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Ideology, Values, and Foreign Policy

Ideology is a prototypical “contested concept,” though competing definitions can generally be sorted into pejorative and nonpejorative categories. Pejorative definitions consider ideology to be a set of false beliefs about the world and how it operates, typically facilitating exploitation or injustice. Nonpejorative definitions consider ideology to be something neutral (or its normative dimension to be undetermined a priori), a kind of systematized thinking about politics or political economy; a worldview. It is the latter definition that is most common in international relations scholarship outside of the Marxian tradition, and it will be used here. Values are commonly defined as rank-ordered ideas about what is desirable, transcending specific situations, that guide behavioral choices and influence evaluations. Given these two definitions, values are subsumed under ideology; they form the normative dimension of ideology. For example, A may value both self-determination and democracy (and A may see elections as a means of ensuring self-determination); but if A’s ideology pictures the international system as dominated by a superpower that regularly interferes in elections, she may support the decision of a less powerful state to avoid elections to evade the superpower’s interference. Ideology, as a systematized way of thinking about politics, can help adjudicate conflicts between values—as in this example, between self-determination and democracy. International relations scholarship has traditionally overlooked the influence of ideology and values on foreign policy and public opinion about foreign policy. Considerations of power maximization and balancing were commonly hypothesized to overwhelm any influence of ideational factors, such that the latter could be safely ignored as mere epiphenomena of the former. More recently, the variously named ideational, interpretivist, or constructivist turn in international relations has opened the way for IR scholars to investigate the effects of ideas within the international system. Foreign policy analysis, operating at a less abstract level, has been more open to ideational factors as influences on policymakers. Yet a great deal remains to be explored about the way ideology and values constrain and influence foreign policy decision-makers, and public opinion (which, in turn, may constrain and influence decision-makers). Ideology and values can be conceptualized at the micro level as beliefs held by individuals and at the macro level as widely shared beliefs (akin to “social representations”) enforced, inculcated, and/or reproduced by institutions.