FPITW-C2: The Foreign Policy Arena §

Class: IS401 Created Time: October 28, 2021 2:06 PM Database: Class Notes Database Last Edited Time: January 4, 2022 10:49 PM Type: Presentation Notes

• Foreign Policy Arena is the Terrain on which FP decisions are made and actions taken. It refers to both physical features and potential resources including human capital, economic capability, political power, etc.
  • This FP arena is occupied by a range of significant forces (actors, issues and interests).
    • Context of Actions
    • Forces of Actors

Contexts §

• What is FP context?
  • Similar to Kenneth Waltz Images of IR
    • International context
    • Governmental context
    • Domestic context

International Context §

• International context is the most important concern for policy makers
  • because uncertainty of environment
    • global uncertainties
    • shifts in balance of power
    • hegemonic order
    • hierarchical international system
  • FP is responsible for maximizing gain and minimizing loss
  • How
• How to evaluate impact of international concext and access its change?
• 3 Dimentions of Change
  • Location of Activity: center of importance, econmic gravity, and global focus
    • Cold War’s concentration of Europe to Post-Cold-War shift to Asia, Africa
  • Focus of Activity: Emergence of new issues: shift of focus to economic, social, environmental concern in their decision making and policy making
    • Environment: climate change, natural disaster
    • Socio-Economic issues: corruption, poverty, unemployment, inequality, refugees
    • Prolonged and new security challenges: interstate wars, civil wars, refugee crisis
    • Geo-strategic and geo-economic competition: Belt and Road Initiative, Quad, AUKUS
      • sphere of influence overlapping each other
  • Instrument of Activity: the means to get to the end: soft, hard, and smart powers
    • Realism ideological warfare, using economic or military pressure.
    • Liberalism Now soft power is more effective due to interdependence

Governmental Context §

• State-centric appraoch with traditional assumptions
• Government is the representative of the national state, claim for sovereignty and security.
• According to Chapter 1 Traditional FPA assumed that “ all government have the same principle, even though each had a different version of the foreign policy problem.
• In recent year, it has become ever more apparent that the government structure for foreign policy making are open to challenge and change.
• One element of those has been organizational restructuring to reflect change in the International context.
• Another type of challenge within governmental context of foreign policy making has been growth and diffusion of government itself.
• In the Western society, the scope and scale of the government machine had increase. ( Globalization, Regionalization and proliferation of new state and organization)
• The net effect of development in the government context is that the long establish image of foreign policy as the preserve of a skilled diplomatic.
  • In some case, it maybe modified by the limitation of government capacity and structure.
  • In other case, it maybe modified by the sheer extent of the structure.

Domestic Context §

• Pattern of communication and information sources makes it so domestic politics is influence by the support and pressure of non-state actors
• Implicit in much of what we have said so far are important arguments about the role played in foreign policy making by the domestic context.
• Domestic views of foreign policy, except in times of major national crisis, have often been described in terms of a restricted ‘attentive public’ and a great mass of those who are uninformed and uninterested.
• It is not surprising that such restricted views of the domestic influences on foreign policy have come under pressure, but the results of the pressures are not all in the same direction.
• But there is another side to this coin.

How to evaluate context of FP §

• FP arena is occupied by a range of significant forces
  • Context of actions
  • Forces of Actions
• 3 Interrelated contexts to frame or structure FP: to examine important forces of actors, issues, and interests

Actors §

• Who makes FP?
• Political and bureaucratic elites who have power and authority to influence FP
  • Must look at political circle of FP making
  • Background: education, social, family
  • Capacity, quality, personality
  • Worldview, perception: conservative, reformist, radical
  • Political experience in FP formulation
• The concentric circles of power in foreign policy making:

Issue §

• Issues of security have a high priority for allocation of national resources
  • Warfare (for independence or sovereignty) vs. welfare for Cambodia?
  • National security — traditional and non-traditional security issues
• New security challenges/non-traditional issues (e.g. Al in IR4.0…)
  • Cyber-attacking software
  • Data crunchers
  • Automatic machines: drone strikes, sattelite spyware,

Interests §

• The idea of national interests is fundamental to traditional notions of FP
  • Change in actors can lead to change in interests
  • Change in issues can shape actors and interests