Norway The Foreign Ministry: Bracketing Interdependence

Abstract

The literature on the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) is dominated by the comparative foreign policy writings of Maurice East and his associates. It explores the implications of growing interdependence in world politics and focuses on what they see as a puzzle: how is it that the MFA does not modify the organization and its interface with other administrative bodies so that it maintains an optimal measure of control over Norwegian foreign policy decisionmaking? This paper postulates a clash of cultures between East on the one hand and the MFA on the other. It explores the MFA by looking synoptically at its historical interfaces with Norwegian society, with the MFAs of other countries, with Norwegian domestic ministries and with Norwegian politicians. The introductory section presents East’s pre-empirical presuppositions and suggests that, as long as one formulates research puzzles without taking into consideration how the MFA is seen by the people working in it, one cannot adequately explain those puzzles. The two following sections present two clusters of empirical material which are part of the horizon of people working in the MFA: organizational trajectory and discourse on reorganization. The conclusion suggests that more of MFA behaviour can be explained by starting with the question of MFA identity rather than with the systemically global characteristic of interdependence, as does the comparative foreign policy literature.

I should like to thank Maurice East, Brian Hocking, Olav F. Knudsen and also Einar Ansteensen, Eva Bugge, Jan Wilhelm Grythe, Sverre Jervell, Henrik Ofstad, Kjetil Skogrand, Olav Stokke, Johan Vibe and Geir Westgaard for their comments.