Remy Davison

Book Review: Public Participation in Foreign Policy:

This edited volume brings together both distinguished scholars and relative newcomers to the field of foreign policy analysis. Given that many of the contributors are from New Zealand, four of the chapters deal with New Zealand foreign policy issues, and New Zealand-related topics occupy half a page of the index. This book is one in a long tradition of studies that have attempted to measure the impact of public opinion upon foreign policy. In 1967, the doyen of neorealism, Kenneth Waltz, devoted his only major empirical work to a second-image study of democratic politics and foreign policy decision-making in Britain and the United States. One of Waltz’s major findings was that publics do not necessarily restrain foreign policy decision-makers in democratic states: in other words, in comparison with dictatorships, democracies do not face particular constraints arising from the pressures wrought by their domestic constituencies. Waltz’s other findings demonstrated that foreign affairs are a rarefied and discrete policy domain, largely dominated by government institutions, while remaining relatively autonomous from domestic influences. The implicit question posed by this book is whether Waltz’s thesis still holds in twenty-first-century foreign policy decision-making. Public Participation in Foreign Policy is divided into four parts. Part I deals with the question of the public’s ability to contribute to foreign policy, and the extent to which publics wish to participate. The debates in the first two chapters revolve around direct democracy and public comprehension of foreign policy issues and decision-making. In Chapter 1, James Headley and Jo-Ansie van Wyk provide a solid review of the extant literature, from élite theory to the ‘democratization’ of foreign policy. Part II evaluates two case studies: US public opinion before and after the 2003 Iraq conflict and South Africa in the post-apartheid era. In the former, Ole Holsti argues that the Bush administration attempted to control public opinion, as well as to hide the more graphic aspects of Iraq from the US population. However, Holsti does gloss over some widely available facts; for example (p. 66), Bush sought and received the UNSC’s unanimous assent to Resolution 1441 because Blair pushed him to do so. Conversely, in relation to the abortive UNSCR 1442 (the withdrawn draft resolution that dealt with authorizing military force against Iraq), Holsti writes: ‘Washington withdrew Resolution 1442 to avoid an embarrassing defeat when it became clear that most Security Council members would vote against it’ (p. 67). The fact is that the French government asked Washington to withdraw the second UNSCR so that Paris would not be forced to vote against it. Some analysts viewed this as President