Democratic Politics and Foreign Affairs

Whether foreign policy should be exempted from democratic politics has been discussed since the early days of modern democracy. While this debate has oscillated between executive-friendly and democracy-friendly positions, it has neglected the role of political parties as essential actors in democratic decision-making and in providing cues to the public more broadly. Institutionalist and ideational theories of the so-called Democratic Peace in particular have neglected political parties, even though they silently assume that foreign and security policy is a matter of party-political contestation. Therefore, the theoretical framework outlined in this chapter also draws on scholarship in Foreign Policy Analysis that examined the role of ‘government ideology’. It suggests two propositions to inform the empirical analyses, namely 1) that foreign affairs are systematically contested, rather than shielded from democratic politics; 2) that party-political contestation is structured along the left/right dimension.

Contestation and Politicization of Security and Defence Policy

Votes in parliament reveal the degree to which foreign affairs are contested and politicized. Data from the US Congress since its first session in 1789 confirm the established narrative that foreign affairs have become politicized since the Vietnam War but also qualify the politicization narrative by showing that post-Vietnam levels of contestation are far from unusual if compared to the first 150 years of Congressional voting. While levels of contestation vary, foreign affairs have never been fully exempted from democratic politics. An analysis of voting behaviour in the German and the Dutch parliament confirm that democratic politics does indeed not stop at the water’s edge. A new dataset of deployment votes in eleven countries shows that dissent is also common in votes on military interventions but also highlights differences across countries. In many countries, the government is successful in building a broad coalition in support of the military intervention in question. The rising numbers of deployment votes indicate that military interventions have gained in saliency since the end of the Cold War.

Conclusions and Outlook

Summarizing the various findings from the empirical chapters, this chapter concludes that party politics does matter for external relations and that democratic politics does not stop at the water’s edge. However, the concluding chapter discusses a number of caveats and qualifications to this general finding: first, party-political contestation over foreign affairs is often less intense than over domestic politics; second, party positions do not simply translate into state policy when parties enter government; third, party positions develop in interaction with external events, especially if parties are in government. Altogether, party politics is best understood as an independent and thus far understudied factor in explanations of foreign policy that interacts with other domestic politics variables, such as a state’s institutional structure, and international ones, such as a state’s international position or exposure to threats. The conclusion closes with suggestions for further research. (Populist) far-right parties and parties in the ‘Global South’ are identified in particular as areas for future research, as both have barely been studied systematically and both are very likely to have an impact on the liberal international order and world politics more broadly.

The Party Politics of Foreign and Security Policy

Analyses of party manifestos, of expert judgements on party positions, and of parties’ actual behaviour when voting on military missions all show that party-political contestation is structured along the left/right dimension. Support for the military and its interventions is systematically related to the left/right dimension in a skewed inverted U-curve: support is weakest at the far left and increases as one moves along the left/right axis to the centre right where it reaches its peak. The far right is less supportive then the centre right but less opposed than the far left. The relation to the ‘new politics’ dimension is shaped very similarly but is generally weaker. Party-political contestation of military missions in the post-Communist party systems in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe follows a different pattern than elsewhere. In the post-Communist party systems, the relationship between left/right and support of military interventions is weaker, and the relationship with the ‘new politics’ dimension is either weak or even points in the opposite direction as in Western Europe. It is important to note, however, that the influence of the left/right dimension is not limited to Western Europe. As the manifestos of various non-European countries show, the correlation can also be found in Asia, Oceania, Africa, and Latin America.

Debating Military Interventions

Parliamentary debates on the military missions in Afghanistan and against Daesh in Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom are analysed to demonstrate that political parties systematically differ in the way they frame the use of armed force. The analyses provide strong evidence for a left/right difference in approaching conflict generally. Left, and particularly radical left parties, exhibit ‘spiral model thinking’, i.e. a critical reflection on how one’s own policy contributes to the adversary’s behaviour. From this perspective, the threats posed by the Taliban and the jihadists of Daesh are not simply given, but their severity, at least in part, results from the intervening countries’ policy. In contrast, parties on the right have a higher tendency to take the nation state as their prime reference point and to argue in terms of national interests and national security. References to humanitarian universal values can be found across the political spectrum. A MANOVA analysis shows that an MP’s party family is a stronger predictor of the frames she will evoke than her nationality, further underlining the relevance of party politics for the study of military interventions and foreign policy more broadly.

Introduction and Plan of the Book

The notion that politics stops—and should stop—at the water’s edge is widespread in foreign policy analysis and foreign policymaking. The notion suggests that party politics becomes inappropriate, if not dangerous, to the national interest if a country faces an external threat or an international crisis. Scholars of foreign affairs have only mildly protested against the idea that external relations are exempted from democratic politics. This is least surprising with a view to the (neo-)realist school of thought that is well known for its emphasis on national interests and structural forces. Constructivist scholars of political culture and of securitization, however, have barely paid more attention to party politics than their realist colleagues. The disciplinary divide between scholars of international relations and those of comparative politics has not helped to overcome the neglect of political parties in the study of foreign policy. The chapter presents the plan of the book and introduces two lead questions: 1) to what extent is foreign, security, and defence politics exempted from party politics? and 2) how is party-political contestation in foreign, security, and defence politics structured?