Linking Foreign Policy and Systemic Transformation in Global Politics: Methodized Inquiry in a Deweyan Tradition

Abstract

Foreign policy analysis and International Relations (IR) maintain an uneasy relationship. This holds at least with regard to how the (IR-)field of foreign policy analysis and the broader discipline of IR relate to one another in conceptualizing and theorizing the connection between foreign policy agency and transformative events in international politics. The latter by definition transcend the state and sometimes even amount to structural change at the level of the international system. The former, in contrast, is located at the level of the state. What is more, to the extent that the black box of unitary state agency is opened up (which, for many, is the very rationale for doing foreign policy analysis) we are facing concrete collective actors such as governments, foreign policy bureaucracies, societal actors and sometimes even individuals (Hudson, 2005) — with all the complications this raises in handling a complex set of factors or variables.KeywordsForeign PolicyInternational RelationSystemic TransformationEuropean Monetary UnionInternational PoliticsThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.