State Characteristics and Foreign Policy:

Abstract

In the UNESCO crisis the industrialized countries were confronted with the Third World's claim for a New World Information and Communication Order. To this challenge they reacted in many ways, ranging from support of Third World demands to withdrawal from UNESCO. In order to explain this variety, the policies of the United States, the Soviet Union, France and West Germany at the height of the crisis in 1983/84 are compared. Three competing approaches of foreign policy analysis are tested: foreign policy as `interest-oriented behaviour', `behavioural style', or `emergent behaviour'. On the whole, `interest-oriented behaviour' proves to be the most adequate model because the conflict behaviours of the four countries can be systematically related to their different interests. Only US and West German behaviours differed to a much greater extent than their interests. In a basic first cut the variety of UNESCO policies is therefore explained by variables assumed to influence foreign policy interests: the media systems, and the societal values they represent, as well as the positions in the overall international power structure. In a second cut this explanation is refined by looking at factors which might account for differences in US and West German foreign policy styles. In this respect, the differences in behaviours seemed above all to reflect differences in the belief systems of the German and American foreign policy elites.