Domestic - foreign, governmental - non-governmental, political - economic: pairs of terms commonly used in Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) to describe and explain different aspects of policy making processes and policy outcomes. Notwithstanding the enduring appeal of these terms, it seems that their ‘conceptual borders’ become increasingly blurred in the actual world. Whereas this uncertainty is sometimes portrayed as the cause of a chaotic international environment, the paper asserts that it is the epiphenomenon of the ‘multi-facetedness’ of the global milieu. The emergence of new influential global actors (not necessarily governmental) and the seeming omnipotence of global markets have produced a highly diversified international environment, challenging the building block of international society, sovereign statehood.
In view of this challenge to the state - the principal unit of analysis for traditional FPA - it is claimed that the discipline has, today, a double ‘mission’: first, to deconstruct the aforementioned challenge and second, to adopt its analytical tools to the descriptive and explanatory research needs of a foreign policy under transformation. In this perspective, it is suggested that the different faces of the global milieu constitute varying depictions of a Janus-faced reality, combining two major concerns for the international society: prosperity and security. To the extent that modern foreign policy making is or has to be structured around these two axes, the analytical ‘settings’ of FPA need to be reconfigured, in order to be compatible with an interdisciplinary approach of foreign policy. Hence, the paper argues that key deliverable of such a reorientation is the interruption of a long course of mutual neglect between FPA and International Political Economy (IPE). Such a ‘cross-fertilization’ between FPA and IPE requires an attentive and flexible methodological approach, but it offers, at the same time, the appropriate lens for the analysis of a foreign policy navigating between prosperity and security.
