“Ideas” and their impact on foreign policy are the focus of a burgeoning research in Foreign Policy Analysis. Usually, they are depicted as either a “motivating force for action” or as a “legitimizing corollary for the furthering of other interests”. What is more, however, they often serve as a residual explanatory category in case all other conventional explanations fail. Our approach, in contrast to this, seeks to address “ideas” – generalized views on what is and what ought to be, i.e. worldviews – in a way that engages them as phenomena with a distinctive quality. Hence, we focus on a specific interpretive methodology for assessing their impact on foreign policy. As against the empirical field of politics in the Western hemisphere, we start from the hypothesis that ideas play a central role in explaining the policies: strategies, choices, actions and non-actions pursued by the main protagonists.
Our paper poses two main questions, one empirical and one methodological. We ask, first, which role do ideas concerning hierarchy play in current hemispheric politics? Inevitably this leads to a second, more methodological concern: How to assess the role of ideas in foreign policy making, how to ground our interest in their impact (constitutive a/o causal) in our research design? As for the last set of questions, we employ a specific way of interpretive process tracing which highlights the necessity not to solely focus upon grand statements of decision-makers but also upon the practices employed in specific situations and the justifications for acting so put forth by the protagonists.
