INTRODUCTION – THE MASS PUBLIC AS FOREIGN POLICY VARIABLE

It is important to understand clearly the relationship between the mass national public and government decisions, not simply for the sake of political analysis. It is also important that we should be able to think clearly about ‘what is the proper relationship between a society and those professionally responsible for its external affairs’. Because of the methodological difficulty, however, in generalising from the individual out to the group, there has existed a specific difficulty in foreign policy and international relations theory in understanding the role of the mass public, or in using the mass public as a theoretically integrated variable. There have, nevertheless, been two lines of approach to the subject, the first of which has been unconcerned about the methodological difficulties, and the second of which has selfconsciously floundered in them.

The first approach has been that of the strategists and realists who have straightforwardly recognised the mass population as being one of several resources available for foreign policy and, in the final analysis, war. If war is diplomacy conducted by other means, then those means include the men and women prepared to take up arms. Put at its most basic, this is a recognition of the mass public as cannon fodder, as another power resource. This approach to the populace can be made slightly more subtle by the further recognition that it is not only the quantity, but the quality that matters.