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probing how global change is spurring a qualitative transformation of the European Union, it provides a pragmatic and specific framework to unpack the process by which the decision to change foreign policy is made during specific crisis episodes. How do crises in EU foreign policy produce policy changes, and why? The key goal of this book is to improve our understanding of EU foreign policy change, how it happens and what it looks like. To achieve this, this book will develop an analytical framework and a typology of change suitable for this task
A long-standing, self-deprecating joke in Brazil runs as follows: ‘Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be.’ Although ambitions of global importance and international influence are not new to Brazilian foreign policy, the capacity and credibility to realize these dreams have until recently been absent. Whether it be Brazil’s relative geographic isolation from the main US–Europe axis of power, a lack of industrial capacity in the first half of the twentieth century, financial disaster in the 1980s and 1990s, or a generalized lack of military
11 Conclusions on an Irish role in the world Introduction We began this exercise asking how one might outline a picture of Irish foreign policy. Clearly the dominant approach that we have at our disposal is one based upon an excavation of ‘national interests’ (or ‘raisons d’etat’) and the subsequent pursuit of rational explanations for human behaviour. These approaches have traditionally added much to our knowledge of human nature and human relations. A very different approach, by contrast, is rooted in understanding rather than explanation – an understanding
7 Policy actors and structures: the democratic coda Introduction The aim of this chapter is to review the structures, both formal and informal, through which democratic control is exercised over the formulation and conduct of Irish foreign policy. It is evident from the previous chapter that in the 1980s and 1990s the winds of a gentle revolution were sweeping through the corridors of Iveagh House. Some of the resulting change in executive structures, roles and procedures could be seen to be a result of Ireland’s twenty-five-year engagement in Europe and an
Vic2-00 _Vic00 10/03/2011 11:18 Page 1 Introduction This book is the second volume on The Labour Party and the World. Volume 1 began by pointing out that foreign policy has been an underresearched area of Labour Party policy and history. Studies of the Labour Party have tended to focus on domestic policy, in particular social and economic policy, both in terms of policy-making and in terms of ideology. None of the major studies of the Labour Party subject Labour’s foreign policy to sustained analysis, and the general conclusion was that Labour had failed to
Vic00 10/23/03 3:53 PM Page 1 Introduction Labour’s election victory in May 1997 was closely followed by the new Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, launching his department’s mission statement in which he made a commitment to an ‘ethical dimension’ to British foreign policy. Cook declared that he was going to implement a new kind of foreign policy, which ‘recognises that the national interest cannot be defined only by narrow realpolitik’. The aim was ‘to make Britain once again a force for good in the world.’1 This sparked a debate on the nature of Labour
1 Introduction To examine the role of the mid-Victorian Conservative Party in foreign policy is to leave oneself in splendid isolation. With a very few exceptions, there has been little historiographical interest in the Conservatives between 1846, when Sir Robert Peel’s administration collapsed in turmoil over the repeal of the Corn Laws, and 1874, when Disraeli returned the party to majority government. There has been even less interest in the Conservatives’ part in the politics of foreign policy. The ‘politics of foreign policy’ constitutes a helpful
The argument made in this book is relatively simple in nature, but one that is counter-intuitive to first inclinations when analysing a country’s foreign policy. Simply put, the point I have sought to make is that Brazilian foreign policy is primarily concerned with questions of structural power, not relative power. Brazil is not seeking power over other states or regional dominance simply to enforce its own will. Instead, the focus is on influencing a deeper and more profound type of power, an effort which seeks to embed Brazilian interests in the very fabric
Vic2-08_Vic01 10/03/2011 11:23 Page 215 Chapter 8 Conclusion Labour’s election victory in 1997 stimulated a new generation of academics to develop an interest in foreign policy under a Labour government. The commitments that Robin Cook and Tony Blair made back in 1997 seemed at the time to most scholars of International Relations to be novel, a product of a globalised post-Cold War era, and there was little awareness of how these commitments had developed. One of the aims of this study has been to show that the ideas at the heart of Labour’s foreign policy at
One of the most intellectually stimulating roundtables at a professional political science conference that I have been to was about connecting the study of public policy with the study of foreign policy. It was inspiring because it was a meeting of minds and the participants, as representatives from both areas of research, discovered common grounds as well as new ways of thinking. The two subfields shared similar conceptual ideas, methods, and challenges, although they communicated in different languages. In other ways, there were clear