Morality in Foreign Policy

The foreign policy analysis (FPA) subfield is situated at the intersection of international relations (IR) and foreign policy behaviors of states. It is characterized by the primacy of the agent-specific ontology and the various cognitive decision-making theoretical models that explain the causal link between actors and foreign policymaking. FPA privileges realist conceptions of the world and downplays the role of normative considerations in foreign policymaking. With the end of the Cold War and the increased frequency of humanitarian interventions foreign policy analyses devoted more attention to normative considerations and the role of ethics or morality in foreign policy, while also retaining the focus on agent-specific explanations. In particular, the just war theory, while primarily a theory/tradition about moral reasoning, became the most prominent theoretical model in the debates about humanitarian interventions. However, the just war theory scholars mostly debate the theory’s reasoning with reference to the specific humanitarian actions instead of using it as a heuristic device for mapping out the moral compass of the actual decision makers. In other words, the FPA subfield has not experienced any paradigmatic transformations, similar to those in IR, and it is not ready to deal with the possibility of morality as a separate analytical category. The British foreign policy literature differs from the American along those lines, especially concerning the foreign policy of the European Union (EU). This literature looks at morality as the initial motivating factor behind EU foreign policy, whereas the American scholarship debates the morality of foreign policy outcomes based on the criteria set out by the just war theory. The FPA subfield in the United States could benefit from thinking about morality from a critical perspective. Incorporating critical approaches in FPA will elevate the role of morality in foreign policymaking.