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The Social Interpretation of Foreign Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Mare Trachtenberg
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Extract

That foreign policy is a social product, that it is in particular the outcome of a political process and an element in the national political system—these are general notions that few scholars would in principle dispute. But in practice foreign policy has been commonly portrayed in exactly the opposite way. It is viewed as some-thing with its own life, essentially cut off from domestic politics, existing primarily in the international sphere. Scholars do of course recognize that domestic factors play a role, but the implied connection is often extremely amorphous and general, with no attempt on the whole made to specify the mode of linkage in a concrete and testable way. Thus America's return to isolation after the First World War is commonly attributed to the unwillingness of her people to bear the burden of world power; British and French foreign policy after 1924 is explained in terms of the deep-seated pacifism of the masses. The actual mechanism of linkage is not spelled out. On those occasions when a specific relation is described the very language used often betrays an unwillingness to see it as a legitimate, integral part of a normal political process. Such things as public opinion and party and interest-group politics are seen basically as exogenous forces, “intruding” or having an “impact” on the policy-making system, not as regular parts of it.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , July 1978 , pp. 328 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1978

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References

1 Rosenau, James, ed., Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy (New York, 1967), p. 3Google Scholar.

2 Small, Melvin, “Historians Look at Public Opinion,” in Public Opinion and Historians: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Small, M. (Detroit, 1970), p. 14Google Scholar.

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7 Ibid., p. 13.

8 Ibid., pp. 15, 18–19.

9 Ibid., p. 187.

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12 Cohen, Bernard C., “The Relationship between Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Maker,’ in Small, p. 77Google Scholar.

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19 This was in fact Cohen's original methodological orientation, explicitly borrowed from Lee Benson. See Cohen, , Public's Impact, pp. 2–8Google Scholar, and Benson, , “An Approach to the Scientific Study of Past Public Opinions,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 31 (Winter 1967), 522–567CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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36 See for example Key, , Public Opinion and American Democracy, esp. pp. 481–499Google Scholar; Robinson, James A., Congress and Foreign Policy-Making (Homewood, Ill., 1962)Google Scholar; and for a typical historical account, Divine, Robert, The Illusion of Neutrality (Chicago, 1962)Google Scholar. An excellent journalistic account, focusing on Senator Henry Jackson's power over arms control policy, is Drew, Elizabeth, “An Argument over Survival,” The New Yorker, 4 04 1977, esp. pp. 108–112Google Scholar.

37 Cohen, , Public's Impact, p. 186 and p. 209, n. 9Google Scholar. Cohen also cites here some work by Richard Brody, Benjamin Page and their associates on the electoral impact of the Vietnam War issue, but their conclusions do not tend to support Cohen: policy voting in this case was real when the voters had a real choice, and when they did not, the convergence of candidates' views can be explained in “economic” terms as the optimal response of both candidates (from a vote-getting point of view) to a given distribution of opinion. Cohen had cited two preliminary papers; a more final and concise statement of Page's and Brody's argument is their article “Policy Voting and the Electoral Process: The Vietnam War Issue,” American Political Science Review, 66 (1972), 979–995CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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41 This can be formalized in terms of the indifference curve analysis so familiar to introductory economics courses. (The theory of consumer preference can be readily expanded to a general theory of choice.) Anything that redraws the indifference curves—for example, an “intrusion” of public opinion into decision-making in foreign policy—is a “constraint” in this sense.

42 Mayer, Arno, Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe (New York, 1971), esp. chap. 6Google Scholar, “Internal Causes and Purposes of War in Europe, 1870–1956”—this chapter was originally published in the Journal of Modern History, 41 (09 1969), 291–303Google Scholar; Chapman, Geoffrey, “The Political Mainsprings of International Conflict: France, Italy and World War I” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1971)Google Scholar; Lammers, Donald, “Arno Mayer and the British Decision for War: 1914,” Journal of British Studies, 12 (05 1973), 137–165CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 “The Terms of Peace,” published anonymously in the Quarterly Review, October 1870. The kind of analysis Salisbury makes would now be associated with Marxist scholarship. It is thus curious to note in this context that Marx's own analysis of the probable future course of international politics ignored domestic factors of the sort Salisbury stressed and was based instead on traditional power political considerations, colored only by the racial consciousness so characteristic of pre-World War I political thought: France would be driven into the arms of Russia, and Germany would have to “make ready for another ‘defensive’ war, not one of those new-fangled ‘localised’ wars, but a war of races—a war with the combined Slavonian and Roman races” (The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune1 [New York, 1968], pp. 32–33Google Scholar).

44 Some of the principal recent West German works on the subject are briefly reviewed in Poidevin, Raymond, “Aspects de l'imperialisme allemand avant 1914,” Relations internationates, no. 6 (Summer 1976), pp. 111–112Google Scholar. On Kehr's influence on American scholarship, see Skop, Arthur L., “The Primacy of Domestic Politics: Eckart Kehr and the Intellectual Development of Charles A. Beard,” History and Theory, XIII, 119–131Google Scholar.

45 Fischer, Fritz, War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914 (New York, 1975), p. viiiGoogle Scholar.

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47 Berghahn, V. R., Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (New York, 1973), p. 17Google Scholar.

48 Ibid., p. 40.

49 Ibid., p. 13.

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51 Ibid., p. 72.

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53 Maier, Charles, “Revisionism and the Interpretation of Cold War Origins,” Perspectives in American History, 4 (1974), 313–347, esp. pp. 339, 345–347Google Scholar.

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56 Ibid., pp. 53–54, 85.

57 Ibid., p. 64.

58 Ibid., chap. 19, esp. p. 649. The phrase “preemptive thrust” is on p. 15.

59 Ibid., pp. 660–662.

60 Ibid., chap. 18, esp. pp. 624–632.

61 This conclusion is drawn largely from my own unpublished work, but the negotiations can be followed in detail in the introduction to Burnett, Philip Mason, Reparation at the Paris Peace Conference (New York, 1940)Google Scholar.

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63 Many American scholars are unfortunately unaware of the important work in this area being done in France. See especially Jeanneney, Jean-Noel, François de Wendel en République: L'Argent et le pouvoir 1914–1940 (Paris, 1976)Google Scholar, and some of Georges Soutou's recent articles, especially “Les Mines de Silésie et la rivalité franco-allemande, 1920–1923: Arme économique ou bonne affaire?” Relations internationales, no. 1 (05 1974), pp. 135–154Google Scholar. See also an important series of works by Pierre Renouvin's students: Poidevin, Raymond, Les Relations économiques et financières entre la France et l'Allemagne de 1898 à 1914 (Paris, 1969)Google Scholar; Guillen, Pierre, L'Allemagne et le Maroc de 1870 à 1905 (Paris, 1967)Google Scholar; and Girault, René, Emprunts russes et investissements français en Russie, 1887–1914 (Paris, 1973)Google Scholar. On this school, see the notes by Duroselle, J.-B. in Relations internationales, no. 1 (05 1974), pp. 210–211Google Scholar, and Renouvin's, own programmatic article, “Les Relations franco-allemandes de 1871 à 1914: Esquisse d'un programme de recherches,” in Sarkissian, A. O., ed., Studies in Diplomatic History and Historiography (New York, 1961) pp. 308–321Google Scholar.