Foreign Policy Analysis and the study of Indian foreign policy: a pathway for theoretical innovation?

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that the study of Indian foreign policy and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) offers a “win-win situation” for scholarship. On the one hand, this bridge-building exercise leads to a better understanding of the making and substance of Indian foreign policy. On the other hand, it advances FPA in both theoretical and empirical terms, thus contributing to overcoming FPA’s US/Western bias and to decentering the field more generally. Framing the argument in terms of levels of analysis, we offer specific contributions to the understanding of foreign policy in areas such as leadership traits, poliheuristic theory, coalition politics, and state-society influences. Moreover, this line of research suggests the contours of a new comparative foreign policy agenda which could emerge from this examination of Indian foreign policy.     

Two-Level Negotiations and U.S. Foreign Policy: The Failure of the Johnson Plan for the Palestinian Refugees, 1961–1962

The Kennedy administration sought to resolve the Palestine refugee problem in 1961–62 with a plan for compensation, resettlement, or repatriation under the formal auspices of the United Nations Palestine Conciliation Commission and negotiated by UN special envoy Dr. Joseph Johnson. The negotiations failed and the plan was canceled by the administration in December 1962. The article utilizes a multi-level conceptual model which examines the links between interstate negotiation, domestic politics and boundary-crossing interactions between foreign states and non-state domestic actors and their impact on foreign policy. It analyzes the multi-level negotiations that were conducted between representatives of the governments of Israel and the United States regarding the Johnson proposals, discussions held between Israel representatives and American Jewish leaders and prominent Jewish individuals, and between American government representatives and these same Jewish leaders and individuals. The study analyzes the factors that contributed to the failure of the plan and illustrates the nexus between foreign policy and domestic politics and the role of non-state actors in foreign policy decision making.     

Two-Level Negotiations and U.S. Foreign Policy: The Failure of the Johnson Plan for the Palestinian Refugees, 1961-1962

The Kennedy administration sought to resolve the Palestine refugee problem in 1961-62 with a plan for compensation, resettlement, or repatriation under the formal auspices of the United Nations Palestine Conciliation Commission and negotiated by UN special envoy Dr. Joseph Johnson. The negotiations failed and the plan was canceled by the administration in December 1962. The article utilizes a multi-level conceptual model which examines the links between interstate negotiation, domestic politics and boundary-crossing interactions between foreign states and non-state domestic actors and their impact on foreign policy. It analyzes the multi-level negotiations that were conducted between representatives of the governments of Israel and the United States regarding the Johnson proposals, discussions held between Israel representatives and American Jewish leaders and prominent Jewish individuals, and between American government representatives and these same Jewish leaders and individuals. The study analyzes the factors that contributed to the failure of the plan and illustrates the nexus between foreign policy and domestic politics and the role of non-state actors in foreign policy decision making.     

Israeli-Turkish Tensions and their International Ramifications

The deterioration of relations between Israel and Turkey, culminating in the “Gaza flotilla” affair of June 2010, are part of a reorientation in the Turkish foreign policy over the past several years: a move away from the West and toward Muslim states and non-state groups, including such radical actors as Iran, Hamas and Hizballah. This article reviews the rationale for the Israeli-Turkish strategic partnership in the 1990s and the early years of this century. It then documents deviations in Turkish foreign policy from Western patterns. Next it examines how changes in Turkey's twenty-first century strategic environment, as well as in the domestic arena, led to a reorientation of Turkish foreign policy and to current tensions in bilateral relations. And finally, it assesses the impact of the changes in Turkish foreign policy on the Greater Middle East and global politics.     

Sustainability

As a consummately effective ‘boundary term’, able to link disparate groups on the basis of a broad common agenda, ‘sustainability’ has moved a long way from its technical association with forest management in Germany in the eighteenth century. In the 1980s and 1990s it defined – for a particular historical moment – a key debate of global importance, bringing with it a coalition of actors – across governments, civic groups, academia and business – in perhaps an unparalleled fashion. That they did not agree with everything (or even often know anything of the technical definitions of the term) was not the point. The boundary work done in the name of sustainability created an important momentum for innovation in ideas, political mobilisation, and policy change, particularly in connection with the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio in 1992. All this of course did not result in everything that the advocates at the centre of such networks had envisaged, and today the debate has moved on, with different priority issues, and new actors and networks. But, the author argues, this shift does not undermine the power of sustainability as a buzzword: as a continuingly powerful and influential meeting point of ideas and politics.     

The View from Next Door: Greek-Turkish Relations after the Coup Attempt in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Turkey’s recent slide into authoritarianism will have implications for its close neighbours in the West. Especially Greece cannot avoid negative spill-over effects. A coalition government comprising Syriza and Independent Greeks does not have an unconstrained set of policy choices in responding to this. Maintaining effective working relations is a paramount interest but achieving this is easier in principle than in practice especially considering the issues of asylum seekers and Turkish revisionism on the Lausanne Treaty. Unlike the two parties that dominated the Greek political scene after 1974, PASOK and New Democracy, the current government has little experience navigating choppy diplomatic seas with Turkey.     

Coalition politics and the making of Indian foreign policy: a new research program

ABSTRACT

Do Indian regional parties influence foreign policy and under which conditions? Some foreign policy studies have shown that certain coalition-building configurations have facilitated the inclusion of the concerns of small parties in the foreign policy debate. Other works have looked at the role of decentralization and federal power-arrangement in providing more control to political sub-units over the external affairs of a state. Those separate scholarships provide interesting insights to account for the multi-level nature of coalition-building in a federal and pluralistic polity like India. Bridging these two literatures, I argue that the interdependence of regional and national coalition building processes (visible in federal settings) create locked-in alliances between national parties and regional parties which affect foreign policymaking. In these contexts, India’s national parties have to, under certain conditions, take into account the preferences of regional parties when designing foreign policies. This article looks at the hypothesized causal mechanisms and expectations through two illustrative case studies of India’s foreign policy.     

When and How Parliaments Influence Foreign Policy: The Case of Turkey's Iraq Decision

Turkey's decision on its role in the Iraq war in 2003 illustrates the power—and limits—of parliaments as actors in foreign policy. Traditionally, assemblies are not seen as important players in the foreign policies of parliamentary democracies. Instead, cabinets are generally considered the chief policymaking authorities. If the government enjoys a parliamentary majority, legislatures typically support the cabinet, if they are brought into the process at all. The March 1, 2003 vote by the Turkish parliament to not allow the United States to use Turkey as a base for the Iraq invasion challenges this conventional wisdom on parliamentary influence (in addition to many interest-based explanations of foreign policy). This paper examines this decision in the context of the role of parliaments in foreign policies and explores the relationships between parliamentary influence, leadership, intraparty politics, and public opinion.     

Bridging the Realist/Constructivist Divide: The Case of the Counterrevolution in Soviet Foreign Policy at the End of the Cold War

The surprising end of the Cold War has led to a debate within international relations (IR) theory. Constructivists have argued that the end of the Cold War is best explained in terms of ideas and agency—specifically Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev's new thinking. A few realists have countered that Soviet material decline was "endogenous" to the new ideas. Can these two theoretical perspectives be reconciled with respect to this case? They can be partially integrated with a path-dependent strategy that places an emphasis on "institutions." Nevertheless, explaining the end of the Cold War largely requires a theory of Soviet foreign policy and its relation to the state. As a former or ossified revolutionary state, Soviet foreign policy for at least several years was largely based on the principle of externalization: outside threats were used to rationalize radical centralization, repression, and the dominance of the Party. In using the USSR's institutionalized legacy as a revolutionary state, Gorbachev acted as a counterrevolutionary and reversed this process with his revolution in foreign policy. In creating a new peaceful international order, he sought—through the "second image reversed"—to promote radical decentralization, liberalization, and the emergence of a new coalition. The case examines how Gorbachev's domestic goals drove his foreign policy from 1985 to 1991.     

Federal Calculations in State Level Coalition Governments

When political parties organize, compete and maintain interests at different levels, they bring interconnections both between as well as horizontally across levels. This study suggests that the autonomy of state politics formulation may have to pay greater attention to the federal framework and give more consideration to the role of polity-wide parties. This study uses the autonomy thesis as a heuristic tool and expands the discussion beyond state politics as considered by Yogendra Yadav-Suhas Palshikar. It examines the interface between the rise of the state as the primary unit and the functioning of political parties, especially in a multi-party competitive scenario where parties are forced to enter into coalitions. By situating India and its coalition experiences within a broader literature of comparative politics, the study tries to enrich our understanding about the relationship between federalism, political parties and coalition politics.     

Bureaucratic Roles and Positions: Explaining the United States Libya Decision

This analysis examines the decision-making process of the Barack Obama Administration that led to the American decision in March 2011 to intervene in Libya. Its focus is whether the bureaucratic politics model of foreign policy decision-making can accurately explain the situation. In this case, finding mixed empirical support for the explanatory power of bureaucratic politics, it contributes to the further development of the model for foreign policy decision-making.     

Centralizing Advisory Systems: Presidential Influence and the U.S. Foreign Policy Decision-Making Process

This study is motivated by a simple yet vitally important question for an understanding of U.S. foreign policy. Quite simply, how does a president's choice of management style influence the U.S. foreign policy decision-making process and decision outcomes? Presidents play a critical role in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy; however, the presidential studies literature and foreign policy analysis literature arrive at very different conclusions regarding how presidents influence the policy process and both are often inaccurate. This study develops an Advisory Systems Typology to address how presidents influence the decision-making process. In addressing this question, this study overcomes the deficiencies of both the presidential studies and foreign policy analysis literature. Four different types of decision-making processes are produced by a president's choice of advisory structure and level of centralization. In addition, the study identifies "unstructured solutions" that indicate how the presidential advisers and president choose to resolve policy disagreements, thereby providing an indication of the decision outcome. The identified decision-making processes and their associated decision outcomes are explored using four cases of decision making on security policy drawn from the Nixon (Vietnam War), Carter (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks II), Reagan (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks I), and Clinton (Bosnia conflict) administrations. The case studies are constructed using the method of structured–focused comparisons, whereby a set of theoretically based questions and anticipated observations to those questions are made in order to guide the research and allow for comparison of decision making within and between cases.     

From De-Europeanisation to Anti-Western Populism: Turkish Foreign Policy in Flux

ABSTRACT

Recent Turkish foreign policy (TFP) under the successive AKP governments has seen different populist turns. A clear distinction can be made between the thin and thick populisms of TFP, based on the status of the West. The first decade of AKP rule, when foreign policy was thinly populist, was characterised by steady de-Europeanisation, increasing engagement with regional issues and a decentring of Turkey’s Western orientation. The turn toward thick populism has been characterised by anti-Westernist discourses in which the West is resituated as the ‘other’ of Turkish political identity.     

A situational theory of pork-barrel politics: The shifting logic of discretionary allocations in India

ABSTRACT

Despite the extensive literature on distributive politics, there is still is a lack of a theory of how political and fiscal institutions interact to shape the pork barreling ability of national leaders in a federal parliamentary democracy. This article examines how the party system types (dominant party versus coalition system) and particular attributes of discretionary grants (providing credit claiming opportunity or facilitating side payments) influence opportunities for pork-barrel politics. This article proposes a situational theory of distributive politics that states that incentives for exclusive targeting of affiliated states in one-party dominant systems drive national ruling parties toward particularism while the shrinking opportunity to indulge in such a policy in multiparty coalition systems creates a universalization effect. The disaggregated analysis of discretionary grants using Indian data for 14 states for the one-party dominant period (1972–89) and the coalition era (1996–2012) confirms the theoretical expectations. Additionally, the exercise brings to the fore the fact that the shift from particularism to universalism occurs for schematic grants that provide credit claiming opportunity. The ad hoc grants that are like side payments remain subject to particularism.     

Shaping the European External Action Service and its post-Lisbon crisis management structures: an assessment of the EU High Representatives’ political leadership

ABSTRACT

This article assesses the role, influence and core aspects of the EU High Representatives’ (HR/VPs) “political leadership” in the context of their efforts to advance the institutionalisation of the EEAS and its crisis management structures in the post-Lisbon era. By combining analytical lenses from the literature on “European political leadership”, foreign policy analysis (FPA) and political psychology with insights from a wide range of semi-structured interviews and primary sources, the article analyses how the leadership approaches of Catherine Ashton and Federica Mogherini were influenced by core aspects, such as institutional setting, situational factors and “personal qualities”. By examining how both HR/VPs and their chosen advisors sought to shape the EU’s EEAS and crisis management institutions, scholars can gain important insights about how “personal qualities” and prior foreign policy experience can influence the HR/VPs strategic choices and their impact within and across the EEAS. Finally, the article considers the differing effects between “maverick” and “orthodox” leadership and approaches and concludes that whilst outside perspectives can bring fresh ideas and institutional innovations, they will fail to be of lasting significance and permanence if not accompanied by sufficient support from the dominant foreign and security policy conventions.     

Measuring and comparing party ideology in nonindustrialized societies: taking party manifesto research to Africa

Despite a growing interest in African parties, no comparative analyses of African party manifestos have been undertaken to date. This study applies the Manifesto Research Group's (MRG/CMP) coding scheme to a complete set of manifestos in three countries. The study's main aim is to determine whether a research tool that has been seminal in the study of Western politics can be used to advance the study of political parties in nonindustrialized societies. In a first step, the article examines the extent to which African manifestos advance programmatic ideas. The results show great differences across parties and time. The study subsequently investigates how parties position themselves on a right–left spectrum; it further outlines which policy categories African parties stress most. Finally, it examines the stance of individual parties on specific policy issues. The study argues that the MRG coding scheme can contribute to a much more nuanced analysis of African parties.     

Political competition and foreign policy power sharing

In this essay I examine the intersection of domestic and international politics in the formation and conduct of foreign policy. 1 develop a three‐actor model that allows us to specify the incentives for power sharing under different assumptions about the distribution of preferences and capabilities between a government, a domestic opposition, and a foreign state. The model generates several interesting hypotheses about the interaction of policy goals and the willingness of actors to share power. In particular, I show that under certain conditions there are important asymmetries whereby doves may be more willing to share power than hawks. Importantly, this willingness is endogenous to the model and comes from the alignment of preferences in the policy space, rather than from an a priori value for the democratization of foreign policy making. The model also suggests several hypotheses about the circumstances under which states have incentives to meddle in the foreign policy processes of other states.     

Regime Change and Foreign Policy: Portugal,Indonesia and the Self-determination of East Timor

This article argues that the nature of interim governments is not a satisfactory explanation of foreign policy initiatives, or their absence, during particular types of transition to democracy. The proposal is rejected for two main reasons. On the one hand, both the Portuguese (1974-76) and Indonesian (1998-99) transitions to democracy provide evidence that contradicts the proposal. On the other hand, the proposition does not explain which foreign policy decisions are taken and the reasons why. This article argues that we should focus instead on the new individual and corporate evaluations and strategies that come about inside a country as a result of new elite alignments, following the installation of a democratic regime, which opens a window of opportunity for making foreign policy changes. Moreover, the perceptions of the international community also influence the decision-making of individual and corporate interests and their strategies. Where the preceding authoritarian regime pursued foreign policies that the international community regarded as illegitimate, then there will be incentives to change policy. This approach sheds more light on the case studies involving Portugal, Indonesia and East Timor, by identifying correctly the foreign policy initiatives that were taken during the regime transitions to democracy and by explaining the underlying reasons.     

International Relations Theory and Minimum Deterrence

ABSTRACT

India’s government under Narendra Modi represents a return to single party rule. This paper investigates whether and why single party governments in India differ in their extremity of foreign policies from coalition governments. It particularly focuses on how different forms of government influence the saliency, contestation, and enactment of national conceptions about India’s global role. First, I situate India within the academic debate regarding coalitional governments and foreign policy. I suggest that one reason why India challenges scholars‘ assumption is the missing link between partisan conceptions of India’s global role and their institutional representation. Second, I propose a role theoretical approach and argue that the process of self-identification, consisting of ego and anticipated alter expectations, conditions a state’s role set and extreme foreign policy. It is hypothesized that the nature of contestation of national role conceptions varies between factions and fractions because of the nature of India’s party system, as well as the relative significance of external others for India’s identity. Third, I examine instances of role-taking in the field of nuclearization and Sino-Indian relations. Findings suggest that contested role conceptions during single-party rule caused more extreme variances in international role-taking, while coalition governments proved to induce more complementary role-taking processes.     

Foreign Policy Analysis: Actor-Specific Theory and the Ground of International Relations

Examining the history, conceptual breadth, and recent trends in the study of foreign policy analysis, it is clear that this subfield provides what may be the best conceptual connection to the empirical ground upon which all international relations (IR) theory is based. Foreign policy analysis is characterized by an actor-specific focus, based upon the argument that all that occurs between nations and across nations is grounded in human decision makers acting singly or in groups. FPA offers significant contributions to IR—theoretical, substantive, and methodological—and is situated at the intersection of all social science and policy fields as they relate to international affairs. A renewed emphasis on actor-specific theory will allow IR to more fully reclaim its ability to manifest human agency, with its attendant change, creativity, accountability, and meaning.