Domestic contestation over foreign policy,role-based and otherwise: Three cautionary cases

Abstract

Foreign policy role theorists have recently placed domestic role contestation central to their accounts of foreign policy continuity and change. Yet, contestation over national role conceptions is only one aspect of domestic competition over political power that can impact the roles states play in world politics. Frequently, foreign policies are an outgrowth of political struggle over matters only indirectly related to a state’s international role. In this article, I draw role theorists’ attention to cases where non-role-based political competition affects role performance, urging them to trace empirically the connections between role contestation, non-role-based political competition with role implications, and role performance. To make this case, I develop three plausibility probes: America’s embrace of the hegemon role after 1945, Britain’s 2016 Brexit vote, and the United States’ recent turn towards a more transactional foreign policy. Highlighting non-role political competition with role implications offers a productive challenge that promises to enrich role theory in foreign policy analysis (FPA) by bringing it a step closer to domestic political competition.

Keywords

Brexit domestic role contestation role theory US foreign policy

Introduction

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of role theory in foreign policy analysis (FPA) (Below, 2016; Harnisch et al., 2011; Malici and Walker, 2016; Walker, 2014; Wehner, 2018; Wehner and Thies, 2014). One of the most vibrant areas of research centres on the domestic determinants of the roles states play in international politics. As Juliet Kaarbo (2015), Christian Cantir (Cantir and Kaarbo, 2016a), and others have shown, connecting international factors to domestic-level political dynamics is perhaps the main value-added of FPA within the universe of international relations (IR) theories. While IR scholars often treat the domestic sporadically, if at all, FPA focuses directly on inputs like leader personality, bureaucratic pathologies, and group psychology. Addressing role theory’s contribution to FPA’s understanding of the domestic factors in foreign policy-making is consequently a vital, ongoing, task.

This article contributes to that task by pushing forward foreign policy role theory’s attempts to connect domestic contestation with foreign policy role-playing. Theorizing domestic contestation over national role conceptions (NRCs) is central to research in foreign policy role theory at the current time (Cantir and Kaarbo, 2016). IR scholars – including foreign policy role theorists – have too frequently assumed consensus inside states on the role states should play on the global stage, when often – perhaps most of the time – no such consensus exists, or is fleeting at best. As Cantir and Kaarbo show, role contestation – or ‘the social process among individuals, groups, and organizations within states and societies regarding the selection of a role among the menu of available choices’ (Walker et al., 2016: 123) – is, therefore, an under-analysed part of foreign policy-making. Disagreement over role conceptions occurs ‘vertically’ – between elites and masses – and/or ‘horizontally’ – between elite groups (Cantir and Kaarbo, 2016: 1–22). Rarely is contestation absent.

This article therefore departs from the assumption that contestation, not consensus, should be the starting assumption for foreign policy role theorists. However, the article addresses something of a conceptual blind spot in the recent literature on domestic role contestation: the relationship between contestation over NRCs and political contestation more broadly. By ‘contestation’, I mean the full range of practices of political dispute: from narrow disagreement over particular policies, decisions, and legislative acts, to disagreements over the norms and ideologies underpinning them (see Weiner, 2014). Also included are the quotidian acts that constitute the cut and thrust of political struggle through which politicians, parties, and interest groups jostle over political terrain, including, crucially, control over the decision-making authority of the state. A broader view of contestation, not limited to disagreement over role conceptions, highlights how often-important foreign policy decisions flow from contestation not in the first instance over NRCs.

The Marshall Plan, for example, followed a rapid turnaround in US foreign policy after 1945, from demobilization and the resumption of a more detached international role, to a potentially open-ended commitment to ‘free peoples everywhere’ – in the words of the Truman Doctrine (1947)¹. From a role theory perspective, the Marshall Plan was a signal policy in America’s assumption of the hegemon role, and followed from a domestic struggle between internationalists and isolationists, in face of the Soviet threat. Absent from this putative account,² however, are the non-role-based domestic political struggles that underpinned the Plan’s formation. The Plan was a contingent outcome of intra- and inter-party contestation ranging across international and domestic policy – from foreign aid to labour relations and the relaxation of wartime economic controls. Specifically, concerns with the activities of militant labour during the massive 1946 strike wave became interlinked with support for Truman and his hardening policy towards the Soviet Union. Struggles over the liberal state were therefore central rather than peripheral to the adoption of American hegemony after 1945 (Bell, 2004). The Marshall Plan case is thus one in which domestic political contestation had important implications for foreign policy and role performance, but was not the direct product of foreign policy role contestation.

This article consequently lays out the challenge to foreign policy role theory of the often non-role-based contestation that impacts role selection and performance in world politics and suggests a possible way forward. I argue that foreign policy role theorists should carefully distinguish between role contestation, non-role-based political competition with role implications, and role performance. In the case of the Marshall Plan, to illustrate, domestic contestation was predominantly vertical – that is, between elites, especially the major political parties – and largely non-role based, centred more on the reconversion of the wartime state than clear visions of America’s post-war role. Nonetheless, domestic positions had implications for the role America could and should play in post-War world politics: between hegemon, unwilling to grant the Soviet Union a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe; great power, willing to countenance such a division of Europe; and isolationist, supported by some Republicans in Congress. Debates over specific foreign policies, here over European reconstruction, were refracted through domestic non-role-based political competition with important role implications.

Far from weakening foreign policy role theory, highlighting non-role-based contestation with implications for role selection promises to enrich the approach by bringing it closer to the domestic determinants of state action. While likely complicating the analytical narratives foreign policy role theorists offer, doing so will clarify the relationship between contestation and foreign policy outcomes. Three specific improvements can be noted: first, a more variegated understanding of domestic political contestation; second, a greater sensitivity to the nature and effects of power in domestic struggles – an oft-noted weakness of FPA and role theory; and third, a relatedly, a finer grained understanding of causality and causal processes in role performance and foreign policy-making. The result, in sum, is more accurate, if more complex historical and contemporary accounts of foreign policy selection, which – as foreign policy analysts and IR theorists – remains the central purpose of foreign policy role theory.

The article focuses on the challenge of non-role-based contestation to foreign policy role theory, but the challenge extends to FPA more broadly. FPA typically assumes contestation over foreign policy in its explanations of foreign policy-making. The gap this article identifies in the role-theory literature therefore reflects a broader gap in the FPA field. Due to space constraints, I limit the discussion to role theory specifically.

After revisiting the basic tenets of role theory, and its understanding of domestic contestation as contestation over NRCs, I delve into three cautious plausibility probes, which suggest that role performance is also deeply affected by non-role-based domestic political struggle. I then distinguish between role contestation, non-role-based political competition with role implications, and role performance, revisiting the three case studies to illustrate the usefulness of the distinction, and outlining five further conceptual implications. In conclusion, I point towards a research agenda on domestic contestation – role based and otherwise – beyond the Western, democratic, cases investigated here.

Role theory and domestic contestation

This article adds to calls from role theorists like Juliet Kaarbo and Christian Cantir (2017) for a renewed effort to address shortcomings in the approach. As they and others have shown, role theory has blazed a trail in FPA, but it has also left behind many of FPA’s insights by focusing squarely on national roles. My call goes beyond the need to take fully into account domestic contestation over foreign policy, however, to address domestic contestation not directly over foreign policy roles. I first reprise the persistent disconnect between FPA and role theory before addressing the challenge of integrating role theory with non-role domestic sources of foreign policy. The challenge is significant, but far from insurmountable, and the effort should result in more accurate accounts of foreign policy formulation.

One step back, two steps forward?

Role theory found its most fertile IR ground within FPA, yet the literature on NRCs ‘has developed largely without much interaction with other research in foreign policy analysis’ (Cantir and Kaarbo, 2012: 6). As a result, the strengths of FPA are, ‘at best, overlooked . . . and, at worst, what we know about how domestic politics influences foreign policy is inconsistent with assumptions in much of the role theory literature’ (Cantir and Kaarbo, 2012: 6).

This is a serious omission. FPA has been a crucial repository for grounded theorizing, in contrast to the macro-level preoccupations of IR. Early path-breaking work includes insights on ‘groupthink’ (Janis, 1972), bureaucratic politics (Allison, 1971), the lessons of history (Khong, 1992), and leader personality traits (Dyson, 2009). These insights are of perennial value, and unsurprisingly re-emerge periodically (e.g. Yarhi-Milo, 2018). The downplaying of domestic politics by scholars of NRCs has the consequence of cutting off role theory from the broader FPA community, with the attendant risks of reinventing the wheel.

Curiously, Cantir and Kaarbo (2012: 10) note, ‘Few NRC scholars have recognized that there could be some disagreement about roles in a country’, when for FPA scholars ‘this is precisely what they would expect’. Ignoring FPA’s insights means black boxing the state, which FPA is predicated upon prying open. As Klaus Brummer and Cameron Thies (2015: 273) lament, ‘One of the shortcomings of foreign policy role theory is its tendency to black-box the state’.

Kaarbo and others thus counter role theory’s black-boxing tendency by emphasizing the importance of domestic contestation in the shape of coalition governments (1996, 2012, Kaarbo and Beasley, 2008) and bureaucratic minorities (1998). In so doing, Kaarbo (1996: 503) draws attention to contexts often ignored in Anglophone literatures, where parliamentary foreign policy-making looks different from prominent cases like the United States, China, Russia, and the United Kingdom. In a study of junior coalition partners in foreign policy-making in Germany and Israel, to illustrate, Kaarbo (1996: 523) shows that under certain circumstances, weaker coalition members can successfully hijack the foreign policy-making process. When junior partners have public opinion on their side, control key ministers at cabinet level, and seek influence over an issue of high salience, they can frequently achieve their policy goals, despite their minority status.

Cantir and Kaarbo (2012: 6) are careful to note that insights from FPA will not always be fruitful for scholars of NRCs. ‘There may be many cases’, they note, ‘in which scholars will discover that NRCs are not, in fact, contested by either elites or by masses’. In such cases, the analyst can proceed by focusing on how NRCs limit or enable foreign policy action, without the impact of domestic-level disagreement. Moreover, ‘not all policy disagreements invoke contested roles. Whether a state should increase its defence budget, for example, may not have any bearing on its role as a strong ally’ (Cantir and Kaarbo, 2016: 19).

There may also be good reasons to foreground agreement over roles related to research design, among them analytical parsimony and narrative clarity. One benefit of bracketing domestic contestation over roles, in other words, is precisely the attempt to maintain a degree of coherence to the stories role theorists tell, especially when competing with realist-inspired accounts. The barriers in the way of knitting together every aspect of domestic contestation and role expectations ‘are partly practical – an eye to detailed domestic processes and external involvement can create an unwieldy narrative’ (Cantir and Kaarbo, 2012: 8). In such circumstances, it may be better to set aside differences among elites over NRCs. In the case of British foreign policy since 1945, for instance, I have set out a plausible account of the United Kingdom’s maintenance of a residual great power role that does not venture into inter-elite disagreement (McCourt, 2014).

However, ‘Aside from the focus on elites, NRC scholars often underplay or ignore the contestation of roles within the elite group’ (Cantir and Kaarbo, 2012: 9). What is left out of role theory is ‘the elite-masses nexus’ and the ‘identity of the elite member who made a certain statement which was later used to code a particular national role conception’ (Cantir and Kaarbo, 2012: 8, 7). Absent well-defended analytical decisions, role theorists should not ignore role contestation: ‘[T]he analysis of role contestation is inherently valuable because it will either provide evidence for the assumption of role consensus or reveal contestation. In either case, the role theory literature will be stronger from a theoretical and empirical standpoint than it is now (Cantir and Kaarbo, 2012: 10)

Contestation, role based and otherwise

FPA scholars have already done important work in bringing domestic contestation in to foreign policy role theory (e.g. Hagan, 2016). In addition to Cantir and Kaarbo’s (2012: 11–12) distinction of horizontal (inter-elite) and vertical (elite-mass) domestic role contestation, Brummer and Thies (2015: 278–280) advocate for a focus on government-opposition contestation and government-legislative relations, outlining a series of propositions for testing when and how domestic politics impacts role selection. Their propositions are worth outlining in full.

Brummer and Thies hypothesize that (1) opposition parties will attempt to substitute or modify a government enunciated NRC to make it more in line with their own; (2) coalition governments experience internal contestation over NRCs based on preexisting party ideology, which delays, if not renders impossible, the adoption of an NRC by the government; (3) due to diverging bureaucratic interests of individual cabinet members, governments experience intragovernmental conflict when selecting NRCs; (4) driven by the desire to see their preferences realized, individual cabinet members try to impose ‘their’ NRC on the government as a whole; (5) to lessen or remove the strain that results from internal NRC conflict, governments attempt to resolve such conflicts through instrumental or ritual acts, attention deployment, or changes in beliefs; (6) governments may be unable, or powerful actors within the government may be unwilling, to resolve internal NRC conflicts.

These propositions form a powerful set of hypotheses and foreshadow the line of critique developed here, namely that foreign policy role theory tends to reduce the complexity of domestic political contestation and limit the plurality of actors involved – which they show includes governments and cabinets, parties, and political cliques. Yet, like much work in foreign policy role theory, domestic contestation in Brummer and Thies’ propositions – as in most work on domestic contestation in role theory – appears primarily as contestation over NRCs. Governments and oppositions, and a variety of elite groups, struggle to ‘see their preferences [over roles] realized’. What remains missing here is the relationship of role-based domestic contestation to political contestation writ large, that is, domestic contestation with important implications for role selection and performance, but which is not in the first instance over role selection.

In the next section, I discuss three cases in which significant foreign policy change was instigated by contestation over political power that is primarily domestic focused. In the spirit of constructively challenging role theory in FPA, I ask, how can foreign policy role theorists address the often-complex mix of role-based and non-role-based dynamics of domestic contestation?

Three cautionary cases

With the following illustrations, I suggest that the next step in the reintegration of FPA and role theory should be an attempt to include and disaggregate the impact on foreign policy of non-role based. The selection of cases is pragmatic. Each is drawn from larger research projects, where the difficulties associated with adopting role-theoretic concepts without addressing non-role-based competition has emerged.

Methodologically, the following are ‘plausibility probes’ (Welch, 2005) rather than full-fledged empirical analyses. In the absence of existing role-theoretic analyses of these cases, I have endeavoured to avoid creating ‘straw-men’ to knock down by developing the most faithful role-based account of each case possible. I have drawn primarily on an exhaustive survey of secondary literature by historians and political scientists, together with media materials in the two contemporary cases.

American hegemony and the Marshall Plan

Officially known as the European Recovery Program (ERP), the Marshall Plan came into effect in April 1948 and disbursed US$12 billion – primarily to Western Europe – before it ended in 1952 (Hogan, 1987; Steil, 2018). Alongside the Brussels Pact and later North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the ERP, and the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) created to organize European countries to receive aid, became central pillars of the architecture of post-war American hegemony. From a role theory perspective, the Plan was the result of a process of intense role contestation.

With troops stationed across the world, US leaders faced the problem of defining America’s new global role. Internationalists, Democrats, and Republicans faced opposition from conservative isolationists and Leftist Democrats who sought a return to normalcy after the rigours of wartime and baulked at the ERP’s costs. As state department speech writer Joseph Jones (1965: 90) later remembered, in the post-war months,

The all-absorbing question of the day was not whether the President would or could lead the United States to accept heavy world responsibilities, but how far the new Congress would roll back New Deal legislation, cut appropriations for the armed services and foreign relief, and carry on back to the political isolation of the 1920s and the economic isolation of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.

Other states also cast the United States into the hegemon role by looking to Washington for leadership (Westad, 2017). US foreign policy decisions were, therefore, made against the background of strong role prescriptions.

However, the Marshall Plan was the result of a contestation process in American domestic politics not easily conceptualized in the vocabulary of role theory. Why, for example, did American’s embrace of the hegemon role take the form of an economic aid package, rather than, say, the military-security organizations created after 1950? Here, the specific nature of the internationalism shared by the Truman administration and his Congressional supporters, namely Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg, becomes relevant. To understand the unique nature of the Plan they forged and stewarded through a conservative Congress, it is crucial to address fully the non-role-based contestation that gave rise to the Marshall Plan.

The Marshall Plan was forged in an intense political struggle after War’s end that spanned the ideological spectrum. At stake was the legacy of the New Deal – its spirit of government engagement in society and the economy, and its concrete organizational forms, including the Office of Price Administration. While foreign policy leaders addressed matters of German reconstruction, economic strife across Western Europe and the attendant rise of Leftist parties, day-to-day domestic politics was dominated by mundane matters like the price of meat, and the effects of the largest strike wave in American history in 1946 (Bernstein, 1966). As is often the case, electoral competition took place at a pace discordant with that of diplomacy. The mid-term elections of November 1946 handed the Democrats a crushing defeat, with two years before the 1948 presidential election to overturn deep public antipathy towards Truman’s presidency.

In the context of this political contestation, the term ‘anti-communism’ came to mean two things simultaneously: the growing geopolitical problem of the Soviet Union and the activities of domestic American labour groups. The issue of what the Democrats could do in relation to communism in both guises, domestic and foreign, increasingly split the Party during the tumultuous mid-term election year of 1946 (Bell, 2004). The split rent the progressive followers of New Dealer Henry Wallace from the increasingly anti-communist Truman (Hamby, 1973). The Wallaceites wanted a continuation of the New Deal domestically, cooperation with the Soviet Union, and for Truman to adopt labour-friendly policies and to resist Republican rhetoric about communism’s ‘un-Americanness’.

Truman was not rapidly anti-Soviet, nor did he believe that communism was a major domestic threat. But Truman and his government found themselves in the middle of the Wallaceites and the more conservative Republicans, which won the 1946 mid-terms, taking control of Congress, based on tough anti-communism messaging. The Marshall Plan became a solution to a complex set of foreign policy problems related to aid for European reconstruction. To get money from conservatives in Congress, Truman had to develop a large plan that saw the problems of Europe as inter-related and requiring a collective solution – preferably targeted to unifying the European market. But to get anything passed Truman had to, in Dean Acheson’s words, ‘scare the hell out of the country’ using anti-communist rhetoric. This was made possible finally by the emergence of a cross-party alliance forged between the Truman government and internationalist Republicans, notably Vandenberg and John Foster Dulles.

Again, political contestation had brought about by 1948 the adoption of a new foreign policy role for America. However, it had done so via a process that was not in the first instance one of foreign policy role contestation. The Marshall Plan thus poses a challenge to foreign policy role theory.

Losing or finding a role? Brexit and UK foreign policy

The second case of non-role-based domestic contestation with far-reaching implications for foreign policy is the 2016 referendum result in the United Kingdom. In the now-notorious ‘Brexit’ vote, the British electorate chose to leave the European Union. As Kai Oppermann et al. (2019: 2) explain, ‘the 2016 British referendum decision to leave the European Union (EU) represents a major rupture in Britain’s international position’. The centrality of EU membership to Britain’s role in the world has been the subject of bipartisan consensus among British elites since the Labour Government of Harold Wilson launched in the mid-1960s a second bid to join the then-European Economic Communities – the first having failed in 1962 at the hands of French President Charles de Gaulle (Parr, 2006.) The Brexit decision is thus momentous in British foreign policy: overturning five decades of elite consensus (McCourt, 2014). As Oppermann et al. go on (2019: 2), Brexit will ‘remove a central pillar of British foreign policy and lead to a fundamental change in Britain’s international role’.

Scholars of foreign policy have drawn explicitly and implicitly on concepts from role theory to assess how British elites might go about responding to this unmooring from Europe. While some commentators, scholarly and popular, have focused on the newfound freedom and control Brexit would provide (Owen and Ludlow, 2017), the notion that Britain can make its own ‘Global Britain’ role in the world – touted explicitly by ex-Prime Minister Theresa May – has come under scrutiny (see Glencross and McCourt, 2018). As a range of scholars have noted, serious practical challenges arise in strategizing Britain’s new non-EU-based role in the world (Adler-Nissen et al., 2017; Dee and Smith, 2017; Niblett, 2015; Oliver, 2016; Whitman, 2016).

Yet this work focuses almost exclusively on what happens after Brexit. The causes of Brexit are by and large left unaccounted for. To be sure, there were aspects of the lead-up to Brexit where foreign policy role dynamics intervened. Important Others, for example, tried to ‘alter-cast’ Britain into a great power role by cautioning against leaving. Most notably, American President Barack Obama made it plain that America saw Britain’s proper role in the world as inside the EU, stating in April 2016 that ‘the European Union doesn’t moderate British influence – it magnifies it’ (New York Times, 2016). British politicians also at various points suggested Britain would lose influence globally in the event of a vote to leave. Role expectations are, in sum, an important part of the story of how the Brexit vote unfolded.

However, Brexit was not in the main about foreign policy. As Andrew Glencross (2016: 2) explains, Cameron agreed to relatively muted and unpopular calls for a referendum ‘to improve his chances at the ballot box and to reconcile factions within his party’. With the rise of rightist alternatives to the Conservatives, in particular the UK Independence Party – under the charismatic leadership of Nigel Farage – Cameron faced a competitor for the votes of Middle England (see Goodwin, 2015; Hayton, 2016). As in the previous case, the Marshall Plan, intra-party dynamics were at least if not more important as cross-party contestation when it comes to Brexit.

Brexit was Prime Minister David Cameron’s ‘great miscalculation’ (Glencross, 2016). Cameron believed he could win the referendum, underestimating the general political dissatisfaction of much of the British electorate, including loss of confidence in elites and experts, and widespread anti-immigrant feeling, unveiled as a vague dislike of anything non-British. Cameron also underestimated the skill of pro-Brexit campaigners in channelling such dissatisfaction, in a new media landscape.

Brexit was not, in short, a referendum on Britain’s role or roles in world politics. The Leave campaign was triumphant in the Brexit vote by playing on domestic issues and using the EU as a symbol of myriad – often contradictory or inaccurate – concerns, such as economic inequality and immigration. While Brexit will have profound and long-lasting implications for British foreign policy, a straightforward application of role theory to domestic contestation over Britain’s EU membership would result in a partial even inaccurate account.

US hegemony and the rise of China

A final example of non-role-based domestic contestation with important consequences for foreign policy is the recent move by the Trump administration to a more confrontational posture for America on the international stage. In the economic and cultural spheres, Trump has initiated a transactional approach, sceptical of multilateral trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and international bodies such as the United Nations (Drezner, 2019). In the military-security sphere, the administration is in the process of shifting priorities away from the terrorism, humanitarian intervention, and unconventional warfare focus of the post-Cold War era and towards great power competition (New York Times, 2019). In both areas, the chief policy manifestation is confrontation with China – from the trade war launched in 2018 to the ongoing strategic realignment strategy towards the Indo-Pacific (Department of Defense, 2019).

Once again, much of the Trump administration’s policy changes are explicable in terms of domestic role contestation as it currently stands. A putative role-theoretic explanation for developments under Trump would focus on elite differences over how to play the hegemon role. The Trump administration’s decision to confront China in the hopes of securing a trade deal, for example, fulfils the pre-campaign desires of a particular network within the Trump White House, centering on Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro, director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. Lighthizer and Navarro have been supported in a tough approach towards China by people in the Department of Defense and the National Security Council, like NSC Asia director Matthew Pottinger. Opposition to the potentially open-ended trade war has been voiced from Stephen Minchin at the Treasury Department, concerned over the impact of uncertainty on global markets (see Davis and Wei, 2020). Notably, and as in the other two cases discussed, there has been more contestation over US foreign policy towards China within the Republican Party – intra-party contestation – than between Republicans and Democrats.

While plausible, an account focused on elite contestation would likely miss many of the most signal features of American foreign policy under Trump. To recall Cantir and Kaarbo’s concerns over the disconnect between role theory and FPA, Trump’s unique personality and foreign policy style would have to be central to any accurate account of the changes brought in to the conduct of American international relations following his entering office. As Daniel Drezner (2019: 7) notes, ‘This is a president whose foreign policy is defined by ‘maximum pressure’ campaigns’, an understanding of how to conduct foreign relations transferred from his time in business. Bureaucratic contestation over security and defence priorities also clearly lies behind the newfound prominence of great power rivalry. Previously de-prioritized branches of the military – notably the Navy and Air Force – are asserting their institutional preferences after three decades of army and Central Command (CENTCOM)-centric defence posture.

However, even a broader role contestation approach, one fully utilizing the insights of FPA, would likely miss the non-role-based political competition without which the change in US foreign policy under Trump is incomprehensible. As in the previous two cases, Trump’s foreign policy is not conducted in isolation from domestic political dynamics. Two signal features illustrate the point.

First, Trump’s foreign policy is bound up with the intense polarization that characterizes contemporary American politics (Schultz, 2017). In such a polarized context, the conduct of foreign policy is as much about distinguishing decisions from the positions of the previous administration – and a hypothetical Hillary Clinton White House – as it is a struggle over clearly defined understandings of hegemon role expectations. Most tellingly, the identification of China as a great power challenger is noteworthy given the clearer challenge posed by Russia. Both China and Russia are identified in the December 2017 National Security Strategy (N.S.S. 2017) as great power rivals to America. However, as in the case of the Marshall Plan, Russia means something quite different within US politics to different constituencies: a meddler in the 2016 election and geopolitical menace for some; for others, a distraction conjured up by Democrats in their attempts to frustrate Trump’s presidency.

Second, Trump’s foreign policy – indeed his election itself – is part of a broader populist rejection of establishment politicians and experts, with their long-standing modes of governance. In the case of China policy, for example, a more confrontational policy contrasts explicitly with four decades of ‘Engagement’ with Beijing, a policy aimed at integrating China into the American-led global order (Campbell and Ratner, 2018). Although Engagement enjoyed widespread and broadly bipartisan support among America’s China hands, and the inevitability of some degree with engagement between the two largest global powers over matters of shared concern, Engagement is rejected as the policy of the foreign policy Establishment. The replacement of Engagement with confrontation, therefore, is less the outcome of contestation over how to play the hegemon role than a rejection of prior accepted policies of whatever variety.

Conceptual, theoretical, and methodological implications

In each of these cautionary cases, intense domestic contestation had serious consequences for foreign policy. One conclusion might be, therefore, that foreign policy role theory – and perhaps even FPA itself – is inapplicable to a subset of historical events, like the above. Yet in each of these three cases, foreign policy roles were very much involved; even when not the main issue contested, roles were implicated strongly. Foreign policy role theory should, therefore, have something big and important to say about them. More problematically, perhaps, to echo Cantir and Kaarbo, to keep accounts of foreign policy centred on role-based and non-role-based contestation separate might lead foreign policy role theorists to revert to a pure application of role theory, setting aside the broader insights of FPA, even if inappropriate.

Rather than ignore it, consequently, role theorists should address head-on the challenge of non-role-based domestic contestation. They should acknowledge that domestic contestation over NRCs does not exhaust political contestation when it comes to foreign policy. Contestation over roles is likely to be a subset, or feature, of political competition as a broader phenomenon. Foreign policy role theorists should pose at the outset of research design the extent and nature of domestic contestation’s impact on foreign policy-making. Six further implications – conceptual, theoretical, and methodological – point the way towards a fuller integration of role- and non-role-based domestic contestation and the making of foreign policy.

First, role theorists should carefully distinguish between role contestation, non-role-based political competition with role implications, and role performance. The importance of fine-grained distinctions is inherent to role theory, going back to Kal Holsti’s (1970) foundational distinctions between role conceptions – international understandings of a state’s role – and external role prescriptions (see Thies and Breuning, 2012). But adhering to them can often be difficult when it comes to messy empirical cases. Nevertheless, the distinction made here is vital in that domestic role contestation – horizontal and/or vertical – may be a feature of domestic political competition, but equally, it might be only one aspect. Moreover, role-based and non-role-based domestic contestation should not be equated with role performance, the matching of policy with role expectations.

In the case of the Marshall Plan, to illustrate, America performed the role of hegemon by offering public goods provision and creating legitimate dominance over the states across Western Europe – and beyond – receiving economic assistance. Such a role conception was explicitly supported by some in the Truman administration, who hoped to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 1930s, when the United States had retreated to an isolationist role rather than adopt the hegemonic role only it could afford to play (see Jones, 1965). Yet, the actual domestic contestation that led to Marshall Aid was primarily non-role-based with role implications. The Marshall Plan was not in the first instance a function of role contestation between hegemonists and isolationists. Rather, aid to Europe was supported by anti-communist internationalists in both major parties because of what communism meant domestically – that is, militant labour. With the 80th Congress deeply divided on domestic issues, a contingent bipartisan alliance between internationalists Republicans and Democrats joined forces to put together a far-reaching aid package to Western Europe.

A second implication of the foregoing is that role theorists should consider whether role selection and role performance are intended consequences of role contestation or unintended consequences of non-role domestic competition. America’s role selection after 1945 was in many ways an unintended consequence of how Truman and his supporters found common cause with internationalist Republicans over a specific approach to the connected problems of communism internally and externally, namely massive foreign aid couched as necessary to stave off a vaguely defined communism. Whereas hindsight suggests US policy-makers were united on hegemon as the rightful role for America to play in world politics after 1945, only a fraction of the elite – and few among the war-weary general public – supported such a role.

Future role-theoretic analyses of Brexit and Trump’s America First Foreign policy might conclude something similar. In the short time since Brexit, there have been few indicators policy-makers conceive of the United Kingdom’s role in the world as something other than the ‘Global Britain’ promoted by former Prime Minister Theresa May (Glencross and McCourt, 2018). But performing such a role might be impossible unless conferred by important others like America, China, and the remaining EU states, which after Brexit, their leaders may be unwilling to do. The same might be said for America’s occupation of the role of hegemon or global leader (see Reich and Lebow, 2014). In each case, considering the importance of unintended consequences suggests a connection to the rich literature on the unintended outcomes of purposive social action beyond IR and FPA (Merton, 1936).

Third, political contestation over foreign policy might be conceptualized as lying on an ideal-typical continuum: from pure role contestation at one end, to political contestation with implications for foreign policy but which is not role based, at the other. Foreign policy role theorists should, therefore, ask where the case at hand lies – recognizing the ideal-typical nature of the question. Such a yardstick would help scholars defend analytical choices over the extent to which contestation over role selection accurately characterizes role change in given empirical instances. From the cases above, Brexit would seem to lie particularly close to the non-role-based end of the spectrum, meaning analyses resting on role contestation are especially in appropriate. By contrast, Trump’s America First foreign policy would seem to rest further towards role contestation, justifying an analysis resting on a careful heuristic deployment of role contestation and downplaying non-role-based political competition.

A fourth, theoretical, argument about the micro-foundations of role theory follows from the claims made here. Foreign policy role theory, especially the symbolic interactionist variant (McCourt, 2014), tends to assume that all social life is role based. It begins from the assumption that stable role expectations exist, and that the analytical task is one of identifying them and any contests over what policies and actions follow – role location and role contestation. Yet sometimes, stable roles do not exist in social life, and the same goes for international life too. As sociologist Eric Leifer (1988: 873) has shown, in such pre-role interactions, local action – or ‘the avoidance of action that would be interpreted as a claim to a giver or taker role’ – becomes salient. In local action, ego and alter specifically distance themselves from general roles until it is clear that such roles are likely to be conferred by the other. The Marshall Plan case in particular suggests the purchase to be gained by role theorists in relaxing the assumption that all social life is role based, especially when domestic and international conditions are in flux.

A fifth theoretical argument follows from the above, and places power and struggles over political control at the heart of foreign policy-making. At present, power tends to be downplayed in role-theoretic analyses, appearing only in the form of asymmetric role relationships – leader/follower, dominant ally/subservient ally, for example – and assumed in the form of political power of elite foreign policy-makers. Competition over political power and role performance are, consequently, portrayed as separate phenomena. By contrast, from the perspective developed here, domestic contestation – role based and non-role based – is seen as quintessentially power-laden.

Sixth, and finally, the approach developed here suggests the need to pay careful attention to causality as it relates to domestic contestation and the emergence and performance of foreign policy roles. The foregoing has highlighted, in particular, the insufficiency of assuming that domestic contestation over roles is always the sole or primary causal process in play. In each of the three cases, for example, inter-party factional competition was a key causal process: divisions between the liberals and the progressives drove the former towards an anti-community foreign policy in the case of the Marshall Plan; the UK Conservatives were rent between pro- and anti-EU factions prior to the 2016 referendum; and Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party has successfully silenced liberal internationalist Republicans. Practically speaking, role theorists are already well equipped to extend their analyses of causal processes to non-role-based contestation, and should deploy tried and tested techniques such as process tracing (see Bennett and Checkel, 2015) and narrative analysis (Wehner, 2018; Wehner and Thies, 2014) to uncover causal connections between role contestation, non-role-based political competition with role implications, and role performance.

Conclusion

Previous waves of interest in foreign policy roles waned after a period. By contrast, the new upsurge of interest in role theory shows no sign of abating (Opperman et al., 2019). Particularly influential in the United Kingdom and Europe (Aggestam, 2006; Beneš and Harnisch, 2014; Gaskarth, 2014; McCourt and Glencross, 2019; Strong, 2019), the existence a critical mass of senior and junior role theory scholars in the sub-field suggests foreign policy role theory is here to stay. At this stage, however, Cantir and Kaarbo note, role theory is less a theory than ‘a conceptual frame for social, structural, interactional, or behavioral analyses, from which explanatory theories may develop’ (2016b: 19, citing Stryker, 1999: 486).

In that spirit, this article has sought to push forward the approach by highlighting problematic instances of foreign policy change in which role performance followed from what I have termed non-role-based domestic political competition with role implications. In broad agreement with Cantir and Kaarbo’s (2012) call for role theorists to take one step back towards the tried and tested insights from FPA in order to take two forwards, I have argued that domestic contestation can have a significant impact on role performance even when contestation is not centred on differing elite and mass understanding of a state’s role in the world. Far from viewing these events as lying outside FPA and role theory’s purview, the result is a call for a careful, reflexive, application of role theory’s powerful theoretical tool-kit, cognizant of the interplay of roles as inputs and outputs in complex processes of political competition.

Several questions prompting further research suggest themselves. Two are particularly noteworthy. First, to what extent must non-role-based domestic contestation with role implications be included in role-theoretic accounts of foreign policy-making? Are there cases in which excluding non-role contestation has minimal impact, while in others, it can lead to especially inaccurate explanations? It would seem that historical cases might be in the greatest need of the notes of caution developed here. The non-role-based elements of Brexit, in particular, are profound, and unlikely to be downplayed, even by role theorists focused primarily on its international aspects. Yet, as role theorists use primary and secondary materials in historical cases, domestic contestation might more easily drop out, suggesting the need for role theorists to keep in mind non-role-based domestic competition with role implications as a possible, but not always necessary, ‘robustness check’ on their explanations.

Second, are the dynamics of non-role-based domestic competition with role implications only relevant to the Western, democratic, governments discussed here? How well do the distinctions between role contestation, non-role-based domestic competition with role implications, and role performance travel to non-Democratic states and countries in the Global South? Is it the case that the foreign policies of states with fewer economic and military resources and weaker governance capacities are more or less impacted by non-role-based domestic contestation? Thinking through these questions promises to further integrate foreign policy, domestic politics, and the ever-present question of power in global politics.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

David M McCourt

Notes

Author biography

David M McCourt is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California-Davis. He is the author of Britain and World Power since 1945 and American Power and International Theory at the Council on Foreign Relations, 1953-54, both published by the University of Michigan Press. He is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled American Hegemony and the Rise of China.

References

Adler-Nissen

Galpin

Rosamond

(2017) Performing Brexit: How a post-Brexit world is imagined outside the United Kingdom. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19(3): 573–591.

Aggestam

(2006) Role theory and European foreign policy. In: Elgström

Smith

(eds) The European Union’s Roles in International Politics. London: Routledge, pp.31–49.

Allison

(1971) Essence of Decision. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Bell

(2004) The Liberal State on Trial. New York: Columbia University Press.

Below

(2016) Environmental Politics and Foreign Policy Decision Making in Latin America. New York: Routledge.

Beneš

Harnisch

(2014) Role theory in symbolic interactionism: Czech Republic, Germany, and the EU. Cooperation and Conflict 50(1): 145–156.

Bennett

Checkel

(2015) Process Tracing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bernstein

(1966) The Truman administration and the steel strike of 1946. The Journal of American History 52(4): 791–803.

Brummer

Thies

(2015) The contested selection of national role conceptions. Foreign Policy Analysis 11(3): 273–293.

10.

Campbell

Ratner

(2018) The China reckoning: How Beijing defied American expectations. Foreign Affairs 97(2): 60–70.

11.

Cantir

Kaarbo

(2012) Contested roles and domestic foreign policy: Reflections on role theory in foreign policy analysis and IR theory. Foreign Policy Analysis 8(1): 5–24.

12.

Cantir

Kaarbo

(eds) (2016a) Domestic Role Contestation, Foreign Policy and International Relations. New York: Routledge.

13.

Cantir

Kaarbo

(2016b) Unpacking the ego in role theory: Vertical and horizontal role contestation and foreign policy. In: Cantir

Kaarbo

(eds) Domestic Role Contestation, Foreign Policy, and International Relations. London: Routledge, pp.1–22.

14.

Davis

Wei

(2020) Superpower Showdown: How the Battle between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War. New York: Harper Business.

15.

Dee

Smith

(2017) UK diplomacy at the UN after Brexit: Challenges and opportunities. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19(3): 527–542.

16.

Department of Defense (2019) The Department of Defense Indo-Pacific Strategy Report. Arlington, VA: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1 June.

17.

Drezner

(2019) Economic statecraft in the age of Trump. Washington Quarterly 42(3): 7–24.

18.

Dyson

(2009) The Blair Identity: Leadership and Foreign Policy. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

19.

Gaskarth

(2014) Strategizing Britain’s role in the world. International Affairs 90(3): 559–581.

20.

Glencross

(2016) Why the UK Voted for Brexit. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

21.

Glencross

McCourt

(2018) Living up at a new role in the world: The challenges of ‘Global Britain’. Orbis 62: 4582–4597.

22.

Goodwin

(2015) Ukip, the 2015 general election and Britain’s EU referendum. Political Insight 6(3): 12–15.

23.

Hagan

(2016) Role contestation in the July 1914 crisis: The British and French cases. In: Cantir

Kaarbo

(eds) Domestic Role Contestation, Foreign Policy, and International Relations. London: Routledge, pp.23–39.

24.

Hamby

(1973) Beyond the New Deal. New York: Columbia University Press.

25.

Harnisch

Frank

Maull

(eds) (2011) Role Theory in International Relations. London: Routledge.

26.

Hayton

(2016) The UK independence party and the politics of Englishness. Political Studies Review 14(3): 400–410.

27.

Hogan

(1987) The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952. New York: Cambridge University Press.

28.

Holsti

(1970) National role conceptions in the study of foreign policy. International Studies Quarterly 14(3): 233–309.

29.

Janis

(1972) Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

30.

Jones

(1965) The Fifteen Weeks. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

31.

Kaarbo

(1996) Power and influence in foreign policy decision making: The role of junior coalition partners in German and Israeli foreign policy. International Studies Quarterly 40: 501–530.

32.

Kaarbo

(2012) Coalition Politics and Cabinet Decision Making. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

33.

Kaarbo

(2015) A foreign policy analysis perspective on the domestic politics turn IR theory. International Studies Review 17(2): 189–216.

34.

Kaarbo

Beasley

(2008) Taking it to the extreme: The effect of coalition cabinets on foreign policy. Foreign Policy Analysis 4(1): 67–81.

35.

Kaarbo

Cantir

(2017) Domestic role contestation and foreign policy. Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Available at: https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/domestic-role-contestation-and-foreign-policy(624ce686-5c08-4908-82f6-7916d05a528d).html

36.

Khong

(1992) Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

37.

Leifer

(1988) Interaction preludes to role setting: Exploratory local action. American Sociological Review 53(6): 865–878.

38.

McCourt

(2014) Britain and World Power since 1945: Constructing a Nation’s Role in International Politics. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

39.

McCourt

Glencross

(2019) Great expectations: The EU’s social roles as a great power manager. New Perspectives 27(1): 1–27.

40.

Malici

Walker

(2016) Role Theory and Role Conflict in U.S.-Iran Relations. New York: Routledge.

41.

Merton

(1936) The unanticipated consequences of purposive social action. American Sociological Review 1(6): 894–904.

42.

New York Times (2016) Obama urges Britain to remain in the EU. New York Times, 21 April. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/world/europe/obama-urges-britain-to-remain-in-the-eu.html

43.

New York Times (2019) U.S. versus China: A new era of great power competition, but without boundaries. New York Times, 26 June. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/world/asia/united-states-china-conflict.html

44.

Niblett

(2015) Britain, Europe and the World: Rethinking the UK’s Circles of Influence. London: Chatham House.

45.

Oliver

(2016) The world after Brexit: From British referendum to global adventure. International Politics 53(6): 689–707.

46.

Opperman

Beasley

Kaarbo

(2020) British foreign policy after Brexit: Losing Europe and finding a role. International Relations 34(2): 133–156.

47.

Owen

Ludlow

(2017) British Foreign Policy after Brexit: An Independent Voice. London: Biteback Press.

48.

Parr

(2006) Britain, America, east of Suez and the EEC: Finding a role in British foreign policy, 1964-7. Contemporary British History 20(3): 403–421.

49.

Reich

Lebow

(2014) Good-Bye Hegemony! Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

50.

Schultz

(2017) The perils of polarization for U.S. foreign policy. Washington Quarterly 40(4): 7–28.

51.

Steil

(2018) The Marshall Plan. New York: Simon & Schuster.

52.

Strong

(2019) Using role theory to analyse British military intervention in the Syrian civil war during David Cameron’s premiership. British Politics 14(4): 372–390.

53.

Stryker

(1999) Role theory. In: Manstead

Hewstone

(eds) The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 485–488.

54.

Thies

Breuning

(2012) Integrating foreign policy analysis and international relations through role theory. Foreign Policy Analysis 8(1): 25–46.

55.

Walker

(2013) Role Theory and the Cognitive Architecture of British Appeasement Decisions: Symbolic and Strategic Interaction in World Politics. New York: Routledge.

56.

Walker

Schafer

Bieler

(2016) Belief systems and foreign policy roles: Role contestation in U.S. foreign policy decisions. In: Cantir

Kaarbo

(eds) Domestic Role Contestation, Foreign Policy, and International Relations. London: Routledge, pp.122–139.

57.

Wehner

(2020) The narration of roles in foreign policy analysis. Journal of International Relations and Development 23(2): 359–380.

58.

Wehner

Thies

(2014) Role theory, narratives, and interpretation: The domestic contestation of roles. International Studies Review 16(3): 411–436.

59.

Weiner

(2014) A Theory of Contestation. London: Springer.

60.

Welch

(2005) Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

61.

Westad

(2017) The Cold War: A World History. New York: Basic Books.

62.

Whitman

(2016) Brexit or Bremain: What future for the UK’s European diplomatic strategy? International Affairs 92(3): 509–529.

63.

Yarhi-Milo

(2018) Who Fights for Reputation? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.