Emerging Tenets of Responsive Foreign Policymaking?

Abstract

The rise in prominence of new foreign policy actors, agendas, and security threats in the decades following the end of the Cold War has led to intensified uncertainty about the basic notions of what are appropriate actions of states and other actors in particular situations, who are legitimate actors, what provides legitimacy for international actions, and how. An intensive search by governments for new ideational, conceptual, and procedural underpinnings fitting the newly emerging conditions in the international environment has been underway. On the ideational side, this led to the rise of doctrines such as human security, the Dutch notion ofgidsland, and the concept of preventive action.' It has also been reflected in academic analyses such as those conceptualizing the European Union as a civilian power or normative power or developing the concept of shared sovereignty arrangements.2 Since the common denominator of these foreign policy doctrines is a concern with the promotion of human rights and democracy beyond national borders, these ideational developments generate expectations of greater openness and domestic public involvement in the process of foreign policymaking. While the parliamentary channels provide a level of democratic control, it has been traditionally limited by the extensive focus on secrecy and information security inherent in foreign affairs administrations around the world. This has been a problem not only for the citizens but increasingly also for the governments, because in the context of shifting doctrinal and conceptual underpinnings of foreign policy, governments often face difficulties in providing sufficient public justifications for international actions, resulting in the severe undermining of legitimacy of foreign policies.' Governments of countries taking on the role of mentor states promoting human rights and democracy are hence often involved in a search for new procedures allowing for domestic public consultation and involvement in foreign policymaking so as to gain legitimacy for their new foreign policy role and actions.In recent years, the Canadian government has been a vanguard worldwide in tackling this challenge through developing innovative approaches to public involvement in foreign policy consultation and engagement of societal actors. This article describes the recent practice of foreign policy eDiscussions hosted by Foreign Affairs Canada (FAC) and asks to what extent this may be indicating the emergence of what might be termed responsive foreign policymaking.In the first part of the article, responsiveness as a structural feature of political and diplomatic representation is elaborated upon. The second part then describes the process of FAC's public eDiscussions. In the third part the institutional and organizational challenges this new procedure brings about are outlined and it is argued that such process is dependent on the ability of the foreign ministry to frame public debates and absorb public inputs effectively. In the conclusion, the question is raised whether the online public consultations represent an improvement in responsiveness or whether this is merely a new public diplomacy tool.RESPONSIVENESS IN POLITICAL AND DIPLOMATIC REPRESENTATIONWhile both diplomatic representation and political representation are constitutive of modern states as units of political organization, the former traditionally differs from the latter in particular when it comes to responsiveness of the representatives vis-a-vis the represented. In domestic political representation, responsiveness of representatives plays a key role. In fact, as Pitkin argues, responsiveness is a constitutive element of any form of political representation as the latter means acting in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them.4 Referring to this process as congruence, Eulau and Karps suggest four modes of responsiveness.5First, policy responsiveness is defined as the presence of a meaningful connection between constituent policy preferences or demands and the representative's official behavior. …