Reviewing the Literature on Sequential/Dynamic Foreign Policy Decision Making

Abstract

Most, if not all, foreign policy problems continue over an extended period of time and are revisited numerous times before finally being resolved. In fact, foreign policymakers “often find themselves returning again and again to the task of coping with an issue they have addressed before” (Billings and Hermann 1998:53) because a foreign policy problem of any consequence is likely to be “ill-structured” (Steinbruner 1974) and rarely disappears from the scene easily. Turkey's accession negotiations with the European Union, for example, have taken more than four decades. Since Turkey's first application for full membership to the Union in 1959, both European Union and Turkish foreign policymakers have had to deal with the issue of Turkey's membership on numerous occasions. As this example shows, foreign policy concerns cannot usually be dealt with by a single decision. Rather, policymaking involves a series of decisions that entail differing priorities at different times as well as different decision-making bodies (Hermann 2001). As a result, foreign policy decision making needs to be examined sequentially (Stern 1999), taking into account the past and prior actions as well as the future (Billings and Hermann 1998). This thinking is in line with the major argument Ranan Kuperman has just made in the previous pages. However, even though Kuperman's suggestion that we should be exploring “dynamic foreign policy decision making” is valuable and on target, it is rather misleading to suggest that studies on dynamic foreign policymaking have been absent from the fields of international relations (IR) and foreign policy analysis (FPA). Indeed, very different strands of research have made some important contributions to our understanding of how sequential foreign policymaking takes place, and “thoughtful scholars have long acknowledged that policymaking is itself an ongoing process in which decisions (and nondecisions) generate responses that create new opportunities …