State Influence in Foreign Policymaking: Water Related Environmental Disputes Along the United States-Mexico Border

Abstract

rT ^RADITIONALLY, scholars have conceptualized international relations as conducted by political units treated almost as personalities. The structure is taken as given; foreign policy begins where policy ends (Kissinger 1966: 503). This tendency has not gone without its critics, however. In a pathbreaking study of influences Rosenau (1967: 4) observed, domestic factors may be of considerable significance even if they are not primary sources of foreign policy, and on some issues they may well be dominant. Over the last decade this bifurcation of and foreign policy and its attendant concept of the nation-state as unitary actor have virtually broken down as scholars have examined the foreign policy implications of international interdependency (Keohane and Nye 1977), bureaucratic politics (Allison 1971), structure (Katzenstein 1976; Wagner 1974; Hanrieder 1978), and subnational diplomacy (Duchacek 1983, 1984a, 1984b). As the state-centric paradigm has dissolved, structures have increasingly absorbed the attention of researchers. Domestic structures, loosely conceptualized as institutions, and organized interests at the national and subnational level, are presumed to exert a determining influence on the behavior of foreign policy decision-makers. At the most general level, the relationship between structure and foreign policy creation has been conceptualized vertically in terms of state-society relations, where societal demands on the state generate foreign policy behavior. These statesociety relations may vary from state to state and issue to issue in the degree that authority is centralized or dispersed, affecting policy outcomes (Katzenstein 1977: 15-19). As Hanreider observes, however, this model reflects a traditional state-centric, government-to-government approach at the international level that neglects the variety of cross-national relations seen in the international system. He suggests a typology of international interactions that includes (a) horizontal linkages between governments; (b) lateral, society to society, relations among subnational actors; and (c) integrative, or supra-national, processes to which states are party (Hanrieder 1978: 1278). While Hanrieder's typology does clarify the diversity of international interactions, moving away from the state-centric model, it does not adequately specify the manner in which structures may be linked to