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Foreign Policy and Interdependence in Gaullist France
By Edward L. Morse PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1973 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05209-0
CHAPTER 1
THE TRANSFORMATION OF FOREIGN POLICIES
The notion that modernization has a revolutionary effect on foreign policy is not new. Comte and Spencer, for example, among other optimistic observers of industrialization in the nineteenth century, argued that war was irrational as an instrument of policy in the relations among highly developed economies. Others, including Hobson and Lenin, surveyed industrialization and linked it to the "new imperialism" of the late nineteenth century. They contended that what they understood as modernization would lead inevitably to conflict rather than cooperation among the same types of societies. While experience belies the specific predictions of both groups, it has reinforced their fundamental premise that foreign policy has been radically transformed in societies that have become highly industrialized. The difficulties that these observers found in tracing out the effects of various phases of the modernization process on foreign policy are still puzzling. However, there is evidence that indicates that once societies have reached a phase of high mass consumption or high modernization they confront a set of problems in all phases of foreign policy whose similarity is marked.
The hypothesis that underlies this study is that most of the significant features of the foreign policies of relatively modernized societies are similar and can be derived from the characteristics of modernity. The immediate implication of this hypothesis is that the principal set of determinants of foreign policy can be thought of as relating to domestic social structure rather than to any of the other sets of variables that theorists have suggested. By and large, I have chosen to ignore these other clusters of variables because I feel that this one is compelling. The others are subsumed by those associated with either social structure in general or modernization in particular, or they can be invoked to explain variations from the model.
The argument of this chapter is divided into three parts. First, the general implications of high levels of modernization for foreign policy are outlined together with a definition of the universe of states whose foreign policies fit the model of analysis. The second section consists of an outline of the breakdown of the ideal distinctions between domestic and foreign affairs in Western thought. Finally, the transformations in foreign policy are elaborated with reference to its substantive dimensions, the processes associated with its formulation, and the instruments used to control its external and internal effects.
Modernization and Foreign Policy
The implications of modernization for foreign policy can be derived from many of the definitions of modernization that have been formulated. I have chosen to follow Levy's definition because of its power in isolating those societies in which I am interested. It is based on two variables: "the uses of inanimate sources of power and the use of tools to multiply the effect of effort." Each of these variables is conceived as a continuum, so that "a society will be considered more or less modernized to the extent that its members use inanimate sources of power and/or tools to multiply the effects of their efforts." Accordingly, "among the members of relatively modernized societies, uses of inanimate sources of power not only predominate, but they predominate in such a way that it is almost impossible to envisage any considerable departure in the direction of the uses of animate sources of power without the most far-reaching changes of the entire system. The multiplication of effort by application of tools is high and the rate is probably increasing exponentially."
Only a few such societies have existed in history, and they all reached high levels of modernization during the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Those for which the generalizations in this essay are germane include the fourteen societies identified by Russett and others as "high mass-consumption" societies. To these may be added some societies that are likely to become so characterized in the near future, and that are closely associated with these other societies via specialized international organizations. They are all modern democracies. There is no logical reason to assume, however, that the foreign policies of nondemocratic modernized societies would not also be subsumed by these generalizations.
The general characteristics of modernized societies include the growth of knowledge about and control over the physical environment; increased political centralization, accompanied by the growth of specialized bureaucratic organizations and by the politicization of the masses; the production of economic surpluses and wealth generalized over an entire population; urbanization; and the psychological adjustment to change and the fleeting rather than acceptance of the static and permanent.
It is obvious that each of these characteristics carries with it momentous implications for the ways foreign policies are conducted and controlled. For example, the intellectual revolution has expanded the spectrum of feasible goals that statesmen could hope to obtain in domestic or foreign affairs. Therefore it results in an emphasis on technological innovation in modern statecraft both for the purpose of achieving security and for the increased well-being of the members of society. The politicization of a large percentage of the population of modernized societies has infringed upon the reserved domain of state decision-makers in foreign policy and thereby restricted their freedom of action. The growth in political and economic instruments of control at the disposal of modern governments has similarly served to enhance as well as to restrict the decisional domain of governments in foreign and domestic affairs. Perhaps the most momentous product of modernization, however, has been the emergence of the nation-state framework as the most generalized form of political organization. The nation-state has provided the framework through which the physical and human environment has most generally been ordered and through which authority has been rationalized. A consequence of rationalization of authority, according to Huntington, is the "assertion of the external sovereignty of the nation-state against transnational influences and of the internal sovereignty of the national government against local and regional powers. It means national integration and the centralization or accumulation of power in recognized national law-making institutions."
The consolidation of the nation-state is also one of the central enigmas of contemporary politics, for modernization has been accompanied not only by increased national development but also by transnational structures that cannot be subjected to the control of national political bodies individually. The confrontation of the political structures developed along the lines of the nation-state with these revolutionary transnational activities is one of the most significant features of contemporary international politics. Modernization has resulted in the integration of individual societies under the political control of individual governments. These governments, however, have been confronted by problems that can be solved with decreasing reliability solely within the terms of the nation-state framework. In other words, modernization has transformed not only the domestic setting in which foreign policy is formulated; it has also transformed the general structures of international society by creating higher levels of interdependence among the diverse national societies, especially among the more highly modernized ones.
The revolution in modernization has also served to bring about new forms of diplomacy, especially those that lie on the predominantly cooperative end of the spectrum, including the development and transformation of international law and organization and the creation of various types of regional and global integration. These developments, however, are only part of a more fundamental set of phenomena whereby domestic and foreign policies have been merged. The creation of interdependencies among societies, linked by the transnational forces of modernization, has resulted in the externalization of domestic policies and the internalization of foreign policies. The two are linked not only by the general characteristics of interdependence, whereby predominantly domestic policies have recognizable external and domestic effects, but also by the creation of policy instrumentalities that are used for the attainment of both domestic and foreign goals.
There are, of course, many different paths that a society may follow in the development of levels associated with high mass consumption; each path and each step of the way have manifold implications for foreign policies. Likewise, there are many ways in which a state can deal with interdependence. Once high mass consumption levels and high interdependence are reached, however, several common features appear that can be discussed in general terms and that pertain to democratic as well as nondemocratic forms of political institutions. It is to these features as exemplified in French foreign policy that the argument in this chapter is addressed.
Foreign and Domestic Policies
A fundamental distinction between foreign and domestic policies seems to break down under modernization. This distinction is much more characteristic of the foreign policies of governments in the premodern age in both ideal and actual terms than it is of modernized states. In modernized societies, the distinction is difficult to maintain because predominantly political and nonpolitical interactions take place across societies at high levels and because transnational phenomena are so significant that territorial, political, and jurisdictional boundaries are extremely difficult to define. The whole constellation of activities associated with modernization blurs the distinction in such a way that an observer has to analyze carefully any interaction in order to ascertain how it pertains to foreign and domestic affairs.
Foreign policies can be analytically distinguished from domestic policies. Foreign policies are, at a minimum, manifestly oriented to some aspect or objective external to a political system, i.e., to some sphere outside the jurisdiction or control of the polity. Domestic policies, on the contrary, are oriented predominantly to some sphere within the jurisdiction and control of the polity. Foreign policies may be addressed principally to some domestic interest group, but as long as they carry some minimum intention and recognition of an external orientation, they are considered foreign policies.
Classical distinctions between foreign and domestic policies are normatively based and break down once societies become modernized. Two sorts of classical distinctions exist. One, which underlies the Rankean tradition of the primacy of foreign policy, stresses the special significance foreign policies carry that other policies do not. This significance is the concern of foreign policy with the existence and security of a society: "The position of a state in the world depends on the degree of independence it has attained. It is obliged, therefore, to organize all its internal resources for the purpose of self-preservation. This is the supreme law of the state."
The other emphasizes the primacy of domestic over foreign affairs. Unlike the Rankean tradition, associated originally with monarchic foreign policies and later with totalitarian ones, this tradition stresses the pacific nature of policy, its formulation by representative legislative groups, and the control of external events by open rather than closed-door diplomacy. In this sense, democracies were thought to suffer severe disabilities in the conduct of foreign affairs.
In either case, there is an assumption that there exists an essential divorce between foreign and domestic affairs that carries with it in political analysis normative tendencies to stress one of the two while ignoring the other. Foreign policy has been thought to differ from domestic policy in its ends (the national interest as opposed to particular interests), its means (any means that can be invoked to achieve the ends, as opposed to domestically legitimate means), and its target of operation (a decentralized, anarchic milieu over which the state in question maintains little control, as opposed to a centralized domestic order in which the state has a monopoly of the instruments of social order).
Whether the substance of the distinction stresses domestic or foreign affairs, the separation of the two has a strong empirical foundation. Levels of interdependence among all non-modernized societies were generally so low that governments could take independent actions in either domestic or foreign affairs with little likelihood that there would be much spillover between them. The instruments used to implement either domestic or foreign policies did not significantly alter policies in the other field.
This is not to say that domestic factors did not affect foreign policy at all, nor that the general international setting did not affect the substance of policies. What it does suggest is that the normative distinction between foreign and domestic activities was quite well matched by actual conditions. The degree to which the distinction did not coincide with reality led to debates about ways to improve the efficacy of separating foreign or domestic policies, or about their goals. But the extent of convergence was not so great as to call the distinction into question.
It was precisely this distinction between foreign and domestic affairs as implied by the principle of the primacy of foreign policy that was the key to the ideals of Gaullist foreign policy during the 1960s. The core of French foreign policy consisted in the pronounced contradiction between de Gaulle's desire to reassert French independence and the exigencies of interdependence and interpenetration characterizing France and the other societies of the West. A policy of independence, smacking of traditional diplomacy and the separation of both high and low policies and of foreign and domestic affairs, confronted the contradictory realities of the contemporary modernized world. In the long run, the development of the new diplomacy, the politics of modern democratic society, the adumbration of high policies, and the merging of foreign and domestic affairs also meant that de Gaulle's implementation of his concept of international relations would be aborted.
The similarities between the Rankean position on the state and the Gaullist position cannot be overdrawn. Emphasizing the primacy of foreign policy over domestic policies, de Gaulle's entire conception of France was one based on French international stature. The famous first paragraph of his Memoirsis concerned with French international position and the French example for humanity. The Constitution of the Fifth Republic, based on the principles outlined in the Bayeux speech of June 16, 1946, is one that was designed specifically with regard to foreign affairs. It was intended to prevent the recurrence of the situation that arose in June 1940 with the collapse of the Third Republic. The Constitution had to be one that recognized both the "rivalry of the parties in our country" and "the present state of the world" with its "opposed ideologies, behind which lurk the powerful states that surround us [and which] do not cease to inject in our own political struggle an element of passionate controversy." Given the anarchic state of the world, France, for de Gaulle, needed a primacy of foreign over domestic affairs.
If the primacy of foreign policy was required by the state of international anarchy, it was also prescribed in de Gaulle's view by the requisites of greatness. The telos of France, as de Gaulle understood it, could be realized only if France were in the front-rank of states. Without the material resources for achieving first-rank status, de Gaulle felt that France could achieve stature only by being a mediator between any two concentric circles of conflict. Thus, de Gaulle's designs for the role of France consisted of a series of diplomatic triads, each of which centered on France. French political analyst Hassner has said:
In her anti-American undertaking, France was conceived to be in competition with the United States in serving as the interlocutor of Germany and of Russia. In her conception of a desirable international balance, she wished to serve as intermediary and arbitrator between Russia and Germany in Europe and between Russia and the United States in the world.
And the position of arbitrator required complete independence and freedom of movement.
Thus, independence was necessary for the fulfillment of France's role. At the same time, the goal of independence was supported by the Gaullist tactics of surprise, the use of negative policies to deny other states the achievement of their goals, the manipulation of illusions that appeared to enhance French power, the articulation of ambitious policies, the fostering of nationalism, and the consummate use of ambiguity that permitted flexibility both at home and abroad.
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Excerpted from Foreign Policy and Interdependence in Gaullist France by Edward L. Morse. Copyright © 1973 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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