Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics and International Relations: The Case of Italy.

• Author: Yavas, Gokcen
• Position: Book review

Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics and International Relations: The Case of Italy

By Elisabetta Brighi

New York: Routledge, 2013, 193 pages, $145.00, ISBN: 9780415835121.

Elisabetta Brighi's book Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics and International Relations: The Case of Italy, basically aspires to explain the question of how foreign policy interacts with domestic politics and international relations. Brighi depicts a theoretical framework to be applied to the field of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), namely, the "strategic-relational" approach based on critical realism at a dialectical level. Accordingly, the main assumption is that foreign policy is "reconceptualized" as a "product of dialectic interplay between actor and context, and discourses" as clearly illustrated in an empirical analysis of Italian foreign policy. (p. 37)

The book consists of five chapters: "The introduction" starts with a brief definition of foreign policy and the unit of analysis of the research, and reveals the key reasons for the case selection. Brighi (p. 2) aptly identifies foreign policy as "an actor's external relations, specifically, political relations," (cited in Hill 2003; pp. 3-5) and the unit of analysis in the study as "foreign policy process." Furthermore, in conjunction with an understanding of causality, according to Brighi's viewpoint Italian foreign policy is intentionally concentrated and highly represents a "specific" and "heuristically fecund" case with its domestic and foreign policy making processes. (p. 5)

Drawing up the boundaries of foreign policy, the first chapter introduces the students of the foreign policy analysis to the "strategic-relational" model. Initially, the author provides a thorough literature review on the classical theoretical models previously developed by a wide array of scholars, including James Rosenau, Wolfram Hanrieder, Robert Putnam, and Walter Carslnaes. Brighi employs three approaches within the perspective of critical realism in looking at foreign policy, domestic policy, and international policy: monocausal, dualist, and dialectical views. She predominantly devises the dialectical one that constitutes the theoretical and empirical backgrounds of the research, mainly borrowing from the prominent works of Bob Jessop, Colin Hay, and David Marsch. In this respect, it is argued that foreign policy is "dialectic and sequential interplay between actor and context, and discourses." It is strategic because states as actors...