ABSTRACT
Although the term ‘globalization’ has been in academic use since the 1970s, no serious attempts were made to theorize it until the late 1980s. These attempts developed into a stimulating debate, comprising what Held et al., in their influential work Global Transformations, term globalization theory (GT).1 Examination of what we deem to be the best-known works, and most popular forums on globalization, reveals that foreign policy2 – the sum of the external relations undertaken by an independent actor (usually a state) as part of international relations – is virtually excluded from GT.3 Similarly, as discussed in the introduction to this book, students of FPA usually exclude GT from its matrix. In our view, the mutual exclusion of FPA and GT is problematic. Foreign policy is seen usually as the quintessential ‘boundary’ activity, at the interface between the domestic and the external spheres. While these spheres have never been completely separate, the boundary between them seems to have become more porous as a result of globalization – a multidimensional contested process that involves an increasing embedding of political, military, economic, social and cultural activities in politically unified (quasi) global spheres of activity. There are numerous manifestations of this trend. For example, since
the end of WWII, states have become gradually more embedded in a plethora of multilateral, global political institutions and military organizations; ‘national’ economies increasingly are implanted into global economic arenas such as trade and finance; and the information technology revolution has made it very difficult for states to control information. This embedding has been forcefully illustrated in the controversy surrounding the dissemination of hundreds and thousands of classified diplomatic cables on the WikiLeaks website.
