ABSTRACT
Do ideas matter to foreign policy? The answer to this question – not really – was for many decades considered a foregone conclusion in western scholarly debates. However, with the advent of postmodernist and social constructivist approaches to the subject, the debate was provided with fresh fuel in the early 1990s. Not only do ideas matter, but equally the manner in which they originate, diffuse and are perceived. The reaction from the mainstream rationalist camp was that either the whole notion was dismissed as lacking in scientific rigour and methodological potential, or it was co-opted into the prevailing narrative of the rational actor as a calculation of the existing ideological ‘moods’ that could affect the success of a foreign policy framework pursued by any given government. The most vivid installment into the second portrayal of ideas was an edited volume by Robert Keohane and Judith Goldstein, Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political Change (1993). Walter Carlsnaes offered this book as required reading in his Master's course for several years, and used it to problematize ideational causation and expand the notion that ideas do matter to foreign policy. The gist of the book's argument, elaborated in Goldstein and Keohane's succinct introductory chapter is that ideas have causal pathways to influence (that are largely compatible with formal models of rational choice) and that arguably satisfies the call for ideational causation.
