ABSTRACT

For the past decades, great strides have been made in studies of international relations, as they have expanded in scope and depth. But there is also a noticeable deficiency: most scholars in the discipline seek to explain the conduct of nation-states in world affairs primarily in terms of international factors. Few of them suggest that domestic factors can mold the fundamental direction of foreign policy. With the notable exception of the Innenpolitik school, scholars in the discipline have failed to provide a satisfactory and sound answer to the following question: can domestic politics drive foreign policy and if so, how? According to the leading theorist in the discipline, Kenneth Waltz, there are

three levels of account of international relations, the “first image” (human nature), the “second image” (state-level), and the “third image” (international) explanations.1 Most of the mainstream theories in the discipline belong to the third image. They maintain that the international structure, rather than domestic politics, determines the range of choices of states. They even evade the aforementioned question as if it is irrelevant or unimportant. In addition, the mainstream theories of international relations focus on the

range of actions and interactions of states, but not specific ones that are known as foreign policy; they turn away from foreign policy due to its complexity and the difficulty of fitting it into a neat and “parsimonious” theory. In Kenneth Waltz’s words,

[a] theory of international politics … can describe the range of likely outcomes of actions and interactions of states within a given system and how the range of expectations varies as systems change … [It] bears on the foreign policies of nations while claiming to explain only certain aspects of them.2