ABSTRACT
Popular cohesion and regime support are salient. The salient environment, including its challenges and the preferred ways of dealing with them get domestic institutionalization. Ministries of Agriculture or Environment, for instance, will be increasingly subordinated to co-ordination and control in times of external danger, so as to prevent them from pursuing their own sector 'foreign policies'. In the control-relax model, the sources of external policy are often internal but the state of the environment is assumed to determine their actual influence. The information model is actually tailored to a system of mobile units: the persistently changing environment that each unit experiences makes the environment, also in its basic traits, an obvious variable rather than a parameter. In view of the sociological theory and the non-mobility argument, the salient environment has primacy also in relation to internal factors. Anyone with a minimum of familiarity with international politics knows that internal factors may sometimes be co-determinants of foreign policy.
