Social Change, Charisma and International Behaviour: Toward a Theory of Foreign Policy-Making in the Third World

Abstract

Cultivated in a Eurocentric milieu, international regulations theory tended to neglect the developing areas. That genre, the international theories of imperialism, presently being reincarnated in the dependencia literature, did treat the developing areas but mainly as extensions of metropolitan power. More recently, voting and coalition behavior studies of the United Nations have brought empirical tools to bear on the foreign policies of newly independent states-but in a narrow way. Otherwise, there is almost a void of systematic analysis of Third World international behavior. Professor Korany's book is a pioneering effort to fill this void. He has two complementary but not easily wedded purposes. First, he seeks, by conceptual mapping, to cull from the literature concepts and hypotheses that can be used to analyze Third World foreign policies and to integrate that analysis with general theory. Second, he endeavors to lay out and substantiate an empirical explanation of policies of Third World states. He is more comfortable and probably more persuasive with the second. Kornay rejects the (unflattering) power politics explanation of Third World non-alignment which, he contends, regards it as passive neutralism-an expression of impotence in the face of bipolar strategic competition. On the contrary, he argues, non-alignment is a policy of assertiveness; it is better explained by internal, psychosocial variables than by bipolarity; and, rather than helpless conflictavoidance, it is a positive conflict-resolving influence in world affairs. He explains non-alignment as a generic response in Asia and Africa to the colonial legacy of social disorganization. Third World leaders resort to charisma, which requires special results, to achieve national solidarity. Their instrument for this in foreign affairs is non-alignment, which teases rewards from the superpowers and justifies creative diplomatic intervention in peripheral superpower conflicts (e.g., India's mediation in Korea). Intriguing though this model is, two criticisms may be anticipated here. First, it does not do away with power politics explanations of Third World foreign policies. Instead it shows how those pol-