Religious circuits tend to suggest that what a person believes is fundamentally determinative of how that person acts - perhaps even exclusively determinative at times. Policy folk like to burst this bubble - a bit uncharitably at times - when they talk about what is called the structure/agency problem (a problem which, btw, I have found no better answer for than Dooyeweerdian social philosophy). This begs the question: where are the sources of policy?
David Brooks argues that the new architecture of global politics isn't being developed by high minded theory. Some theoreticians, he writes
may still talk about Platonic concepts like realism and neoconservatism, but the actual foreign policy doctrine of the future will be hammered out in a bottom-up process as the US and its allies use their varied tools to build government capacity in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, the Philippines and beyond. Global strategies may imagine a new global architecture built at high-level summits, but the real global architecture of the future will emerge organically from these day-to-day nation-building operations.Ross Douthat paints a similar picture - I think - when he argues that foreign policy can't really be camped out theoretically, but is divided more in terms of personality. Thus we can think Jackson and Hamilton as "realists" perhaps, but different kinds expressing what may be congruent ideas through very different psychologies and processes. A neat little graph to sum up some of these ideas:
3 comments:
Adunare,
See Ross's reply today at his blog.
I pretty much agree with Ross' reply - in the sense that what Brooks writes may not be any more true than it was in the past. Prevailing theories of foreign policy would - in fact - need to be so naturalized that they are taken as givens for the system that Brooks describes to emerge. I do think that in many FP circuits that can be the case. The argument is therefore not so much against theory (as though I would make such an argument!) as for a balanced perception of how naturalized theory systems can still have very different outcomes in different sociological/psychological settings.
And I'm also stunned at the speed with which you noted both this blog entry, and Ross' own. Minutes apart. The glory of desk work.
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