Showing papers on "Foreign policy published in 1973"

Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations

Abstract: A classic of international relations, the starting point of Raymond Aron's book is the state of nature that exists between nations, a condition that differs essentially from the civil state that holds within political communities. Ever keeping this brute fact about the life of nations in mind and ranging widely over political history and many disciplines, Aron develops the essential analytical tools to enable us to think clearly about the stakes and possibilities of international relations. In his first section, "Theory", Aron shows that, while international relations can be mapped, and probabilities discerned, no closed, global "science" of international relations is anything more than a mirage. In the second part, "Sociology", Aron studies the many ways various subpolitical forces influence foreign policy. He emphasizes that no rigorous determinism is at work: politics - and thus the need for prudent statesmanship - are inescapable in international relations. In part three "History", Aron offers a magisterial survey of the 20th century. He looks at key developments that have had an impact on foreign policy and the emergence of what he calls "universal history", which brings far-flung peoples into regular contact for the first time. In a final section, "Praxeology", Aron articulates a normative theory of international relations that rejects both the bleak vision of the Machiavellians, who hold that any means are legitimate, and the naivete of the idealists, who think foreign policy can be overcome. This new edition of "Peace and War" includes an informative introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson, situating Aron's thought in a new post-Cold War context and evaluating his contribution to the study of politics and international relations.

The European Community and the Uncertainties of Interdependence

Abstract: The enlargement of the European Community from six countries to nine, including Britain, comes at a time when the whole world system appears to be in flux. In Europe, a series of agreements culminating in the codification of the status of West Berlin is virtually closing that phase of history associated with the phrase ‘the cold war’, though they do not settle the ambiguities of the long-term balance between the Eurasian super-power, the Soviet Union, and the rest of the European peninsula, especially if, as it now seems, the position of the United States is to be uncertain. While Europe seems to be settling down, in the Far East new stars of the first magnitude, China and Japan, are coming to the fore on a scale comparable almost with the super-powers themselves. The Sino-Soviet quarrel, the American recognition of Mao’s China, and the latter’s triumphant entry into the United Nations, mark the coming of age of the Far East as the major centre of the world balance. These changes accompany a major modulation in relations between the super-powers themselves. America, disillusioned with the notion of policing the world, seems potentially to be consummating the retreat of the West begun with the collapse of the great European empires after the war.

The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

Abstract: This book argues the case for a society organized by private property, individual rights, and voluntary co-operation, with little or no government. David Friedman's standpoint, known as 'anarcho-capitalism', has attracted a growing following as a desirable social ideal since the first edition of The Machinery of Freedom appeared in 1971. This new edition is thoroughly revised and includes much new material, exploring fresh applications of the author's libertarian principles. Among topics covered: how the U.S. would benefit from unrestricted immigration; why prohibition of drugs is inconsistent with a free society; why the welfare state mainly takes from the poor to help the not-so-poor; how police protection, law courts, and new laws could all be provided privately; what life was really like under the anarchist legal system of medieval Iceland; why non-intervention is the best foreign policy; why no simple moral rules can generate acceptable social policies -- and why these policies must be derived in part from the new discipline of economic analysis of law.

Bureaucratic politics and American foreign policy: A critique

Abstract: Bureaucracies, we are told, have become central to the forging and wielding of American foreign policy, but with consequences adverse to the substance of that policy.* In the words of a past critic and present practitioner of American foreign policy: "The nightmare of the modern state is the hugeness of bureaucracy, and the problem is how to get coherence and design in it" [l]. That bureaucracies are crucial to our foreign policy and that they can make life difficult for Presidents are two propositions with which any analyst of American foreign policy could scarcely disagree. But what precisely do these propositions mean ? Do they mean that bureau, cracies largely determine our foreign policy through their ability to select the informa, tion presented to top political leaders and through the control they exert over the details of implementing policy ? Do they mean that Congress has little effect on foreign policy because Congress as an institution plays a small rote in tbrmulating policy and virtually none in implementing it ? Do they mean that the systemic perspective on international politics is of no use, or that Presidential assumptions, perspectives, and decisions are not the controling factors in our foreign policy? Do they mean that bureaucracies, if they are powerful, are equally powerful in all areas of foreign policy? Do these propositions mean that we must concentrate primarily on the mechanics of the foreign policy bureaucracy in order to understand or adduce the substance of policy ? Must we look to the nuts and bolts of bureaucracy to explain the thrust of policy ? Should we now adopt as the most fruitful method of analysis what is variously called "the governmental politics model," "the bureaucratic

Size and Foreign Policy Behavior: A Test of Two Models

Abstract: The categorization of states according to size has long been a part of world politics. Rothstein notes, for example, that the formalization of the categories of great and small powers occurred as a result of the signing of the Treaty of Chaumont in 1817. Recently, the concept of size has received an increasing amount of attention as a factor affecting foreign policy. One manifestation of this is the renewed interest in die foreign policy behavior of small states. In his pre-theory of foreign policy, Rosenau includes size as one of three “genotypic” variables assumed to exert a major influence on foreign policy. In addition, empirical studies have shown size to be an important factor underlying variations in the international behavior of nation-states.

Foreign Aid and United Nations Votes: A Comparative Study

Abstract: This study examines in a comparative foreign policy framework the relationship between bilateral foreign aid allocations and pairwise voting agreements between developed and developing nations in the UN General Assembly. The foreign aid donors considered include the United States, the Soviet “bloc,” and the twelve other UN members of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee. Two different measures of aid allocations in two three-year periods (1962–1964 and 1965–1967) are correlated with two different measures of the percentage of agreements in the UN between each aid donor and its aid recipients, with both indices calculated on the basis of all roll calls taken in the 1963 and 1966 General Assemblies. In general, the results of the analysis were found to be consistent with the hypothesized positive association between aid and votes only in the case of the United States. For many of the remaining donors the association was found to be negative rather than positive, suggesting either that enemies are rewarded more than friends, or, alternatively, that there is little relationship of substantive interest between aid and votes for most donor countries. Even in the case of the U.S., however, which of the two variables should be considered a cause and which a consequence remains unresolved.

Cognitive Process and Foreign Policy Decision-Making

Abstract: As the analysis of foreign policy decision-making has become a more theoretical enterprise, the production of historically oriented case studies has been supplemented by a growing number of investigations employing psychological or socialpsychological perspectives. Early studies of foreign policy decision-making with a psychological orientation emphasized the influence of various psychological traits on those involved in foreign policy decisions (e.g., Levinson, 1957), but, more recently, the emphasis has been on perception, cognition, and information-processing. The cognitive process approaches, by contrast, have attempted, in varying degrees, to map out the belief structures of decision makers and explore the implications of these structures for the way international events are understood and policy alternatives are considered. Studies under this rubric have focused upon the perceptions of particular foreign policy decision makers (Holsti, 1962), on the perceptions and choices of groups of persons simulating the roles of foreign policy decision makers (Driver, 1962; Hermann, 1969; Hermann and Hermann, 1967; Shapiro, forthcoming), and on the decision process of national decision groups focused upon particular policy problems (Steinbruner, forthcoming).

The southern dream of a Caribbean empire, 1854-1861

Abstract: A path-breaking work when first published in 1973, The Southern Dream remains the standard work on attempts by the South to spread American slavery into the tropics - Cuba, Mexico, and Central America in particular - before the Civil War. Robert May shows that the South's expansionists had no more success than when they tried to extend slavery westward. As one after another of their plots failed, southern imperialists lost hope that their labor system might survive in the Union. Blaming northern Democrats and antislavery Republicans alike for their disappointed dreams, alienated southerners embraced secession as an alternative means to achieving a tropical slave empire. Had war not erupted at Fort Sumter, Confederates might have attempted to conquer the Caribbean basin. May's book serves as an important reminder that foreign policy cannot be divorced from the writing of American history, even in regard to seemingly domestic matters like the causes of the Civil War. Contending that America's Manifest Destiny became "sectionalized" in the 1850s, he explains why southerners considered Caribbean expansion so important and shows how southerners used their clout in Washington to initiate diplomatic schemes like the notorious Ostend Manifesto and presidential attempts to buy the slaveholding island of Cuba from Spain. He also relates how Caribbean plots affected American public opinion and ignited sectional friction in congressional debates. May argues that President-elect Abraham Lincoln might have saved the Union in the winter of 1860-61, had he agreed to last minute concessions facilitating slavery's future expansion towards the tropics.

Transnational Strategies of Protection and Defense by Multinational Corporations: Spreading the Risk and Raising the Cost for Nationalization in Natural Resources

Abstract: Multinational corporations in natural resource industries that are challenged by economic nationalists in the countries where they have their production stage can no longer count automatically on the direct diplomatic support of their home governments as they could in the days of the Big Stick or the Pith Helmet. To protect their investments, they are realizing that they may have to devise their own means for the defense of their interests. Gunboats and marines no longer respond unhesitatingly to their beck and call. And even the more subtle pressures from loans blocked, funds impounded, credits unavailable, and aid cut off require a carefully orchestrated private effort to arrange. In the study of transnational relations, the large international natural resource companies have frequently been singled out as nongovernmental actors who possess par excellence the power to carry out their own foreign policy, to form alliances and exercise influence with a scope and range that exceeds the control of the countries in which they operate.' Not all such companies need to perfect these skills in private diplomacy, however. I have shown in a prior study that vertically integrated natural resource companies in which the crucial scale factors or barriers to entry are located downstream from the production stagesuch as tropical agriculture, tin, bauxite, and iron ore-may have various opportunities to keep oligopoly control outside the reach of

Issue Area and Foreign-Policy Process: A Research Note in Search of a General Theory

Abstract: The purpose of this research note is to suggest a potential general paradigm for the study of foreign policy processes. It is explicitly synthetic in that it combines Arnold Wolfers's notion of a continuum, the extremities of which he labels the pole of power and pole of indifference, with Theodore Lowi's efforts to affirm the nexus between issue and policy process. Two questions prove crucial in the determination of issue area: Is or is not the domestic impact of the issue symmetrical? And are the political goods at stake exclusively tangible or not? With the answers to these questions it becomes possible to specify the issue area (distribution, regulation, “interaction-protection,” redistribution) in which an event may be classified and to hypothesize the nature of the policy process (the identity of the major actors, the intensity of conflict) to be observed. Particular attention is paid to limited war as a redistributive issue area in order to make the case that redistribution, contrary to Lowi's view, is an important foreign policy process. Finally an effort is made to suggest how issue-based propositions could be utilized in the transnational comparison of foreign policy processes. It is suggested that differences in the policy process across issue areas within a given state may be as great as differences in process within a particular arena of power for two states as different in political system as the United States and the USSR.

Domestic Factors in German Foreign Policy before 1914

Abstract: Gordon Craig recently deplored the fact that political history, and particularly diplomatic history, no longer attracts the attention of historians or the public as much as has been the case up to now. In his opinion there is no proper reason why this should be so; foreign relations and diplomacy matter very much indeed, and deserve to be studied by historians on their own merits, at least up to a point. However, there are valid reasons why diplomatic history nowadays is in a sort of crisis, and why more and more historians have come to believe that it is not enough to study the diplomatic files, however diligently this may be done, and to inquire about the deeds and motives of the fairly small groups that monopolize decision-making in foreign relations. Most historians nowadays are agreed upon the principle that foreign policy must be explained just as much by finding the social and economic factors conditioning it, as by analyzing the activities going on the level of official diplomacy.

Economic Coercion as an Instrument of Foreign Policy: U.S. Economic Measures Against Cuba and the Dominican Republic

Abstract: The application of economic sanctions against Rhodesia and the results of that effort raise the question of the effectiveness of economic coercion as an instrument of foreign policy. A review of U.S. economic coercion against Cuba, in effect since June 1960, and against the Dominican Republic during the period 1960–1962 may be timely and instructive. By exploring the steps leading to the application of U.S. economic coercion, its objectives, and its concrete impact on the target states it may be possible to develop some useful generalizations about the role of economic weapons as tools of foreign policy.

The foreign policy of the Third Reich

Abstract: In this short outline history of Hitler's foreign policy, Professor Hildebrand contends that the National Socialist Party achieved popularity largely because it integrated all the political, economic and socio-political expectations prevailing in Germany since Bismarck. Thus, foreign policy under Hitler was a logical extension of the aims of the newly created German nation - state of 1871. Trading on his domestic economic successes, Hitler relied on the traditional methods of power politics - backing diplomacy with force. Had he pursued expansionist aims alone, using specific lighting wars as threats or instruments of conquest he might have been more successful. As it was, the scheme went awry when the first phase - European hegemony - was overtaken by and forced to run parallel with the second and third phases: American intervention and 'racial purification'. The ideology became too great a burden to bear, stimulating internal resistance, and the Allies of course determined to wage total for a total surrender.

The politics of Palestinian nationalism

Abstract: basic sense of insecurity, caused by the disappointments of the Yishuv (the Jewish community of Palestine) with the British protector, which generated a mistrust of great powers in general. This period also saw the beginnings of the strong bonds between the Yishuv and the Diaspora, which was later developed by Ben Gurion into the two-camp thesis of Jewish statehood and survival. The holocaust, the destruction of one-third of the Jewish people, has shaped the determination never to let it happen again, 'to fight for the state regardless of all other considerations' (p 70). On the other side, the author highlights the intransigent pursuit of Arab aims, Arab inflexibility which resulted in missed diplomatic opportunities and military disasters. Dr Roberts has given us a perceptive analysis of the psychological predispositions of Israel's political £lite. As a study of Israel's foreign policy, it has been superseded by Michael Brecher's monumental work The Foreign Policy System of Israel, but it is still a valuable contribution to the literature on this subject. He is much less convincing in his conclusions on Israeli imperialism.' His claim that Israel pursues an expansionist policy (with limited goals), partly motivated by the domestic factor of tensions between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews shows a strange unfamiliarity with recent Israeli political conditions.

Christian democracy in France

Abstract: 1. Origins of Christian Democracy in France 2. Christian Democratic Doctrine and Constitutional Theory 3. The Mouvement Republicain Populaire (MRP) 4. Economic and Social Policy 5. Agriculture 6. Foreign Policy 7. Colonial Policy 8. Christian Democracy in the Fifth Republic