Arti Hubungan Internasional dalam video

[ifilm=2706404]

A One Minute Guide to International Relations

Posted Mar 06, 2006

A very brief instructional video on everything you need to know about international relations. Political theory has never been so simple!

Definisi Cold War

Saya kira istilah Cold War atau Perang Dingin muncul lagi dalam kosa kata media massa. Hal ini terjadi sesudah Presiden Rusia Vladimir Putin akan mengarahkan rudalnya lagi ke Eropa sesudah Amerika menegaskan akan tetap melanjutkan sistem pertahanan rudal di Ceko.

Cold War. The term “Cold War” is used to describe the protracted conflict between the Soviet and Western worlds that, while falling short of “hot” war, nonetheless involved a comprehensive military, political, and ideological rivalry from the end of World War II to the early 1990s. It entered modern political vocabulary after World War II, as a description, popularized by the columnist Walter Lippmann, of the conflict between the Soviet and Western blocs. It was initially used to describe a historical period—the Cold War—that began with the breakdown of the wartime alliance in 1946–1947. Some writers saw an end to the Cold War in the 1950s, after the death of Stalin; others saw its demise in the 1970s with détente. The term “Second Cold War” was widely used to refer to the period after the collapse of détente in the late 1970s.

“Cold War” was, however, also used in a more analytic sense, not to denote a particular phase of East-West rivalry but rather to denote the very fact of the rivalry between the communist and capitalist systems itself, one that involved competition and confrontation but not all-out “hot” war. In this sense, the Cold War began not in 1945 but in 1917, with the accession of the Bolsheviks to power, and their proclamation of a worldwide challenge to capitalism, and continued until the late 1980s. The communist revolutionary challenge, and the Western response to it, were checked by a variety of factors—the fragmentation of the world into separate societies and states, the power of nationalism, the fear of nuclear weapons, the limits on the power of each side—but it nevertheless endured for more than seven decades. Whatever the periodicity or meaning adopted, most writers agreed that the Cold War, in the sense of a global rivalry between two competing and roughly equal blocs, ended, after Gorbachev’s accession to power in 1985, with the collapse of Soviet power and the end of the Soviet ideological challenge to the West.

The development of East-West rivalry was marked by a set of crises, in both Europe and the Third World, and by an enduring competition in arms, especially nuclear weapons. Central as the arms race was to Cold War, however, the latter comprised a broader strategic and political contest. After the end of World War II, Europe was soon divided by the “Iron Curtain” of communist border controls into the Soviet and Western blocs, which led to the Berlin blockade of 1948–1949 and to the formation, in 1949 and 1955, respectively, of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Treaty Organization. Further crises over Berlin followed in 1959 and 1961, and attempts by states under Soviet control to assert their independence were crushed by force—the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1981. Yugoslavia, Albania, and Romania were able to evade Soviet domination but remained ruled by Communist parties until they, like the Soviet allies, were overwhelmed by the democratic revolutions of the late 1980s.

The rivalry of East and West was also fought out in the Third World. After the Azerbaidzhan crisis of March 1946, a dispute over Soviet reluctance to pull forces out of Iran that marked the first major dispute of the Cold War, there followed the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Korean War of 1950–1953, the Suez crisis of 1956, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and, in its aftermath, the missile crisis of 1962, and the U.S. involvement in Vietnam of 1965–1973. In the latter part of the 1970s the collapse of détente and onset of the so-called Second Cold War was in part the result of U.S. concern at the advent to power of pro-Soviet revolutionary regimes in a dozen Third World states, notably South Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, and Nicaragua.

The Second Cold War came after the lessening of tensions that was evident in the 1970s with the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of 1972 and the Helsinki Accords of thirty-three European nations, the United States, and Canada on European security in 1975. This amelioration had ended by the late 1970s and appeared dead when Soviet forces occupied Afghanistan in December 1979. The period after 1980 initially saw an intensification of East-West confrontation: an increased emphasis in the West on the arms race, with the deployment of intermediate-range cruise missiles in Europe and the Strategic Defense Initiative, and an encouragement by the United States of anticommunist guerrillas in Cambodia, Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua.

In the Second Cold War the Soviet leadership appeared to have retreated behind the defensive positions of the earlier cold war, but from 1985 onwards, under Gorbachev’s leadership, the Soviet Union made wide-ranging concessions that brought the earlier confrontation and the Cold War as a whole to an end. In 1988 the Soviet Union declared an end to military support for the Eastern European communist parties it had kept in power for forty years and in 1989 withdrew its forces from Afghanistan. In the same period it signed wide-ranging agreements on arms control and arms reduction with the United States, and abandoned its global ideological rivalry with the capitalist West. In November 1989 the opening of the Berlin Wall signaled the end of communist power in Eastern Europe. In December 1990 the Cold War was officially declared over at the Paris Organization for Security and Cooperative in Europe (OSCE) conference. In December 1991 the Soviet Union broke apart.

Writing on the Cold War has revolved around two broad questions. The first has been that of historical responsibility, of which side caused the cold wars of the late 1940s and late 1970s. Whereas earlier writings tended to polarize around a Western view that the Soviet Union was responsible and a Soviet view that the “imperialist” countries were to blame, a later school of “revisionist” Western writing stressed forms of U.S. responsibility. In the 1980s a “postrevisionist” school emerged, locating responsibility in both the Soviet and U.S. blocs, while, with the advent of glasnost in the Soviet Union after 1988, Soviet writers began for the first time to concede that the policies of Stalin and Brezhnev had contributed to exacerbating East-West tensions.

The second broad set of questions concern what the Cold War was and what the sources of the conflict were. Here four broad schools of explanation have emerged. The first, a traditional application of power politics, sees it as a continuation under new ideological guises of the kind of great power rivalry for empire, influence, and domination seen in earlier epochs. A second school stresses the cognitive and subjective factors, the degree of misperception involved in the failure of the two sides to maintain their wartime alliance and resolve subsequent disputes, and to extricate themselves from the reinforcing anxieties of the arms race. A third school views the Cold War as only apparently a rivalry between two blocs, and more as a means by which the dominant states within each bloc controlled and disciplined their own populations and clients, and by which those who stood to benefit from increased arms production and political anxiety promoted a mythical rivalry. Fourth, there are those who see the Cold War not primarily as a conflict between states or as a merely military rivalry but more as a conflict between two distinct, competing social and political systems, each committed to prevailing over the other at the global level. Despite its rapid and, in Europe, relatively bloodless end, the Cold War continues to exert a hold on world affairs. In Russia there is pervasive nostalgia for world stature, exacerbated by the economic collapse that has followed the end of Soviet centralization. In China a communist party still rules, amidst growing social and political pressures. Although communism as an alternative ideology is discredited, many of the tensions, economic and social, that produced it remain acute, as the breakdown of state control in a number of areas formerly ruled by communism has produced new civil and ethnic conflicts.

Bibliography
Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War, 2d ed. (London and New York, 1986).
Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C., 1994).
John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford, 1997).

Fred Halliday

Fred Halliday “Cold War” The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World, 2e. Joel Krieger, ed. Oxford University Press Inc. 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

Definisi Realisme

Realisme merupakan teori dalam ilmu hubungan internasional yang cukup populer. Berbagai perkembangan mutakhir pemerintahan Amerika Serikat dibawah Presiden George W Bush menunjukkan realisme politik muncul lagi.

Berikut salah satu definisi realisme:

Realism. Also known as Political Realism or Realpolitik, Realism remains one of the dominant schools of thought within the field of international relations. With a long intellectual pedigree, dating at least from Thucydides’ (ca. 460–400 B.C.E.) history of The Peloponnesian War and the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Realism is distinguished from contending approaches by three assumptions regarding the nature of international politics.

First, the international system is anarchic and based on the principle of self-help. By anarchy, Realists do not mean that international politics are chaotic. Indeed, some proponents argue that relations between nations do exhibit regularities and are even driven by widely accepted social norms. Rather, for Realists anarchy simply means that the international system lacks any political authority higher than the state. Unlike domestic politics, where a hierarchical pattern of authority exists to enforce private agreements and public laws, sovereign states stand in relations of formal equality. As a result, states are ultimately dependent on their own resources to protect their interests, enforce agreements, and maintain order.

Second, states are the dominant actors in world politics. Both private actors, such as multinational corporations, and intergovernmental organizations, such as the UN, exist and influence international politics. Realists assume these actors are subordinate to states. Private entities and intergovernmental organizations act within the political arena, but they do so only with the consent of national political authorities.

Third, in
Hans Morgenthau’s classic statement (Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed., rev., New York, 1978, p. pp.5
), “statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power,” broadly conceived to include both material and psychological, military and economic capabilities. The “national interest,” in this view, is to maximize power. Because power exists only relationally, it follows that world politics is inherently conflictual; all countries cannot increase their power or satisfy their national interests simultaneously.

Kenneth Waltz (in Theory of International Politics, Reading, Mass., 1979, p. pp.118
) has recently refined this third assumption, clarifying the ambiguity between power as a means and as an end. “At a minimum,” he writes, states “seek their own preservation and, at a maximum, drive for universal domination.” Only after survival is assured, he continues, can they afford to seek other goals; as a result, states act, first and foremost, to maximize security.

Realism emerged in its modern form largely in reaction to Idealism, a more normatively driven approach which held that countries were united in an underlying harmony of interest—a view shattered by the outbreak of World War II. Rather than study the world as it might be, Realists maintained that a science of international politics must study the world as it was—an insistence that resulted in the Realists’ self-acclaimed appellation.

The generation of Realists writing immediately before and after World War II, now referred to as the classical Realists, shared an essentially pessimistic view of human nature. Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), Nicholas Spykman (1893–1943), Hans Morgenthau (1904–1980), and others believed that the struggle for power was inherent in human nature. Viewing humankind as unchanging, these Realists held out little hope for any transformation of international politics. Rather, they focused on the principles of diplomacy and mechanisms—such as the balance of power, international morality and world public opinion, and international law—which regulated and restrained the inevitable clashes of interests between states.

Contemporary Realists, often called Neorealists or Structural Realists, have sought to inject greater theoretic rigor by defining concepts more clearly and deriving testable hypotheses. Neorealists have also focused on the international system, examining how different structures—defined in terms of ordering principles, the functional differentiation of the units, and distributions of capabilities—produce varying patterns of world politics which cannot be explained simply in terms of the interests and policies of individual countries. Most fundamentally, Neorealists derive the causes of international conflict not from innate human characteristics but from anarchy. Given the necessary reliance on self-help, a state must prepare to defend itself against potential threats from others. In so preparing, however, it (perhaps unwittingly) threatens others—thereby creating a vicious cycle of increasing threat and insecurity. Thus, even though all states may possess thoroughly pacific intentions, international competition and conflict may still arise.

In the approximately forty-five years since it emerged as a clearly defined school of thought, Realism has stimulated a diverse research program. In a recent review,
John A. Vasquez (The Power of Power Politics: A Critique, New Brunswick, N.J., 1983
) identifies five foci within Realism: the study of 1) foreign policy, which has sought both to clarify the concepts of national interest and power in the context of past and present policy problems and develop models of national decision making; 2) systemic processes, especially those that regulate international conflict; 3) the causes of war; 4) deterrence and bargaining, with a particular emphasis on nuclear weapons and strategy; and 5) supranationalism, including international organizations and international regimes. Since the early 1970s, a Realist school of international political economy has also emerged. Focusing on the interaction of power and wealth, this school has been particularly concerned with the relationship between hegemony, or the presence of a single dominant state, and international economic openness and closure.

Critiques of Realism.
No theoretical approach to international relations, especially one as central as Realism, is without its critics. Although by no means an exhaustive list, it is possible to identify five general criticisms.

First, the predictive power of Realism, and its status as a positive theory of international relations, rests on the objective determination of the national interest—whether it be defined in terms of power or security. Only if the national interest is clear and unambiguous can the theorist discern whether countries do, in fact, adopt appropriate policies. Yet, “the trouble …,” as
Arnold Wolfers noted in ‘National Security’ as an Ambiguous Symbol (Political Science Quarterly 67, no. 4 [December 1952], p. pp.484
), “is that the term ‘security’ covers a range of goals so wide that highly divergent policies can be interpreted as policies of security.” As a consequence, the predictive and, in turn, explanatory power of Realism is weakened.

Second, many Realists, and especially Neorealists who explicitly exclude domestic policies from their theories, have treated the state as a unitary actor. Critics have charged that even if this “billiard-ball” view was appropriate for describing international relations in an earlier era, it is of declining relevance today. With the growth of private cross-border communications and organizations, and with the rise of economic interdependence, the “hard shell” of the state has crumbled. According to
Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye in Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (2d ed., Boston, 1989
), relations between some countries and in some issue areas are better characterized by “complex interdependence”—where multiple channels connect societies, no clear hierarchy exists between the “high” politics of military security and “low” politics of economic affairs, and military force is of less utility.

Third, Neorealists have recently been criticized for being “statists,” that is, assuming that states are the primary actors in world politics without explaining why they emerged as the predominant form of political organization or considering how they might evolve in the future. Fourth, and closely related, Neorealists have been challenged for not developing a dynamic theory which can explain the evolution of the international system through time. Specifically, critics within the “agent-structure” debate have argued that Neorealism must incorporate how the actions of “agents,” or decision makers operating within the constraints of the system, affect in turn the structure of the system. In
Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Critics (in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics, New York, 1986), Waltz
recognizes both of these problems and accepts them as inevitable limitations of relevant, “problem-solving” theory.

Finally, Realism does not adequately ground the national pursuit of power or security, however defined, in the interests and incentives of individual foreign policy decision makers. Classical Realism was developed before many of the advances in modern political science, and Neorealism seeks to derive strictly systemic theories of international politics. From a public or rational choice perspective, which accepts the methodological individualism of neoclassical economics, there is no necessary reason why the interests of self-seeking politicians should coincide with the national interest. Given the difficulties of translating social preferences into public policy, a considerable gap will often exist between the interests of the people as a whole and actual policy. To the extent that such difficulties arise, the explanatory power of Realism is further weakened.

Despite these limitations, Realism remains a powerful, simple, and elegant theory of international politics. Rather than focusing on ideology, national regime types, stages of economic development, and other particularistic or time-bound factors, Realism builds its explanations on the most general and enduring features of international politics—the struggle for power and security by self-seeking states within an anarchic international system—and in doing so provides both a persuasive explanation for conflict within the international arena and a guide for managing such disputes.

Normative Critique.
Realism is often criticized for being amoral, and perhaps even immoral, in its elevation of the national interest over other ethical principles. Realism, as defined above, is a positive theory of international politics, and as such is not motivated primarily by normative concerns. Yet, to the extent that Realists enter the policy arena, whether as direct participants or outside experts, this criticism is not entirely inappropriate.

Realists do consider standards of conduct at the international level to be different from those governing behavior within states. In an anarchic world, national leaders must, at times, adopt or countenance actions that would be legally or morally repugnant in relations among individuals. As the environment changes, Realists maintain, definitions of morality must change too. As
George F. Kennan writes in Morality and Foreign Affairs (Foreign Affairs 64, no. 2 [Winter 1985–1986], p. pp.206
), the “primary obligation [of a government] is to the interests of the national society it represents, not to the moral impulses that individual elements of that society may experience.”

As always, Realists emphasize the importance of studying the world as it is rather than as we wish it to be. This commitment to “realism” carries over into the evaluation of policy. As
Hans Morgenthau concludes in Another Great Debate: The National Interest of the United States (American Political Science Review 46, no. 4 [December 1952], p. pp.988
), “The contest between utopianism and realism is not tantamount to a contest between principle and expediency, morality and immorality. … The contest is rather between one type of political morality and another type of political morality, one taking as its standard universal moral principles abstractly formulated, the other weighing these principles against the moral requirements of concrete political action, their relative merits to be decided by a prudent evaluation of the political consequences to which they are likely to lead.”

Bibliography
Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (New York, 1939).
Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J., 1978).
Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, N.J., 1987).
Alexander Wendt, The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations International Organization 41, no. 3 (Summer 1987): pp.335–370.

David A. Lake

David A. Lake “Realism” The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World, 2e. Joel Krieger, ed. Oxford University Press Inc. 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

Definisi Politik Luar Negeri

Istilah politik luar negeri juga penting bagi para mahasiswa untuk mengidentifikasi masalah dan mengajukan berbagai konsep politik luar negeri terutama dalam skripsi atau makalah. Informasi berikut disertai sumbernya mungkin menarik untuk Anda kaji.

Foreign Policy. The term “foreign policy” is a nineteenth-century expansion of the idea of “policy,” which had been in use since Chaucer to denote a government’s conduct of affairs. The phrase “foreign affairs” was increasingly common from the seventeenth century, as the growing volume of state business began to compel a clearer organizational distinction between home and abroad in the secretariats of royal households. But the idea of a coherent set of positions towards the outside world, or a “foreign policy,” seems to have been a product of the bureaucracy and systematization of the industrial age.

For modern observers, foreign policy is at once a phenomenon, a concept, and a major area of study. No definition can do full justice to all three of these aspects of the term, but it is still possible to establish a starting point from which the arguments about interpretation can develop. For there are almost as many views of foreign policy as there are different schools of thought on international relations, or types of political ideology in the world.

Foreign policy, then, can be characterized as the sum of official external relations conducted by an independent actor (usually a state) in international relations. Such a definition is short enough to be of practical use, while retaining sufficient flexibility to incorporate the changes that have occurred and continue to occur in the nature of modern international politics. To take the components of the definition: “international relations” refers to the web of transactions across state boundaries by all kinds of groups and individuals, and “external relations” to the same activities from the point of view of these actors as they move outside their own society into dealings with others. Neither is restricted to “politics” in the narrow sense, as almost any act can be political if it relates to fundamental issues like the distribution of power or the setting of social values and priorities. On the other hand relations must be “official” to qualify as foreign policy because otherwise all transactions could be included and there would be no inherent sense of agency or purposive action, which is what the term “policy” always implies. In this sense all external relations conducted by the legitimate officeholders of the entity express and contribute to foreign policy: defense ministers, foreign trade ministers, and environment ministers may be almost as involved as their colleagues in charge of the diplomatic service. To the extent that senior bureaucrats also take part directly in high-level international transactions, they too will be conducting foreign policy, although their margin of maneuver will vary enormously from state to state and issue to issue. At the extremes, bureaucratic and political competition sometimes means that a state is running several foreign policies simultaneously.

The “sum” of external relations is important because although we talk properly about a country’s specific foreign policy towards this state or that, the use of the term tout court must always be holistic—it represents the entire package of actions and attitudes towards the outside world. Lastly, it is important to define foreign policy as issuing from “independent actors” rather than the more conventional restrictive definition, so as to avoid chaining ourselves to the state in an era when it is evident both that foreign and domestic policy often blur into each other, and that non-state actors are major participants in international relations. So although it has to be admitted that the great majority of foreign policies belong to states, which still monopolize the business of global politics, there is no intrinsic reason why other actors, such as churches or political groups, which transcend on a transnational basis much of the control theoretically exercised by states, should not be deemed to have “foreign” policies. For they, like nation-states, naturally distinguish between their internal character and the international system. We may need to qualify their actions as “private foreign policies,” but they can be analyzed in ways not dissimilar to states.

Most non-state entities, however, have neither the reach nor the motivation to go beyond mere external relations into foreign policy proper. The average sporting federation or municipality can rarely defy government-to-government structures. While some companies, regions, and governments-in-exile do have the resources to achieve a high profile in international politics it is particular entities, like the African National Congress or the Anglican Church, rather than whole categories that qualify as foreign policy actors.

Economic interdependence has increased the number of transnational entities and their opportunities for independent action, although here too variable patterns of development and liberalization make it a more patchy process than is often assumed. While there may be relatively few enterprises capable of challenging states frontally, as Rupert Murdoch’s News International has done, many others have complicated the foreign policies of governments. The disputes over extraterritoriality, for example, between the European Union and the United States, only arise because of the existence of companies that operate internationally, and in the first instance on the basis of the market, regardless of national security policies.

Governments have also had to contend increasingly with international non-governmental organizations as participants capable themselves of shaping international politics. Although nominally based in one country, organizations like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and Médecins sans Frontières have increasingly taken on a transnational quality and operate on the basis of specified values unrelated to those of any particular national interest. For their part governments do not stand on the sidelines observing. They have developed ways of coping with such actors, and of using them. As a result, both foreign policy and international politics are more subtle and complicated processes than in the Cold War era.

The literature that has burgeoned on foreign policy since 1960 provides us with the means to understand both the underlying forces which shape a country’s foreign policy, and the evolution of the phenomenon itself. This literature constitutes what is now a major subarea of international relations, known variously as foreign policy analysis (FPA) or comparative foreign policy (CFP). It takes the micro, or actor-perspective on international relations, as opposed to the macro, or system-perspective in which patterns are identified without going into the motivations of the actors who produce them. Views differ on what can be achieved at the micro level of analysis. The CFP school, which became well established in the United States, has preferred a behavioral methodology, and has operated on the assumption that it should be possible to generalize about the behavior of states and foreign policies, as classes of phenomena, once sufficient data has been generated by rigorously scientific methods. This positivist approach did not catch on in most European or Commonwealth universities, or in the more traditionalist American faculties. There are also now signs that after the expenditure of considerable effort, money, and ingenuity, some of the main proponents of the school have come to realize its limitations. Quite apart from the general debate about positivism, foreign policy is an insufficiently discrete phenomenon to be able to bear the weight of extensive cross-cultural comparisons and generalizations.

This is to say that because foreign policy as an activity is not sharply different from other kinds of public policy, it cannot generate an exclusive theory of behavior to fit it; also, that the variations over countries and time periods are large enough to enforce damaging qualifications on attempts to derive general laws. More than a wholly distinctive universe of human behavior, foreign policy represents an arena in which various forms of explanation may be brought together, enabling us to say a great deal about the nature of foreign policy, its making, its interaction with domestic politics, and its place in our understanding of international politics as a whole.

This more eclectic approach, which has established itself as the most fruitful way to study foreign policy, employs the dialectical approach of critically testing generalizations and case studies against each other. It uses theory without being enslaved to it, in the sense of concentrating on what are known as “middle-range theories.” At one end of the spectrum this means rigorously constructed hypotheses about closely defined particular aspects of foreign policy (or “structured empiricism” in Michael Brecher’s words), of which the best example is Brecher’s own work on decisions under conditions of crisis. At the other end of the same scale of middle-range theories are sets of insights, more loosely organized but not less valuable for that, on such matters as the tendency of decision makers to lean on historical analogies, or the impact of geopolitical and other environmental constraints on choice. In the middle is a good deal of impressive work on the domestic sources of foreign policy, perception and misperception, bureaucratic politics, and the problems attending the notion of rational conduct in the context of foreign policy. The dominant position of rational choice approaches in political science has failed to catch on in foreign policy analysis for this very reason: the limitations of the “rational actor” model had been fully exposed by the mid-1970s.

The comparative spirit informs most of this writing, even if a tendency towards the case-study method sometimes obscures that fact. Indeed, the foreign policy characteristics of certain types and groups of states have attracted a good deal of attention from those wishing to link the study of foreign policy making to the broader patterns of international relations. Small states, middle-range powers, developing countries, Islamic states, and west European states all fall into this category. In this sense “comparative foreign policy” is often conducted along traditionalist lines and is not to be associated exclusively with the behavioral school referred to above.

The study of foreign policy has thus evolved over more than thirty years. Despite continuing differences over methodology and scope, it deals in essence with the content of policy on the one hand and the process of foreign policy making on the other. Most often, however, it focuses on the interactions between the two, starting from the premise that what is done will be partially determined by how it is done, and allowing for the possibility of human beings asserting their existential rights to choice, even in the most constricted circumstances. Moreover the environments in which action takes place are to be regarded as crucial but not given; the interplay of domestic and international factors is an endlessly varied and elastic process.

For the most part the contemporary analysis of foreign policy has been driven by a dispassionate desire to open up previously neglected questions. But the spirit of scientific inquiry should not be allowed to obscure the points of connection between the concerns of policy analysis with rationality and perception, and that long-standing normative approach which dwells on such subjects as the extent to which law or morality should affect diplomacy, and the tension between short-term and long-term considerations in foreign policy. Realism, with its black-boxing of the state and its reductionist emphasis on interests as the basis of foreign policy, cannot match foreign policy analysis in this respect as a meeting place for the empirical and philosophical aspects of states’ activities towards each other. Indeed, recent poststructuralist work on discourse and identity has tended to argue that no such distinction can be made; the very concept of “foreign” policy is constituted in its familiar way as the result of a dominant discourse which should be deconstructed so as to reveal its narrowing assumptions about both identity and values. Poststructuralists have revived theoretical interest in foreign policy by examining language and the various worldviews thereby revealed.

Yet the study of foreign policy still faces an important challenge for the future. For the very need to define foreign policy broadly enough so as to cater to a wider range of actions than those encompassed by traditional diplomacy, shows how it is becoming difficult to distinguish the aspects of public policy which are directed towards foreigners from those which are primarily in the domestic domain. The problems of migration and criminality which are high on the “new” agenda of post–Cold War international politics require, by definition, strategies which are both internally and externally directed. If such a distinction becomes increasingly unsustainable, the study of foreign policy will merge with that of comparative politics to form a new, broader focus on the politics and policies of states (or whatever systems for mobilizing decisions may replace states) within the complex web of global interdependence. The disappearance of foreign policy that this would represent, however, is still many decades into the future. Even then the concept would probably need reinventing under another name, given the inherent tendency of human collectivities to perceive inside as different from outside. Whenever foreign policy seems on the point of losing its contemporary relevance, it has the habit of bouncing back to the center of our concerns, whoever and wherever we are.

Bibliography
James N. Rosenau, The Scientific Study of Foreign Policy, 2d ed. (London, 1980).
Yaacov Y. I. Vertzberger, The World in Their Minds: Information Processing, Cognition and Perception in Foreign Policy Decision Making (Stanford, Calif., 1990).
Alexander George, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C., 1993).
David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, rev. ed. (Minneapolis, 1998).

Christopher Hill

Christopher Hill “Foreign Policy” The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World, 2e. Joel Krieger, ed. Oxford University Press Inc. 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

Pengertian Globalisasi (2)

Globalization: The process by which the world increasingly functions as a single community, rather than as many widely separated communities. The term is used particularly to refer to the increasing integration of the world’s national economies and the growth of multinational companies that bestride them. In this specific sense, globalization dates from the late 20th century and is largely a consequence of the increased speed and reduced cost of communications. Jet aircraft, introduced commercially in the 1950s, have made it possible for people and goods to be conveyed to the other side of the world in a single day; and 20th-century developments in telecommunications and broadcast media, notably the Information Revolution of the 1980s and 1990s, have not only provided instant worldwide information but also made possible the establishment of global bodies of data and systems to access them. These technological innovations have been accompanied by the growth of international agreements and regulatory bodies since World War II, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which sought to remove obstacles to international trade, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), which extended GATT’s role by regulating such matters as intellectual property rights. Many companies have benefited from these developments, which have enabled them to expand easily into overseas markets and to conduct their operations wherever in the world is most efficient and most profitable. However, these companies are almost exclusively based in the developed world, especially in the USA, and their increased power is seen in many quarters to benefit already rich countries at the expense of the developing world. A key issue is the removal of tariffs and other barriers to international trade: many countries, both developing and industrialized, argue that exposing their internal markets to unfettered foreign competition would undermine indigenous enterprises and damage their economies. Allied to this is a fear in some cases that the penetration of foreign products and mass media will corrode a country’s traditional culture. Many of these concerns are expressed in the form of anti-Americanism: the USA and US-based corporations are perceived to be the principal economic beneficiaries of globalization, and elements of US culture have penetrated almost every country in the world.

“globalization” A Dictionary of World History. Oxford University Press, 2000. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.