Foreign Offices and New States

Abstract

The content of foreign policy and the range of diplomatic method by which it is executed are too often examined in isolation from the system of foreign affairs administration. It seems to me, moreover, that the diplomatic machinery of new states reveals distinctive enough styles and problems to justify academic treatment of these countries as a single category.1 This paper will attempt a few generalizations about the early experiences of new states in foreign policy management, but the generalizations will apply more reliably to small states than to large and to the economically underdeveloped states rather than to the industrialized or developed. These categories generously overlap but they are not identical. Most new states are small, weak, and underdeveloped, but occasionally a new state is very large (eg, India) or developed (eg, Israel). Although literature on foreign affairs administration is no longer scarce, most of the theoretical writing and empirical studies are preoccupied with North America or European states. Even the recent studies of the foreign policy behaviour of small states tend to treat them all as a single category, as if Norway's foreign policy machinery operated in much the same way as, say, Burundi's. The Commonwealth Secretariat has addressed itself