The Credentials of Foreign Policy Analysis

British books which have focused on the subject include: R. Jones, Analysing Foreign Policy (RKP 1970); P. Reynolds , An Introduction to International Relations (Longmans, 1971); W. Wallace , Foreign Policy and the Political Process (Macmillan, 1971). There are scheduled courses on foreign policy analysis at Aberdeen, Keele, Lancaster, Sussex and the LSE. Courses also exist under another name at Aberystwyth, Southampton and University College, London. In other words, all the eight universities or colleges which offer International Relations include a paper on foreign policy analysis (Which University? 1973: Cornmarket Press, London).

These assumptions are made without delving into the debate about " traditionalism " and " the scientific method " on the one hand, or about the intrinsic validity of comparative studies on the other, partly because the arguments concerned are over-familiar, and partly because they are not strictly relevant to a discussion of foreign policy analysis, for the reason given in the second paragraph of this paper.

William Wallace's essay " The Role of Interest-Groups," in R. Boardman's and A. J. R. Groom's The Management of British External Relations (Macmillan, 1973), pp. 263-287, develops this point.

See, for example, P. Self's Administrative Theories and Politics (George Allen and Unwin, 1972). In concerning itself with this type of question, foreign policy analysis provides a valuable bridge between International Studies and mainline political science, as well as between the actual phenomena of international and domestic politics.

L. Albertini : The Origins of the War of 1914 (Oxford, 1952-7, 3 Vols.), and M. Gilbert : The Roots of Appeasement (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966) may stand here as arbitrary representatives, in their different ways. of a whole tradition of writing.

J. Rosenau (cd.), Linkage Politics (The Free Press, 1969), p. 45.

J. Rosenau , The Scientific Study of Foreign Policy (The Free Press , 1971), pp. 76-94. See also Chap. xi, for a later version of Rosenau's contributions to Linkage Politics.

" Private foreign policy " is defined by J. Harrod (in Boardman and Groom , op. cit, p. 289), as " the amalgam of opinion, attitude and actions concerning a foreign event or situation held, or taken, by organisations which are not formally incorporated within the state foreign policy-making and executing machinery" However, unless one is to grant organisations like university departments their own foreign policies, it should be stressed that the intention and capacity to act must be at the centre of any definition of a direct participant in international relations.

Examples are K. Middlemass in Diplomacy of Illusion ( Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), p. 8, and K. Robbins , reviewing this book in International Affairs, October 1972, pp. 625-630.

G. Allison , Essence of Decision (Little, Brown, 1971).

R. Snyder , H. W. Bruck , B. Sapin (eds.), Foreign Policy Decision-making (The Free Press, 1962). The main part of this book was first published in 1954 as Decision-making as an Approach to the Study of International Politics.

The present literature on crises is otherwise not notable for the attention it pays to domestic affairs. For example both C. Belt. The Conventions of Crisis (O.U.P. for R.I.I.A., 1971) and C. Hermann , "International Crisis as a Situational Variable," in J. Rosenau (ed.), International Politics and Foreign Policy (rev. ed., The Free Press, 1969), concentrate on the interactions between different nations' leaders. Hermann explicitly states his assumption that " In a crisis, with its extreme danger to national goals, the highest level of governmental officials makes the decision " (p. 416). 13. Linkage Politics, op. cit., p. 52.

In, for example, W. F. Hanrieder (ed.), Comparative Foreign Policy (D. McKay, 1971), Chaps. 5 and 6, and D. G. Pruitt and R. C. Snyder (eds.), Theory and Research on the Causes of War (Prentice Hall , 1969), Chap. 16.

Op. cit. Allison's thesis first appeared in Americam Political Science Review, September 1969. See also an article by M. Halperin in World Politics, October 1972, " Thc Decision to Deploy the ABM: Bureaucratic and Domestic Politics in the Johnson Administration," and the Spring Supplement for World Politics 1972, containing Allison's and Halperin's " Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and some Policy Implications. "

Although Allison has greatly stimulated the study of government and bureaucracy with regard to foreign policy, his work in its turn grew directly out of such studies as R. E. Neustadt, Presidential Power ( N.Y., Wiley, 1960); C.E. Lindblom , The Policy-Making Process (Englewood Cliffs, 1968); Herbert Simon , Models of Man (N.Y. , Wiley, 1957). 17. Essence of Decision, p. 246.

In fact the only real case-study to use this model has been Paige's own The Korean Decision (The Free Press, 1968).

M. Brecher , The Foreign Policy System of Israel: Setting, Images, Process ( O.U.P., 1972); J. Frankel , The Making of Foreign Policy (O.U.P., 1963). The " environmental " framework espoused by these writers was first applied to international behaviour by H. and M. Sprout, in Man-Milieu Relationship Hypotheses in the Context of International Politics (Princeton, 1956) and in " Environmental Factors in the Study of International Politics," Journal of Conflict Resolution , 1, 1957, reprinted in International Politics and Foreign Policy, op. cit., pp. 41-56.

The works already cited by Boardman and Groom, Reynolds and Wallace' as well as those by Brecher and Frankel, all use this approach, although some more loosely than others. D. Vital's widely read essay, The Making of British Foreign Policy (George Allen and Unwin, 1968 ), may be added to the list, together with K. Kaiser and R. Morgan (eds.), Britain and West Germany; Changing Societies and the Future of Foreign Policy (O.U.P. for R.I.I.A., 1971). More specifically, the books by B. C. Cohen , The Press and Foreign Policy (Princeton University Press , 1963), and The Public's Impact on Foreign Policy (Little, Brown, 1973), are good examples of the analysis of a particular area of the decision-making process in terms which may be easily related to wider studies in the " environmental " mode.