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UNIT 3 THE ROLE OF LEADERS IN FOREIGN

POL344 FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS

successes and failures in foreign affairs to the leaders in charge at the time they occur.

Citizens are not alone in thinking that leaders are the decisive determinants of state’s foreign policies, and by extension world history.

Leaders themselves seek to create impressions of their own self importance while attributing extraordinary powers to leaders. The assumptions they make about the personalities of their counterparts, consciously or unconsciously, in turn influence their own behaviour.

Moreover, leaders react differently to the positions they occupy. All are influenced by the role or exceptions that by law, and tradition steers the decision makers to behave in conformity with prevailing expectations about how the role is to be performed.

Most people submissively act in accordance with the customary rules that define the roles they hold, behaving as their predecessors tended to behave when they held the same position. Others however, are by personality or preference more bold and ambitious, and they seek to decisively escape the confines of their new role, by redefining how it will be performed.

One of the difficulties of leader-driven explanations of foreign policy behaviour is that history movers and shakers often pursue decidedly irrational policies. The classic example was Adolf Hitler, whose ruthless determination to seek military conquest of the entire European Continent proved disastrous for Germany. How do we relate such behaviour with the logic of realism? That theory says that survival is the paramount goal of all states and that all leaders engage in rational calculations that advance their country’s’ aspiration for self advantage. But this theory cannot account for the times when the choices leaders make ultimately prove counter-productive. If the realists are correct, even defects in states’ foreign policy-making processes cannot easily explain such wide divergences between the decisions leaders sometimes make, and what cold cost benefit calculations would predict.

We can explain this divergence in part by distinguishing between procedural rationality and instrumental rationality. Procedural rationality is the foundation of the realist’s billiard ball image of world politics. It views all states as acting similarly, because all decision makers engage in the same cool and clearheaded ends-means calculations based on a careful weighing of possible course of action, but realism downplays leader’s capacity to lead through rational procedural choices.

Realism discounts leaders by assuming that global constraints limit what leaders can do. Because the global systematic imperatives of anarchy or interdependence are so clear, leaders can only choose from a limited

POL344 FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS

range of alternatives, if they are to exercise rational leadership and maximise their state’s movement towards its goals, only certain actions are feasible (Herman & Hagan 2004 in Kegleys Jr. 2007).

Instrumental rationality is another angle of the realist’s assumptions. It pictures leaders as powerful decision makers who are able, “based on their perceptions and interpretations to build expectations, plan strategies, and urge actions on their governments about what is possible”

(Hamann & Hogan, 2004). In this respect, leaders do actually lead and are important. They are rational instruments because they have preferences on which they choose. When faced with two or more alternative options, they can rationally make the choice that they believe will produce the preferred outcome.

The implications of these seemingly semantic differences are important.

The idea of instrumental rationality demonstrates that rationality does not connote super human calculating ability, omniscience, or an Olympian view of the world, as is often assumed when the rational actor model we have described is applied to real world situations. They also suggest that an individual’s actions may be rational even though the process of decision making and its product may appear decidedly irrational. Why did Libya’s leader the mercurial Muammar Qaddafi, repeatedly challenge the United States, almost goading President Ronald Reagan into a military strike in 1980? This is because, we can postulate, Qaddafi’s actions were consistent with his preferences, regardless of how “irrational” it was for a fourth-rate military power to take on the world’s preeminent superpower. This and many other examples serve as a reminder of the importance of the human factor in understanding how decisions are made. Temptation, lack of self control, anger, fear of getting hurt, religious conviction, bad habits, and overconfidence all play a part in determining why leaders make the kinds of decisions they do.

SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1 What is procedural rationality?