ABSTRACT
In order to understand the reasoning behind Saudi Arabia’s repeated attempts to mediate in international and intra-national conflicts in the Middle East, one first needs to study the genesis of Saudi foreign policy decisions and the motivations and constraints influencing this process. As the Saudi government does not take its foreign policy decisions in a political vacuum but within the boundaries of the international system, it is essential to analyze the Kingdom’s actions within this wider context. In the following, I suggest a theoretical framework that aims at explaining the nature of international relations and the formation of state foreign policy decisions in general.1 Hereafter, I am going to apply this theoretical approach to the specific case of Saudi Arabia and explain the Kingdom’s foreign policy choices at large and its recurrent mediation attempts in particular.
2.1 Foreign policy analysis The different schools of International Relations (IR) theory suggest either twoor three-level analyses of the nature of international relations and the genesis of foreign policy decisions. The first level of analysis deals with the nature of the international system itself and the rules and limitations it lays out for the development of international relations and state foreign policy. With regard to the implications which the nature of the international level has on states’ foreign policy one could hypothesize: “What you [the state] do depends on what the system both allows and forces you to do.” The second level of analysis then studies the relevant state and addresses, depending on the assumptions drawn from the analysis of the first level, up to two basic questions: First, in which relation do the individual state’s material capabilities (characteristics that directly influence international relations, such as military capabilities) stand to the capabilities of the remaining states? Second, how is the state’s environment characterized with regard to the quantity and respective capabilities of other states in geographic proximity? As a result, the former question is associated with the assertion: “What you do depends on how powerful you are.” The latter question is grounded on the hypothesis according to which “where you stand depends on where you sit,” meaning that foreign policy decisions are formulated with regard to a state’s immediate environment.
