| |
The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary
The summary of the selected article appears at the bottom of the page. In order to get back to the contents of the issue this article belongs to you have to access the link from the title. In order to see all the articles of the archive which have as author/co-author one of the authors mentioned below, you have to access the link from the author's name. |
|
| |
Abstract: There are several questions whose answers might explain, for the political scientist, the way in which a state conducts foreign policy. First of all, a question of the type “how is foreign policy being made?” would lead us into a research on the organizational bases of decision-making, largely conducted in the 60s and 70s by what has been called the foreign policy analysis approach . Or we might ask “who makes foreign policy? Is it the State as such, or the individual decision-makers?”. But because the study of foreign policy is on the edge between the internal and the external realm of the State, between IR and political science, we shall need tools from both disciplines in order to seize the nature of foreign policy decision-making. Thus, internal factors alone or external factors alone are not sufficient to explain the actions of a State. This being said, one might combine the external pressures of the distribution of capabilities in the system and the internal constraints and drawbacks of the bureaucratic process in order to have an image of how decision is being made at the national level. Or, for a neo-liberal, a good combination would be that of external pressure of International Organizations and internal bargaining among political groups. This is, of course, a caricaturized image of different possible approaches to the study of foreign policy, taking into account external and internal factors. We are trying to place ourselves in a different stance of thought, and to have a comprehensive view on foreign policy-making, by asking the question: “how can we understand the foreign policy of the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs)?”. We will try to propose some working hypotheses for the understanding of foreign policy which draw on the assumptions that, on the one hand, the structures of the international system are primarily ideational, and not material, and on the other hand, that the identities of actors are not naturally given, but constructed through a process of intersubjectivity . This leads us to consider ideas as structural, but meanwhile allows us to take into account the agency role of socially constructed subjects. |
|
