Foreign Policy Elites Research Articles

Ideas and Change in Foreign Policy Instruments: Soft Power and the Case of the Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency

Constructivism in the International Relations literature mainly focuses on the constitutive interaction between international norms and state actions. Few studies explore when ideas at the domestic level matter in foreign policy change. I propose a constructivist account for policy change that emphasizes not only ideas but also material interests as exogenous factors constituted within domestic structures. My empirical analysis in the case of the Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency reveals important evidence demonstrating the influence of (i) shared normative values, mostly constituted by the foreign policy elite's intersubjective understanding of Turkey's historical roots and cultural ties in the region and (ii) material interests, favored through the “trading state” and framed by the convergence of principled and causal beliefs on policy change. Ideas matter in foreign policymaking when a set of contingent conditions is satisfied: (i) A small group of recognized foreign policy elite has shared normative beliefs and (ii) an enabling political environment exists, particularly a majority government facilitating foreign policy appointments to key positions so that a window of opportunity is provided for policy entrepreneurship.

Thinking Outside the Bloc: Explaining the Foreign Policies of Small States

What explains change and continuity in the foreign policy behavior of small states? Given the proliferation of small states over the past century, this topic has received relatively little systematic attention. When researchers do focus on small states, the emphasis has been on external and international factors, and the primary conclusion has been that small states are more likely to bandwagon with threatening great powers than to balance against them. In this article, we suggest that state- and individual-level variables can play a greater role in explaining the foreign policy behavior of small states and that small states sometimes choose to balance rather than bandwagon, especially when elite ideology is deeply embedded in formulating foreign policy. We develop this claim in terms of elite ideas about the identity and purpose of the state and examine its plausibility using primary sources and exclusive interviews with the security and foreign policy elite in Georgia. We find that this approach offers a more plausible explanation for Georgia's otherwise puzzling foreign policy behavior than frameworks that focus on the international or regional system. Although Georgia may be the exception that proves the rule, it can advance an understanding of the conditions under which standard explanations of small-state foreign policy behavior may miss their predictive mark and when incorporating the role of elite ideas can provide additional explanatory leverage.

Securitisation from below: the relationship between immigration and foreign policy in South Africa's approach to the Zimbabwe crisis

The political and economic debacle in Zimbabwe has led to a large-scale influx of Zimbabweans into neighbouring South Africa. This article argues that there is a complex and significant link between the domestic response to this immigration influx and South Africa's foreign policy towards Zimbabwe. South Africa's foreign and security policy elite preferred to use an immigration approach of benign neglect as a tool to promote its ‘quiet diplomacy’ approach towards the Zimbabwean regime, treating the influx as a ‘non-problem’. But increased xenophobic violence, vigilantism and protests in townships and informal settlements against Zimbabwean and other African immigrants, culminating in widespread riots across the country in 2008, contributed to a change not only in immigration policy but also in the mediation efforts towards the Zimbabwean parties. I argue that this foreign policy change was pushed by a process of ‘securitisation from below’, where the understanding of Zimbabwean immigrants as a security threat were promoted not by traditional security elites but by South Africa's marginalised urban poor.

Turkish-Japanese Relations

The last few years have witnessed a dramatic transformation in Turkish foreign policy, from an introverted approach with limited involvement in regional and global affairs to an activist approach and eagerness to assume an assertive role. Coupled with its expanded wealth and supported by the consolidation of state power, Turkey has found itself better positioned to more effectively implement its foreign policy objective of asserting itself as a country.1 A growing number of studies examine the new activism of Turkish foreign policy in nonwestern neighbourhoods, especially in the Middle East, Balkans, central Asia, and the Caucasus. However, how the new Turkish foreign policy asserts itself beyond these immediate neighbourhoods has scarcely been studied. The aim of this article is to scrutinize the multidimensional and global aspects of Turkish foreign policy in the specific case of Turkish- Japanese relations. The central question that drives this inquiry is the extent to which Turkey has formed a clearly articulated global strategy to undergird its evolving relations with Japan. Turkey- Japan relations offer a useful case study to examine Turkey's global agenda. With Japan, Turkey has had the longest and most-established relations in Asia. Moreover, a consistent pattern in the bilateral relationship can be observed and both countries have a history of partnership in global institutions.Historically, Japan has occupied a peculiar place in the vision and discourse of Turkish foreign policy elites. While Turkey's relations with its regional neighbours and other great powers in the world have carried a more realist or pragmatic character, its foreign policymakers have approached distant Japan with a degree of sentimentality. The phrase coined by the researchers of Turkish-Japanese relations to explain this sentimentality, romanticism, will be used in this study as well.2The dominance of a discourse of romanticism in diplomatic language and also in informal accounts of Turkey- Japan relations can be traced from the onset of their initial contacts through the present. Today, this romantic rhetoric is reinforced with historic narratives of rescue, solidarity, and support, and by a sense of mutual empathy as victims of natural disasters.3 These narratives are accompanied by a vague and undefined sense of commonness, which references various similarities in culture, common social and paternal values, and occasional claims of common ancestry. These so-called similarities can range from political ideational factors - both countries were late modernizers, westernized outside the west, and did so at times when they were in conflict with the west - to rather inconsequential and even trifling cultural similarities, such as removing one's shoes when entering someone's house.1 However these narratives are old, dating back to Ottoman times when the challenges both countries faced first created this sense of commonness among the elites of each country.5This study claims that surges in Turkey's interest in Japan - and the rest of Asia, for that matter - have come at times when Turkey has decided to adopt a multifaceted and multidimensional foreign policy, generally as a result of a change in its relations with the west, or when there has been a domestic discussion on the redefinition of its identity between the west and east.6 One can observe such predicaments during the time of Abdulhamid II, in a much more subtle way during the premiership of Turgut Ozal, and more recently as a result of the multidimensional policies of the current minister of foreign affairs, Ahmet Davutoglu.This article, thus, contends that together with the heavy use of emotional references, rational calculations have also accompanied Turkish-Japanese relations. The imagined identities of similarities and narratives of solidarity have placed Turkish-Japanese relations in a social context that has made it easier for these countries to perceive each other as suitable partners in the contemporary world and have facilitated harmonious cooperative behaviour, especially in global platforms. …

Europæisk afhængighed af russisk gas – Har vi noget at frygte?

The Russo-Ukranian gas dispute of 2009 has sent ripples through European energy policy debates. Does dependence on Russian gas represent a threat to European energy security via politically motivated supply interruptions? Or was the conflict simply a dispute over the right price of a good?This paper represents a contribution to this debate. Rather than focusing on the outcomes of or motives behind the conflict, we conduct a neoclassical realist analysis of Russian foreign energy policy in order to assess Russia’s ability to use gas as a political instrument of coercion. Our analysis will show that structural conditions promote an increasing emphasis on gas. Furthermore we will show that this shift translates into Russian foreign policy elite consensus about using gas as a foreign policy instrument, and that this consensus is facilitated by an increase in state cohesion since Vladimir Putin assumed the offce of president in 2000.

Obama and the Bolivarian Agenda for the Americas

President Barack Obama’s campaign rhetoric suggested a significant shift away from the militarist intervention practiced by U.S. administrations since the Reagan presidency, and his emphasis on multilateral diplomacy was endorsed by some key foreign policy elites. Focusing on home-grown obstacles to the hoped-for change in Latin American policy, such as domestic ideologies and narrow corporate interests, may underestimate the role of Latin American resistance and of the global shifts that have presented alternatives to the multilateral diplomacy of the OAS and the regional economic integration of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas. The Bolivarian agenda offers a direct challenge to neoliberal globalization as promoted by the United States under presidents of both parties. While for a number of reasons it is unlikely to bring U.S. hegemony in Latin America to an end, it has facilitated alternative forms of cooperation for economic integration and security, and this poses a significant dilemma for the Obama administration.

Germany and Central and Eastern European Countries: Laggards or Veto-Players?

Germany, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have always been loyal members of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP). Yet they have never shown enthusiasm for it or displayed noteworthy activism within a co-operation framework that is perceived by their foreign policy elite as a necessary concession to southern EU member states in order to secure the latter's support for continuing pro-active EU engagement in eastern Europe. With this in mind, this study provides a comparative analysis of the foreign policy of Germany, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic toward the southern Mediterranean and discusses in particular the different responses of their governing, economic and societal elites to plans to create a Mediterranean Union (UM).

Constructing Turkish “exceptionalism”: Discourses of liminality and hybridity in post-Cold War Turkish foreign policy

This article examines the discursive practices that enable the construction of Turkish “exceptionalism.” It argues that in an attempt to play the mediator/peacemaker role as an emerging power, the Turkish elite construct an “exceptionalist” identity that portrays Turkey in a liminal state. This liminality and thus the “exceptionalist” identity it creates, is rooted in the hybridization of Turkey’s geographical and historical characteristics. The Turkish foreign policy elite make every effort to underscore Turkey’s geography as a meeting place of different continents. Historically, there has also been an ongoing campaign to depict Turkey’s past as “multicultural” and multi-civilizational. These constructions of identity however, run counter to the Kemalist nation-building project, which is based on “purity” in contrast to “hybridity” both in terms of historiography and practice.

Review: Essence of Indecision Diefenbaker's Nuclear Policy

ESSENCE OF INDECISION Diefenbaker's Nuclear Policy, 1957-1963 Patricia I. McMahon Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. 246PP, $85.00 cloth ISBN 978-0-7735-3498-8Five decades after it took place, Canada's nuclear weapons debate of the late1950S and early 60s remains poorly understood. This is a consequence of several factors - the long-standing tendency of Canadian defence scholars and historians to turn their attention elsewhere, the fact that most Canadians have only a limited knowledge of their own history, and perhaps even the discouragement of this country's foreign policy elites (who might prefer that Canadians not know about this entire affair) - but the net result is that the debate and final decision remains a subject of study.Patricia I. McMahon's book, Essence of Indecision, is the most recent attempt to try to make sense of this episode. Building on a relatively smaU body of scholarship (perhaps the best known of which remains Jon McLin's seminal 1967 work Canada's Changing Defence Policy), McMahon chaUenges the consensus view by arguing that Prime Minister John was not indecisive in being unable to determine whether Canada should accept US nuclear weapons during his period in office. Rather, his inability to reach a final decision was the result of considerations. In particular, Diefenbaker's Conservatives were attempting to navigate government waters for the first time in decades, and the prime minister was acutely aware of the political consequences of making the wrong decision. At the same time, the government had come under withering criticism for its decisions on other defence issues (especially establishing NORAD in 1957-58 and cancelling the Avro Arrow in 1959), thereby making the nuclear weapons decision even more difficult.Without question, McMahon's task is not easy. As I and others have written, dithered for virtuaUy his entire tenure as prime minister. Even as his time in office was coming to an end in early 1963, he was still unable to articulate a clear position. His speech in January of that year - intended to clarify his thinking in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis - remains a masterpiece of double talk and obfuscation. During his six years in office, steadily moved from one side of the debate to the other. He spent his first four years laying the groundwork to accept nuclear weapons, but over the last two years of his term he did everything possible to ensure that Canada did not accept the weapons that he had previously said it would.The consensus view is that this change was the result of several factors, three of which stood out. First, appointed Howard Green - a man committed to disarmament - as secretary of state for external affairs in mid1959. Second, contrary to the opinion polls of the day, believed that the majority of Canadians opposed nuclear weapons, a condusion he reached largely by reading his personal mail. Finally, in this period arms control talks between the US and the USSR got underway, the goal of which was general and complete disarmament and an end to nudear testing.McMahon argues that these explanations are insufficient, and that to understand the delay one must first understand Diefenbaker's tenuous political position (even after winning an unprecedented majority in 1958). As the author notes in a critical passage, Diefenbaker feared the potential political fallout that could accompany the acquisition of nuclear weapons... [and this] is what lent an air of indecision to his behaviour (x). According to McMahon, Diefenbaker's delay was understandable, and his recognition of the political risks that nuclear acquisition entailed largely explains his difficulty in coming to a final decision.McMahon insists that always wanted Canada to acquire the weapons, but the timing was never right. …

Low expectations: does Italy factor into American foreign policy calculations?

The American attentive foreign policy elite's perceptions of Italy as a foreign policy actor appear inconsistent with Italy's global role. The paradox of Italy's global status as a middle-power and the absence of status within the American foreign policy community raises three questions: What role should we expect Italy to play in American foreign policy calculations given its structural position in the international system? What role does Italy play in aiding or hindering American foreign policy objectives within the transatlantic community? Is there a disjunction between the American elite's subjectively low expectations for Italy as a foreign policy actor and Italy's objective importance for the successful realisation of American foreign policy objectives?

Flight from Risk: Unified Germany and the Role of Beliefs in the European Response to the Financial Crisis

Since the end of World War II, scholars have attempted to make sense of Germany's insistent multilateralism. Many concluded that this sacrifice resulted from a deeply ingrained political identity that stressed international cooperation and shunned parochial national politics. More recently, however, German leadership has suggested a willingness to weaken its role as global altruist and reassert its interests in Europe and abroad. This article argues that core German attitudes towards regional and global cooperation have changed. But rather than a shift to "national self-interests," I argue that the unification process elevated long-held beliefs about policy conservatism and caution that now compete with the postwar multilateral policy frame within the foreign policy elite. In addition to the pro-European, multilateralist agenda, a second powerful lesson of the interwar period emphasized the dangers associated with sudden change and the benefits of incrementalism. Owing to the uncertainty associated with sociopolitical events, decision makers must rely on their beliefs about how the world works to guide their decisions. To explore the relationship between beliefs and Germany's regional policy, the paper examines the government's regional response to the post 2008 financial crisis and the banking crisis in Eastern Europe.

The Military State of America and the Democratic Left

The invasion of Iraq was a defining moment for the United States. This was the kind of war that many Americans believed formed no part of this country’s repertoire—an aggressive war of choice. Its aim was not to stop some wider conflict or to prevent ethnic cleansing or mass killings; indeed, its predictable effect was to promote these things. The purpose was to extirpate a regime that the United States had built up but that had morphed into an obstacle to this country—and to replace it with one that would represent a more compliant instrument of American purpose. In short, the war was a demonstration of American ability and willingness to remove and replace regimes anywhere in the world. Even in the wake of the Iraq fiasco, no one in high places has declared repetitions of such exploits “off the table”—to use the expression favored by this country's foreign policy elites.

EU Foreign Policy Elites and Fundamental Norms - Implications for Governance

Starting from the assumption that the European Union’s (EU) common foreign and security policy (CFSP) will rely on a pre-dominantly intergovernmental governance setting for the foreseeable future, this paper focuses on alternative institutional options for conducting policy dialogue in such a context. It reviews the current coordination practice in the key forums for policy dialogue between the member states, such as the General Affairs and External Relations Council, the Political and Security Committee, as well as the Policy Unit and the role of the High Representative for the CFSP within these forums. To this end the paper proposes a two-fold theoretical framework combining insights from the analysis of other intergovernmental policy coordination contexts within the EU, on the one hand, and research on norm contestation on the other hand. Rather than assuming that key norms, principles and rules in the field of the CFSP can be agreed upon in a one-off fashion, we hold that even once these norms have acquired quasi-constitutional status, say, in the form of Treaty provisions or through repeated European Council resolutions, they remain inherently contested and therefore leave room for policy-makers to derive different policy approaches when enacting their meaning-in-use. The question is therefore whether the CFSP coordination context allows for the identification of diverging interpretations of fundamental norms and organising principles in foreign and security policy debates and thus can establish common understandings through practice rather than through initial acclamation. This can best be achieved through forward looking policy debates including the increased use of scenario-based policy review procedures. The overall reliance of the CFSP process on intergovernmental policy dialogue implies a central role for foreign policy elites both at the national and EU level. This poses key questions about the notion of legitimate decision-making within such a context.

The Metamorphosis of Metaphors of Vision: “Bridging” Turkey's Location, Role and Identity After the End of the Cold War

During the Cold War, “buffer” or “bastion” seemed a popular metaphor to describe Turkey. After the Cold War, “bridge,” (and, to some extent, the “crossroad”) metaphor started to dominate the Turkish foreign policy Dışcourse. This article traces the use of “bridge” metaphor in this Dışcourse in the post-Cold War period by the Turkish foreign policy elite. It develops two arguments. First, the word bridge is a “metaphor of vision” combining Turkey's perceived geographical exceptionalism with an identity and a role at the international level. As a “metaphor of vision,” the employment of the word “bridge” highlighted Turkey's liminality and justified some of its foreign policy actions to Eurasia and then to the Middle East. Second, because the bridge metaphor was used in different context to justify different foreign policy choices, its meaning has changed, illustrating that metaphors are not static constructs. It concludes by Sayıng that the continuous use of “bridge” metaphor might reinforce Turkey's “liminality,” placing Turkey in a less classifiable category than the regular “othering” practices.

Russian National Interests, Use of Blood and Treasure, and Energy Price Assessments: 2008-2009

Do Russian foreign policy elites' definitions of the geographical domain of Russia's interests change with the stability of oil prices? Using survey data from March and April 2008, Russian foreign policy elite conceptions of national interest are examined. Key foreign policy matters are the foci. The ways expectations about an oil price decrease shaped views of Russia's national interest, and how these impinged upon elite predispositions concerning use of military power and energy resources to protect state interests and support the interests of Russians outside Russia, are considered as are attitudes toward unification with Ukraine and Belarus.

Review: The World in Canada

THE WORLD IN CANADA Diaspora, Demography, and Domestic Politics David Carment and David Bercuson, editors Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008. 256pp, $29.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-7735-3297-7)As the co-editors, David Carment and David Bercuson, suggest in their introduction, the purpose of this book is to survey the recent changes in Canada's ethnic mosaic and assess the impacts of those changes on foreign policy (4). In the chapters that follow, the focus appears to be on recent immigrant communities and the Quebecois, while older minority communities such as First Nations and Ukrainians are missed out. They admit to an assumption of linkage politics, the notion that a porous domestic-international divide ensures that foreign policy elites must to some extent adapt their goals to reflect their constituents' opinions (5). Long-term demographic change within at the very least constrains future foreign policy goals.The first chapter immediately confounds the reader. Taking the Canada as small-power thesis to an extreme, Adam Chapnick argues that the question of the prime minister's on Canadian foreign policymaking is largely irrelevant because the office's occupants have rarely had a measureable impact on international affairs (16). He supports this extreme position with dubious claims, for instance by arguing that the Canada-US free trade agreement lacks significance for anyone in the long run. Regardless of the veracity of his revisionist thesis, the reader must ask how this piece is relevant to the rest of the collection. Indeed the basic claim that Canadian policy is insignificant threatens to undercut the whole purpose of the book.A better introduction to the collection is the second chapter, Elizabeth Riddell-Dixon's overview of immigration to and its on Canadian foreign After a brief description of the major immigration trends, she surveys the foreign policy interests of recent immigrant communities, including attitudes towards a more liberal immigration and refugee policy and ties to home countries. She also assesses their potential for influence through the electoral process and NGOs.In the first half of chapter 3, Andrew Harrington, Stewart Prest, and Per Unheim present interesting case studies of the criminal connections between Jamaica and Haiti and their respective diasporas in Toronto and Montreal. They argue that criminal deportation and illegal immigration have fostered a transnational conduit between and the Caribbean for drugs and criminal gangs. This study is the most information-intensive in the collection (as its large number of footnotes attests) and may provide readers with data they would not otherwise encounter. The authors then shift focus to show how this transnational conduit might be used to alleviate the chronic poverty and instability in the diasporas' home countries. But this approach then begs for a similar analysis of the conduit's on the Canadian state.J.L. Granatstein wants to discuss this in chapter 4, Multiculturalism and Canadian foreign policy. He poses a series of provocative questions: does a policy of multiculturalism lead inevitably to foreign policy pacifism and neutralism? What happens when dual loyalties conflict? What duties do immigrants have to their new state? How active can they remain in the politics of their state of birth (up to and including terrorism)? These are important questions and could be debated on their own moral grounds. But Granatstein reverts to the old dichotomy between national interests and values and argues that only the former should determine foreign The frailness of this bifurcation is evident in the fifth national interest he enumerates - work with like-minded states for the protection and enhancement of democracy and freedom - which is clearly value -laden (80). (Granatstein' s five national interests are very similar to my own scheme except that mine keeps the ideological one - the projection of a national identity - generic and requires no dichotomy between values and interests. …

The transatlantic American foreign policy elite: its evolution in generational perspective

This article applies a generational perspective to approach the phenomenon of the development of an American foreign policy Establishment, an elite that was, from the late nineteenth century onward, committed to an expansive United States role, preferably in collaboration with the British empire. It argues that one can discern four generational groupings, stretching across a period of around a century: (a) the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century founders or forerunners, a group clustered around Theodore Roosevelt, who looked back to the Civil War as a formative experience; (b) those Americans already well into their careers, for whom World War I served as an epiphany, giving them new consciousness of the existence of Europe, and often converting them to a long-term belief in the importance of either Rooseveltian or Wilsonian internationalism; (c) those younger men whom one might term the ‘wise men’ generation, a group whose first formative experience was usually military experience in World War I,...

Why peace can be as difficult as war

The book under review fills an important gap in examining American foreign policy during the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events of September 11, 2001. It documents American reactions to the events during and after 1989 and explains some of the difficult foreign policy choices facing the US during the 1990s. It also describes how the mid-1990s came to be seen by some as ‘an age of anxiety’. The book largely focuses on the thinking of the foreign policy elites and, in the opinion of this reviewer, might have said more about American domestic politics at this time. The rise of the conservative movement, the belief in the unfettered free market, and the seemingly unconditional support for Israel were largely rooted in domestic politics but had important foreign policy implications. One paradox, so this reviewer argues, was the way in which some in the West—the Cold War victors—seemed disorientated or even demoralized by their own victory. One underlying problem, implicit in this book, is that of achieving cohesion in the absence of a common enemy. For that reason peace can sometimes be as difficult as war.

Explaining the Change in China's Attitude toward UN Peacekeeping: a norm change perspective

China's attitude towards UNPKOs has experienced two shifts since the 1980s. One is about changing from non-financial-support, non-voting, and non-participation concerning peacekeeping to financial-support, voting, and participation in 1981. The other shift concerns China's gradual change in its attitude toward non-traditional peacekeeping over the 1990s. This paper provides a norm perspective on the issue. Specifically the author argues that China's attitude toward UNPKOs changed as a result of the change in international norm from prioritizing sovereignty to prioritizing human rights, and the diffusion of the norm of human rights into China through a variety of agents such as foreign policy elites and two special groups of PLA officers.

Reflections on the Iraq War: Implications for U.S. Foreign Policy

Our foreign policy elites, the press, our elected representatives and the general public internalize “lessons” from each war, although the lessons may be wrong or misapplied. How we arrive at such consensus lessons is a mystery. It is too early to predict what lessons from Iraq will guide future U.S. decision-making. But on the situation as it now stands, it is possible to make some broad generalizations concerning what went right in Iraq and what went wrong.