ABSTRACT
More than a few observers have come to recognize that in a rapidly changing, interdependent world the separation of national and international affairs is problematic.2 In some cases their concerns give voice to a desire for stability, to a longing for certitude as to what organizes and governs the course of events, to a sense that logically boundaries should divide domestic and foreign affairs. But many analysts also acknowledge that such boundaries may continuously elude our grasp because the phenomena, problems, and processes of greatest interest are not confined by them. From this perspective – which is also my own – it is clear that to separately analyze domestic and foreign affairs is more than arbitrary: it is downright erroneous. The two have always been a seamless web and the need to treat them as such is urgent in this time of enormous transformation. We can no longer allow the domestic-foreign boundary to confound our understanding of politics, that the boundary is best problematized by those who seek a deeper grasp of why events unfold as they do. Border guards may check passports and customs officials may impose duties, but to conceive of the foreign-domestic distinction in this simple way is to mislead, to mistake surface appearances for underlying patterns and to underplay the powerful dynamics that are accelerating the pervasive transformations of even the most routine dimensions of daily life. Individuals, groups, and communities are contending with the challenges of expanded horizons, with the ambiguities of transnationalization, with the realities of internationalization (or, as I prefer to put it, globalization, a term that does not presume the dominance of the international system).
