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The National Interest and its Interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Miroslav Nincic
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Extract

This article discusses possible interpretations of the concept of national interest, with a view to providing a conception more analytically useful than those that have dominated the literature. It argues against the two most prevalent approaches. The first, most obviously represented by political realism, relies on a single overarching assumption that both encompasses the national interest and provides a standard for assessing how successfully it is pursued. The second, identifies a finite set of national objectives which, by possessing a large measure of the formal attributes by which the national interest is defined, are considered its proper subsets. While both approaches have their virtues, each is flawed as a method for establishing correspondence between policy and interest. The approach proposed here relies on a different principle altogether—the nature of the political procedure via which judgments about the link between foreign policy and national interest are made. The article argues that our ability to judge whether a policy does serve the national interest is intimately connected to how democratic the decision behind the policy is.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 61 , Issue 1 , Winter 1999 , pp. 29 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1999

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References

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