The Paramount Importance of Cultural Sources: American Foreign Policy and Comparative Foreign Policy Research Reconsidered

Abstract

The author notes that there are two "worlds" of foreign policy analysis: the quantitative world of comparative foreign policy and the qualitative world of largely non-cumulative and single-case foreign policy studies. A major division concerns the inclusion of "intangibles", of which the "cultural factors" behind a nation's foreign policy may be considered at the core. The article points to the need for theoretically focused comprehensive studies with few cases as a way of bridging these two "worlds", and as a fruitful approach to theory-construction. With American foreign policy as one case, the author demonstrates how cultural sources should be considered a major source component of foreign policy. He then reviews how cultural/societal sources, broadly speaking, have been treated in the comparative foreign policy field and notes that while the "foreign policy events" school largely ignores cultural sources, the theorizing of James N. Rosenau, over a twenty-year period, has come to recognize such sources as fundamental. This, the article notes, seems to be linked to the definition of the dependent variable: foreign policy defined as "behavior" or discrete acts versus "orientation" (cf. K. J. Holsti). Rosenau's "adaptation model" as reformulated by Nicolaj Petersen is subsequently used to demonstrate how cultural/societal sources are of paramount importance when analyzing foreign policy defined as "orientation". The author concludes by proposing a three-level hierarchical definition of foreign policy as (1) foreign policy orientation, (2) sectorial foreign policies/programs of action, and (3) foreign policy behavior. A model is set up which hypothesizes a strong causal relationship between cultural/societal forces and foreign policy orientation and between situational/contextual factors and foreign policy behavior respectively. This fits in with a probabilistic relationship between policy as a "standard used in the making of decisions" and foreign policy behavior as discrete acts, and provides a perspective which helps explain issues related to consistency.