My Thoughts on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy & The Identity of the State

Conventionally, foreign policy is a set of goals that provides the general rule of conduct determining how a state interacts with its neighbours economically, politically, socially and militarily, and to a lesser extent, how the state will interact with non-state actors. The objectives of these policies are to protect the states interests, namely its security, ideological goals, and economic prosperity. This can occur as a result of peaceful cooperation with other states, or through exploitation. Diplomacy on the other hand, is how the state communicates these policies to its neighbours. Together, they represent an instrument of statecraft necessary to identify the state in relation to its neighbours.

A state’s foreign policy represents a linkage between the state’s domestic interior and the international exterior and can be seen as a portrayal of the state’s character or ‘personality’. This ‘personality’ is determined principally by the culture practiced by either the state’s citizen’s en mass or simply by its elites and how this culture views itself to be in relation to the international. The culture of the state constructs its identity by contrasting itself against its neighbours, acknowledging primarily the differences, real, perceived or synthetic, in order to define itself a unique singularity from which it can determine its current standing and where it wishes to be.

It is through this self-examination of what it perceives its identity to be and its place in the international that defines its interactions with its neighbours. This ‘self-made identity’, or interior, exerts itself onto the exterior by determining the form of conversation between itself and its neighbours. This colours the state’s ‘personality’ by making it inherently bellicose or passive in its attempts to achieve its goals. In recent years however, with the growth of stronger inter-state and non-state players and the diffusion of cultures via mass diaspora the concept of an inherent ‘stable-state-identity’ is increasingly becoming fictitious.

In Conclusion, it is from this Manichean construct of “us against the other” that the state perceives what its interests to be. Furthermore, it also determines the methodology it will use, namely the disposition of the diplomacy it practices, in order to attain these interests. It is in the author’s opinion that this represents a form of self-inflicted division, however it is an inherent facet of the current international system and it is increasingly becoming redundant in this current era globalisation but that is the topic of another paper.