The field of international relations has long since moved beyond the traditional ‘billiard ball model’ that once dominated the discipline. Few scholars today would take issue with the assertion that "domestic politics matters" when it comes to explaining foreign policy. This book shows how peace movements affected US decisions to enter nuclear arms control talks during the Cold War. The book contends that many major theories of international relations adopt an unduly narrow view of domestic politics. Domestic society is generally treated as a source of constraints on foreign policy makers. This book builds on the ‘domestic structure approach’ to explaining foreign policy. It demonstrates that popular campaigns against nuclear arms race had a significant impact on United States arms control policy. The case studies undertaken in this book show that societal activism can be the trigger to foreign policy initiatives that most analysts would regard as consistent with national interests and can serve as a direct stimulus to the development of new state preferences.
This book explores that what impact, if any, peace movements had on United States decisions to seek nuclear arms control with Soviet Union. The case studies taken in this work are;
• Talks on a nuclear test ban in 1958
• Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) 1958
• Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) in 1982.
By demonstrating the importance of public protest and citizen activism, Jeffrey Knopf shows how state preferences for cooperation can be shaped from below. Grassroots-based campaigns can be a direct stimulus to decisions to seek cooperation. Most studies of cooperation adopt a fairly top down perspective, coming under one of three categories. Some derive preferences from system level factors, meaning that they treat domestic arena as a source of constraints. Others adopt a statesmen centered perspective. Finally, some focus on societal inputs, but emphasise dominant economic interests or technical elites. The dependent variable adopted in the case studies is ‘willingness to cooperate’ and independent variable is ‘anti-nuclear weapons protests’ and control variables for this study are military balance, state of political relations and domestic economic conditions. Thus domestic structure approach identifies those aspects of country’s political institutions and culture that could provide access for societal actors and indicates which kind of coalition parameters would prove most useful. A wide range of work on domestic sources of US foreign policy highlights three key institutions: regular, national elections; an independent legislature and a large decentralized bureaucracy. However, existing work in domestic structure approach has not specified the circumstances under which opportunities for citizens’ groups to gain access through these institutions are most favorable. To overcome this Jeffrey Knopf has identified three causal mechanisms through which a citizens’ campaign could gain leverage on arms policy, each of which corresponds to one of the institutions mentioned above, involve generating electoral pressure, changing coalitions in Congress, and feeding ideas in bureaucracy.
Earlier top-down approaches are not wrong, rather, incomplete in explaining impact of public protests. In the two Eisenhower cases, there were both constraints and a direct stimulus. Bureaucratic actors, primarily the military and atomic weapons complex, served as a constraint across both Eisenhower terms. From a more radical perspective, these actors could also be viewed as representatives of societal elite. At the same time, though, Eisenhower’s second term saw a shift toward a preference for cooperation, arising in part through a direct stimulus from below, so Eisenhower policy cannot be understood without incorporating this role of domestic society as well. At no point of time Eisenhower administration have an absolute preference for either cooperation or defection. Mechanism 3, where arguments connected with the rise of a citizens’ movement are used by the actors inside the administration had the greatest direct impact. Mechanism 2, in which the efforts of activist groups interact with those of elites, had an important stage setting effect in this case. The contacts between activists and major political figures and the ability of groups like SANE (committee for a sane nuclear policy) to mobilize well-known figures from other walks of life behind the test ban objective made testing an object of ongoing political and media attention that distinguished it from other possible subjects of arms control talks.
In the Nixon case, domestic actors both at the grassroots and elite level, probably are best characterized as constraint. SALT had been placed on the agenda in the Johnson years, largely in response to international developments. When Nixon tried to postpone talks to gain leverage on Soviet Union, domestic constraints forced Nixon to return to arms talks. Here too, grassroots actors still mattered but more in restoring an earlier preference for cooperation. SALT is the only case of serious arms talks during the cold war in which a major surge in citizen activism did not predate the start of talks. Mechanism 2, congressional coalition was the primary process at work. Mechanism 3, bureaucratic pathway control further reinforced this process. Bureaucratic leaks to the media raised the expectations that arms talks would begin soon, thereby accentuating the president’s problems. Mechanism 1, the electoral pathway, did not factor in the decision to enter SALT talks. Though to some extent administration was moved by electoral considerations, it was not responding to existing protest movements. Although domestic pressure is significant in this case, its impact differs in an important way from that exerted by the test ban and freeze movements. There was no major push from below driving the government into arms talks. When Nixon and Kissinger entered office they had already accepted the idea that arms talks would be a tool of US policy. They just wanted to delay talks to gain leverage on Soviet behaviour in other areas and they wanted to get Congressional support for new US strategic programmes so as to improve the nuclear balance. Though elites played a greater role in initiating pressure in this case, they gained much of their leverage from a wider peace movement that was starting to show an interest on nuclear weapon issues. Knopf assigns a weaker but still significant role to domestic factors in explaining the Nixon Administration’s decision to push forward the SALT I talks. Yet given the absence of a grassroots anti-nuclear movement during this period, even Knopf‘s modest claims for the role of citizen’s activism seem exaggerated in this case.
Finally, the Reagan years provide the best example of a direct stimulus from the grassroots. The nuclear freeze movement swept the country like a wildfire. The decision to seek cooperation thus emerged mainly from the bottom up. This pattern across the cases suggests that the different views of the role of domestic politics are not mutually exclusive. The anti-nuclear weapons movement of 1980’s activated in a way where mechanism 1 created electoral incentives for raising the place of arms restraint on national agenda. It also interacted with divisions among political elites, thus bringing mechanism 2 into play and promoted Congressional efforts to get Reagan to give less emphasis on increasing US strength and more preference for achieving mutual restraint. Thus mass electoral pressure and coalition shifts brought arms control policy at the national agenda. However, Congressional action would not have taken the same course without the pressures exerted by freeze movement. It was the rise of freeze movement that first encouraged many Congressional members in the house to take up the issue of arms control. As compared to the freeze resolution put in the house, the alternative SALT, initially favoured by administration lacked grassroots support and of course, not preferred by many elites as well. Congress thus did not have much impact on administration policy but freeze movement was instrumental in bringing this change in the posture of Reagan administration.
The Soviet Union certainly tried to take advantage of the growing citizens’ movement in United States and Europe. Soviets took no concrete actions that offered a promise of mutual advantage, limiting them instead to rhetorical endorsements meant purely to serve Soviet interests. More importantly, Reagan began trying to demonstrate a commitment to arms control immediately after United States defence build up had borne fruit. Reagan administration had tried to forestall talks unless and until United States achieved its own strong defences against Soviet armaments. Efforts to proclaim a willingness to cooperate on arms control reached a new peak in early 1984. Despite the fact that Soviets had walked out of negotiations less than two months earlier, Reagan in January 1984 made a speech in which he argued that the build up of US military has placed the United States “in its strongest position in years” , and US government could now afford to be forthcoming in arms control talks. Thus the nuclear disarmament breakthroughs of the Reagan era--the INF Treaty (which eliminated intermediate range nuclear missiles from Europe) and the START I Treaty (which reduced United States and Soviet strategic nuclear arsenals) resulted from the Reagan administration’s nuclear buildup of the 1980s.
This book by Jeffrey Knopf ‘domestic society and International Cooperation’ provides useful insights into cooperation theory by emphasizing that domestic public opinion can also act as a source of formation of social values which in the long run influence foreign policy. Most scholarship assumes that state policies on pursuing international cooperation are set by national leaders, in response either to international conditions, or to their own interests and ideas. Whereas, this book explores the fact that ordinary citizens can make a difference in world politics in general and promoting international cooperation in particular. However, Knopf do not entirely resolve the problem that societal activism can lead to foreign policy change, he offers perhaps the most sophisticated discussion to date of how one might go about tracing and measuring the impact of societal activism on foreign policy. Knopf’s work shows the optimism about idealism that idealism can sometimes be quite realistic. Moreover Knopf’s work concentrated on the types of actors that have usually been neglected by many studies of international politics.
This book is no doubt a great source to have first hand information about commoners making a dent in US policies and has particularly aroused my interest in studying further on issues of international cooperation. However, Knopf gives insufficient weight to the transnational ties connecting the American anti-nuclear movement with those abroad, especially Western Europe.
This book explores that what impact, if any, peace movements had on United States decisions to seek nuclear arms control with Soviet Union. The case studies taken in this work are;
• Talks on a nuclear test ban in 1958
• Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) 1958
• Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) in 1982.
By demonstrating the importance of public protest and citizen activism, Jeffrey Knopf shows how state preferences for cooperation can be shaped from below. Grassroots-based campaigns can be a direct stimulus to decisions to seek cooperation. Most studies of cooperation adopt a fairly top down perspective, coming under one of three categories. Some derive preferences from system level factors, meaning that they treat domestic arena as a source of constraints. Others adopt a statesmen centered perspective. Finally, some focus on societal inputs, but emphasise dominant economic interests or technical elites. The dependent variable adopted in the case studies is ‘willingness to cooperate’ and independent variable is ‘anti-nuclear weapons protests’ and control variables for this study are military balance, state of political relations and domestic economic conditions. Thus domestic structure approach identifies those aspects of country’s political institutions and culture that could provide access for societal actors and indicates which kind of coalition parameters would prove most useful. A wide range of work on domestic sources of US foreign policy highlights three key institutions: regular, national elections; an independent legislature and a large decentralized bureaucracy. However, existing work in domestic structure approach has not specified the circumstances under which opportunities for citizens’ groups to gain access through these institutions are most favorable. To overcome this Jeffrey Knopf has identified three causal mechanisms through which a citizens’ campaign could gain leverage on arms policy, each of which corresponds to one of the institutions mentioned above, involve generating electoral pressure, changing coalitions in Congress, and feeding ideas in bureaucracy.
Earlier top-down approaches are not wrong, rather, incomplete in explaining impact of public protests. In the two Eisenhower cases, there were both constraints and a direct stimulus. Bureaucratic actors, primarily the military and atomic weapons complex, served as a constraint across both Eisenhower terms. From a more radical perspective, these actors could also be viewed as representatives of societal elite. At the same time, though, Eisenhower’s second term saw a shift toward a preference for cooperation, arising in part through a direct stimulus from below, so Eisenhower policy cannot be understood without incorporating this role of domestic society as well. At no point of time Eisenhower administration have an absolute preference for either cooperation or defection. Mechanism 3, where arguments connected with the rise of a citizens’ movement are used by the actors inside the administration had the greatest direct impact. Mechanism 2, in which the efforts of activist groups interact with those of elites, had an important stage setting effect in this case. The contacts between activists and major political figures and the ability of groups like SANE (committee for a sane nuclear policy) to mobilize well-known figures from other walks of life behind the test ban objective made testing an object of ongoing political and media attention that distinguished it from other possible subjects of arms control talks.
In the Nixon case, domestic actors both at the grassroots and elite level, probably are best characterized as constraint. SALT had been placed on the agenda in the Johnson years, largely in response to international developments. When Nixon tried to postpone talks to gain leverage on Soviet Union, domestic constraints forced Nixon to return to arms talks. Here too, grassroots actors still mattered but more in restoring an earlier preference for cooperation. SALT is the only case of serious arms talks during the cold war in which a major surge in citizen activism did not predate the start of talks. Mechanism 2, congressional coalition was the primary process at work. Mechanism 3, bureaucratic pathway control further reinforced this process. Bureaucratic leaks to the media raised the expectations that arms talks would begin soon, thereby accentuating the president’s problems. Mechanism 1, the electoral pathway, did not factor in the decision to enter SALT talks. Though to some extent administration was moved by electoral considerations, it was not responding to existing protest movements. Although domestic pressure is significant in this case, its impact differs in an important way from that exerted by the test ban and freeze movements. There was no major push from below driving the government into arms talks. When Nixon and Kissinger entered office they had already accepted the idea that arms talks would be a tool of US policy. They just wanted to delay talks to gain leverage on Soviet behaviour in other areas and they wanted to get Congressional support for new US strategic programmes so as to improve the nuclear balance. Though elites played a greater role in initiating pressure in this case, they gained much of their leverage from a wider peace movement that was starting to show an interest on nuclear weapon issues. Knopf assigns a weaker but still significant role to domestic factors in explaining the Nixon Administration’s decision to push forward the SALT I talks. Yet given the absence of a grassroots anti-nuclear movement during this period, even Knopf‘s modest claims for the role of citizen’s activism seem exaggerated in this case.
Finally, the Reagan years provide the best example of a direct stimulus from the grassroots. The nuclear freeze movement swept the country like a wildfire. The decision to seek cooperation thus emerged mainly from the bottom up. This pattern across the cases suggests that the different views of the role of domestic politics are not mutually exclusive. The anti-nuclear weapons movement of 1980’s activated in a way where mechanism 1 created electoral incentives for raising the place of arms restraint on national agenda. It also interacted with divisions among political elites, thus bringing mechanism 2 into play and promoted Congressional efforts to get Reagan to give less emphasis on increasing US strength and more preference for achieving mutual restraint. Thus mass electoral pressure and coalition shifts brought arms control policy at the national agenda. However, Congressional action would not have taken the same course without the pressures exerted by freeze movement. It was the rise of freeze movement that first encouraged many Congressional members in the house to take up the issue of arms control. As compared to the freeze resolution put in the house, the alternative SALT, initially favoured by administration lacked grassroots support and of course, not preferred by many elites as well. Congress thus did not have much impact on administration policy but freeze movement was instrumental in bringing this change in the posture of Reagan administration.
The Soviet Union certainly tried to take advantage of the growing citizens’ movement in United States and Europe. Soviets took no concrete actions that offered a promise of mutual advantage, limiting them instead to rhetorical endorsements meant purely to serve Soviet interests. More importantly, Reagan began trying to demonstrate a commitment to arms control immediately after United States defence build up had borne fruit. Reagan administration had tried to forestall talks unless and until United States achieved its own strong defences against Soviet armaments. Efforts to proclaim a willingness to cooperate on arms control reached a new peak in early 1984. Despite the fact that Soviets had walked out of negotiations less than two months earlier, Reagan in January 1984 made a speech in which he argued that the build up of US military has placed the United States “in its strongest position in years” , and US government could now afford to be forthcoming in arms control talks. Thus the nuclear disarmament breakthroughs of the Reagan era--the INF Treaty (which eliminated intermediate range nuclear missiles from Europe) and the START I Treaty (which reduced United States and Soviet strategic nuclear arsenals) resulted from the Reagan administration’s nuclear buildup of the 1980s.
This book by Jeffrey Knopf ‘domestic society and International Cooperation’ provides useful insights into cooperation theory by emphasizing that domestic public opinion can also act as a source of formation of social values which in the long run influence foreign policy. Most scholarship assumes that state policies on pursuing international cooperation are set by national leaders, in response either to international conditions, or to their own interests and ideas. Whereas, this book explores the fact that ordinary citizens can make a difference in world politics in general and promoting international cooperation in particular. However, Knopf do not entirely resolve the problem that societal activism can lead to foreign policy change, he offers perhaps the most sophisticated discussion to date of how one might go about tracing and measuring the impact of societal activism on foreign policy. Knopf’s work shows the optimism about idealism that idealism can sometimes be quite realistic. Moreover Knopf’s work concentrated on the types of actors that have usually been neglected by many studies of international politics.
This book is no doubt a great source to have first hand information about commoners making a dent in US policies and has particularly aroused my interest in studying further on issues of international cooperation. However, Knopf gives insufficient weight to the transnational ties connecting the American anti-nuclear movement with those abroad, especially Western Europe.
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