ABSTRACT

The adage ‘politics stops at the water’s edge’ captures the tradition of foreign policy being an area where domestic political factionalism is sublimated to the interests of national security. This realist perspective on foreign policy and the communitarian pull of nationalism obscures both the complexity of decision making and the centrality of domestic factors in shaping the aims and outcomes of that process. Timehonoured questions such as who makes foreign policy and in whose interests, highlight the difficulty of ascribing simplistic, realist-tinged interpretations of foreign policy. The problems inherent in defining what constitutes the ‘national

interest’ inspired closer examination of the sources of foreign policy decision making and the nature of the process itself and extensive investigation of the individual decision maker and the role of bureaucratic influences in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. This work, in turn, raises questions about how those elements outside the formal state structures of foreign policy decision making, but still within the sovereign confines of the state – societal actors, interests and values that reside in the domestic setting – are actually accounted for and integrated into the foreign policy process. Domestic influences outside the formal state structures – lobbyists,

the media, class factors, constitutional restrictions – are clearly significant and in some cases central to the making of state foreign policy.1 For instance, societal actors, such as interest groups, actively engage the relevant state political actors in order to influence the foreign policy process in line with their concerns. At the same time, the formal and informal rules of political conduct within a given state are critical for shaping the manner in which this influence is exercised and the degree to which it is effective. Also, the overarching societal

and access and particular forms that foreign policy assumes. Reflecting this complex mosaic, within FPA there are three basic

approaches to understanding the impact of domestic factors on state foreign policy. Each is rooted in a different account of state-society relations and, therefore, reflects the assumptions and interests of that particular depiction of those relations. One approach sees the principal source of domestic influence in the actual structural form (i.e. institutions and regimes) of the state. A second approach sees foreign policy making as being driven by the nature of the economic system within states and, concurrently, in the interests of a narrow elite that traditionally has acted in what it perceives to be the national interest. A third approach sees foreign policy as the product of a competitive pluralist environment as expressed by the interplay between interest group politics and state decision makers and structures. In Chapter 4, we focus on the enduring importance of the domestic setting in shaping foreign policy. In particular, we analyse the three accounts referred to above and examine efforts to model foreign policy decision making at the domestic level. Finally, the neglected role of political parties in foreign policy making process is discussed.