Introduction: Global Changes, Foreign Policy, and the Study of Small States

Abstract

In the last decade, both diplomats and scholars have spent a significant amount of time assessing the changes in foreign policy wrought by the changed global environment. (In this book, “foreign policy” refers to the purposive—that is, official and intentional—actions and behavior of states targeted toward external state as well as nonstate actors.)¹ Of the utmost interest to both has been the much-debated process of globalization brought about primarily by rapid advances in technology. Scholars may argue about whether this process is new or not and benign or not, but all agree that nations and peoples have become interlinked in an unprecedented way in the last few decades.² Certain foreign policy changes are implicated in globalization and the corresponding global interdependence. Perhaps most important is the fact that the distinction between the domestic and the international has been nibbled away since the 1970s in such a way that domestic issues have become internationalized and international issues have taken on domestic importance. The term “intermestic” has been devised to denote these issues—issues such as environmental degradation, health, poverty alleviation, and sustainable development.³ The post-cold war rise to centrality of nonmilitary issues has simply confirmed a trend that began much earlier.