Abstract
The two requirements for achieving domestic support for an ambitious foreign policy identified by Henry Kissinger encouraged me to develop the concept of “policy legitimacy,” the focus of this chapter. I develop an analytical framework for this purpose, which I use to analyze Franklin D. Roosevelt’s failed effort to develop the kind of policy legitimacy necessary to support his plan for a cooperative U.S.-Soviet relationship after the end of World War II.
The acid test of a policy… is its ability to obtain domestic support. This has two aspects: the problem of legitimizing a policy within the governmental apparatus… and that of harmonizing it with the national experience.
—Henry Kissinger.
This text was first published as: “The Need for Policy Legitimacy.” Chapter 2 of On Foreign Policy: Unfinished Business. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006, pp. 15–50. The permission was granted by the copyright Clearance Center on 26 June 2017 to Dan Caldwell. Research for this chapter was supported by a grant (number SOC 75-14079) from the National Science Foundation and by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at which the author was a Fellow in 1976–1977. Parts of the chapter were presented earlier in a paper delivered to the Symposium on U.S. Foreign Policy in the Next Decade at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, April 1977, and in a paper for a conference on approaches to the study of decisionmaking at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Oslo, Norway, August 1977.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
In preparing the interpretative essay on which this chapter is based, I relied mostly on secondary sources describing Roosevelt’s plans for a postwar security system and the Nixon-Kissinger detente policy. The case study of the detente policy is omitted from the chapter itself.
Roosevelt’s “Grand Design” for the postwar period was conveyed to him most explicitly in background interviews with Forrest Davis, who published detailed accounts of Roosevelt’s plans and the beliefs supporting them in several articles appearing in the Saturday Evening Post: “Roosevelt’s World Blueprint,” 10 April 1943; “What Really Happened at Tehran-I,” 13 May 1944; “What Really Happened at Tehran-II,” 20 May 1944. [For background and evidence of Roosevelt’s later acknowledgment that Davis’s article accurately reflected his views, see John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 6, 153.] Detailed secondary accounts of Roosevelt’s thinking and plans are to be found in Willard Range, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s World Order (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1959); Roland N. Stromberg, Collective Security and American Foreign Policy (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1963), esp. chap. 8; Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969); Gaddis, Origins of the Cold War; Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1977), esp. chap. 2; and Robert Garson, “The Atlantic Alliance, Eastern Europe and the Origins of the Cold War: From Pearl Harbor to Yalta,” Contrast and Connection (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976), pp. 296–319.
- 2.
The concept of “policy legitimacy” (versus “regime legitimacy”) is discussed in a stimulating and insightful way by B. Thomas Trout, “Rhetoric Revisited: Political Legitimation and the Cold War,” International Studies Quarterly 19, no. 3 (September 1975).
- 3.
This important refinement of the analytical framework will not be developed further here since it will not be utilized in the case study.
- 4.
Forrest Davis, “Roosevelt’s World Blueprint,” Saturday Evening Post, 10 April 1943. That the State Department was not an “ideological monolith” in its attitude toward the Soviet Union during and immediately after World War II has been persuasively argued and documented in recent studies. [Cf., for example, Robert L. Messer, “Paths Not Taken: The United States Department of State and Alternatives to Containment, 1945–1946,” Diplomatic History 1 (Fall 1977).] Moreover, as Eduard Mark demonstrates, Charles Bohlen and other State Department specialists did not operate on the assumption that there was an ineluctable conflict between the principle of self-determination in Eastern Europe and legitimate Soviet security interests in that area. Instead, they distinguished between different kinds of spheres of influence, arguing that an “open” (versus “exclusive”) Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe was acceptable and consistent with U.S. interests. See Mark’s “Charles E. Bohlen and the Acceptable Limits of Soviet Hegemony in Eastern Europe: A Memorandum of 18 October 1945,” Diplomatic History 2 (Spring 1979). On this point see also Thomas G. Patterson, On Every Front: The Making of the Cold War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979), chap. 3.
- 5.
Gaddis, Origins of the Cold War, pp. 198–205.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
George, A.L. (2019). The Need for Policy Legitimacy. In: Caldwell, D. (eds) Alexander L. George: A Pioneer in Political and Social Sciences. Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90772-7_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90772-7_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90771-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-90772-7
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)