Foreign Policy Problems and Polarized Political Communities: Some Implications of A Simple Model

In: British journal of political science, Volume 1, Issue 2, p. 223-251

Abstract

Once upon a time, during the early 1960s, all undergraduate International Relations courses in the United Kingdom were deemed incomplete if they did not contain a number of lectures on the question of the relationship between a country's foreign policy and the shape, size and other attributes of its national political community. The lectures often evolved into a discussion of the relative advantages of possessing a large population, and whether or not this was an element in a state's power (as in the case of the Soviet Union) or of a state's weakness, and hence of its inherent inability to attain a wider range of desirable foreign policy goals (as in the case of India). The debate was usually fairly inconclusive.