Affective attachments and foreign policy: Israel and the 1993 Oslo Accords
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066110366055 |
| Author | Brent E. Sasley |
| Published date | 01 December 2010 |
| Date | 01 December 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
European Journal of
International Relations
Affective attachments and
16(4) 687–709
© The Author(s) 2010
foreign policy: Israel and
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the 1993 Oslo Accords
DOI: 10.1177/1354066110366055
ejt.sagepub.com
Brent E. Sasley
University of Texas at Arlington, USA
Abstract
Although the important role of emotions in decision-making has been highlighted in
the psychology, neural science, and decision research literatures, this conclusion has
not been widely adopted in foreign policy analysis and International Relations (IR). Of
the work that has been done, much of it has been focused on public perceptions and
the impact on foreign policy, but not on elites and the actual decisions of foreign policy.
This article seeks to address this imbalance by examining the role of one element of
emotion — affect — on key foreign policy decision-makers. It argues that the greater
the emotional attachment a leader has to an object, the less flexible she is in foreign
policy toward that object. The model is used to explain a critical puzzle in IR: Israel’s
decision to pursue and sign the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Keywords
affect, decision-making, emotion, foreign policy, Oslo Accords
Introduction
Do leaders have emotions? That is, are they subject to the same emotional processes that
members of the general population are? Intuitively one would think so — after all, we are
all human. In Political Science, emotions have recently been used to study public percep-
tions toward political objects and events in a domestic politics context (e.g., Clarke et al.,
2006; Marcus, 2000; Sniderman et al., 1991; Westen 2007). But our theoretical models in
International Relations (IR) and foreign policy analysis (FPA) almost never account for such
processes.1 Two of the more recent and dynamic research projects on individuals in foreign
policy-making — prospect theory and poliheuristic theory — are both focused on cognitive
(or rational) processes.2 In a recent textbook written for university students of FPA, less than
a handful of pages discuss the role of emotions on foreign policy decision-making; and there
Corresponding author:
Brent E. Sasley, Department of Political Science, University of Texas at Arlington, PO Box 19539,
Arlington, Texas, 76019, USA.
Email: bsasley@uta.edu
688
European Journal of International Relations 16(4)
are no chapters on this new field of research. Indeed, the short discussion on emotion is only
part of a chapter on rationality in decision-making (see Smith et al., 2008).
There has been some preliminary work done on emotions in FPA and IR.3 Both Neta
Crawford (2000) and Jonathan Mercer (2006) have called for including emotions in the
study of foreign policy-making, but neither links them into a causal process. Geva and her
colleagues (see Geva and Sirin, 2008) have explicitly focused on emotions and foreign
policy-making, but these have generally been lab experiments conducted on university
students. While useful components of a research agenda on emotions and policy, they may
not be accurate reflections of ‘real-life’ leaders making decisions in all the complexity and
uncertainty of world politics and so need to be complemented by studies of these leaders.
Jacques Hymans (2006) is one of the first to explicitly link specific emotions (fear and
pride) to foreign policy through an examination of decision-makers working on critical
issues in international relations (nuclear proliferation). In a world of incomplete informa-
tion and ambiguity, emotions help guide decision-makers toward or away from a nuclear
option. Hymans’ focus on elites — the actual decision-makers — is also relevant, as
most of the literature even in Political Science more generally examines the emotions of
the population in general. His study illustrates that it is possible to study leaders and trace
the impact of their emotions on foreign policy.4
The lack of theoretical development on emotions and foreign policy-making is puz-
zling on two accounts. One, emotion is now widely recognized in three key disciplines
as being critically important for understanding how decisions are made: psychology,
neural science, and decision research. Surely foreign policy decisions can be understood
as similarly arrived at as other types of decisions. Two, IR scholars have always liked to
apply concepts from psychology to their own work. Yet they have not done so with the
use of emotional processes, continuing to prioritize cognitive models.
This article seeks to help fill this gap in understanding how emotions impact on the
foreign policy-making process. It does so in two ways. First, it focuses, like Hymans, on
decision-makers. Second, it examines the impact of a different emotion, affect. To this
end, the article is organized as follows. The first section examines evidence from other
fields of research, to illustrate how the role of affect in decision-making has been dem-
onstrated. This section also includes an effort to define both emotion and affect, a condi-
tional task at best given disagreements over such definitions. The second part applies
what has been learned to foreign policy-making. Here I hypothesize that leaders who feel
strongly about a foreign policy object are more likely to rely on the affect heuristic to
make decisions regarding that object, which in turn limits their ability to consider new
information and options. I turn next to my case study, Israel’s decision to pursue and sign
the 1993 Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Here I look at exist-
ing explanations for Oslo, and then through a comparison of two Israeli prime ministers
demonstrate how affect can be used to explain foreign policy decisions. The conclusion
discusses some of the implications of this approach.
Affect in decision-making
The lack of attention to emotions in IR is partly due to the inability of researchers to
agree on a definition of emotion; without definitions, it becomes difficult to measure
Sasley
689
their effects.5 Emotions are widely viewed as mental states, but beyond that there is no
agreement on what they are — what should be included as an ‘emotion’ (for overviews
of these disagreements see Elster [1999] and Kagan [2007]). There is also no agreement
on where they come from — whether from neural-biological (Damasio, 1994), psycho-
logical (Smith and Lazarus, 1993), or social contexts (Parkinson et al., 2005).
Finally, there are differences over whether emotion and cognition work hand-in-hand
(Damasio, 1994; Pham, 2007), whether one precedes and drives the other (Ellis, 2005;
Loewenstein et al., 2001), or whether they are completely independent of each other (see
the debate between Lazarus [1984] and Zajonc [1984]). Some have even argued that
instead of defining emotions, we should just identify and define the circumstances that
surround an emotion (see Elster, 1999: 246–283; Parkinson et al., 2005: 3–4).
A good working definition of emotion would recognize its multifaceted nature. Michel
Tuan Pham defines emotions as: ‘complex states of [an] organism characterized by
changes in automatic nervous system arousal accompanied by distinct physiological
expressions, specific action tendencies, and subjective feeling experiences of a certain
valence’ (Pham, 2007: 156; see also Crawford, 2000: 125). If we accept that such a broad
definition is necessary to do justice to the wide-ranging and complex elements that make
up ‘emotions,’ then we can move on to focus on specific emotions, which in turn will
help us narrow down our operational concepts.
My purpose here is to discuss one aspect of emotions: affect. As with emotions, there
is some disagreement over what affect is and what purpose it serves, mostly because it is
usually considered to be a very broad spectrum of feelings (see, e.g., Peters, 2006).
According to one standard review of the psychology literature, affect is defined as ‘a
generic term for a whole range of preferences, evaluations, moods, and emotions’ (Fiske
and Taylor, 1991: 410–411). Others refer to affect as, conversely, part of the emotional
experience more generally (Pham, 2007: 156). Still others distinguish between different
kinds of affect: integral affect is associated with a particular stimulus, while incidental
affect is associated with non-stimulus factors, but which is misattributed to those stimuli
(see Bodenhausen, 1993).
The most effective definition of affect comes from decision researchers, and is both
broad and simple. Affect can be defined simply as ‘the positive and negative feelings
evoked by a stimulus’ (Betsch, 2005: 41). This covers the essence of affect: general
valence feelings toward something (see also Finucane et al., 2003: 328-329; Isen, 2001;
Peters, 2006: 459). Affect is thus a broad, overall mental and physiological framework
an individual undergoes for long periods of time, possibly his entire life, divided into
general positive or negative feelings. Affect encompasses feelings toward an object,
event, or person — with feelings being defined as mental states distinct from the cogni-
tive processes associated with thinking.
Affect is used in decision-making by providing a short cut from our thinking/feeling
processes to a decision. Psychologists have long recognized that, given the inherent
ambiguity and informational complexity in the world, the mental simplification of reality
is the critical way in which individuals...
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