It’s Foreign Policy Week at LeftCenterLeft, during which I’ll try to articulate some principles for a left-liberal-meets-center-left U.S. foreign policy. See this post for an explanation.
Pelican sees my call yesterday for first principles of foreign policy and puts to me an excellent question:
I think the debate though should be about context or frameworks for [foreign policy]. Some probably still hold to the notion of the nation-state and international relations and policy as being about the relations of nation-states. Others hold to a view of international relations as being composed of antiquated nation-states and "modern" trans-national, multinational, and "stateless" organizations and entities that act around the world with the nation-states, e.g. the WTO, Al Qaeda, the UN, etc. What it means to promote democracy, for example, might be entirely different depending on what context or view of international relations you have. Perhaps it is worth starting trying to figure out the conception of international relationships first -or- LCL should make explicit what conception he is working under.
The former. Foreign policy still seems to me to be fundamentally about nation-states and their relations. At the very least, the nation state is unit of analysis. We study foreign policy to get an idea of what a nation-state (in this case the U.S.) should do, and through elections and political alignment people jockey for control of those decisions accordingly. It’s comparable to the way that we understand economics: increasingly we’re seeing international integration of goods, services and capital, but despite some entities straddling nation-states (the multinational corporation, forex markets) and some areas approaching genuine integration (EU), for the most part laws are still set by the nation state, monetary policy is sovereign (even under dollarization) and most macroeconomic measures point to domestic effects of economic variables.
Similarly, the presence of non-state actors, NGOs or international bodies of law and governance do not in themselves spell out the obsolescence of nation-states as the principle actors on the world stage. If I might use an analogy, the nation-state is like a chemical element, with international bodies like the UN or the World Court serving as an unstable compound. Eventually, these compounds may grow stable (already the EU is becoming a genuinely single body), but they are not yet. As such, our "chemistry" is still one of atoms rather than molecules. And the existence of subatomic agents (ions, say) doesn’t change that either.
This does not mean, however, that stateless entities and supranational organizations shouldn’t be taken seriously on their own. If I might hazard to read between the lines of Pelican’s question, it seems that he’s asking whether we give credence to the neocons in their assertion that a) terrorism is at most a problem of rogue states; and b) supranational bodies like the UN aren’t worth bothering with because they work against U.S. interests. Assertion a) is more egregiously wrong than assertion b), but in any case both are wrong. I just don’t think the neocons’ willful misreading of terrorism should put us off to recognizing that there still are a good number of quite conventional foreign policy questions dealing with matters of nation states. North Korea, the hostility between India and Pakistan, how to deal with Latin American states that challenge U.S. regional hegemony, the tension between Russian sphere of influence and emerging nationalisms in former Soviet Republics… all of these are similar in scale and scope to the issues facing the major powers in 1950 or 1920.
Conversely, it’s worth remembering that non-state and supranational questions have always been on the table. Even 19th century Europe — the classical age of foreign policy and the era of Metternich — faced both incipient subnationalisms (sometimes engaging in guerilla warfare) and supranational alliances (like the faceoff between the Triple Alliance and Triple Entente that spiraled into World War I). Metternichian foreign policy dealt with both levels, yet acted through the nation state, for the interests of the nation state. We may be entering a new phase in some senses, but it’s not without precedent.
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