true that these global south commonalities play out now more as convenient diplomatic stances than concrete activities that today are more likely to be regional or bilateral in scope. As Randolph Persaud notes in his contribution to this book (Chapter 4), today’s third world is much more fragmented than in the past: “The age of Bandung is over, and with it the movement for change that once took the form of activist foreign policies founded on shared principles of justice, equality, and rights.” Another phenomenon of this global era focuses attention on the third world in an amorphously unifying way. The rise in influence of transnational civil society, particularly nongovernmental organizations and groups with disparate goals, has done more, perhaps, to focus the global community on third world issues today than has any intergovernmental forum. A large number of groups in global north countries seek to champion the causes of the disaffected of the world, joining in this endeavor with groups in the South, which generally tend to have

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THE FOREIGN POLICIES OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH

more targeted social or economic goals. The result is a heightened emphasis on the resolution of socioeconomic issues and a heightened debate on the pros and cons of liberalism and capitalism. In other words, transnational civil society derives much of its impetus from perceived first world injustice toward third world communities both in and outside the industrial centers. Today, the rubric “global south” seems to have more meaning to this movement than to governmental policymakers themselves. But even here, as Andrés Serbin points out in his contribution to this book (Chapter 7), the regional civil society agenda is not necessarily the same as the global agenda, and the regional agenda differs from region to region. Thus he argues correctly that perhaps the most effective level of analysis today is the regional and subregional one. Global integration is occurring at the same time that regional integration is being strengthened. The enhancement of regional integration is not necessarily antagonistic to globalization in that regional mechanisms are generally a prelude to global opening, but there are inevitable tensions. In Latin America, for example, regional free-trade areas have been strengthened or newly created—the Southern Cone Common Market (Mercosur) and the Association of Caribbean States being examples of the latter—in order to both counteract the effects of, and strengthen the capacity to, accommodate hemispheric integration. But in Africa, as Paul Adogamhe points out in Chapter 6, the goal of the incipient integration movements is more to work toward self-reliance—a feature of the “older” 1960s integration attempts in Latin America—than to move toward global integration. These differences make for varied regional and national foreign policy strategies and stances, despite the seemingly similar overall goal of freer trade. The differences in foreign policy priorities among African, Asian, and Latin American nations are also more noticeable today than in the past. In Latin America and the Caribbean the key policy issue on the regional agenda is trade and integration (which is not to say that security issues such as civil conflict and drug trafficking are not also very important in some countries); in East and Southeast Asia, trade issues are also clearly given high priority, reflected in the strength of intraregional trade, the widening and deepening of the Association of South East Asian Nations, and the growth of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. But in South Asia, there is as yet no strong economic collaboration, given that power issues between India and Pakistan overwhelm the agenda. In North Asia, the continuing conflict between North and South Korea is central to regional policy. In much of Africa, the resolution of ethnopolitical and democratization issues remains a higher priority than trade, and priority is also given to such pressing social

INTRODUCTION

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issues as poverty alleviation and efforts to counter the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In the Middle East, long-standing political conflicts continue to attract global and regional attention, especially in view of the heightened threat of radical Islamic terrorism. In sum, each region prioritizes different issues; each region of the South needs to be considered on its own merits as researchers attempt to find useful ways to study their decisionmaking and strategies. At the most basic level of analysis of foreign policy making—that is, the traditional state level—it is clear that in most of the South intergovernmentalism rather than supranationalism holds sway. First, in most places (Latin America being somewhat of an exception), regional integration is not as advanced as in Europe, so the effort to build supranational institutions is still in its relatively early stages. Second, the countries of the South are jealous of their hard-won sovereignty and less likely than the global north nations to see the benefits of a higher form of integration beyond functional and economic cooperation. Globalization notwithstanding, tension continues to exist—in the North as well, of course—between nationalism and regionalism. In the North, we see this played out in Europe, where Britain has been reluctant to join in European monetary union and Ireland at first voted down the Treaty of Nice on European Union enlargement. (Irish voters turned down the treaty in 2001 but voted for it in the wake of a vigorous government campaign in 2002.) National interests also loom large in U.S. policy as it seeks to protect U.S. economic interests in liberalization negotiations with Europe and China. But the appeal of sovereignty remains stronger in the global south, where state- and nation-building have not been totally successful and where petty interstate hostilities still rankle. Although these countries are joining in creating more and more international institutions, it can be reasonably posited that, given their need to solve their many dire domestic problems, they are more interested in gaining individual benefit from institutions than fostering the collective good. Thus in this book we recognize that national strategies for achieving foreign policy goals vary; contextual national analysis is clearly important to any search for an understanding of the dynamics of foreign policy in the South; and regional or continental policy (e.g., in the case of the African Union analyzed by Adogamhe) still rests on a strong foundation of national interest. Foreign Policy Analysis, Structural Analysis, and Sociological Perspectives

International relations (IR) scholars view foreign policy as a subfield that focuses not on the international system structure and relationships

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THE FOREIGN POLICIES OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH

but on substate influences. Though often described as “agency” focused (Hudson and Vore 1995; see Carlsnaes 1992 on the debate in foreign policy), foreign policy focuses as much on the historically and culturally determined national institutional structure and the system structure (i.e., system as environment) as on the choices of decisionmakers and societal actors. Still it is correct to say that international relations analysts take a “macro” approach to the subject, whereas foreign policy specialists adopt a “micro” approach. In this tradition, foreign policy’s development as a field is usually seen as dating back to decisionmaking frameworks offered by Richard Snyder, H. Bruck, and Burton Sapin (1962), moving through the primarily quantitative era of comparative foreign policy, and coming back to more eclectic analysis of psychological, societal, and bureaucratic factors in the post–Cold War era (Hudson and Vore 1995). One problem with this compartmentalization, however, is that often foreign policy theorists, in focusing on internal structures and actions, give less attention to certain systemic (i.e., IR) factors that are highly important to global south–oriented analysts. Even as the subfield of international political economy developed in the 1980s, focusing on these omitted structural aspects of—and often impediments to—economic relations, it developed in an artificial divorce from foreign policy analysis (Rosenau 1988). Yet in the third world, foreign policy could never be separated from structural considerations, whether within the traditional weak state– great power realist approach or within the core-periphery analysis of international political economy research. From a practical perspective, the security aims of all third world nations have been influenced by balance of power or alliance considerations (superpower/great power or nonaligned), and the economic survival of these states has also depended on the pursuit of judicious external policies—including regional integration—pursued to counter the negative effects of an imbalanced international economic system. Thus to study global south foreign policy is to incorporate elements of international relations and international political economy, as well as traditional ideas about foreign policy emanating from decisionmakers’ choices. In fact, global south–oriented scholars have generally preferred to theorize about foreign policy through the political-economic lens of dependency/counterdependence or, more recently, counterhegemony (see, e.g., Biddle and Stephens 1989; Hey 1994; Persaud 2001) and the related impact and “permissibility” of the international system, reflected, for example, in changing levels of state autonomy configured by changing relations between domestic and international forces (see, e.g., a short critique in Van Klaveren 1996: 40–41). The emphasis on

INTRODUCTION

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external-internal structure has tended to trump research focusing on the intricacies of decisionmaking. Where decisionmaking studies have been undertaken, they have generally emphasized the interplay of the leader, rather than the leadership, and the environment (Korany 1986). Moreover, in third world foreign policy analysis, bureaucratic and societal factors, which usually are considered significant in developed country analysis, have received considerably less attention. But a question arises, given the global transformations that have led to the decline of state authority and the rising influence of civil society, as to whether foreign policy in its traditional sense of state policy is still a viable approach to understanding global relations. Or, as Ole Waever asks: What is foreign policy if not that specific field of relations among states? Does the enterprise not inevitably partake in the reification of the state? Is the whole agenda not inherently linked to the conceptual bifurcation into domestic and foreign? Is the very idea of foreign policy meaningful without the basic inside/outside metaphor? (Waever 1994: 239)

I have already pointed to the tenacity with which third world states seem to guard their sovereignty even in an era of loosening state control. But there is another issue: when questions such as Waever’s are asked, usually the questioner wants to point to or discuss the increasingly weak distinction between the domestic and the international and the “sociologization” of international relations today—that is, the rise of issues that transcend the domestic/foreign border or merge domestic and international interests. The problem is that this discussion suggests that the substance of foreign policy has somehow changed suddenly from a concentration on “high politics” to incorporation of “low politics” issues, or from some inherently foreign concerns to a domestic-foreign mix in the aftermath of the Cold War. But for most global south states— particularly the large number of states that were not involved in major military security crises of one sort or another after independence—the business of foreign policy has long been at heart economic and social. Clearly because of the international environment and the interests of the so-called great powers—ideological interests yesterday, counterterrorism today—global south foreign policy has been skewed toward accommodating these interests by shaping foreign policy strategies to suit these powers (e.g., in votes at the United Nations). But there is no strong line to be drawn between a time when global south states conducted “militarized” foreign policies and when they conducted “economized” policies, or between when they “externalized” foreign policy

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and when they “domesticated” foreign policy. Foreign policy has long been closely tied to domestic concerns—economic, social, and societal (e.g., cultural-ethnic), as well as political (nation-building, regime survival) issues. These issues happen today to be given priority on the international agenda. In other words, the foreign policy of global south countries has for long been both politicized and “sociologized.” Thus it is difficult, when dealing with the foreign policy of the global south, to talk about a new form of analysis either from a conceptual or from an issue perspective, though there are some issues (e.g., human rights) that have been thrust onto the global south agenda only under outside pressure. However, this does not mean that global south foreign policy analysis does not need, as all foreign policy analysis, to be reconceptualized to take into account: the weakening of the state as portal to and from the outside (the state, long challenged by transnational corporations, is now challenged also by civil and uncivil groups with transnational ties); the strong participation and influence of regional, subregional, and international institutional entities in policymaking; and the diffuseness of foreign policy challenges that can now come from a variety of domestic or international quarters and involve a wide range of issues. Foreign policy is still conducted through the intermediary of the state; even civil society, as Serbin points out, uses the state as a major interlocutor. But today there are other gateways and channels available for intervention in foreign policy, now that the state does not control the agenda as tightly as before. In short, global south foreign policy analysis must take into account aspects of IR, of international political economy, of “traditional” foreign policy analysis, and of social analysis induced by changes in the role of the state vis-à-vis other actors seeking to change both the domestic and the international environments. In this book, we focus first on the existing general literature on foreign policy to discern what can be and has been usefully applied to global south analysis. Despite today’s postpositivist, postmodern eclectic approach to international relations, theorizing should still be theorybuilding, which by its very nature suggests a cumulative enterprise. Chapters 2 and 3 offer essential background perspectives on the collective self-image of the global south (the unit). Each arrives at a different but not mutually exclusive conclusion. In the remaining chapters we focus on a variety of foreign policy conceptualizations as they apply to various regions or conglomerations of the global south: the Arab world, African states, Latin American states, the often-neglected small-sized states, and developing Asia. Perspectives on the role of the state, on political economy and decisionmaking, on foreign economic policy, on

INTRODUCTION

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the role of civil society, and on the impact of modernization and globalization are offered. Most contributors also keep an eye on generalizing their models to the entire range of global south countries, either through regional or national comparisons. A synthesis of sorts is attempted in the conclusion, but we certainly did not feel that it was necessary to harmonize ideas in a volume that is intended to provide food for thought. We recognize that the contributions to this book only suggest a range of approaches that might be offered in the study of the foreign policy of the global south. We also were not preoccupied with analyzing or promulgating traditional, positivist, postmodern, or other distinctions in approach; rather we were simply guided by what we know of events and ideas in the global south. Whatever the limitations, we feel that there is clearly a need to at least begin to revisit the “understudied foreign policy of underdeveloped nations” in hopes of reviving theoretical interest in these regions of the world (Korany 1983: 165–166). Moreover, the book aims to bring to the attention of the global north public some of the research that is being done on the global south, by global south analysts who live outside as well as within the industrial global north. Finally, we do expect that our initial theoretical analyses will be followed up with both more conceptual work and the empirical applications that some may wish to see in this book but that, for lack of space, must await another publication. Notes

1. One early and much quoted work in this area was Joan Edelman Spero’s Politics of International Economic Relations, first published in 1977. The fifth edition, coauthored with Jeffrey A. Hart, appeared in 1997. Apart from analyzing the management of economic relations in the Western industrial and socialist countries, Spero devoted a section of the book to analysis of North-South relations. 2. It may be noted that although the term global south normally refers to the third world (i.e., African, Asian, Latin American) countries, the fact that there are “southern” sectors in the prosperous North as well as “northern” sectors in the South provides a broader focus for some analysts. 3. Comprehensive development has been the term used by the United Nations since the late 1990s to refer to the need for development to include political (governance), human, ecological, as well as economic improvements. As UN Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette noted: “[T]his concept does not only refer to policy. It refers to the interaction among the various actors of development. It argues for coherent and coordinated approaches, with developing country governments playing a leading role” (United Nations 1999).

2 Assessing Current Conceptual and Empirical Approaches Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner and Michael T. Snarr

Although international relations and foreign policy researchers assume different perspectives—macro, in the one case, micro in the other—the foreign policy subfield continues to be intimately linked to the broader realist and idealist-liberalist approaches that have been the analytical underpinnings of the field of international relations after World War II. It is linked as well, albeit less often, to the international political economic approaches common since the 1970s. The first two approaches, modified, remain the primary orthodox international relations theories in the 2000s, and they present structural considerations that bear on the study of foreign policy as well. International Relations Approaches: The Usefulness of Current Perspectives

The enduring focus on realism is attributable to the fact that it is the most parsimonious of international relations theories, whether used in its neorealist systemic form (i.e., the analysis of the formation by states of self-help balances in an anarchic world) or in the classical realist tradition that sees power as a state goal undertaken in the national interest (Waltz 1979; Morgenthau 1968). But researchers studying the developing countries tend to argue that realist analysis has little explanatory potential with respect to global south countries’ foreign activities inasmuch as most if not all of these states assign a low role to traditional power considerations. Nevertheless, they have still given credence to 13

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realism by framing analyses within the context of small/weak power vulnerability vis-à-vis great power dominance, as well as by emphasizing external and geopolitical constraints on state behavior. Moreover, even as global south academics have hesitated to use “power” as an explanation of their own states’ behavior, their policymaker counterparts have long seemed to adhere to the power politics paradigm. Even in the post–Cold War era, for example, it can still be said, as one scholar does with reference to Latin American states, that “power-politics still carries considerable weight with diplomats and high-ranking policymakers” (Van Klaveren 1996: 42). Similar thoughts have been echoed in other parts of the third world. Moreover, in many military academies throughout the global south, geopolitical doctrines have been crafted and refined and have influenced state foreign policy at times when national security issues have been predominant and also when the military has exercised a strong influence on government. On the one hand, policymakers still tend to see large states as only too willing to impose their political and economic will on smaller states. Small states therefore have had to form “self-help” alliances at the bilateral, regional, and international levels. On the other hand, it is also especially clear that large developing states (the so-called middle powers) have their own power ambitions: India’s pursuit of a nuclear role in world politics is illustrative. In 1998, after India carried out several nuclear tests, government officials described India’s actions solely in balance-of-power and deterrence terms. The action, they noted, was intended to counter closer U.S.-China ties, as well as to protect India’s place in a hostile region given its rivalries with Pakistan and China. As one defense analyst explained: “When a major power like China emerges, it needs to be counterbalanced. Russia balances China from the north, Japan and Korea from the east, and now India is doing it from the west and south” (quoted in Friedman 1998). Contrary to the liberal view, officials from Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee on down proclaimed “security first, everything else afterwards.”1 Like the policymakers, some global south scholars continue today to look to neorealist ideas in an effort to explain global south international relations and foreign policy, particularly security perspectives (see, e.g., Neuman 1998). To be sure, modified, not traditional, versions of realism are offered, for example Mohammed Ayoob’s “subaltern realism” and Carlos Escudé’s “peripheral realism.” Both concepts concentrate more on domestic elements than does traditional realism. Ayoob describes subaltern realism in the following way: [First], issues of domestic order and those of international order are inextricably intertwined, especially in the arena of conflict and conflict

ASSESSING CURRENT APPROACHES

resolution; second, issues of domestic order, which are primarily the by-products of the state-making enterprise within states, must receive analytical priority if one is to be able to explain most conflicts currently underway in the international system for the simple reason that they are the primary determinants of such conflicts; third, issues of domestic order/conflict are, however, not immune to external influences, either regional or global, . . . and therefore such external variables must be integrated into any explanation of the course and intensity of domestic conflicts. . . . And fourth, the linkage between domestic and external variables also explains the nexus between intrastate and interstate conflicts, and the intertwining of the statemaking enterprise with regional balance of power politics. (Ayoob 1998: 45)

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The introduction of the domestic element is particularly important for foreign policy analysts in that it adapts international relations perspectives to deal with influences that are at the core of the foreign policy enterprise. Indeed, Ayoob’s state-making viewpoint is advocated in somewhat different form in this book by contributor Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou (Chapter 5). But even apart from the fact that foreign policy analysis also must take into account dispositional, perceptual, political economic, and other variables, the question remains as to whether any realist model can really accommodate the activity of global south states in arenas far removed from military security. Carlos Escudé’s peripheral realism takes another view, one that essentially argues for the role and relevance of middle powers. Like Ayoob, he argues for the need to analyze specific societies and the domestic factors that condition their foreign policy, but he also emphasizes the importance of hierarchy (rather than anarchy) in determining the behavior of developing states. Again, his focus here is on security issues, and Escudé offers us only the simplest grouping of states and therefore of state behavior—that is, those that command, those that obey, and those that rebel (Escudé 1998: 55). Unfortunately, this cannot help us explain much of what the diverse nations of the global south do. In fact, while Escudé wishes to make a case for the acceptance of the foreign policy of middle states, he seems, like so many realists, to deny a significant role for smaller states in the international system. In so doing, he precludes his approach from explaining the behavior of a very large number of global south states. As noted in Chapter 1, many analysts from the global south, unlike these authors, have repudiated the applicability of the realist approach, opting instead for approaches grounded in international political economy, that is, emphasizing the effects of the (imbalanced) structure of the international economic system and the class and social forces created by

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and upholding this system. Realism has been criticized for its focus on the great powers and its view of the weak state as the mere object or target of great power strategy, useful only as ally or pawn of the great powers and having only the simple choices of either bandwagoning or remaining neutralist. Realism’s focus on military issues and conflict is unhelpful for states that set more store by economic and social goals, and realism is unable to accommodate class analysis or analysis of social— and societal—forces. Neorealism is also criticized for taking the world as is, paying little attention to history and to change (Cox 1981). Moreover, the changes in the world today suggest that realism’s single-minded focus on the state and military power (even when economic power is included as a subordinate variable) is out of touch with new nonstate challenges, including the renewed focus on transnational terrorism, and with revived views of the importance of domestic considerations. For example, even as India’s actions in the 1990s seemed to affirm the realist view of international affairs, observers also made note of the importance of domestic factors, in particular the ultranationalism of the Indian government and its need at the time to increase its fading domestic support. As another example, even as Indian prime minister Vajpayee seemed to be articulating a power approach, new south bloc thinking could be seen in Mexican president Vicente Fox’s claim in 2001 that there was no longer a need for a Western hemispheric collective security arrangement such as exists in the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (the Río Treaty). He suggested instead that cooperative efforts ought to be focused on such threats as extreme poverty, human rights abuses, environmental degradation, and natural disasters (New York Times, Sept. 8, 2001: A6). Despite the turn in late 2001 toward the urgent task of confronting global terrorism, the global south view of the importance of social and economic security is unlikely to change. Indeed, poverty is cited as the breeding ground for the very terrorism that has led to new global violence. Moreover, counterterrorism strategies pit states against transnational and substate forces that realism does not well accommodate. If we accept that realism is inadequate to explain so much of global south behavior, is it the case that neoliberalism (or liberalism) provides the better framework? Viewed as a counterpart to neorealism, neoliberalism highlights cooperation in the international arena, with an emphasis on the effects of institutional norms and rules. Adapted to the two levels that characterize foreign policy, institutions and norms certainly constrain, influence, and change the behavior of the global south countries, perhaps more so than is the case for the global north countries, which tend to initiate and promote norm changes. Although the study of

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the domestic impact of international norms (as opposed to the systemic impact) is of relatively recent vintage, a few scholars have begun to address third world policy in these terms.2 But beyond the specific institutionalist debate, a liberal foreign policy approach offers us a view of policy formation as an exercise in interest articulation and relatively harmonious competitiveness.3 Indeed, in this book both Rita Giacalone (Chapter 8) and Andrés Serbin (Chapter 7) offer perspectives that fit into a competitive societal model. Still, this liberal view is at odds with several aspects of the global south perspective. For one, the sophisticated interest-group lobbying that is part of the political game in so many developed countries is only beginning to have an impact in most developing states and does not yet exist in many whose systems remain barely democratic (e.g., some Arab states). Related to this is the fact that in many developing societies deep class and societal antagonisms exist that cannot be adequately accommodated by the liberal model. Even within the global civil society movement that is having a differential impact on global south public policies, sharp divisions exist, with some counterhegemonic forces refusing to participate in traditional lobbying (see Serbin, Chapter 7). Of course, not surprisingly, neo-Marxist developing state scholars find liberalism inadequate on ideological grounds. As Hilbourne Watson notes, An enduring tenet in liberalism is the myth that Western civilization rests upon a natural impulse and inclination toward freedom with its foundations rooted in the period of classical Greco-Roman Antiquity . . . On the contrary, liberalism has always rested on social systems based on negative freedom via economic exploitation, national (ethnic and racial) oppression and political repression. The legitimation of liberalism is centered on the production and reproduction of capitalist ideology and social reproduction as a whole. . . . Liberalism has legitimized capitalist hegemony. (Watson 1994: 11–12)

Both neorealism and neoliberalism can be viewed, in the words of Robert Cox, as “problem-solving” theories, taking the world as it is (Cox 1981). In contrast, Cox offers us the concept of “critical theory,” which emphasizes transformative analysis within a framework of historically changeable and socially configured realities. Theories that can be termed “critical” have proved more appealing to many third world scholars, embracing as they do work on imperialism, dependency, and world systems theories. These are not irrelevant to foreign policy in that they help explain the structure of the international system that impacts the capacity of developing countries to act. They allow for a focus on the vulnerability of these countries and the counterdependence strategies

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that can be adopted to explain the South’s counterhegemonic perspectives and actions. They also allow for a focus on domestic society and class configurations. Although in today’s interdependent and integrated world, counterdependence is not articulated as strongly as in the 1970s and 1980s, there remains great ambivalence in the South about the strategies and benefits of the new world order. Moreover, as reflected in the varied reactions to the U.S. military action against Afghanistan that began in 2001, in the South counterhegemonic sentiments are inbred among both peoples and policymakers, though these sentiments may be muted depending on state interests and the pervasiveness of international system norms. Finally, critical theory also permits a necessary focus on domestic forces—which can also include race, ethnicity, and gender— and their relationship to world order. As Randolph Persaud notes: [In this conceptualization] world order does not stand in high heaven above domestic social formations, and outside of history as it does for Waltz [the major proponent of neorealism], nor are societies impervious to world order pressures. On the contrary, not only do world order, forms of state, and domestic social forces interact as a structural reality; but each is produced through historically conscious action. (Persaud 2001: 36–37)

Yet even though an approach that is historically sensitive and attuned to structural issues at both domestic and system levels is almost instinctively attractive to global south researchers preoccupied with defining issues of inequity and domination, the enthusiasm for structural critique (at all levels) tends to leave no room for detailed analysis of the political, bureaucratic, personalist (i.e., psychological), and societal dynamics that are essential to understanding the details of foreign policy. In particular today, societal perspectives and pressures—within and without the state—are influencing policy in ways that deserve detailed analysis. For all their worth, the broader international relations approaches cannot pinpoint some of the distinctive features of foreign policy. To truly understand policy, we still need to go beyond structure to a deeper understanding of agency. Foreign Policy Analysis: The Usefulness of Current Approaches

Two types of approaches to understanding foreign policy are reviewed here with respect to their relevance to the global south: decisionmaking analysis, and the empirical approaches of comparative foreign policy. Because the contributors to this volume review some of the research of

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third world scholars in their respective chapters, the discussion here will focus only on works that have already been broadly disseminated within the community of international relations scholars. These works are almost exclusively those of global north scholars. The decisionmaking system continues to be viewed as the heart of the foreign policy enterprise in that, once an internal or externally generated stimulus is received requiring a foreign policy response, both domestic and external inputs are channeled through the decisionmakers who generate a suitable response. This does not mean that every decision or act has to be analyzed from the point of view of what the literature refers to as a “psychological-perceptual” lens (Jervis 1976; Korany et al. 1986) or “idiosyncratic” attributes (Rosenau 1966). It may be, for example, that there are cases in which the impact of external structural considerations is so important in determining action that there is little need to analyze the motivations and perceptions of leaders and their advisers. It may also be, following classical analytical analysis, that an analysis of a country’s capabilities will suffice in certain instances to allow us to understand its foreign policy strategies. By contrast, most foreign policy analysts have assumed that studying the decisionmaking environment, including who makes decisions, why, and what segments of society are most influential in the process, is as important to the foreign policy enterprise as it is to the study of domestic public policy. The systematic study of the foreign policy decisionmaking environment began with the classic work of Richard Snyder and his colleagues, who in turn drew on the work of Harold and Margaret Sprout (Sprout and Sprout 1956; Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin 1962). It has been enhanced over the years by research into—among other things—the psychology and role of leadership (as examples, see Hermann 1980; Greenstein 1995), decisionmaking under stress, crisis, and risk (respectively, Janis 1972; Paige 1968; Herek, Janis, and Huth 1987; Levy 1992), the role of perception and belief systems (Jervis 1976; Holsti 1962), decision process/procedures (P. Anderson 1987; Hermann and Hermann 1989); bureaucratic-organizational input into decisionmaking (Allison 1971), and decision framing and representation (Purkitt 1992). Although most researchers continue to employ a cognitive approach, the use of rational, strategic choice modeling is growing (see, e.g., Kim and Bueno de Mesquita 1995; Maoz 1990). But in contemplating this rich body of research, one is struck by how little work has been done on the global south states. Theoretically oriented, as opposed to descriptive, decisionmaking research remains Decisionmaking

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heavily focused on the behavior of the global north developed countries, in particular the United States. Of the nondeveloped regions, the Middle East (including Israel) is the only one that seems to have received some attention, no doubt because of the salience of ongoing crises in that region. With regard to the third world, in 1986 Bahgat Korany pointed out in a much-cited work that of the two prevailing schools of thought in decisionmaking—the psychological-perceptual and the bureaucratic— the perceptual “great man” approach was, not unexpectedly, the one that continued to be most used to analyze the third world. Though not opposed to “charismatic leader” analysis, Korany felt strongly that it was as important to analyze the context or environment within which leaders made decisions. Apart from Korany’s own work and the analyses of Latin America and the Middle East contributed to his 1986 volume, some third world inclusive work has been done by global north scholars from the psychological perspective, notably the work of the Hermanns (e.g., Hermann and Hermann 1989), which seeks to assess the style of various decisionmaking units comparatively, and, from another viewpoint, works such as Jerrold Post’s (1991), which attempt—somewhat dubiously—to analyze the psyche of leaders, in this case Saddam Hussein. Strategic choice models have also not completely omitted third world analysis. Astorino-Courteois (1998), for example, analyzed decisionmaking choices in the Jordanian civil war of 1970. By reconstructing the process in terms of decision structure and strategic options, she is able to evaluate the relative impact of the structural setting vis-à-vis the cognitive environment. However, these studies focusing on or incorporating decisionmaking in the global south are few. Moreover, the community of third world scholars that might have been expected to try to remedy this failing have generally not embraced decisionmaking analysis. Contributing to the reluctance to conduct research in this area has been the difficulty in accessing information either for historical case studies or for more current assessments—a difficulty encountered in all countries but particularly in the third world, where memoirs and archives are often not available and interviewees are often suspicious of researchers’ intent. Moreover, as noted previously, the political economy approach has seemed to offer more promising explanations to many global south academics. Still, the heightened salience of societal factors in the twenty-first century has led to an increased relevance of foreign policy approaches, including decisionmaking. In this respect, even some of those global south researchers who favor political economic perspectives have been

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seeking ways to incorporate an understanding of domestic influences. As it turns out, it is possible not only to adopt a political economic view of foreign policy (i.e., by assessing the impact of economic strategies and the role of the international economic and financial institutions in foreign policy) but also to blend political economic and decisionmaking approaches in order to have a more complete understanding of why certain decisions and policies are enacted.4 Notwithstanding the applicability of aspects of international relations theory discussed earlier, most work in the field of foreign policy has consisted of middle-range theorizing and analysis of determinants of global south behavior. In the wake of the independence of African and Asian states in the 1960s and their external focus on issues such as decolonization, nonalignment, and neocolonialism rather than the traditional security concerns of larger countries, the need for comparative foreign policy frameworks became evident, leading to some pioneering works on African international relations (e.g., Zartman 1966; McKay 1966) and on developing countries as a whole (e.g., Clapham 1977). There was a spillover to Latin America, which, though independent more than a century earlier, had mostly been studied from the point of view of U.S. foreign policy, not the region’s own perspective on foreign policy. Some works (e.g., Ferris and Lincoln 1981) tried to offer these region- and nation-centric perspectives. At the same time, the subfield of comparative foreign policy was taking shape. James Rosenau’s classic articles on comparative pretheorizing and on the adaptive strategies of states were central to the developing field (Rosenau 1966 and 1980). They offered certain propositions relevant to developing countries (specifically, the importance of individual and system-level influences on these states, the concept of penetration of the decisionmaking process by external participants, and the foreign policy strategies of acquiescent and intransigent adaptation). An outpouring of empirical work followed, most but not all of it using quantitative methodology, and all of it focused on finding causal connections between various domestic inputs and behavior in foreign policy. “Behavior” was generally analyzed in terms of United Nations (UN) activity or patterns of diplomacy measured using transactional or events data.5 As for explanatory variables, among factors of interest to the third world, modernization and size were perhaps the most popular variables for analysis. For example, Robert Morse (1970) related modernization to interdependence and externalization; Robert Good (1977) Comparative Foreign Policy

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saw state-building as a key determinant of foreign policy; and James Kean and Patrick McGowan (1973) viewed modernization and size, working hand in hand with other economic variables, as important influences on state behavior. With respect to size—which Rosenau viewed as a key “phenotypic” variable in his pretheory formulation— empirical work was able to affirm that smaller states were less participatory, more focused on international and regional organizations, and more inclined toward high-risk behavior based on limited information (East 1973a and 1973b).6 However, it is generally agreed today that the comparative foreign policy approach, at least in terms of its development in close association with quantitative methodology, failed to produce major theoretical insights. Significant correlations were in short supply in most research efforts, and where found, the accompanying proposition was not earthshaking, as, for example, the aforementioned significance of size as a differentiating factor in foreign policy. In foreign policy, the 1980s saw a new emphasis on economic dependence as a key explanatory variable, and following the popularity of the dependency thesis originating in Latin America, research turned to a focus on the behavior of the “dependent” state. In dependent state analysis, three types of approaches were relevant: the compliant behavior model (or bargaining model), the consensus model, and statist models of counterdependence. The first approach, the compliance model, was essentially a realist explanation focusing on bargaining between actors. Studies relied on systemic foreign policy explanations focusing on power. The second approach, rooted in dependency theory, highlighted the affinity between elites in the core and periphery. This approach therefore focused on a societal explanation of dependent state foreign policy. Both the compliance and consensus models focused on procore foreign policy. A third grouping of scholars utilized statist explanations of dependent state foreign policy to understand anticore (or counterdependent) foreign policy. These studies highlighted the autonomy that regimes have in selecting their foreign policy, despite their relative weakness. Because they represent a relatively coherent body of empirical research aimed at cumulation through explicit reference to a common literature (and often the use of the same dependent variable), a more in-depth look at these studies seems justified.

Compliance. The first wave of studies on dependent state foreign policy came in the form of correlation studies in the 1970s. These studies were based on the assertion that asymmetrical relationships between

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countries would result in compliant behavior by the dependent state toward the dominant state. Consequently, it was posited that a dominant state such as the United States could influence its dependencies with rewards and punishments that act to condition or shape the behavior of the weaker state. This approach is also referred to as the “bargaining model.” Some key studies are illustrative of the type of analysis pursued. In the earliest study of this kind, Eugene Wittkopf (1973) tested the relationship between dependence on foreign aid and UN General Assembly voting records. He examined UN voting patters for ninety-six foreign aid recipients during four General Assemblies (1963–1966). Three years later, N. Richardson (1976) replaced foreign aid dependence with export dependence. Three indicators—commodity concentration, recipient concentration, and economic development—were utilized to measure a country’s export dependence. K. B. Rai (1980) tried a different angle by examining the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective aid recipients during the 1967–1976 General Assemblies. Like Wittkopf, Rai focused on foreign aid as the indicator of dependence. Utilizing Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye’s (1977) distinction between sensitivity and vulnerability, Richardson and C. W. Kegley (1980) examined the relationship between trade vulnerability and foreign policy. As with most other global south foreign policy studies of this sort, foreign policy was measured by UN General Assembly voting behavior. Richardson and Kegley examined twenty-five countries between 1950 and 1973 that were trade-dependent on the United States. Again, like several earlier studies, Adrienne Armstrong (1981) focused on economic dependence, using a measure of trade dependence based on a country’s trade magnitude, commodity concentration, and trade partner concentration. Military and economic aid were also taken into consideration. In order to measure compliance, UN General Assembly votes for 1956–1957, 1961, 1965, and 1970 were included. In addition to UN voting, events data (see Azar and Sloan 1975) were used to measure levels of conflict and cooperation. Kenneth Menkhaus and Charles Kegley (1988) tried an innovative alternative to the above studies by suggesting that dependent states are dependent on multiple states rather than a single dominant state. Thus they suggested a “dependent state–centric” model rather than the traditional “dominant state–centric” model. Instead of using a cross-national approach, Menkhaus and Kegley focused on Somalian foreign policy during the 1976–1980 period. They examined the relationship between export, foreign aid, and military dependence and foreign policy compliance, as measured by UN General Assembly voting behavior. More

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recently, Kegley and Steven Hook (1991) examined the policy of Ronald Reagan’s administration of rewarding and punishing countries by tying aid to UN voting behavior. The study focused solely on the influence of U.S. aid during the mid-1980s. The results of these studies have, at best, been mixed. Many of the correlations have been weak, and some in the wrong direction (DeRouen and Mintz 1991). Consequently, it became clear that the compliance approach could not explain a significant amount of defiant foreign policy behavior (i.e., foreign policy behavior that does not comply with the interests of the dominant state). As Kegley and Hook note regarding dependent countries, The resilience of aid recipients clearly demonstrates that their policies were driven more powerfully by interests other than by the economic threat of a hegemon. Even though the bilateral relationship between donor and recipients was highly asymmetrical, the limits to the exercise of influence by a dominant state over weak states were revealed. (Kegley and Hook 1991: 308)

This quote highlights another shortcoming of this type of work, which is perhaps the most serious: these studies have ignored the fact that unless the preferences of the regimes ruling dependent countries are understood, there is no way of knowing whether or not compliance is taking place. This lack of careful attention to dependent state preferences is one of the concerns of the consensus approach, which was an explicit reaction to the compliance approach.

Consensus. In the 1980s, an alternative explanation for dependent state foreign policy emerged (Moon 1983 and 1985). This approach rejected the power politics–based model and instead based its assumptions on the theory of structural imperialism (developed in Galtung 1971) and dependency theories. Moon emphasized the ideological affinity between elites in the core and periphery to describe the relationship between the dominant state and the dependent state. He argued that at the center of the relationship is not power but rather shared values. Dependent state foreign policy will comply with U.S. foreign policy, for instance, not because of short-term bargaining but due to “consensus” on the issues. Moon was therefore suggesting that political agreement frequently occurs, but for different reasons than the bargaining approach suggests. Thus, unlike the compliance model, the primary influence on dependent state foreign policy is societal. In his 1985 article, Moon attempted to distinguish between compliance and consensus by generating a counterfactual baseline, derived

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from UN voting and U.S. foreign aid variables (military grants, economic loans, and economic grants) as measures of external influence on dependent state foreign policy. The results led to the following conclusion: “Much as expected by the dependency model, it appears that the greater the percentage of a nation’s foreign policy transactions and interactions accounted for by the United States, the greater the similarity of the foreign policy behavior of the two states” (Moon 1985: 327). But as he acknowledged, this agreement does not necessarily mean that influence or distortion is present. In order to determine this, one must first, once again, have some knowledge of the regime’s preferences. Moon’s study thus also points to the importance of regime effects—that is, changes in foreign policy following a change in regime—when there is a dramatic change in government such as occurred in revolutionary situations during the Cold War (e.g., in Cuba when Fidel Castro replaced Fulgencio Batista).

Statist approaches to counterdependence. A third group of studies focused on precisely these regime effects and on the latitude even dependent states have in making foreign policy decisions. Some studies have highlighted the salience of a change in a developing country’s regime for its subsequent foreign policy behavior. For instance, J. D. Hagan (1989) engaged in a cross-national examination of 432 regime changes in eighty-seven dependent countries in an effort to see if regime change, based on the magnitude of change in the regime, results in a corresponding change in foreign policy. Hagan distinguished among five types of regime change, from a minor change in which the head of state changes but not the “regime’s basic political makeup in terms of its component factions or parties,” to a revolutionary change in which an “antisystem group” assumed power. The results were encouraging and supported the findings of other studies (see also Andriole and Hopple 1986) that a change in regime frequently leads to a subsequent change in a country’s foreign policy. More specifically, the greater the change in regime, the greater the change in a country’s foreign policy. These findings strongly supported the statist approach’s contention that regimes of dependent states have significant latitude in their foreign policy—in contrast to the claims of the compliance and consensus approaches. Not all statist-oriented studies have emphasized the importance of regime change. Others have utilized the case-study method to highlight the ability of dependent regimes, primarily Latin American regimes, to chart an independent foreign policy course. Given the frequency of anticore foreign policy (Hey and Kuzma 1993; Hey 1994; Snarr 1997), especially in the 1970s and 1980s, it became evident that not enough

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attention had focused on this foreign policy behavior. Earlier, Franklin Weinstein (1976) had described the “dilemma of dependence” in which regimes of dependent countries had to balance their need for assistance from the West with their desire to avoid becoming too dependent. One of the first empirical studies stressing the anticore aspect of dependent state foreign policy focused on the foreign policy of Jamaica. Based on a case study of the Michael Manley regime, it argued that “it is possible for political elites in dependent countries to carry out policies directed against at least some of the interests of core countries” (Biddle and Stephens 1989: 414). Although the three approaches to dependent state (or global south) foreign policy offered important insights, several shortcomings were evident. First, neither the compliance nor the consensus approach offered convincing empirical evidence. Second, neither of those two approaches examined the anticore foreign policy of dependent states. With respect to UN General Assembly votes, a significant number of dependent state votes in the various studies went against the United States (Moon 1985; Hagan 1989). In addition, both approaches could be criticized for their lack of attention to the concept of distortion. The compliance model assumed that the core state shapes dependent state foreign policy, and the consensus model assumed core-periphery agreement. However, because neither approach considered the preferences of the dependent state, neither could be certain if that state’s foreign policy was being distorted. As a result, both were incapable of determining if compliant and consensual foreign policy was taking place. Finally, few of the studies engaged in effective long-term research.7 Despite these criticisms, the compliance and consensus approaches were, and remain, useful in highlighting the fact that in some cases dependent states are coerced into behavior that defies their wishes; in other cases dependent states agree with the core state because their preferences coincide. The statist approach provides an important contribution by emphasizing the importance of regime autonomy. It demonstrates that dependent countries can change foreign policy directions based on internal influences, such as a change in regime. Consequently, unlike the compliance and consensus approaches, the statist approach allows for the possibility of anticore foreign policy. But focusing on regime change does not tell us much about a regime’s preferences. For example, Hagan distinguishes among different degrees of regime change and reports when a change in regime occurs and how significant a change in foreign policy can be expected, but he does not consider in which direction (in this case, pro- or anti-U.S.) the foreign policy change will be. In order to overcome these problems and advance the literature, Michael Snarr (1995) used the idea of “development strategy” to

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conceptualize regime preferences. According to C. W. Anderson (1967: 158), development strategy “is a way of delimiting the problem of the allocation of the state’s resources. It is an economizing technique, a way of choosing between rival claims on scarce resources.” Key to the development strategy model is the overwhelming importance of economic development to most political leaders in the global south, including Latin America, and its influence on the conduct of their foreign policies (Milenky 1975). Using data from 1948 to 1978, Snarr classified 121 regimes from twenty Latin American countries according to development strategies common at the time: conventional (i.e., the regime’s economic development strategy is focused on the modern sector), and reformist (the strategy focused on both traditional and modern sectors) with subcategories of moderate reformist (relying on incremental change) and radical reformist (opting for sudden and comprehensive change). It was posited that states choosing a conventional development strategy would have a foreign policy more closely aligned with the United States, whereas radical reformers would be least likely to agree with the United States. Moderate reformers, seeking some independence from right or left, would fall somewhere in between. Indeed, when the data for development strategy were correlated with UN voting using A. Lijphart’s (1963) index of agreement, a moderate correlation was found in the expected direction. Moreover, comparing the change in foreign policy within regimes to the change between regimes produced significant eta squared statistics for eleven of the twenty Latin American countries, indicating that regime change did indeed lead to shifts in foreign policy. However, tests to determine the direction of change produced mixed results, indicating that shifts from conventional to moderate reformist regimes did not necessarily result in a more anti-U.S. foreign policy. Although radical reformers have all but disappeared in the global south today, and countries are adopting the neoliberal model, analysis of regime effects can still provide useful insights with respect to subtle variations in foreign policy. Variations in preferences and development strategy can still be found within the neoliberal model. Policy differences toward foreign investment, stakeholder participation, and government involvement in the economy and society can be built into a refined typology. Moreover, moderate (and even radical) reformers may yet reemerge as democratization allows voters to express their discontent with free-market policies and reject at least some aspects of the neoliberal model. In the 1990s and 2000s, some important research has continued to refine our understanding of the policies of the “dependent” state. In particular, the qualitative empirical work of Jeanne Hey (1993 and 1994) is noteworthy. Based on her research on Ecuador, Hey rejects the notion

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that dependent state foreign policy will result in one general type of behavior (e.g., compliant or consensual): Attempts to identify an exclusive or even dominant pattern convey the false impression that dependence has a unique effect on foreign policy. Instead, it is necessary to catalogue the numerous ways in which dependence influences foreign policy and to identify the conditions under which each influence emerges. (Hey 1993: 143–144)

Examining Ecuadoran foreign policy during the 1980s, Hey identifies substantive instances of compliance, consensus, and counterdependence. She therefore suggests that scholars give close attention to the concept of issue area. In the Ecuadoran cases she examines, Ecuador was pro-U.S. on economic issues and anti-U.S. on diplomatic issues. In a later work (Hey 1994), she echoes other studies calling for an understanding of regime preferences: she herself opts for highlighting the importance of the “primary policymaker’s ideological orientation,” which, she maintains, will assist the researcher in understanding whether to expect agreement between core and dependent states or to expect a clash between countries, which may lead to a counterdependent foreign policy. Conclusion

In this review, we have sought to identify some well-known theoretical approaches that have been relevant in varying degree to the study of global south foreign policy. We have critiqued their ability to explain global south actions and behavior while bearing in mind that theoretical development is a cumulative enterprise. Briefly, the general theories of international relations—realism and liberalism—contain elements that are relevant to foreign policy analysis but are limited in their capacity to analyze key state and societal influences. Critical theories such as dependency and world systems analysis do a good job of highlighting the global south’s position in the world hierarchy, explaining global south counterhegemonic perspectives, as well as incorporating analyses of domestic social forces. However, they are too grounded in structural considerations and in economic determinism. Decisionmaking studies have not been applied a great deal to the third world, where there exist some daunting research difficulties, and some approaches are in any event too complex to operationalize. However, they are clearly helpful in filling out the details of the voluntaristic nature of foreign

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policy. Finally, empirical studies of a quantitative nature have produced rather weak findings, even where they have employed the third world–focused concept of the “dependent state.” Qualitative or combined quantitative-qualitative studies of dependent state behavior are more promising, but in an interdependent world it has become far more difficult for any state or regime to institute the type of independent policies envisioned by third world theorists in the 1970s. This is not to say that the issues of state autonomy, which is tied to economic dependence, and of regime preferences that lead to subtle choices with regard to liberalization are not still relevant. Certainly global south decisionmakers see their choices as more circumscribed than those of their counterparts in developed countries. But this alone would provide a rather limited explanation of foreign policy behavior in the twenty-first century. In short, some coalescing of approaches is clearly needed if we are to conceptualize global south policy today. One factor stands out among all others as we look at research in international relations and foreign policy today: the increasing relevance of domestic publics, world society, and transnational forces, whether civil or uncivil. Thus it is not surprising that most of the contributors to this volume focus on these factors as they affect foreign policy. As globalization deepens and the state continues to share its authoritative space with other partners, the essence of foreign policy has changed. Although we are not yet ready to concede that “world politics” has replaced foreign policy, the broadening of conceptualizations of foreign policy away from rigid military and ideological perspectives certainly offers the opportunity for a greater understanding of the policies of the third world. Notes

1. For example, at a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization conference held in October 1998, India’s human resource development minister responded, when asked if the resources spent on nuclear tests could not have been spent instead on the social sector: “Only a well-defended nation can indulge in high academic pursuits. . . . If there is no country, where is the question of social welfare?” (See “Security First, Everything Else Afterwards, Says Joshi.” United News of India report, October 7, 1998, in Rediff on the Net, www.rediff.com/news/1998/oct/07nuke.htm.) 2. Andrew Cortell and James Davis, two of the major contributors to this newer perspective, cite several works on the third world in their own articles in International Studies Quarterly (1996) and International Studies Review (2000). In the latter work they criticize the system-level bias of research on

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norms: “Analyses cast at the international system level are basically correlative and capture group tendencies rather than the effects of norms on particular states and foreign policy decisions. If norms can be counterfactually valid . . . a systems-level analysis of compliance will underestimate the range of actors and decisions for which the norm was an important, if not determinative, factor” (2000: 68, n. 12). 3. However, Andrew Moravcsik (1997) clearly recognizes that exactly whose interests are represented and influential depends on the structure of state institutions, such that in some instances only very narrow class interests may be heard. This modified liberal view is more applicable than more democratic conceptualizations in theorizing global south policy. 4. There are examples (e.g., Swatik and Shaw 1994; Wurfel and Burton 1990) of the use of a political economy approach to foreign policy. In this book, Paul Adogamhe (Chapter 6) offers a combined decisionmaking-political economy model. 5. Analyses using United Nations data include Joseph Harbert (1976), Robert Keohane (1969), K. B. Rai (1980), N. Richardson (1976), and Bruce Moon (1983 and 1985). Transactional and events data are used by Patrick McGowan (1969), James Kean and McGowan (1973), and Maurice East (1973a and 1973b), among others. 6. Curiously, the literature is sometimes rather confusing as to what is meant by “size.” For example, whereas East (1973b) used the more common population measure (itself a variable subject to continual changes as to upper and lower limits), Salmore and Hermann (1970) used a gross domestic product measure (really, size of the economy). Some researchers (e.g., McGowan and Klaus-Gottwald 1975) used “small” and “developing” interchangeably, whereas others (including Rosenau 1966) expressly recognized that small countries can be developed as well. 7. N. Richardson and C. W. Kegley (1980) cover the period 1950–1973, but a flaw of the study is that it does not take into account sessional changes in the agenda and procedures of the United Nations.

3 Postcoloniality in Global South Foreign Policy: A Perspective Siba N. Grovogui

Either by benign neglect or sheer intellectual hubris, the vast majority of Western theorists have forsaken the idea of an alternative conceptualization of foreign policy that might differ in both substance and ethos from that which emerged from modern Europe. This neglect may be explained by the fact that theorists have predicated the study of international relations and foreign policy on ontological foundations that uncritically assume that postcolonial states will inevitably converge with Western states in their formulation of “interest,” “value,” and “power.” Thus the prevailing models of foreign policy are derived from extrapolations on selective Western experiences and posited as immutable traditions. This being the case, the fields of foreign policy studies, and international relations generally, depend upon a combined historiography, hermeneutic, and ethnography that precludes the possibility of non-Western political imaginaries as a basis for any coherent set of values and norms that may be generalized as global standards of foreign policy and international relations. In contrast, the disciplinary trend has been to presume the absence of any unified field of experiences within the postcolonial world. Here, theorists frequently emphasize the peculiarities of postcolonial entities and their divergent political trajectories in order to depreciate the attributes, values, and expectations shared by the formerly colonized. It is not my intention to dispute the detailed accounts of the cultural, social, and political particularities of postcolonial entities. I do not wish to depreciate the countless critical analyses of particular Western foreign policies in their former empires. And it is not my wish to claim 31

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that Western theories are united in their methodologies and teleologies. Furthermore, it has not escaped foreign policy and international relations theorists that the global south has maintained a critical stand toward a certain Western ethos of power as manifested in postwar geopolitics. But many have regularly derided third world reactions to the structures of hegemony and their attempts to escape political and economic subordination as ineffective political grandstanding. This may be so. However, I contest the general inference that the postcolonial experience contains no comprehensive normative or ethical commonplaces bearing on the nature and purpose of the global moral order. As I argue below, third world foreign policies may be productively taken to be an attempt to create a new ethos for foreign policy intended to orient international relations toward new ends. In fact, the political entities that sought to end colonialism were guided by a political desire to end the immediate violence, exploitation, and subordination of Western imperialism. They were also inspired by historical understandings of modernity, the state, and nationalism and their impact on Western imperialism and colonialism. Indeed, the latter-day designation of the former colonial entities as the global south (the third world) denoted their postcolonial condition as well as an insurgency against the legal dispositions, political processes, and economic structures that characterized colonialism. This is to say, the global south, from its realization after decolonization, understood itself to constitute a sphere of symbolic and material interactions with their own objects, corresponding ideological associations, and political responses. Indeed, the general thrust of the collective actions of the global south was an unmistakable desire to expunge colonialism from international relations and to eradicate the bases of inequity and injustice in the international system or Westernimposed structures of power, interest, and subjectivity. Thus was constituted what might heuristically be called postcoloniality in international relations. To be sure, postcoloniality emerged in direct opposition to Western colonialism and neocolonial designs. Its ultimate aims were: (1) to support the politics adopted by the global south countries in their quest to eradicate colonialism in global affairs; and (2) to establish a new regime of foreign policy, based upon a historical understanding of global subjectivity, a new configuration of subjectivity of the human interest, and new modulations of power. Postcoloniality was formulated first by anticolonial movements, and then by postcolonial states, against the hegemonic tendencies of the two post–World War II ideological blocs. It found the political space of its enactment in the political positions of the Cold War rivals. It informed the foreign policies of former colonial

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entities, particularly after the establishment of the United Nations, whether within the global south itself (as manifested by the creation of the Group of 77 and the Non-Aligned Movement) or in their interactions and negotiations with hegemonic powers (exemplified by the 1956 Suez crisis and the formation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). These events were not happenstance from a historical standpoint. From the 1920s anticolonial alliances to the 1955 Bandung conference and beyond, colonial entities formulated specific ethical requisites and political determinants that they understood as means to a unified foreign policy imaginary. These were expressed by sets of conventionalized systems of ideas and idioms, or languages, and of politics that emerged from the collective ethos and style of anticolonialism. Thus from the 1955 Bandung conference onward, third world entities converged in their foreign policy goals on crucial matters involving their dignity or self-understanding as moral subjects (identity), their autonomy as sovereign agents (integrity), or their freedom to choose (will). The remainder of this chapter consists of a contrast in the genealogies of modern European and third world (i.e., global south) foreign policies. My goal is to identify postcoloniality as the basis of historical and spatial understandings of the purpose of foreign policy that differed markedly from its purpose in Europe and the West. These understandings have changed over time in accordance with the external context of postcoloniality, including the vagaries of colonialism and the foreign policies of hegemonic powers. For example, the end of the Cold War eradicated the political space and the sense of urgency that once bound the global south. The unevenness of developments in the global south, particularly measured by the economic successes of some Asian countries, also affected the political strategies and the pace of diplomatic initiatives of the postcolonial states beginning in the mid-1970s. As I show below, the impetus to postcoloniality has not disappeared altogether from global politics. The states of the global south continue to conduct their foreign policies on the basis of their historical commitment to eradicating the political, cultural, and economic foundations of the inequities embedded in global subjectivity and international morality. As a result, there is little reason to feel that their desire for equal moral solicitation in global affairs will be diminished in the near future. It is in this sense that the general contours of postcolonial foreign policies may justifiably provide the foundation for a valid explanatory or teleological model of postcolonial foreign policy that may be opposed to those developed and executed by the West. I should add a note of caution: in proposing foreign policy as a set of uniform spheres of expectations and interactions, I am not endorsing

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a notion of uniformity among policymakers and the entities that they represent. Like European states, third world entities are characterized by particularities and differences that include various forms of internal hierarchies and structures of subordination. The singularities of the formerly colonized were compounded by European imperialism. Distinct colonial traditions induced peculiar forms of racial, political, cultural, and economic hierarchies that amounted to modes of differentiations now prevalent among postcolonial entities. Therefore, I am not proposing that the political entities of the global south have been similarly situated within the structures of subjectivity and identity subtending the Western-initiated moral order. It would be a mistake, therefore, to anticipate uniform third world reactions to colonialism and the mechanisms of Western hegemony. My goal is to capture generalities and the historical conjecture of imperialism and colonialism, as well as to identify convergences toward a relevant third world foreign policy. Generalities on Disciplinary Genealogies

I begin, once again, by acknowledging that historical particularities and cultural differences distinguished European entities and also subtended their political competitions, or power struggles. Nonetheless, European political entities converged in significant policy areas such that one might detect shared commonalities. My goal, therefore, is to comment on the commonplaces that have gained authoritative standings in the conceptualizations of the nature and purpose of foreign policy as they reside in historical understandings of the state and its relation to power and interest. The dominant Anglo-Saxon approaches to international relations, for instance, are united by their triple inspirations from ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment and its aftermath. In this light, neorealists found their reflections on power, war, and the effects of war from maxims provided by Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Machiavelli, and, later, Hobbes, von Clausewitz, and E. H. Carr, among others. In their speculations on the nature of the moral order and its possibilities, so-called neoliberals and institutionalists also take their inspirations from accounts provided by Aristotle, Grotius, Rousseau, Kant, and Woodrow Wilson, all considered to be “trustees” of international morality and executors of universal standards (Fitzpatrick 1987). These individuals yearned to impart wisdom to European sovereigns and states and, in doing so, to bring about solutions to the recurring violence and political instability that transformed the face of Europe from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century.

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Whether they succeeded in shaping the foreign policies of their own times is irrelevant to their eloquence and their capacity to capture the spirit of their times. Consequently, it may be argued legitimately that their maxims hold lessons for the present. Yet one need not belittle their accounts of the causes and remedies of war and chaos to wonder why Western canons alone should suffice as inspiration of today’s scholars of international relations. A part of the explanation is that the maxims of Western canons have been retroactively applied to subsequent events to rationalize ex post facto the events that transpired during the great modern upheavals of Europe. As Jens Bartelson (1995: 137–185) points out, with the advent of the modern state in the seventeenth century, international theorists found in the concept of state interest (later national interest) a rational substitute for reasons of state. Colloquially speaking, “interest” split the difference between passion (which was contrary to reason) and reason (which intimated a diminution of the sovereign privileges of the state). Henceforth, a foreign policy imagined to express the general will could not be taken to result from popular or irrational passion (however passionately wars had to be fought); neither could it be taken to be selfishly reasoned in regard to its object—certainly not colonial expansion. Thus understood, the major events of modern international relations represent a succession of diplomatic successes founded in rational decisions. The high points of this ascent to rationality and higher civilization are best captured by a lesson in political geography: the Treaty of Augsburg (1555), Peace of Westphalia (1648), Congress of Vienna (1815), Versailles Conference (1918), Geneva Convention (1949), and so on. The relevant recitations and mythical encodement and narratives led inevitably to the belief that foreign policy was rational and, as such, lent itself to scientific investigation. One could therefore detect regularities in the conduct of foreign policy and, on this basis, predict and influence the future. It is also on this basis that the above events and their outcome are held to general universal standards of state conduct, or international morality. There is much to be learned from the political transformations that resulted from such events as cited above. The political processes that established the sovereign state as the ultimate authority in foreign policy also transformed their subjects into individuals and citizens. In the first instance, one may note that the modern imaginary of foreign policy, both as an idea and in practice, congealed during the seventeenth century, reflecting the outcome of modern European contentions for power, hegemony, and material well-being. The post-Reformation decline of papal authority in Europe and the advent of the modern state

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ushered in practices and discourses that reflected a persistent anxiety over the political turmoil that led to the collapse of monarchical and dynastic power and the emergence of the modern state-system. The wars and political transformations proceeding from the sixteenth century actualized global distributions of power that were predicated upon the maintenance of a European system of sovereign entities with claims to moral superiority over all others. The resulting political universe was organized into geopolitical spaces constituted by kingdoms, principalities, and later nation-states that were governed by dynasts, bishops, princes, monarchs, and parliaments. These events also created mutual dependencies between the sovereign, on the one hand, and the citizen and the individual on the other. They also ensured that the identification of the collective good was not entirely abandoned to the former. Although the sovereign retained monopoly of the representation of the national interest for geopolitical reasons, the substantive identification or generation of the object of foreign policy as collective good belonged equally to rights-bearing individuals as to citizens, albeit to a lesser extent. The politically significant classes that established individual rights did so to claim autonomous agency from the existing sovereigns for themselves strictly. They also appropriated political representation for themselves, retaining a universalist language for purposes of legitimation. They also wrested from the sovereign a commitment for their personal protection and that of property, both within and without the polity. When, therefore, during the foundation of merchant and colonial empires, these domestic entities claimed material interests in resources located outside of their own territorial boundaries, their respective sovereigns were duty-bound to provide them with extraterritorial protection through corresponding juridical instruments: concessions, protectorates, mandates, and the like. Therefore, state rationality obtained from parochial and subjective ideological structures. The relevant symbolic attributions suggest the existence of natural or inherent orders consisting of proper and alien political entities distinguishable through associations of sameness and difference. These structures are sustained within the global order by historical mechanisms and processes of inclusion and exclusion. Consistently, the rulers of these entities first imposed a unified or national political culture and citizenship as a precondition to the ensuing power dynamics. They achieved this task by creating a national consciousness through processes of collective recollection and cultural preservation involving appropriation of biblical translations and the interpretations of archeological finds as well as the establishment of monuments, museums, and official archives. These processes led to the consolidation of

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particular forms and kinds of social knowledge and the erasure or forgetting of significant counternarratives. This process of defining self-knowledge was the prerequisite for the management of external affairs, or foreign policy. Self-knowledge laid the foundations of, or justification for, external political actions by selectively appropriating individual and meaning-creating experiences (i.e., history and destiny), along with their symbols and metaphors, for the sake of the preservation of the sovereign. This management had particular domestic resonance in that the establishment of the sovereign sphere of foreign policy also subordinated the individual will and desire to those of the sovereign, acting within geopolitical spatiality prohibitive to the individual. To paraphrase Michel Foucault (1973), the delineation of foreign policy was the outcome of historical representations that were derived internally from hegemonic and othering processes in which the subject, citizen, or individual must appear to lose control over the production of the symbols and metaphors of power and subjectivity. These political processes had ideological and legal corollaries as well, including the civilizational narrative of European cultural superiority as justification for conquest and colonization. The idea of a selfcontained Europe and superior Europe, with an original and superior civilization, emerged after the seventeenth-century European naval dominance and during the establishment of merchant empires and colonial settlements in the Americas and Africa. The Enlightenment contributed greatly to this conceited self-image and provided the basis for a knowledge of self and others, particularly in regard to their intellectual and cultural traditions. Specifically, various Enlightenment-derived narratives established metaphysical boundaries separating the self-declared civilized from the violent cultures without. These authoritative discourses claimed that Europe possessed reason (rationality), science (positivism), and the sensibility (pragmatism or cosmopolitanism) to set itself apart from the rest of the species.1 Finally, in the ideological instance, the Enlightenment also crystallized a near consensus (reinforced by the advent of the industrial revolution) that non-Europeans must find comfort and salvation in European traditions, rationality, and science. Similar narratives would be implicated in discourses and doctrines of subjects, rights, and justice. At one time, European travelers, and particularly the entrepreneurial classes, maintained contacts and symbolic exchange relations with other moral subjects. While these contacts and relations lasted, Europeans learned about commercial practices in the Strait of Malacca, the transnationalism of the Ottoman Dragomans, and the hospitality of the Wangara in West Africa. Following their ascendancy, these European classes divested themselves of their prior view of

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their former partners as different but equal moral subjects and negated the validity of non-European symbols of authority, idioms of property, and ethos of exchanges. Instead, the rising European empires established new structures of subjectivity by which to justify their own hegemony, conquest, and later colonization. Henceforth, the views of European adventurers, merchants, and colonists of difference within Christendom fundamentally upheld similarity in the sense of moral sameness. Consequently, the Christian outsider or foreigner remained within measure subject to equal and reciprocal moral solicitation. In contrast, European powers now considered non-Christian and non-European outsiders as totally distinct entities, marked by ontologically perceptible and incompatible differences and bound by cultures of an inferior civilizational order. Therefore, they were to be subjected to different orders of norms. Foreign Policy and the Colonial Project

The study of foreign policy can be meaningless, however, if it is carried out without close attention to the historical condition and constitution of the field and its object. First, it is worth keeping in mind, for instance, that the constitution of the field of foreign policy, like other categories of discourse in the academy, inadvertently elucidates historical processes, structures of power, and modes of subjectivity. As Stanley Hoffmann (1977) and others have pointed out, the field of foreign policy analysis has been primarily motivated by the desire to reproduce a hegemonic ideology of state uniformity and omnipotence (i.e., sovereignty) that also promotes the mythical materialization of the collective will in the state. Indeed, it can be reasonably argued that foreign policy studies, as a field of inquiry, purposefully justifies parochial institutions of politics, law, economics, and morality as inherent and legitimate. Thus in order to understand the historicity and peculiarity of the concept and practice of foreign policy, one must examine the historical conditions of the ontological coherence of the particular sets of human activities identified as foreign policy. There seems to be a convergence among Western theorists, activists, and politicians about the stipulations of international morality or the standards of conduct of states, their incorporated organizations, and their constituencies. They do so without due attention to the specificity of modern Western political trajectories and the historicity and limitations of the associated cultural forms and social experiences. Although it is the basis of legitimacy and authenticity of international events, international morality is derived from European experiences and formalized

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through peculiar Western historiography, hermeneutics, and ethnography and elevated as the foundations of the modern sciences and languages of international politics, including international theory, international law, and international ethics. It thus is worthwhile to investigate the stipulations of international morality to understand the constitution and formulation of foreign policy. One may wish also to inquire into the manner in which certain preoccupations of the sovereign state became exteriorized as “foreign policy.” One approach would be to look into the constitution of the original grid of European sovereign states along with the political processes that legitimized them and the mechanisms through which they (re)produced agency. By this approach one identifies the historical representations of state rationality, the processes of foreign policy decisionmaking, or the generative principles of the duties and rights that constitute the various agencies of the state, including the sovereign, individual, and citizen. Such considerations may elucidate the founding moments of foreign policy (including wars and revolutions) in conjunction with the function and teleology of power and politics within them. In this light, the 1588 defeat of the Spanish armada by England and its allies did not simply give rise to the Dutch republic; it changed the balance of power in Europe (Holsti 1995: esp. 43–82). Yet this outcome should not blind one about the global consequences of that event, particularly in regard to foreign policy, including colonial interventions. The subsequent ascent of the Dutch to hegemony in world politics also affected their position in the ongoing colonial conquest. It allowed the Dutch to challenge Portuguese hegemony in the Strait of Malacca and, later, enabled them to conquer what is present-day Indonesia. Similarly, the eighteenth-century Anglo-Dutch wars spelled the end of the Dutch Republic as a world power. Once again, the outcome was felt regionally in the European balance of power; but it also propelled England to global hegemony. Once again, the latter outcome had colonial implications. The connections between domestic European contests, the European balance of power, global foreign policies, and colonialism are also obvious in early modern international thought. For instance, international law did not emerge as a uniform body of juridical principles, norms, and rules that applied equally to all. Those rules applied to nonEuropeans in the course of the expansion of Europe differed systematically from the jurisprudence followed by European nations and their courts when considering international relations within Europe. Neither have the principles involved in these rules been similar to those relating to the relations among Europeans outside their continent of origin. The norms applied to intra-European relations (interactions among European

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communities within the boundaries of Western Christendom) formed a particular body of law known as jus gentilis. By design, this law differed from the rules and procedures applicable in inter-European relations (interactions among Christian merchants, settlers, and adventurers abroad). These two sets of laws bore no resemblance to yet a third, which governed the dynamics between Westerners and non-Europeans.2 This situation prevailed throughout the modern era when the distinction between natural and positive rights regarding property, the principles of reciprocity, and justice had no particular relevance outside of Europe. The indigenous colonial populations were believed to possess inferior religion, social habits, moral sentiments, and political structures. They were also deemed to lack civil institutions and notions of rights. The general sentiment of the era was best captured by Emerich de Vattel (see Reynolds 1992: 9–22); he stated that the natives had no physical, legal, or emotional attachment to land or territory worthy of European respect. The above historical conjectures of power, subjectivity, and identity also conditioned the production of the field of knowledge known to the theoretical imaginary as foreign policy. First, Western diplomatic history validated, through either rationalism or philosophies of natural selection, the European ethos of foreign policy, that is, (1) internal competition among presumed equal moral subjects; and (2) external conquest, occupation, and settlement of the geopolitical spaces of the less endowed political entities. Thus diplomatic historians and theorists have long maintained that the purpose of foreign policy is the attainment of power and security as the fulfillment of the national interest. All other values, including justice, have been subordinated to this end of national grandeur in accordance with the above historical structures of subjectivity. This teleological imagination has had significant consequences. To synthesize: the related discursive modes have erased the domestic context, or generative rules, of foreign policy along with alternative foreign policy imaginaries and real histories of power struggles, political subordination, and economic exploitation. Significantly, the prevailing models of foreign policy have surreptitiously validated a particular ethos of international relations by elevating them into universal categories. By appropriating these models, the discipline of international relations partakes in the ideological offensive against those whose subjectivity and interests must be subordinated to the hegemonic or imperial Western project. In short, the spheres of activities identified today by social scientists as foreign policy congealed during modern European contentions for power, hegemony, and material well-being. As such, they valorize particular regional political trajectories, historically delineated by the

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demise of Rome, followed by the Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation, as well as the collapse of successor imperial or dynastic orders and the advent of the nation-state. These models also privilege cultural particularities such as values derived from Christianity, the Enlightenment, and opposing and derivative movements, as well as various related intellectual artifices. Historically, these factors formed the psychological foundations that conditioned the European ego and the subsequent delineation of the self from others. They also provided the foundations for unified symbolic spheres of material expectations, cognitive modes of understandings, and cultural translations that in turn generated the justifications of the prevailing ethos of engagement with others (i.e., foreign policy). Indeed, hegemonic powers maintained discriminatory modes of sovereignty applicable to multiple categories of states or political agents, according to varying degrees of moral solicitude, that corresponded to parochial identities and political interests. These mechanisms, interests, and corresponding modes of moral solicitude have had as much influence on the determination of international morality as the abstract notion of sovereignty. For instance, the security structure created by the West during the Cold War—both in response to perceived threats from the now-defunct communist bloc and from the desire for hegemony—allowed for outright transgressions of global south sovereignty in the forms of aggression (as in Vietnam) or proxy wars (Angola, El Salvador, and others). It supported domestic modes of governance founded upon untold crimes: Indonesia, Guatemala, Argentina, Cambodia, among the many. These sobering realities should dispel the notion that the regime of sovereignty has dissuaded political interventions. They also indicate that the West has not consistently brought disinterested and unproblematic solutions to bear on those pathologies. Policy as Antihegemonic Processes

To return to an apparent theme of the argument, the study of foreign policy has necessarily obeyed authoritative discourses that rely preferentially upon peculiar associations and interpretations given to a set of events, ideas, and their consequences. These topical understandings legitimize certain representations as necessary to the methods of inquisitions and explanations of the discipline of international relations. It is therefore by the power of authority and habitats that the initiatives of the global south have been viewed by the vast majority of Western theorists,

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activists, and politicians as antiliberal and in contravention of the requisites of the autonomy of the economic instantiations of civil society, civil liberties, human rights, and universal ethics. These commentators have held third world countries and their defenders in both political and ideological contempt. Their attitude can be summarized by Martin Wight’s lament that “the existence of the United Nations has exaggerated the international importance of the have-not powers, enabling them to organize themselves into a pressure-group with much greater diplomatic and propaganda weight than they would otherwise have had” (in Jackson 1990: 114). This comment was applied by Robert H. Jackson to the proceedings of UN agencies, particularly the UN Education and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the UN Economic and Social Council, to imply that third world positions have led to a downward slide in international morality from the higher standard it attained during the nineteenth century to a lower common denominator (Jackson 1990: esp. 109–124). Again, third world interventions in the international system have had their Western defenders as well (Brown 1988). Despite various efforts at encouraging a North-South dialogue, Western states have consistently demanded a mere acquiescence of the former colonial entities to their dictates. This attitude has been dubbed rightly by Chris Brown as a modern-day version of the colonial-era “requirement.” Indeed, the tensions that led to the departure of the United States and Great Britain from UNESCO in the 1980s suggested the extent to which the former colonial powers go to snub international forums that mandate substantive conversations with the formerly colonized.3 It is in such contexts that the general contours of postcolonial foreign policies may justifiably provide the foundation for a valid explanatory or teleological model of postcolonial foreign policy that may be opposed to those developed and executed by the West. Surely, one can accept the hegemony of academic paradigms and still disagree on empirical grounds with the conclusions that global south foreign policy initiatives have been founded upon a nonreflexive nationalism based on retrograde cultural dictates and/or religious precepts, on the one hand, and a resentment of the West on the other. The movement toward postcoloniality has been neither irrational nor nonreflexive. Its realization and symbolic attributions, too, must be viewed in light of the historical processes, structures of power, and modes of subjectivity that the global south has had to confront. Postcoloniality itself constituted a field of significations through which the vast majority of postcolonial societies understood the function of the state, the function and purview of foreign policy, and their social relevance. It also delineated the

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processes of constitution and formation of state interests and the collective identity, both intended to identify the collective good. To be sure, the ontological standing of the postcolonial state bears significant imprints from the mechanisms of modernity. As in Europe, the state emerged in the global south erroneously as the ultimate means to international representation, equality, and justice (Chatterjee 1993: 75). But this genetic defect must not divert from the fact that the postcolonial state was by historical necessity constitutively distinct from the earlier European state and that this temporal specificity helped to shape the field of foreign policy emerging from the postcolonies. Just as disenchantment with the old regime and revolutions shaped the European state and subjectivity within it, so too postcoloniality, colored by cultural and political alienation and economic marginalization, determined the forms and substance of the state and foreign policy in the era following decolonization in the global south. Postcoloniality generated antihegemonic discourses characterized by distinct ideological and cultural sensibilities as well as novel political and ethical bases as foundations for a different ethos of foreign policy and international relations. To elaborate on an earlier point, anticolonialism and postcoloniality were by no means a total opposition to modernity; neither was postcoloniality fully captured by the modernist project. Their complex processes may be more aptly seized through the Gramscian notion of “passive revolution” (Chatterjee 1993). It began with the alienation of the middle strata of the colonial empires, who ordinarily mediated between the colonial order and local, or “native,” ones. These middle strata opposed the Western-inspired international order for its nonrepresentativeness, and colonialism for its violation of the very ethos of salvation which Europe proposed through its universalist discourses. These anticolonialists rightly perceived the colonialist conceit and folly (la folie imperiale) that others will and must find comfort and salvation in European myth and traditions. The root cause of this folly was a certain confidence in rational knowledge (of self and other), an obstinacy in charting the course of the common human history, and a related fantasy of self-erasure aimed at asserting universality. The contradictions underlying this folly occurred to the colonized in the earlier phases of Western conquests. On the one hand, the myth or original scripts of Western civilizational superiority invoked ironic European texts (including Herodotus) but buttressed its civilizational credentials by locating the exemplary human achievements in Greece, Rome, Florence, and elsewhere in Europe. On the other hand, the colonized could point to the ruinous histories and colonial tragedies contained in the European mission of civilization. Initially, the colonized located these ruins in the

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post-Columbian Americas and European empires in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Later, however, the anticolonialists could point to the violent trajectories of Europe itself, spanning from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Consequently, the anticolonialists viewed the two most violent convulsions of the twentieth century—the two wars provoked by Europe before they became global—as mere confirmation of the horrors embedded in the rationalist logic of Western civilization (Dirks 1977). The gap between the colonialist narrative and its universalist-quahumanist self-representations was evident also to the vast majority of the colonized, including those who could not theorize it. The colonized elites, however, could articulate their perceptions of all the contradictions and ironies contained in the picturesque mission of civilization: European ambition sustained by the toil of slaves and colonized, a humanism followed by the betrayal of exploitation, and glory built on abstract ideals and cowardice. In the words of Nicholas Dirks, the colonial elites could see Immanuel Kant’s sublime aesthetic progressively surrender to the senses as imperial betrayal (which Edmund Burke may have predicted) and horrible wars of conquests, both external and internal to Europe (Dirks 1977). Indeed, the twin wars of the twentieth century were fought efficiently with the technologies of the day only to leave “ruins to house culture”—a horrible scenario that Walter Benjamin may have anticipated (Dirks 1977). This criticism and subsequent anticolonial resistance was complicated by different orders of power and subordination, emanating from within, of the vast majority of the colonized by the indigenous middle strata. The latter’s own modernist project depended upon appropriated European intellectual, ideological, and political arsenals of nationbuilding. Through this appropriation, they reproduced the European precedent of selecting particular individual experiences and memories for the purpose of creating the collective knowledge and memory and, thus, the national consciousness. In addition, the middle strata retained a vested interest in the international economic order and, as a result, desired to maintain its basic organizational principle of separate national spheres of related decisionmaking. This spatial distribution of economic spheres also corresponded to the need of the colonized middle strata to maintain separate cultural and political spheres, which they dominated. This process of unquestioned self-identification of the middle strata with the national project created its own forms of internal alienation among women, the domestic outcasts, peasants, and other subordinated or exploited domestic entities. Yet the related frustrations did not offset

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the stronger generalized phenomenon of alienation from the colonialist project, and consequently, the anticolonialist appeal for the preservation of the domestic spheres of culture, spirituality, and politics retained its potency. The near uniformity of this sense of alienation from the colonizer provided the background for the forms of criticism of the ordering mechanisms and processes of the modern international order. The related judgment and sensibilities provided the context for the domestic legitimacy of subsequent postcolonial projects, internationalist discourses, and strategies. In this sense, the formation of the postcolonial nation was indeed an antihegemonic process that required its own form of knowledge and memory, its imagined and real histories, as well as the sense of a putative destiny through self-determination. Postcoloniality and Global Emancipation

In the context of the modern international system, anticolonialists had few options but to insist on obtaining their own states as means to nationhood, representation, equality, and justice. Yet the postcolonial governors faced disciplinary and normalizing processes of the modern international order that perverted the meaning of self-determination and international society. Indeed, the general acceptance by the colonizer of the inevitability of decolonization and the related passage from the colonial to the postcolonial state reflected a certain flexibility on their part, but it led to only limited accommodation of the process of selfdetermination. Whether at the United Nations or other international forums, the former colonial powers continued to implement mechanisms of cultural and political hegemony, on the one hand, and economic subordination on the other, along with corresponding structures of normalization or juridical regimes of rights, liberty, and property. Although the related processes of assimilation of the formerly colonized into the structures of modernity succeeded in the economic instance where the corresponding mechanisms were fully implemented prior to independence, the modernist representations and articulations of power and their productions and reproductions of meanings and significations contained sufficient ambiguities and contradictions. Thus colonial elites predicated their struggle upon new modulations of identity and power (Chatterjee 1993: 13, 55). In particular, they articulated the right to self-determination internationally to mean the implementation of new modes of subjectivity, identity, and difference to correspond with internally formulated fields of public and private authority, which in turn were grounded in indigenous material cultures, social relations,

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and spiritual values. These processes were to result in new images of culture, communities, and humanity. In sum, national independence, or decolonization, was to constitute an initial step toward self-determination whose processes opened new avenues to the political imaginary. Anticolonialists implemented different domestic processes with both complementary and contradictory results. However, whatever their disagreements and conflicting agendas, the postcolonial constituencies retained a deep-seated suspicion of the intentions of the West vis-à-vis the formerly colonized. This sentiment, and the determination to overcome the legacies of colonialism both domestically and in the international sphere, created a sphere of understanding and support for related collective actions. Depending on the historical conjectures, or their conditions of existence, the constituencies of the global south thus attempted to improve upon the international configuration of power in order to rectify its mechanisms of allocations of resources (material or immaterial, tangible or intangible), as well as alter their implications for the production of knowledge and the political imagination. In effect, they sought to transform the ethos, or internal laws of the international system, that defined relations between the postcolonies and the former colonial powers (Aijaz 1992). In this context, foreign policy was a means not necessarily to exclusive power but to emancipation and survival through collective renegotiation of the ethos of global politics. Its purpose was to restore integrity and dignity to the postcolonial entities. Indeed, it may be said with certitude that, throughout the post–World War II era, the vast majority of the postcolonies have both retained their singularities and remained suspicious of the broad powers assumed by the so-called Allied powers. Thus during the crucial moments of the postwar restructuring of the international order, the colonized continued to view the Allies as transmuted colonial powers, and a plurality stayed suspicious of the ethos of international relations (or its intrinsic values, norms, and purposes) implemented by the former colonial powers. During the United Nations organizing conference at San Francisco, for instance, the former perceived the latter’s initiatives as new instantiations of old mechanisms of global governance that posed a threat to the integrity and dignity of the formerly colonized. The 1955 Bandung conference made similar points in its criticisms of the role of the United Nations in the Korean War and its record on ongoing colonial wars such as in Vietnam. The foundation in 1961 of the Non-Aligned Movement and its articulation of a “positive neutralism” vis-à-vis Cold War divisions and contentions, the consummation of the Algerian revolution and its validation of armed revolt in pursuit of national self-determination, the reverberations of the 1968

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Tet offensive against U.S. occupation of Vietnam, and other politically significant events not only transformed third world attitudes toward prevailing Western-imposed geopolitics but also affected the collective consciousness of progressive Western organizations. Conclusion

It is not my intention to imply that one must not aspire to study foreign policy on the basis of the authoritative disciplinary methods and analytical criteria. In fact, I propose that analysts seek to understand—and predict, if need be—the foreign policies of the global south on its own terms, that is, in light of a historiography and hermeneutics that may be unique to it. This goal may not meet the anxiety underlying the prevailing analysis of the foreign policies of the global south, that is, whether and when they can be expected to be congenial to Pax Americana or the postwar liberal hegemonic project. My point is that the study of the foreign policies of the global south requires novel analytical tools that must respond first and foremost to the internal constitutional processes of the anticolonialist revolution and their identity-producing experiences. But such an inquiry cannot be complete without an appreciation of structures of subjectivity that lay outside of the colonial boundaries but produced them, be they legally authorized (as the colonial mandate system) or politically enacted (e.g., the Monroe Doctrine). There seems to be indeed a direct and necessary relationship between anticolonialism and postcolonial identity, on the one hand, and the international status quo on the other. This symbiosis also has had political implications. For instance, the economic activities of United Fruit Company may have been represented in the public U.S. imaginary as the private enactment of constitutional rights. Yet once the activities of that company conflicted with the domestic policy requirements of postcolonial Guatemala, the U.S. government secretly intervened to undermine the domestic authority of the government of Guatemala, leading to the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz (Smith 1994: 74–79, 101–228). These and numerous such events in the global south suggest an often overlooked intimacy between economic activities and political processes, as well as intersections between the private and public spheres, on the one hand, and the national and international domains on the other. It is worth noting once again that this omission is only disciplinary. Indeed, the study of foreign policy has construed international politics in such a manner as to exclude the cultural, economic, spiritual, and social instantiations of foreign policy from its purview. However

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attractive and relevant the distinctions in the production and organization of knowledge in the Western academies might be, they have not been self-evident to the vast majority of observers in the global south. In sum, there is a case to be made that the advent of decolonization brought to the fore postcolonial entities whose cultural sensibilities, ideological sentiment, and political dispositions—however diverse and contradictory—could be subsumed by their uniform desire and will to be incorporated within international society stripped of its prior pathologies of hierarchies, domination, and exploitation. To account for such a trajectory, one needs new forms of knowledge and a reconfiguration of the objects of the field of foreign policy. To begin, we must ask ourselves questions pertaining to the appropriate methodologies, historiographies, and ethics. In regard to the last, we must recognize the need for cooperation among all members of the international community for a just international order. We must also identify the structures of hegemony as well as account for our own actions, successes, and failures. In this exercise, our inquiries and findings ought to be open to other kinds of judgment and to accommodation and rectification. Notes

1. As used here, the notion of an authoritative discourse comports within it Michel Foucault’s (1973) notion of the episteme, or the totality of relations that gives a given discourse its regularities. 2. On the rules of possession during conquest, see Henry Reynolds (1992: 1–54) and Basil Davidson (1961: 53). 3. UNESCO, it must be remembered, was conceived as a global forum of exchange and communication, intended to assemble elites of all nationalities to discuss issues of global significance outside of the strictures of sovereignty. Its deliberations were also designed to remain open-ended and democratic, reflective of the goal of promoting moral learning and teaching, on the one hand, and disallowing unidirectional injunctions and the sovereign veto of any political entity on the other. In the 1970s, this organization took up several issues related to the preservation of the cultural heritage of humanity, the production and distribution of global intellectual resources, and the redefinition of the purpose of scientific and cultural activities in the human interest. As Robert Jackson (1990) so aptly documents, the United States and Britain led other Western states in opposing these proceedings through political boycott and economic sanction in order to protect parochial interests.

4 Reconceptualizing the Global South’s Perspective: The End of the Bandung Spirit Randolph B. Persaud

By any measure, the nature of global south foreign policy is different from that of the developed states (Korany 1974 and 1983; BraveboyWagner 1989; Moon 1985; Persaud 2001). The differences exist in terms of the internal and external factors that inform foreign policy and, more specifically, how decisions are made. The internal conditions existing in Western great powers are very different from those of the developing states. These states are not nearly as industrialized, and much of their external economic activities is still tied to former colonial powers. Moreover, the full complement of impersonal bureaucratic elements of Western democracies does not obtain in the developing states, and this has specific consequences for decisionmaking. In addition, the location of global south states in the interstate system is very different from that of the great powers, and these states are principally concerned with survival in the international arena, a survival that is based on both security and economic needs (Fox 1959). Finally, the global south state itself is not fully consolidated, and indeed the nation-state formula in many of these states is still in the making (Jackson 1990). Despite these notable differences in the behavioral and structural features of the South, not enough effort has been made to develop theoretical analyses of these countries’ foreign policies. There is, in effect, too much of an unproblematic acceptance of the models developed for, and out of, the experiences of the Western states. The application, for example, of the bureaucratic politics model either implicitly or explicitly to third world countries is symptomatic of this. It is interesting to note that the same model was developed by Graham Allison to reflect 49

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the unique nature of fragmented institutional power in U.S. government, rather than a general theory of decisionmaking (Allison 1971). In addition to inherent differences between the foreign policies of developed and developing states, the latter have gone through massive transformations since the mid-1980s. The changes in question are structural rather than relational, and, in fact, in most instances there has been a near reversal of the very thinking of developing states with respect to the global political economy. A quick glance at the key principles of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), which in the 1970s was the intellectual and practical framework through which global south states articulated their foreign policy orientation, helps to highlight the pervasiveness of the changes under way. According to Craig Murphy, the key elements of the NIEO ideology were as follows: (1) the need for international management of the global economy; (2) affirmation of the economic rights and duties of states; (3) affirmation of the equality of individual states; (4) recognition of the moral obligation of past and present exploiters to negotiate the reform of existing international economic systems; and (5) recognition of the duty of current exploiter states to compensate their victims (Murphy 1984: 158). The assertion of these principles amounted to a fundamental challenge to key aspects of the extant world order. But what is equally important here is the fact that these challenges could have been mounted with some credibility. Today, those principles would be, and have been, dismissed, and the proof of this is that developing states, except for a few cases, have abandoned the language and spirit of the NIEO and the broader NonAligned Movement. The movement away from foreign policies in the “spirit of Bandung” is itself an interesting problem, but, more significantly, this movement is symptomatic of a fundamental reconfiguration of the world order. In turn, the new world order has led to the adoption of different strategies by the global south states, and these new strategies have spawned a new era of foreign policies. At the very heart of the new conditions generating the need for new foreign policies is the process of globalization. Is There Now a Global South Foreign Policy?

The very notion of global south, or third world, foreign policy is based on a number of assumptions, some of which are contradictory. First, there is an assumption that the world system may be divided on the basis of some explicit principles of delineation. Systemic location of an entire class of states was the basis upon which the world was divided

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into first, second, and third worlds. A class of states must not be confused with a group of states. Whereas a group of states is based upon common attributes (such as level of economic development, military capacity, or even size), a class of states is determined by position in the global system. The taxonomic procedures governing group belonging are unit attributes, whereas class location is based on system structure. The notion of third world foreign policy has for a long time been based upon the assumption that there is a correspondence between the unit attributes and system structure and that the behavior of these states was an outcome of this combination. But there was another element here, namely, that the group-class configuration was further consolidated by ideational forces, primarily informed by the history of colonialism and imperialism to which the group or class of states was subjected. Third world foreign policy, then, has supposedly existed as a distinct set of practices in the international system, defined by a set of states that belong to the same group and class vis-à-vis other groups and classes in the system. Second, the assumption that reliable knowledge might be based upon the behavior of an entire class of states is itself based on certain methodological assumptions, which, for want of a better term, might be called “positivism.” The particular form that this positivist knowledge takes is nomological explanation. In their book on U.S. foreign policy, Charles Kegley and Eugene Wittkopf note that “nomological explanations use lawlike statements . . . to explain a particular event or class of events. Usually such statements explain events by reference to generalizations or covering laws, which attach cause to effect” (Kegley and Wittkkopf 1996: 18). But the point to underline here is that third world/ global south foreign policy per se does not exist as a matter of selfevident empirical fact. This is so because there is no coordinated (or “grand”) foreign policy decisionmaking body of global south states. Third world/global south foreign policy is in fact the product of taxonomic practice based upon specific ontological positions in world politics (Cox 1992: 132–139). With the rise of globalization, and with the breakdown of the cornerstones of third world solidarity, the question must be asked if there is such an entity as third world foreign policy. Framing the question this way consciously moves away from a purely state-based definition of the problem. Third world/global south foreign policy should not be understood as the “addition,” or sum, of foreign policies of developing states. Neither should it be restricted to the type of “scientific propositions” that Bahgat Korany called for (Korany 1974: 72). The third world of old was essentially a historically and socially constructed idea and set of

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practices. There were clear principles of unity binding the disparate countries into a collective force in world politics. Despite nuances in state policies, the idea of third world action was grounded in a fundamental democratization of world order. President Houari Boumedienne of Algeria once stated the general south perspective as follows: “The principal confrontation in today’s world is between imperialism and the Third World” (Mortimer 1984: 26). Though Boumedienne was reflecting the most radical analysis in the third world movement, and this in a very radical conjuncture (1967), his position had considerable support among third world leaders. The notion of a third world foreign policy, therefore, was based upon the existence of a third world political movement. It is debatable if the surviving practical wisdom of that movement, and its various institutional materialities, would be able to stem the tide of globalization. Foreign Policy and National Identity

Foreign policy is not only about what states do outside their territorial borders. To begin with, the division between the external and internal aspects of policy is always blurred. The category “intermestic” was specifically developed to deal with this amorphous area, which is neither inside nor outside the nation-state boundary. More directly, there is increasing recognition that foreign policy is as much about developments within the nation-state as it is about the outside world. As Alberto Van Klaveren put it, “In some senses, a state’s foreign policy is the international expression of a society, but it also serves to integrate the world at large into that society” (Van Klaveren 1996: 37). Furthermore, David Campbell has made a compelling case that foreign policy is fundamentally directed at the production of a sense of national solidarity, identity, and nationhood. National identity, in part, emerges through discourses of difference, where the discourses serve to simultaneously instantiate the national self in relation to socially constructed “enemies.” Campbell himself puts it this way: “The passage from difference to identity as marked by the rite of citizenship is concerned with the elimination of that which is alien, foreign, and perceived as a threat to a secure state” (Campbell 1992: 42). Although Campbell’s work was concerned with a country where the nation-state equation is well established (i.e., the United States), it is indeed still very, if not more, appropriate for global south states. The reasons for this are obvious. Global south nation-states emerged through the structural logic of the international state system as ready-made entities, not as a result of organic

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developments particular to their social formations. For many of these states, there was a fundamental disjuncture between internal (i.e., national) solidarity and state authority. There were varying degrees of organicity between nation and state in the South: in some, such as many of the Caribbean states, the nation-state formula was quickly consolidated, but in other cases there were political and often ethnic struggles that threatened to destroy the nation-state complex. Christopher Clapham notes that: The danger was particularly acute when, as in Sudan and Nigeria, the opposition enjoyed widespread support in large and relatively clearly defined regions which possessed at least some of the attributes required for separate independent statehood; or when, as in north-eastern Kenya or eastern Ghana, a region bordered a neighbouring state governed by fellow members of the locally predominant ethnic group. (Clapham 1996: 49)

In other instances, states that were themselves formed through intense contestation and violent means were later broken up. The fragility upon which East Pakistan rested before it became Bangladesh was extreme, yet this example points to the tenuousness of the third world nation-state. Nonetheless, the process of building nation-states had to be embarked upon with great vigor. The legacy of the colonial structure of political power became important in this period. Nationbuilding would essentially take place from above, very much within the context of what Hamza Alavi theorized as the “over-developed superstructure.” By “over-developed” Alavi meant a concentration of power in the state apparatuses (police, military, bureaucracy). “The colonial state is therefore equipped with a powerful bureaucratic-military apparatus and mechanisms of government which enable it through its routine operations to subordinate the native social classes” (Alavi 1972: 61). The third world state in this context (of a disjuncture between state power and civil society) had considerable autonomy vis-à-vis society in foreign policy. In addition to nation-building per se, the global south states have had to construct the legitimacy of the state in the postcolonial period. State legitimation is not simply an internal matter but is a dimension of the sovereignty of the state within the international system. In this respect, the role of foreign policies in third world states took on some distinctive attributes. In the case of the established states in the system, internal cohesion fomented through discourses of solidarity was essentially constructed on some notion of “otherness.” The characteristic technique of inscribing otherness was to produce some form of danger.

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Two general types of danger and corresponding forms of othernesses may be identified: the more known one was in the form of the EastWest conflict. Communism was the global danger. It was represented as a fundamental threat to the capitalist world economy, individual freedom, religious faith, and other values that were represented as uniquely Western. The threat here came from the idea of communism and the states that subscribed to its tenets. The second kind of danger preceded the communist danger and developed through the formation of European empires and/or the acquisition of colonial property. It came from what we generally call the third world and/or the non-Western world. The danger here was cultural and civilizational, and the threat took the form of possible contamination by supposedly lesser peoples. At the same time that the third world states were emerging in their modern (independent) form, the world system became organized in a global bipolar structure and driven by a complex of political and military alliances and competing ideologies of economic and social systems. This global bifurcation (the Cold War) allowed the major competitors to essentially construct each other’s identity around valorized notions of danger. These discourses of danger became productive of the other as an enemy that must be contained, defeated, or even destroyed. Therefore, internal solidarity, or nation-ness, was built around notions of absolute exclusivity. One of the interesting things about global south foreign policies is that in the production of nation-ness, legitimation of state power, and consolidation of sovereignty, the discourses of otherness employed were generally not about “enemies” defined in terms of other states. Although many global south states did rely on border disputes and other forms of traditional state-to-state conflict (e.g., India and Pakistan) in their strategies of national construction, the other invariably has been larger forces of history (imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism) or abstract moral values (justice, equality, fairness, responsibility). Murphy has shown that in the very early years of the post–World War II global order “the south understood the equal rights of states as giving each government the right to choose its own development path, while believing material support of every nation’s particular development program to be an international matter” (Murphy 1984: 30) These notions of development and rights were themselves part of a broader theoretical, political, and even moral critique of the structures and institutions extant in the global political economy. Dependency theory, for example, attempted not only to explain the dynamics of world capitalism and its center-periphery structure but also to provide the basis for political mobilization. Thus

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dependency theory contributed much more to the new order ideology than an analysis of TNCs [transnational corporations] and the transfer of technology. More significant was the dependency theorists’ concentration on global structures that affected all third world nations to the exclusion of analysis of regional differences in the third world. The emphasis contributed to third world unity. (Murphy 1984: 108)

Robert Jackson has emphasized this particularity of third world sovereignty by labeling it “sovereignty plus” (Jackson 1990: 40). The “global otherness” has not been restricted to questions of economic development or the nature and composition of international institutions. The explosion of nuclear devices by India and Pakistan was enormously interesting in this regard. Although indeed there is a compelling logic of otherness in the Indian-Pakistani relationship, the nuclear tests elicited instant, sustained, and far-reaching criticisms from the extant recognized nuclear powers. Global South Foreign Policy Today

Although there are contending positions on what specifically constitutes globalization as well as its consequences, there is sufficient consensus that the current global order is undergoing rapid and considerable change. There is also widespread acknowledgment that the relationships between states and the international system, and those between states and their civil societies, are being reconfigured. These multiple changes are having an impact on global south foreign policy. In fact, an important part of what is being argued in this chapter is that the very “stuff” of foreign policy is currently undergoing change. In their comprehensive and acclaimed book Global Transformations, David Held and colleagues define globalization as a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity, and impact-generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power. (Held et al. 1999: 16)

This is a useful definition of globalization, insofar as it contains considerable scope for apprehending the changes that are occurring. What is missing, however, is sufficient recognition of the extent to which globalization is a set of ideational practices. These ideational practices, when combined with the social forces advancing them through a mixture

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of consent and coercion, constitute an ideological system. The ideological “superstructure” (to use an old term) of globalization binds together the material developments (processes and flows) currently under way, as well as the new thinking that has arisen as part of the new world order. As used here, “ideology” should not be understood simply as a belief system that provides legitimacy (Persaud 2001). On the contrary, the ideological practices in question are partly constitutive of globalization; put simply, they help to shape its meaning. By so doing they also intentionally and otherwise figure in both the extensity and limits of the possible. Globalization as an ideological configuration is the product of multiple discursive practices. These discourses are not detached from economic, political, national, or even intellectual interests; yet at the same time they are not mechanical expressions of those same interests. It is probably more accurate to see globalization as a set of forces, some of which are tied to specific interests, with others that are more structural in character. The material, institutional, and ideological reconfiguration of the global political economy on the basis of the neoliberal consensus, in addition to the other forces of globalization, is having a decided impact on global south foreign policy. The Washington consensus, which in many ways represents the coalescence of a U.S.-driven refashioning of the world economic and political order with the more structural developments of globalization, has since the early 1990s severely limited global south options. The recommendations resulting from this “consensus” included the promotion of fiscal discipline, elimination of subsidies, broad and moderate taxation, market-determined interest and exchange rates, trade and foreign investment liberalization, privatization of state enterprises, deregulation, and respect for private property rights. (Vacs 1994: 81–82)

This so-called consensus actually is based on a broader neoconservative ideological and political movement, involving a general rollback of social welfare rights and other “entitlements” that were won during the postwar contract among labor, government, and businesses. In Western states, these rights were partly granted as a concession to labor as part of a larger deal in the global anticommunist campaign (Cox 1992; Harvey 1990; Gill 1995). What has been the effect of all this on the global south? First, the ability of these states to pursue independent (i.e., third-path) economic policies has been severely weakened. The triumph of neoliberal hegemony has meant that the foreign policies of third world states must

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now be principally directed at recruiting capital via transnational corporations and pleading for either more time for reforms (consistent with monetarist-neoconservative perspectives) to be put in place or for exemptions. In addition to, if not instead of, the more traditional preoccupation of debt rescheduling or relief, combined with various projects of global south solidarity construction, foreign ministries and their staffs have essentially become global sales representatives for their countries. Neoliberal globalization is also having far-reaching political implications for global south countries. According to Vacs: The development of self-regulated markets and the establishment of minimalist states in a context of growing transnationalization and global interdependence reduces the capacity of these states to influence the evolution of crucial economic, political, and social variables. This decline in the state’s sovereign power profoundly affects its ability to generate loyalty and support among the population and to foster the creation and maintenance of all-embracing national identities and solidarities. (Vacs 1994: 87)

The changes in global south foreign policy described thus far have been framed in terms of state policies. This is not adequate, because the very notion of global south foreign policy, as noted earlier in this chapter, is based on a system structure and the location of a class of states within that structure. The question that arises, then, is whether the systemic transformations of recent years have implied a repositioning of that class of states. The states in question may have the same attributes, but the problem is not so much a unit-attribute one as it is a systemdefined one. Put differently, these states for the most part are still poor, weak, underdeveloped, peripheralized in global institutions, and lack the material power (defined through wealth or the means of violence) to bring about systemwide change in their own interest. One of the things that has changed is the almost total displacement of efforts to bring about a more equitable distribution of the world’s wealth through third world diplomacy. The multilateral institutions through which such efforts were orchestrated in the post–World War II period have now been put in the service of facilitating global capitalism. The Shift in World Order and the Shift in Global South Foreign Policy

The shift in global south foreign policy from a general position of challenging the dominant development ideology, as well as the structures

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and institutions of the global political economy, to one of adopting the thrust of neoliberal globalization requires further theoretical analysis. The neo-Gramscian theory of hegemony is especially well suited for this purpose. The Gramscian theory of hegemony must be distinguished from the neoliberal strain that expresses itself in hegemonic stability theory and that may be classified as “problem-solving.” By comparison, the more critical position is praxis-oriented and, like dependency theory before it, has a strong emancipatory dimension. The liberal version of hegemony may be understood not only as a theory of explanation but also as a perspective that articulates a particular set of values. Its values are consistent with the power configuration of the extant world order and advance the idea that U.S. leadership is conducive to global stability. Hegemonic stability theory therefore takes both the structure and content of world order as givens and uses them as a framework to evaluate what states do within that framework. The framework is concretized in various institutions and regimes, each within a particular issue area, but all underpinned by a common set of philosophical assumptions. Among the most important of these assumptions are: (1) that the world system has been gradually moving in the direction of progress; (2) that the market unhindered by state intervention is the most reliable mechanism for facilitating economic growth and social progress; (3) that the global economic system should operate on the same free-market fundamentals, thereby giving rise to free trade and free movement of the factors of production; (4) that multilateral action should be to bring about consensus on the way in which the world system works and to punish those states that violate those norms; and (5) at the security level, that state sovereignty is the highest value and that multilateral intervention must continue within the context of great power assent. The neoliberal theory of hegemony stresses order and stability and justifies the actions of the hegemon on these very bases. More than that, this version of hegemony posits the “hegemon” as a sort of anchor in the world system, an anchor against chaos, disorder, and instability. Put differently, the hegemon is a “friend” of other states, even though it might be called upon to discipline them for supposedly recalcitrant behavior. Neoliberal institutionalism sees various regimes as the mechanisms through which a liberal world order might be maintained. The analysis of global south foreign policy from this point of view is concerned with the extent to which there is subscription or deviance from the regimes and their assumptions. Deviance could take many forms, including collective action by global south states geared toward challenging the principles, norms, and decisionmaking procedures not

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only in specific issue areas but also in the general architecture of the extant world order. At the heart of the liberal project is the conviction that states can maximize their interests and that cooperation in key issue areas is not antithetical to the rational pursuit of these interests. The liberal project is rather closer to the neorealist structural focus than might be assumed. In this regard David Baldwin is correct to note that “both sides argue from assumptions that states behave like egotistic value maximizers” (Baldwin 1993: 9). What is of interest here is that the liberal project—which has a determined critique of realism and neorealism—is in fact not antithetical to the position of the great powers. The liberal institutionalist stresses cooperation, but the very principles and norms that underpin this cooperation are themselves elements of power that keep third world countries in structurally disadvantageous positions. Cooperation is the form of power consistent with the liberal project of capitalist globalization and the great power “coordination” of the state system’s homeostasis. Neoliberal institutionalists differentiate between soft power and hard power. The key difference is that soft power is asserted through persuasion rather than force. Although this is an interesting distinction, it gives the impression that soft power is benign, if not desirable. This is highly problematic, and untangling this formulation of power is critical to an understanding of the foreign policy of global south states. The neo-Gramscian theory of hegemony is especially well suited to establishing the link between the general liberal construction of world order, the dynamics of globalization, and the pressures that poorer countries face. As a number of writers have noted, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony has to be understood in terms of the movement of power within social formations and the world system (Persaud 2001; Gill 1995; Cox 1992; Mittelman 2001). It is not simply a concept that one applies to an outside reality. More than that, hegemony is not merely an instrument, condition, or outcome. The institutionalist concept of soft power is problematic precisely because it sees power as “something” that is used by “someone” against someone else for some objective—the last usually defined in terms of some objective interest. Put differently, this amounts to powerful states employing noncoercive instruments against less powerful states to get the latter to accept the defining properties of world order and its various institutional rules. This way of approaching the problem in an age of globalization is problematic because, in fact, corporate power, the corporate capture of significant aspects of the state, and, ultimately, corporate imperialism are critical to the strategies adopted by global south societies in dealing with the new global realities.1

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In its simplest and most popular formulation, hegemony is understood to be a particular syntax of power, one in which consensus is more important than force. The argument is that the power of ideas is fundamental in shaping the social (or world) order in ways that benefit the dominant classes and elite groups. In this way, global south elites are interpolated into the neoliberal worldview, and those elites in turn adopt policies, including foreign policies, consistent with the extant world order. But hegemony cannot be sufficiently theorized by focusing on the dominant (i.e., economic) classes, because hegemonic practices involve all sectors of a social formation, not the least the masses. Once the broader social forces that drive foreign policy are factored in, then the narrow version of hegemonic domination is rather difficult to sustain. In fact, one of the distinguishing characteristics of post-1989 hegemony is the extent to which nonstate forces are significant in the inscription of hegemonized “common sense.” The specific issue is this: with the fantastic expansion of communication technologies and the attendant spatial compression, the deeper penetration of civil societies in the South by Western commodified cultural forms, the strong pull factors of migration to the developed countries, and the demonstration effect of remittances from the developed countries, the leadership in global south states is hard-pressed to “simply” critique “neocolonialism,” “imperialism,” and so on and make the critique register. The way the world system operates is not simple at all, yet leaders must indeed simplify matters if they are going to be understood at the mass level. It is important to recognize here that the first challenge of poor countries is to fight off the massive cultural invasion consistent with lifestyles based on consumption; in doing this, the “enemy” is rather amorphous. Put another way: the hegemonized cultural common sense of capitalist globalization is not a direct result of Western states. States are important, but state power and corporate power are combined in a unique way. Separation of the two in the analysis of the hegemonic project would be a mistake. In fact, a complete picture would require attention to state, corporate, and cultural practices. Stephen Gill explains: One vehicle for the emergence of this situation has been policies that tend to subject the majority to market forces whilst preserving social protection for the strong (e.g., highly skilled workers, corporate capital, or those with inherited wealth). These policies are cast within a neoliberal discourse of governance that stresses efficiency, welfare, and freedom of the market, and self-actualisation through the process of consumption. (Gill 1995: 401)

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The new hegemony, then, is made up of a unique combination of corporate power, state withdrawal from social welfare and services, persistent intervention in order to achieve momentum, hyperconsumerism, and the use and/or threat of force. The articulation of these values is hegemonic to the extent that they have triumphed in the Western/capitalist countries and form the basis for the definition of the world order. Moreover, Western states, working closely with global corporations, have been insisting that poor countries adopt the hypermarket “common sense” that began in its modern form in Chile under General Augusto Pinochet, the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher, and the United States under Ronald Reagan. This new hegemonic configuration is not simply ideological but rests upon, or is consistent with, a set of material developments in the areas of production, finance, and politics. In brief, in production, we see: (1) a general shift away from reliance on industrial production in the center countries, as well as increasing shares of gross domestic product in services; (2) far-reaching restructuring of labor markets, with the most notable change being the rise of core and contingent workforces or, in some instances, the development of entirely new juridical principles aimed at ending employment while maintaining accessibility to labor; and (3) a general shift of industrial production and/or assembly of end products in the South, this often taking the form of export production zones. These developments in production have been accompanied by equally spectacular developments in global finance. In this regard the hypermobility of financial capital is of considerable importance, given the implications it has had for a number of global south economies (some of this expressed in the Asian financial crisis of 1997). Speculative “hot money” has developed a new autonomy, relying as it does on real-time flows of information, financial liberalization, and support in instances of bad investments. The general trend, pushed as it is by an incessant “paper entrepreneurialism,” has been toward short-term windfalls instead of productive investments (Harvey 1990: 163). The new dominance of finance is not apart from the general structural trends of flexibilization. Even in the areas of foreign direct investments (FDI), transnational corporations have considerable relative autonomy insofar as: (1) most FDI still targets opportunities in the developed capitalist states; and (2) poor countries in the South must compete with each other for capital inflow. Competition in itself is not the issue. The problem is that the transnational corporations have considerable flexibility, and “such flexibility makes it all the easier for transnationals to play off one government against another in their search for concessions” (Gill and

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Law 1989: 485). The impact of securing foreign investments as a fundamental plank of global south foreign policy cannot be overemphasized. It is important to keep in mind that these efforts are not restricted to “recruiting” foreign investments in the narrow economic sense. Rather, the recruitment process must be broad-based, involving governments having to not only make specific concessions to the foreign corporations but also show adherence to the general principles of neoliberal ideology. South governments must also deal with the enormous resistance that emanates from within their own societies. Protests against global liberalism have been very persistent and have taken different forms. In some countries the government has had to resort to force in order to maintain political stability. Conclusion

Given these far-reaching changes, what has been the consequences for the foreign policies of global south countries? Although there are individual global south state foreign policies, the idea of an overarching third world/global south foreign policy has ended. In part, this is related to the collapse of the bipolar global security structure. Bipolarity implied a particular distribution of political power and military capability in the world system. The postwar security structure was, however, more than a question of politics and force. It was also about ideas and ideology, involving struggles over the very essence of societies, states, and peoples. The tightness of the bipolar Cold War conjuncture has been replaced by a different kind of restrictiveness. Although no longer caught in the East-West conflict, countries in the South must essentially choose between their own locally developed solutions to problems, on the one hand, and solutions handed down from the global power bloc on the other. In this context, local solutions imply strategies that are consistent with the specific historical development of the countries in question. In these instances, a good deal of the foreign policy effort must be devoted to “defending” the policies, because they elicit disapproval from the international financial institutions, from multinational capital, and from governments in the West that are insistent on the market as the solution to all problems. Malaysia’s employment of capital controls in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, and the response to that nationalist strategy, are a good case in point. One definite consequence of globalization on the external relations of poor countries is that the political movement that had helped to formulate the idea of the third world as a bloc no longer exists. The reasons for this are multidimensional. The spirit of decolonization that once

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formed the basis of solidarity has not been successfully replaced, and dependency theory—which at one time provided the theoretical wisdom for political mobilization—has been marginalized in the academy. The decline of the intellectual bases of third world praxis has been accompanied by the simultaneous rise of what might best be described as the hegemonization of socioeconomic alternatives. Whereas it was once acceptable to undertake collective political action on the ground of moral reasons, usually in the form of economic betterment, the very leitmotiv of globalization is to defeat such “interventions.” The “meta power” that Stephen Krasner (1985) once attributed to the third world has now been effectively replaced by notions of market fundamentals. Accordingly, countries that were once steadfast in their critique of the blandishments of the world capitalist system, and that directed much of their foreign policy resources to seeking structural change, have now “accepted” the global marketplace as the authoritative referent. The gravest impact that globalization may be having on the foreign policy of poor countries is the inducement of the structural “docility” described above. The term docility, as used here, is synonymous with the way the term is used to conceptualize the social relations of vulnerable labor (Sassen 1988: 26). Much like the submission of contingent and other vulnerable workers to the discipline of capital, global south countries have been increasingly pushed into behavior that is more consistent with the extant regimes designed by the dominant state (Harrod 1987). In the same way that internal restructuring involves an upward redistribution of political power in favor of capital, global restructuring, which is a key aspect of globalization, has resulted in the increasing concentration of power in transnational firms and the states that support them through various means. Unlike the early years of independence, however, when the poor countries of the world adopted a joint and coordinated strategy of fighting for change, in the current conjuncture the position seems to be one of defensiveness. The age of Bandung is over, and with it the movement for change that once took the form of activist foreign policies founded on shared principles of justice, equality, and rights. Notes

The subject matter of this chapter has been discussed with a number of colleagues. I wish to acknowledge the input of Siba N. Grovogui, Sankaran Krishna, Hilbourne Watson, Mustapha Pasha, Stephen Gill, and Craig Murphy. Thanks also to Fred Halliday, who provided some very useful comments. 1. Timothy M. Shaw (2000) draws a distinction between the foreign policies of states, companies, and civil societies.

5 Foreign Policy in the Arab World: The Promise of a State-Centered Approach Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou

After a half-century of existence as a separate subfield of international relations, foreign policy analysis has proved to be strong on description but relatively weak on explanation. One reason for this has been the overemphasis by global north scholars on decisionmaking processes— in contrast to the political economic focus of many global south researchers. Ever since Richard Snyder et al. (1954) identified the perception, choice, and expectations of leaders as the main notions to be investigated, the process of foreign policy analysis has been dominated by decisionmaking and perceptual frameworks. The descriptive and reductionist approaches that initially dominated were replaced by perspectives overemphasizing the political psychology of leaders. This confined framework has obstructed the understanding of many major problems in international relations. Foreign policy is indeed about short-term decisionmaking, but that is not all. There is a broader, long-term concern. How a decision originates from a historically determined reality, and how it fits into societal, regional, and international patterns of politics, are eventually more significant than how it is made. Most important, the traditional focus on components, structures, and processes of decisionmaking has obscured the understanding of the role of the state in foreign policy making. This chapter argues, therefore, that a better explanatory approach to foreign policy, at least for Arab states, is a state-centered one that would bring to light neglected phenomena such as state-building processes and the state’s need to maintain its position and perpetuate its existence in the international arena. 65

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Foreign Policy Analysis of Arab States

Summarizing the trends in the study of Arab foreign policies, Bahgat Korany and A.E.H. Dessouki (1991) made note of the underdeveloped state of the study of Arab foreign policy and recognized three traditional approaches leading to syncretistic accounts: (1) the psychologistic approach; (2) the great powers approach; and (3) the reductionist approach. The first school, they argue, views foreign policy as a result of the impulses, desires, and idiosyncrasies of a single leader. Relying on a static, paradigmatic understanding of Arab leaders—for instance, Saddam Hussein as heir of Gamal Abdul Nasser—this school errs by overemphasizing individual choice as the primary determinant of foreign policy.1 Moreover, it ignores the context (domestic, regional, and global) within which the foreign policy making process occurs. This school has long dominated and has often been relayed by journalistic accounts and, later, political psychology formulations. The particularist dialectic of this approach, which I critique in greater detail below, is an impediment to analysis of systemic aggregations. Derivative of realist political thinking, the great power approach was dominant during the Cold War and viewed the foreign policy of third world nations as a function of the bipolarity of the international system. The foreign dynamics of these countries, it was argued, could not be but reactive to external political and economic stimuli. The main criticism leveled against this school was that it neglected domestic factors. Other shortcomings were its focus on the East-West conflict rather than on relevant geostrategic interactions, as well as its neglect of internal variables. Moreover, the end of the Cold War and other changes in the international system during the 1990s render the explanatory power of this approach limited, if not obsolete. One well-known proponent of the great power approach was Nadav Safran (1985), who argued that the determinative role of the external powers is both crucial and constant in the foreign policy of the Middle East states.2 Specifically, he noted: The involvement of rival outside powers has been at the heart of the Middle East problem for some two centuries. During the period, the specific geographic focus of the problem often shifted, the particular configurations of domestic and regional weakness changed, the identity of the rival outside powers and the nature of their interests altered, but the matrix that made up the problem remained constant. It always involved the extension into the Middle East arena of big-power struggles involving external interests and wider power configurations. (Safran 1985: 359)

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Safran placed the outside powers “matrix” at the heart of the understanding of Middle East foreign policy. Thus the great power dimension, and the U.S.-Soviet rivalry in particular, provided the narrative of the history’s region. Domestic developments were secondary. The effects of the great power dimension, Safran maintained, were reflected in all facets of foreign policy: internal politics, regional politics, and conflict situations. Michael Hudson (1976) also adopted that approach, focusing on the occurrence of conflicts and the role of external powers, although he recognized that the interrelationship of regional and foreign powers had become more complex over the years. Noting that the relationship was one of “mutual exploitation,” he argued that it is conflicts (Arab versus Israeli, Arab versus Persian, and Arab versus Arab) that form the matrix of the system, providing springboards for influence. Domestic stimuli of foreign policy, as well as the role of the state, were as absent from his discussion as they were from Safran’s. The reductionist, or model-building, approach explains the foreign policies of nations through the use of the same factors as those that affect developed nations. The variations in terms of resources and capabilities provide the framework for comparison. Postulating unchanging rational actor behaviors and similar foreign policy rationales, this approach fails in particular to account for institutional specificities and differing behavioral motivations. James Rosenau’s (1969) linkage politics, an older foreign policy approach, is an example of this reductionism, which proved problematic when applied to the Arab world. An offshoot of his concept of a “penetrated” political system, linkage politics was defined as the recurrent sequences of behavior that originate on one side of the boundary between the two types of systems and that become linked to phenomena on the other side in the process of unfolding, [or] any recurrent sequence of behavior that originates in one system and is reacted to in another. (Rosenau 1969: 45)

The concept proved difficult to apply to Arab political systems. Indeed, as Eberhard Kienle (1990: 26–27) points out, the subtype of linkage processes actually depends on a dichotomy between internal and external politics, for no linkage would exist if the two systems were to coincide. But in Arab foreign policies the frontier between the domestic and the external (other Arab states) is razor-thin, pointing to an overarching Arab polity encompassing in various ways the several Arab states. In short, inasmuch as Arab states’ foreign policy making processes are largely affected by the notion of the Arab region as a segmentary society, Rosenau’s linkage politics concept—as an example of

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a model-building approach—loses much of its explanatory power. To determine the degree of overlap between internal and external Arab affairs, one need only look today and in the past at Syrian-Lebanese, Egyptian-Libyan, Saudi-Yemenese, Moroccan-Mauritanian, or JordanianPalestinian relations—all characterized by a high level of policy interdependence and multilayered interrelatedness. Thus the three traditional approaches identified by Korany and Dessouki lack explanatory power. Focusing on an often arbitrary set of idiosyncrasies, they have tended to account for isolated features. This has resulted in the development of a body of theory too scanty to be useful for the foreign policy analyst. The need is for more substantive and systematic frameworks. Korany and Dessouki offer their own framework in which the foreign policy output is conceptualized in terms of “role.” The role category is broken down into role conception (the actor’s objectives and strategies) and role performance (the actual behavior). This duality is meant to enable the analyst to identify the conformity, or lack thereof, between conception and performance. Against this background, four categories are offered to understand the foreign policy domestic environment: (1) geography, population and social structure, economic and military capabilities, and political structure; (2) foreign policy orientation; (3) the decisionmaking process; and (4) foreign policy behavior. Shaped by domestic conditions, a foreign policy output is the sequential result of an orientation, a decision, and an action. Korany and Dessouki’s recourse to role theory is useful in that it highlights the fact that foreign policy analysis starts from the actor’s perspective. As a reaction to great power approaches, where the level of analysis lies beyond the subordinate nation, it is particularly appropriate. The framework is undoubtedly a seminal contribution to the study of foreign policies and a welcome departure from the three classical schools. Yet it is faced with at least two problems. First, little information is conveyed about the actors who conduct foreign policy: although Korany and Dessouki correctly note that the process of foreign policy making takes place in a specific social and institutional context, the interaction between the presidency (as head unit of a regime) and the state (the permanent all-encompassing institutional unit), and the effects of this interaction on foreign policy, are not emphasized at all. Second, although the four categories of information are sound, their interconnections, if any, are not articulated and are not grounded in a historical perspective. Notwithstanding these comments, the work of Korany and Dessouki inspired studies of Arab foreign policies that were more analytically focused and used concepts as varied as ideology, the operational code

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(drawing on Leites 1951; George 1969), revolution, legitimacy, and nationalism. This wave of new studies shared a common emphasis on the interplay between domestic sources of foreign policy making and the international environment. In effect, internal constraints and external influences were understood to be the determinative patterns of foreign policies. One such study is Kienle’s (1990). He looks at several determinants of Syro-Iraq relations that have impacted their foreign policies in the period 1968–1989. After analyzing the changing dynamics and successive phases of the Ba’thi-Ba’thi relationship—from party quarrels to state consolidation and conflict and competition for regional influence, with a period of rapprochement in 1978–1979—Kienle concludes that “inter-Arab relations are characterized by a blurred distinction between internal and external affairs” (1990: 170). More explicit in their use of domestic dimensions are Tareq Ismael and Jacqueline Ismael (1986), who examine the patterns of variation in domestic environments as a way to account for the variation in Arab foreign policies. Their conclusion is that domestic socioeconomic issues (such as the challenge of national development) and ideological concerns (primarily religious ones as well as the attitude toward the West) have a major impact on the foreign policy process of Arab states. However, most of these research agendas still reserve a disproportionate role for external-internal linkages. “Domestic circumstance and international posture” (Ismael and Ismael 1986: 17) and “the primacy of constraints” (Korany and Dessouki 1991: 25–48) are the overriding and all-encompassing categories. Their interplay supersedes analysis of the state’s multilayered and continuous attempts at maintaining legitimacy and authority through foreign policy behavior. Despite the renewed interest in the effect of domestic politics on foreign policy making, the state as a focal point remains largely absent from the reflection. The Arab state is, notwithstanding, the domestic actor that enacts the regional and international designs formulated through the dynamics of internal politics. The state’s control over the nation’s economic resources also provides it with an opportunity to pursue through foreign policy its own structural state-building agenda with regard, in particular, to notions of sovereignty. Both these dimensions point to the need to go beyond the interplay of domestic and international environments first identified by Korany and Dessouki and followed by other writers. The state itself deserves more analytical attention as both a catalyst and initiator of foreign policy. Furthermore, the identification of the issues (as Ismael and Ismael have done) is only a first step. If we need to understand the formulation and implementation of policies, then we have to ask what is it in the nature of these issues that

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makes them persist. How do the processes of statehood promote such continuity? (I note that in a brief discussion in her general study about Iraq, Christine Helms [1984] isolates statehood, along with strategic vulnerability and authority, as prime considerations in the formulation of the country’s foreign policy. Regrettably, she does not discuss this factor at any length.) Finally, how are these problems played out in the foreign policy behavior of each regime? The Fallacy of the Political Psychology Approach

Before going further, I wish to return to a discussion of one of the most common approaches to Arab foreign policy, described by Korany and Dessouki as the “psychologistic” approach (see Post 1993; George 1992; Renshon 1993; Karsh and Rautsi 1991). Political psychology is essentially concerned with notions of personality and “good” decisionmaking, that is, the analysis and assessment of the quality of decisions taken by the actors in foreign policy. Both foci share a primary concern about individuals rather than governments or regimes. Because studies based on these foci tend to be chronicles—which are certainly informative from a purely historical point of view—the insights we get from this perspective have tended to be more descriptive than analytical. Essentially, the study becomes a narrative, an observation of sequential events. This approach, however, lacks explanatory power. Focusing on an often arbitrary set of idiosyncrasies, it has tended to account for isolated features of states. Jerrold Post (1993), for instance, examined Iraqi foreign policy during the 1990–1991 Gulf War by looking exclusively at the psychological makeup of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Post’s view was that the perceptions, calculations, actions, and style of Saddam Hussein were the main influences on the decision to invade Kuwait and what followed. But this analysis errs first and foremost because it uses inaccurate evidence. In his narrative, Post gives an account of Hussein’s childhood, which he later offers as determinative in his political career but can cite no authoritative sources. He makes detailed references to founding episodes in Hussein’s relationship with his family, without distinguishing governmental propaganda and mythmaking from serious biographical literature.3 As Post would have it, “Saddam has been consumed by dreams of glory since his earliest days” (1993: 268). That may very well be, but neither the nexus between Hussein’s childhood and contemporary Iraqi policymaking nor the relevance of this link is firmly established. Similarly, Post blames, as do even more explicitly Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi, the failure of the October 7,

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1959, Ba’thi assassination attempt against President Abdelkarim Qassem on “a crucial error in judgment by Saddam” (Karsh and Rautsi 1991: 281). But accounts of this incident show that if indeed Hussein participated in the preparation of the coup and was reportedly wounded, his role was at best peripheral.4 The mid-1960s split inside the Ba’th party, which initially originated as a result of a dispute in the Syro-Iraqi National Command, is attributed to Hussein, and the 1968 Ba’thi revolution is reduced to a coup mounted by him. In sum, the policies of Iraq acquire meaning, according to Post, only from the impulses of Saddam Hussein. This lays the groundwork for Post’s analysis of the Gulf War, which, he notes, was personalized by the president of Iraq. In sum, Post’s analysis overstresses Saddam Hussein’s role and its logic of inquiry is essentially anecdotal. Stanley Renshon is also interested in using the Gulf War as a test of good judgment insofar as this political crisis “provides us . . . with a set of sharply etched circumstances . . . within a sharply bracketed time frame” (Renshon 1992: 67). In adopting such a perspective, Renshon narrows his understanding of the Gulf War to the whims of one individual during a seven-month period. In addition, as with Post, most of the literature that constitutes his factual reference material is misleading, as is some of the public information on which he relies. Ghazi Algosaibi (1993) and Bishara Bahbah (1991) also present Saddam Hussein’s psychological makeup as a prime factor in their analyses of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Algosaibi sees the war as the result of Hussein’s “adventurism” and his “gambler” cavalier attitude and extends this vision to all Arabs, arguing that they tend to rationalize international crises in terms of foreign conspiracies. Bahbah, for his part, emphasizes what he sees as Hussein’s miscalculations and misperceptions. By focusing almost exclusively on the psychological makeup of President Saddam Hussein, the analyses of Algosaibi, Bahbah, Karsh and Rautsi, Post, and Renshon obscure the determinative role that the historical context plays in informing both the social and political categories in which the decisionmaker is immersed. As Snyder and colleagues themselves noted in their classic work: What is required is a sociological conception of personality . . . [a] scheme that places the individual decision-maker (actor) in a special kind of social organization. Therefore, we must think of a social person whose “personality” is shaped by his interactions with other actors and by his place in the system. This does not mean that we reject the influence of ego-related needs and tensions but only that the behavior of the decisionmaking actor be explained first in terms of personality factors relevant to his membership and participation in a decision-making system. In this

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way, we can isolate what area of behavior must be accounted for in terms of idiosyncratic factors, that is, self-oriented needs not prompted by the system. (Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin 1962: 161)

The difficulties in assessing the determinative role of personality or context arise, as Snyder and his colleagues further argued, because “we are still confronted by the empirical puzzle of the extent to which an individual policy-maker (such as a particular foreign minister or head of state) influences policy outcomes and the extent to which impersonal forces (such as historical movement, ideologies, and governmental systems) also determine actions” (Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin 1962: 7). The psychological analyses represented by Post, Renshon, Algosaibi, Bahbah, and Karsh fail to balance the macro and micro dimensions of foreign policy making in such a way as to place the idiosyncrasies of individuals within a historically defined space (the state they lead) and an equally ongoing issue (the foreign policy matter at hand). Foreign policy making is, here, the province of psychological conditions; medical diagnosis is the technique of analysis. Although the political psychology approach does provide a more precise and systematized conception of how to look at foreign policy problems, it in effect requires an amount of information that is excessive and empirically almost impossible to obtain. More important, it reduces the process of foreign policy making to a set of tasks enacted by a decisionmaking unit. In so doing, it obstructs the identification of both the historical role of the state as a builder through foreign policies and the introduction of this continuing state-building process into the decisional background of any given regime or administration. The Elements of a State-Centered Approach

An alternative way to study comparative foreign policy is to focus on the state itself. The postulate in research agendas based on the role of the state is that there is a need to look beyond the idiosyncrasies of a decision process, because to limit the analysis to the understanding of how a decision is made confines foreign policy making to ad hoc hypothesizing. Bringing the state back into the analysis of foreign policy can yield improvements in the quality of findings in the field. As noted by Rosenau: For several decades [students of foreign policy] have not been inclined to treat the state as a substantive concept, preferring instead to equate

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it with the actions of governmental decision-makers and thus to bypass the questions of its role, competence, and autonomy. For better or for worse, such an inclination is no longer tenable. (Rosenau 1987: 3)

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Despite the ever-increasing influence of nonstate actors in the twentyfirst century, the comment is still à propos in terms of the continuing need to analyze the role of the state in foreign policy. The approach that I espouse is a state-building one, with the term state-building viewed in two senses: (1) as a continuous process (the state as becoming); and (2) as maintenance of the state’s position in the international system, that is, state survival. Both notions are inscribed in a competitive continuum. As such, they are indistinguishable from a historical understanding of a country’s position with regard to its regional and global environment. Using the state as the unit of analysis and working within the parameters of these theoretical assumptions, an analysis of foreign policy can be constructed on the explanatory logic that states seek to survive within a competitive and anarchical environment and that states’ essential and immediate concern is to gather economic and political resources. The approach builds on earlier state-centric models that emphasized the interrelationship between the domestic and external environments with the state as core actor.5 For example, Howard Lentner (1974) posited that foreign policy is policy directed toward or responding to the environment of a territorial state and its government. For him, the state’s external environment is understood through the role of both the international system (i.e., a pattern of interaction among states within a structure) and what he terms “situations” (i.e., limited patterns of interaction). In addition, foreign policy is seen as the result of the active interaction between domestic and international influences. Therefore, for Lentner, foreign policy is an exercise conducted by states embedded in situations within the international system. Maria Papadakis and Harvey Starr (1987) add texture to Lentner’s analysis, arguing that to comprehend the nature of foreign policy it is necessary to understand the relationship between the state and its environment. Foreign policy is posited as resulting from the state’s action with regard to all aspects of its environment and its capacity to make use of particular opportunities. The state (i.e., institutions and structures) is the central actor whose choices (based on its willingness) affect both the output (i.e., the decision) and the outcome of foreign policy behavior. The effects of this process reverberate at different levels of the domestic and international environments, providing, in turn, opportunities and constraints for the state to act and react. The centrality of the

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relationship between the state and the environment stems from the fact that the latter, in both its tangible and relational aspects, establishes the range of possibilities for the former’s action. Nonetheless, both Lentner and Papadakis and Starr formulate a rather static vision of the relationship between the state and its environment matrix, failing in particular to accommodate the historical environment.6 For if the state, on the one hand, and the environment on the other are permanent structures, given their ongoing set of relationships, foreign policy then becomes a repetitive exercise. The foreign policy behavior of a given regime or administration can better be comprehended as part of a global pattern of the state’s historical foreign policy. More precisely, in the case of Arab state foreign policy, the use of specific opportunities (Starr and Papadakis) or situations (Lentner) such as the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait can be seen as answering to the logic of both the state’s foreign policy telos and the Ba’thi regime’s own disposition. In addition to the historical environment of the state, a state-building approach to foreign policy analysis should investigate the dividing line between the state and the regime or administration, identifying the concerns of each, as well as the regime leaders’ understanding and use of their state’s history.7 Looking at the linkages between domestic politics and the decisions to go to war, J. D. Hagan (1994) demonstrates that the interests and the beliefs that a regime holds and shares with its support network (interest groups, party, military) are an important motivational basis for the general orientation of a state’s foreign policy. Pointing to connections between international environment, state, regime, and domestic structure, he notes: It is assumed that who governs matters because it is normally a small elite who makes choices related to going to war. Nonetheless, the ability of these leaders to carry out their preferred policies is conditioned by ongoing domestic constraints. These domestic political pressures are of sufficient magnitude that they can significantly modify the constraints of an anarchic international system. With these assumptions as a backdrop, it is possible to identify two basic approaches to linking domestic political systems to war proneness—a “regime structure” approach, and a “statist” approach. (Hagan 1994: 84)

I contend that both of these approaches need to be integrated into an understanding of foreign policy as a whole. A state-centric approach to foreign policy analysis makes it possible to discern the role of the effect on foreign policy of both regime structure and norms, on the one hand, and state structure and organization on the other. In sum, a state-building approach focuses on both state and regime considerations and the state’s historical position in the global and

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regional environment. For example, the contemporary Arab state has generally displayed five major characteristics: (1) an inherently modern nature due to recent decolonizations; (2) territorial problems; (3) the existence of a difficult and complex state-society relationship; (4) the presence of one-man leadership systems; and (5) salience of legitimacy issues. In an analysis of the foreign policy making process of the Iraqi leadership during the 1990–1991 Gulf War, these factors were found to be particularly pertinent to Iraq (Mohamedou 1998). Iraqi regimes have devoted much effort over the years to consolidating their power in the face of chronic political restiveness. In the reconstruction period following the Iran-Iraq War, the Ba’thi regime needed an issue that would give it occasion to act in the name of the Iraqi state, thereby using statehood attributes to regenerate itself. The initial decisions taken were an attempt to reposition Iraq (cashing in on postwar Arab support) in the regional and international environments while at the same time reaffirming the Ba’thi regime’s control over society. The annexation of Kuwait after Kuwait’s refusal to yield to Iraq’s financial demands was an opportunity for the Ba’thists to renew their lease on their own state, that is, to consolidate the state’s position and ensure the regime’s security. Although space does not permit a full analysis here, during the Gulf War key decisions taken were almost always determined by the dimensions of the state-building/regime security rationale, with regime security overtaking state development as events turned more and more against Iraq. In fact, because of these self-imposed limitations, the Iraqi leadership enjoyed only a narrow decisional space. As the crisis dramatically turned into an international event with the United States and its allies resolved to defeat Iraq, the Iraqi authorities improvised a strategy of maximization of the regime’s interests by closely associating them with the country’s fate. The analysis of Iraq’s foreign policy behavior during the Gulf War also reveals the importance of embedding our analysis in history: the many factors that entered into the situation originated from a historically determined reality, and the Ba’thi regime systematically rationalized its behavior by referring to Iraq’s historical rights over Kuwait. The coupling of security considerations with long-term statehood considerations was the ultimate expression of the invasion’s legitimacy in Iraqi eyes.8 Conclusion

“It is inadvisable to personify states and to attribute decisions directly to them,” wrote Joseph Frankel (1959: 2), stressing that “personification implies continuous and constant units.” Yet continuity and constancy

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are indeed appropriate characteristics of the state. My view holds that the abstractness of the state, not the psychological makeup of its leaders, is the locus of foreign policy. The process of policymaking is an aggregate and continuous one, and it is inherently linked to the aspirations and position of the state within a global system. Beyond Weberian and juridical approaches to the state, a normative Hegelian understanding of the state’s need to achieve (as a collectivity) becomes a tool to grasp the nature of a country’s foreign policy. The rationale behind the approach is that there should be a symbiotic relationship between foreign policy analysis and international relations. This, I submit, can be achieved through the adoption of a state-oriented approach to foreign policy. The presumption that foreign policy is made by government officials, and that it is in terms of the interests of these officials that the analysis of interests must be constructed, is today complemented by concern about the role of the state and its institutional structures, as well as the way these features are causal to foreign policy behavior. A statecentric approach to foreign policy analysis makes it possible to discern the interplay of state structures, regime structure and norms, historical and global roles, and state action. Given the particular characteristics of the Arab state outlined in the last section, I believe that, among global south states, this model is most appropriate for the analysis of the foreign policies of Arab states. Empirical analysis may show that it is applicable as well to some other regions of the global south. Notes

1. This particular thesis was, for example, offered by Peter Mansfield (1982: 62–73). For a counterthesis that proposes Nasser as a universal paradigm, see Saad Eddin Ibrahim (1981: 30–61). 2. Safran’s essay is supposedly devoted to the foreign policies of Middle East countries. Yet its very title (“Dimensions of the Middle East Problem”) announces that it is providing a modern formulation of the so-called Eastern question. 3. References to unproven episodes include the following: “[Saddam Hussein] left his home in the middle of the night” (1991: 280), or “Saddam’s mother . . . may have attempted suicide” (1993: 50). 4. Saddam Hussein’s name is not once mentioned in the extensive account that Uriel Dann gives of the incident. Dann writes: “An executive committee [to carry out the assassination plan] was formed composed of Fuad al-Rikabi, Abdallah al-Rikabi; Ayad Sa’id Thabit, and Khalid al-Dulaymi, all members of the Ba’th regional command. The operational responsibility was in the hands of Thabit” (1969: 253). In an equally detailed account, Majid Khadduri (1969: 126–132) makes vague mention of one “Sudam Tikriti” who was present.

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5. I am not referring here to political economic models that by nature are state-centric. For example, Bruce Moon (1987) offers a theoretical treatment of the role of the state in his presentation of a political economy approach to foreign policy analysis. In sketching such a perspective, Moon offers three guiding principles: (1) Policies arise from states lodged within a political economy that shapes their behavior; (2) the environment shaping the character and behavior of states is to be grasped globally and with regard to economic as well as political phenomena; and (3) the crux of most countries’ foreign policies lies in the sphere of economic relations and domestically determined distribution patterns. Political economy conceptions of the state and its primary objectives highlight economic policy as the centerpiece from which the remaining elements of foreign policy flow. It is nonetheless possible to ask where the logic ultimately leads. For if, as Moon emphasizes, the backbone of the approach is the growing interdependence of public policy, comparative politics, and international relations theory (each endowed with its own research questions), by focusing heavily on the economic bases, structures, and processes of national power reflected only secondarily in foreign affairs, we risk losing sight of the initial query of foreign policy analysis, more simply formulated by Lloyd Jensen (1981) as “why do states behave the way they do?” In the end, Moon’s laudable effort boosts political economy analysis, not foreign policy analysis. 6. Papadakis and Starr list six levels of environment (international system, international relations, societal, governmental, role, and individual) that combine to create opportunity or constraints for the state. Adding a historical dimension could have been an improvement. Papadakis and Starr’s levels are homogenous, for they are spatial categories, whereas the proposed historical dimension is temporal. Yet if foreign policy is, as has often been argued, a spatio-temporal activity, then a combination of the seven levels is possible. In addition, if, as Papadakis and Starr maintain, some characteristics of the environment will be consistently more important than others, the history of the state can in certain instances gain greater explanatory force with regard to foreign policy behavior. Lentner, for his part, recognizes that by using a concept of the state in foreign policy analysis and emphasizing longer-term considerations, historical developments are brought into theoretical context (1994: 9). 7. As particular and temporally limited incarnations of a state, regimes and administrations are synonymous. The main difference is that the term regime tends to be applied to undemocratic governments and also to developing countries where regimes can last for only months, sometimes days, whereas administration tends to be reserved for democracies where the alternation of power is usually more peaceful and institutionally stable. 8. For further details, see Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou (1998).

6 African Foreign Policy: Integrating Political Economy and Decisionmaking Perspectives Paul G. Adogamhe

Increasingly, empirical research demonstrates that foreign policy processes of developing countries are as complex as those of developed countries even though they differ in content and processes (Hey 1995: 202). The changing circumstances of the post–Cold War era offer a unique opportunity to review and reconceptualize theoretical research on African foreign policies. The changed environment is stimulating new sets of research questions and puzzles in foreign policy analysis that can adequately be addressed only through a broad conceptual framework. In other words, explanations of African foreign policies require a multilevel and multivariable explanatory framework, a conceptual framework that recognizes the limitations of single-cause explanations of foreign policy behaviors and processes of African states. According to Michael Brecher: “It is only through an integrated framework of a foreign policy system that . . . [it is] possible to amass sufficient knowledge about state behavior in the past to permit tentative predictions of probable response to similar challenges in the future” (Brecher 1972: 15). Study of foreign policy is increasingly important if we are to address the challenges and issues posed by globalization and democratization. In particular, the institutional managers of the global economy represented by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank have created structures that are bringing about significant changes in the options open to developing countries at both the national and regional levels. Within the global south, the economic progress of African countries has been particularly lagging. The question is: How can African countries enhance their 79

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participation in the global economy or negotiate meaningful trade agreements when “the prevailing global ideology constrains the ability of national governments to protect ordinary citizens, especially those who bear the cost of shifts in the configuration of the international production network” (Evans 1997: 62–63)? In sharp contrast to other regions, Africa remains the poorest continent in the world, still plagued by political, economic, and social turmoil. In 2001 the continent had some 6 million refugees, a debt burden of U.S.$350 billion, and about 25 million people infected with HIV/AIDS, 70 percent of the world’s total (Xiaoyan 2001: 3). Few African analysts are attempting to explain foreign policy phenomena by applying theoretical models or engaging in empirical analysis. If Africa is going to able to respond strategically to a number of threats posed by globalization, not to mention threats to both the shortand long-term strategic and security interests of African societies, it requires not only the conceptual understanding of the issues but also their foreign policy implications. This chapter, therefore, will review the directions of foreign policy analysis in Africa and suggest ways in which we can advance our analysis of African foreign policies by attempting to integrate two different theoretical perspectives in future research. Specifically, one way of moving the dialogue forward is to reconceptualize African foreign policy by bridging the gap between the political economy and the decisionmaking perspectives within a comparative framework. In this way, we can improve the understanding of African societies and states and their foreign policy behavior. This will not only enhance our knowledge of the foreign policy process in Africa but also provide new insights into the foreign policy analysis of all developing countries. Theoretical Research on African Foreign Policy

African analysts have used varied perspectives to analyze foreign policy phenomena, reflecting the intellectual and theoretical changes within the subfield of foreign policy analysis as a whole. In most cases, the theoretical models designed to explain foreign policy behavior in the developed world have been modified to help explain African foreign policy processes. As a result of their educational and intellectual backgrounds, most African scholars have tended to borrow from Western social science theories and concepts to help formulate theoretical paradigms and models that are adaptable to the African context, even though these concepts and theories are recognized as culture-bound and rooted

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in Western social values. These modified models and approaches sometimes pose serious methodological problems, partly because they were developed to explain international relations in the industrialized world, and partly because the data needed to make them applicable to the African environment are simply not available. Before introducing my own model, therefore, it is worthwhile to review the main theoretical work on the subregion to date, highlighting the problems and issues involved in the use of these approaches and suggesting some new directions that can be taken in future research. The dominant theoretical traditions in African foreign policy research are traditions of political realism and political economy. The vast majority of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa became independent from colonial rule in the 1960s and thereby became actors in their own right in international affairs. Many of the scholars who have been involved in the analysis of postcolonial African foreign policy have been intrigued by the nature of this power shift, in particular the interplay of domestic forces and the external environment that informs state foreign policy in general. This is not surprising considering the fact that most of the scholars were educated in Western Europe and the United States and the realist approach was the dominant paradigm for analyzing foreign policy in the post–World War II era. This realist approach emphasized power politics in the study of foreign policy and in the pursuit of state goals in the international arena. The idea that foreign policy is pursued in order to achieve the national interest defined as power is the distinguishing characteristic of this approach. Following this tradition, Olatunde Ojo describes African international politics as power politics marked by competition for leadership within African regions and on the continent as a whole (Ojo 1985: 38). Indeed, many scholars (e.g., Thompson 1967; Akinyemi 1978 and 1982; Akinsanya 1976; and Gambari 1989) argue that realpolitik, and not ideological division, is the key to understanding Africa’s foreign policies in the 1960s and, according to Ojo, in the 1980s as well (Ojo 1985: 35). Ojo argues that the economic (and therefore military) weakness of nearly all the African states helped to entrench external states, especially the former colonial powers, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, in the role of essential actors in Africa. But the power approach focuses on the concept of national interest, which is so ambiguous as to make it methodologically difficult to accurately translate into an operational variable in cross-national research (Moon 1983). Furthermore, the weakness of this approach to foreign policy analysis is that it is usually operationalized through case studies that emphasize complexity and possess little comparability. Conceptually,

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this is significant because the bulk of the literature on African foreign policy has remained largely atheoretical, ideological, and policyoriented. The other problem with this line of approach is that it largely ignores the historical origins and structural composition of postcolonial states in Africa and their relations with civil society, which have implications for foreign policy behavior. As a result of the developmental crisis of the 1980s, there was a perceptible intellectual shift in foreign policy analysis in Africa. A new political economy approach gained popularity. Adherents argued that the shifts and reverses in African foreign policy could best be understood by studying the constraints as well as opportunities resulting from the positions occupied by particular African states in the evolving world capitalist system (Daddieh and Shaw 1986). Concepts of dependency, neocolonialism, and imperialism were emphasized and applied to African foreign policy. The works of I. William Zartman (1983), Timothy Shaw and Olajide Aluko (1984), Julius Ihonvbere and Timothy Shaw (1998), and Stephen Wright (1999) are representative of this form of analysis. The literature of this school is significant in its emphasis on economic influences coming from outside Africa and the penetration of African societies—influences that seriously limit the choices available to the policymakers in these states. This political economy approach enables the identification of structural constraints under which state policies are formulated and implemented. Timothy Shaw (1986) emphasizes the pressure that fragile and dependent states in Africa face in decisionmaking. He argues that we must examine the peculiar socioeconomic and political configuration of African society, which provides the context, the limitations, and the opportunities within which decisionmakers operate to produce policy decisions. Therefore, analysts of foreign policy must stress the complex political economy of peripheral social formations and the manner in which they impact the dominant elites’ public policy at the national and international levels. In recommending this approach to the study of foreign policy, Shaw states: Particularly for dependent and vulnerable states there is a new recognition that economic relations are central and that indigenous social forces are integral to both external interest and foreign policy: . . . In short, foreign policy and development policy have been redefined to take into account social forces in peripheral formations, a veritable African intellectual revolution. (Shaw 1986: 493)

It makes sense, therefore, for foreign policy analysts to take into consideration the structure of the political economy, especially socioeconomic inequality and the ownership of the means of production in

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the country, for these phenomena also impinge on the rational decisionmaking process. According to Claude Ake, “Our problems are rooted in our history and in the concrete economic and social structures which it has evolved [sic]” (Ake 1976: 49). Any attempt to grasp the dynamics of state behavior must examine the interaction between the socioeconomic and institutional variables that impact the decisionmaking process. But, as Larson notes, There are social processes which are involved in the making of a given political decision, complemented by intellectual and cultural processes which give to each society a distinctive mode of decisionmaking. Each decision maker is a product of the national culture; cultural values shape political decisions in many subtle ways. (Larson 1980: 30; emphasis added)

Thus not only socioeconomic variables but also cultural variables should be taken into consideration in analyzing policymaking. Irving Markovitz makes this point in arguing for a suitable methodology for analyzing African politics: In the African context, factors of cultural values and communal concern, as well as those of race and ideology, must certainly modify class models. The normal and historical logic of the social sciences is that of an either/or situation, to think in terms of class and community as mutually exclusive categories. Yet the political facts of the real world indicate the need for a different logic and a more subtle formulation. Sometimes a given population acts in unity on the basis of a perceived common identity; at other times “a people” split into clashing classes. When and why does this happen? Are appeals to ethnic or tribal loyalties simply another device of the dominant classes to strengthen their rule? What are their alternative explanations? (Markovitz 1987: 6)

Our analysis of African foreign policy must therefore deal with ethnic and cultural factors as well as the economic/class factors that impinge on decisionmaking. Moreover, important political aspects such as shifts in political culture, political leadership, and intra-African diplomacy must also be included. In other words, we must conceive of society as a totality, with political relationships treated in light of the interplay of multiple forces that constitute the dynamics of politics. Because even though most political economists tend to ascribe high priority to economic phenomena as dependent or independent variables, such economic determinism ignores too many other important explanatory factors. Furthermore, the post–Cold War period has created new realities in the continent of Africa, providing new opportunities in

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African foreign policy that have opened up new policy choices to African ruling elites. The decisionmaking approach pioneered by Richard Snyder and his colleagues (1962) is a useful complement to the political economy approach, offering new insights to analysts interested in dismantling the abstract concept of the state. The decisionmaking approach assumes that state decisionmakers are important to the understanding of the foreign policy process and that they play a critical role in shaping the manner and extent to which social forces exert influence on foreign policy behavior. As an international political actor, a state is made up of individuals, organized within an institutional framework, attempting to achieve certain objectives. These individuals are affected by the environment within which they operate (the operational environment); however, the motivations for their actions are derived from the way in which they perceive and evaluate that environment (the perceptual environment). The behavior of foreign policy officials such as presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers, defense ministers, members of national assemblies, ambassadors, and others now becomes a legitimate focus of analysis. This suggests that the state serves as an important independent or intervening variable between social and international forces, on the one hand, and foreign policy on the other. Although it is recognized that numerous domestic and international factors can and do influence foreign policy behavior, these influences must be channeled through the political apparatus of a government that identifies, decides, and implements foreign policy. This decisionmaking approach to foreign policy was adopted by some African scholars (notably, Akindele 1976; Olusanya and Akindele 1986; and King 1996). Others have modified the framework to suit the African situation (e.g., Aluko 1983; Ofuatey-Kodjoe 1980). The limitation of using this approach by itself is that too much weight is given to institutional forces with the result that “the impact of socio-economic structure and social class is de-emphasized, if not completely ignored” (Olusanya and Akindele 1986: 43). In the absence of such inputs, institutions are sterile and meaningless. The other problem with this approach has been that it has normally been applied in an ahistorical manner, limiting itself, in its most extreme form, to the study of the decisions of a few public officials while continuing to separate this from the wider process of conflicts and bargaining among different groups in the society at large (Jackson and Rosberg 1982). The analysis of African leaders must deal with their actions as a part of the underdevelopment of the global south, which has serious consequences for their foreign policy behavior. It should transcend the mere making of choices by

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public officials. It must integrate socioeconomic and cultural factors (both internal and external) that tend to influence African decisionmakers. Such analysis is, in fact, compatible within the comparative framework, if these governmental decisionmakers are viewed, as they certainly should be, as variously representing, responding to, and in some degree guiding and being guided by socioeconomic and cultural forces. Toward a Synthesis of Two Approaches to African Foreign Policy

One of the areas of debate among analysts in the subfield of foreign policy has been the question of how to describe the dependent variable. What is foreign policy? What is foreign policy behavior? Are they one and the same thing? Does a country’s foreign policy consist of conscious or isolatable key decisions (White 1978: 158)? In other words, can one understand all of a country’s foreign policy through the isolated analysis of one or two key decisions? Because the answers to these questions are not clear, there is intellectual and conceptual confusion among analysts as to what is to be explained and what appropriate methodology is to be used to explain the problem. Laura Neack warns that “those of us concerned with theoretical development in foreign policy must do more to stipulate the foreign policy problem, puzzle or behavior we seek to explain and how proposed variables contribute to it” (in Neack, Hey, and Haney 1995: 25). There is no consensus among African analysts as to whether the foreign policy process is more than one of a series of discrete and identifiable decisions or a continuous flow of policy (Shaw and Aluko 1984; Ojo 1985; Gambari 1989; OfuateyKodjoe 1980). In my judgment, foreign policy should be conceptualized as a strategy or strategies that inform the behavior of the state. It is the output of a decision process in which decisionmakers are subjected to a large variety of inputs from both international and domestic settings (captured by Rosenau’s [1966] five source categories). By contrast, foreign policy behavior consists of discrete actions of decisionmakers that are taken in response to an occasion for a decision created by the prior action of domestic or foreign entities (Meehan 1971: 267–274). The behavior of the state is an attempt to influence the international arena by the deployment of foreign policy instruments used for making threats, promises, and normative appeals. My conceptualization of decisionmaking does not stop with the making of one or a series of choices but

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includes as an integral part of the process the translation of the decision into action and/or inaction. The decisionmaking process refers to the broad span of activities ranging from initial recognition of a problem necessitating a decision to any resulting implementation. Therefore, the decisionmaking process can be categorized into the following stages: (1) information collection and interpretation; (2) option formation; (3) choice-making; and (4) implementation (East, Salmore, and Hermann 1978: 20). This broader conceptualization of the process shifts the focus from only the decision to the behavior itself. This is of critical importance, because it is the behavior and not the decision to which other states’ decisionmakers must respond. In light of the above, it is important to emphasize the distinction between foreign policy and foreign policy behavior not only in terms of what is to be explained but also in terms of the appropriate methodology of investigation. As already noted, I maintain that the analysis of African foreign policy requires the conceptual tool of the political economy approach, which enables the identification of structural constraints under which state policies are formulated and implemented, and the analysis of how these constraints are expressed by conflicting forces within the state to produce foreign policy. The political economy approach is oriented toward explaining the substantive policies that constitute the background conditions in contrast to the decisionmaking model that is oriented toward explaining policy decisions themselves. However, because the political economy approach cannot deal with crucial noneconomic variables, it is useful to integrate it with the decisionmaking approach. The conceptualization of African foreign policy must locate African leaders within the context of the socioeconomicsociocultural structure that constrains their choices. The foreign policy process as a whole is part and parcel of the wider social process reflecting both the characteristics of third world permeable societies and their subordinate position in the global system (Korany et al. 1986: 170). Certainly, foreign policy officials in virtually all contemporary national governments behave in the context of various organizational and institutional structures (Hermann and East 1978: 28). The strength of these and other influences depends on the relative autonomy of the government decisionmakers in their relationship to the foreign policy elites (Poulantzas 1973). Integrating decisionmaking with political economy will allow for a broad analysis of influences, not permitted by either approach by itself. The political economy approach, which tends to view the state as an arena for political conflict and a relatively passive political actor, needs to be enhanced by focusing on the role of state officials and institutions in the policy process.

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This suggests that the state serves as an important independent or intervening variable between social and international forces, on the one hand, and foreign policy on the other. The role of the policymakers’ perception of the environment is that it establishes the opportunities and constraints for actual choices and thus the human dynamics of the decisionmaking process itself (Brecher, Steinberg, and Stein 1969: 11–12). Decisionmakers act in accordance with their perception of reality, not in response to reality itself. This perceptual approach also helps us to find and understand the interest and cognitive patterns of social groups, which informs the broader social perspective, reflected in policymaking. We must ask: What is the perceptual disposition of the political group? In integrating the two perspectives, we also can note that the character of the state and the nature of the policy environment in which it functions produce distinctive foreign policy behaviors (Moon 1985). Therefore any attempt to synthesize these perspectives must also advance a more sophisticated analysis of the African state and its relations with various social forces, as well as the mechanisms by which these conflictual relations are turned into foreign policy. Theoretically, this is significant in that the socioeconomic and political arrangements within specific social formations ensure that the interests of the dominant classes prevail over those of other classes, and this partly explains the state’s foreign policy behavior. The political behavior of any class, group, or category is not an inherent function of the class itself but rather of its interaction with other classes, in the context of the overall political system (Roxborough 1979: 87). The state incorporates the values that prevail among the dominant social classes, and its officials are likely to be recruited from these groups. As Guillermo O’Donnell has correctly noted, The state should be understood from within the civil society, though in its objective institutional form it appears to be and proclaims itself to stand above society. . . . This tension between the underlying reality of the state as generator and organizer of social domination, on the one hand, and as an agent of a general interest which though partialized and limited, is not fictitious, on the other hand is characteristic of any state. This tension is the key to the theoretical analysis of the state. (O’Donnell 1979: 91–92)

This theoretical perspective is crucial to the understanding of the character of the state in Africa and has implications for African foreign policy behavior. Like domestic policy, foreign policy produces private differential benefits to various individuals and groups within the national society. It is for this reason that different groups within society advocate

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different foreign policies. The influence and bargaining power of these social groups could determine policy outcomes. Such emphasis on social groups and their networks at national and international levels complements decision theory by linking it to wider social processes. For example, the existence of economic groups connected to the international financial institutions, seeking to influence policy outcomes, is widely recognized. The purpose of engaging in foreign policy behavior is to meet the material and the ideological needs of the particular society. It is the decisionmakers who evaluate the material resources and skills and determine the mode of social organization that the society needs to be able to maintain itself or develop into the kind of society they want. The sources of the decisionmakers’ perceptions of the internal needs of the society lie in the foreign policy elite. These elites’ interests are discernible through their conception of their national identity, their political and social attitudes, and their international commitment. They are the most critical sources of the foreign policy behavior of the state. Given the fact that most African states’ elites share material and ideological interests with the elites in the Western countries, their foreign policy orientation has tended to reflect the pro-West position (Osoba 1977; Moon 1983 and 1985). Figure 6.1 offers an explanatory model that explicitly shows the relationship between the behavior to be explained (foreign policy behavior, the dependent variable), the decisionmaking process (as the intervening variable), and the perceived environment (independent variable). As expected, the model takes into consideration societal, cultural, and ecological factors as well as cognitive ones. An Application of the Model to African Foreign Policy Analysis

This framework raises a number of questions as it applies to the African situation, given the balkanization of the continent. We need to ask: Is this model applicable at all levels—national, regional, and continental? Under what conditions are African states likely to pursue national, regional, or continental foreign policies? What are the implications of this model in terms of the formulation and implementation of foreign policy at the various levels? Space does not permit a discussion of how the model can be applied at all levels. Instead, I choose to discuss briefly the implications at the continental level of analysis, which has been boosted in importance by the formation in 2000–2002 of the

Figure 6.1 A Model of the Perceived Environment of Foreign Policy

Societal Factors: Social structures and cultural norms and values

Systemic Factors: Motivations and capabilities of other international actors

Ecological Factors: Access to global human and material resources

Elite attitudes regarding (1) the definition of the national “self” and (2) the preferred political, economic, and social organization of society, based on their material and ideological interests

Elite cognitive and affective attitudes toward other international actors Elite attitudes regarding the need to convert resources into foreign policy instruments, based on the availability of convertible resources, institutional capability, and technological ability

Perceived Environment

National Objectives

OPPORTUNITIES AND CONSTRAINTS IN THE EXTERNAL SETTING

National Capabilities

NATIONAL INTEREST (decisionmaker perceptions of external needs)

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African Union (AU), envisaged as a successor to the Organization of African Unity (OAU). At present Africa is undergoing major socioeconomic and political transformation, which will have serious foreign policy implications for the continent, especially if the African Union is sustained. Given the past history of distrust and the initial disagreements among the African leaders, what accounts for the successful efforts of the Organization of African Unity to create the new African Union? Although many issues specific to individual countries still capture the attention of foreign policy analysts and policymakers, common economic policy, political and economic integration, and democratization are increasingly emerging as important behavioral trends across the entire continent of Africa. African states that participate in foreign policy enterprises at the regional and continental levels have done so because their interests are best served at these levels. Therefore our framework should be as useful for analyzing issues at these levels of analysis as at the traditional state level. The pan-African initiative to create a union of African states represents one of the most important strategic decisions taken by African leaders in the twenty-first century. It took almost two years of debate and controversy before the AU idea came to reality. The establishment of the African Union, first proposed by Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Qaddafi during the thirty-fifth OAU summit in Algiers in July 1999, was a historic event with far-reaching consequences for the future of the African continent. Although the Libyan proposal came as a surprise to African leaders, they soon accepted the idea in the Declaration of Sirte, and the draft Constitutive Act was later adopted at the thirtysixth OAU summit in Lomé, Togo, in July 2000. On April 26, 2001, Nigeria became the thirty-sixth country to deposit its instruments of ratification of the act in the OAU secretariat, which effectively gave the union the required majority to come in existence. The thirty-seventh OAU summit in Lusaka solemnly declared to the world that the one-year transformation of the thirty-eight-year-old OAU into the African Union was now a reality. Amara Essy, the former foreign minister of Ivory Coast, was elected interim secretary-general of the OAU, to preside over the transition to the African Union. The African Union was finally launched by African heads of state in Durban, South Africa, on July 9, 2002, touted as the new organization to meet the collective aspirations of the African peoples. Amara Essy was again appointed the interim chairman of the AU Commission, which will be responsible for carrying out the AU’s objectives. The OAU itself was founded on May 25, 1963, and designed to promote the unity and solidarity of the African states, eliminate the remaining

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vestiges of colonialism and apartheid, defend the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence of member states, and coordinate and intensify cooperative efforts to achieve a better life for the peoples of Africa. It is envisaged that the African Union, which is modeled on the European Union, will play a bigger role in world affairs than its predecessor. The new charter stipulates a number of organs for the AU, including an assembly of heads of state and government, an executive council, a panAfrican parliament, a commission, a central bank, a court of justice, and a single African currency. Many perceive the establishment of the AU to be a prelude to a full-fledged African federation, the United States of Africa (OAU 2000 [Constitutive Act]). Dynamics of Decisionmaking on the AU’s Creation and Implementation The draft of the AU Constitutive Act was prepared at the seventysecond ordinary session of the council of ministers and finally presented to OAU leaders in Lomé, Togo, for adoption at their thirty-sixth ordinary session in July 2000. However, there were disagreements among the African leaders at the thirty-sixth OAU summit in Lomé with respect to the pace and modalities of integration. Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa withheld their assent with respect to the resolution by heads of state and government, arguing that the time was not appropriate. Both were absent at the ceremonial endorsement of the document by its initiator, Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi, and the other twenty-six OAU heads of state who advocated immediate adoption, ratification, and implementation of the document. Along with Nigeria and South Africa, Uganda and Egypt pressed for greater caution and the need for time to digest the principles of the charter before ratification. Some African leaders were also believed to be wary of losing their powers, as it was unclear how much authority the AU would have over individual states. However, it was clear from the Lomé summit that the question was not whether the union should be established but rather what type of union and at what speed it should be established. Still, it was not until the fifth OAU extraordinary summit in Sirte, Libya, on March 1–2, 2001, that the OAU leaders finally approved the establishment of the African Union after the signing of the document by the last holdouts (Angola, Botswana, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Guinea Conakry, Kenya, Mauritius, Mauritania, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe). Perceptual Differences

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Some of the disagreements reflected the view of those who advocated the gradual establishment of the institutions before embarking on full-fledged African union. For example, the former OAU secretarygeneral, Edem Kodjo, suggested that the union should be created through rational and methodical projects, taking into account what had already been achieved by the OAU. Kodjo expressed the view that the Lomé Constitutive Act should have been more liberal and defined in terms of stages of implementation. According to him, the African states could at first surrender their sovereignty in key areas such as transportation, communication, telecommunications, health, and scientific research. This stage-by-stage approach seemed to him to be a more reasonable option than speeding things up and trying to encompass everything at once. “I am in favor of a gradually formed African Union. Those that are ready would make specific achievements while others will catch up as time goes by,” he said (Panafrican News Agency, Feb. 27, 2001). In accordance with these ideas, in a joint declaration three former OAU secretaries-general expressed their readiness to contribute toward the creation of the African Union, on the basis of their familiarity with the issues (Panafrican News Agency, Feb. 27, 2001). The idea for the African Union has historic precedence and also offers historic lessons. The idea of African union can be traced to the time of Presidents Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Seko Touré of Guinea, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, among other African leaders of the early 1960s. But then it was an idea whose time had not come because it partly helped to divide African leaders into two groups: the Casablanca progressives and the Monrovia conservatives. The Monrovia group, including Nigeria, argued in favor of functional cooperation, whereas the former group, led by Nkrumah, supported outright political unity in the form of a union government of Africa. The Monrovia leaders considered their political independence to be still very fragile and therefore would not surrender their sovereignty. Subsequently, the idea of continental unity was shelved, and the OAU was therefore a compromise between the two groups. The problems militating against the realization of the new union are very similar. A union that must last cannot be based on distrust. To a considerable extent, the initiator of this new African spirit, Colonel Qaddafi, is regarded as a pariah among world leaders and is generally not trusted by the other OAU leaders. Some African leaders reject his interference in the internal affairs of member states and his sponsorship of rogue states in sub-Saharan Africa, which have been responsible for civil conflicts and instability within the region. As was the case with the now deceased Nkrumah, some African leaders see Qaddafi’s diplomatic

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campaigns for a pan-African union as a reflection of his personal ambition to rule and dominate the continent. The project has in fact been carried forward primarily by his willingness to fund it: Libya has provided $1 million to help the process of transition (Derrick 2001). But Nigeria, with its Africa-centered “high profile leadership,” or dominant South Africa, or possibly historically important Egypt, would seem to be better candidates for leading an African renaissance than is Libya. Therefore, it was not surprising that Qaddafi’s advocacy of the union should meet with skepticism in Africa as well as in the Western world. Some African countries also remain nationalistic and xenophobic. One element of the union—free movement across national borders— will be a challenge given the presence of border conflicts in so many regions across the continent. Events such as the deportation of Nigerians from Libya in 2000 are not consistent with calls for African solidarity and unity. The incidence of xenophobic treatment of refugees in many African countries is rising. Conflict on these issues among AU leaders is almost inevitable. With many countries also seemingly indifferent to the urgent need to ratify the African Economic Community Treaty launched since 1991, and some not even having paid their arrears to the OAU, there is a question as to their seriousness of purpose with regard to African unity. Furthermore, Africa is marked by political, economic, social, and historical imbalances and diversity, all of which are formidable challenges to establishing an effective supranational union. The Sahara Desert divides Africa by race and culture; South Africa’s economic capacity is almost the total of forty other sub-Saharan countries combined, or one-third of the African continent; Nigeria has a population of about 120 million, hundreds of times more than some small countries; some countries are rich, many are poor; some enjoy peace, others are torn by civil conflicts. Some African analysts have therefore suggested that all African leaders ought to urgently strengthen their regional and subregional groupings first before moving to a continental framework. In short, any analysis of decisions with respect to the AU must take into account all these ecological and societal factors in terms of the leaders’ perception of these difficulties and willingness to overcome them. The demise of communism as a viable ideology in the former Soviet bloc and the aggressive efforts of the United States and Western European countries to promote and foster democratic and economic reforms in the rest of the world have created new realities in Africa. Since the Political-Societal Factors

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early 1990s, the African continent has experienced unprecedented political, economic, and social change. Many African countries have either joined or are in the process of joining the ranks of multiparty democracies. The enhanced prospects for democracy have significant implications for African foreign policy, especially for countries where multiparty elections have ensured a relatively peaceful transfer of power from one ruling elite to another, ushering in a new generation of African leaders who ought to be more responsive to the will of the people in the formulation and implementation of their foreign policies. The democratic process could also significantly alter the centralized foreign policy structure in several African countries by strengthening other domestic institutional agencies, most notably national legislatures capable of challenging the monopoly of the presidency in the foreign policy arena and therefore having an important voice within the realm of foreign affairs (Schraeder 1996: 133–134). All segments of African societies will have to be engaged to shape the new continental initiatives. The establishment of a pan-African parliament will help to institutionalize democracy in a continent that has been known for its dictatorial regimes. Article 30 of the new Charter of African Union, dealing with member suspension, also emphasizes this democratic principle by prohibiting participation of unconstitutional governments in AU activities (OAU 2000 [Constitutive Act]). This also means structurally transforming the politics of Africa to empower all segments of society, particularly workers, youths, women, and small businesses, to be active participants in policy formulation. The initial endorsement of the pan-African project by African youths and the Union of African Workers Organizations implies the active involvement of people at the grass-roots level, not just at the level of heads of state and government. As African foreign policy begins to reflect the interests of the people, especially the large segments of African societies that have been previously excluded from the process, African policymakers will, hopefully, be able to formulate and implement foreign policies that are strong enough to be able to secure African interests. The democratization process is critical for the development of a dynamic foreign policy framework that places the interests of African people ahead of donors, creditors, and foreign capital. Another important political-societal consideration centers on the reconceptualization of regional security. The power vacuum created after the Cold War accounts partly for the subsequent anarchy and escalation of ethnic-inspired conflicts all over the continent and offers African regional powers the opportunity to evolve regional security systems, especially within their subregions. The African regional security dilemma is not only gradually changing the patterns of state relations

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but also providing opportunities for redefining the concept of security, creating new frameworks and options, although inevitably constrained and conditioned by a variety of historical and structural patterns. The intervention of the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group in the conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone had tacit approval from the OAU. A key question is this: What should be the proper role of regional hegemonic powers such as Nigeria and South Africa in the new evolving African security system? Given the population sizes, economic and military strengths, and leadership roles of Nigeria and South Africa in their subregions, both countries occupy pivotal positions in the continent. But the challenge facing these and other African societies is to formulate security policies that support sustainable peace and are based on shared values of democratic freedoms, human rights, and justice. This requires a new concept of security that goes beyond defense of territorial integrity and the use of violent tactics that are not supported by the people. In this regard, the African Union as a supranational body could provide the architecture for a new approach to national and continental security. This approach would recognize that peace is not simply the absence of war but an end to political and economic conditions that sustain all forms of structural violence against African peoples. The importance of improvements in the education, health, and safety of the ordinary people would be emphasized. Since the beginning of the 1990s, African economies have recorded a low average growth rate of 2.2 percent per annum (World Bank 2001) and a crushing debt burden, which ballooned from $80 billion in 1982 to $350 billion in 2000 (Xiaoyan 2001: 1–3). This has occurred despite major efforts in some African countries to service their debt, as well as some cosmetic efforts to underwrite the debts of very poor African countries by the creditor nations under the Toronto agreement brokered by World Bank/IMF in 1988. The debt burden has a significant impact on the poor; according to the World Bank, the amount annually repaid by African governments equals more than twice their spending on health and primary education combined. The debt has had to be rescheduled, often through new loans from the IMF and Western industrial countries, which then have used their financial might to impose their form of market-oriented strategies on the African states by requiring a restructuring of their economies. The multilateral financial institutions are in fact now playing more active roles than ever before in the economic decisionmaking of African states. Political-Economic Influences

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Unable to pay their debts, most African states are compelled to seek various forms of debt relief and to implement structural adjustment programs (SAPs). The widespread adoption of SAPs and their implementation have brought into sharp focus the contradictions in the African political economies and have led to the widening gap between the socioeconomic classes, with a concentration of wealth in the hands of the few even as the majority lives in poverty. It has been argued by neoliberal economists that African countries risk marginalization unless they open up their economies, attract investment, participate more strongly in international trade, and thereby integrate into the global economy. But the prevailing view among the African ruling elite is that regional and continental integration is an alternative to greater dependence on trade with developed industrialized countries. They view integration schemes as leading to the enhancement of the international leverage of the African states and as a vital instrument for achieving collective self-reliance. Initiatives of this sort include the West African Economic and Monetary Community, the African Economic Community, the Cross-Border Initiative, the Economic Community of West African States, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, and the Southern African Development Community. We may well ask: Are these economic integration schemes the most effective ways for African economies to withstand the intense pressures of globalization and marginalization, or are they merely symbolic arrangements? The thirty-seventh OAU summit in Lusaka in 2001 adopted an African economic initiative, a fusion of the Millennium African Recovery Plan (initiated by leaders of South Africa, Nigeria, and Algeria) and the Omega Plan of Senegal. This new African economic initiative, which is now referred to as the New Partnership for African Development, is to serve as a blueprint for the full-scale socioeconomic development of the continent. Some African leaders view these new forms of economic cooperation in the post–Cold War era as important not only for transforming intra-African economic relations and improving Africa’s economic competitiveness but also for providing new security arrangements for conflict resolution and the promotion of democratic reforms within subregions. For them, the creation of the African Union is the culmination of these existing integration schemas. Could the AU be the basis for a common continental foreign policy, an eventual continental partnership coordinating defense, foreign affairs, and the economy? What will be the potential effects of continental foreign policy on African states? There is some debate as to whether the objective of building the United States of Africa should be to support processes of socioeconomic and political transformation of

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African societies or to integrate into the global economy. But if the former is achieved, it will automatically transform the way African societies are integrated into the global economy. Therefore, the continental initiative will require a transformation of African foreign policies at the national, regional, and global levels. As the initial steps in this process are taken, the mode of thinking, guiding vision, purpose, principles, and values will be critical in determining the impact on African societies (Campbell and Mealy 2001: 18). The unity of the African countries, as well as pan-African interests and alliances with other developing countries, could enhance African influence in international bodies that would otherwise continue to be dominated by external powers. But if unity is not maintained, then African policymakers will be unable to use the available policy instruments to develop new sources of competitive advantage, wealth creation, and human resource–based economic development. Conclusion

African analysts must not only be conscious of the contextual parameters of their work; they must explicitly seek to link their research to the major substantive theoretical concerns of foreign policy analysis. The utility of a model that combines decisionmaking with analysis of the political economy and sociocultural factors is that it not only helps us to understand how the decision was made but also explains the contextual factors that impinge on decisionmaking. The application of this combined approach to the African foreign policy issue of continental integration demonstrates its analytical and empirical utility to the African situation. It not only illuminates our understanding of the intricacies of Africa’s foreign policy behavior but also may be useful in providing an analytical framework for foreign policy analysis of the global south as a whole. Even in an era of change, the subfield of foreign policy requires analysts to address the most important substantive analytic and policy changes in international relations. African policymakers today have to address a host of issues—the challenges of AIDS, militarism, economic exploitation, environmental degradation, narcotics, and migration, among others—and need to conceptualize foreign policy at all levels— national, regional, continental, and global. To understand these complexities, the researcher needs to resist being wedded to only one type of analysis. The merging and expanding of two major approaches as presented here promise to provide us with a fruitful and detailed comparative analysis of foreign policy behavior.

7 Latin American Foreign Policies: Incorporating Civil Society Perspectives Andrés Serbin

In this chapter, I argue that changes in the world have introduced new elements in international relations today that need to be examined carefully in the context of their foreign policy relevance. Specifically, the phenomenon of globalization has engendered the following changes in foreign policy: (1) Foreign policy is increasingly being formulated as public policy in the same way as other public policies, characterized by the growing complexity of the international and domestic scenes; (2) public and government agendas do not always coincide, and the agenda of civil society is increasingly impinging on governmental public policy; (3) globalization has given rise to issues that are “intermestic,”1 that is, they span the domestic and international spheres; and (4) in this regard, the international agenda is an increasingly complex one where transnational actors of different characteristics—including nonstate actors in the context of the so-called complex multilateralism (O’Brien et al. 2000)—determine how the state implements public policies, including foreign policy. In Latin America and the Caribbean, civil society influences at the domestic, regional, and international levels appear to be stronger than in the rest of the third world, primarily because of the strength of both the democratization movement and the movement toward regional and hemispheric integration. Therefore, I suggest that foreign policy analysis of this region must now incorporate various perspectives on civil society, especially regional civil society. But before I discuss these points in greater detail, I wish to review the main currents in Latin American foreign policy theorizing so as to provide a context for my 99

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arguments. The main questions raised in this section are: (1) How have Latin American foreign policy studies emerged and developed in the past? (2) What approaches and theoretical principles have sustained them and contributed to foreign policy studies in Latin America and the Caribbean? and (3) What is the effect on the study of Latin American foreign policy of the transforming dynamic imposed by globalization? Before trying to address these questions, it would be useful to make some conceptual clarifications. First, in order to reflect faithfully the status of foreign policy research in as opposed to just about Latin America, I have limited myself to predominantly Latin American sources. Although many of the approaches and views considered here may be, to a greater or lesser extent, influenced by concepts from other cultural, academic, and political contexts, it is important to emphasize their processing and use in a more specific framework and in terms of the requirements and particularities of Latin American foreign policies over a half-century. In this regard, starting in the 1970s, studies of Latin American international relations underwent significant development, which was not matched by a similar development of foreign policy studies. This imbalance generated “an unequal coverage and quality” (Van Klaveren 1984: 2). Second, it is also important to acknowledge the difference between the study of international relations and the study of foreign policy in the Latin American context. As Van Klaveren notes: Although the distinction between the analysis of foreign policy and international relations is often confused and ignored, it seems valid and appropriate in the Latin American case. While the former mainly involves conduct inside a country directed or related to its external medium, the latter centers on the processes of interaction involving at least two units of the international system. (Van Klaveren 1992: 174)

According to this distinction, foreign policy can be seen as a public policy (Nohlen, Fernández, and Van Klaveren 1990: 2–3) and consequently considered as a specific field of political science, whereas the study of international relations, in my opinion, operates in a different framework and requires its own methodology and approach. For his part, Luciano Tomassini adds, in relation to Latin American countries: The most dangerous illusion has been to confuse the study of international relations with the study of the foreign policy of the countries, particularly in relation to nations in which the latter is naturally weak, and in which dependency on the external framework is high, as in developing countries. At the same time, the optical error of isolating

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the analysis of foreign policy with respect to the international context distorts the analysis and seriously compromises the usefulness of the prescriptions that could be derived from it. (Tomassini 1985: 217–218)

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However, as we will see later, it is not always easy to differentiate between the development of these two fields in Latin America, for they generally overlap. Third, this last consideration brings us to the need to establish a clear distinction between the study and analysis of foreign policy, on the one hand, and its formulation and execution on the other. Although both respond to a complex web of internal and external factors, the former relates to an academic dimension that began to emerge in the 1970s with a series of initiatives and activities aimed at establishing a specific field of study and analysis of foreign policy, often linked to the development of political science and international relations as disciplines in the Latin American academic context (Van Klaveren 1984: 2). In contrast, formulation and execution are linked to the traditional processes of implementation of foreign policy in Latin American states, whose roots date back to their establishment as independent states and relate to phases prior to World War II. In this respect—and keeping in mind the particularities of each case—the situation of states that achieved independence in the early part of the nineteenth century is different from that of the Afro-Asian and English-speaking Caribbean states, whose decolonization began in the late 1950s to the 1960s. Although before World War II, and especially immediately after, Latin America was largely isolated in the international context (Tomassini 1985: 201–204), the existence of specific policies in relations with the United States, European countries, or other Latin American states implied the emergence of incipient modalities of foreign policy.2 In this regard, the relationship between the studies and approaches developed in the academic field, and the implementation of foreign policy in each country and region, are in contrast to the “revolving door” image of the U.S. context, especially in relations between academics and practitioners (see Serbin 1996 for an elaboration). Fourth, apart from the link between external and internal factors, the models of formulation and implementation of foreign policy in Latin America do not follow a single general pattern. Although common cultural traits (particularly evident in similar political cultures) can contribute to the identification of common features from a comparative point of view, in reality differences of size, political history, configuration, resources, and the role of decisive actors and international capacity allow clear distinctions to be made among national foreign policies.

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It is not by chance that the foreign policies of Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Cuba on the international and hemispheric scenes are more relevant than the policies of the Central American countries.3 Finally, one should resist the ethnocentric temptation to homogenize the performance of Latin American foreign policies in the context of Latin America and the third world in general, not to mention the difficulties of operating with such a vague concept as “third world,” which in any event has been surpassed by international events. Again, Van Klaveren (1984: 2–3) is cautious about the generalizability of Latin American policy processes: First, a minimum requirement for any general approach in the social sciences is a reasonable degree of universality, in the sense that the approach is applicable to more than a few cases. Second, the foreign policy-making process of several Latin American countries is fairly complex and sophisticated, and there is no practical reason to give it a unique status. [But t]hird, it could well be argued that just as Latin American processes are very different from, say, North American ones, they are also far apart from those prevailing in other Third World regions, if only because the internal political and economic environments in which they function are also radically different. (Van Klaveren 1984: 2–3)

He adds, in a more recent work, that “the development of foreign policy studies in Latin America has not led to the emergence of a new singular and specific approach adapted to the reality of the region or to developing countries in general” (Van Klaveren 1992: 173). Foreign Policy Studies in Latin America: A Review

Between the two world wars, the debate between idealists and realists in the field of international relations had its effect on the development of the discipline and on the foreign policies of Latin American countries. As Roberto Russell notes, in that period most Latin American authors were inclined to idealism, more in its Grotian rationalist than its Kantian aspect (Russell 1992: 8). Russell gives three reasons for this inclination: (1) emphasis on law and international institutions and the idea that states are part of an “international society”; (2) professional training linked to the legal profession and/or diplomacy; and (3) the understanding that the law was the ideal instrument for protection from intervention by the central states. The predominance of this approach led to an obvious juridical bias and eventually to an “excessive formalism” in

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the studies because authors and analysts had more links with political than academic life. By contrast, the adherents of realism, particularly in the Southern Cone, used basically a geopolitical approach. Realist analyses, however, were fewer in number than those using the rationalist-Grotian viewpoint (Russell 1992: 9). Even so, both approaches, which were more related to the exercise of policy than to an academic view, tended to reflect the foreign policy priorities of Latin American countries in that period: relations with the great powers, first with Europe and later with the United States; and the relations with neighboring states, frequently marked by territorial disputes and tensions. The end of World War II and the development of the Cold War immersed Latin American countries in the strategic dynamic imposed on the Western Hemisphere by the United States, with the region’s consequent isolation. In the 1950s and 1960s, along with the persistence of juridical-normative studies, new theoretical approaches began to emerge, which laid the bases for the later development of a more systematic and empirical approach. In this regard, Russell identifies three predominant approaches: the influence of the realist school through U.S. and British authors, the emergence of the theory of dependence, and the further development of studies of a geopolitical matrix (Russell 1992: 10–11). In the Latin American case, the characteristics of the development of these three approaches need clarification. The influence of the realist school was expressed through what Russell terms “peripheral realism,” as realist assumptions were used as a tool for the incorporation of a series of specific considerations about the peripheral situation of Latin American states in the international scene, with very explicit references “to regional integration and cooperation as the most appropriate ways to thaw world power” (Russell 1992: 10). This was particularly evident in the period that covered the emergence of the Andean Pact and the development of the bases of Central American integration. The development of the second approach was influenced by thinking within the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (known by the Spanish acronym CEPAL), principally promoted by Raúl Prébisch of Argentina, who was very close to this position, and by the early development of teoria de la dependencia (dependency theory) in relation to the insertion of Latin American countries in the world capitalist system under conditions of dependence and asymmetry. This development took place in the context of a broad range of tendencies and emphases with respect to relations between the center and the periphery, as well as the characteristics that a peripheral development of endogenous traits should

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assume. In turn, the geopolitical approach combined elements of classic geopolitical doctrines with the doctrines of hemispheric security that evolved with the Cold War, principally through contributions by military authors who “take the geopolitical matrix as one of the principal determinants of foreign policy and not as an analytical tool for examination of the same” (Russell 1992: 11). These three approaches, which predominated in the 1950s and 1960s, are seen by some Latin American authors as the components of the “foundational period” of foreign policy studies. They still contain many elements of normative theory and very few of empirical theory. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the theoretical and institutional conditions were forged for a more systematic development and empirical basis for foreign policy studies. This phase generally coincided with an intensifying search for the autonomous aspects of Latin American foreign policy, breaking with the isolation and the dynamic of hemispheric security imposed by the Cold War. In the first place, social sciences in Latin America began to develop significantly, as illustrated by the creation in 1968 of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences. Although the council focused its attention on the internal problems inherent in the development of Latin American societies, it paved the way for a theoretically solid and more systematic academic discussion, which in turn resulted in the inclusion of international relations at the beginning of the 1980s (Tomassini 1985: 205–206). In this respect, the boom in social sciences prompted “a growing application of a politological [sic] perspective to foreign policy studies and a criticism of studies based on juridical perspectives or on geopolitical assumptions” (Russell 1992: 12). Second, a series of important spaces began to open for discussion and development in the field of international relations, as well as in the debate on foreign policy. The Institute of International Studies was created by the University of Chile in 1967 (which started the publication of the journal Estudios Internacionales, with significant regional reach). The Latin American Forum was established in 1974, and the Joint Studies Program on International Relations of Latin America (RIAL) began in 1977. Schools of international relations and research institutes were set up with links to academic institutions, frequently related to the development of the theory of international relations in the United States, as well as to the education of a new generation of researchers and analysts in U.S. schools (Perina 1985; Russell 1992). These processes created the conditions for what some authors term the “boom” in international studies in Latin America in the 1980s and the emphasis—mostly based on theoretical baggage of U.S. origin—on

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investigation of little researched aspects of foreign policy. This stage is characterized by the following features: a) most of the authors are academics; b) they work with a more well defined and precise analytical universe, with explicit theoretical and methodological assumptions in the studies; c) there is a clear concern for making “empirical theory,” for finding nexuses of causality between the selected variables and establishing causal priorities; d) approaches developed in the United States are applied, starting fundamentally in the 1970s (especially Allison’s bureaucratic policy model, Keohane and Nye’s matrix of complex interdependence, and to a lesser extent approaches on ideologies, images, and perceptions by authors like Jervis or George; and on decision-making processes, based on the work of Snyder, Bruck and Sapin); finally e) an effort was made to “construct theory” from the periphery.4 (Russell 1992: 14)

To some extent, this process was linked at the beginning of the 1980s with the development of dependency theory, which attempted to break with Marxist orthodoxy and to construct innovative schemes in an effort to interpret the development of capitalism in the periphery. Although it is recognized that this approach was never conceived as a theory to explain foreign policy, before and during the boom it was an important reference in the regional debate on the different interpretations of international relations. Simultaneously, as noted, one of the decisive elements in the development of the boom was the creation and evolution of the Joint Studies Program on the International Relations of Latin America. RIAL was created as an association of Latin American academic institutions, specializing in the study of the foreign relations of their respective countries, with the aim of stimulating joint work among member centers. Each year, RIAL promoted the formation of a number of work groups by researchers from member centers to analyze a particular subject. RIAL then evaluated and supported the proposals formulated by the different groups, arranged regular meetings to discuss the progress of their research, and published their results in a series that was centralized by the Grupo Editor Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires. Many members of RIAL also participated in the Latin American Forum when it emerged as an opinion group in the mid-1970s and, in the 1990s, many occupied important ministerial and diplomatic posts involving the implementation of foreign policy in their countries. RIAL perceived the usefulness of an annual report of a more global nature, in parallel with the studies done by the work groups in the subject area chosen by them. The report reviewed trends in the international

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system in each period from a Latin American angle and outlined the implications they could have for the countries of the region. As its secretary-general said at the time: From the start, we wanted to avoid a report with a fixed or recurring content. Its analysis is centered on a subject of particular relevance to the appreciation of the state of international relations each year. As a result, reports have analyzed a wide range of issues: the possibility of a new era of U.S. hegemony; the international impact of the third industrial revolution; the systems of formulation of the foreign policy of the more recently developed countries; and relations between Europe and Latin America. (Tomassini 1989: 13–14)

The activities of RIAL, with regular meetings and discussion of the work groups and the publication of the yearbook, lasted until the early 1990s. They generated intense contacts and interaction among researchers and centers all over Latin America and the Caribbean and were a fundamental landmark in the development of the study of international relations and foreign policy in the region.5 A preliminary assessment of the activity of RIAL reveals the stimulus it gave to international relations as an academic discipline; its contribution to the modernization of the study; the links forged with relevant Latin American issues and broad and equilibrated approaches; the promotion of academic, ideological, generational, and geographical pluralism; and finally the effort to develop a discourse in all these activities in which “academics, men of government and the representatives of the nongovernmental sector understood each other” (Tomassini 1985: 219–220). In addition to the activities of RIAL and the meetings of Latin American specialists in international relations and foreign policy since 1984, the Follow-up Program of Latin American Foreign Policies (PROSPEL) was established in Chile. This program also published until 1993 the Yearbook of Latin American Foreign Policies, reflecting much of the research and empirical follow-up of the foreign policies of Latin America and the Caribbean.6 As the last PROSPEL publication stated, it was a response to two essential needs of the development of international studies in relation to Latin America and the Caribbean: “first, development of a systematic analysis of foreign policies adopted by the countries of the region, and second, promotion in this study of a Latin American perspective of the international affairs of the continent” (Heine 1993: 6). Along with the development of programs like RIAL and PROSPEL, the 1980s were characterized by the establishment and proliferation of schools of international relations, private centers, and research institutes

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associated with universities. Journals and publications in the field of international relations and foreign policy studies also contributed to the boom in the region (Perina 1985), and a network and epistemic community was progressively formed (Serbin 1996). The advances in the analysis and study of foreign policy were made possible by the developments in the field of international relations as an academic discipline, as well as the growing separation between the juridical approaches and political science. In this respect, it is important to mention, first, the mutual enrichment of the two fields, notwithstanding the difficulties in their delimitation in more recent Latin American experience; and second, despite the transformations, the persistence of the fluctuation between the descriptive and prescriptive levels of foreign policy studies, as well as the urgent need to move forward with explanatory and comparative studies in this field (Van Klaveren 1984: 2). In terms of systematic studies, a useful typology of predominant approaches to foreign policy analysis in Latin America was proposed by Van Klaveren in 1984. In classifying approaches, he assumed, with anticipation, that the forces of transnationalism “tend to make them less clear-cut than they [were] in the past” (Van Klaveren 1984: 3). In his classification, he grouped among the “perspectives on external sources of foreign policies” the approaches emphasizing international system, power politics, and dependency and external reliance. In the section on “perspectives on domestic sources of foreign policy,” he placed works on “regime orientation,” “decision-making and domestic policies,” “bureaucratic politics,” and “leadership,” pointing out that they had received less attention in Latin America. In a 1992 work, he regrouped the perspectives on the external sources of foreign policy into two categories in order to create a framework for the analysis of foreign policy in Latin America: the international system (including the theory of dependence) and power politics. At the same time, he restated the perspectives of domestic sources of foreign policy, including works on the political system, development strategy, historical and cultural factors, actors and decisionmaking, and resources. The changes are illustrative of the transformations in both the international and domestic environments and their impact on the orientation of researchers and analysts in Latin America. Overall, there has been a tendency to attribute many of the determinants of Latin American foreign policies to external factors. This is evidenced in the development of the different views of dependency (the importance of which has now significantly diminished) in the analysis of the international system, and possibly in the considerations on the subsystemic character of international relations in Latin America (Atkins

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1999). The original Cepalist thinking as well as the dependency approaches have had a strong impact on the study and practice of foreign policy, although they do not specifically relate to it (see Van Klaveren 1992). In this sense, the dependencia approach—considered an approach to the theory of economic and political development and international political economy—has significantly influenced the perceptions of the political and intellectual elites of the region even if it was not directly related to the decisionmaking process in foreign policy. The influence of this kind of thinking on scholars and policymakers has made them particularly sensitive to understanding the dynamics of the international system and the factors and actors involved, making possible a significant transition toward understanding the phenomenon of globalization, particularly in relation to the acceleration of the subregional, regional, and hemispheric integration processes in the twentyfirst century. For this reason, most of the studies of the international situation and its impact on foreign policy have been developing intensely on the Latin American scene. The topics of economic globalization, the insertion of Latin America into the international economic system, the role of regional integration processes, and more specific issues such as industrial and technological transformation, competitiveness, and trade and investment have permeated not only government agendas in the twenty-first century but also the research agendas of the region’s academics. The interdependence processes highlighted by some Latin American analysts (especially in Mexico), together with the boom in integration processes, have resulted in more emphasis on elements of cooperation than on conflict, with a strong accent on the economic. This perspective has also affected issues of security, which in the 1990s began to be dealt with more on the basis of cooperation than antagonism (see, e.g., Pellicer 1995). The renewed emphasis on economics today has generated a growing need to link the study of foreign policy with other policies in the economic area, on the assumption that the transnationalization processes affect the clear and sharp delimitation of domestic and external processes and require more complex and sophisticated approaches. Other noneconomic linkages also need to be addressed; for example, the attention to regional and hemispheric integration also assumes new political, cultural, and social dimensions. Furthermore, the processes of democratization and democratic consolidation in most Latin American countries have resulted in a reconsideration of the domestic factors that influence the formulation and execution of foreign policy in Latin America. On the one hand, there is the growing interrelation of these processes with external factors; on the other, we now need more than

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ever to incorporate into the analysis factors such as political regimes, development strategies, historical and cultural factors (including political culture) that make each experience unique, as well as the complexity of the set of actors in decisionmaking in foreign policy and the resources available. In this respect, along with the relevance of governance in relation to public policies (including foreign policy) that a state assumes in its relations with internal and external actors, the discourse and interest in foreign policy analysis have shifted toward a combination of political and economic variables as the prioritization of the economic factors has increased. More recently, there has been a shift as well toward social factors, often under the influence of the recommendations of international organizations and pressure from certain domestic sectors. Incorporating New Perspectives in the Study of Latin American Foreign Policy

As noted, globalization imposes an increasingly stronger link between the internal and external factors that determine foreign policy, making it exceedingly difficult to establish a clear distinction between them, given the growing permeability of national frontiers resulting from transnationalization. To understand this process involves not only a rethinking of the role of the state, the limits of national sovereignty, and the predominance of the strategic and diplomatic elements associated with a traditional approach to foreign policy but also the consideration of the growing pressure on the state to transform itself into an “agent of globalization.” Consequently, the complex web of factors, processes, and external actors is woven through an increasingly complex and dynamic linkage of these elements at the internal level. It is not by chance that some Latin American analysts of foreign policy studies now include not only the characteristics of globalization in all its diverse facets but also the problems of formulation of public policies and governance, returning to earlier observations on foreign policy as public policy (cf. Moneta and Quenan 1994; Tomassini 1991, 1993, and 1996). Increasingly, however, public policies are not dictated only by the government agenda but are also related in the domestic area to a public agenda. These processes are occurring in the context of a reformulation of relations between state and civil society, particularly in processes of redemocratization or democratic consolidation. Civil society is increasing its influence on public policy through the dynamic of the market with the participation of business and labor sectors; through consumer

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groups with their own demands and agendas; through actors in the informal economy—micro, small and medium-sized entrepreneurs, small farmers, and cooperativists; and through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) of the associative or philanthropic type. Again to cite Tomassini, the linking of the governmental and public agendas basically requires the building of a consensus for decisionmaking, which will have a positive effect on governance (Tomassini 1993). In the context of globalization and the external pressures associated with intermestic processes, government and public agendas, which do not always coincide, also need to be related to an increasingly complex international agenda, where transnational and nonstate actors of different characteristics determine how the state implements public policies. This complex process affects foreign policy, as it involves the foreign relations of the state and other policies, particularly in the economic area, such as adjustment, trade and exchange, fiscal, and development strategies. But it also affects social policies, which frequently are not always linked to the economic in Latin American countries. A brief look at the various perspectives on the role of transnational civil society and nonstate actors will help us better understand its linkages with the traditional state. It is important to note that in our efforts to incorporate transnational actors into foreign policy analysis, we should make distinctions between domestic and regional civil society and between regional and global civil society. All affect foreign policy, but their agendas and styles can be quite different (Serbin 2001). Regionalism and Civil Society: Foreign Policy Relevance

The priority of economic issues in Latin America and the Caribbean in the twenty-first century is reflected in foreign policies that are geared toward expanding trade opportunities bilaterally, regionally, and globally. But in terms of coordinated policy, the regional and subregional agendas need special emphasis. In noting the ambiguity of the terms region and regionalism, Andrew Hurrell (1994) distinguishes among (1) regional consciousness and identity; (2) interstate regional cooperation and state-promoted regional integration; (3) regionalization; and (4) regional cohesion. With respect to foreign policy, the last three are of particular relevance. Interstate regional cooperation implies the negotiation and construction of interstate and intergovernmental agreements. These agreements can reach a high level of institutionalization without necessarily guaranteeing political effectiveness or importance; or they can make

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way for systems that are more informal, based on international “regimes” (Hurrell 1994: 42). In addition, these agreements or regimes can serve a variety of purposes, from coordinated regional positions in international forums and agencies in response to the perception of external threats, to assuring common values or to resolving common problems. State-promoted regional integration is a subcategory of the above, referring to specific policy decisions by governments in the sphere of economic integration designed to reduce and eliminate barriers in the mutual exchange of goods, capital, services, and people. Regionalization is a more diffuse process, referring to the growth of intersocietal integration in a region and to the frequently nondirected processes of social and economic interaction (Hurrell 1994). Hurrell refers both to the tendencies toward economic integration promoted by market forces, trade and investment flows, or company policies without state intervention, and to the flow of populations and shaping of complex social networks through which flow ideas, political attitudes, and ways of thinking, giving rise to a transnational regional civil society. I argue here that this process also has implications for foreign policy. Hurrell’s concept of regional cohesion is also relevant in that it can be understood in two ways: (1) when the region performs a defining role in the relations between the states (and other relevant actors) of that region and the rest of the world; and (2) when the region forms the organizational base for implementation of policies on different issues at a regional level. In this sense, then, foreign policy may emanate from the regional unit itself. After the Cold War, Latin American and Caribbean nations moved aggressively toward trade liberalization through the enhancement of existing integration mechanisms, notably the Latin American Integration Association, the Andean Community of Nations, the Central American Integration System, and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). In addition, new movements were established, in particular the Southern Cone Common Market (known as Mercosur) and the Association of Caribbean States. By consolidating links among themselves, these nations sought to take advantage of globalization processes while maintaining and eventually strengthening a regional space. The creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992 between Mexico, the United States, and Canada furthered the process in encouraging states to form common negotiating positions, and this has been enhanced by the proposed establishment of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) by 2005. It should be noted, however, that the centripetal forces of integration have competed with centrifugal forces associated with (among other things) the pressures of globalization, varying levels of external

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dependence, and varying national policies with regard to the pace of liberalization, bilateralism, and the role of transnational corporations in dynamizing productivity, exchange, and external trade in the various subregions. Although the various state (or government) and region-unit decisions and policies with regard to integration can be studied through decisionmaking, political economy, or other perspectives (see, e.g., Chapter 8 in this volume by Rita Giacalone), the issue of the role of civil society needs to be addressed within a framework that underscores the complex web of relationships among the local, regional, and global levels. Specifically, we need to understand the different agendas, strategies, and linkages among domestic, regional, and transnational civil society. These differences are tied in with differing perspectives on the processes of globalization and regionalization. Global Civil Society

Within the framework of the debate on globalization, the emergence of a global civil society based on the development of nonstate networks and linkages, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and transnational social movements is a phenomenon that is relevant to the understanding of the global dynamic, as it transcends the limits and the traditional dynamic of domestic civil societies. Beyond the redimensionalizing of the nation-state and the rise of a web of transnational actors basically tied to the global market, the real possibility of regulating and limiting the action of the market like that of a government or intergovernmental organization comes from the development and consolidation of the networks of actors that make up a transnational civil society, in the context of a process of transnationalization that dramatically increases the significance of extranational factors. The possibility of correcting and rectifying the process of globalization “from above,” whereby a small number of actors take (frequently with limited or no representativeness or legitimacy) a series of decisions that affect the whole process, necessarily implies the development of global governance. In turn, this implies the development of a transnational civil society that promotes and advances the interests of a common citizenry, in the context of a process of citizen participation that some associate with the emergence of a cosmopolitan democracy (Archibugi and Held 1995; Held 1997). It is evident, then, that the establishment of a global or transnational civil society takes to the transnational level many of the suppositions of the politically liberal

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perspectives, with respect to both democracy and the role of civil society. Especially in the latter case, it tends to transfer uncritically the liberal discourse of civil society and its function in regard to the democratic governance of a country to a discourse on global civil society that is frequently permeated by antistate positions (Pasha and Blaney 1998). But transnational civil society is not necessarily just engaged in liberal lobbying, and neither is it necessarily completely antistate. In the first place, there is a continuing debate about the importance of global civil society, and different perspectives on the issue depend on how one views the process of globalization itself. “Skeptics” (a useful classification in McGrew 1998) believe that what is under way today is not a globalization process but rather an intensification of the internationalization of the world economy (see, e.g., Colás 1977) in which national economies, particularly the most powerful ones, are still hegemonizing the international economic dynamic. In this perspective, globalization is perceived as a myth, because the world economy continues to be characterized by a division of power and labor in a transition from internationalization to transnationalization but without producing an effective globalization of the international economy (Ferrer 1997). As an illustration, skeptics invoke the global financial crisis of the late 1990s, which mainly affected the emerging economies and, in the final analysis, was favorable to the more developed economies (Ferrer 1997). Also for many skeptics, given growing international inequalities, exclusions, and asymmetries, the consolidation of an international system hegemonized by the industrialized countries is making way for the reactive development of ethnic, religious, and national fundamentalisms and particularisms that call into question the intended imposition of Western civilization in the global process (Huntington 1996). They contribute more to fragmenting the world system into blocs than to homogenizing it and creating a global society. For these skeptics, there is no emerging global civil society, as neoliberalists contend. Just as there are no transnational processes not controlled by states, so there is no developing civil society outside the frontiers of the nation-state that, consequently, might have a relevant influence on the international system. This is certainly the case with respect to the positions taken by some Latin American governments with avowedly “statist” orientations, given the traditional weakness of national civil societies in Latin America. By way of contrast, what Anthony McGrew calls “globalists” (neoliberals as well as Marxists and post-Marxists) view globalization as a final phase of the development of capitalism with respect to the configuration of a global market imposed on the nation-state. The process is fundamentally economic, has a global reach, and, depending

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on the ideological affiliation of the respective authors, can be perceived optimistically or pessimistically. The optimistic view is the “end of history” and the creation of a world governed by market logic, with its political links associated with liberalism (see Fukuyama 1992; Ohmae 1995; Guéhenno 1995). The pessimistic position identifies the imposition of the logic of capital accumulation at a world level and increased contradictions and inequalities in the international system (as found in the analyses of Cox 1987 and Gill 1993), or a more profound historical approach in the case of the evolution of the “world system” (Wallerstein 1995). Based on diverse ideological perspectives, globalists see the globalization process as either engendering the emergence of a third sector—global civil society—in the framework of a new articulation of the state–market–civil society trilogy on a world sphere, or as making way for the spread of counterhegemonic social forces on a global scale. “Transformationalists” also view globalization as a new phenomenon but insist on a more multidimensional and complex vision of the changes wrought by globalization. To them, globalization is a new process in the history of humanity, is occurring rapidly, is plagued by uncertainties and turbulence, is hard to pin down and forecast, and is framed by new linkages among economic actors, nation-states, and social actors at a global level (Rosenau 1990 and 1997). In this perspective, global civil society, which each author sees with different nuances, is an important emerging actor in the context of the heterogeneity and complexity of a multicentric international system. For some, globalization from above promoted by nation-states and market actors is triggering the progress of “globalization from below” by a global civil society articulated by NGOs and transnational social movements that require the development of new forms of global governance (Falk 1995a and 1995b). For both globalists and transformationalists, global civil society, like globalization itself, is a new phenomenon, with novel identifying traces that privilege the role of the networks that are emerging in the context of “new social movements” (environmental, gender, human rights, peace, and international justice; see Shaw 1994; Lipschutz 1996). These new movements are not based on social classes but on views and interests grounded in more specific and focused global issues (Shaw 1994: 14). They are also less preoccupied with traditional politics if not with power, less tied to the mobilization of the masses, and more narrowly focused on lobbying and impacting public opinion through specific campaigns.7 As such, global civil society constitutes, consequently, a level of nonstate action that has grown in visibility and presence in the international system, leading to the emergence of a

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global conscience and to the reconfiguring of the global political space as an increasingly democratic one (Pasha and Blaney 1998: 425). In this view, with various shades of difference, often the conceptions of a global civil society are associated with three elements: (1) a critical vision of the role of the state against which civil society (including global civil society) is conceived as having varying degrees of autonomy and, in the final analysis, antagonism; (2) an idealized and optimistic vision of civil society that frequently ignores its contradictions, fragmentations, and internal tensions, particularly in the context of a process of globalization marked by inequality, social and geographic exclusion, and civil society’s difficulties in articulating and pushing through large-scale societal projects; and (3) the perception of the hegemonic validity of the modalities of liberal democracy in the context of the irreversibility of the process of globalization and an uncritical vision of the structure of world power (Pasha and Blaney 1998). Along these lines, conceptual development has focused on the emergence of transnational advocacy networks not necessarily linked or identified with social movements. These are best viewed as communicative structures for interchange emerging out of social networks. These networks seek to structure and frame political opportunities through information policies and campaigns in which massive means of communication play a relevant role (Keck and Sikkink 1998).8 In this view, the vision of the role of governmental and intergovernmental organizations (and of the state in general) is more nuanced insofar as it postulates, on the basis of empirical analysis, the possibility of development of a variety of links and alliances between the different state agencies and transnational actors. A more recent development in this regard is the articulation between a focus on global public goods—identified basically in terms of equity and justice, market efficiency, the environmental and cultural patrimony, health, knowledge and information, and world peace and security (Kaul, Grunberg, and Stern 1999); and an analysis of global public policy networks, with the introduction of new issues on the global agenda, the establishment and negotiation of new standards, the recompilation and dissemination of knowledge, and the overcoming of the participatory gap, among other things (Reinicke and Deng 1999). One conception that is most associated with the visions of the transformationalists postulates the emergence of a specific transnational civil society that includes both old and new social movements and NGOs, taking into account different levels of interaction and scope, different agendas and aims, and different methods of mobilization and political action in the local, national, subregional, and regional arenas,

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in addition to the global. In this regard, new political spaces are being defined, composed of networks based on economic, social, and cultural relations, spaces occupied by the conscious association of actors, in locations that are physically separated, who are linked among themselves into networks with particular social and political aims (Lipschutz 1996: 104).9 This is taking place in the framework of world politics and not only in the process of economic globalization. A Conceptual Synthesis

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the skeptics’ view of the absence of a global civil society is belied by the formation in recent years of a strong network of civil society agencies that transcend the domestic boundaries. But even though the terms global civil society and transnational civil society have often been used interchangeably, the former may be misleading. My own view is that transnational civil society is a more useful concept because it can more easily be understood as framing differentiated actions at different levels—that is, the local, subregional, regional, and global levels. First, a distinction must be made between domestic civil society and transnational civil society. Many of the views of global/transnational civil society are based on a predominantly descriptive vision of a national civil society that just so happens to transcend the domestic sphere in its actions. But analytically, it is not feasible to equate domestic societal processes with those of transnational civil society. I will therefore try to highlight from a conceptual perspective what is unique about transnational civil society in the context of globalization. After this, I will focus on the importance of a regional conception of civil society in Latin America. Particularly in the context of the global dynamic, transnational civil society assumes a series of characteristics that are different from the traditional conception of domestic civil society as any form of social organization that is not associated either with the state or with profitmaking enterprises. In this respect, although it can potentially contribute to regulating, alongside the state, the dynamic of the market, it also contributes to limiting the action of the state itself within an extremely complex set of interrelationships of levels, spheres of interaction, and actors. Transnational civil society, unlike domestic civil Transnational Versus Domestic

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society, is not engulfed by the state. It does not need to have the nationstate as its only target and interlocutor. It does not interact with a specific territoriality or sovereignty, and so it is not state-centric (Lipschutz 1996). And yet despite the dominant antistate discourse and the limitations of many states, particularly in the global south, these states and their agents continue to be the main focus of the actors of transnational civil society. But this transnational civil society is also not engulfed by the market, like a third private nonprofit sector that is merely philanthropic, as some neoliberalists claim. Rather, transnational civil society can be conceived as the web of networks of activities organized by groups and individuals who may be sharing certain services or trying to influence and improve society as a whole, without being part of a government or enterprise (Jorgensen 1996: 34) but still remaining in a necessary relationship with them both.10 Transnational civil society interacts, on the one hand, with different government interlocutors (government agencies, diverse intergovernmental organizations, political decisionmakers, functionaries, and technocrats), which it seeks to influence in order to increase its participation and to push through public policies that accord with its interests; and, on the other hand, with market forces (transnational corporations, multilateral financial institutions, and private international banks), which it seeks to limit and regulate. Also as noted earlier, transnational civil society works at multiple levels—local, subregional, regional, and global. But in the main, the targets of civil society at the regional and global levels are intergovernmental if not supranational, as is the case of the institutions of the European Union, or as seen in 1999–2001 in the anti–World Trade Organization mobilizations in Seattle, or those in Washington against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, or those in Genoa against the Group of Seven. Also, in contrast to the dynamic of domestic civil society, transnational civil society involves special spaces and spheres of interaction, particular methods of advocacy and policymaking, and varied links to political parties, syndicates, and national and regional legislatures in the framework of representative democracy. Although transnational civil society possesses a higher level of autonomy vis-à-vis domestic political spaces and, more specifically, the state, it still keeps the governments and intergovernmental organizations as privileged interlocutors and also focuses on different expressions of national political societies (e.g., regional parliaments and international party groupings). In addition, unlike domestic civil society, transnational civil society involves a highly sociopolitical dimension of citizen action by way of its interaction, dialogue, and confrontation with other relevant public

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actors in the international system on transnational issues and on a global social agenda formed in the context of the promotion of forms of global democratic governance. In this regard, it generates the development of interconnected political spaces that transcend national and territorial frontiers and that, therefore, are not contained—different from domestic civil society—by the national state or by a defined territoriality. These interconnected political spaces at the regional and global levels point to the development of a transnational democratic governance that promotes forms of political accountability on the part of transnational as well as national actors involved in the dynamic of the international system. However, each sociopolitical dimension implies likewise distinctive positions and strategies with regard to the existing structure of power, as well as significant variations in the possibilities of political advocacy in accordance with social and geographic position. The claim of the emergence of a global civil society is often associated with an optimistic view of the role of agents in social transformation. But when we speak of “transnational” civil society, we recognize that it is not homogeneous. Rather, it consists of a very complex web of networks and actors that are not necessarily convergent and that often are torn by internal fragmentation and the existence of deep-seated tensions and contradictions. Transnational civil society is not composed only of social movements (“old,” like the worker and peasant movements; and “new,” like the environmental and gender organizations); and it cannot be reduced to NGOs, which are only the intersocietal tip of the iceberg. However, NGOs are often key actors because they, more than the traditional social movements that mobilize masses or sectors, tend to prefer lobbying, media exposure, and advocacy as forms of political action, and they do not seek to accede to power but rather to advocate with it. NGOs bring up specific issues and are closer to the new social movements in their reclamation of identities. In this process they need to maintain a dialogue and to engage in multiple strategic alliances with state actors, political society, and the actors of the market. Also, NGOs have an especially great capacity for media visibility. In this respect, an important component to take into account in the composition of transnational civil society are the media, which channel and express many of the demands of the different sectors and contribute to influencing the political decisionmakers with regard to issues on the regional and global agendas (Shaw 1994). In addition to its diversity, transnational civil society is differentiated by the agenda of its various subunits. Frequently, the agendas of Transnational Versus Global

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social actors working in developed countries do not coincide with the agendas of those working in developing countries. Also, there are differences among the social actors of the developed countries, as reflected in the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in 1999, which brought together labor wanting protectionist platforms, environmentalists seeking conservationist programs, and anarchists confronting the state. Therefore, transnational civil society includes diverse networks, frequently with imprecise contours—“new” and “old” social movements, NGOs, epistemic communities, media and communications networks, and so on. It is at once contradictory, heterogeneous, and laden with tensions because it comprises diverse actors and sectors that have aims that stretch beyond national negotiation. In fact, it is not possible to consider the process of the growth of transnational civil society outside the context of inequalities, exclusions, and contradictions engendered by the very process of globalization, both in social and geographic terms, beyond the aspiration of the member movements and organizations to promote issues of a global nature and to consolidate the mechanisms of democratic governance on a world scale. Finally, transnational civil society is more transnational than global because it includes subregional and regional networks and webs that do not necessarily associate themselves with global agendas and that link the global with the transnational in a particular manner. In this respect, transnational civil society often reflects characteristics of the domestic and local civil societies involved in terms of their relationship with the state (i.e., political cultures). This is so because global events are processed across regional, national, and local cultures in such a way as to throw into question any view of total homogenization. In turn, given this heterogeneity, transnational civil society implies a “globalization from below” in search of regulating and regimenting the activities of other actors in the international system. The differential articulation mentioned above at distinct levels and in distinct areas gives rise also to the emergence of a regional civil society as a part of the dynamic interaction of transnational civil society in the international system, but one that is guided by regional objectives and themes. These objectives build on strategies and forms of policymaking framed in the context of national political cultures. In Latin America and the Caribbean, regional civil society has focused, with mixed success, on impacting the subregional and regional Regional Civil Society

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processes of integration, often questioning the creation of free-trade areas but also searching for participation and political advocacy of social agendas. The regional issues and social agendas that are formulated are not necessarily linked with global agendas and are promoted in contexts that can be but are not necessarily antagonistic to governments (for a more elaborate discussion, see Serbin 2001). Regional civil society seeks to advocate with national foreign policy agencies and with intergovernmental organizations, particularly those whose agenda is relevant to regional concerns. For example, in the Greater Caribbean subregion, one of the leading mouthpieces for civil society is the Caribbean Policy Development Center (CPDC), formed in 1991. It is an umbrella body that represents a network of NGOs from the insular Caribbean (including Cuba and the Dominican Republic), Belize, and Guyana. The CPDC sits together with the Caribbean Congress of Labor and the Caribbean Association of Industry and Commerce in a regional consultative council formed by the governments of CARICOM as a way to effect greater consultation with social partners (Byron and Girvan 2000). In the context of the many subregional and hemispheric integration initiatives that have been taking place, dialogue is ongoing in several contexts: among national civil society groups within their regional umbrella organizations, between regional civil society groups and regional and international organizations, and between national and regional civil society groups and nongovernmental development organizations in the North (Byron and Girvan 2000). Moreover, the CPDC is able to interact with its counterparts in Central America and elsewhere through the Greater Caribbean Civil Society Forum (created in 1997) and various regional and hemispheric consultation forums. In sum, these organizations are all oriented toward increasing civil society’s (and particularly citizens’) influence on decision processes regarding public policies. They are looking for improvement in the standards of open information, transparency, and accountability that characterize democratic political systems. The political methodology of these organizations is mostly oriented toward lobbying and the development of information campaigns as means of influencing powerful actors. The Latin American and Caribbean region also has its share of civil society organizations that are antiglobalization, with links to similarly positioned global social movements. Both the advocacy and antiglobalization trends have been clearly reflected in the Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiating process. For example, at the third FTAA summit in Quebec in 2001, after a broad consultation process, a number of groups chose to advocate by means of a hemispheric consultation mechanism

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involving a variety of NGOs and organizations in different countries. The final document that was presented to the governments meeting in Quebec advocated specific points related to the greater involvement of civil society and citizens in decisionmaking with respect to the FTAA. On the other hand, trade unions and anti–free trade organizations held a parallel people’s summit in Quebec. The Assembly of the Peoples of the Americas seriously questioned the objectives of the entire FTAA process, claiming that the process goes against the interests of significant sectors of the population and that, in this regard, there was no point in presenting any alternatives to the government representatives at the summit. Although parts of the consultation document presented by the first group reached the final draft of the summit declaration, the Assembly of the Peoples of the Americas rejected any attempt to establish a dialogue with the government representatives. In the final analysis, of course, state and regional foreign policies are most likely to be influenced by advocacy initiatives rather than by antiglobalization agendas. However, the latter still need to be taken into consideration, as they may have an indirect impact on what governments say and do and how they frame their actions. It may be added that, in general, the possibility of influencing both global and regional processes is more reduced if the influence attempt comes from the South rather than the North. NGOs and global social movements from the North clearly have more knowledge, information, and resources to establish and promote global agendas than their counterparts in the South. Therefore, more often than not, the agenda of global south civil society and social movements is strongly conditioned by the North. This does not contradict what was said previously about the differences between global and regional agendas. It is important to note that, in general, regional issues are not relevant for global north organizations and movements unless they are strongly related to global issues. From this point of view, sometimes it is very difficult for global south organizations and movements to raise resources and disseminate information with regard to regionalization and to define their own agendas regarding global issues. As a consequence, even intersocietal networks are, more often than not, conditioned by the North-South gap (Serbin 2001). Conclusion

The study of Latin American foreign policy has at various times emphasized the role of external actors, power considerations and capabilities,

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regime structure, decisionmaking, and, more recently, political economy perspectives. I have argued here that the recent accelerated globalization processes suggest that we also need to take into consideration foreign policy initiatives with respect to free trade and regional integration, given the heightened importance of such issues in Latin America and the Caribbean today. As we seek to frame these issues appropriately, a case is made that there is a need to deal with the increasing impact of nonstate actors and civil society, especially regional civil society, which interacts in a selective (and conditioned) manner with global civil society as well. Taken together, intersocietal initiatives promoted from the diverse regional and subregional webs of civil society (i.e., “from below”), as well as those from the intergovernmental and multilateral agencies (“from above”), highlight the emergence of a series of networks of regional civil society with distinctive characteristics, which are engendering greater participation in the intergovernmental processes from above or an articulation with national processes. However, it should be noted that this is an incipient movement that has only recently begun to link up, with respect to some specific issues, with wider movements of transnational civil society that are not necessarily following its dynamic and orientation at the global level. Much more work needs to be done to clarify conceptually and empirically the impact of the political activity of the numerous organizations that have put forward demands and claims of a regional character, linked to particular strategies and methods of intervening in decisionmaking in the sphere of both public policy in general and, more specifically, foreign policy. Among third world regions, Latin America and the Caribbean, with its focus on integration and political liberalization, is a good place to start. Whether this focus can apply as well in time to the rest of the global south remains to be seen. Notes

My thanks to Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner for translating and organizing parts of this contribution from the Spanish version. A part of this chapter was presented to the graduate studies faculty at the University of Belgrano, Argentina, as Working Paper No. 82, December 2001. 1. “A term coined by Manning in an article in Foreign Affairs (1977) specifically in the context of American foreign policy. The author was seeking to encapsulate the extent to which traditional boundaries between ‘international’ and ‘domestic’ issues had broken down in contemporary analysis. The expression may be separated from its American origins to achieve wider applicability wherever policy making in pluralistic communities involves issue areas

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that amalgamate actors from domestic/international contexts” (Evans and Newnham 1999: 258). 2. Luciano Tomassini speaks about the “strategic loneliness” that characterized Latin America’s role in hemispheric relations in the stage after World War I up to the beginning of the Cold War. He terms this “the conversion of Latin America into a strategically solitary place” (Tomassini 1985: 204). 3. Alberto Van Klaveren sums up the approach as follows (1992: 187): “In its most extreme versions, crude and simplistic, this perspective led to the conviction that Latin American underdevelopment was a direct consequence of the development of rich economies and it could only be overcome by revolutionary change (Frank, 1967; Dos Santos, 1978). In its more sophisticated versions, it argues that Latin American structural dependency with regard to external markets and capital limits and distorts the capitalist development of the region. However, it does not make it impossible (citing Cardoso and Falletto 1969; Muñoz 1978 and 1981).” 4. Reference is to Graham Allison (1971); Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye (1977); R. Jervis (1976); Alexander George (1969); and R. Snyder, H. Bruck, and B. Sapin (1954). 5. RIAL disappeared in the 1990s. One of the reasons was financial constraints; other factors were related to the establishment of democracy in different Latin American countries and the increasing involvement of some of RIAL’s individual members in political activities in their own countries. Among members who went on to hold political positions were Miguel Angel Burelli Rivas, who became Venezuela’s minister of foreign affairs; José Miguel Insulza, who held the same position in Chile; and Rosario Green, who became secretary of international relations of Mexico. 6. Similar factors to those related to the disappearance of RIAL motivated the gradual disappearance of PROSPEL. 7. Ronnie Lipschutz gives two basic reasons to justify the notion of global civil society conceived as “the self-conscious construction of networks of knowledge and action, by decentered, local actors, that cross the reified boundaries of states as though they were not there.” His reasons are: first, “that there is not one, but many heteronomous transnational political networks being established by and among actors within civil society who themselves are, in a sense, ‘imagined communities,’ and who are challenging and changing, from below the nation-state system”; and second, that “the growth of global civil society represents an ongoing project of civil society to reconstruct world politics” (Lipschutz 1996: 102). In this he agrees with Martin Shaw, who notes that what makes civil society global is “global politics” (M. Shaw 1994: 655). 8. An interesting element in this concept of transnational advocacy networks is the fact that although it is not reduced to NGO activists, they can bring together, in the final analysis, government functionaries, politicians, and the media in a linkage based on issues that transcend the divisions between civil society and government per se (Keck and Sikkink 1998). 9. “While the participants in the networks of global civil society interact with states and governments over particular policy issues, the networks themselves extend across levels of analysis and state borders, and are not constrained by the state system itself” (Lipschutz 1996: 104).

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10. Although we make use here of the traditional trilogy of state, market, and civil society, it can be pointed out, with implications for the global south, that the trilogy of state, market, and civil society has also been extensively criticized as coming from an ahistoric and culturally detextualized viewpoint that promotes a particular model of society based on Western concepts of democracy. As R. Trivedy and J. Acharya note: “In one sense, the trinity framework is an ideological expression of the globalisation of the market economy. In trying to undermine the positive side of the role of the state in the South, it undermines the sovereignty of less developed nations. In trying to subsume everything under the western-liberal notions of what is civil and democratic, it undermines local history, culture and alternative paths of development. In so far as it obfuscates the structural distinction between the social groups—classes, castes, ethnic groupings, gender differences and other dimensions and by submerging these differences under the rubric of civil society—it tends to undermine the povertyfocused and rights-based approaches which have been the avowed hallmark of many development agencies” (Trivedy and Acharya 1996: 58).

8 Latin America’s Foreign Economic Policy: Toward a Global South Framework Rita Giacalone

In this chapter I develop the notion that domestic businesses (and their interests) and transnational forces (embodied in ideas) should be incorporated into a framework of analysis of global south foreign economic policy (FEP). In the first section I review some attempts to integrate international relations (IR) and international political economy (IPE) made during the 1990s (see, e.g., Gourevitch 1996; Milner 1997; Legro 1996); compare the results (see, e.g., Norgaard 1996; Ikenberry 1990; Ikenberry and Kupchan 1993; Goldstein and Keohane 1993); and discuss others who put more emphasis on socialization, institutions, and ideas rather than on economics. I also outline a framework of analysis, which I apply to Latin American integration, Latin America being the global south region where integration is most advanced in the twentyfirst century. I conclude with a discussion of the possibility of applying a domestic and a regional level of analysis, constructed upon the basis of integration, to the foreign policy of other regions of the global south. Before reviewing the literature, I want to establish a definition of “foreign economic policy” and assess how it is different in the analysis of developed or developing countries. Also, I wish to consider the difference between IPE and FEP analysis in developing nations. If both realists and liberals see foreign policy as a response to characteristics of the international system (either to a state of anarchy or to the need to cooperate in an increasingly interdependent system), constructivists consider that foreign policy is internally motivated and a response to domestic factors. I accept the constructivist view but with the limitation that, in the case of developing nations, internal motivations and domestic power 125

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considerations are highly influenced by the need to cooperate in an increasingly interdependent system. Definitional Issues

Is it always necessary to distinguish between foreign policy in developed and developing nations? And, if so, what are the elements that establish the distinction? I consider foreign policy to be a tool devised by the national state, with the objective of achieving goals within a given international context. Governmental decisionmakers are important to the design and the implementation of foreign policy, but they cannot be totally responsible for its outcome; the influence of domestic groups, the level of economic interdependence, and/or the ideas and institutions involved can exercise diverse pressures and vary sharply within and without the nation. The main differences between the foreign policies of developed and developing nations are determined first by the quality of the resources employed to design and carry out policy. In this sense, we expect the foreign policy of developed countries to be better in quality and more likely to achieve its objectives, as it is devised by more qualified personnel who are exposed to a higher level of information. Developed nations also have more relative power to impose conditions during negotiations with other nations. Thus the difference does not rest so much on objectives or interests as on differential capacity to devise and apply certain tools to achieve goals. It is a difference of degree rather than content. Second, there is the impact of external forces on the economies of global south nations. Some scholars consider developing states to be weaker than developed nations vis-à-vis business interests. However, I do not assume any position regarding the relative strength of the global south state, because there are cases of developed nations in which business interests have been known to alter even security considerations and because a state may be weak internationally while strong domestically.1 Rather, my position is that whether a state is strong or weak is specific to the historical and cultural experience of each nation. Given that a good part of global south foreign policy deals with economic questions and that the impact of the international economy is always an important and unavoidable consideration, it may look as if IPE and foreign policy analysis are one and the same for these states. Such is not the case. Foreign policy analysis has a focus that is at the same time more specific (i.e., smaller) and more general (i.e., wider)

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than that of IPE. Its specificity rests on the need to look with more detail at the policies themselves, viewing them as the tools employed by domestic actors to achieve their IPE objectives. Its amplitude derives from the incorporation of elements of analysis that IPE is not concerned with, such as the bureaucratic aspects involved in the design and implementation of foreign policy. Accordingly, in this chapter I will treat foreign policy as a dependent variable, a tool designed by the state, with more or less input and participation from nonstate domestic actors but always conditioned by internal power configurations, in order to advance domestic goals. Because these goals in developing nations are heavily affected by outside economic considerations, IPE approaches will also be used whenever needed. Review of the Literature and a Framework for Analysis

Of the two explanations relevant to this discussion—one centered on ideas, institutions, and other cultural elements, the other on economic elements—I will start with the position that emphasizes culture over economics. In this regard, Alexander Wendt believes that people’s actions are organized according to collective meanings provided by their identities, from which originate their interests (Wendt 1992: 391). Whenever identities and interests are established as a stable set of rules, an institution is born. Accordingly, the institutionalization of an international process such as the signing of an agreement among nations is possible only when new visions of oneself and of the other are internalized by the collective national being (Wendt 1992: 417, 420–421). This argument, established upon the basis of the socialization of international actors, can be combined with an approach predicated upon the rationality of actors’ choices (Norgaard 1996: 31). Because human beings act intentionally and also reflect in every context, their preferences are molded by experience and cultural inheritance, but this does not mean the disappearance of interests. Even if people reflect, have intentions, and try to be cognitively consistent, sometimes they follow their own interests, predicated upon a narrow identity concept, and at other times they do not (Norgaard 1996: 38–39). Uncertainty also affects the capacity of the individual and collective to act as rational actors motivated by interests (or preferences) or as a socialized product.2 Institutions, be they formal or informal, give order to this chaos and help shape human interaction. For example, domestic national institutions are the result of previous power struggles; thus, once established, they are

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slow to change. They determine how power is shared internally in decisionmaking, so they have influence in establishing what set of preferences and what groups have access to the executive power (Norgaard 1996; also Milner 1997: 99). The impact of institutions is both static (they constrain the capacity of action) and dynamic (they help shape preferences). In summary, both rationality (shaped by interests/preferences) and cultural elements (such as ideas about oneself and the other) are social constructions developed within real life experiences, and as such they can be combined and elaborated in an approach aimed at explaining foreign policy (Norgaard 1996). For some constructivists, it is important to explore how and when a hegemon establishes its power among other nations (Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990: 283–284); only when the hegemon projects a set of norms (ideas) that are accepted by the leaders of other nations is hegemonic power possible. Thus socialization is easily achieved after periods of turbulence and international restructuring and when domestic power coalitions have been fragmented by legitimacy crises. The simultaneous processes of international and national instability create a propitious climate for a new process of socialization of the national leadership, meaning the acceptance of a new set of ideas. If elites are not receptive to these ideas, no socialization takes place. Even if ideas are assumed first by the masses, only when elites are socialized into them do they have the opportunity to be applied and institutionalized. However, we need to be cautious about the fixed character of the ideas adopted by the elite: after being transplanted to other nations, ideas go their own way and are transformed by the cultural milieu in which they develop (Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990: 294). As for the role of ideas in foreign policy, it is not a matter of ideas being more important than interests in explaining human interaction but rather that both have the same causative weight and cannot be discarded as elements of analysis (Goldstein and Keohane 1993: 3–4). Even if human beings act rationally to achieve their objectives, ideas matter because they help humans conceptualize their interests into preferences. Shared ideas and knowledge form the basis of decisionmaking whenever they can provide practical solutions to political problems. They do not need to be the “best” ideas but only the most apt to create new coalitions of interests around them, and they are usually adopted by political leaders if they can aggregate interests around them (Ikenberry 1993: 84; Garrett and Weingast 1993: 176). Thomas Risse-Kappen criticizes the focus on the role of ideas in foreign policy because “ideas do not float freely,” and there is no explanation of how and why decisionmakers accept certain ideas rather than

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others (Risse-Kappen 1994: 187). In Chapter 6 of this volume, Paul Adogamhe makes some comments that we can use to clarify this point. According to him, the character of the state depends upon the existing class structure within a nation. This does not mean that the political behavior of groups is inherent in their class position but rather that the state incorporates the values that predominate among the dominant classes in a historic moment. In this way, when making foreign policy decisions, the state is receptive to the cognitive inputs (ideas) of decisionmakers as well as dominant domestic groups. This last element takes us back to the question of the importance of economic interests in foreign policy analysis and to the IPE line of argument. In a study of the responses of developed nations to international economic crises, Peter Gourevitch (1993: 77) has isolated the mechanism of what he calls “the politics of political economy.” According to Gourevitch, every phenomenon of crisis at the international level, be it economic or military, negatively affects domestic actors and the compromises previously established between them and the state. In this way, there will always be some willing to defend the preexisting situation with the help of their links with intermediate associations (political parties, trade associations, informal networks, etc.) in order to get the state to produce economic policies in their favor. These policies will be viewed as positive or negative to their interests according to their ideological interpretation of what is happening. He sees five explanations for how certain economic policies are adopted in crisis situations: (1) the production profile, which underlies actors’ preferences in terms of their place within the national and international economy; (2) the role of intermediate associations in linking domestic actors’ preferences with state institutions; (3) the role of state structure or the centrality of formal institutions, bureaucracies, and legislation; (4) the economic ideology explanation that concentrates on perceptions, models, and values to interpret crisis situations and on preferences and actors’ behavior to determine policy decisions; and (5) the international system argument, which places in the forefront elements of the system of nations (security considerations, traditional alliances, etc.) rather than economic policy elements (Gourevitch 1993: 61–62). Besides encapsulating most of the existing interpretations of foreign economic policy from the point of view of IPE, Gourevitch (1996: 364–365) wonders what makes governments adopt certain foreign policies and abandon other options. For him the only possible way to answer these question is to disaggregate each nation into domestic groups that confront each other around matters of cost, benefit, and power. Moreover, groups interested in cooperating should look for common interests

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to face the opposers of a given policy. This not only applies to the domestic level but also can be carried out to explain international cooperation among nations, as the credibility and continuation of international agreements depend on the convergence of domestic interests and policies among member nations (Gourevitch 1996: 370). Thus there is the need to work with both IR and IPE approaches to understand foreign economic policy formation; in IR the rational choice approach has put emphasis on the process of interaction among nations while leaving out cultural components and the question of preference formation at the domestic level (Legro 1996: 118). Only in IPE studies does one find attention being paid to the preferences of domestic groups, firms, economic sectors, and the like; without this level of understanding of foreign policy, especially of an economic nature, explanations are rather incomplete (Legro 1996). At the same time, state behavior in foreign policy formation can reflect “the rational actions of governments constrained at home by domestic societal pressures and abroad by their strategic environment” (Moravcsik (1993: 474). Thus in order to overcome the partial equilibrium issue in two-level game analysis—the “second image” in which IR derives from domestic causes, and the “second image reversed” that has international causes impinging on domestic behavior—it is necessary to emphasize the causative interaction of both domestic and international factors (Putnam 1988: 430). With this background as our starting point, what adaptations can we make to design a framework of analysis of global south foreign economic policy? I start with Helen Milner’s (1997) model of two-level game analysis of foreign policy employing IPE elements because the explicit aim is to develop a theory of the interaction between domestic and international politics (Milner 1997). Moreover, her starting point is how and why nations cooperate with one another, which fits the idea of regional integration. She uses Keohane’s concept of cooperation as the adjustment of actors’ behaviors to the “actual or anticipated preferences of others, through a process of policy coordination” (Milner 1997: 7). In this sense, actors’ behavior is goal-directed and they receive, or expect to receive, gains from cooperation; the central argument is “that cooperation among nations is affected less by fears of other countries’ relative gains or cheating than it is by the domestic distributional consequences of cooperative endeavors. Cooperative agreements create winners and losers domestically; therefore they generate supporters and opponents” (Milner 1997: 9). To understand foreign economic policy making one needs to focus on how the game among domestic actors is played, and this game depends on three variables: domestic actors’ preferences, their

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distribution of information, and the nature of domestic political institutions (Milner 1997: 14). It is important to distinguish between policy preferences and interests: two or more groups can have the same policy preferences, but their interests can be different (e.g., consumers and businessmen backing an integration agreement). The same happens with nations: two or more can have the same policy preference, such as the signing of a cooperation agreement, but different interests. Thus no single set of interests, but a common set of policy preferences, determines a foreign economic policy of cooperation (Milner 1997: 36–37). Another point is the realization that rational policymakers choose a cooperation policy depending on the degree of openness of their economies (i.e., “the extent of integration between a country’s economy and the world economy”) and on the type of externalities that policy generates (i.e., “a country’s level of economic growth, employment, and/or inflation may depend critically on the behavior of other states, not just on its own policies”) (Milner 1997: 44). This functional relationship (among policy preferences, the openness of the economy, and the type of externalities generated) will not change even if the party in power changes. In this sense, IPE elements are important for understanding foreign policy decisions beyond ideological preferences of parties in government. If partisan orientation is important, it may be because of the weight it gives diverse objectives within a cooperation agreement (Milner 1997: 58–59). Thus international cooperation agreements may depend on the preferences of the domestic interest groups involved in the policy area (Milner 1997: 60). This dependence hinges on two factors: first, their shaping of the politicians’ preferences by means of the ability to contribute campaign funds or mobilize voters; and second, their provision of information to political actors who are not wholly aware of the consequences of their own policy preferences. This implies that involved domestic actors vary according to the policy area of cooperation and that domestic actors who dominate a certain issue area, even if their information is incomplete, will have a sound advantage to get a certain foreign policy approved. If interest groups involved in foreign policy vary according to the issue area, in foreign economic policy the factors of production are of central interest. Here Milner (1997: 86) introduces a new concept of the “endorser” of a specific foreign policy, meaning any domestic group, other than the executive, that signals its preferences for a foreign policy and usually has or is assumed to have more information about it. Milner recognizes four players: the foreign country with whom cooperation is being negotiated, and three domestic actors—the executive, the legislature, and

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domestic interest groups. All the players are utility maximizers and manage incomplete information, this last determining that in the presence of asymmetric information an international agreement is more likely with an endorser. Domestic interest groups and/or the endorser intervene mainly during the ratification stage, be it formal by the legislature or informal (i.e., by interest groups implementing the decisions taken). Regarding this point, our case study and the literature on global south regional integration support the notion that in most developing nations ratification by the legislature is of little importance (except in matters relating to border or military questions). At the same time, given the need for the executive to save face in front of voters, governments cannot risk having powerful domestic interests not implementing decisions taken; thus whenever possible, they would rather have their prior explicit or informal approval included in policy preferences visà-vis another state. Milner takes a specific look at the process leading to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This case is interesting because it helps clarify the fact that her model applies to the foreign policy analysis of developed polyarchic states rather than to that of global south nations. It is well known that the NAFTA negotiation began due to a Mexican initiative, and it was slowed down by the ratification process in the United States and in Canada. The Mexican government, however, had few or no problems with internal ratification once it got the approval and support of most major business associations and internationally oriented firms, especially from the northern border region. Thus the Mexican executive could discard any risk of opposition by the legislature, firmly controlled by the government party, unlike the situations in the United States and Canada. Even if government parties in those countries had control of the legislatures, opposition would have been an option given the polyarchic types of government prevailing there. The Mexican experience shows that in most developing countries without polyarchic governments the formal ratification process is not as important as the approval or endorsement of important domestic interests. In this way one of the three domestic actors included in Milner’s model—the legislature—loses importance to the point of disappearing in the analysis of a global south nation’s foreign economic policy. What elements provide the link between domestic business interests and the state apparatus in the process of foreign economic policy formation? To bridge the gap between the two, businessmen adopt ideas that support their interests and employ communication mechanisms to enhance their chances of winning over certain sectors of public opinion that impinge upon the government. Usually these ideas come from outside the

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global south nation, are seen as solutions to similar problems elsewhere, and, due to their acceptance in the academic community or their support by international actors, are relatively easily accepted by members of governments as well. Conversely, ideas may be adopted first by state actors and later by important business actors, or it may be a simultaneous process. After all, state and nonstate actors are affected by the same processes of uncertainty, lack of complete information, and cultural norms that help determine what ideas are more easily accepted and implemented within the existing institutional environment. When these observations were applied (by this author) to a case study of the process of negotiation of the free trade agreement of the Group of Three (G3, comprising Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela) in 1994, it was found that in those three countries business associations and governments perceived the 1980s as a critical period in which established patterns of relations among them were shaken or broken. The crisis had exacerbated internal divisions and the fragmentation of business associations, impeding the development of coherent or original proposals to solve the crisis. Ideas coming from abroad—castigating state intervention and praising the role of the private sector within the economy—were adopted in the public discourse of the associations even as internal dissensions and the loss of their channels of communication with the state apparatus (due to the changes taking place within the latter) weakened them. However, sectoral interests prevailed over ideas when business associations in Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela had to assume a position toward the G3 treaty.3 In spite of common fears and common ideas, national business associations in Colombia and Venezuela, which opposed the free trade treaty, failed to fulfill their intermediary role to negotiate consensus among diverse sectoral interests and the state (Giacalone 1999). If the three governments were responsible for initiating, maintaining, and successfully concluding negotiations on the treaty despite business associations’ opposition, what influenced those governments to engage in that particular foreign economic policy? Although the study never reached Gourevitch’s recommended level of disaggregation of each member nation into domestic groups supporting or opposing a policy, it was observed that the largest economic groups (more transnationalized and concentrated), such as Ardila Lule and Sindicato Antioqueño in Colombia, and Polar and most commercial banks in Venezuela, supported the government’s integration policy (Colombia) and/or benefited from it to the extent that existing trade and investment in each other was protected by the treaty (Mexico and Venezuela). This allows us to infer that the preferences of these largest economic

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groups—which do not need to act through business associations—were taken into consideration in the foreign economic policy adopted by the three governments. Our conclusion coincides with the view that during the 1990s different institutions—political parties, trade unions, and business associations—that had traditionally played a powerful intermediary role in relations between state and civil society lost influence in policymaking in Latin America. It also fits another claim that economic instability has provoked a more active level of business participation in the political process. This kind of behavior, however, does not assume the same shape everywhere. At least in the case of Mexico, it is not big business or multinationals—which can opt out and have more liquid assets ready to move—but medium businesses—which are more constrained by specificity to remain in activity within a country and less able to build links at the higher level of government—that make public their disagreement or support with a policy and resort to public opinion campaigns (Heredia 1991; Mizrahi 1992 and 1994; Viguera 1995). Large businesses with access to government do not follow this line of action. Our study confirms that whenever business associations publicly attempt to influence the outcome of a policy that has not yet been developed, it is, as the IPE literature suggests, because they are not in a position allowing them to exert pressure by other means. This coincides with the claim that influence in policymaking in Latin America is unseen because those who exert influence on a policy usually do not need to discuss it publicly. Indeed, they rarely do. Those who are more vocal in their opposition resort to public opinion campaigns because they perceive themselves as weaker than other domestic groups with opposing interests.4 Moreover, a policy of following the preferences of the largest economic groups with transnational links in order to launch an economic foreign policy based on exports may be rational for a government pressed by international forces and a sense of urgency to turn the domestic economy around. This seems to have been the case for the executive branches of Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela during the negotiation of the G3 free trade treaty. In outlining a framework of analysis for foreign economic policy in the global south, my starting point was the national level of analysis to deal with the question of negotiating regional integration schemes. But from that level I have built a second regional one that begins operating once an integration scheme achieves some measure of success or negative reaction. In this perspective, the independent variables are external ideas, embodying influences coming from the international environment, as well as the domestic interests of powerful groups within individual

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nations. When external ideas and domestic interests intersect in a positive way, they become translated into policy preferences about specific foreign economic policies, and in the case of regional integration, they manage to construct a second level of foreign policy making within the integration schemes created. I also accept cooperation among global south nations as the basic concept behind economic integration, but I suggest that, for understanding this cooperation, the two-level game should take into consideration two sets of actors for every nation participating in negotiations: the executive and business (understood as representing the associations that include the most important segments of the economy and/or the largest firms or economic groups). Most of the time, the second would act as an unofficial “endorser” of the negotiation before it begins or will shortly after manifest its support for the negotiation in order for it to be concluded and implemented at all. In this way, the foreign economic policy of a developing nation will incorporate the preferences of the most powerful domestic production groups. The linkage between business and the executive is usually provided by ideas influencing both actors, and most of these ideas come from beyond the national level. After seeing how this outline works when applied to regional integration experiences in Latin America during the 1990s, I will add elements that form a second (regional) level of analysis and assess its overall value for analyzing foreign economic policy in any other global south nation or group of nations. Latin American Regional Integration as Foreign Policy

Figure 8.1 represents an outline of the process already described at the national level. At the center of the process two actors—business and the executive—both under the influence or impact of external forces, shape ideas about how to deal with the economy in order to obtain expected goals or solve specific problems. The impact of external economic forces on global south nations usually comes together with a package of ideas that are the catalysts for converting domestic actors’ interests into policy preferences. Ideas may either cement consensus among actors or create profound ideological divisions among them. When powerful business groups and politicians in control of the executive coincide in their support for external economic ideas (as was the case in Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela at the beginning of the 1990s), they manage to constitute implicit coalitions and develop a foreign economic policy (such as a regional integration scheme) according to their preferences.

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Figure 8.1 Global South Foreign Policy: Domestic Level of Analysis

External Ideas

Domestic Interests: Business & the State History and Culture

Preferences

Foreign Economic Policy Regional Integration

If at any moment powerful domestic actors coincide in their opposition to external ideas or choose to support a different set of policy preferences, the process of formation of foreign economic policy will assume another orientation and other characteristics. However, we need to be cautious about the power of external ideas in the formation of global south foreign economic policy for central actors are socialized according to the set of norms and institutions that permeate the domestic environment in which they live. These elements are specific to a community and determined by its history, so it is risky to anticipate the adaptation that external ideas may suffer when seen through this prism. But at the same time, in most instances institutions and norms may also be the result of the external ideas previously adopted by a society. In this sense, they may help or hinder the adoption of the new ones. Additionally, in the case of global south nations, external influences of an economic nature are especially strong when they solved similar problems elsewhere, were accepted by academics, and were endorsed by a group of powerful actors in such a way as to make possible the formation of a coalition of support. In the case of regional integration, the ideas that influence domestic actors should be the same or similar for all member nations in order for a coalition of policy preferences to be constructed among them, even if their interests remain different. The process of regional integration in global south countries is a multilevel phenomenon originating from the impact of external economic changes and ideas upon important domestic actors. But once a regional scheme is put into operation, it generates new changes and ideas that impact the member nations domestically as well as externally. The domestic impact will determine the preference of actors for augmenting

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(or deepening) the process of integration if it is perceived as positively successful, or for changing or abrogating it if it is seen as negative to their interests. At the same time, the external impact will be stronger in nearby nations belonging to the same geographic region (Latin America, Southeast Asia, etc.), creating demands from the other nations either to enter into or negotiate special deals to widen the scheme if it is perceived as successful, or to circumvent and abolish it if it is considered as detrimental. Whenever domestic opposition coincides with efforts to abolish integration on the part of neighboring nations, and these sentiments are conveyed by important power elements, the regional scheme may disappear or fade away. If powerful supporting elements coincide at the domestic level and among neighboring nations, there will be a higher chance for the regional scheme to succeed (success being measured by a combination of achieving some of its goals and perpetuating itself across time). However, there is a third scenario, characterized by indifference at the domestic level and among neighbors that see no reason to adhere to or combat the scheme. In this case, the scheme is likely to survive over time, at least in a formal way, without being deepened or widened or altered at all, until the moment when a new coalition of support or opposition moves it into a new level of action. In Latin America, the experience of the Andean Pact during most of its life fits into this third scenario. How does this model perform when applied to Latin American regional integration experiences? In considering the overall importance of common ideas favoring such a foreign economic policy, we can see different packages of ideas at work during the formation of what has been called the “first generation” of integration schemes (the Latin American Free Trade Association, the Central American Common Market [CACM], the Caribbean Free Trade Area, the Caribbean Community [CARICOM], and the Andean Pact) and the “second generation” of integration schemes (the Southern Cone Common Market [Mercosur], the G3, and NAFTA). In the first, the main external influence came from a combination of the example of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the ideas sponsored by the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). These ideas helped determine the institutional organization and the reach of the schemes, even if they were adapted to diverse historical and cultural experiences. An example: CARICOM and the Andean Pact were established practically at the same time and under the influence of the same ideas and international economic environment, but they were modified by factors such as the high level of dependence of the Caribbean economies on Britain (when

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CARICOM was created in 1973, most of its members were still British colonies) and, in the Andean nations, by the historical pattern of state intervention in the economy reflected in more detailed regulations. In the first case, the reluctance of the British government to wholly follow the dictates of the EEC impacted CARICOM, whereas in the second the ideas of the ECLA favoring centralized and coordinated industrial planning were more important. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the formation of the second-generation schemes, the external economic environment of crisis and the package of ideas about how to deal with it were different from those of the 1960s and 1970s. All the Latin American and Caribbean nations were forced to deal with the need to adopt structural adjustment packages predicated on the ideas of the so-called Washington consensus in order to offset the negative impacts of high external debt and world recession on their domestic economies. Those ideas exalted the notion of opening up the economy to free trade to enable development based on export promotion and a stronger level of integration into the new global market. In this context, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) produced a package of ideas in the name of open regionalism that reevaluated the stagnant regional integration schemes (primarily the Andean Pact and CACM) and promoted new ones, in particular Mercosur. This time, however, ECLAC’s influence was secondary to that of economic ideas coming from outside the region, with the support of the international academic community as well as powerful multilateral organizations (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank). Peter Kingstone (1999) studied the process of domestic coalition formation around the need to achieve neoliberal reforms within the Brazilian economy. He illustrates the process through which reforms initiated by government officials at the executive level obtained the active support of business owners despite the costs incurred by this group, which was used to performing under strict protectionist conditions. According to Kingstone, the economic crisis of the 1980s ruptured relations between business and the state in Brazil, leaving politicians and business owners open to new strategies that made possible the crafting of a new coalition around a package of neoliberal reforms. Although Kingstone does not credit external ideas with having any impact on the process, the way he analyzes the behavior of business owners hinges around the notion of “working” ideas about how to solve the crisis situation. For example, he credits business owners with not being static, so they look backward and forward in time and make their own conclusions about the viability of change. If politicians in government also are actively looking for support

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for plausible solutions predicated upon external ideas sponsored by economists and multilateral agencies, the chance of businesses adopting them may be higher. The importance of the relationship between coalition formation and cultural or historical elements can be seen in the fact that, in order for the Brazilian business community to coalesce with the government around neoliberal economic policies, it needed the government to guarantee that it would fulfill its commitment to deal with the fiscal crisis and other related systemic economic problems (Kingstone 1999: 2–5). The experience of Brazil supports the finding that different coalitions may emphasize different aspects of economic liberalization depending on their interests (Solingen 1997: 72). At the same time, this example shows that a foreign economic policy of regional integration may be a policy preference supported by different domestic actors and nations for quite different reasons. A comment by R. McNamara (quoted in Crystal 2000: 17) also relates to the situation observed in Brazil: uncertainty may translate into temporary inaction by domestic business groups waiting for a credible solution by government. Even in this case, the proposed solution will still have to accommodate the policy preferences of business owners and their dominant economic ideas in order to be accepted as the basis for an explicit or implicit coalition. According to some claims, actors who experience uncertainty tend to adopt ideas accepted by other important actors if they do not have clear ideas of their own, because they consider them as “road maps” to get them closer to their preferences (Goldstein and Keohane 1993). After all, domestic actors see their interests and the possibility of achieving them through the lens of their interpretation of what is happening, why, and what can be done in a given context (Crystal 2000: 19). Preferences are submitted to a costbenefit analysis for determining the least costly course. Accommodating ideas sponsored internationally and domestically by other important actors may be less costly than fighting them, especially for large business groups that have more capacity to adapt to new environments (Crystal 2000: 23). Moreover, “societal preferences are not just inputs to politics; they themselves are the product of political processes” (Crystal 2000: 27). I might add that business preferences cannot be far away from the main ideas predominating within a society’s elite. If business owners and politicians are part of the same elite group, they will tend to share their interpretation of society and of plausible ways to deal with problems. In general, then, once the process of coalition formation around a foreign economic policy is put into motion domestically, its behavior follows the assumption that

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the beneficiaries of a change will try to continue and accelerate it, while the victims of the same change will endeavor to retard or halt it; . . . those that enjoy a sudden increase in wealth and income will thereby be enabled to expand their political influence as well . . . ; and . . . the likelihood grows that political entrepreneurs will devise mechanisms that can surmount the obstacles to collective action. (Rogowski 1989: 4–5)

In regard to Mercosur, the literature has recorded the way in which diverse business groups reacted to and/or profited from integration in all the four countries involved, as well as the importance of the most powerful economic groups in this process. Almost all the studies affirm that big exporters are free trade supporters (Milner, quoted in Crystal 2000: 9) and that inasmuch as the already largest firms are most likely to be able to implement the redeployment of assets and physical relocation necessary to reap fully the larger scale economies, political support for integration is expected from these firms; conversely, smaller firms will be less enthusiastic. (Frieden and Rogowski, quoted in Crystal 2000: 10)

The lack of importance of the formal ratification process can also be seen in Mercosur. Only in Uruguay was there heated debate in the legislature, but it did not elicit any measure of compromise by government or of change in the agreement. The exception to this trend was Chile: when ratification of its associate membership in Mercosur came up, parliamentary discussion was strong, and the agricultural sector was able to obtain concessions from the Chilean government by way of subsidies and other incentives. However, no change was made in the agreement. In this case, the high level of influence of this traditional sector, made up mainly of large landowners, as well as the need of the Eduardo Frei administration to maintain its domestic political support, explains the outcome. Historical reasons and cultural elements account for this exception. The process of accession of Chile, and a year later of Bolivia, to Mercosur demonstrates the impact of a regional integration scheme among neighboring countries when the scheme is perceived as successful. This perception was fostered by the considerable increase in the volume of intra-Mercosur trade and investment by 1996 and 1997. Chilean businessmen also needed to obtain the same treatment as nationals of Mercosur in order to participate in the process of privatization within Argentina. Figure 8.2 summarizes the elements of the regional level of analysis constituted by the process of integration (i.e., the ideas, impacts, and

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Figure 8.2 Global South Foreign Policy: Regional Level of Analysis

External Ideas

Integration Scheme

Feedback (Deepening)

Specific History and Culture

Neighboring Nations (Widening) Regional Foreign Economic Policy

A, B, and C: Business and the State

reactions it generates within member nations and neighboring countries). At this level, I think that the concept of reverberation aptly summarizes one of the major differences between the foreign economic policies of developed and global south nations: the former have a wider range of reverberation (i.e., of capacity to impact or affect other nations) compared with the latter. When foreign economic policies result in an integration scheme among a group of global south nations, this tends to generate more impact, but only in their surrounding environment. Additionally, there is the possibility that at this level a regional foreign economic policy may develop (see, e.g., in the case of the European Union, Tooze 1994: 76).5 According to our premises, this possibility is more limited in the case of global south nations, which exert less influence internationally. However, the processes of deepening and widening the agreements, and attempts to develop common positions in matters of external negotiations with the European Union and other external actors, point in that direction. This trend may be more limited due to the unstructured character of most global south agreements, which lack the element of supranationality. This hinders the possibility of disciplining a member nation reluctant to follow the guidelines of a regional foreign policy over its own domestic ones. At the same time, lack of supranationality may be determined by the weakness of these nations at the international level of action, for regional hegemons may support it when they are at the center of the regional integration scheme but oppose it if it means the constitution of an alternative power actor within the region. The experience of NAFTA also suggests that certain

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hegemons (such as the United States) oppose supranationality in all instances due to historical and cultural reasons inherent in their domestic experiences. Conclusion

In summary, economic interdependence has long been of paramount importance for global south nations—and became even more so following the external debt crisis of the 1980s—as a result of the need to negotiate loans from multilateral financial organizations. The influence of ideas sponsored by them can be seen in the considerable domestic changes taking place in Latin America since the mid-1980s, affecting the configuration of business and state. Dividing and weakening the former while concentrating and changing the internal composition of the coalition controlling the latter seem to have been the rule in Latin America. However, we observe the existence of business sectors strengthened by change (i.e., the largest economic groups with diversified assets, high level of capital concentration, and transnationalized relations). At the same time, internal changes in the state apparatus increased the interest of economic groups in influencing policymaking. But in order to do so, they ignored the established channels of pressure provided by fragmented business associations and acted without their mediation. Most of their action was not public because their economic power was an important consideration that state officers had to take into account in policymaking. Other reasons not to publicize their support exist: in some Latin American countries it may work against a policy to have the outspoken support of powerful domestic groups, and some groups do not have a tradition of resorting to public opinion. The case of the Consejo Mexicano de Hombres de Negocios is almost paradigmatic; this small group of some nineteen members never makes public any decision or activities, yet its members meet and have lunch with officials within the Mexican executive branch of government at least monthly (Mizrahi 1994). Could business have resorted to “no action” toward the state, inasmuch as the state was already under pressure from external ideas to implement policies that benefited them one way or another? I do not think so. International pressure, embodied in ideas about what is the right solution for an economic problem, is not enough to impose changes in economic foreign policy unless those changes are supported or assumed by domestic actors. Also, specific foreign policies have different economic and political impacts depending on the previous history

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of domestic interactions between business and the state. And I add that support and/or assumption of external ideas depend on the existence of some domestic business sector that might benefit from them and have access to and “receptivity” within the government. In this sense, business must be a necessary member of the dominant coalition in a global south nation if that nation is to adopt a foreign economic policy of integration. However, I hypothesize that the form business adopts in a coalition depends on its previous relations with the state as well as the changes affecting the latter. First, access and receptivity to business by the state are constructed during a period of relations between them so that their development becomes intertwined with domestic politics. Second, the type of state is a key consideration, because business groups would be reluctant to cooperate with state institutions that do not share at least some minimal ideological identification. Affinity may be secondary whenever the state, as in Mexico and Venezuela, controls domestic resources and regulatory power and may be the most important consideration in situations where strong domestic class threats exist, forcing businesses to compromise sectoral interests in support of an ideologically friendly government (Frieden 1991). An underlying conclusion about the intervention of the businessstate domestic coalition in economic foreign policy making, in the case of regional integration, is that “states are not, then, the only important actors in either a domestic or international context” (Underhill 2000: 9). To wonder why states have taken part in their own demise at the hands of nonstate actors, particularly those of the market, is irrelevant because “the market does not make any sense without the state . . . indeed the market was structured and enforced by the state” (Underhill 2000: 13, quoting Polanyi 1944). If the state-market relationship is reconceptualized as “a condominium, an integrated ensemble of governance, as opposed to two separate things with separate dynamics, a clearer picture emerges” of the transformation currently taking place, which reflects only “a changing balance of public and private authority” over time (Underhill 2000: 16). The implications of this concept need to be more fully understood in global south nations as they seek to address the dynamics of economic foreign policy making and the possibilities of regional integration. In conclusion, I started from the premise that foreign policy is a tool of the state affected by the interests of nonstate domestic actors and by pressures coming from the international environment, under the guise of ideas accepted by the state as well as important business groups. At the same time, external pressures are filtered by historical relations between the global south state and its domestic constituents.

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The final outcome, in terms of foreign policy, is the result of an accommodation of external pressures and domestic interests. Applying Geoffrey Underhill’s point of view, economic foreign policy will not be the result of the preferences of a supporting domestic coalition of business and the state but rather the manifestation of the changed economic and political balance within the state. This does not erase the role of external ideas as catalysts for converting state interests into state policy preferences, but it does erase the whole question of the diffusion of ideas within national elite groups (from business to state actors or vice versa, or a coincident influence upon both actors). Although this opens a very interesting area of research and discussion in IR, IPE, political science, and even economics, I think that the framework presented in this chapter is sufficient to understand the domestic and regional levels of analysis of foreign economic policy in Latin America; it can be modified as needed to incorporate more radical views of the relationship between the market and the state. Linking foreign policy analysis and IPE when studying regional integration in Latin America is a useful exercise, especially when analyzing critical situations in which economic change becomes important for business and the state and facilitates their acceptance of external ideas that provide plausible solutions. I accept that this may not be true under different conditions and in other types of foreign policy decisions. Employing the notion of foreign policy as a tool also facilitates an understanding of the pressures behind its formation and allows us to put aside the content of that policy and even the mechanisms of implementation. Thus in this chapter I dealt with only one dimension—that of economic foreign policy formation predicated upon cooperation, not conflict. Looking beyond Latin America, Etel Solingen (1997 and 1999) has applied a domestic coalitional perspective to explain the process of formation and evolution of the Association of South East Nations (ASEAN) cooperative regional framework, constructed originally by Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and later incorporating Brunei, Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar. (Cambodia became the last Southeast Asian country to join ASEAN, in 1999.) For Solingen, ASEAN is “a regional cluster of ‘internationalist’ coalitions that co-operate with one another to advance their grand strategy, encompassing domestic, regional, and international objectives” (1999: 31–32). The domestic internationalist coalitions usually group together exportintensive firms and sectors, large banking and industrial corporations involved in foreign trade, and even some export-oriented small business, with state agencies promoting economic reform and a diverse array of politicians, skilled workers, technocrats, and academics. In the author’s words:

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In the realm of economic co-operation, strong internationalist coalitions transfer their domestic programmes to the regional arena. Regional co-operative regimes emerge that serve the purposes of strengthening the international model at home while disabling its opposition, and lubricating external ties to the global political economy. The need to harmonize standards and legal and administrative infrastructures deepens the institutional links and interdependence among internationalist coalitions. They thus embrace trade-creating schemes that emphasize positive regional and global externalities compatible with “open regionalism.” (Solingen 1999: 34)

Thus Solingen’s approach incorporates the two elements of the domestic coalition I consider necessary for the establishment of a foreign economic policy of regional integration among global south nations (business, whatever its form, and the state, or at least the executive). She also states that “where internationalist coalitions are feebler at home and threatened by backlash coalitions in the region, the quality of co-operation is more likely to erode in response to these domestic and regional threats” (Solingen 1999: 47). This fits my observation that for a regional integration arrangement to succeed, the sustained presence in power of the domestic coalitions of support is necessary; also, no important efforts for abrogating or changing it should be made by neighboring nations. In sum, this chapter has made several points. First, the analysis of foreign economic policy of Latin America or the global south as a whole can usefully begin from approaches created to deal with the experience of developed nations; however, these approaches need to be refined in order to account for the differences between the two types of nations. Second, analysis needs to take into consideration two independent variables: external ideas and the interests of powerful domestic business actors. Third, once ideas and interests intersect to construct preferences for certain foreign policies, the process develops a momentum of its own, which is affected by the historical and cultural experiences of the nation or group of nations involved. Fourth, the foreign economic policy of a global south nation, or group of nations, usually does not reverberate outside the region. Notes

1. See Chun-Tsung Chin (2000) for a study of the way in which U.S. firms managed to change U.S. security provisions impeding the export of dualpurpose goods and technologies. 2. J. Crystal (2000) develops the main lines of the debate about the concepts of interests, preferences, and strategies. For our interpretation, it is

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enough to say that interests may be presupposed from an actor’s place in the economy, but preferences are more a political than an economic construction, in the sense that they match what a group wants with what it can achieve given certain political and cultural conditions. Strategies and preferences may or may not be the same thing, but for purposes of this work there is no need to go further into them. 3. In the case of Mexico, the G3 was unimportant in comparison with the simultaneous negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and so it did not generate either open support or rejection in the business community. 4. This behavior has also been documented in a case study of European firms (Alt et al. 1999). 5. For R. Tooze (1994: 76), in the European Union two levels of foreign economic policy are visible: one dominating relations among member nations of the union, in which domestic politics predominate, and another one when the organization negotiates with extraregional countries. In the latter case, domestic political considerations of the member nations seem to have less relevance than an orientation and rationality of action that can be called “regional.”

9 Making Room for the Smallest States Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner

In Chapter 2, which contains a review of relevant empirical works, the focus on size as an explanatory variable was noted, with the caveat (see note 6 in that chapter) that the literature is sometimes rather confusing as to what is meant by “size.” Although some have used the more common population measure (e.g., East 1973b), others (e.g., Salmore and Hermann 1970) have used economic measures such as gross domestic product. Moreover, in the past some researchers (see, e.g., McGowan and Klaus-Gottwald 1975) have used “small” and “developing” interchangeably, whereas others (including Rosenau 1966) specifically recognized the existence of small-sized developed as well as developing countries. Despite early promising empirical findings that smaller states were less participatory, more focused on international and regional organizations, and more inclined toward high-risk behavior based on limited information (see East 1973a and 1973b), the utility of using size to explain foreign policy behavior was questioned, first, because strict categorizing and dichotomizing (“large-small”) was empirically and theoretically problematic, and second because other characteristics of states more often than not mediate between size and foreign policy behavior. Although most researchers have, at least, separated states not only by size but by level of development, this still leads to very broad explanations of behavior. For example, as shown in Table 9.1, the distribution of population across the globe is highly skewed: China and India with more than 1 billion people are distant outliers, whereas the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and 147

Table 9.1 Distribution of World Population in 2000 (in thousands)

Above 1 billion 1 China 2 India

120 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

50 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

30 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

10 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

million–1 billion United States Indonesia Brazil Russian Federation Pakistan Bangladesh Nigeria Japan

million–120 million Mexico Germany Vietnam Philippines Turkey Ethiopia Iran (Islamic Rep.) Egypt (Arab Rep.) Thailand United Kingdom France Italy Congo (Dem. Rep.)

million–50 million Ukraine Korea (Rep.) Myanmar South Africa Colombia Spain Poland Argentina Tanzania Canada Algeria Kenya

million–30 million Sudan Morocco Afghanistan Peru Uzbekistan Venezuela (RB) Nepal Korea (Dem. Rep.) Iraq Malaysia Romania

1,261,100 1,015,923 281,550 210,421 170,115 145,542 138,080 129,754 126,910 126,770 97,966 82,150 78,523 75,580 65,311 64,298 64,015 63,819 60,728 59,739 58,850 57,679 51,390

49,600 47,275 45,611 42,801 42,299 39,450 38,650 37,032 33,696 30,735 30,399 30,057

29,677 28,705 26,550 25,661 24,650 24,170 23,920 23,620 23,264 23,260 22,435

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Uganda Saudi Arabia Sri Lanka Ghana Australia Mozambique Yemen (Rep.) Syrian Arab Republic Côte d’Ivoire Netherlands Madagascar Chile Cameroon Kazakhstan Angola Ecuador Zimbabwe Cambodia Guatemala Burkina Faso Cuba Malawi Niger Mali Yugoslavia (Fed. Rep.) Greece Czech Republic Belgium Zambia Hungary Portugal Belarus

5 million–10 million 79 Somalia 80 Tunisia 81 Senegal 82 Sweden 83 Dominican Republic 84 Rwanda 85 Bolivia 86 Bulgaria 87 Austria 88 Azerbaijan 89 Haiti 90 Chad 91 Guinea 92 Switzerland 93 Burundi 94 Hong Kong, China 95 Honduras 96 Tajikistan 97 Benin 98 El Salvador 99 Israel

22,063 20,723 19,360 19,200 19,195 17,620 17,507 16,110 15,950 15,919 15,523 15,211 15,085 14,865 12,717 12,646 12,112 12,021 11,385 11,274 11,234 11,042 10,848 10,840 10,616 10,560 10,273 10,252 10,089 10,022 10,010 10,006

9,711 9,580 9,530 8,869 8,558 8,508 8,329 8,167 8,098 8,052 7,959 7,694 7,415 7,180 6,807 6,798 6,485 6,335 6,284 6,276 6,233

(continues)

Table 9.1 continued

100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154

Libya Paraguay Georgia Slovak Republic Denmark Lao PDR Finland Nicaragua Sierra Leone Kyrgyz Republic Jordan Turkmenistan Papua New Guinea Togo Norway Croatia Lebanon Moldova Eritrea Singapore Bosnia and Herzegovina Puerto Rico New Zealand Armenia Ireland Lithuania Costa Rica Central African Republic Albania Uruguay Liberia West Bank and Gaza Congo (Rep.) United Arab Emirates Panama Mauritania Jamaica Latvia Mongolia Oman Lesotho Macedonia (FYR) Slovenia Kuwait Namibia Botswana Estonia Trinidad and Tobago Gambia Gabon Guinea-Bissau Mauritius Swaziland Guyana Fiji

5,540 5,496 5,460 5,402 5,340 5,216 5,180 5,044 5,031 4,933 4,887 4,841 4,807 4,670 4,492 4,460 4,328 4,264 4,097 4,018 3,923 3,920 3,831 3,827 3,794 3,698 3,650 3,597 3,411 3,337 3,130 2,945 2,936 2,905 2,856 2,669 2,620 2,417 2,398 2,395 2,154 2,031 1,988 1,984 1,740 1,602 1,435 1,301 1,286 1,237 1,207 1,186 1,045 863 810

155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207

Bhutan Cyprus Bahrain Djibouti Qatar Comoros Equatorial Guinea Macao, China Solomon Islands Cape Verde Luxembourg Suriname Malta Brunei Bahamas Iceland Maldives Barbados Belize French Polynesia Netherlands Antilles New Caledonia Vanuatu Samoa St. Lucia Guam Channel Islands São Tomé and Principe Mayotte Virgin Islands (U.S.) Micronesia, Fed. Sts. St. Vincent and the Grenadines Aruba Tonga Grenada Kiribati Seychelles Isle of Man Dominica Northern Mariana Islands Antigua and Barbuda Andorra American Samoa Bermuda Greenland Marshall Islands Faeroe Islands St. Kitts and Nevis Cayman Islands Liechtenstein Monaco San Marino Palau

World (Total)

805 766 690 660 585 558 454 442 442 441 438 415 382 328 302 281 276 268 255 234 217 213 200 169 156 155 149 149 145 121 118 115 101 100 98 91 81 75 73 72 68 67 65 63 56 52 45 41 35 32 32 27 19

6,054,431

Source: World Bank. 2001. World Development Indicators. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Includes dependent territories.

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Japan form a second layer of states with populations above 120 million. And though size would not be a sufficient differentiating characteristic to explain the variations in behavior between the United States and China or between Nigeria (population 126.9 million) and France (population 58.9 million), within the subcategory of developing nations, size considerations do suggest some broad distinctions that may have theoretical significance. China and India certainly have stood out in their role as world players and third world leaders. The more populous developing states in the second and third layers also tend to be seen as more important by the developed nations and see themselves as occupying key positions in the region and the globe. Many of these nations are assigned the role of “middle powers” in the international relations literature and are analyzed from a realist or modified realist perspective (see, e.g., the discussion in Chapter 1 on this issue). However, beyond these broad perspectives, it is difficult to find commonalities among the developing nations on the basis of size alone. This is even more so when we look at the bulk of the world’s “small” territories, about 129 (105 independent), which have populations below 10 million, a reasonable upper limit for a small state given that the top states of the world have more than 1 billion people. Thus, apart from the distinction between developed and developing, there is a need for much greater detail in the search for explanatory categories that can be used to understand small states’ behavior. With some exceptions (e.g., Libya), these states are generally too small to be power-seeking in the traditional realist sense. Domestic social, economic, and political conditions vary among them, as do levels of international interaction. Instead of taking such an expansive but theoretically questionable view of small states, this chapter focuses on states whose small-size status is recognized by the global community as engendering special security, environmental, or economic difficulties. No fixed population limits need be given, but an assessment of the international policy literature suggests that these are states that have populations of no more than around 4 million, with most below 2 million. Most of these countries are Pacific and Caribbean island territories, but some are small continental states in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (see Tables 9.1 and 9.2). Overall, there are about forty independent states of the world in this low-population category. From a purely policy perspective, these states have long posed peculiar dilemmas for the international community. Although the fortunate few among these countries have key natural resources such as oil, most are not so well endowed and are highly dependent on external sources of assistance. To some large states, they

Table 9.2 Identification of Small States by Some International Community Agencies Commonwealth Secretariat a

Caribbean Antigua and Barbuda Bahamas Barbados Belize Dominica Grenada Guyana St. Kitts–Nevis St. Lucia St.Vincent and the Grenadines Trinidad and Tobago Jamaica

South Pacific Fiji Kiribati Nauru Solomon Islands Tonga Tuvalu Vanuatu Western Samoa Papua New Guinea

Africa Botswana Gambia Lesotho Swaziland

Indian Ocean Maldives Mauritius Seychelles

Asia Brunei

Members of Alliance of Small-Islanda Developing States (AOSIS)b Antigua and Barbuda Bahamas Barbados Belize Cape Verde Comoros Cook Islands Cuba Cyprus Dominica Fiji Federated States of Micronesia Grenada Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Jamaica Kiribati Maldives Malta Marshall Islands Mauritius Nauru Niue Palau Papua New Guinea Samoa Singapore Seychelles São Tomé and Principe Solomon Islands St. Kitts and Nevis St. Lucia St. Vincent and the Grenadines Suriname Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tuvalu Vanuatu

Notes: a. The listing of Commonwealth States is from Commonwealth Secretariat. 1985. Vulnerability: Small States in the Global Society. London: Commonwealth, p. 10. Includes former British colonies only. Non–third world Cyprus and Malta were also included in the study. b. The following are observers in AOSIS: American Samoa, Guam, the Netherlands Antilles, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

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are important only for their numbers, which makes them useful as bloc supporters at the United Nations and elsewhere. But the governments and people of these states expect to be granted the same rights and privileges granted to all sovereign states. Most seek to participate in international fora on equal terms to their larger counterparts. In this chapter, I do not focus on the details of these countries’ foreign policies. Instead, in keeping with the theme of this book, I focus on some relevant conceptual issues—first the global and academic debate about the status of these small states, and second the development of a simple model for understanding their foreign policies. Very Small Size and the Global Debate With the independence in the 1960s and 1970s of states that would in other eras have been considered too small to be self-determining, the global debate on the effects of size was accelerated. In the early 1970s, the policy community expended some effort trying to define what a “small” state was. A consensus of sorts existed over a cutoff of 1 million (see, e.g., Rapoport, Muteba, and Therattil for UNITAR 1971), though some analysts added subcategories of ministates/microstates (e.g., Blair in a 1968 Carnegie Endowment study; Plischke 1977 for the American Enterprise Institute). Beyond the mere definitions, the common thread in these works was the perspective that the independence of states of small size, though rational in the context of the principle of self-determination, presented a legal and political dilemma. The concern was whether these states were “viable” sovereign units: Could states of such small size survive economically without considerable injections of foreign aid? In the foreign policy realm, could states of this small size and limited resources properly assume the responsibilities of global diplomacy, that is, could they finance protocol trappings, attend and participate actively in global conferences, and vote in an informed manner on global matters? Clearly, the answer to these questions was “barely.” But more important, the debate implied a prescriptive question: Should they? Should they, for example, be given the same rights in the United Nations as the more powerful states? Should they be expected to have full and equal participation in global affairs? This 1960s and 1970s debate about viability was based largely on prevailing perceptions of sovereignty, hence the focus on defining size and questioning the sovereignty of small states. For if sovereignty The Policy Debate

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implied equality, these states were really only quasisovereign, and they could justifiably be treated unequally. This was the approach implied in some of the policy suggestions that emerged during this period. Elmer Plischke (1977: 24), for example, concluded that small states should not be granted “full status and rights in the councils of the collective global community” and they should not participate in the “broader international conferences, organizations and affairs,” dealing with matters “distant to their national interest.” In other words, these states’ interests were necessarily limited, and there was no reason for them to become involved in the councils of the larger powers. This narrow view occasionally still resurfaces in suggestions such as Elliott Abrams’s (1996: 86–92) that small Caribbean states, not being “viable,” should enter into protective arrangements of one sort or another with the United States. It was really the passage of time and community socialization that attenuated this debate. Despite lingering doubts, by the mid-1970s the “viability” perspective in international discourse had given way, under the sheer force of the decolonization regime, to a focus on the effects of neocolonialism and dependence. Neocolonialism was not a size-related phenomenon: it was a common bond among all developing countries. Thus beginning in the early 1970s, the developing countries turned their attention from decolonization to the development-related distortions engendered by colonial policies, as well as to the need to correct imbalances in the international economic system. The economic debate on injustice was diffused to the political sphere (i.e., to concerns about intervention by the North in global south affairs) and to the social sphere, leading to differing North-South positions on a range of ecopolitical issues such as population, food, environment, information, and other global issues. In effect, small state problems became absorbed into the overarching North-South conflict. In the mid-1980s, the disparate strands of the discourse on the special situation of small developing states were brought together in an important public policy study done for the Commonwealth Secretariat (1985). By then, the notion of “vulnerability” had taken center stage, replacing the issue of viability. The Commonwealth study was undertaken at a time when most small states were reeling under difficult economic conditions, Cold War–related ideological and political difficulties, and new social assaults in the form of environmental problems, narcotics trafficking, and increased crime and poverty. The authors summed up the special vulnerabilities of small-sized states, focusing on the problems of Commonwealth states located in the Caribbean, South Pacific, Africa, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and Asia (Brunei only). The small state was seen as inherently vulnerable to intervention—“a potentially

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easy victim for external aggression in all its guises”—and economically weak as a result of undiversified economic structures, a narrow resource base, relative openness, high infrastructural costs, remoteness, high dependence on external trade, vulnerability to the forces of nature, and limited access to external financing (Commonwealth Secretariat 1985: 15, 21–22). All of this added up to various threats to territorial security, threats to political security, internal security, and economic development (Commonwealth Secretariat 1985: 23–33). The task, then, was to define appropriate strategies to address these problems. Beginning in the late 1980s and accelerating with the end of the Cold War, the debate on size and international behavior took yet another path. To match the new challenges posed by globalization and liberalization, the discourse turned to issues of competitiveness, efficiency, and countermarginalization. Small-sized states—with small markets, undiversified economies that are often disrupted by environmental and market hazards, and diseconomies of scale—face peculiar challenges to their economic and environmental survival in a more competitive world. For many, new free trade norms are a threat to vital preferential trading arrangements, size limits the possibilities of diversification of production and markets, and external aid has become scarcer and subject to more conditions. Politically, small states can be as easily democratic as autocratic, but even when espousing democracy, there is an inherent tendency toward personalism and oligarchy in societies where one or a few persons can easily exert control over a limited geographical space. For some, rigid systems and institutions of governance are out of step with today’s need for technocratic expertise, civil society participation, and transparency in governance. The need to develop both domestic and external strategies to deal with these and the widening range of global issues are perceived as very basic “survival” issues by small states in the 2000s. Drawing from (and also influencing) these policy issues, academics developed two broad conceptual approaches to the foreign policy of the small state over the years: the great power/external influence approach and the dependency/political economy approach. As these approaches have already been discussed in terms of their third world applicability in Chapter 2, there is no need here to describe them in detail except to identify their particular relevance for the small state. Early on, scholars of small states were preoccupied with external influences, to the point of questioning whether the smaller of these A Matching Academic Debate

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states even had the autonomy to conduct foreign policy. Some saw these states as constrained by the systemic environment and reactive to systemic events rather than having the capacity to initiate any type of behavior (see, e.g., Braveboy-Wagner 1983). Vaughan Lewis, for example, argued that the focus of debate had to be “whether in acting as a formally sovereign unit at the level of engaging in necessary relationships in the international environment, the state finds that it possesses sufficient instruments from its ‘sovereignty arsenal’ to cope with the complexities of that environment” (Lewis 1976: 229). These ideas complemented the analyses of developed state scholars who tended to view small states as very weak (Singer 1972), acquiescent (Rosenau 1980), and incapable of affecting the pattern of world politics in any significant way. Yet even though the external environment was and remains clearly important as a constraint on small-state behavior, it lost ground as an explanation of behavior when the third world as a whole began to articulate clear independent global stances in the 1970s. At that time, even a number of very small states experimented with some form of economic and political nationalism and foreign policy independence. By then, the dependency thesis had emerged out of Latin America, with reformist and radical solutions being proffered (e.g., Raúl Prébisch and colleagues at the Economic Commission for Latin America 1973; Frank 1967; and others). As discussed in Chapter 2, the dependent state literature in foreign policy in one sense emphasized the limits of choice for dependent states (e.g., Richardson and Kegley 1980) but in another (Moon 1983 and 1985) emphasized consensual possibilities and counterdependence strategies (Biddle and Stephens 1989). More complex political economy approaches focused on the relations between internal and external forces and their effect on foreign policy. For example, Holge Henke (2000) argued—based on the Jamaican experience—that dependent state foreign policy might best be viewed as “a systemic process that entails fundamental functional incompatibilities within and between diverse national and international social actors who, according to their position within the structures of capitalist production, adopt policies which give this systemic process its dialectical character” (Henke 2000: 4). For him, dependent state foreign policy evolves from the “contending priority interests of social forces of which the bourgeoisie usually has the ideological and political hegemony” (Henke 2000: 6). Thus foreign policy positions are determined by the degree of a state’s autonomy, which is in turn dependent on a matrix of relationships between the interests of the local bourgeoisie and those of international capital. State autonomy is limited in cases where the local bourgeoisie and international capital have common

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interests, and it is relative if both forces are indifferent or the local bourgeoisie wants to pursue a policy that is against the interests of international capital. It may be noted that approaches based on dependency and state autonomy take the intellectual debate away from the impact of size per se into a wider realm that covers a much larger number of states. But clearly, very small states are much more likely to be highly dependent and, as a result, to experience reduced autonomy in decisionmaking. In other words, as one policymaker put it, “the real problem [is] not the question of smallness per se but that . . . on a day-to-day basis we come up against an international system that is organized and geared towards ensuring the continuing domination of our economies, our countries, and our peoples” (quoted in Bartilow 1997: 82). However, explanations focused solely on the nature of structural dependence have tended to have rather limited explanatory power both in terms of states’ domestic policy and of foreign policy behavior. Alberto Van Klaveren has rightly suggested that “the foreign policy decisionmaking processes of most countries of the world are strongly affected by external events more as a consequence of the permeability of the modern state than of structural dependency” (Van Klaveren 1996: 40; emphasis added). Certainly, as interdependence has increased, almost all nation-states have become permeated states, though small states are especially unable to keep out external influences. The interesting question has become how states manage this permeability rather than whether it exists and whether it fosters economic, political, and cultural (inter)dependence. Indeed, it is proposed here that more than dependence, the concept of vulnerability that gained currency among academics in the late 1970s and 1980s—described as essentially a by-product of asymmetrical interdependence (Keohane and Nye 1977)—is particularly useful in assessing the foreign policy options and behavior of very small states. By “vulnerability,” I do not infer a narrow realist notion of challenged sovereignty and security, and neither is vulnerability equated simply with economic dependence; rather it is a broader materially, historically, as well as cognitively defined attribute that plays a major role in determining foreign policy stances. All states are vulnerable to some degree, but for small states vulnerability is a defining characteristic.1 Conceptualizing Small-State Foreign Policy

Vulnerability, then, is a key attribute of small states, one with behavioral implications (note that in a small state, foreign policy is even more

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closely intertwined with domestic policy than in the rest of the world). All small states share common vulnerabilities already outlined: small undiversified economies, risks of isolation, excessively permeable territories and societies, openness to external influences and dominance, and so on. But of course, each state’s level and type of vulnerability depend on (1) objective material and structural considerations (the particular combination of size, ecology, resources, societal structure, and political structure); (2) the nature of (both historical and current) relations between the state and the world (including the nature of the international system, as well as relations with larger nations and with international institutions); and (3) the (changeable) worldviews of small state decisionmakers and influencers and their perceptions of self and of their states’ capabilities, and regional and global roles. Thus, just looking at the first and second points alone, Brunei and the Bahamas may have similar numbers of people but have entirely different “vulnerability profiles,” with the Bahamas (as a nation of many islands) more concerned about territorial permeability, economic progress, and U.S. dominance, with a foreign policy to suit, whereas wealthy Brunei may feel relatively secure in most areas and prefer a foreign policy oriented toward being treated equally by its neighbors in Asian affairs. Regarding the three factors outlined as impacting on or defining “vulnerability,” the first is material, the third relational, and the second—the cognitive and perceptual—is most important in determining the actual choices of strategies undertaken by decisionmakers. Thus the first question we need to ask in assessing small-state foreign policy is, What is the particular vulnerability profile of the small state? It is important to note that objective vulnerability does not necessarily infer subjective (i.e., perceptual) vulnerability. For some decisionmakers, vulnerability does not place undue limits on behavior; for others it does. For some it is not unduly limiting, but still it may be preferable to have publics believe that it is so that certain policies (e.g., unpopular liberalization policies) can be more easily implemented. Again, some decisionmakers are not particularly anxious for their countries to play a global role; for others, international visibility is important not least because it enhances their own sense of personal worth. Whether authoritarian or democratic, the small-state decision structure tends to be quite focused. I use the phrase “decision structure” in a broader sense than is usually the case, because in third world states— and small ones in particular—the influential elite is small, at the top of a pyramidal societal structure; the decision structure should include not only those who make the decisions but also those relatively inbred sectors who influence it. The governing unit (usually the cabinet) is not

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necessarily very small in these countries. But those who actually influence the leadership’s ideas and choices (in both positive and negative ways) are quite few, including informal as much as formal advisers, key stakeholders (usually business leaders), and academics. In other words, the size of the state tends to produce a governance structure that is socially and politically more personal and more nuclear than that of larger states. Also given the small size of these societies, the governors and their policies tend to have a more direct and less diffuse impact (positive or negative) on their publics. Finally, in small states, governors and governed generally share basic cultural and value systems, though this will be moderated in ethnically or socially polarized societies. In general, in small states social pressures reduce the impact of alternative value systems and styles. At the same time, in small states, elite ideas are more easily disseminated, and as a result the leadership may also have an easier time persuading and manipulating key societal constituencies to conform to and adopt their personal or ideological perspectives on the world. All this means that in evaluating foreign policies (as well as domestic policies) it is important to identify key decisionmakers and influencers to determine their perspectives and ideologies. It is also important to be knowledgeable about the overall values and norms of the society. Although this is applicable as well to other countries, it is especially important in small states where bureaucrats occupy a relatively subservient role, and oppositional groups may have difficulty not so much in being heard but in actually influencing the predominant elites. This key role of decisionmakers’ views has been pointed out by some dependent state theorists who have found that the objective aspects of what we are calling “vulnerability” may sometimes lead to an outcome of acquiescence or compliance and, at other times, to an outcome of counterdependence. Thus Jeanne Hey (1994), for example, in her study of Ecuadoran foreign policy, found that dependency does not automatically result in one or the other type of behavior (consensual, compliant, or counterdependent). Rather, she finds, behavior varies by issue area and by the primary leader’s ideological orientation. We can substitute “vulnerability” for “dependency.” In sum, the second important question to ask in assessing small-state behavior is, Who are the decisionmakers, what individuals and segments of the society influence them, and what do all these think? If small-state foreign policy tends to be oriented toward overcoming or coping in some way with the state’s vulnerabilities, behind it all is the constant striving to be seen and heard in the international community. As the early literature found, most small states find solace in the

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regional arena, where they are treated more equally, and in the United Nations, with its one-state, one-vote principle and its facilitation of global networking and discussion. Beyond this, a standard strategy of small states, used to increase their voice and visibility, is coalitionbuilding or coalition-joining. These basic multilateral strategies are accompanied by a continuous search to preserve, strengthen, and find bilateral partnerships, usually partnerships that are the legacy of history or geography. On the “output” side, therefore, a foreign policy framework for analyzing small states’ behavior and activities should ask three pertinent questions: What dominant bilateral relations exist and why? What regional arrangements are in place? And what larger coalitions or organizations are tapped for support? For example, among small states, Jamaica has been the subject of a fair amount of research, most of it focused on the era of socialist-leaning Michael Manley. Almost all analysts of that period (e.g., Stephens and Stephens 1986; Henke 2000; Persaud 2001) have taken a statist approach to both domestic and external policy, looking at the relationship between domestic state, class, and social forces and external forces, to elucidate the level of state autonomy and therefore the potential for counterdependent or counterhegemonic policymaking. But before the Manley era, the most significant work done on Jamaican foreign policy used the elite attitudinal approach to assess the values and ideologies of the main decisionmakers (Bell 1977–1998; Bell and Gibson 1978). From what has been said in this chapter, it should be clear that both political perspectives can be incorporated to develop a fuller understanding of a country’s foreign policy. Attempts to overcome Jamaica’s economic vulnerability have been at the heart of Jamaican foreign policy, whether today or in the Manley era. The economy has suffered successive crises attributable to a lack of diversification, dependence on volatile external markets (including the tourist market), fluctuations in capital inflows, and currency problems. There is regularized ecological vulnerability to hurricanes and floods. In the relational sphere, historical dominant-dependent relations with Britain have been supplanted by excessive reliance on aid and trade with the United States, which sometimes generates pressures on Jamaica’s sovereignty (threats of decertification for inadequate drug cooperation are a constant example). Excessive reliance on the international financial institutions have also taken their toll on Jamaica’s sovereignty. Globalization has only added to these problems. How Jamaica has dealt with these vulnerabilities at any point in time has depended not so much, as some would suggest, on the type of regime (which has always been democratic in form) or on society as a whole

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(the public that is attentive to foreign policy issues is small) but on the attitudes, ideologies, and perceptions of the leadership and the influential members of key segments of society, especially business and union leaders, who sometimes draw on the ideas and support of regional and global counterparts. Though structural conditions in Jamaica do not change very much, and though there is continuity in the basic conduct and embedded social and political values that underlie foreign policy, leaders’ changing attitudes (including a change by Manley himself from a socialist to pragmatist stance) have resulted in a number of changes in foreign policy strategies over the years. But many of these changes have been variations on the same theme of coalition-building and participation, with the intention of extracting tangible gains of one sort or the other—whether at the regional level through the Caribbean Community or the third world level through the Group of 77, the International Bauxite Association, or, more recently, the Alliance for Small Island Developing States (AOSIS). Overall, the urge to be heard and be respected is a key component of Jamaica’s foreign policy and is generally reflected in a drive to distinguish itself as the key Caribbean player in regional, hemispheric, and global forums. Conclusion

Just as the smaller nations of the North (Austria and Switzerland, Iceland, Malta, Luxembourg, Andorra, Liechtenstein, and others) have historically tried to devise neutralist, cooperative, and other appropriate roles for themselves in their region and in the world, the very small states of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Central America, and the Caribbean have sought to counter the ever-looming possibilities of marginalization and vulnerability and to carve out some suitable space for themselves in the international community. Although some may see their efforts as merely negative—drawing down on other countries’ resources—they themselves also seek positive and equal participation in the business of international affairs. Conceptually, they form a bloc of almost 25 percent of the world’s independent nations, sharing common traits that make it quite appropriate to analyze them collectively for certain purposes. By seeing their foreign policy as intended to secure the resources needed to overcome or reduce various key vulnerabilities resulting from size, we can readily understand their main bilateral and multilateral strategies. A “vulnerability” approach is able to accommodate both “traditional” approaches to small-state foreign policy—the external pressure and the political economy perspectives. An assessment of these

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naturally forms part of each country’s vulnerability profile. But knowing a country’s weaknesses is only one part of the picture: states respond in different ways to the fact of vulnerability. Only by looking at the decisionmakers themselves—their views, their preferences, and their values— can the analyst understand variation in responses to similar situations. In this sense, the analysis in this chapter concurs with Paul Adogamhe’s analysis regarding African foreign policy (see Chapter 6). Although structural configurations are a key part of the analysis of developing state foreign policies, it is human choice that is determinative. Note

1. Since 1998, United Nations experts have been working on building a vulnerability index, primarily in the context of the problems of small-island developing nations. Initial agreement was reached on the inclusion of measures of export diversification, capital openness, and vulnerability to natural disasters. According to the UN, the index is meant to reflect relative economic and ecological susceptibility to exogenous shocks, that is to say, the risk of a country being affected by such shocks. The vulnerability index is structural, designed to identify which group of countries exceed a threshold of vulnerability at which they are particularly susceptible to risks and warrant special attention from agencies providing assistance. At the same time, the index and its components are intended to provide a multidimensional approach to the identification of programs designed to reduce the exposure of individual countries to exogenous factors that may affect their development. See UN Economic and Social Council, Document A/53/65-E/1998/5, 6 February 1998.

10 Modernization and Foreign Policy: An Alternative Approach to the Global South Howard H. Lentner

A fundamental challenge facing the analyst of foreign policy is the difficulty of problematizing the subject matter. Clearly, foreign policy involves matters of states conducting relations with other states and foreign entities, but the premise that all states are fully formed actors remains subject to serious doubt. Another complication arises from the tendency among foreign policy scholars (dating back to Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin 1954) to aspire to general theory in the belief that the explanation of any state’s foreign policy contributes to the understanding of the actions of all states. As a counter to this proclivity, students of third world foreign policy have offered categories such as dependency to distinguish one group of states from another (e.g., Hey 1995). In addition to constituting an a priori judgment of which countries fit the category, notions of dependency are easily challenged on grounds of incomparable diversity and failure to acknowledge change through uneven development. Placing Dominica and India in the same category appears ludicrous on its face; and a country like South Korea that moved from a per capita income of U.S.$87 in 1960 to more than U.S.$10,000 in the 1990s can hardly be understood in the same framework as Nicaragua, whose income declined significantly in that same period. Moreover, a dependency approach regards economics as dominant over politics, an unlikely and unpromising premise on which to build knowledge about foreign policy, a matter of politics if there ever was one. Finally, whatever approach they have used, most foreign policy analysts do not relate their concerns to the main issues involved in international politics, creating a conceptual divorce between sectors of scholarship that could prove mutually fertilizing and productive. 163

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In this chapter, I wish to step outside the mainstream of foreign policy analysis in order to render all these matters problematical and to try to frame the contemporary world and the place of states in it in a different way from extant schools of thought in the foreign policy analysis literature.1 The first issue to be faced is that of conceiving the category that we wish to examine. Classification Problems

During the Cold War, the countries of what is now termed by some the “global south” were framed in the context of the bipolar structure of international politics and were thus tagged as the “third world,” in contradistinction to the first world composed of the democratic, advanced industrial countries mostly allied with the United States and the second world of communist states mostly allied with the Soviet Union. This never portrayed an altogether satisfactory classification, for a number of countries—Thailand and Philippines, to cite but two of many— remained allied with the United States, and others—Egypt before 1972 and India after 1971, for example—found themselves at one time or another bound by security treaties or circumstances to the Soviet Union. An overlay that brought many countries into the third world category was provided by recent independence from colonialism, but sometimes Latin American countries, which had become independent only a few years after the United States and long before Italy and Germany were created, identified themselves with this grouping. One justification for that inclusion stemmed from the level of wealth or stage of development, but poor countries like Ireland were excluded and wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia were included. Still, the overlapping counterpressures of security alliances, the levels of development and wealth, and the decolonization process combined to make plausible the idea that the third world could be construed as a category. In the post–Cold War period, in the absence of a category that is shaped by the structure of the international system, it becomes necessary to conceptualize an appropriate class into which states might be combined in the interest of coherent analysis. The obvious method for determining a classification lies in examining shared characteristics. What do the states whose foreign policy we wish to examine have in common? Given the immense diversity of geographical and population size, wealth and level of development, culture, stage of state formation, national coherence, and other characteristics, it appears altogether implausible to

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treat developing countries as a group. Steeped in a bloody and anguished civil war for years, poverty-plagued Sudan can hardly be treated in the same class as powerful, democratic, nuclear-armed India with its advanced industrial sector and functioning state. Brazil, standing as it does at the brink of major power status, may someday be usefully placed in the same category with Indonesia, but it would not be very useful to do so at a time when the latter remains mired in an economic and political crisis, with few obvious prospects for a near-term entry into Brazil’s league. Diversity simply renders not analytically useful the lumping together of the 150 or so countries that are usually included in a category of global south. That conclusion leads to a further question of whether there may be grounds for smaller groupings of states into categories that can usefully be examined in studying foreign policies. One answer to that question is to employ a regional categorization. Frequently, scholars invoke shared culture as the link that ties together regions such as Latin America into a coherent object of study. There is much to be said for this view, for in Latin America language provides a basis for experts to work in the documents and other sources of scholarship in many countries. In addition, a certain amount of shared cultural heritage may be seen in an ancient history, remnants of indigenous cultures, the Spanish conquest, religion, and other components of a shared culture (Cronk 1999). One can remain skeptical of this argument, as I do, with respect to Latin America; but more important, it is critical to point out that the only other region with a similar set of cultural traits in common is the Middle East, and very little of Middle East countries’ foreign policies can be explained on the basis of cultural characteristics (but see Huntington 1996). East Asia shares some philosophical and other cultural characteristics, but the distance between the Chinese and Japanese languages is as great as that between either one of them and English. Much attention has been showered on regional cooperation in Europe, but neither language nor common history can account for that cooperation; the common Christianity of France and Germany may be used to explain their comity since 1945, but how does it figure in their three wars between 1870 and 1940? In short, regional categories may prove convenient for certain scholars to pull together a limited set of countries for manageable analysis, but they do not offer a way to organize the study of the great number of countries that form the subject of this book. Neither does the convenience of scholars provide a theoretical or conceptual basis for lumping together different countries. Furthermore, a regional approach is very likely to overlook, or at least treat as anomalous, cross-regional foreign policies of specific countries. For example, a run-up in oil prices in 1999 and 2000 stemmed

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largely from the initiative of Mexico, with support from Norway, to gain the cooperation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) as well as non-OPEC countries in restricting production in order to stimulate prices, which had fallen to pre-1972 levels. This successful policy of cross-regional cooperation appears even more remarkable when one considers that it ran parallel to Mexico’s cooperation with the world’s prime oil consumer, the United States, under auspices of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other bilateral agreements. Additionally, no other Latin American country shares in this unique configuration of foreign policy achievement. Another way to grapple with the classification problem involves the method used in the Cold War, that is, to treat countries in the same structurally constrained positions as comparable. This approach requires an analysis of the constraining effects and opportunities provided by the Cold War structure. To carry the method forward, then, also requires a sketching out of the post–Cold War structure and its effects on position. As we will see, these structural constraints in both cases fail to place individual states in broad positional categories. While the United States and the Soviet Union consolidated their domination within their respective spheres of influence and alliance arrangements, they contested the rest of the world. That contest provided opportunities for some states to gain advantages because of their strategic positions, their valuable resources, or their clever strategies. From 1955 to 1972, Egypt gained assistance from the Soviet Union and its allies by providing the Soviet Union with a platform on which to land when the Soviets decided to leapfrog U.S. attempts to contain them north of the boundaries of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Upon realizing that the Soviet Union could provide neither the diplomacy to wrest land lost to Israel in the war of 1967 nor the assistance to cope with Egypt’s internal economy, Egypt shifted its alliance from the Soviet Union to the United States. Other countries suffered harm as a result of the Cold War structure, for example, Vietnam, which—aided by China and the Soviet Union— fought a nearly twenty-year, bloody, and extremely costly war against the United States. In a somewhat different pattern, Angola’s civil war was embraced by the superpowers, which exacerbated the violence that continued with its own momentum and viciousness long after the Cold War ended. Ethiopia and Somalia offered strategic assets to the superpowers, and both countries gained material advantage from arrangements with the Cold War Structural Effects

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Soviet Union and the United States, but they also suffered costs from the involvement of these strategic partners, which employed the strategic advantages for their own ends. Because of the global expanse of their contestation, the United States and the Soviet Union helped to shape a debate over international arrangements for providing economic and technical assistance and for establishing regimes for trade and finance. In this context, third world countries engaged in some collaborative behavior, like the Group of 77, working through the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and other devices and forums to stake out a distinctive position on the international negotiating agenda. These efforts gave to certain observers an impression that the developing countries shared a common foreign policy. Except for limited negotiating stances, however, each country necessarily resolved its own foreign policy aims, established its own links with other countries, and staved off the costs imposed by the superpowers as best it could. The Cold War structure failed to condition many of the conflicts among third world countries. India went to war against Pakistan in 1971 in the context of the establishment of Bangladesh largely without reference to the Cold War structure; and the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir has transcended, though it was not unaffected by, the Cold War. Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1979 was handled diplomatically by the major powers in Cold War terms, but the interests of the two countries involved did not stem from the Cold War structure. Many, many other examples could be given to illustrate the point that the Cold War structure, despite its constraining and opportunityaffording aspects, did not define the position of third world states to such an extent that it transcended the uniqueness of each country’s foreign policy challenges and needs. Just as is the case among powerful, wealthy states, collaboration on certain matters was pursued by third world states. By contrast, each foreign office, head of government, and other responsible official was obliged to figure out the interests and policies that would serve the country. Sometimes this called for collaboration with others, and sometimes it demanded unilateral actions. The collaboration should not be confused, however, with a common condition that channeled foreign policy. In the post–Cold War period very different constraints operate on those countries. However, in the absence of a broad contestation for the world, the countries in question possess few strategic assets that offer Post–Cold War Structural Effects

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leverage in gaining assistance from the leading powers, although Pakistan and selected countries in Central Asia have been able to leverage such assets in the U.S. war against terrorism. In the liberal order that marks the contemporary era, the leading powers have found it more convenient and less costly to buffer the pursuit of their remaining marginal interests in many political and economic contests by employing the United Nations and other international agencies and by turning over to private enterprise the responsibilities and opportunities for conveying investment, trading arrangements, and even humanitarian assistance to less well-to-do lands. In that context, many countries of the world have adopted market principles in their economic arrangements and are incorporating democratic principles in their governing arrangements. Though pressured by the international system structure to move in these directions, developing countries face the world even more on their own than they did during the Cold War. Each country competes with every other country, and each has to rely on itself even more obviously than during the Cold War. On the whole, strategic imperatives for assistance have been lost, or at least muted, and the powers have reduced their direct bilateral engagement with most countries’ foreign policy and related needs. Exceptions such as Colombia—with its intertwined Cold War–remnant insurgency, drug war, and corruption—only serve to highlight the unusual nature of bilateral collaboration between a power and a weak state in the context of the early twenty-first-century international structure. To a large extent, assistance is channeled through international intergovernmental organizations and private nongovernmental organizations. Toward a Foreign Policy Framework: Impact of Modernization

A conventional view of the post–Cold War era presents it as one in which globalization moves forward inexorably toward uniformity in culture and commerce. Best practices spread as a global rationalization of production occurs, and financial transactions happen so rapidly that power shifts away from states to markets uncontrolled by anyone. Western values envelop the earth as everyone drinks Coca-Cola and eats fast-food hamburgers. Some cultural interchange pervades the global village, as Central African singers book dates in Los Angeles and Parisians eat sushi, but homogenization marches forward; and its dominant theme trumpets the market and individualism, Western values at their core with U.S. styles setting the pattern.

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Despite its rise as a buzzword, globalization provides a contemporary label for a process that has been proceeding for a couple of centuries: the spread of the Enlightenment (see also Chapter 7, Andrés Serbin’s analysis, in this book). Since 1850 or so, new ways of thinking more readily designated “modern” have grown from the Enlightenment but also have departed from previous modes of thought (Everdell 1997). The ideas, techniques, and modes of thought of modernity have inexorably moved forward like a glacier across the face of the earth. The Enlightenment and its spawn—modernity—have been met sometimes by resistance but also by the embrace of many and by modification to suit local traditions. Great dynamism has been imparted to the processes by capitalism and its power base in the nation-state (Giddens 1987). This constitutes the fundamental problem of analyzing the foreign policies of developing countries in the contemporary world: to grasp the interaction of traditions and modernity. In order to proceed, one needs to bring intelligence to bear on understanding sympathetically other traditions that try to cope with modernity. Doing this requires the analyst to recognize that distinctly different traditions also have to be studied, though generalization and objectivity have a place in explanation. Together, the global spread of modernity and the traditions that cope with its pressures constitute the central subject matter of foreign policy in states not dominant in the international system. Although modernity may be uniform, those traditions cannot be reduced to simple categories a priori. Given enough empirical labor in the vineyards of inductive studies, it might someday be possible to construct broader generalizations. In the first instance, however, a serious attempt needs to be made to get outside the approach that insists on uniformity and to understand diverse traditions. For several centuries the forces of modernization have been spreading throughout the world, first through the accumulation of power by a few states, and then through the imperial activities of those states. Inexorably, modernity’s “progressive drives and universalistic hopes” penetrated the minds of people in the centers and the peripheries of empire, until modern imperialism—linked to both corrosion of power at the center and dogged warfare and political action in the colonies—was exhausted (Berman 1992: 46). Since its beginning, the Enlightenment has faced challenges ranging from the nihilism of Nietzsche to the war machine–centered Nazi system of Germany and the alternative command economy of the Soviet Modernity

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Union, and on to the current fashion of postmodernism’s rejection of rationality. As the Soviet Union retreated from its challenge to the United States and then disintegrated, the world contained no sufficiently great power center to check the dominant coalition, led by the United States, that underwrites the liberal international political economy. This condition most often gains the label globalization. Although the term globalization remains a contested one in social science discourse (as Serbin also notes in Chapter 7), the conventional wisdom attributes to the process a movement toward homogenization and the creation of a single rational world. In considering what this means, it is important to grasp all that the notion of modernization entails. Jurgen Habermas offers a complex yet still succinct conceptualization: The concept of modernization refers to a bundle of processes that are cumulative and mutually reinforcing: to the formation of capital and the mobilization of resources; to the development of the forces of production and the increase in the productivity of labor; to the establishment of centralized political power and the formation of national identities; to the proliferation of rights of political participation, of urban forms of life, and of formal schooling; to the secularization of values and norms; and so on. (Habermas 1987: 2)

Thus the phenomena associated with modernization affect nearly all aspects of life. It is no wonder, then, that Karl Marx regarded the forward movement of capitalism as a destructive process that sweeps away old forms of production to make room for the new. William McNeil (1997) has reminded readers that the deepest change wrought by twentieth-century communications technology is the disruption of village communities throughout the world. In addition to the comprehensive nature of modernization, Habermas notes the disjunction that occurs in the modern world between politics and economics: Through the media of exchange value and power, two systems of action that are functionally complementary have been differentiated out. The social system has been separated from the political, a depoliticized economic society has been separated from a bureaucratized state. This development has put too great a strain upon the classical doctrine of politics. Since the end of the eighteenth century, it has split apart into a social theory grounded in political economy on the one hand and a theory of the state inspired by modern natural right on the other. (Habermas 1987: 37)

Thus in the modern conception, the economy forms a distinct realm of activity from that of the state, and the state tends to be regarded as a

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repressive apparatus rather than as the mechanism for deliberating about, choosing, and achieving the common good of society. Indeed, the modern way of organizing society—with a distinct realm of economic activity—has proven immensely productive. Repeated failures of command economies, in which the state interferes unduly in economic activities, have demonstrated the decided superiority of free-market systems of production. In another aspect of the relationships between state and economy, overwhelming empirical evidence leads to a preference for a developmental state over a predatory one in which a societal group uses the apparatus of the state to enrich itself at the expense of good of the society as a whole. The issue in making this distinction does not rest upon including the state, in the one case, and excluding it in the other. Rather, both manifestations of state include a relationship with the economy, but developmental states work with firms to engender wealth for the common good, whereas predatory states plunder the economy to enrich the few (Evans 1995). In one sense, this dimension of state organization and behavior seems unrelated to foreign policy analysis. However, if one conceives of foreign policy as constituting those plans and activities that aim at preserving and enhancing the position of the state in the international system, this remains a crucial dimension. Whether the state forms merely an instrument for private plunder or a mechanism for accumulating power that can be put to public use makes immense difference in the roles and effects of its foreign policy. Whether a society adopts a modern economy remains a political question. Complex markets do not arise spontaneously: They are built by political decisionmaking processes; and they are sustained by the continued support and regulation by state authority (Evans 1997). Moreover, once having determined the configuration of the economy, states continue to operate as policy mechanisms to provide such public goods as contract enforcement, currency regulation, and so forth. When economic entities and arrangements face difficulties, only public authorities have the legitimate function and capacity to intervene and to compensate for market failures. Furthermore, the scope of public life encompasses a much broader array of concerns than economic activities. Maintenance of public order and security remains an essential good that states provide. Welfare for citizens remains a major function for states, and only states can engage in redistribution based upon a standard of equality, offsetting the natural tendency of markets to result in unequal distribution. Although many foreign policy analysts would maintain a rigid distinction between foreign and domestic policies, substantial pressures emanating from abroad

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make it difficult, especially for smaller states, to carry out these tasks effectively. Thus states necessarily strive for autonomy in dealing with their internal problems even while they seek gains through international cooperation to strengthen themselves. And thus part of the foreign policy of smaller states in the contemporary world consists of building elements of autonomy in order to serve their own citizens and to accomplish broad public tasks within their societies. In the construction of autonomous elements, traditions may be brought to bear either against or mixed with modernization pressures. These tasks of state formation and the building of sufficient capabilities to retain autonomy in the international system of states remain at the forefront of foreign policy problems for developing countries. Although an array of matters needs to be attended to, it is useful to recall the four institutional clusters that Anthony Giddens identified with modernity, for they constitute the essential matters that developing countries need to cope with and incorporate into their own polities in order to maintain or improve their respective positions in the international system. The institutional clusters of modernity are: enhanced surveillance, capitalism, industrial production, and centralized control of the means of violence (Giddens 1987: 5). Without adapting these clusters to their own respective states, developing countries are unlikely to form sufficiently strong and autonomous states to pursue an effective foreign policy. At the same time, each state necessarily makes such adaptations in the context of its own traditions. The forward march of modernity seems relentless, and states that make erroneous choices are very likely to be punished by powerful structural forces in the international political economy. Bandwagoning appears to be the foreordained choice to be made by political leaders intent on preserving or improving the respective international positions of their countries. Moreover, the apparent relentlessness of modernity’s movement tends both to be extraordinarily powerful because of the impetus of dominant forces in the world and to accumulate as more countries and firms climb on board the bandwagon. This march forward also advances with a strong push from the predominant neoliberal ideology that trashes the state and promotes everything private, from firms to the concept of civil society. Traditions, by contrast, remain divided among distinctive cultures and separate states and peoples. They include language, art, architecture, family arrangements, ways of doing business, social customs, and Traditions

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many other dimensions. To take advantage of foreign investments and markets, some traditions have to give way as a means of opening a state’s economy to outsiders, although governments necessarily remain vigilant so as not to lose control over the destinies of their respective countries. Moreover, market and foreign cultural forces engender further changes in the course of a society’s modernization. But each nation retains distinctive traits, and every society has unique characteristics that need to be attended to for purposes of maintaining identity and social peace. Foreign policy therefore constitutes a tool used for working toward the broader social and political objectives of the state. These general views may be illustrated by several examples of developing countries. In the selective presentations below, I simply discuss various aspects of particular countries that show how their respective traditions have confronted and/or used the pressures of modernization. Each country remains distinct even while it deals with global constraints. The two countries chosen for illustrative analysis—Korea and Malaysia—have confronted and grappled with the dilemma posed as central to the analytical challenge faced by the contributors to this book. Each has succeeded to some extent in building itself and moving to the first rank of developing countries. Indeed, South Korea has flourished so greatly that it has joined the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the club of the rich. I include it, among other reasons, because it demonstrates that such categories as developing countries remain static while the peoples, societies, and states belonging may prove so dynamic that they move out of the category. Application of Framework Korea’s homogeneous society has adopted a posture toward the international political economy that earned South Korea membership at the end of 1996 in the OECD. The economic problems revealed throughout the course of the following year and the currency crisis that occurred in fall 1997 demonstrated that full transparency of financial transactions had hardly been achieved and that regulation of the banking sector was weak and underdeveloped. Since that crisis, the country has undertaken many institutional reforms and policy actions that have contributed to its recovery from the crisis. Even without the recovery, Korea would stand as an extraordinary success story as one of East Asia’s “four tigers” and the world’s eleventh largest economy. That triumph was Korea

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achieved through the choice of becoming open and cosmopolitan, to a large extent spurning a good deal of the tradition of Korean society. Still, Koreans remain proud of their distinctive Hangul alphabet, rich literature and art, rich tradition of printing, and other cultural treasures. Koreans speak and read their own language. Korean teenagers still eat kimchee even as they enjoy rap songs by So Tae-ji. The cuisine of the peninsula remains both unique and distinguished. Beyond these cultural dimensions, such profound characteristics as equality, devotion to education, and exceptionally hard work have made significant contributions to the Korean success story. From the point of view of future foreign policy, those characteristics have such deep roots that they promise continuity, whatever effects are engendered by international finance, the Internet, and other artifacts of globalization. Foreign policy analysts do not ordinarily pay attention to such matters as the number of Ph.D.s per capita, a population’s work ethic, or the distributional effects of a deep cultural norm of equality. Nevertheless, if one wishes to understand how a country advances its position in the international system, then it becomes imperative to examine carefully the distinctive cultures and traditions of specific nations in order to grasp why some states do better than others. The serious student of foreign policy must become expert in specific countries, gaining an acquaintance with the culture, politics, and economics of the states whose foreign policy he or she wishes to explain. Of course, decay and decline provide another face to the process of striving for position in the international system; and to understand that dimension, analyses of specific countries should also prove efficacious for understanding mistakes and blunders that cause countries to slip. Korea offers another lesson in treating countries differentially. In much of the world in the twenty-first century, economics and other dimensions of life aside from security have gained prominence in the wake of the Cold War. In the Korean Peninsula, however, an exceptionally heavily armed frontier exhibits an arsenal spawned by well-founded fear, and military readiness remained apparent until mid-2000 following the summit meeting between President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea and leader Kim Jong Il of North Korea. (The summit was one of the high points of South Korea’s “sunshine diplomacy” toward North Korea, but tensions remained, particularly with regard to North Korea’s missile programs. In fact, in October 2002, North Korea admitted that it had a secret program to develop nuclear weapons.) Minefields are regarded by military authorities in both South Korea and the United States as sufficiently important to have blocked their respective states’ signing of the 1997 landmine treaty. The observer who drives north of

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Seoul cannot miss the immense concrete tank barriers looming above the highways, ready to impede the advance of any North Korean invading force. In this country, security persists as the central consideration of foreign policy as much as that core interest ever did in Central Europe during the Cold War. Since that summit meeting, increased hopes of unification have blossomed, but the tremendous differences in development of North Korea and South Korea pose difficulties at least as great and perhaps greater than those facing Germany at the time of unification. Moreover, the diplomacy of both Koreas remains as complex and subtle as that of any but the United States. Not only did President Kim Dae Jung promote a major campaign to seek reconciliation with North Korea; he also needed to take into account his major ally’s security concerns. In addition, China’s interest in stability has been brought to bear in the Korean situation as the Chinese proved very helpful in arranging the historic June 2000 summit meeting in Pyongyang. Given the eventuality that unification of Korea should finally occur, the country’s leaders would hardly be in a position to relax their concerns with security. Recalling a long history of buffeting by its larger neighbors, China and Japan, they would need to be concerned with finding a means to balance those neighbors. They would remember that when China was weak—defeated by Japan in the war of 1894–1895— Japan became ascendant over Korea and occupied the country from 1910 to 1945. One does not know the future, but Koreans—recalling the ancient foreign policy guideline of allying with a distant country in order to protect oneself against a neighbor—might give consideration to continuing the long-term alliance that South Korea has had with the United States. Koreans might find a different solution to their security problem, but they cannot wish away the reality that will remain central to their existence. Likewise, analysts of Korean foreign policy will be impelled to consider the issue; the security problem for Korea is unique, unlike that of any other country. However, it is in the economic realm that South Korea’s position in the international system has been largely determined and continues as crucial. Although the basic activities have remained within the domestic realm, building and maintaining the Korean economy have entailed very important foreign policy considerations. During its ascendancy, South Korea actively sought in foreign markets loans and investments to build its economy, although these were largely activities confined to the private sector. Willingness to invest on the part of private persons and firms relied to some extent upon the political endorsement of the Korean government by the governments of the powers. In the midst of

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its 1997 crisis, Korea turned to the governments of the powers and to the international financial institutions—particularly the International Monetary Fund—to help stabilize the economy. Even though the South Korean economy has stabilized, any understanding of the politics of the crisis situation must take into account the domestic turmoil of the presidential election that occurred on December 18, 1997. Some of President-elect Kim Dae Jung’s comments both during the campaign and after his election contributed to the market turmoil that made even more difficult the problem of working out terms to rescue the economy. Yet the president-elect’s influence with labor leaders, which induced them to negotiate layoffs, made implementation of adjustments required by the rescue plan a smoother path than might otherwise have been the case. These events also indicate the complexity of state–civil society relations in Korea (Koo 1993). Still, the powers were required to attend to the Korean economic difficulties, for Korea’s position in the international system had become so important that its economy’s health or disease affected the economies of all the rich countries. Had the Korean economy completely collapsed, repercussions would have reverberated first to Japan and then throughout the world. As it turned out, Korea was able to maintain an effective foreign policy throughout its ordeal of economic crisis (Lentner 1999). Furthermore, after a 6.7 percent contraction in 1998, the Korean economy rebounded and grew at the rate of 10.7 percent in 1999, its highest growth rate in twelve years (Len in New York Times, March 23, 2000: C4). Growth continued at 9.3 percent in 2000 before slowing to 3 percent in 2001 (World Bank 2001). Yet another aspect of Korea’s development deserves the attention of a serious foreign policy analyst. In the contemporary neoliberal thinking that dominates the discourse about economic growth in developing countries, the advice proffered indicates that economies should open up for foreign trade and investment and should produce for export. In economic terms, it makes little difference what products may be shipped in international trade: flowers are as good as steel. For the political analyst concerned with the state’s position in the international system, however, the configuration and structuring of the economy include quite significant matters. In particular, a rising state needs to produce industrial products not just for consumption but also for production (Rynn 2001). South Korea’s record in this regard indicates some great strengths, for the Korean economy includes a steel industry that stands important in world terms and a shipbuilding industry that leads the world. Selling flowers to the world would not have provided a basis for becoming the world’s eleventh largest economy, but making and selling steel and ships and other industrial products have served well. Other countries

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depend upon South Korea for important commodities and investments. Part of post–Cold War Eastern Europe’s economic growth is owed to investments and technology transfers by South Korean firms. Therefore, to discern South Korea’s, or any country’s, position in the international system—the basic measure of foreign policy results—the analyst needs to break out of the bureaucratic straightjacket imposed by foreign policy studies orthodoxy and become a student more broadly immersed in comparative politics, economics, and culture. Comparisons can be made, of course, at either superficial or deeper levels, but the basis of comparison of different states’ foreign policies is likely to prove useful and significant only by profounder analyses that delve into and probe each country’s public life. On the basis of such studies, foreign policy analysis becomes a way of looking at states’ respective positions in the international system and the influence that they wield rather than simply a slice of political life not rooted in the whole being of the respective states. In contrast to Korea, Malaysia provides an example of an ethnically divided state, with a different political orientation in its foreign policy and a different economic development strategy. Military threats to Malaysia ceased with the overthrow of President Sukarno in Indonesia in 1965. Malaysia’s location in Southeast Asia has affected its association with other states, especially through the links provided by the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which it is a founder. As an Islamic country, Malaysia stresses ties with other Muslim states. Particularly since the early 1980s with the coming to power of Mahathir Mohamad as prime minister, Malaysia has emphasized its third world orientation. This orientation combines in an unorthodox manner with Malaysia’s aspiration to become the first developed country in Southeast Asia, for the country stresses aid and investment in other less developed countries. For example, Malaysia has important investments in India, Turkey, and South Africa (see, e.g., Business Times [Singapore], October 15, 1997: 2). While retaining important trade ties with the United States and Western Europe, Malaysia also gives devoted attention to its Pacific links (Ariff 1991). Officially, Malaysia established a more independent foreign policy, helping found ASEAN in 1967, recognizing communist China in 1974, and identifying the nation with the nonaligned countries of the third world (Information Malaysia 1996 Yearbook: 3). Nevertheless, the country clearly aims to develop a modern economy. It has a national car project and a steel industry. Since the discovery of oil, Malaysia has Malaysia

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become an important non-OPEC oil and liquefied natural gas exporter. Following Prime Minister Mohamad’s clarion call, the country has adopted a “Vision 2020” program that aims at achieving the status of developed country by the end of the second decade of this century. More recently, Malaysia has devised the concept of a “multimedia information corridor” designed to make it a leader in information technologies and a regional source for education. These ambitious programs have moved forward even while poverty has basically been eliminated (Government of Malaysia 1996). The country has succeeded in keeping its economic fundamentals sound, so the currency devaluation that occurred in late 1997 did not carry devastating consequences specific to Malaysia, although the economy suffered serious damage. If macroeconomics were the only issue, Malaysia’s position in the international system seems quite sound. However, another state function—that of maintaining social peace— plays an important part in Malaysia’s politics and economics, potentially affecting its international position. Since communal riots in 1969, the Malaysian government has pursued, under auspices of its New Economic Plan (NEP), an affirmativeaction program aimed at providing more economic assets to the Muslim, Malay-speaking portion of the population known as bumiputera (literally, “sons of the soil”), as distinct from Chinese and Indian and other groups identified with more recent immigration. Ownership of corporate assets provides the main benchmark by which progress toward success of the NEP is measured. Although a target of 30 percent ownership of corporate assets by 1990 had been posited originally, that goal was not met, despite a great shift that occurred in ownership and other measures aimed at economic equality. Beginning with the 1996–2000 five-year plan, the government has given a different emphasis to its equality program by stressing education and scientific training. But the government’s privatization program has come under fire by critics who argue that it has necessarily fallen within the terms of the positive discrimination program (Jomo 1995). These critics charge that government assets have been passed at favorable prices to friends and relatives of highly placed government officials. Should those charges prove accurate, then the developmental state might be undergoing the corruption that would give it some of the characteristics of a predatory state. In that case, instead of gaining in international system position, the country might be found to be falling back, for the evidence of history seems overwhelming that predatory states lose position while developmental ones tend to gain.

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Other indicators suggest that the country continues to advance, despite such weaknesses in the economy as overinvestment in speculative real estate. In confronting its problems, the government—despite some ragged edges produced by the outspokenness of the prime minister—tends to face up to difficulties and follows coherent, intelligent policies to overcome them. In Malaysia’s case, two outstanding features are worth mentioning with regard to the meeting of modernity with tradition. First, the traditional growth of a wealthy entrepreneurial class composed predominantly of Chinese has been modified, not by appropriating Chinese property but rather by providing special opportunities for the mostly rural bumiputera and by putting into place programs favoring the latter’s acquisition of industrial property as well as education and training. Thus far, these policies and programs have contributed to both economic growth and social peace and equity. Second, Malaysia has almost completely adopted the norms of the open liberal economy, and its foreign policy has been aimed partly at resisting closures of the advanced economies through new protectionist measures such as voluntary export restraints and punishments provided by the Super 301 provisions of the U.S. Trade Act. This is a case of a small country invoking the international norms governing trade that are, on the one hand, advocated by the world’s leading country, and, on the other hand, violated by the actions of that same country. The argument of this chapter—that detailed study of individual countries is warranted—is not limited to Asian countries. Costa Rica provides an example of a small Latin American state that has often managed to position itself strategically. Though continuing a tradition of abjuring a standing army, Costa Rica nonetheless provided an important channel for arms flowing to Nicaragua in the late 1970s. Costa Rica’s experiences in the 1980s suggest that a weaker country may prevail against stronger ones if the circumstances are right and the developing country cleverly employs intelligence even in the face of might. By accumulating information, engaging in strategic planning, and employing the skills of its leading economists, the country achieved an agreement in 1990 that eliminated 84 percent of its public debt (Saborio, n.d.). Together with Guatemala, Costa Rica proved able to channel the Central American conflict of the 1980s into a diplomatic course. By offering a regional plan for a diplomatic solution among the belligerents in the three countries in Central America facing internal armed adversaries—Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala—the presidents of Costa Rica and Guatemala contributed effectively to a negotiated settlement of

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the Central American conflicts and avoided broader U.S. military and subversive action (Fernandez 1989). Conclusion

Throughout its existence as a subdiscipline, foreign policy analysis has been distinguished by a comparative feature. That characteristic has undergone a number of metamorphoses, from decisionmaking to eventsdata analysis to comparative case studies. The approach suggested in this chapter presents no obstacle to continuing the tradition, though it does recommend the pursuit of knowledge in depth about a single country before proceeding to a second or third level that would form the basis for comparisons. Moreover, the distinctive traditions of each country may be placed in an overall context of the confrontation of modernity and traditions. In addition, a single criterion—maintenance of position in the international system—may be applied in all cases to assess the level of success of the foreign policy of particular countries. The chapter recommends that foreign policy analysts abjure two tendencies that have characterized professional activity in foreign policy analysis. First, it argues that analysts should not use a priori categories into which they fit specific countries. This position results from an acknowledgment that developing countries represent an immense diversity of characteristics and positions and that the dynamics of uneven growth tend to promote changes over time. Thus, for example, dependency should not be used as a permanent category into which developing countries easily fit. Should any scholar wish to employ dependency concepts in an approach to analysis, no contradiction would be set up with the framework advocated here. But an approach does not constitute a category. Second, the chapter advises not to generalize from a single case. To learn about a specific country’s foreign policy does not represent an advance in knowledge about every state’s policy. Foreign policy persists as a particular angle from which to view the life of a nation, and the life of each is nothing less than unique. From true comparisons based upon a sufficient knowledge base might come some generalizations. However, the field of comparative foreign policy analysis may command more respect from political science, international relations, and general audiences by contributing specialized and historically based knowledge about specific countries than it would from broad generalizations that have little applicability to practical and real life.

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I am grateful to Mi Ae Geoum for research assistance on the Korean case presented in this chapter. 1. For an overview of the history of the subfield, see Deborah Gerner (1995).

11 Conclusion Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner

Are the nations of the global south so different from other nations that they merit separate study? Is there a global south (i.e., a third world) to begin with? And even if there is, is it not the case that all nations, given the forces of globalization, are so integrated that dividing them into categories is not conceptually helpful? Beyond that, even if the division makes sense, are there really major differences in foreign policy substance and conduct between global north and global south nations? Clearly the enterprise of this book has rested on the belief that the answer to all of these questions is “yes.” There is a global south that is sufficiently differentiated from the North as to merit greater study. Saying so does not imply a naive belief that the third world is a unified entity. As Howard Lentner notes in his critique of the dependency approach, “Placing Dominica and India in the same category appears ludicrous on its face; and a country like South Korea that moved from a per capita income of U.S.$87 in 1960 to more than U.S.$10,000 in the 1990s can hardly be understood in the same framework as Nicaragua, whose income declined significantly in that same period” (Chapter 10). The recognition of the great diversity among third world nations is a given. However, theoretical development can best be generated by finding commonalities among the differences, and for these nations, commonalities are not so hard to find at the appropriate regional and third world levels. The theorist does not need to find perfectly matching nations in order to generalize; she or he simply needs to identify particularly cogent and shared characteristics that therefore generate similar policy choices and strategic actions. These characteristics can indeed 183

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be found for this group of nations at the regional and global south levels. It is true that the “global south” rubric (like the “third world”) is essentially a convenient handle with which to analyze a large number of diverse nations. It is also true, as Randolph Persaud states in Chapter 4, that the spirit of Bandung is dying if not quite dead and that the kind of solidarity and robust—albeit somewhat superficial—unity that characterized the third world in the heady days of the 1970s does not exist in the twenty-first century. It was lost once the sober realities of structural adjustment policies, debt refinancing, and liberalization became the norm in the third world. But the nations of the south still share common economic problems, even if some have pressed ahead faster than others. Few, if any, can boast of the “development” achievements of North America, Western Europe, and Japan, that is, the possession of strong, relatively stable, and diversified economies that are able to withstand international economic stresses and financial shocks; advanced social systems; adequate human resources; and strong and legitimate governments and institutions. Few, if any, have the ability and resources to finance and satisfy most of the needs of their populations. In fact, figures from the United Nations (UN) show that the number of people living in absolute poverty in developing nations is growing rapidly. Moreover, these nations still see themselves as unequally treated in the international community. Most cannot quite forget the ills of colonialism and imperialism, even though they may recognize that they have contributed to those ills through mismanagement, corruption, and political and societal disharmony. Most perceive the developed countries as an exclusionary club whose members make economic and political decisions that affect the whole world but without the participation of other countries. As a result, they still seek out global south allies when international bargaining and support are needed, whether in the Group of 77, the weakened but still active Non-Aligned Movement, or other regional and UN bodies. But to some extent the global south is an “imagined” identity, based on shared vexation over historical and economic grievances. In the twenty-first century, African governments still seem to feel strongly about this identity even as some Latin Americans are seeking instead to join the first world, and most have moved so deeply into regionalism that they have almost come full circle to the era before Afro-Asianism. Following the Mexican example, much of Latin America looks north and forward to a time of greater hemispheric integration. As for Asia, the South Asian subcontinent’s specific security dilemmas make regionalism, if not third worldism, difficult, whereas Southeast and East Asians look more to Japan and the West than to the third world.

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But whether one views the global south identity as a mere “handle” or as an imagined or true reality, and whether one prefers to analyze these nations singly, regionally, or tricontinentally, these nations are recognized as different historically, culturally, and economically from the developed countries. Their needs are intensely complicated and extensive for the international policy community. For social scientists, the most common approach to developing nations has come by way of studying the dynamics of development itself, hence the predominance of related political economic approaches in international relations. Too often foreign policy has been seen as irrelevant to dealing with the most vital issues preoccupying the third world. Today, however, the fact that it is widely accepted that foreign policy is but one form of public policy, used more and more to achieve the same ends as domestic policy, makes it easier to claim space for the study of the foreign policy perspectives of the nations of the global south from both the practical and theoretical angles. In this book, we have concentrated on the second angle, seeking ways in which we might understand how these countries think about the world and how they develop strategies to achieve their goals. No single overarching approach has been offered. As Siba Grovogui points out in his contribution (Chapter 3), there are a variety of methodologies and historiographies (including nontraditional ones) that need to be explored and employed in nonjudgmental and accommodative fashions. Contributors to this book have certainly not rejected the important existing research and approaches that characterize international relations and foreign policy today, even though most of these approaches have been devised to explain the policies of the North rather than the South. In fact, most contributors wish to build on this research. To that end, the conceptual contributions seem to fall into two positions: a statist one and a societal one. It is interesting that given the traditional penchant for third world leaders to focus on the constraints and pressures emanating from the international system, global south researchers today tend to view the system as a “background” rather than the determining component of the theoretical package. In the state-oriented category are the contributions of MohammadMahmoud Ould Mohamedou (Chapter 5), Howard Lentner (Chapter 10), and, to some extent, Paul Adogamhe (Chapter 6) and Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner (esp. Chapter 9). Mohamedou argues that rather than the favored psychological or external power approaches that have characterized scholarship on the Arab states, an approach that combines state-building and regime security as determinants of behavior in a historical context is far more appropriate for countries that have modern state structures built through personalist governance and legitimacy

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deficits. Foreign policy is undertaken to improve the position of the state in the global environment while also consolidating regime control and enhancing state capabilities. Although this model is particularly apt for Arab states, it is possible that the behavior of other developing states with similar characteristics can also be analyzed from this perspective. Lentner is of the view that “if one wishes to understand how a country advances its position in the international system, then it becomes imperative to examine carefully the distinctive cultures and traditions of specific nations in order to grasp why some states do better than others” (Chapter 10). In other words, he favors an approach that analyzes each country in detail with an eye on the specific mix of modernity and tradition. But Braveboy-Wagner considers that, for the entire category of very small developing states, the concept of vulnerability, which refers to material, relational-systemic, and cognitiveperceptual factors, provides stronger explanations. In both cases, the state is seen as attempting to position itself to its advantage, but in the case of very small states this positioning is reflective of a very basic concern about marginalization. Contributor Adogamhe integrates the politics and economics of nation-building and state-building into his model of African foreign policy. Furthermore, he and, to a lesser extent, Braveboy-Wagner share a focus on both cognitive-perceptual variables and elite analysis. Both, in their own way, seek to combine political economic and decisionmaking approaches to offer a more inclusive view of what motivates global south states. One of the touted strengths of foreign policy is its ability to incorporate the human element. Though the decisionmaking approaches offered by these two contributors are cognitive, it is also possible to devise rational models of decisionmaking based on factors outlined in each contribution. On the societal side, Latin Americanists Andrés Serbin (Chapter 7) and Rita Giacalone (Chapter 8) offer models that are very much in keeping with the liberal approaches sweeping that region in both the policy and the academic realms. The growth and influence of civil society are probably more advanced in Latin America today than in any other region of the third world. At the same time, the region’s economies are becoming increasingly integrated as a prelude to wider hemispheric and global integration. Therefore, Giacalone’s finding that business is a key player in the spread of ideas is important. According to her, for the state to adopt external ideas they must first be adopted by domestic business elements that also have access to and receptivity visà-vis government. Of course, business and state must be in sync in terms of ideological orientations, though affinity plays a secondary role

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in cases where the state has strong regulatory power and control over resources. Serbin takes the analysis of civil society to the larger regional and global arenas. While arguing for attention to the analysis of each state/ region’s unique historical, political, economic, and cultural characteristics, he observes a shift to the analysis of the social environment. As part of this, the domestic, regional, and global transnational societies are all exercising influence on policymaking in both positive and negative ways. One admitted absence from the analyses is an approach that locates itself in the arena of intrastate conflict that has plagued a number of developing nations in the post–Cold War world. Mohamedou comes closest to focusing on conflict, in his case interstate conflict, in that his model seeks to explain why even war can be a tool of state-building (e.g., for Iraq). But although societal coherence or polarization is noted by several other contributors as a key factor in policymaking, the contributions generally reflect the view that the foreign policy of the global south in the twenty-first century, even where there is internal conflict, is grounded in socioeconomic concerns. No need was felt in this book to incorporate the different approaches offered into a single framework for analysis of the foreign policy of the global south. As stressed many times, the global south is too diverse for one explanation to be offered for these nations’ behavior. We can probably all agree, however, that some combination of systemic, internal structural, and human influences must be incorporated into a framework for the study of global south behavior. A truly comprehensive model of global south behavior would have to apply this combination of influences to analysis at the national, regional, and global south levels, along the following lines: • Nation: External and internal determinants, nature and content of each third world nation’s behavior toward other nations and toward regional and international institutions. • Region: External and internal determinants, nature and content of behavior of collective group of nations at the regional level, usually best analyzed through study of regional institutions. • Global south: Determinants, nature and content of behavior of third world nations as a collective group, usually best analyzed through study of third world coalitions and institutions.

Of course, this task would be too much to undertake in toto. Instead, we must focus on understanding specific behaviors or specific

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countries and regions of the global south. In terms of this framework, it may be noted that while the theme of the book has been reconceptualizing foreign policy, foreign policy itself has been left relatively undefined except for occasional note of particular strategies adopted by individual countries or groups of countries. In fact, the lack of definition of foreign policy itself is an age-old lament. As this research continues, therefore, empirical work should lead both to more and more varied applications of these approaches (and other approaches being formulated, e.g., those focused on gender and race) and to a better understanding of what exactly global south nations actually do. Hopefully, the start made in this book will encourage further work in the area of what Bahgat Korany (1983: 465) once called “the underdeveloped study of underdeveloped nations.”

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The Contributors

Paul G. Adogamhe is associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, Wisconsin Teaching Fellow (2002–2003), and a fellow of the university’s Institute for Global Studies. He has also served as coordinator of the International Studies Program at the university. His research interests are in the areas of African politics, international organizations, and foreign policy. His “Nigerian Transnational Economic Crimes and Corruption” appeared in the Nigerian Journal of International Affairs 27(1) (2001).

Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner is professor of political science at the City College and the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York and Director of the M.A. Program in International Relations. A former president of the Caribbean Studies Association, she currently serves as NGO representative for the International Studies Association. She has published many books and articles, among them Interpreting the Third World, The Caribbean in World Affairs, The Caribbean in the Pacific Century (edited; with W. Marvin Will, Dennis J. Gayle, and Ivelaw L. Griffith), and Caribbean Public Policy: Regional, Cultural, and Socioeconomic Issues for the 21st Century (coeditor with Dennis J. Gayle).

Rita Giacalone is professor of economics, Universidad de Los Andes, Mérida, Venezuela, and coordinator of the Pluridisciplinary Research Group on Regional Integration and the International Research Network on Regional Integration. She serves as editor of Revista Agroalimentaria (Centro de Investigaciones Agroalimnetarias). Her latest publications include Integración regional de América Latina: Procesos y actores (2001); “Transición política y constitución en América Latina,” in F. Mariñez Navarro, ed., Ciencia Política. Nuevos contextos, nuevos 205

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desafíos (2001); and “De l’influence des concepts économiques américains sur la FEDECAMARAS,” in Isabelle Vagnoux, coord., Les États Unis et les élites latino-américaines (2000).

Siba N. Grovogui is associate professor and teaches international relations in the department of political science at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and SelfDetermination in International Law (1996). He is currently completing a manuscript entitled “Beyond Babel: Theory and Languages of International Relations.” Howard H. Lentner is professor of political science at Baruch College and the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. He is the coeditor of Power in Contemporary Politics: Theories, Practices, Globalizations (2000) and the author of International Politics: Theory and Practice (1997) and State Formation in Central America: The Struggle for Autonomy, Development, and Democracy (1993).

Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou is a Mauritanian political scientist and currently director of research at the Geneva-based International Council on Human Rights Policy. Previously, he was research associate at the Ralph Bunche Institute at the United Nations in New York and a scholar-in-residence at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He holds a degree in law from the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris, a Ph.D. in political science from the City University of New York Graduate School, and did postdoctoral research at Brown University in Rhode Island. He is the author of Iraq and the Second Gulf War (1998 and 2002), Societal Transition to Democracy in Mauritania (1995), as well as articles and chapters on Arab politics.

Randolph B. Persaud is assistant professor at the School of International Service, American University, in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Counter-Hegemony and Foreign Policy: The Dialectics of Marginalized and Global Forces in Jamaica (2001) and coeditor (with R.B.J. Walker) of a special issue of Alternatives (2001) on the subject of race and international relations.

Andrés Serbin is the director of the International Relations Post-Graduate Program and of the Center for Global and Regional Studies at the

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Universidad de Belgrano, Argentina, visiting professor at the Joint Postgraduate Program in Government and Politics of Georgetown University and Universidad Nacional de San Martín, and Simón Bolívar Chair at the Université de la Sorbonne in France. He is also the elected executive president of the Coordinadora Regional de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales, a Managua-based network of fifty-four NGOs and research centers from the Caribbean Basin; president of Concertación Centroamericana, a Central American network of NGOs; and the elected coordinator of the board of the Greater Caribbean Civil Society Permanent Forum, a broad regional platform of civil society organizations. His most recent book is Sunset over the Islands: The Caribbean in an Age of Global and Regional Challenges (1998).

Michael T. Snarr is assistant professor of social and political studies at Wilmington College, Ohio. He is coeditor of Introducing Global Issues, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002) and Foreign Policy in Comparative Perspective: Domestic and International Influences on State Behavior (2002).

Index

Actors: goal-directed behavior of, 130; international, 127; policy preferences and, 131; rationality of choices by, 127; rise of nonstate, 1; socialization of, 127 Advocacy networks, transnational, 115 Afghanistan, 18 Africa. See also Foreign policy, African; African Economic Community in, 96; balkanization of, 88; border conflicts in, 93; Casablanca progressives in, 92; colonialism in, 91; competition for regional leadership in, 81; CrossBorder Initiative in, 96; debt burden in, 95; democratization issues, 6, 90, 94; developmental crisis in, 82; development in, 5; distrust among leaders in, 90; economic cooperation in, 96; economic integration in, 90; economic issues in, 95; economic weakness in, 81; elections in, 94; ethnopolitical issues, 6; foreign policy in, 79–97; former colonial powers in, 81; independence, 81; integration movements in, 6; Monrovia conservatives in, 92; nationalism in, 93; New Partnership for African Development in, 96; outside penetration of society in, 82; power politics in, 81; power vacuum in, 94; realist approach in, 81; refugees in, 80, 93; regional hegemonic powers in, 95; regional integration in, 96; regional security issues in, 94–95; self-reliance

efforts, 6; social issues, 6–7; socioeconomic/political transformations in, 90; structural adjustment in, 96; structural composition of postcolonial states, 82; surrender of sovereignty issue in, 92; turmoil in, 80; West African Economic and Monetary Community in, 96; xenophobia in, 93 African Economic Community Treaty, 93 African Union, 90; as basis for common continental foreign policy, 96; Charter, 94; Constitutive Act, 90, 91; dynamics of decisionmaking in, 91–97; establishment of, 90; formation of institutions of, 92; historic precedence for, 92; leadership issues, 93; level of authority over states, 91; pace of integration in, 91; perceptual differences in implementation of, 91–93; in world affairs, 91 Algeria, 46, 96 Alliance of Small-Island Developing States (AOSIS), 151tab, 160 Andean Community of Nations, 111 Andean Pact, 103, 137, 138 Angola, 41, 91, 166 Anticolonialism, 43, 44, 45; domestic processes and, 46; nationhood and, 45; postcolonial identity and, 47 Apartheid, 91 Arab states: foreign policy analysis, 65–70, 185–186; legitimacy issues, 75; modern nature due to

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210

INDEX

decolonization, 75; political psychology approach to foreign policy, 70–72; state-centered foreign policy, 72–75; state-society relationships in, 75; territorial problems in, 75 Arbenz, Jacobo, 47 Argentina, 41, 140 ASEAN. See Association of South East Asian Nations Asia. See also specific countries; development in, 5; regional policy in, 6; trade issues, 6 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, 6 Assembly of the Peoples of the Americas, 121 Association of Caribbean States, 6, 111 Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), 6, 144, 177

Bahamas, 157 Bandung Conference (1955), 33, 46, 184 Bangladesh, 53, 147, 167 Belize, 120 Bilateralism, 112 Bolivia, 140 Botswana, 91 Brazil, 138, 139, 147, 165 Brunei, 144, 153, 157 Burke, Edmund, 44

Cambodia, 41, 144 Cameroon, 91 Canada: NAFTA and, 111, 132 Capital: accumulation, 114; controls, 62; financial, 61; flows, 159; formation, 170; hypermobility of, 61; limits, 123n3; openness, 161n1; recruitment of, 57; speculative, 61 Capitalism, 6, 105, 113, 172 Caribbean area: civil society in, 99; independence in, 101; regional civil society in, 119–121; trade liberalization in, 111 Caribbean Association of Industry and Commerce, 120 Caribbean Community (CARICOM), 111, 120, 137 Caribbean Congress of Labor, 120 Caribbean Free Trade Area, 137

Caribbean Policy Development Center (CPDC), 120 CARICOM. See Caribbean Community Cartelization, 3 Central America, 111, 137, 178 Central American Common Market (CACM), 137 Central American Integration System, 111 Chile, 61, 104, 140 China, 14, 147, 150, 175, 177 Class: analysis, 15; antagonisms, 17; configurations, 18; dominant, 60, 129; politically significant, 36; social, 53, 84; structure, 129 Colombia, 133, 134, 135, 168 Colonialism, 39, 54, 91; ending of, 32; history of, 51; justification of, 37, 38; third world reactions to, 34 Commonwealth Secretariat, 151tab, 153 Communism, 54, 93 Conflict: border, 93; civil, 2; East/West, 2, 54, 62; ethnic, 53; focus of realism on, 15; interstate, 187; intrastate, 187; Middle East, 7; North/South, 2, 5; political, 7, 86; proxy wars, 41; state-to-state, 54; territorial, 103 Congress of Vienna (1815), 35 Consejo Mexicano de Hombres de Negocios, 142 Consensus: for decisionmaking, 110; hegemony and, 60 Cooperation: cross-regional, 166; economic, 96; emphasis on, 108; as form of power, 59; functional, 92; gains from, 130; international, 16, 130, 131; interstate, 110–111; liberal institutionalism and, 59; pursuit of state interests and, 59; regional, 103, 110, 165 Corporations, transnational, 55, 57, 112, 116–118; challenges to state by, 10; concentration of power in, 63; relative autonomy of, 61 Cosmopolitanism, 37 Costa Rica, 178 Counterterrorism, 16 Cross-Border Initiative, 96 Cuba, 120

INDEX

Cultural: alienation, 43; commonalities, 101; dangers, 54; hegemony, 45; heritage, 165; hierarchies, 34; inferiority, 38; inheritance, 127; interchange, 168; invasion, 60; patrimony, 115; preservation, 36; processes, 83; superiority, 37; traditions, 37; translations, 41; values, 41, 83

Debt, 3; reduction, 5; relief, 96; service, 95 Decisionmaking, 8; actor behavior in, 71; African perspectives, 79–97; approach in foreign policy, 19–21; autonomy in, 86, 156; belief systems and, 19; bureaucratic approach, 19, 20; charismatic leader analysis, 20; choice-making, 86; consensus for, 110; crisis and, 19; defining, 86; dynamics in creation of African Union, 91–97; elite interests in, 88; implementation, 86; information collection/interpretation, 86; internal needs of society and, 88; intricacies of, 9; leadership and, 9; option formation, 86; penetration by external participants, 21; perceptions of reality and, 87; perceptual ‘great man’ approach, 20; quality of, 70; rational, 83; research, 19, 20; role of leadership in, 19; shared ideas and knowledge in, 128; short-term, 65; societal factors in, 20; socioeconomic/ institutional variables in, 83 Declaration of Sirte, 90 Decolonization, 21, 164; demands for, 2; as initial step toward selfdetermination, 46 Democratic Republic of Congo, 91 Democratization: African, 90, 94; global norms of, 3; Latin American, 108; of world order, 52 Dependency theory, 1, 22, 54, 55, 63, 82, 103, 105, 155, 163; countermodernization elaboration of, 2 Development: comprehensive, 5, 11n3; conventional, 27; diffusionist model of, 3; dominant ideology in, 57; economic, 23, 27, 108; in global south, 33; levels of, 164; national, 69; options, 2; political, 108;

211

reformist, 27; strategies, 2, 26–27, 109, 110 Dominica, 183 Dominican Republic, 120

“Early bird” syndrome, 3–4 ECDC/TCDC, 5 Economic: aid, 23; collaboration, 6; cooperation, 96; crises, 113; decline, 3; dependence, 22, 23, 29; determinism, 28; development, 27, 108; diversification, 154, 157; environment, 138; globalization, 108; growth, 58; hierarchies, 34; instability, 134; integration, 135; interaction, 111; liberalization, 3, 139; marginalization, 43, 96; nationalism, 155; policy, 56, 125–145; reforms, 93; resources, 69, 73; subordination, 32, 45; survival, 8; vulnerability, 159 Economic Commission for Latin America, 137, 138 Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 103, 138 Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group, 95 Economy: capitalist, 54; command, 3, 169, 171; global, 50, 54, 80; informal, 110; internationalization of, 113; international management of, 50; mixed, 3; openness of, 131, 173; political, 3, 8, 10, 15, 20, 30n4, 50, 56, 58, 79–97 Ecuador, 27–28, 158 El Salvador, 41 Egypt, 91, 93, 164, 166 Enlightenment, the, 37, 41, 169 Environment: anarchical, 73; competitive, 73; degradation of, 16; domestic, 69, 73; economic, 138; external, 73, 81, 155; historical, 74; international, 9; levels of, 77n6; operational, 84; perceptual, 84; policy, 87; social, 187; state relationship to, 74 Eritrea, 91 Essy, Amara, 90 Ethiopia, 166 Europe: colonialism and, 39; contentions for power in, 35; cosmopolitanism of, 37; cultural

212

INDEX

superiority of, 37; decline of papal authority in, 35; expansion of, 39; external conquest and, 40; hegemony of, 38; political instability in, 34; positivism of, 37; rationality of, 37; violence in trajectories of, 44 European Economic Community (EEC), 137, 138 European Union, 7, 117, 141, 146n5

Finance, global: hypermobility of capital and, 61; new dominance of, 61 Follow-up Program of Latin American Foreign Policies (PROSPEL), 106, 123n6 Foreign economic policy, 125–145; actors preferences and, 135–136; development of, 135; domestic actors game in, 130–131; in European Union, 146n5; factors of production in, 131–132; international relations and, 130; as manifestation of change in economic/political balance, 144 Foreign policy: acceptance of Western models of, 49; anticore, 26; attainment of power as purpose of, 40; behavior, 14, 15, 20, 22, 85, 86, 87, 88; changes, 25, 27; colonial project and, 38–41; comparative, 3, 8; compartmentalization and, 8; decisionmaking in, 65; defiant behavior in, 24; as dependent variable, 127; developed/developing countries, 126; domestic factors in, 10, 15, 66, 68, 69; extrapolated from Western experiences, 31; formulation/execution dichotomy, 101; gateways to, 10; historical environment and, 74; interest groups in, 130–131; internal motivation for, 125; international norms and, 16, 17; liberal approach, 17; modernization and, 163–180; neoliberal perspectives, 16, 27; priorities, 6; as public policy, 99, 100; rationality of, 35; role of ideas in, 128; “role” theory in, 68; social forces impact on, 84; state-building and, 22; statecentered, 65–77; theoretical relevance of third world countries to, 1; transnational actors in, 99

Foreign policy, African, 79–97; autonomy of decisionmakers, 86; centralized structure in, 94; decisionmaking approach in, 80–97; discrete decisions or continuous flow, 85; ethnic/cultural factors in, 83; historical issues in, 83; perceived environment of, 89fig; political/ economic influence on, 95–97; political economy approach, 80–97; political/societal factors, 93–95; private differential benefits in, 87; realpolitik and, 81; shift in analysis of, 82; social forces impact on, 84; socioeconomic/institutional variables in, 83; theoretical research on, 80– 85; Western orientation in, 80–81, 88 Foreign policy, analysis, 7–11; actor’s perspective, 68; Arab states, 66, 185–186; bargaining model, 23; case-study method, 25–26; compliant behavior model, 22–24; consensus model, 22, 24–25; critical theories of, 17, 18; decisionmaking, 19–21; dependent state-centric model in, 23; development strategy model, 27; dominant state-centric model in, 23; levels of, 4–5; micro approach, 8; modernization and, 21, 22, 168–173; neorealist views, 14, 16; overemphasis on individual choice in, 66, 71, 72; political economy approach, 77n5; realist, 13, 14, 15, 16; regime autonomy and, 26; regional, 6; role of external powers in, 66; sensitivity and, 23; state level, 7; state uniformity and, 38; statist model of counterdependence in, 22, 25–28; transformative, 17; usefulness of current approaches, 18–28; vulnerability and, 23, 186 Foreign policy, Arab states, 65–77, 185–186; division between external/domestic, 67, 68; domestic factors in, 66, 68, 69; great powers approach, 66, 67; historical environment and, 74; inter-Arab relations and, 69; Iraq, 69, 70, 71, 75; psychologistic approach, 66, 70–72; rationalization of crises as foreign conspiracies, 71; reductionist model, 66, 67; role of historical

INDEX

context in, 71; state-centered, 65–77; Syria, 69; variation in, 69 Foreign policy, Latin American, 99–122; bureaucratic policy in, 105; caution about generalizability of, 102; civil society and, 110–112; decisionmaking in, 108; dependency theory and, 103, 105; economic, 125–145; emergence of, 100; excessive formalism and, 102–103; external/internal factors in, 101; foundational period in, 104; geopolitical matrices and, 103; globalization and, 109–110; global south framework in, 125–145; great power relations and, 103; idealism and, 102; new perspectives in, 109–110; public policy and, 109; realism and, 103; regional civil society and, 119–121; regional integration and, 135–142; regionalism and, 110–112; role of business associations in, 132, 133, 134, 143; strategic loneliness in, 123n2; transnational v. domestic civil society in, 116–118; transnational v. global civil society in, 118–119; use of approaches developed in United States, 105 Foreign policy, southern, 136fig; as antihegemonic process, 41–45; assumptions on, 50–52; autonomy/ sovereignty in, 33; background of, 1–11; changes in, 55–57; Cold War structural effects, 166–167; comparative, 21–28; conceptual approaches, 13–29; correspondence between unit attributes and system structure in, 51; current, 55–57; decisionmaking approach, 19–21; differences from developed states, 49; domesticated, 10; economic, 125–145; economic dependence and, 22; economic issues in, 126; empirical views of, 13–29; externalized, 9–10, 136; foreign investment and, 62; as function of bipolarity of world system, 66; importance of economic development in, 27; inclusion of smallest states, 147–161; lack of coordinated decisionmaking body in, 51;

213

modernization and, 163–180; national identity and, 52–55; politicization of, 10; positivism and, 51; post–Cold War structural effects, 167–168; postcoloniality in, 31–48; reconceptualization of, 10; regional level of analysis, 141fig; retroactive application of Western canons to, 35; reverberation in, 141; shared values and, 24; shifts in, 57–62; societal influence on, 24; world order and, 57–62 Foucault, Michel, 37, 48n1 Fox, Vicente, 16 France, 150 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), 111, 120, 121 Frei, Eduardo, 140 Fundamentalisms, 113

Geneva Convention (1949), 35 Ghana, 53, 92 Globalization: from above, 114; from below, 119; capitalist, 59, 60; changes wrought by, 114; commonality and, 5; consequences of, 62, 63; cooperation and, 59; defining, 55; dynamics of, 59; economic, 108; as final phase of development of capitalism, 113; foreign policy and, 99, 109–110; ideational practices of, 55; imposition of Western civilization on, 113; increase in, 1; intermestic issues and, 99; irreversibility of process of, 115; modernization and, 170; nation-state promotion of, 114; neoliberal, 57, 58; perceived as myth, 113; political implications of, 57; pressures of, 111; rise of, 51; as specific interest/structural forces, 56; spread of the Enlightenment and, 169; superstructure of, 56 Greater Caribbean Civil Society Forum, 120 Group of 15, 5 Group of 77, 4, 33, 160, 167, 184 Group of Seven, 117 Group of Three, 133, 134, 137, 146n3 Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 105 Guatemala, 41, 178 Guinea Conakry, 91

214

INDEX

Gulf War, 70, 71, 75 Guyana, 120

Hegemony: changes in, 61; consensus and, 60; cultural, 45; European, 38; liberal version of, 58; neo-Gramscian theory of, 59; neoliberal theory of, 58; political, 45; structures of, 32; as syntax of power, 60; third world reaction to, 32 HIV/AIDS, 7, 80 Hyperconsumerism, 61

Identity: “imagined,” 184; national, 52–55, 170; regional, 110 Imperialism, 54, 60, 82; global south and, 52; history of, 51; modern, 169; structural, 24; Western, 32 India, 6, 54, 147, 150, 164, 165, 167, 177, 183; nationalism in, 16; nuclear role, 14, 29n1 Indonesia, 41, 144, 147, 165 Institutions: centrality of, 129; civil, 40; domestic, 127; financial, 159, 176; formal, 129; impact of, 128; influence on policymaking, 10; international, 10, 102, 159, 176; national, 8, 127; political, 131; regional, 10; state, 30n3, 129; subregional, 10; supranational, 7 Integration: Central American, 103; centripetal forces of, 111; continental, 96; economic, 90, 135; global, 6; hemispheric, 6, 99, 108; intersocietal, 111; mechanisms, 111; regional, 3, 6, 7, 99, 103, 108, 110, 111, 130, 135–142, 143; subregional, 108; views of neighboring countries on, 137 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, 16 Intergovernmentalism, 7 International Bauxite Association, 160 International Monetary Fund, 79, 95, 117, 138, 176 International political economy, 125; international relations and, 130 International relations: current perspectives, 13–18; foreign economic policy and, 130; foreign policy as subfield of, 1, 7–8, 100; international political economy and,

130; realist perspective, 3, 13, 14, 15, 16; sociologization of, 9; Western canons as inspiration for, 35 Investment, 168; foreign, 27, 56, 61, 62, 173; intra-Mercosur, 140; liberalization, 56; productive, 61; securing, 62; short-term, 61 Iran-Iraq War, 75 Iraq, 69, 70, 71, 75 Ireland, 7, 164

Jamaica, 155–156, 159; independent foreign policy course in, 26 Japan, 14, 150, 175 Joint Studies Program on International Relations of Latin America, 104, 105, 106, 123n5 Jus gentilis, 40 Justice: principles of, 40; social, 2

Kant, Immanuel, 44 Kashmir, 167 Kenya, 53, 91, 92 Kenyatta, Jomo, 92 Kim Dae Jung, 14, 174, 175, 176 Kim Jong Il, 174 Kodjo, Edem, 92 Korea, 173, 183; alliance with United States, 14, 175; economic development in, 175, 176; modernization and, 173–177; relations with North Korea, 14, 175; security issues, 14, 175; state–civil society relations in, 176, 177; sunshine diplomacy in, 174; tradition and, 173–177 Korean War, 46 Kuwait, 70

La folie imperiale, 43 Laos, 144 Latin America. See also Foreign policy, Latin American; Andean Pact and, 103; capitalist development in, 123n3; civil society in, 99–122; decisionmaking in, 21; democratization in, 108; development in, 5; emphasis on cooperation, 108; foreign economic policy in, 125–145; foreign policy in, 6, 99–122; Free Trade Area of the Americas and, 111; free-trade areas in, 6; Grupo Editor Latinoamericano

INDEX

in, 105; independence in, 21, 101; independent policy course by, 25–26; Institute of International Studies at the University of Chile, 104; integration in, 6, 125; international relations field in, 104, 105, 106, 107; Joint Studies Program on International Relations of Latin America in, 104, 105, 106; limits of sovereignty in, 109–110; policymaking in, 14; post-war isolation of, 103; power politics in, 14; regional civil society in, 119–121; regional integration/cooperation in, 103, 135–142; role of globalization in, 109–110; social sciences in, 104; Southern Cone Common Market, 111; structural adjustment in, 138; structural dependency in, 123n3; territorial disputes in, 103; trade issues, 6; trade liberalization in, 111 Latin American Forum, 104, 105 Latin American Free Trade Association, 137 Latin American Integration Association, 111 Liberalism, 6, 16, 28, 114; inadequacy of, 17 Liberalization, 112; economic, 3, 139; financial, 61; investment, 56; trade, 111 Liberia, 95 Libya, 90, 91, 93

Malaysia, 62, 144, 173; bumiputera in, 177, 178; modernization and, 177–180; as multimedia information corridor, 178; New Economic Plan in, 178; open liberal economy in, 178; tradition and, 177–180 Manley, Michael, 26, 159 Marginalization, 4; economic, 43, 96 Market(s): complex, 171; efficiency, 115; external, 123n3, 159; free, 58; global, 113; labor, 61; logic, 114; self-regulated, 57; small, 154; tourist, 159; volatile, 159 Marxism, 105, 113, 170 Mauritania, 91 Mauritius, 91 Mbeki, Thabo, 91 Mercosur, 6, 111, 137, 138, 140

215

Mexico, 134, 135, 143; Group of Three and, 133, 146n3; NAFTA and, 111, 132, 146n3; oil prices and, 166; private sector in, 133; strength of domestic business interests in, 132, 133 Middle East, 165; foreign policy in, 65–77; political conflicts in, 7 Migration, 60 Military: aid, 23; dependence, 23 Millennium African Recovery Plan, 96 Modernization, 2; defining, 170; foreign policy and, 163–180; Korea and, 173–177; Malaysia and, 177– 180; postcoloniality and, 43; as variable for analysis, 21 Mohamad, Mahathir, 177, 178 Morality, international, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41, 42 Multilateralism, 99 Myanmar, 144

NAFTA. See North American Free Trade Agreement Nasser, Gamal Abdul, 66 Nationalism, 7 Nationalization, 3 Neocolonialism, 21, 60, 82, 153 Neoconservatism, 56 Neoliberalism, 16, 27, 56 Neo-Marxism, 17 Neorealism, 14, 16, 34 New International Economic Order, 2, 50 New Partnership for African Development, 96 Nicaragua, 178, 183 Nigeria, 53, 90, 91, 93, 95, 96, 147, 150 Nihilism, 169 Nkrumah, Kwame, 92 Non-Aligned Movement, 2, 33, 184; abandonment of, 50; as articulation of positive neutralism, 46; third world countries participation in, 4 North American Free Trade Agreement, 111, 137, 141–142, 146n3, 166; Mexican iniative in, 132 North Korea, 6 Norway, 166 Nyerere, Julius, 92

216 Obasanjo, Olusegun, 91 Omega Plan, 96 OPEC. See Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Organization of African Unity, 90, 91, 93, 95, 96 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 2, 5, 166 Organizations: civil society, 120; intergovernmental, 120; international, 22, 120; nongovernmental, 5, 110, 112, 115, 118, 120; regional, 22, 120; tricontinental, 5; umbrella, 120 Otherness, global, 53, 54, 55

INDEX

Pakistan, 6, 54, 147, 167, 168 Particularisms, 113 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 35 Philippines, 144, 164 Pinochet, Augusto, 61 Policy: as antihegemonic process, 41–45; bureaucratic, 105; coordination, 110, 130; domestic, 87, 157, 185; economic, 56, 125–145; environment, 87; external, 8; formation, 17; individual effect on influence, 72; intermediate associations and, 129; preferences, 131; production profile and, 129; public, 99, 100, 109, 115, 153, 185; regional, 6; social, 110 Policymaking: context of, 66; institutional influence on, 10, 134; power politics and, 14; structural constraints on, 82 Political: action, 118; conflict, 86; culture, 36, 83; economy, 3, 10, 15, 20, 30n4, 50, 56, 58, 81, 129; hegemony, 45; imagination, 46; instability, 34; institutions, 131; interventions, 41; leadership, 83; leverage, 4; mobilization, 63; nationalism, 155; participation, 170; power, 62, 63, 170; preferences, 131; psychology, 70–72; realism, 81; resources, 73; transformations, 36 Politics: global, 46; internal, 69; international, 3, 39; nuclear, 2; of political economies, 129; power, 14, 24, 81 Positivism, 37, 51

Postcoloniality, 31–48; antihegemonic discourses and, 43; continuation of impetus to, 33; as field of signification, 42; foreign policy differing from that of West, 33; global emancipation and, 45–47; modernization and, 43; movement toward, 42; opposition to Western Colonialism, 32; passive revolution and, 43; relations with former powers and, 46; state legitimacy in, 53; subjectivity and, 42; suspicion of Allied powers in, 46; understanding of global subjectivity and, 32 Postmodernism, 170 Poverty, 16, 153, 178, 184 Power: accumulation of, 169; anticolonial resistance and, 44; attainment of, 40; corporate, 59, 60; dynamics, 36; dynastic, 36; executive, 128; global distributions of, 36; hard, 59; hegemonic, 41, 60, 128; legitimation of, 54; monarchical, 36; movement of, 59; national interest and, 13; political, 62, 63, 170; politics, 14, 24, 81; regulatory, 143; sharing, 128; soft, 59; state, 1, 13, 54, 60; structures of, 38, 42; struggles, 127; vacuums, 94 Prices: commodity, 3; oil, 3 Privatization, 56, 140, 178 Production: development of forces of, 170; foreign economic policy and, 131–132; industrial, 61, 172; ownership of means of, 82–83

Qaddafi, Muammar, 90, 91, 92, 93

Rationality, 170; of Europe, 37; of foreign policy, 35; state, 36, 39 Reagan, Ronald, 24, 61 Realism, 13, 14, 16, 28, 103; class analysis and, 15; focus on military issues, 15; great power model and, 66; inadequacy of, 16; peripheral, 14, 15, 103; political, 81; subaltern, 14–15 Reciprocity, 40 Refugees, 93 Regime: autonomy, 26; change, 25; political, 109; preferences, 26, 27, 29; security, 75

INDEX

Regional: civil society, 119–121; classifications, 165; cohesion, 110, 111; consciousness, 110; cooperation, 110, 165; identity, 110; integration, 3, 6, 7, 99, 103, 108, 110, 130, 135–142, 143; objectives, 119; organizations, 22, 120 Regionalism, 7, 184; civil society and, 110–112 Regionalization, 111 Remittances, 60 Resources: allocation of, 46; control of, 143; domestic, 143; economic, 69, 73; mobilization of, 170; political, 73 Reverberation, 141 Río Treaty, 16

Saddam Hussein, 66, 70, 71, 76n3, 76n4 Saudi Arabia, 164 Second world: transition to free-market democracies by, 4 Security: alliances, 164; collective, 16; military, 15; multilateral intervention and, 58; as purpose of foreign policy, 40; regime, 75; regional, 94–95; sovereignty and, 58; state pursuit of, 3; third world aims in, 8 Self-determination, 45, 46 Senegal, 96 Sierra Leone, 95 Singapore, 144 Social: class, 53, 84; environment, 187; formations, 60; interaction, 111; justice, 2; movements, 112, 114, 115, 118, 120; networks, 115; relevance, 42; theory, 170; transformation, 118; values, 81; welfare, 56, 61 Society: international, 102; multiethnic, 4 Society, civil, 87; antistate positions in, 113; domestic, 110; global, 110, 112–116, 118–119; increasing influence of, 109; levels of autonomy in, 117; penetration by Western culture, 60; public policy and, 99; regional, 6, 99, 110–112, 119–121; relations with state, 55; rise in influence of, 5; state relations and, 109; transnational, 5, 6, 110, 115–118; weakness in Latin America, 113

217

Somalia, 166 South, global: accommodation of great powers by, 9; ambivalence toward new world order, 18; autonomy in foreign policy, 53; breakdown of solidarity in, 51; classification issues, 164–168; Cold War structural effects, 166–167; collective selfimage of, 10, 14, 33, 37, 41, 44; colonial-era requirements and, 42; colonialism and, 32, 51; cooperation in, 135; decisionmaking and, 20; dependency and, 1; disjuncture between internal solidarity and state authority in, 53; diversity among, 183; economic development in, 79; economic integration in, 135; economic policies in, 56; emancipation and, 45–47; ethnic struggles in, 53; export production zones in, 61; foreign economic policy in, 125–145; foreign policies of, 1–11; globalization and, 1; impact of external forces on economies of, 126; imperialism and, 51, 52; inclusion of smallest states, 147–161; independence and, 21; industrial production in, 61; intergovernmentalism in, 7; modernization and, 163–180; otherness of, 53–54; post-Cold War structural effects, 167–168; as readymade entities, 52; reconceptualization of perspective of, 49–63; size commonalities, 150; social relations of vulnerable labor in, 63; sovereignty of, 7; state formation in, 53; state legitimacy in, 53; transgressions of sovereignty of, 41; transnationalization and, 1; underdevelopment of, 84; uneven development in, 33. See also Foreign policy, southern South Africa, 91, 93, 95, 96, 177 Southern Cone Common Market (Mercosur), 6, 111, 137, 138, 140 South Korea, 6 Sovereignty: abstract notion of, 41; consolidation of, 54; discriminatory modes of, 41; national, 109–110; “plus,” 55; pressures on, 159; transgressions of in global south, 41

218

INDEX

Soviet Union, 147, 167; in Africa, 81; demise of, 4 State: abstractness, 76; authority, 53; autonomy, 8, 29, 155–156, 159; behavior, 14, 15, 20, 22, 77n5, 85; building, 69, 73, 74, 75; bureaucratic-military apparatus in, 53; as catalyst/initiator of foreign policy, 69; civil society and, 87; control, 3; decline in power of, 1; decline of authority of, 9; dependent, 3, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 82; developing, 14, 17, 49, 50, 150; developmental, 171; equality of individual, 50; formation, 172; hierarchy in, 15; interests, 35, 43; as intervening variable between social forces/ foreign policy, 87; interventions, 58, 133; legitimacy, 53, 69; minimalist, 57; modern, 35–37; nation, 41, 53; postcolonial, 31–48, 82; power, 54, 60; predatory, 171; preferences, 24; rationality, 36, 39; reasons of, 35; relationship to environment, 74; relations with civil society, 55; relations with international system, 55; rogue, 92; role of, 10; sovereignty, 35, 39; standards of conduct, 38; structure, 129; survival, 73; weakening of, 10 States, small, 3, 14, 22, 147–161; academic debate over, 154–156; African, 151tab; Alliance of SmallIsland Developing States, 151tab; Asian, 151tab; assistance to, 150, 151; bloc supporters at United Nations, 152; in Commonwealth Secretariat, 151tab; concerns over viability of, 152–153; cultural/value systems in, 158; dependency issues, 150, 151, 154; dependency/political economy model, 154–156; drug trafficking and, 153; environmental problems, 153; equal regional treatment and, 159; external aggression on, 154; foreign policy of, 147–161, great power/external influence approach in, 154–156; independence and, 152; Indian Ocean, 151tab; as less participatory, 147; limited interests of, 153; marginalization of, 160; neocolonialism and, 153;

oligarchy and, 154; permeability of, 157; personalism in, 154, 158; policy debate over, 152–154; population categories, 150, 151; responsibilities of global diplomacy and, 152–153; security threats to, 154; skewed population distributions, 147, 148–149tab, 150; in South Pacific, 151tab; special difficulties of, 150; undiversified economic structures of, 154; vulnerability approach and, 153, 156, 157, 158, 160–161, 186 Structural adjustment, 3, 96, 138, 184 Subjectivity: global, 32; new modes of, 45; postcoloniality and, 42 Subsidies, 56 Sudan, 53, 165 Supranationalism, 7 Swaziland, 91 Syria, 69 Syro-Iraqi National Command, 71

Tanzania, 92 Taxation, 56 Technology: communications, 60, 170; disruptions by, 170; expansion, 60; transfer, 55 Terrorism, 1, 16, 168; Islamic, 7 Thailand, 144, 164 Thatcher, Margaret, 61 Theories: critical, 17, 18; dependency, 1, 22, 24, 54, 55, 63, 103; empirical, 105; hegemonic stability, 58; neoGramscian hegemony, 59; normative, 104; problem-solving, 17; social, 170 Third world countries: as academic field of study, 2; decline in academic interest in, 4; demands for decolonization, 2; economic “lost decade” in, 3; economic survival of, 8; first world injustice toward, 6; global importance of, 2; independence in, 2; interventions in international system, 42; levels of analysis in, 4–5; loss of bargaining solidarity, 4; security issues, 8; structural considerations, 8; theoretical relevance to foreign policy, 1. See also South, global Trade, 1; agreements, 80; arrangements, 168; dependency, 96; expansion, 110; external, 154; free, 6, 58, 120, 133, 134, 154;

INDEX

international, 96; intra-Mercosur, 140; intra-regional, 6; issues, 6; liberalization, 111; magnitude, 23; partner concentration, 23; preferential, 154; unions, 134; vulnerability, 23 Tradition, 172–173; colonial, 34; cultural, 37; European, 37; in Korea, 173–177; Malaysia and, 177–180; modernity and, 169 Transnationalism, 107 Transnationalization, 109, 114; effect on states, 57; increase in, 1; process of, 112; world economy and, 113 Treaty of Augsburg (1555), 35 Treaty of Nice, 7 Turkey, 177

Uganda, 91 Ultranationalism, 16 Union of African Workers Organizations, 94 United Fruit Company, 47 United Nations, 168; Conference on Trade and Development, 2, 167; criticisms of, 46; democratic deficit in, 5; Economic and Social Council, 42; Education and Cultural Organization, 42, 48n3; General Assembly, 23, 26; importance of have-not powers and, 42; third world countries participation in, 4; voting behavior and aid, 24; vulnerability index by, 161n1

219

United States, 147, 150, 167; in Africa, 81; alliance with Korea, 14, 175; dependent state votes in United Nations against, 26; economic interests in, 7; economic sanctions by, 48n3; liberalization negotiations of, 7; military action in Afghanistan, 18; NAFTA and, 111, 132; national interest policies, 7 United States of Africa, 91 Urbanization, 170 Uruguay, 140

Venezuela, 133, 134, 135, 143 Versailles Conference (1918), 35 Vietnam, 41, 46, 47, 144, 166, 167

West African Economic and Monetary Community, 96 Western: civilizational superiority, 43; external conquest, 40; imposition of geopolitics, 47; relations with nonEuropeans, 40; validation of own ethos of foreign policy, 40. See also Europe World Bank, 79, 95, 117, 138 World Trade Organization, 79, 117, 119

Yearbook of Latin American Foreign Policies, 106

Zimbabwe, 91

About the Book

Seeking to refocus thinking about the behavior of the global south (“third world”) states in international affairs, this book explores contending explanations of global south foreign policy and strategy. The authors draw on both traditional approaches and newer conceptualizations in foreign policy analysis, contributing to the development of an integrated theoretical framework. Examples from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Arab world enrich the analysis.

Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner is professor of political science at City College of New York and the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. Her numerous publications include Interpreting the Third World, The Caribbean in World Affairs, and The Caribbean in the Pacific Century (with contributors). She is a former president of the Caribbean Studies Association.

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