The Politics of External Relations

Abstract

Little mention has been made so far about the politicians who deal with Britain’s external relations. This is partly because a study of the nature of British external policy-making in the 1990s is necessarily concerned with the underlying determinants of policy and will therefore tend to concentrate on the institutions, the structural factors, and on general trends within the world of officialdom. Moreover, many analysts, not to mention many officials, consider that the politicians who preside over external affairs simply make very little difference to policy. Most of the existing literature on British foreign policy-making makes only passing mention of the role of different politicians and parties on the policy-making process. Personalities and political parties matter, of course, and may have critical effects on particular issues. When leaders change, at the very least, a new set of personality characteristics comes into the reckoning. But most previous accounts of British foreign policy-making have found little that could usefully be said about the effects of different political leaders and of changes of government on the nature and conduct of the external policy process.