Foreign Policy Initiatives Research Articles

The Importance of the Idealist Discourse in Defence of American Foreign Policy Initiatives: beyond rhetoric towards a new form of imperialism

Les États-Unis font rarement appel à un discours basé sur la défense de leurs propres intérêts nationaux pour défendre sa politique étrangère. Dans leur discours officiel, ils tentent plutôt de subordonner l’intérêt national aux objectifs plus nobles de défendre les droits de l’homme ou la démocratie. Cet article commence par retracer les origines de ce discours idéaliste américain. Puis, il tente d’analyser le rôle important joué par ce discours, suggérant qu’il est révélateur d’une nouvelle forme d’impérialisme. Elle est nouvelle dans la mesure où l’État-nation dominant se présente comme l’incarnation de la démocratie libérale faisant en sorte que ses propres intérêts coïncident avec ceux de la démocratie libérale. Le discours idéaliste serait, selon l’auteur, non pas une façade, mais plutôt un élément essentiel d’une nouvelle forme d’impérialisme car la relation étroite qui s’établit entre démocratie libérale et interventionnisme américain renforcerait les intérêts du capitalisme moderne.

The Monroe Doctrine and Russia: American Views of Czar Alexander I and Their Influence upon Early Russian-American Relations

The history of early Russian-American relations has often been presented in a contradictory and conflicting fashion. This has occurred partly because the historical literature tended to have political or ideological biases after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and especially during the Cold War. The differing historical interpretations also have arisen because of the mysterious character of Czar Alexander I (r. 1801–1825). Historians have labeled him as an “enigmatic tsar,”“paternalistic reformer,” or “the sphinx.”1 At the beginning of his reign, Alexander was considered to be a liberal ruler. But as revolutions broke out in Spain, Portugal, Naples, and Piedmont during the early 1820s, he became increasingly conservative, even reactionary. Late in 1821, former U.S. President James Madison, an erstwhile admirer of the czar, wrote that he had “seen, not without some little disappointment, the latter developments of character in the Emperor Alexander.”2 In addition, it was not always easy for outside observers to trace Russian foreign-policy initiatives to Alexander, even though he was the most absolute monarch of the time in Europe. Contemporary and later scholars have often been unable to determine whether Russian diplomacy was propelled by the czar, his ministers, or the directors of the semi-official Russian-American Company, which had considerable economic interests in North America.3

Crossing the Water's Edge: Elite Rhetoric, Media Coverage and the Rally-Round-the-Flag Phenomenon, 1979-2003

The most widely accepted explanation for the rally-round-the-flag phenomenon is a relative absence of elite criticism during the initial stages of foreign crises. In this study we argue that the nature and extent of elite debate may matter less than media coverage of any such debate, and that such coverage is heavily influenced by commonly held professional incentives and norms that lead journalists to strongly prefer certain stories over others. We also argue that not all messages in this debate matter equally for public opinion. Rather, the persuasiveness of elite messages depends on their credibility, which, in turn, arises out of an interaction between the sender, receiver, and message. Hence, only by understanding the interactions between elites, the public, and the press can we account for variations in public responses to presidential foreign policy initiatives. We test our theory by examining public opinion data and network news coverage of all major U.S. uses of military force from 1979 to 2003. We content analyze all congressional evaluations of the president and the executive branch of government from the three network evening newscasts within 60-day time periods centered on the start date of each use of force. Our results offer strong support for the theory.

Health and foreign policy: influences of migration and population mobility.

International interest in the relationship between globalization and health is growing, and this relationship is increasingly figuring in foreign policy discussions. Although many globalizing processes are known to affect health, migration stands out as an integral part of globalization, and links between migration and health are well documented. Numerous historical interconnections exist between population mobility and global public health, but since the 1990s new attention to emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases has promoted discussion of this topic. The containment of global disease threats is a major concern, and significant international efforts have received funding to fight infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome). Migration and population mobility play a role in each of these public health challenges. The growing interest in population mobility's health-related influences is giving rise to new foreign policy initiatives to address the international determinants of health within the context of migration. As a result, meeting health challenges through international cooperation and collaboration has now become an important foreign policy component in many countries. However, although some national and regional projects address health and migration, an integrated and globally focused approach is lacking. As migration and population mobility are increasingly important determinants of health, these issues will require greater policy attention at the multilateral level.

Advocacy Journalism at Its Most Shameless

In 1960, shortly before John F. Kennedy and his New Frontiersmen swept into the White House, the salty nightclub comedian Mort Sahl made an ill-advised bid for movie stardom. Sahl appeared as Corporal Crane in the Korean War drama All the Young Men, which featured Sidney Poitier as a black sergeant in command of a detachment of Marines near the 38th parallel. The film's celebration of how battlefield camaraderie could overcome racial prejudice was already shopworn as the Eisenhower era drew to a close, and audiences stayed away. One scene, however, generated some buzz: Sahl's deathbed monologue, in which he gasped, “I want to get straight with the Man Upstairs.” When Sahl, whose agnosticism comprised a major part of his public persona, was kidded about this line on the Jack Paar Show, he responded, “I was referring to Henry Luce.”1 The humorless, devout publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines would not have been amused by Sahl's wisecrack—he would have found it tasteless if not blasphemous—but Sahl had merely stated in jest what an army of historians later confirmed: for most Americans at midcentury, Henry Robinson Luce was“the Man Upstairs,” their principal source of information about world events, the propagandist who made America's competition with international communism both comprehensible and seemingly necessary. Luce, one biographer notes, “controlled access to millions of minds,” and while that may be an overstatement—Luce never managed to whip up much support for some of his more cherished projects, such as installing bomb shelters in the backyard of every American home—there is little doubt that he was the most successful mass communicator of his generation.2 No one wielded more media power in the 1940s and 1950s, and no one used his command of print, radio, and newsreel journalism more effectively to shape American public and official opinion. Assessing Luce's influence has become a cottage industry. Bestselling works of popular history by David Halberstam and W. A. Swanberg trace how Luce invented the newsmagazine and built a multimedia empire.3 More scholarly texts explore the ways in which Luce molded the attitudes Americans developed about a variety of foreign-policy initiatives, from aid to the Allies in World War II to the toppling of the Iranian government in the early years of the Cold War.4

The United States, the Cuban Rebellion, and the Multilateral Initiative of 1875*

Ulysses S. Grant's annual message to Congress in 1875 announced a striking foreign-policy initiative. For the preceding seven years, Spain's heavy-handed response to a rebellion in Cuba had threatened the interests and ideals of the United States. Repeated unilateral protests from Washington had failed to moderate Spain's tactics in dealing with the insurgency. With no end to the rebellion in sight, Grant declared that his government could no longer tolerate disorder ninety miles from U.S. territory. It was now the duty of “ other nations,” the president contended, “to assume the responsibility which devolves upon them, and to seriously consider the only remaining measures possible— mediation and intervention” (emphasis added).1 Indeed, on the day before Grant's message, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish instructed U.S. ministers in six European capitals to arrange a coalition of governments to join the United States in an attempt to compel Spain to end its war in Cuba.

Search for Identity in Modern Foreign Policy of Lithuania: between the Northern and Eastern dimensions?

The article attempts to look at foreign and security policy of independent Lithuania as a state identity formation process. The analysis is based on social constructivism methodology, underlying the predominant role of immaterial factors in the development of international system. The article begins with the presentation of the Lithuanian geopolitical environment as an interaction of differently constructed identities. In this context, the place and role of Lithuania in the Northern dimension of the EU before and after the EU membership is analyzed. In analyzing Lithuanian foreign policy landmarks after the double enlargement, a wider survey of problems and perspectives of its participation in the latest EU foreign policy initiatives and its relationship with the EU Eastern dimension is given. The article states that Lithuania, trying to become the center of regional cooperation, is creating a civil state identity assembling other states by force of the example to be followed. However, the regional identity of Lithuania is still under formation: pretensions to unite the North, South and East are conceptually not grounded enough and the narrative uniting the region is still at an embryonic stage. In its position Lithuanian foreign policy substantiation is closer to the EU Northern and not Eastern dimension.

Auto-Estima in Brazil

Less than two weeks after Luiz Inacio LuIa da Suva was sworn in as president of Brazil, his newly appointed foreign minister, Celso Amorim, was asked what would change in his country's foreign policy. For seasoned national observers the reply that Brazil would take an active role in world affairs was a bit of a disappointment, representing little more than a reaffirmation of the country's longstanding position of pushing multilateralism as a device for defending national autonomy. Subsequent suggestions by LuIa that Brazil might fill a middle ground between the north and the south as well as Amorim's detailed call for the use of multilateral institutions to democratize international affairs contributed to the impression that, despite forceful assertions to the contrary, little of substance had changed. Indeed, the reappointment of Amorim as foreign minister-he served in the post from August 1993 to December 1994-reinforces the long-term trajectory of Brazilian foreign policy initiatives such as regional and continental integration, elaboration of an inclusive multilateral trading system, and the expansion of linkages with other major emerging markets. These similarities between the Cardoso and LuIa policies aside, suggestions that everything was changed so that all could remain the same are quite mistaken. Although LuIa has maintained the tradition of continuity in Brazilian foreign policy, he has precipitated a dramatic change in the psychological tenor of his country's diplomatic efforts.This article argues that the LuIa government in Brazil is pursuing a psychologically transformative foreign policy agenda in the global south. The goal is not to overturn or delink from the existing international political and economic system, but to prompt a change in how developing countries are inserted into and view the system. In itself, this is not a particularly original ambition and is firmly grounded in Cardoso's persistent calls for reform of international economic governance institutions to make them more inclusive of the south. The originality lies in the strategy being taken to achieve this end. Although Cardoso-style institutional reform and a commitment to multilateralism remains a central facet of Brazilian foreign policy, it has assumed a subordinate role to a conceptual agenda that explicitly questions the neat division between developed and developing. LuIa is consciously attempting to reframe the development dichotomy, deliberately seeking to reshape notions of southern and Brazilian identity in the international political economy. Rather than presenting the country as a developing state in need of aid, the emphasis is on Brazil as a complex and highly sophisticated economy and polity that is working to overcome an inequitable internal development pattern. The argument that emerges in Brazilian diplomatic discourse is that neat categorizations of developed and developing bifurcate countries into two camps. Implicit in this division is a packet of assumptions about the capabilities of developing countries predicated upon a hierarchical ordering that privileges the capabilities, markets, products, investments, development practices, and socio-cultural norms of northern countries over those found in the south.1The result is not only a perpetuation of the socioeconomic dependence outlined by Cardoso in 1971,2 but also a psychological dependence on the north that prevents developing countries from recognizing and exploiting opportunities in the south. In a theme that strongly recalls the argument in Frantz Fanon's anticolonization text Black Skin, White Masks, LuIa makes constant reference to the auto-estima-self-confidence-that saw Brazilians calmly elect as president a former union leader from the impoverished northeast of the country who lacks a formal education. As will be outlined in the first section of this article, the importance of auto-estima is that it is a signal that a people are making decisions on their own terms to address their needs as they see them. …

India's Recent Foreign Policy Initiatives and Implications for East Asian Security

Abstract India has come a long way from the days of Gandhian and Nehruvian foreign policy. Morally high principles, which had guided India's foreign policy since independence, have now been left behind. A more pragmatic approach to defending its own national interests is informing India's foreign policy makers today. Convinced that it needs both China and the United States for further significant economic development, India is endeavoring to manage its relationship with these two major powers very delicately, with no simple choice of favoring one over the other. While the United States can naturally be more helpful in terms of India's economic and military security, China has been playing a more significant role with regard to energy and other regional issues. The rise of India as a major economic and military power has changed the fundamental structure of the world system that came into existence after the end of the Cold War. Both Eastern and Western camps, led by the United States and China respectivel...

William Howard Taft: confident peacemaker

This book is a study of the internationalism of William Howard Taft. In the months after war broke out in 1914, Taft was second only to Woodrow Wilson in his awareness of the need to preserve the peace of the world through a new version of international organization. Built upon a synthetic interpretation of Taft's foreign policy ideas and initiatives, the book encompasses the whole of his public career as a statesman, from his years as civil governor of the Philippines through his tenure as chief justice of the Supreme Court. During those years, he moved from a basic belief in the theory and practice of balance of power to the application of dollar diplomacy. In response to the calamity of World War I, Taft came to recognize that world peace must be based upon a combination of idealism and realism, of high-minded principles placed and kept in effect by force, deliberately chosen and carefully applied.

The Obligation of empire: United States' grand strategy for a new century

The end of the cold war left the United States without a plan for navigating the international security challenges of a new world order. Though many policy-makers believe that the United States is in a unique position to influence global politics, few can agree on what, if any, grand strategy should replace containment. In The Obligation of Empire, some of the nation's most respected scholars of international affairs examine the debates over U.S. grand strategy in light of U.S. security policies and interests in tactical regions around the world. The contributors begin by describing the four grand strategies currently competing for dominance of U.S. foreign policy: neo-isolationism argues that the United States should not become involved in conflicts outside specifically defined national interests; selective engagement proposes that the United States, despite its position as the world's only remaining superpower, should limit its involvement in foreign affairs; cooperative security advocates that the United States is not and should not act as an imperial country; and finally, primacy asserts that the United States is an empire and therefore it should conduct an expansive foreign policy. Focusing on regions that present new challenges to U.S. grand strategy, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, the contributors offer the most current examinations of U.S. policies and assess the effectiveness of competing strategies in each region. The Obligation of Empire offers an innovative set of foreign policy initiatives that explore the tensions between global agendas and regionalist approaches.

What Color is Hegemony? Powell, Rice and the New Global Strategists

The appointments of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to the positions of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, respectively, represented a significant breakthrough in terms of the participation of black Americans in US foreign policy construction. Their appointments, for a number of publics, raised issues about the relationship between race and US foreign policy, and whether either Powell or Rice could or would represent at any level a black consensus on foreign policy. This tension was heightened by the events of September 11, which led to the most sweeping transformation of US foreign policy in perhaps half a century, a transformation in which Powell and Rice played decisive roles. This article argues that while race has played a symbolic role in how the black community and others have perceived Powell and Rice, it has played no role in their substantive participation in the Bush administration's foreign policy initiatives.

An Introductory Essay: Are We in “the Age of Resistance” in a Post-9/11 World?

This introductory article to the Special Issue of Peace and Conflict Studies asks, “are we in the ‘Age of Resistance’ in a post-9/11 world?” It is argued the concept of “resistance” may be framed in a broad theoretical context to include multiple and contested meanings by social and political actors as well as by scholars and through intellectual debate. The article questions recent ideas prevalent in fauxpolitical science studies which promote a clash of civilizations, essentialize histories, support anachronistic Orientalist-approaches, and bolster foreign policy initiatives by removing the human element. The contention is for researchers and theorists to concentrate on “invisible histories”, which reveal the less understood elements of history, social organization, and the inter-connectedness of conflict and violence across a broad range of cultures. Anthropology as a discipline demonstrates how invisible histories are revealed in multi-valent and nuanced ways of the past in the present and through the social interrelatedness of violent expressions and their analytical understanding. Beyond this, it is claimed that epistemological conceptions of nationalism may be examined on different levels through cultures, localities, and regions as contested and multiple expressions, which confront generalist and monolithic images. Partially this is explained through the notion of the “distributed” and “partible” person, as an extension of human activity, political agency, and political ideology to complementary and constituent parts of collective but detotalized wholes. To conceptualize this theory, the Basques will be utilized as exemplifying how such ideas are applicable. In all, this Special Issue of Peace and Conflict Studies will present some new approaches for comprehending our post-September 11 world, not only in our understanding of conflict but our role as conflict-resolution-specialists.

The Virtualization of Elián González

The Virtualization of Elián González

Who's making UK foreign policy?

The war in Iraq has intensified a debate about the extent to which Tony Blair's style of government is presidential, secretive, ad hoc, informal and susceptible to groupthink. But who is really making UK foreign policy? This article suggests that there is no simple or singular answer since the government simultaneously pursues multiple foreign policies involving different combinations of institutions, actors and external pressures. It then discusses New Labour's impact upon the four interrelated phases of the foreign policy process: formulation, interpretation, implementation and presentation. The author suggests that Blair's government has found it difficult to implement many of its foreign policy initiatives and has relied instead upon three ‘big ideas’, namely, multilateralism, Atlanticism and neo-liberalism. To date, it has failed to resolve the practical tensions between these three commitments. The final section explores how the demand for open and accountable government has increased the importance attached to the presentation of foreign policy. This, in turn, has increased the importance of the news media as a battlefield on which the struggle for hearts and minds is taking place. Ironically, the government's unparalleled attempts to sell its foreign policies (both at home and abroad) has opened the policy process up to levels of scrutiny that it may not be able to withstand.

Ecology in an Age of Empire: A Reply to (and extension of) Dalby's Imperial Thesis

If we are to think imperially about global environmental politics we must be clear about what we mean by empire, as use of the term often conflates two distinct trends. If “empire” means the resurgence of muscular American unilateralism, then the principal ramification is the need to understand international environmental cooperation not simply “after hegemony” but in the face of it, with American domestic politics a central consideration. If the term refers instead to broader processes of world economic restructuring that are not reducible to American foreign policy initiatives, then we need to situate global environmental politics in the context of changing global modes of accumulation and regulation. Although the two images of empire are not easily reconciled, some of their implications for the study of global environmental politics are shared. Both suggest the growing importance of studying contentious environmental politics alongside more familiar cooperation-theoretic approaches. Also, both suggest that tensions between the localized and non-localized meanings of the world's forests, rivers, watersheds, and coastlines will be at the center of such contention.

Thaksin and the Politics of Domestic and Regional Consolidation in Thailand

Thai-Cambodian bilateral tensions in 2003 were not an accurate reflection of Thailand's recent foreign policy initiatives. Thailand has embarked on its most aggressive foreign policy moves thus far to seek regional peace and stability, partly driven by domestic political consolidation and a reformist/populist agenda under Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai party. This article first examines Thai politics and foreign policy from the Chatichai Choonhavan government's Indochina Initiative onwards, then focuses on the Thaksin government's domestic and foreign policies since 2001 and the implications for Thailand and the region. It is argued that the ongoing initiatives of the Thaksin government have significant implications for domestic politics while foreign policy initiatives are to be understood within the Thai tradition of performing a regional leadership role.

External and domestic sources of foreign policy ambiguity: South African foreign policy and the projection of pluralist middle power

As a pluralist middle power, post-apartheid South Africa seeks to generate successful foreign policy initiatives at bilateral, multilateral and regional levels in order to shape international outcomes. In this endeavour, it has three important political resources - a recognition of its geo-political position and importance as a democratic yardstick and reformer; its acceptance of a transnational, neo-liberal elite alliance and finally, recognition of its leadership role from forces wishing to challenge African political establishments. However, the international and domestic political environment which in the mid-1990s was favourable towards middle-power initiative and reform has narrowed. South Africa's currently ambiguous foreign-policy responses therefore stem from a combination of the growing tendency towards unilateralism at the international level, from regional efforts to neutralize South Africa as a pluralist force - in and around NEPAD - as well as the absence of a national or domestic consensus on foreign policy. These constraints coupled with scarce foreign policy resources may, in the long term, necessitate a fundamental reorientation of South Africa's foreign policy.

Clerics, Exiles, and Academics: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States, 1969–1974

AbstractVirtually no one in the United States raised objections to the 1964 military takeover of the Brazilian civilian government. In the early 1970s, however, the Brazilian regime had become associated with torture and the arbitrary rule of law. By the end of that decade, compliance with human rights standards had developed into a yardstick for measuring U.S. foreign policy initiatives in Latin America. This paper argues that between 1969 and 1974, a small group of dedicated church activists, exiled Brazilians, and academics introduced the issue of human rights in Latin America into the U.S. national body politic. A network of concerned activists fashioned a systematic campaign to educate journalists, government officials, and the public about the abuses taking place under the generals' rule. Their activities helped isolate the military regime and laid the groundwork for a broader solidarity movement with Latin American popular struggles in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Regime Change and Foreign Policy: Portugal, Indonesia and the Self-determination of East Timor

This article argues that the nature of interim governments is not a satisfactory explanation of foreign policy initiatives, or their absence, during particular types of transition to democracy. The proposal is rejected for two main reasons. On the one hand, both the Portuguese (1974-76) and Indonesian (1998-99) transitions to democracy provide evidence that contradicts the proposal. On the other hand, the proposition does not explain which foreign policy decisions are taken and the reasons why. This article argues that we should focus instead on the new individual and corporate evaluations and strategies that come about inside a country as a result of new elite alignments, following the installation of a democratic regime, which opens a window of opportunity for making foreign policy changes. Moreover, the perceptions of the international community also influence the decision-making of individual and corporate interests and their strategies. Where the preceding authoritarian regime pursued foreign policies that the international community regarded as illegitimate, then there will be incentives to change policy. This approach sheds more light on the case studies involving Portugal, Indonesia and East Timor, by identifying correctly the foreign policy initiatives that were taken during the regime transitions to democracy and by explaining the underlying reasons.