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During the past decade much attention has been given, in studies of Soviet foreign policy formation, to institutions in processes on the one hand and to beliefs on the other. Theoretical advances in the social sciences have provided each of these two concerns with a coherent—albeit unsystematically applied—framework. Studies concerned with institutions and processes have been informed, to varying degrees, by organization theory; those concerned with beliefs have used insights from cognitive theory. Although neither of these framework is fully developed in its application to the analysis of Soviet foreign policy formation, the outline of the approach that is defined by their joint focus can be discerned.
The principal concern of both organization theory and cognitive
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theory is information processing. Organization theory and cognitive theory are, respectively, the structural and behavioral aspects of the processing of information by persons. If we call their combined application a cybernetic approach, we direct attention to what happens to information during the various stages of decision making that lie between cognition (of a situation abroad) and choice (of an action or policy in response to that situation).
The cybernetic approach, in its most abstract expression, comprises norms, structures, and behavior. Soviet foreign policy behavior seen as the output of a system that processes information on the international situation. The analyst attempts to explain that behavior on the basis of the system's structures, which transform such information according to sets of norms. Intrapersonal structures transform information according to cognitive norms; interpersonal structures transform information according to organizational norms. Two sorts of organizational norms may be distinguished. If the organization involved is formal, the norms are institutional; if it is informal, the norms are noninstitutional. The cybernetic analyst, having a general understanding of the intrapersonal and interpersonal structures through which information passes, attempts, by following its transformations, to infer the particular cognitive and organizational norms that animate those structures.
Six recent monographs on Soviet foreign policy formation are reviewed here with an eye to determining their contribution to the study of cognitive and organizational issues.[1] These issues are inseparable in practice, because intrapersonal and interpersonal information-processing structures are not mutually independent (i.e., "where you stand depends on where you sit"). In the second section of this article, we shall discuss both sorts of issues, paying attention to the question of relating cognitive methods of analysis to particular conceptualizations of Soviet foreign policy formation. At the same time, we shall examine what progress has been made toward applying an organizational process approach to the analysis of Soviet foreign policy formation; for despite Valenta's success in using the bureaucratic politics
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approach, it is as true today as it was in 1973 that "the literature [contains] no full-fledged attempt and a few partial efforts to apply the [organizational process] approach to Soviet decisionmaking."[2]
In the third section, organizational issues are addressed with special reference to questions of inference in traditional (Kremlinological) methods of Soviet policy-making analysis. The items under review exemplify some of the difficulties of applying such techniques under present-day conditions of Soviet organizational complexity. We shall discuss the overlap between the organizations that make Soviet propaganda and those that form Soviet foreign policy, and specify the implications of this overlap for the application of inferential techniques.
In the concluding section we delineate the significance of cognitive and organizational studies for general conceptualizations of how the Soviet system works, and discuss the place of such studies in cumulative knowledge about the Soviet Union.
In recent years, organizational aspects of Soviet foreign policy formation have been investigated more systematically than cognitive aspects. That is partly the result of grantee Allison's research, which provides a coherent framework for investigating organizational aspects of decision making, both formal and informal.[3] No comparable unified approach to the investigation of its cognitive aspects has yet been elaborated.
Valenta's main analytical tool is the bureaucratic politics approach, which he combines skillfully with the organizational process approach. He infers the interest of an organization from the mission that is supposed to perform,[4] and he evaluates possible policy decisions in terms of "payoffs" related to that mission. Because Valenta uses the term "payoffs" also in reference to the potential gains or losses to intra-elite coalitions, he is able to treat functional bureaucracies (apparaty) both as organizational actors and as organizational resources for members of the elite (pp. 20, 22, 27, 78–82, 108, 114, 155). His use of the organizational process approach is at its most continuous, con-
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sistent, and constructive in the analysis of events falling between the Bratislava conference on August 3, and the Soviet intervention, on August 21, 1968. He illustrates how pressure for intervention came from some bureaucrats responsible for ideological affairs,[5] from Ukrainian party officials and the K.G.B., from some segments of the armed forces, and from some East European leaders (pp. 97–118). The most noticeable lacuna in this otherwise lucid analysis is that the organizational pressures treated are almost exclusively for intervention (see also pp. 32–33, 63). They are probably easier to detect than organizational pressures against intervention, which have the advantage of standard operating procedures and bureaucratic inertia. Valenta limits his treatment of routine operations in Soviet foreign policy formulations to the important issue gathering and evaluating information (pp. 123–26, 155–57).
Valenta's application of the bureaucratic politics approach is straight-forward; he draws heavily on memoirs and interviews and puts the information contained in them into a systematic analytical framework. He concludes that, when this approach is tailored to Soviet conditions, it "elucidation importance of the players' perceived payoffs, the coalition politics and organizational maneuvering, and the silent bargaining among top bureaucrats"; coalitions in Soviet politics "seemed to be loose, issue-oriented, heterogeneous alliances of convenience among subgroups for a temporary common purpose" (pp. 155, 17).[6] The latter observation may apply more to the ruling elite than to organizations as actors. On several occasions, Valenta refers to Soviet decision makers as "uncommitted thinkers" (pp. 7-9, 157). This term is taken from the work of John D. Steinbrenner, who distinguishes among grooved, uncommitted and theoretical thinkers.[7] The distinction is
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useful because it associates the level of abstraction predominate in the thinker's mind with his or her organizational position. In Steinbrenner's framework, specialist policy advisors would be called theoretical thinkers.
Eran's volume is essentially an institutional history of the role of research organizations and researchers in Soviet foreign policy formation. His overall historical analysis is animated by market metaphor of supply and demand: the government and party bureaucracies are consumers of such services as personnel training, ideological legitimation, and information gathering and processing, and the research institutes are the suppliers. The last part of the book (pp. to 227–76) describes the proliferation of such institutes since Khrushchev, notes their various fields of specialization, and briefly discusses their increasing functional differentiation. Eran gives the reader more than just a history, however, for he includes a long and sensitive analysis of the "debate on bourgeois nationalism and revolutionary democracy" that took place between the Institute of the Peoples of Asia and the Institute of World Economics and International Relations from 1956 to 1964 (pp. 161–222). Khrushchev's policy toward the Third World was the issue under dispute at a time in the Soviet Union had not chosen between local communist parties and national regimes that were anti-imperialist but not socialist. Eran successfully demonstrates the existence of informal organizational links between the debate that was going on in the research community and the conflict within the party elite. The institutes became, in effect, formal organizational resources to be marshaled on one side or the other of the dispute.
Spielmann, without offering a detailed case study, attempts to elaborate a new analytical framework tailored to the investigation of how Soviet leaders decide which a strategic arms and systems to construct. He suggests that the organizational process and bureaucratic politics approach is maybe collapsed into a single category of "pluralistic" decision making when they are applied to the Soviet Union, and that the rational actor approach falls within the framework of the "totalitarian" perspective on the Soviet system. Against the pluralistic and totalitarian points of view, Spielmann posits a "national leadership decision making perspective" that would "[focus] on the Soviet leaders, not just as a strategic [rational actor] calculators, not just as individuals who might succumb to constituent [pluralistic] pressures, but as leaders who have a country to run" and who may bring other considerations to bear on defense decisions (p. 124). Thus, analysts of Soviet strategic arms and decisions should not ignore budgetary trade-offs which leaders
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must make between defense and non-defense sectors, or the effects of patronage on resource allocation. But Spielmann's only discussion of how this perspective might be used in a particular case—Khrushchev's decision on the SS–6 system—is to brief to illustrate the putative advantages of this approach convincingly (pp. 124–34). It is probable that the two pluralistic approaches, separately applied, will be more productive than the national leadership approach. Spielmann does not suggest that this last should supplant the former two, but rather that a complement to them; and to the degree that "the nature of the data should determine [which] decision making approaches [are used]" (p. 9), it may be useful for strategic studies. In this connection, his chapter on the data problem is noteworthy for its direct and frank criticism of the use and nonuse of data in his field (pp. 93–108), although it contains disappointingly little on the issue of inference (but see pp. 146–147, notes 6–8, and p. 167, note four).
While Jerry F. Hough's concept of institutional pluralism[8] has drawn attention to organizations other than the party, it has led to a discounting of the importance of the party in studies of Soviet policy making. Spielmann's "national leadership" approach reasserts, if only indirectly, the primacy of the party in such matters. Kass also tries to go beyond institutional pluralism, but in a different direction. She finds that each press organ expresses only one point of view, but concludes that the bureaucracy to which the organ is attached cannot be unitary; thus, the publication presents the views of only the group "in ascendance" within the organization (pp. 213–35). This guess is plausible, but it is logically unconnected with her analysis and has no into her for basis in her study. Likewise her conclusion that there exists a Soviet military-industrial complex—while quite possibly correct—is drawn unsystematically and presented in ways that will be familiar to many readers.[9]
One of Kass's problems is that she does not distinguish between two levels of abstraction on the part of Soviet policy makers: general philosophical attitudes and specific policy positions. This lack of distinction
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is the source of much confusion among many analysts of Soviet foreign policy formation. Spechler encounters a problem when she addresses empirically the question of the existence of a Soviet military-industrial complex. Among the six central publications in the Soviet Union, she detects four elite opinion groups, each of which "appears to formulate its Middle Eastern policy [on the basis of] its image of and attitude toward the West, most importantly, the United States, and its vision of the future of U.S.–Soviet relations" (pp. 63–64). When the government and military newspapers display divergent concepts of these images, Spechler concludes that she has no evidence to confirm the existence of a Soviet military-industrial complex. Nevertheless, when she discusses the four elite opinion groups in detail, spelling out the policy significance of their general attitudes, she does see a potential community of interest on the specific issue of arms sales among some organizations in the government and military bureaucracies (pp. 64–70, esp. p. 67).
Jönsson, in his case study of Soviet behavior during the nuclear test ban negotiations with the United States, describes an unambiguous correspondence between general attitudes and specific policy positions: the general attitudes based on the image of the United States, and the specific policy issue is whether to sign a treaty with Washington. By examining the shifting balances of images among domestic Soviet actors (as well as in the Sino–Soviet dyad), Jönsson establishes a contrast with traditional game theory. Whereas the latter "tends to postulate an objective reality," his approach "assumes multiple subjective realities" and so "represents … a substitution of 'psycho-logic' for pure logic" (pp. 12–13). Spielmann suggests elements of an organizational approach to the formulation of Soviet strategic policy; Jönsson provides a cognitive perspective on the matter. In the process, he applies a qualitative game-theoretical framework, making useful empirical distinctions among subgames, supergames, and auxiliary games (pp. 7–12, 38, 51–53, 74–76, 135–36). On the question of a Soviet military-industrial complex, Jönsson concludes that the Soviet military was internally unified on the issue of negotiating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and that "[d]ata on the views of industrial managers are inconclusive but suggest orthodox leanings on the part of heavy industry" (p. 206).
A distinction between general philosophical attitudes and particular policy preferences will contribute to eliminating the confusion between the "interest group" and "tendency of articulation" approaches to Soviet foreign policy formation. The interest-group approach was intro-
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duced into the study of Soviet politics in response to the need for analytical construct that could be applied to conflict over specific issues of immediate policy relevance. Because such issues touch directly on organizational goals, the premise that functional bureaucracies have unitary interests is implicit in this approach. The tendency-of-articulation approach, on the other hand, was developed with reference to climates of opinion that coalesce around relatively general attitudes. It recognizes the possibility that policy preferences may conflict even within a single bureaucratic organization.[10]
Cognitive methods now exists that would permit these two approaches to be formally differentiated according to the level of abstraction implicit in each. The cognitive-map technique, which is concerned with influences that particular policy preferences have on choices, is appropriate to the interest-group approach; the tendency-of-articulation approach is suitable for the application of the operational-code technique. Indeed, the criteria along which Jönsson and Spechler delineate their opinion groups are basic operational-code dimensions: image of self and image of other.[11] Previous research has clarified the specific differences between the operational-code and cognitive-map perspectives on decision making.[12] In principle, a perspective grounded in the organizational process underlying Soviet foreign policy decisions is not necessary to the use of cognitive techniques. Cognitive mapping, for instance, has been used where plentiful elite opinion data permit an analytical focus on bureaucratic politics, to the exclusion of consider-
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ations arising from the organizational process;[13] in practice, however, the probability of finding high-grade data in the requisite abundance is small in a Soviet context.
Cognitive methods offer an avenue for systematic investigation of collective decision making. A study of the course of a policy debate over time could shed light on the subject of coalition building in Soviet foreign policy making. Research suggests that the operational-code and cognitive-map approaches can be integrated within a unified framework that draws and literature on artificial intelligence.[14] The question—which of several competing operational codes dominates in Soviet foreign policy formation—could be addressed from this point of view, with empirical reference to how each code may influence particular policy decisions.
Cognitive methods are appropriate to the investigation of organizational processes in Soviet foreign policy formation, particularly the role of the press. They provide a vehicle for testing, on a substantive basis, hypotheses concerning the "rules of the game" that govern the articulation and aggregation of interests prepress organs. For example, if analysis of a policy debate establishes the presence of two (or more) opposing points of view in Pravda but only one in Trud, then conclusions are possible concerning the functions of the different publications. Or, if Izvestiia and Krasnaia zvezda express consonant views three times out of four, a qualitative conclusion could be sustained that they usually agree, even the one could not conclude on the basis of pre-established confidence levels that they always agree. In such instance, moreover, deviant-case analysis would permit the formulation of hypotheses concerning the conditions under which they may disagree.
In evaluating the studies under review, it is important to ask how analysts of Soviet decision making know what they know. The answer is that they usually infer the dynamics behind a decision from written "propaganda"—a term they construe in the broadest sense. (Propaganda may include anything printed in the Soviet press, tran-
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scribed from Soviet radio, published by Soviet researchers, or distributed by Soviet publishers.) Analysts construct hypotheses about latent policy conflict in the process of interpreting the manifest content of such propaganda. The most consistent and probable set of such hypotheses is then said to explain the propaganda observed.
Such hypotheses are most often constructed inferentially. Alexander George, in his study of Allied analyses of Nazi propaganda, distinguished a "direct method" of inference, based on the frequency of a content indicator's presence or on its intensity, from an "indirect method" of inference, based on its presence or absence. The direct method relies on quantitative correlations of a noncausal nature; in Soviet studies the direct method is used only infrequently, due to the difficulty of discovering data numerous enough to permit its application. The indirect method, which is more prevalent,
may be likened to an effort to reconstruct the missing pieces in a mosaic. … [T]he analyst rehearses in his mind the different possible versions of each particular missing variable which he wants to infer, trying to decide which version is the most plausible, given the known value of the content variable and the known or postulated values of other antecedent conditions.[15]
It is disappointing that Kass, who surveyed fifteen thousand individual press items did not follow George's recommendation to use the direct and indirect methods for hypothesis-forming and −testing respectively, "[making] such transitions from the direct to the indirect approach … quite deliberately."[16] The transitions that Kass makes are few in number of unsystematic (pp. 11, 79, 86, 11, 172); it is not always clear whether her inferences from Content Characteristic to Intention/Policy proceed by way of an intermediate term (pp. 31k 48, 52, 77, 82, 113). Spechler, on the other hand, follows an indirect method quite deliberately, although she is not explicit about the inferential steps; still, her analysis of Pravda's coverage of the 1973 war between Israel and its neighbors is particularly instructive in the use of the method (pp. 21–25).
The indirect method of inference constructed by George in his study of Allied propaganda analysis during World War II is reproduced in Figure 1; the arrows indicate the direction in which inference proceeds. George notes that this model is "appropriate for inferring only the [particular missing variables] that were of interest to the [Allied]
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| Source: George (fn. 15), 41. |
analysts."[17] Similar techniques remain appropriate for stuyding Soviet foreign formation. It is instructive, for example, to compare some of Valenta's conclusions with those arrived at by David W. Paul, whose earlier and shorter study of the Soviet decision to intervene in Czechoslovakia relied exclusively on materials from the Soviet press.[18] First, Paul's inference—on the basis of a survey of Izvestiia—to Kosygin's cool attitude toward the prospect of intervention is confirmed by later primary sources that Valenta was able to use. Second, Paul's inference that the decision to intervene was not made before the Bratislava Conference in early August, is also confirmed. Changes in Soviet decision making since Stalin's death do not by themselves make Kremlinological tehniques obsolete; what is needed is to refine these techniques formally, building on George's work and incorporating organizational and cognitive approaches that are appropriate to the analysis of the Soviet system's increased complexity. Kremlinologists use many of the variables discussed by George, but in different ways and for different purposes. One difference from the method portrayed in Figure 1 is:
- Situational Factors reported in newspapers betcome textual Content Characteristics; from the Situational Content Characteristics in a text, the analyst infers the writer's "definition of the situation," i.e., an Estimate.
An analyst of the Soviet press does not use Soviet newspapers in the belief that decision makers read them in order to discover their policy options; nevertheless, interviews with current and former Soviet journalists, and with Western correspondents who have worked in Moscow, indicate that the Soviet press does portray contrasting points of view on important matters of substance. A prominent member of the journalism faculty at Moscow University explained the issue this way:
Any opinion based on sound analysis is taken into consideration in reaching a decision. Ideas are the most important things; journalistgs simply express them, stressing the points they see to be important in
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international affairs. If you write articles of interest and importance, they will unavoidably present your views. Different leading journlaists evaluate current conditions differently.[19]
Specialized journalists, operational propagandists, and propaganda planners help to draw up the reports that form the basis for policy decisions and they also act as advisors to decision makers. Some members of research institutes also work for either the International Department or the International Information Department of the Central Committee. All of these policy analysts have an inherent interest in making accurate evaluations and predictions: if their prognoses were incorrect, their advice would in the future be discounted and their status would decline. These advisors want to continue to make their knowledge available and to present it in such a way that the policy they prefer will prevail.
Such opinions may find their way into the Soviet press. Some newspapers symmetrically reflect the view of—and are to some extent manipulated by—various groups in the Central Comittee and its Secretariat. These groupings may be institutionally based (as in the case of the International Information Department's access to Literaturnaia gazeta), but they need not be so (as in the case of the Russian nationalists' coalsescence around Sovetskaia Rossiia). The process by which these connections evolve is informal and ad hoc: when members of different groupings get into executive responsibility in different newspapers, loose cliques are established around editorial boards, and it becomes known information that different groupings of people think in different ways.[20]
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There is another way through which such differences may find expression. The various treatments that are given to the same story by various Soviet newspapers may reflect, over and above mere functional differentiation and audience targeting, the different perceptual filters of different editorial boards. In turn, these filters may reflect the different "evoked sets" on which the different interpretations are based that policy advisors may present to those who would ask them for their opinions. (George's direct method of inference is appropriate for examining these differences.) The link between editorial coverage and expressed policy options is less obvious, but no less clear.
Although the rules of the Soviet press do not permit overt foreign policy advocacy in print before an authoritative decision has been taken,[21] there is a fine line between the evaluation of the present and the recommendation on how to alter it; the latter is often implied in the language of the former. An analyst of the Soviet press may undertake to uncover this hidden meaning. However, "what we want to understand is not something hidden behind the text, but something disclosed in front of it."[22] That is to say: any text being analyzed was written by the author with some audience(s) in mind who will react in some way(s). It was, in this sense, written with reference to a future. That future is what is "disclosed in front of" a text, what the analyst tries to understand; it is the basis for the interpretation that he makes in extricating from the text its meaning for policy. In other words:
- From the author's Estimate of the present situation, the analyst infers his Expectation for the future, which is disclosed in front of that Estimate.
"In this process, the mediating role played by structural analysis [is central]."[23] Structural analysis here means only the use of symbols, and their mutual relations, to make the interpretation. In the present instance, such symbols are concepts expressed in words. The authors of the texts that the analyst examines manipulate such symbols; this
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process has been called "esoteric communication."[24] By hypothesizing particular relations among these symbols (phrases), the analyst builds an interrelated structure. Codewords embedded in the ideology-laden language of the policy debate, reflected in the press, are explicated by being put into mutual relations. By way of that structure of relations, the analyst infers from the overt discourse the policy covertly advocated. In terms of George's variables, this step may be expressed as follows:
- From the author's Expectation the analyst infers the author's Intention, i.e., the particular Policy that he intends to promote through the veiled language of esoteric communication.
It bears repeating that the foregoing discussion—which involves what George has called the logic-of-the-situation pattern of inference—applies when the Content Characteristics involved are Situational Factors. When a Content Characteristic in a text is not merely a report of a current event (i.e., when it is a Nonsituational Factor), the motive-belief pattern of inference comes into play. Epistemologically undergirded by philosophers who call it the Logical Connection Argument the motive-belief pattern posits that an actor does X because (motive) he thinks (belief) that in that way he can achieve Y.[25] In this pattern of inference, the analyst's procedure comprises the two steps illustrated in Figure 2. "In many cases," George remarks, "content characteristics which 'indicate' (permit the analyst to infer) the propagandist's goal or strategy can be readily spotted."[26] Although neither Kass nor
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Spechler provides much discussion of Propaganda Goal/Strategy, both authors recognize that a text may be directed at several audiences. These audience effects must be taken into account in inferent making. For example, the international audience of Pravda leads its editors to consider foreign reactions before deciding how to cover important international stories; the mass trade-union audience of Trud leads its editors to cover some stories different that would the editors of Krasnaia
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zvezda, whose military audience is more specialized. Such intention behavior may be called purposive. In order to avoid weak conclusions about internal policy debates, it is necessary to account for Nonsituational Content Characteristics such as the abbreviation of a report for lack of space; because these are present for reasons germane neither to the analyst's principal concern nor to the propagandist's, they may be said to result from Nonpurposive Propaganda Behavior.[27] Briefly put:
- Inference from Nonsituational Content Characteristics in the motive-belief pattern must proceed first to Nonpurposive Propaganda Behavior, so that the effects of standard editorial or reportorial procedures are not mistaken for policy conflict.
Both Spechler and Kass, for example, in making their interpretations, rely in part on the functional division of labor, with respect to audience targeting, among Soviet publications. Kass suggests that the function performed by a given bureaucracy may create an organizational interest that influences what appears in its newspaper (pp. 64, 202, 213–214), but then says little more on this subject. Spechler tends to infer that the views found in a press organ are those of the decision maker who heads the bureaucratic apparat for which the publication is assumed to speak (pp. 6–7, 15–16, 27, 35, 55, 61). Thus, she ascribes to the head of government the views expressed in the government newspaper Izvestiia, to the head of the trade-unions those in the rade-union newspaper Trud, and so forth. This approach runs the risk of ignoring the organizational complexity of the Central Committee, but a worse risk in this pattern of inference is overinterpretation. Such functional differences as exist among publications should not be taken, in the absence of other evidence, as indications of a disagreement over policy. Other evidence, suggesting that such differences actually reflect a policy disagreement, most often comes from inferences based on Situational Content Characteristics. Therefore:
- The inference from Nonsituational Content Characteristics to Nonpurposive Propaganda Behavior should be cross-checked against and reconciled with the inference from Situational Content Characteristics to the Estimate, described in (1) above.
- This having been done, inference may continue from Nonpurposive Propaganda Behavior to Propaganda Goal/Strategy; at the same time. the inference from Estimate to Expectation, specified in (2) above, may be re-evaluated as a result of the inference in (5).
From the standpoint of the text's author, Propaganda Goal/Strategy and Expectation respectively represent objective and subjective influ-
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ences on the text. From the standpoint of the analyst, they yield, for that reason, a strengthened inference based on the combination of the motive-belief and logic-of-the-situation patterns. Therefore:
- The original inference, to Intention/Policy, may be made jointly from Propaganda Goal/Strategy and Expectation.
The model of inference portrayed in Figure 3 synthesizes the seven steps that have emerged from the consideration of organizational and cognitive factors. This is a general model that can be adapted, in modified form, to the specific structure and operational procedures of particular propaganda organizations. Its top branch, based on the logic-of-the-situation pattern of inference, describes the process by which the analyst attempts to establish intersubjectivity with the author of the text. The bottom branch, based on the motive-belief pattern, describes the steps the analyst takes to insure that he does not impose, by overinterpretation, his own subjectivity on that of the text's author. In other words, generally speaking, the top branch portrays cognitive effects on a text's content, and the bottom branch controls for extrinsic organizational effects. These two procedures check one another and together contribute to the final inference.
 |
| The numbers refer to issues enumerated in the text; they do not necessarily correspond to the order in which the steps, which are interrelated, must be executed. |
In the end, neither the study of who has power over individual decisions, nor that of how the broad contours of policy are formed, in enough. Each is necessary, but even together they are insufficient. James Rosenau has succinctly stated the problem by observing that
hypotheses that seek to predict decisional behavior are too narrow to provide more than partial comprehension of [a state's external behavior],
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and hypotheses that seek to predict policy behavior are too broad to provide an incisive understanding of [it. The problem with using decisions as dependent variables is that] a society must engage in a series of behaviors and not in a single behavior in order to preserve or alter a situation abroad. …
[But policies,] in their most common usage as dependent variables, … have no fixed behavioral boundaries and are so variable, amorphous and all-encompassing that the findings they yield obscure variance and defy cumulation.[28]
When Rosenau suggested the study of foreign policy "undertakings," he meant "the serial, purposeful, and coordinative nature of foreign policy behavior."[29] A focus on fluid noncrisis situations would be appropriate to the study of foreign policy undertakings.[30] This sort of approach could shed light on organizational actors in Soviet foreign policy formulation; it would provide a framework for observing not only behavioral continuities resulting from standard operational procedures, but also behvioral discontinuities resulting from the impact of significant international events.
The question whether Soviet foreign policy is totalitarian had best be asked not in terms of the existence or nonexistence of competing domestic interests, but in terms of the change or constancy of Soviet external behavior.[31] The term "cybernetic" has been used to describe the school of Soviet foreign policy analysis which asserts that the Soviet Union can learn to alter its behavior in fashion or another. (Of
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course this is not the same as saying that he can "trained" to act in a given manner.) To write that "external events have an impact on attitudes and produce structural adaptation" is to say that such events have cognitive and organizational effects.[32] The strategy of creating vested interests among domestic constituencies and Soviet Union assumes that organizational learning occurs. What requires further attention is the specification whose attitudes, and which structures, change—i.e., but how learning occurs in Soviet foreign policy formation. Cognitive and organizational framework for analysis, combined within an approach focuses on information processing, are appropriate for such investigations.
Daniel Tarschys has summarized the differences among the totalitarian, pluralistic, and bureaucratic grand theories; and, as Hough has observed, the popularity of the third is partly explicable by the fact that it can be stretched to subsume the first two.[33] In order to facilitate the accumulation of knowledge about how the Soviet system works, it may be best to build several middle-range theories of Soviet politics, each limited in its explanatory power to a given arena of policy formation. If it is possible in this matter to specify the norms and structures of a cybernetic model for each arena, including foreign policy, it will later be possible to mount a rung higher on the latter abstraction by synthesizing these various specifications into a model of the Soviet system that assumes the proper elements when it is animated in turn by each particular policy arenas.
These issues may be treated abstractly in a relatively general fashion, but, outside of individual case studies, they cannot be addressed directly. Multiple case studies will allow regularities in the Soviet organizational process to emerge. An understanding of organizational processes in Soviet policy making, including the press as a vehicle of political communication,[34] will help to clarify precisely what kind of general
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model might describe Soviet reality most accurately. The use of cognitive and organizational perspectives will contribute to making the results obtained in the study of the Soviet Union comparable across political systems.
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This article owes much to the freedom for reflection and reseach permitted me, during 1979–1980, as Albert Gallatin Fellow in International Affairs at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva, Switzerland. I wish to acknowledge the Fellowship's support; the hospitality of the Institute's faculty, particularly that of Professor Urs Luterbacher; and the assistance of its Director, Professor Christian Dominicé.
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[Note 1]. Seweryn Bialer, ed., The Domestic Context of Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1981), was received too late to be included for review in this article. The volume should be consulted by anyone seriously interested in the subject. Although none of its constituent chapters can properly be called a case study of Soviet foreign policy formation, it is the best survey currently available of the domestic aspects involved. The factors covered range from demographic trends (Warren W. Eason) to Eastern Europe as an "internal determinant" of Soviet foreign policy (Andrzej Korbonski). The contributions are coherently interrelated, but the contributors do not always agree about everything. The book is richer for these differences.
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[Note 2]. Arnold L. Horelick, A. Ross Johnson, and John D. Steinbruner, The Study of Soviet Foreign Policy: A Review of Decision-Theory-Related Approaches, Report R–1334 (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1973), 37.
[Note 3]. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missle Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).
[Note 4]. Compare Lawrence B. Mohr, "The Concept of Organizational Goal," American Political Science Review, Vol 67 (June 1973), 470–81.
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[Note 5]. Indeed, one of the more suprising findings is that the ideologist Suslov, who is almost invariably and with good reason considered a hardliner, did not like the idea of intervention because he thought it would disrupt the World Communist Conference (held in Moscow in 1969); he had the responsibility of planning the conference.
[Note 6]. See also Jiri Valenta, "The Bureaucratic Politicsl Paradigm and the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia," Political Science Quarterly, Vol 94 (Spring 1979), 55–76. Another point of view is expressed by Karen Dawisha, "The Limits of the Bureaucratic Politics Model: Observations on the Soviet Case," Studies in Comparative Communism, XIII (Winter 1980), 300–326. Dawisha's principal contribution is to point out the informal organizational structures that figure in Soviet foreign policy formation; see the comments on her article by Allison, Eidlin, and Valenta, and Dawisha's rejoinder, ibid., 327–46.
[Note 7]. Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision: New Dimensions of Political Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 125–35. Steinbruner's sometimes difficult reasoning is clarified in Robert M. Cutler, "Decision Making in International Relations: The Cybernetic Theory Reconsidered," Michigan Journal of Political Science, 1 (Fall 1981), 57–63.
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[Note 8].Hough, "The Soviet System: Petrification or Pluralism?" Problems of Communism, XXI (March–April 1972), 25–45; reprinted in Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1977), 19–48.
[Note 9]. Compare, for example, Kass, pp. 223–25, and Vernon V. Aspaturian, "The Soviet Military-Industrial Complex: Does It Exist?" Journal of International Affairs, XXVI (No. 1, 1972), 3, 14–15; Kass, p. 3, and H. Gordon Skilling, "Interest Groups and Communist Politics: An Introduction," in Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths, eds., Inteerst Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 3, 8; Kass, pp. 1–2, and William Zimmerman, "Elite Perspectives and the Explanation of Soviet Foreign Policy," Journal of International Affairs, XXIV (No. 1, 1970), 84–85.
[ page 425 ]
[Note 10]. On tendencies of articulation, see Franklyn Griffiths, "A Tendency Analysis of Soviet Policy Making," in Skilling and Griffiths (fn. 9), 335–77; Griffiths, "Images, Politics, and earning in Soviet Behavior toward the United Sates," Ph.D. diss. (Columbia University, 1972).
[Note 11]. See, further, Christer Jönsson, "Foreign Policy Ideas and Groupings in the Soviet Union," in Roger E. Kanet, ed., Soviet Foreign Policy and East–West Reations (Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon Press, forthcoming 1982). Compare Franklyn Griffiths, "Ideological Development and Foreign Policy in Bialer (fn. 1), 19–48, esp. 21–31, 41–45.
[Note 12]. Daniel Heradstveit and Ove Narvesen, "Psychological Constraints on Decision Making. A Discussion of Cognitive Approaches: Operational Code and Cognitive Map," Cooperation and Conflict, XIII (No. 2, 1978), 77–92. Hannes Adomeit adopts the operational-code approach in his attempt to demonstrate that "[d]ecision making in international crises in the Soviet system is shaped much more by consensus on political issues and operational principles than by domestic conflict" Alexander Dallin maintains the "whenever it comes to fundamental choices in preference, orientations, and values, the dominant decision makers in the Soviet Union remain fundamentally wedded to the primacy of domestic over foreign affairs." Adomeit, "Consensus Versus Conflict: The Dimension of Foreign Policy," in Bialer (fn. 1), 76 (emphasis added); Dallin, "The Domestic Sources of Soviet Foreign Policy," ibid., 339–40. Dallin's chapter includes (but is more than) an exhaustive review, discussion, and critique of the literature. On the potential utility of studies of noncrisis decision making in Soviet foreign policy, see the last section of this article, and fn. 30.
[ page 426 ]
[Note 13]. Robert Axelrod, "Argumentation in Foreign Policy Settings: Britain in 1918 Munich in 1938, and Japan in 1970," Journal of Conflict Resolution, XXI (December 1977), 727–56.
[Note 14]. Robert M. Cutler, "Unifying the Cognitive-Map and Operational-Code Approaches: An Integrated Framework with an Illustrative Example," in Christer Jönsson, ed., Cognitive Dynamics and International Politics (London: Frances Pinter, [1982]), [91–121].
[ page 427 ]
[Note 15]. Alexander George, Propaganda Analysis: A Study of Inferences Made from Nazi Propaganda in World War II (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1959), 61.
[Note 16]. Ibid., 43.
[ page 428 ]
[Note 17]. Ibid., 41.
[Note 18]. Paul, "Soviet Foreign Policy and the Invasion of Cechoslovakia: A Theory and a Case Study," International Studies Quarterly, XV (June 1971), 159–202.
[ page 429 ]
[Note 19]. Personal interview[, Moscow, summer 1980]. This section of the article draws directly on a series of interviews that the author conduct in Europe and the U.S.S.R. in 1980. Further information is available from the author upon request.
[Note 20]. Reference to such
circles is found, upon occasion, even in the Soviet press. One example of this occurs
in July 1974. During the last days of that month, Komsomol′skaia pravda
ran a long two-part article by a section head in the Central Committee Propaganda
Department, lauding détente without qualification—at the height of the
Cyprus crisis: "It is possible to speak with plenty of reason of an expansion of
détente, of realistic prospects for the realization of numerous new
possibilities, on the basis of [those] already achieved." What is even more
striking, this article, in a catalogue of influences contributing détente,
excludes any mention of the Soviet armed
forces.
The very next day, a leading article in
the armed-forces newspaper reminded its readers: "Despite the achieved
détente, the international situation remains difficult. It would be
extremely dangerous if a view prevailed in social circles that everything is
perfectly all right now, that the danger of war has been eliminated, and that the
task of securing peace can be relegated into the background or even further."
(Emphases added.) Since the Soviet Union would not be endangered if such a view
prevailed in Washington, the reference must be to "social circles"
(obshchestvennye krugi) in Moscow. It is possible to conclude from this not
only that such circles exist in Soviet policy formation, but also that these circles
are conscious of their interests (for "securing peace," read "building
arms") and recognize that other circles may have opposing
[ page 430 ]
interests. Such a conclusion would not necessarily imply that the
composition of individual circles is constant over time or across
issues.
G. Oganov, "Razriadka: nastoiashchee,
budushchee. 1. Real′nost′ mira" [Détente: Present and Future.
1. The Reality of Peace], Komsomol'skaia pravda, July 30, 1974, p. 3;
"V interesakh bezopasnosti narodov" [In the Interests of the Security of
the Peoples] (editorial), Krasnaia zvezda, July 31, 1974, p. 1. Translations
are by the author.
[Note 21]. Care should be taken not to confuse what Western policy analysts usually mean by "decisions" with resheniia—also meaning "decisions"—which are authoritative statements, rather like resolutions, adopted at Party gatherings.
[Note 22]. Paul Ricoeur, "The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text," Social Research, XXXVIII (Autumn 1971), 557.
[Note 23]. Ibid., 558 (original emphasis omitted).
[ page 431 ]
[Note 24]. See Myron Rush, "The Role of Esoteric Communication in Soviet Politics," in The Rise of Khrushchev (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1958), 88–94; Rush, "Esoteric Communication in Soviet Politics," World Politics, XI (July 1959), 614–20.
[Note 25]. Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), 93–97, 115–17 and nn.
[Note 26]. George (fn. 15), 60.
[ page 432 ]
[Note 27]. George mentions this variable but does not discuss it: ibid., 41.
[ page 434 ]
[Note 28]. Rosenau, "Moral Fervor, Systematic Analysis, and Scientific Consciousness in Foreign Policy Research," in Austin Ranney, ed., Political Science and Public Policy (Chicago: Markham, 1968), 212, 215.
[Note 29]. Ibid., 221.
[Note 30]. 0n the utility of studying noncrisis situations, see Dallin (fn. 12), 342–43; Paul (fn. 18), 171, 176–77; and, more generally, Lincoln P. Bloomfield, The Foreign Policy Process: Making Theory Relevant, Sage Professional Paper in International Studies No. 02–028 (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, I974), 41.
[Note 31]. Richard Löwenthal has pointed out that the totalitarian model denied only autonomy of domestic groups having such interests, and never suggested that these groups do not exist; Franklyn Griffiths has addressed this issue in terms of "system dominance" versus "subsystem dominance." Löwenthal, "Kommunistische Einparteiherrschaft in der Industriegesellschaft," in Boris Meissner, Georg Brunner, and Richard Löwenthal, eds., Einparteisystem und bürokratische Herrschaft in der Sowjetunion (Cologne: Markus Verlag, [1979]), 33; Griffiths, "A Tendency Analysis" (fn. 10), 335–37, 351, 358. The best case for continuing to use the totalitarian approach to analyzing Soviet external behavior has been made by Leonard Schapiro, "Totalitarianism in Foreign Policy," in Kurt London, ed., The Soviet Impact on Wworld Politics (New Yor: Hawthorn Books, 1974), 3–21.
[ page 435 ]
[Note 32]. William Zimmerman, "Choices in the Postwar World (1): Containment and the Soviet Union," in Charles Gati, comp., Caging the Bear: Containment and the Cold War (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), 99.
[Note 33]. Tarschys, "The Soviet Political System: Three Models" European Journal of Political Research, V (September 1977), 287–320, reprinted in Tarschys, The Soviet Political Agenda: Problems and Priorities, 1950–1970 (White Plains, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1979), 10–39; Jerry F. Hough, "The Bureaucratic Model and the Nature of the Soviet System," Journal of Comparative Administration, II (August 1973), 134–68, reprinted in Hough (fn. 8), 49–70.
[Note 34]. There is a high-quality Soviet literature on this subject that Western specialists on Soviet policy making have yet to tap. To cite but two examples: Zhurnalistika v politicheskoi strukture obshchestva [Journalistics in the Political Structure of Society], Ia.N. Zasurskii, ed. (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo MGU, 1975); Teoriia i praktika sovetskoi
[ page 436 ]
periodicheskoi pechati [Theory and Practice of the Soviet Periodical Press], V.D. Pel't, ed. (Moscow: "Vysshaia shkola," 1980).
Dr. Robert M. Cutler [ website — email ] was educated at MIT and The University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D. in Political Science, and has specialized and consulted in the international affairs of Europe, Russia, and Eurasia since the late 1970s. He has held research and teaching positions at major universities in the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, and Russia, and contributed to leading policy reviews and academic journals as well as the print and electronic mass media in three languages.
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