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Foreign policy Implementation: problems and approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Michael Clarke
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Extract

It is disturbing for a student of foreign policy to read Tolstoy. It is even more disturbing for anyone interested specifically in the implementation of foreign policy, for in several respects he said it all in War and Peace in a way that makes twenty-five years of theorising about foreign policy look ridiculous. Tolstoy is greatly interested in the execution of policy and his conclusions are not only distinctive but they attack some of the most basic assumptions on which foreign policy is based. For in his elaboration of a view of historical causation, he is concerned to examine the elusive forces which motivate events and to ridicule the notion that policy-makers shape history by making effective decisions. He demonstrates this most vividly in describing the business of war, where he adopts a tone of devastating sarcasm in his accounts of the generals, “who of all the blind instruments of history were the most enslaved and involuntary’. Thus, he states starkly:

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , July 1979 , pp. 112 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1979

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References

page 112 note 1 Tolstoy, L., War and Peace (London, 1957), p. 896Google Scholar.

page 112 note 2 Ibid, p. 1421.

page 112 note 3 Ibid, p. 1183.

page 112 note 4 Ibid, p. 1420.

page 113 note 1 Rosenau, J. N., The Scientific Study of Foreign Policy (London, 1971), p. 198Google Scholar.

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page 116 note 3 Frankel, op. cit. pp. 202–3.

page 116 note 4 Puchala, op. cit. p. 517.

page 117 note 1 Able, E., The Missiles of October (London, 1966), pp. 176–7Google Scholar; Rourke, F. E., Bureaucracy and Foreign Policy (London, 1972), pp. 50–1Google Scholar; Halperin, op. cit. pp. 241–2.

page 117 note 2 Pressman, J. L. and Wildavsky, A., Implementation (London, 1973)Google Scholar.

page 117 note 3 Ibid. p. 92.

page 119 note 1 Halperin, op. cit. especially p. 242.

page 119 note 2 Hood, op. cit. pp. 123–7.

page 119 note 3 See for example, Northedge, op. cit. ch. 4; Reynolds, op. cit. pp. 115—22.

page 119 note 4 See for example, Kissinger, H., ‘Bureaucracy and Policy Making’, in Halperin, H. A. and Kanter, A. (eds.), Readings in American Foreign Policy: A Bureaucratic Perspective (Boston, 1973)Google Scholar; Wolfers, A., Discord and Collaboration (Baltimore, 1962), pp. 147–65Google Scholar; Jervis, R. L., The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton, N. J., 1971)Google Scholar.

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page 120 note 2 Hood, op. cit. pp. 25–6; Destler, op. cit. pp. 157–8; Rourke, op. cit. pp. 52, 60.

page 121 note 1 Steinbrunner, J. D., The Cybernetic Theory of Decision (Princeton, N. J., 1974), pp. 327–30Google Scholar.

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page 121 note 3 Ibid. p. 290.

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page 122 note 2 Hood, op. cit. pp. 118–33; Anderson, J. E., Public Policy-Making (London, 1975), pp. 98–131Google Scholar.

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page 124 note 1 Goplin, W.Introduction to International Politics 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1974), pp. 30—58Google Scholar.

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page 124 note 6 Goplin, op. cit. p. 31.

page 125 note 1 Anderson, op. cit. p. 98.

page 125 note 2 Sunday Times, 2 June 1974, pp. 33—4.

page 126 note 1 Marshall, G. B., The Limits of Foreign Policy (New York, 1954), p. 15Google Scholar.

page 126 note 2 Rosenau, op. cit. p. 232.

page 127 note 1 Wallace, op. cit. pp. 51–5.

page 127 note 2 Frankel, op. cit. p. 313.

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page 128 note 1 Williams, op. cit.; Burton, J. W., International Relations: A General Theory (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 141–50Google Scholar.