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Foreign policy Implementation: problems and approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Michael Clarke
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It is disturbing for a student of foreign policy to read Tolstoy. It is even more disturbing for anyone interested specifically in the implementation of foreign policy, for in several respects he said it all in War and Peace in a way that makes twenty-five years of theorising about foreign policy look ridiculous. Tolstoy is greatly interested in the execution of policy and his conclusions are not only distinctive but they attack some of the most basic assumptions on which foreign policy is based. For in his elaboration of a view of historical causation, he is concerned to examine the elusive forces which motivate events and to ridicule the notion that policy-makers shape history by making effective decisions. He demonstrates this most vividly in describing the business of war, where he adopts a tone of devastating sarcasm in his accounts of the generals, “who of all the blind instruments of history were the most enslaved and involuntary’. Thus, he states starkly:

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Type
Research Article
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Review of International Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , July 1979, pp. 112 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1979

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References

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page 112 note 2 Ibid, p. 1421.

page 112 note 3 Ibid, p. 1183.

page 112 note 4 Ibid, p. 1420.

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page 119 note 2 Hood, op. cit. pp. 123–7.

page 119 note 3 See for example, Northedge, op. cit. ch. 4; Reynolds, op. cit. pp. 115—22.

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page 125 note 2 Sunday Times, 2 June 1974, pp. 33—4.

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