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Foreign policy leadership and national integration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Philip G. Cerny
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Extract

National integration and the legitimation of authority

The study of foreign policy leadership is characterized by a number of conceptual and methodological problems for the researcher. It is located on the divide between the study of the individual and the idiosyncratic, on the one hand, and the structural and patterned on the other; it stands at the crossroads of the internal political system and the international arena; and it lends an aura of personalized comprehensibility to complex processes of change and development, integration and disintegration, in the multidimensional political, social and economic environment in which it is set. Its very choice of subject matter seems to assume that political actors, although working within specific systemic constraints, also possess opportunities to make and/or enforce choices under permissive conditions which allow a significant amount of conscious manipulation. Furthermore, such studies often take for granted that the nation-state is the most significant unit of analysis – in the sense that it is treated as given rather than as problematic. This essay attempts to chart a course through these complex waters by developing a set of interrelated hypotheses about a particular type of foreign policy leadership and the uses to which it is put – namely the legitimation of the authority of the state itself within what have been called “modern national culture societies”.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , April 1979 , pp. 59 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1979

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References

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Page 69 note 6. Ibid. p. 300.

Page 69 note 7. Ibid. p. 143.

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Page 70 note 2. Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics, op. cit. p. 19.

Page 70 note 3. Idem.

Page 70 note 4. Verba reminds readers of the significance of “salient crises” in this regard; op. cit. PP. 555 ff.

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Page 78 note 8. Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action, op. cit. p. 81, and The Symbolic Uses of Politics, op. cit. pp. 96–97.

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Page 80 note 3. Weber, ‘The Routinization of Charisma’, op. cit. p. 54.

Page 80 note 4. Ake, op. cit. p. 2.

Page 81 note 1. Apter, ‘Nkrumah, Charisma, and the Coup’, op. cit. p. 770. Conversely, if the leader has no new norms to impose, and if his charisma simply masks a petty and stupid tyranny, then any “normative exemption” may be followed by a period of normative collapse charac-terised by lack of value direction or authority along with widespread criminal activity on the part of the lower echelons of the army, the police, the bureaucracy, etc. This is the case in Idi Amin's Uganda. I am indebted to Professor AH Mazrui for this observation.

Page 82 note 1. Aron, op. cit. p. 49.

Page 82 note 2. Netti op. cit. p. 142

Page 83 note 1. Idem.

Page 83 note 2. Lasswell, op. cit. p. 35.

Page 83 note 3. Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics, op. cit. pp. 32—33.

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