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Spin-doctors, media and mandarins: Why the substance and communication of foreign policy inevitably interact

Dr James Strong Fellow in Foreign Policy Analysis and International Politics

Department of International Relations London School of Economics and Political Science

Paper prepared for the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association New Orleans, Louisiana

February 2015 Word count (excl. bibliography): 8,404.

Please do not cite without permission.

Abstract

Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) pays insufficient attention to public communication, the media and news management. This is odd, given FPA’s long-established interest in the domestic politics of international affairs, and the wealth of evidence drawn from communication studies showing that journalists influence both public opinion and policymakers’ conceptions of public opinion. This paper rectifies this shortfall by illustrating the inevitable interaction of foreign policy making and foreign policy communication in the contemporary digital media age across three levels of analysis. At an abstract level, the introduction of constructivism into the FPA toolkit problematizes crucial rhetorical constructs such as ‘legitimacy’ and ‘success’. At an applied level, substantive decisions have communication implications, while communication decisions feed back into policy substance. Finally, at a practical level, democratic governments have responded to growing media pressure by bringing spin-doctors into the heart of policymaking. It is no longer the case, if it ever was, that foreign policy is made first, and then ‘sold’. Now it is constructed in a manner that makes it saleable, with active input from news management professionals. Media logic consequently colonises foreign policy decision-making. Foreign policy analysts can ignore its impact no longer.

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Spin-doctors, media and mandarins: Why the substance and communication of foreign policy inevitably interact

Introduction

Foreign policy analysis (FPA) does not take public communication sufficiently

seriously. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, it reflects a failure to apply insights

about the role of communication derived from both neoclassical realist and constructivist

accounts of international politics (Checkel 2008, 72). While International Relations (IR) as a

field still largely underplays the importance of communication (Milliken 1999, 240,

Kornprobst 2014, 194-195), these contrasting schools of thought have at least begun the

process of embedding the idea that how actors interact verbally matters politically. Secondly,

it reflects the existence of a separate, vibrant sub-field of research within the broad IR church

focused specifically on communication. From this direction comes the theory of the ‘CNN

effect’, what one study characterized as a key step in the search for “a communication theory

of international relations” (Gilboa 2005, 27). As a mid-range theory it is more closely

grounded in actual policymaking practices than the more abstract accounts of how

communication affects international politics. At the same time, it says more about what the

media does than what policymakers do. It is a theory of media rather than political behavior.

As a result a gap remains between the abstract concepts of IR theory and the grounded mid-

range ideas of communication scholars, a gap that should be filled by FPA.

Grounding abstract IR concepts in the everyday practices of individual policymakers

and states is practically FPA’s reason to exist. Neoclassical realism essentially explains to

structural realists why foreign policy matters. Most rational-choice accounts of foreign

policymaking fit within its frameworks. Constructivism, meanwhile, has gradually begun to

find its place in FPA’s conceptual toolkit (Houghton 2007, 24). Roxanne Doty first suggested

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seeing “foreign policy as a social construction” in International Studies Quarterly more than

twenty years ago (Doty 1993). Marijke Breuning’s excellent analysis of the relationship

between rhetoric and reality in foreign aid policymaking and Jutta Weldes’ constructivist

dissection of debates over ‘national interest’ appeared soon afterwards (Breuning 1995,

Weldes 1996). Together these studies established the utility of a constructivist account for

problematizing the social facts that make particular foreign policies possible. Explicitly

constructivist and poststructuralist scholarship takes up a growing proportion of the pages of

Foreign Policy Analysis, the sub-field’s flagship journal (Gaskarth 2006, Nabers 2009, Thies

and Breuning 2012). FPA does, in other words, draw on the broader IR theory context as it

goes about its mid-range work, and it is increasingly attentive to insights generated by

constructivist scholarship in particular. The problem, however, is that it has not yet

effectively grounded constructivist ideas in the actual practices of policymakers. The studies

cited offer constructivist and poststructuralist accounts of foreign policy, but they are far

more abstract and conceptual than is typically the case for a work of foreign policy analysis.

If the key criterion of the viability of an FPA theory is whether practitioners can readily

understand it, too many constructivist accounts, for all their elegance and sophistication, fail

to measure up.

This paper proposes a bridging strategy to close the gap between abstraction and

practice. It introduces the notion of communicability to the FPA lexicon. Communicability is

a characteristic of individual foreign policies. It describes how readily they can be transmitted

(or ‘sold’) to international and domestic audiences, crucially, via the news media. This issue

has concerned foreign policy makers for some time, but in recent years the increased pace

and scale of the media has prompted greater investment in professional ‘news management’

operations within governments and foreign ministries. This investment has in turn raised the

significance of communicability, bringing media advisers into the heart of supposedly

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substantive policymaking processes. Within the communication studies literature there are

divisions between those who rigidly separate “substantive” and “information” policies

(Cohen 1973, 132, Holsti 1996, 203) and those who think the media affects both (Wander

1984, 339, Gilboa 2002, 732). The traditional FPA approach implicitly (and sometimes

explicitly) sides with the former group, bracketing public and media communication as part

of the implementation of ‘substantive’ policy decisions (Hagan 1995, 133, Webber and Smith

2002, 88, Hill 2003, 277), treating rhetoric as a matter of style (Hermann 1980, 11), or

dismissing it as ‘cheap talk’ (Baum and Groeling 2010b, 17).

This study’s discussion of participant accounts, by contrast, suggests that news

managers are indeed involved at an earlier stage, advising on what one former British foreign

policy official called the “presentability” of different options before substantive decisions are

made (Meyer 1989). Communicability thus directly links the substance and the

communication of foreign policy. Supposedly substantive decisions are influenced by what

appear to be purely communicative concerns. It also links the abstract concepts of IR scholars

to an empirical account of actual policymaker behavior. Policymakers may be alienated by

talk of discourse, communicative action and speech acts. But they understand that the media

matters, that there are good and bad ways of speaking publicly, and that sometimes the words

we use to describe a situation shape the actions available to us in responding to it. The

concept of communicability highlights how the two ways of thinking can be reconciled

without losing either the sophistication of theory nor the utility of applied practical insight.

This paper proceeds in two main parts. The first part establishes the conceptual

background, analyzing the way quite different theoretical traditions have integrated the role

of public communication into their accounts of international politics. It highlights the

neoclassical realist interest in the instrumental use of rhetoric, and the constructivist notion of

social facts constituted through communicative action. The second part grounds these

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abstract notions in the mid-range theoretical language of FPA using the concept of

communicability and drawing on insights from the communication studies literature. It

focuses in particular on the role of the media and the feedback effect that arises when

governments devote significant amounts of time and energy to trying to influence it. It

illustrates the way concern for communicability operates in practice with a case study of

foreign policymaking in the United Kingdom based on documentary materials and participant

accounts. It highlights the close integration of substantive and communicative elements

within the policymaking machinery as well as identifying instances where the two

dimensions directly, and inevitably, interact.

Public communication in the theory of international politics

Communication clearly concerns policymakers. Much of their time is spent giving

speeches, addressing the media directly, posing for photo-ops, and repeating sound-bites

designed to generate headlines and fill airtime on evening news broadcasts. If communication

did not matter, leaders would not spend such time and energy on it (Mitzen 2005, 402,

Jacobsen 2008, 339). International Relations scholarship has responded to this observation in

two distinct ways. The first, epitomized by the work of James Fearon (1994), and expanded

upon by Matthew Baum among others, is closely associated with the neoclassical realist

school of thought. It emphasizes the instrumental use of public communication within a

rational choice account of policymaker behavior. It focuses on how leaders use rhetoric as a

signaling device, transmitting information directly at both the domestic and the international

levels of analysis. It also touches upon the significance of how communication works under

two-level game dynamics (Putnam 1988).

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The second approach is very different. Building upon the work of Jurgen Habermas,

and his ‘theory of communicative action’ (Habermas 1981), it is most commonly associated

with the constructivist school of thought. This approach emphasizes the constitutive role of

public communication within a broadly interpretive account of policymaker behavior. It

focuses on how leaders and their constituents collectively construct the social facts that make

up political reality. Constructivism arguably advances the position put forward by

neoclassical realism by adding two additional dimensions beyond the instrumental to our

account of the roles public communication can play. The first is the theory of speech acts, or

doing something by saying something. When foreign policy involves speech acts, the

substance and communication of foreign policy are the same thing. The substantive policy is

not just reflected by how it is spoken about publicly, speaking publicly is the policy. The

second additional dimension is communicative action itself. Not all public communication is

about rhetorical positioning, persuasion and bargaining. It can also be co-operative and

interactive, geared towards mutual understanding as a prerequisite for policy agreement and

action, rather than unidirectional influencing. As with the neoclassical realist account, then,

the constructivist understanding of the place public communication holds in international

politics emphasizes the fundamental inseparability of communication and substance.

Neoclassical realism, instrumental rhetoric and audience costs

Every rational choice account of international politics features communication in

some form. Bargaining depends on the exchange of information, whether explicitly or

implicitly through signaling. Public communication of the sort investigated in this paper

typically takes the form of instrumental rhetoric in these analyses. A number show explicitly

how rhetorical interactions affect substantive behavior, both in legislative negotiations and

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more generally as leaders seek to mobilize domestic constituents behind a chosen course of

action (Cameron, Lapinski and Riemann 2000, 187, Baum and Groeling 2010a, 445).

Crucially, these studies highlight the irrationality of distinguishing rigidly between

substantive and communicative policymaking stages. For one thing, policymaking its itself an

iterative process, with feedback from the external environment informing successive

decision-making steps (Jacobs 1992, 200). In addition, the importance of domestic

mobilization to policy success is such that no leader would voluntarily try to implement a

decision without due regard to the likely public response. Nor would they wait to try to shape

public attitudes until substantive decisions are already made. Policies that lack

communicability cannot be implemented successfully. Rational decision-makers should

consider communicability among the factors affecting which option to choose at the

substantive stage.

The place of public communication in foreign policymaking is additionally

complicated by another key neoclassical realist observation. As Robert Putnam highlighted

most famously, foreign policymaking requires leaders to bargain simultaneously in closely

linked domestic and international arenas. Rhetoric targeted at international rivals echoes in

domestic public debate, while those same international rivals can under some circumstances

influence domestic debates directly (Putnam 1988, 455). The international dimension makes

the communication of foreign policy uniquely complicated. It also opens up opportunities for

canny policymakers to exploit the dual dimensions of two-level games. The theory of

domestic audience costs sees leaders take advantage of the fact the domestic and international

arenas are separate, but related.

Fearon’s original account of how domestic audience costs operate introduced two

related conceptual possibilities into a two-level game model of international political

interactions. First, he proposed that leaders who publicly declare their objectives in entering a

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bargaining situation might face negative domestic political consequences should they

subsequently pull back or fail to achieve their goals. Second, he suggested that leaders could

use the risk of such consequences as signaling devices, deliberately binding their own hands

in order to establish the credibility of their commitments with an adversary (Fearon 1994,

577, Baum 2003, 285). Fearon’s idea was that once rival leaders have proclaimed certain

negotiating ‘red lines’, they each know where they cannot expect agreement and where,

implicitly, they can (Baum 2004b, 190). International bargaining both depends on, and

necessarily generates, domestic public communication, in this account. From a rational

choice perspective, then, the substance and communication inevitably interact, and they do so

through the deliberate construction of substantive positions with particular communicative

consequences. They do so, in other words, through policymakers’ concern for

communicability.

That is not to say that Fearon’s account cannot be faulted. It operates on the

assumption that domestic constituents want their leaders to demonstrate consistency and

achieve success in overseas negotiations (Heffernan 2006, 584, Tomz 2007, 821). This point

is in some doubt. Firstly, it is far from clear that citizens hold strong views about the

necessity or desirability of leaders taking inflexible positions in international negotiations.

Many will quite readily accept a leader backing down from a public commitment they

considered unwise in the first place (Clare 2007, 732). For example, President Obama’s

failure to enforce his ‘red line’ with military force following the alleged use of chemical

weapons on civilians by the Assad regime in Syria in August 2013 did not result in domestic

audience costs. Most poll respondents appeared to consider Obama’s change of course a

necessary correction to an earlier mistake, regardless of the potential consequences for the

country’s international credibility. Secondly, the claim that domestic punishment awaits a

leader who reneges on an international commitment relies on two assumptions about the

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nature of the relevant state. Citizens must possess sufficient political freedom to register

disapproval in a meaningful fashion. Autocrats and lame ducks share a degree of insulation

from electoral punishment not available to democratic leaders interested in keeping their jobs

(Ramsay 2004, 460). Citizens must furthermore have access to information about their

leader’s international-level behavior (Baum 2004b, 191). This assumption is problematic in

autocratic states lacking a free media (Baum and Potter 2010, 453). It is additionally

problematic when leaders deliberately withhold information. If leaders are sufficiently aware

of the power of domestic audience costs that they can mobilize them instrumentally as Fearon

envisages, they are likely only to seek publicity for negotiations concerning matters of core

interest or principle. Where both parties to a negotiation consider the issues at stake

insufficiently important to warrant the risk associated with ‘going public’ they are likely

instead, in Matt Baum’s words, to ‘go private’, shielding their negotiation positions from

public scrutiny (Baum 2004a, 605). That is why we do not see public bargaining around

double taxation agreements or postal service rules.

The notion of communicability helps draw these criticisms back into an instrumental

account of the part played by public communication in the foreign policy process. The

question of how effectively a policy can be communicated must necessarily be answered

before decisions can be made about ‘going public’ or ‘going private’. Answering it will entail

calculations about public attitudes, domestic political structures and the availability of

alternative sources of information. From a neoclassical realist perspective, then, public

communication represents a tool for, an enabling condition of, and an input into substantive

policymaking. Three theoretical implications flow from these observations. Firstly, the power

of instrumental rhetoric is such that rational leaders will not leave communication to chance,

but will consider the communicability of policy options as they choose among them.

Secondly, the theory of audience costs shows how communication at one stage of a

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policymaking process can constrain substantive decision-making at a later stage. The act of

making a commitment is purely rhetorical. No troops are deployed, treaties agreed,

bureaucrats mobilized or ambassadors appointed. All that is necessary is for the leader to

make a speech. Yet the political consequences of failing to fulfill such a public promise can

be significant in material terms. Thirdly, the problems raised by Fearon’s model highlight the

difficulties associated with conceptualizing public communication. Persuasive efforts do not

always work. Domestic opinion is not always convinced. Leaders who propose policies

firmly out of kilter with what their constituents want are more likely to be punished for

meeting the expectations they establish than they are for changing course. If it is possible to

generate a single theory of foreign policy communication, in other words, it clearly will not

be straightforward.

Constructivism, communicative action and speech acts

Communication arguably plays an even more important part in constructivist accounts

of international politics. Without communication, social groups cannot construct

intersubjective meanings, and so cannot constitute social facts (Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986,

765, Searle 1995, 27). The substance and communication of foreign policy interact, therefore,

because without communication there can be no substance, since what we think of as

‘substance’ in international political terms is socially constructed through communication.

While constructivists differ over the epistemological implications of this position (Kratochwil

2000, 74), they share an ontological belief that much of the political world is constituted only

through human interaction, that it is made up of social or institutional facts that exist only to

the extent they are produced and reproduced through language and through practice (Onuf

1989, 94, Wendt 1992, 406). For those of a postmodern or poststructuralist bent, there is no

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reality other than what is constituted in discourses, themselves established by the public use

of language (D. Campbell 1992, 4, Hansen 2006, 10). Modernist constructivists disagree,

maintaining that a positivist approach is still possible even if the reality we study is

linguistically determined (Jepperson, Wendt and Katzenstein 1996, 67, Finnemore and

Sikkink 1998, 892, Wendt 1999, 41). Reality may be made of language, in other words, but

that does not mean we cannot distinguish between reality and our observations of it. This

problem of “double hermeneutics”, that “we interpret an already interpreted social world”

(Guzzini 2000, 147, 162) underpinned Max Weber’s Verstehen approach to social science,

geared as it was towards ‘understanding’ rather than ‘explanation’ (Weber 1949, 40). When

constructivists consider the role of public communication in international politics, they divide

amongst themselves over the application of Verstehen, over the level of interpretation

required to achieve understanding, and the level of abstraction necessary to understand

particular communicative actions in their proper political function and context. A good deal

of the confusion that exists around what constructivism is and how it works stems from this

disagreement among constructivists themselves. It is exacerbated by the fact that they still

recognize each other as part of the same scholarly tradition despite these fairly fundamental

disagreements (Zehfuss 2002, 22).

The basic belief that language constitutes reality exists with varying degrees of

significance throughout the spectrum of constructivist and poststructuralist work. It has also

appeared in unlikelier quarters, for example the more recent writings of Joseph Nye (2005,

2009, 162-163, 2011, 19). Much of the literature in this area is indebted to a range of social

and critical theorists, and philosophers, principally Durkheim, Weber, Foucault and

Wittgenstein. The thinker whose arguments appear most frequently in accounts of the

theoretical origins of language-based approaches to the study of politics, however, is

Habermas. His ‘theory of communicative action’ distinguished between three separate

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characteristics of language, the locutionary, or what is said, the illocutionary, or the meaning

or significance of what is said, and the perlocutionary, or what effect is intended to be elicited

in the audience (Habermas 1981, 295, Kratochwil 1989, 7-8). It therefore goes beyond the

purely instrumental account put forward in the neoclassical realist literature, which focuses

on the perlocutionary aspect alone. For Habermas, the perlocutionary is less interesting than

and logically follows on from the illocutionary, a dynamic first highlighted by John Austin

(1962). In Habermas’ ideal-typical model of communicative action, the participants in a

public exchange seek not to influence each other but to agree a common definition of the

situation as a prerequisite to a collective response. The study of politics, in the terms more

commonly used by constructivist IR scholars, is thus the study of how certain political acts

are made possible through the social construction of reality (Doty 1993, 298). Habermas

accepts that language makes reality, but in the process distinguishes between this constitutive

function and the instrumental role of rhetoric, a role he considers secondary and less

significant. This makes sense from an IR perspective. Defining the situation logically

precedes seeking to persuade others to accept a particular response to it. Communication thus

establishes the conditions through which substance can be constituted. Communicability,

then, potentially goes even deeper than the consideration of whether a policy can be ‘sold’. It

affects whether a policy can even exist in the first place.

In addition to the notion of communicative action, constructivists draw on John

Searle’s conception of ‘speech acts’, an idea very similar to that of the illocutionary

dimension of language in Habermas’ thought. Searle argued that certain uses of language did

not just describe actions, they were in themselves actions (Searle 1995, 34). Typical

examples include declarations of war, the performance of marriage rites, the appointment of

ambassadors, and so on (Kratochwil 1993, 76, 2008, 457). A speech act directly combines the

substantive and communicative dimensions of foreign policy because it is simultaneously

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substantive and communicative (Onuf 1989, 82). The act of communication is the policy,

representing both decision and implementation. As Quentin Skinner put it, quoting

Wittgenstein, according to the theory of speech acts, “words are also deeds” (Skinner 2002,

4). In its implications this aspect of the constructivist account mirrors more closely the

neoclassical realist model. Both agree that we cannot adequately distinguish substantive and

communicative action given the latter can sometimes also comprise the former.

As with Fearon’s account of domestic audience costs, there are issues with the

Habermasian approach. These become clearer as we seek to ground it in empirical

observations, a goal pursued in more detail in the second half of this paper. The most

fundamental problem is Habermas’ ideal-typical approach, and in particular his assumption

that all of the actors in communicative action will hold equal power status. In practice the sort

of communicative exchanges likely to influence foreign policy involve substantial power

disparities between participants, whether they are rival leaders of mismatched states, or

leaders and domestic political rivals, or political elites and their constituents (Checkel 2004,

240, Kaufmann 2004, 8). Additionally, since there is little point engaging in rhetoric towards

a rival unwilling to be persuaded, most policy discussions consist of exchanges among elites

who hope not to influence each other but to influence third parties, international or (more

commonly) domestic (Muller 2004, 404).

This observation has its own implications, however, and suggests a route through

which communicative action can be preserved as a useful theory contributing to the

explanation of foreign policy making, provided it is properly grounded. If public

communication is to be successful, it needs to be responsive (Ruggie 1998, 2, Risse 2000, 8).

It needs to accord with audience expectations, to shape intersubjectively constructed social

facts from within using ideas and images with which audiences are already familiar

(Breuning 1995, 236, Adler 1997, 322, Hopf 2002, 20, Reus-Smit 2008, 409). As we have

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already seen under the neoclassical realist heading, even the most instrumentally-orientated

uses of public communication still react to audience preferences. It is irrational to behave

otherwise, since reactive rhetoric is more likely to work than a rigid, didactic approach. This

however leads to an inevitable tendency for strategic rhetoric to correspond more closely to

the ideal of communicative action as it develops iteratively over time (Doty 1993, 303, Cole

1996, 95, Risse 2000, 9). Communicative action may be unlikely when the actors involved

hold considerable and mismatched authority. That does not mean it cannot happen in a

political, and so in a foreign policy, context. Smart leaders interested in harnessing the

perlocutionary dimension of language will find a return to illocutionary acts rewarding as

they shape the social construction of reality to suit the objectives they ultimately wish to

pursue. They will find attention to communicability a necessary prerequisite of policy

success. The key factor missing in most theoretical accounts, then, is change over time.

It is difficult to argue that the public justification of foreign policy has nothing to do

with what foreign policy analysts do. This paper makes a tougher case, because it insists that

public justification affects not just the implementation but the decision-making phase as well,

through policymakers’ concern for the communicability of the decisions they take. This

section has established the theoretical background to this claim, by highlighting the room

opened up in two very different traditions of International Relations scholarship for public

communication to affect the way decisions are made. While the neoclassical realist approach

offers some useful insights into the logic of public communication, it is only really once a

constructivist approach is adopted that the full range of roles communication plays really

comes out. Communication is both instrumental and constitutive. It both seeks perlocutionary

goals and consists of illocutionary acts. Without communication foreign policy cannot

effectively be implemented, so decisions cannot rationally be made about which course to

pursue unless the communicability of the options available has been assessed. Yet there is a

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prior stage to this, revealed by constructivist insights. Communication affects what

possibilities are thinkable in the first place. Communicability is not just about ‘selling’

decisions, it is about making them, too.

Public communication in the practice of international politics

This remainder of this paper comprises a detailed illustrative case study of the place

of communicability within foreign policymaking practices in the United Kingdom. It draws

on evidence covering the period from the 1960s to the present day, while recognizing that

official concern for public communication reached unusual heights under the government of

Tony Blair. Its main source materials are participant accounts, including interviews

conducted with retired diplomats by the British Diplomatic Oral History Project, published

memoirs by officials and ministers, and documentary and oral evidence presented to the

Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War and the Leveson Inquiry into the role of the media in public

life. It grounds the conceptual accounts of public communication discussed above in a

detailed discussion of how policymakers actually operate.

Drawing on both the IR theories discussed above and more mid-range notions of how

the media operates, this part of the paper highlights three important dimensions driving the

concern for communicability. The first is that policymakers see public communication,

through the media, as an important part of what they do. The second is that policymakers

bring communication professionals into the policymaking process, ensuring the

communicability of different options influences substantive decisions. The final dimension is

that this concern for communicability creates a feedback loop through which the interests,

concerns and practices of journalists (and, vicariously, their audiences) affect foreign

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policymaking behavior. The substance and communication of foreign policy thus inevitably

interact in practice, just as they do in theory.

Why communicating through the media matters.

Policymakers care about communication through the media because they see it as a

forum for public debate and because they fear the media’s power as an independent political

force. When Habermas discussed the waning concept of the “public sphere”, he explicitly

denied that the modern news media could take on the role once performed by coffee-houses

and bourgeois debating societies (Habermas 1989, 188). His injunctions, however, have not

prevented subsequent scholars explicitly identifying the media’s role as a forum for public

debate with the public sphere’s role as an arena in which political questions are subject to the

collective exercise of reason (Splichal 1999, 26, Castells 2007, 238). Some aspects of what

the media does explicitly mimic this rationalizing and legitimizing role, editorial commentary

being a clear example. The growth of social media, meanwhile, further creates the conditions

for direct participation and the free exchange of opinions upon which the existence of a

public sphere relies. Other accounts are less directly related to the public sphere model, but

remain important nonetheless as examples of ways the media contains, constrains and

conducts public conversations, conversations which play a crucial part in the intersubjective

construction of social reality. In these accounts the media appears as a prism, reflecting,

focusing and magnifying competing actors’ views for public consumption (Kern, Levering

and Levering 1984, 195). It appears as a dominant information source through which the

remote reality of international affairs is brought home to individual citizens (Altheide 1987,

161-162, Risse-Kappen 1994, 238, Castells 2007, 241). It takes on the role of a transmission

belt linking governments and governed (Risse-Kappen 1991, 514). None of these functions

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depend solely on policymakers. All can potentially be influenced by them. Leaders who care

about the information that reaches the public, and the way it is framed for public

consumption, will inevitably seek to compete in the media’s “marketplace of ideas” (Page

and Shapiro 1992, 396, Kaufmann 2004, 5).

A strong belief exists amongst sections of the US policymaking elite that the media,

not the military, lost the Vietnam War. It survives despite a lack of evidence this was actually

the case (Hallin 1986, 213, Taylor 1992, 270). This sense of the media as a threat to rational

policymaking is further fuelled by a growing understanding amongst policymakers of the

way journalistic identities and interests intervene to affect what information becomes news

(Baum and Groeling 2009, 437, 2010b, 5). Together these ideas inform the ‘CNN effect’

model, according to which media attention to an international issue generates domestic

pressure for policymakers to launch overseas interventions against the preferences they

would otherwise hold (Robinson 1999, 301). The examples often offered include US action

in Somalia in 1992/3 and NATO’s token intervention in Bosnia in 1995. By focusing on

particular issues the media can set the agenda for public debate, and so for policymaking

(McCombs and Shaw 1972, 176). So at least the argument goes. The notion that the media

affects foreign policy in such a deterministic fashion has largely been debunked (Jakobsen

2000, 132, Michalski and Gow 2007, 128, Robinson 2002). The ‘CNN effect’ theory remains

useful, however, for the way it draws attention to two key points about contemporary media

activities. The first is the speed of media communications and the concomitant expectation

that leaders will be able to react to international developments instantly and live on TV

(Bennett 1994, 14, Livingston 1997, 293, Gilboa 2002, 736). The second is its recognition

that the media is not a simple conduit for information and ideas to flow between public and

policymakers (Altheide 1987, 163, Baum and Potter 2008, 40).

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The New Labour government led by Tony Blair often appeared obsessed with

headlines. Blair’s Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell later concluded this obsession did more

harm than good (Powell 2010, 187). It did not arise in a vacuum. It resulted from a deeply-

held sense that the alternative to constant media management was being managed by the

media, an echo of the CNN effect hypothesis. This was also not merely a New Labour foible.

As Ivor Roberts, deputy head of the Foreign Office ‘News Department’ from 1982 to 1986,

put it, “while other parts of the Foreign Office had their crises, every crisis was News

Department’s crisis” (Roberts 2007, 17). Every major foreign policy issue generates

headlines, contributing to how it is perceived by the public, establishing new intersubjective

understandings of the situation and shaping the sort of responses policymakers can possibly

make. In a rare moment of magnanimity, Blair conceded to the Leveson Inquiry that he didn’t

really blame journalists for their constant demand for new information in the 24-hour age;

“these guys have to say something. You know, they can’t stand out there and say exactly the

same thing they were saying a few moments ago” (Blair 2012, 25). That said, he also

expressed concern about media hostility, especially during wartime, to the Chilcot Inquiry

(Blair 2010, 446).

Clearly the media is not the only conduit for public communication. But if an

individual leader is to convey a message about foreign policy (or any area of policy)

effectively to large numbers of citizens, they will have to work through the media. That

means being aware of the media’s independent needs and wants, from constant novelty to

short, sharp sound-bites. It means bringing in professionals capable of delivering good

headlines, supportive storylines and news agendas that follow rather than leading political

agendas. It means actively engaging with whatever truncated public sphere might exist

through TV broadcasts, newspapers, YouTube and Twitter. It means recognizing that

intersubjective understandings are built through communication, and that they have a

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constitutive effect on what policy decisions become possible. Media communication, in other

words, is what the discursive practice of foreign policy at the domestic level looks like. Each

of these dimensions exists, and has existed for some time, in the British context. As the

following section demonstrates, this observation has implications in terms for what the

practice of British foreign policy decision-making looks like.

News management and communicability

Policymakers employ communications professionals because they believe it is

possible to influence the media, and so to shape the social construction of meaning

surrounding foreign policy in order to align their own and the public’s ideas (Pfetsch 1998,

71, Esser and Spanier 2005, R. Heffernan 2006, 583). Blair told the Leveson Inquiry that it

would be “an act of insanity” for a serious leader not to employ strong news managers to

maximize their positive press coverage in the 21st Century (Blair 2012, 9). This belief is not

without foundation. It is indeed possible for policymakers to ‘manage’ the news effectively,

though it is not easy (Page 2000, 88, Klarevas 2002, 433, Soroka 2003, 27, Knecht and

Weatherford 2006, 714). In theory, a government that successfully leads the news agenda

wins considerable influence over domestic political debates (Page and Shapiro 1992, 12,

Zaller 1994, 186-187, Bennett 1994, 32, Steuter and Wills 2008, 158). The domestic arena of

the two-level game is shaped by the media, and if policymakers want to influence it they will

have to work through the media. To be effective, news management must usually be distinct

from the disinterested provision of public information, but not actively mendacious (McNair

2000, 127, Louw 2005, 143). What matters above all is reactivity, how closely what news

managers want to ‘sell’ matches, or can be made to match, what journalists want to ‘buy’.

20

Communications professionals adopt a range of tactics to influence what information

becomes news. Habermas himself attacked the way “opinion management…invades the

process of ‘public opinion’ by systematically creating news events or exploiting events that

attract attention” (Habermas 1989, 193). Creating so-called ‘news events’ gives journalists

source material to report on while leaders retain control of the images created and issues

raised (Gamson and Modigliani 1989, 6). This may not affect what the media writes, but it

should influence what it writes about. Governments additionally hold privileged access to

information about foreign policy (Hill 1981, 59-60, Jacobs 1992, 199). This allows them to

shape news coverage through the inclusion or omission of specific facts (Hilsman 1987, 229).

To the extent they understand public attitudes, and indeed possess sound political instincts,

governments are expected to meet audience expectations (Hurwitz and Peffley 1987, 1115).

Good news managers can do this, combing time and skill to give both journalists and their

audiences what they want, in the format they want, and with consequences favorable to their

policymaking masters (Entman 2004, 120).

News managers have gained access to the heart of foreign policy decision making

thanks to the combined effect of the faith (or hope) they inspire in political leaders, the need

for favorable media coverage for foreign policy success, and the imperative to meet tight

news deadlines. Donald Maitland ran the Foreign Office’s ‘News Department’ in the 1960s,

and later served as Press Secretary to Prime Minister Ted Heath. Maitland described the

“special relationship” between News Department and the Foreign Secretary, noting that as

Head he enjoyed “access at all times to the Secretary of State” as well as “under secretaries,

deputy under secretaries, the PUS and ministers at all times because they knew everything

was urgent and they understood that they wouldn't have been bothered unless it mattered”

(Maitland 1997, 10, 12). John Leahy, head of News Department from 1971 to 1973,

concurred. He noted that the Foreign Office took a unique approach to staffing its press teams

21

at that time, using mainstream members of the Diplomatic Service rather than outsiders from

the Civil Service Information Service. Leahy considered this ‘insider status’ an important

resource, ensuring he could speak both to the substance and communication of foreign policy,

and was taken seriously by colleagues interested in both (Leahy 2001, 14). Nicholas Fenn,

head of News Department 1979-1982, further highlighted the importance of control over the

Foreign Secretary’s media arrangements (Fenn 2010, 32). While media management was

formally a distinct aspect of the Foreign Office’s operations, even in Fenn’s time it was

increasingly closely associated with the office of the Foreign Secretary himself. As

Christopher Meyer, Head of News Department 1984-1988, put it, as press secretary “you’re

effectively part of his [the Foreign Secretary’s] private office” (Meyer 2004, 18). During

Tony Blair’s time in Downing Street, his communications chief Alastair Campbell arguably

“had more influence over New Labour foreign policy than did the various ministers

nominally in charge of the UK’s external affairs” (Daddow 2011, 226). As Campbell himself

put it, speaking to the Chilcot Inquiry, “not just on issues to do with foreign affairs and

security, but on any of the major issues and high profile issues, you have to have a

communications element, if you like, embedded in those policy discussions” (A. Campbell

2010, 7-8). That element, in Blair’s government, was Campbell himself.

This degree of access is important, both to the operation of a successful press office

and to the feedback effect that develops, through concern for communicability, between

media dynamics and the substance of foreign policy. Both the level of access granted to news

managers, and their capacity to use it to influence policy, varies according to the preferences

of particular policymakers. Leahy found Sir Alec Douglas-Home “not interested in managing

the news”, which “made the job of being his Head of News Department all the more

interesting and at times worrying” (Leahy 2001, 16). Meyer, by contrast, reflected on an early

appointment as speech-writer to James Callaghan, apparently stemming from a conversation

22

Callaghan had with Henry Kissinger. Kissinger told Callaghan his secret for publicizing

foreign policy: “I give lots of speeches”. He also let slip that he had “a team of about twenty-

five” speech-writers. Meyer then recounted that “Callaghan came back to the Foreign Office

and said he’d like a team of speech-writers and was told that he could have one First

Secretary [a relatively junior civil servant]! Which was me!” (Meyer 2004, 9). Clearly

bureaucratic as well as individual preferences were at work. Reflecting on his speech-writing

experiences, Meyer remarked of ministers “that a lot of them didn’t want just a speech; they

wanted to be told what to think” (Meyer 2004, 11). This is an important point. Policymakers

rely on their senior (and, in this case, less senior) advisers. If they include communications

professionals within their inner circle, it is natural that they will turn to them for advice on

substantive as well as purely presentational matters. Indeed, for the sort of expressive foreign

policy represented by the constructivist theory of speech acts, there is little difference

between substance and communication. A minister asking for advice on a speech declaring

expressive policy positions is not just asking for advice on the speech, but inevitably also on

the policy. If policies are made by writing speeches, speech-writers make policy.

Meyer followed his stint in News Department with a year as a Visiting Fellow at the

Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. While there he completed an

unpublished paper recounting his conclusions from four years in charge of ‘selling’ Britain’s

foreign policy. His observations provide important evidence supporting the notion of

communicability across a number of dimensions. Meyer noted that not only was

communication considered long before any policy reached the implementation stage, in

contrast to the typical assumption in the FPA literature, it was in fact discussed “at an early

stage of policy formulation”. Already by the 1980s, all FCO departments were required to

consult News Department regularly “and copy to it all submissions (memoranda with policy

recommendations) that may have a public dimension” (Meyer 1989, 11). More critically, he

23

made the fundamental observation that “Access inevitably takes the press officer into the

realm of policy-making itself. He cannot be expected mechanically to take delivery of a

policy already decided by others and then advise on how it should be presented. As important

as his expertise on presentation is his advice on the presentability of a proposed course of

action” (Meyer 1989, 38). Officials have understood how giving communications advisers

access to policymakers shapes the substance of foreign policy, through their concern for and

advice on communicability, for decades. It is time FPA caught up.

Feedback and the implications of communicability

Clearly the scope for substantive decisions to be tinged by communicative

imperatives increases once communication advisers are brought in to policymaking

discussions (McNair 2000, 127). It is a basic notion within FPA that the individuals involved

in a process affect its nature and outcomes by shaping the information that reaches

policymakers, and the manner in which it is presented (Hermann and Hermann 1989, 362). If

media advisers form part of a policymaker’s inner circle, information and advice about the

media will form part of the core set of materials policymakers have available as they make

decisions. The introduction of communicability into substantive discussions establishes a

“feedback loop” (Carlsnaes 1992, 261) between policymaking and the media. Decision-

makers consider communication important to policy success and they have information

available, through the presence of news managers, to help gauge the communicability of

different policy options. It is reasonable to assume that this advice has some impact, not just

on how foreign policy is ‘sold’ but on how it is made. News management can thus directly

shape substantive foreign policy (Cohen 1973, 178, Jacobs 1992, 212, Webber and Smith

2002, 101). Once communication imperatives begin to influence substantive decision-

24

making, the policymaking process cannot proceed without reference to the broader public

debate. As we have seen, the successful ‘sale’ of foreign policy relies on the effective use of

communicative action to shape the public understanding of both the context for action and

the legitimacy of possible responses to it. Effective communicative action relies on the

communicator embedding their arguments in the fabric of public debate through their

identification with intersubjectively-established social facts. Just as rhetoric tends to move

towards the expectations of the audience in search of influence, so too the concern for

communicability shapes substantive policies in the direction of what leaders believe the

media will report and their constituents will accept.

Communicability can also generate political consequences that go beyond the

domestic audience costs highlighted in the narrower neoclassical realist account of

communication’s role in international politics. It can lead to an undesirable focus on the

personalities of policymakers rather than their policies (Baum 2006, 115). It can establish

criteria against which decisions are subsequently assessed, not always favorably as Tony

Blair and George W. Bush found (Baum and Potter 2008, 57, Casey 2008, 360, Wolfe 2008,

93-94, Reus-Smit 2013, 226). And it definitely shapes the range of possible justifications

available for leaders to use in future contexts (Kornprobst 2014, 203). After Iraq, no Western

leader will easily be able to win domestic support for military action to prevent a ‘rogue’

state developing Weapons of Mass destruction.

In the British context a critical example of this effect comes from the notorious

‘dossier’ published by the Blair government prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq detailing its

alleged development of Weapons of Mass Destruction. The Hutton Inquiry rejected the

suggestion the dossier had, in the words of BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, been ‘sexed up’.

Hutton concluded, however, that;

25

“the possibility cannot be completely ruled out that the desire of the Prime Minister to have a dossier which...was as strong as possible in relation to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s WMD, may have subconsciously influenced Mr Scarlett and the other members of the JIC to make the wording of the dossier somewhat stronger than it would have been if it had been contained in a normal JIC assessment” (Hutton 2004, 152-153).

Lawrence Freedman, who later became a member of the Chilcot Inquiry panel, concurred,

noting that “if they [the JIC] had judged differently, then there would have been great

embarrassment, because unequivocal claims had already been made” by ministers, in public,

stating explicitly that Iraq definitely had WMD (Freedman 2004, 27). Interestingly, former

GCHQ chief and Cabinet Office Security Co-Ordinator David Omand told the Chilcot

Inquiry he felt the drafting process had not directly been affected by pressure from

government news managers, that “I think by then I knew John Scarlett [chairman of the Joint

Intelligence Committee] well enough, and he knew me well enough, that, if he had felt under

pressure, he would have put his head round my office door and said, ‘Can you help me fend

these people off?’ But he didn't” (Omand 2010, 23). On this occasion, the officials involved

had apparently internalized the logic of news management, a point underlined by Alastair

Campbell’s repeated praise for Scarlett in his book (Campbell and Stott 2007, 618). The

problem, however, was that while ministers stated unequivocally that Iraq posed a military

threat to the United Kingdom, in practice it did not. The absence of WMD after the invasion

proved “critically damaging” to the legitimacy of the entire enterprise (Michalski and Gow

2007, 145). The Blair government had engaged in a program of “organized political

persuasion” involving “deliberate deception through omission and distortion” (Herring and

Robinson 2014). It had been found out, and the consequences of its communicative failure

was significant damage to the legitimacy, and so the effectiveness and sustainability, of its

substantive policy in Iraq.

Communicability also has more practical consequences in terms of the process as well

as the outcomes of policymaking. Not only are news managers seen as vital participants in

26

policymaking, they are sometimes seen as more vital than supposed policy experts.

Christopher Meyer became Ambassador to the United States in 1997, stepping down one

month before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Shortly after 11 September 2001, Tony Blair

visited the US to attend President Bush’s declaration of ‘war on terrorism’ to Congress..

Blair’s Chief of Staff, ex-diplomat Jonathan Powell, told Meyer shortly before arriving in

Washington that his presence would not be required at the crucial meeting between Blair and

Bush. In a break with diplomatic protocol, Blair preferred to have Alastair Campbell present

to advise on communicability rather than having Meyer there to offer policy advice.

Campbell thought the resulting row “a bit silly” (Campbell and Stott 2007, 573). Meyer saw

things rather differently, his response was “furious and expletive-laden”, and he threatened to

resign on the spot (Meyer 2005, 202). In the end, cooler heads prevailed, and both men joined

the meeting. There was a particular irony to the exchange given Meyer’s own career history,

not to mention the fact he was Blair’s personal choice for the Washington job. Bringing press

officers in to decision making had been a first step, one Meyer witnessed first-hand in the

1980s. Blair went further by, at least on this occasion, prioritizing their input over that of the

supposed policy experts.

Conclusion

Blair told the Leveson Inquiry that he “tried very hard to keep the line between

persuading the media of a policy; and allowing them privileged access in formulating it”. At

the same time, he conceded “it could be very hard to adopt a policy when it was likely to be

the subject of an intense media campaign against it” (Blair 2012, 5). It seems evident from

the record that he did not always maintain the line he sought to hold. By shaping how policies

are judged legitimate (or otherwise) and displacing policy advice within the decision-making

27

process, the concern with communicability and the concomitant introduction of media advice

into substantive discussions fundamentally affected his policies. This was not just a matter of

one leader’s personal preferences, as the wider range of historical sources considered here

shows. It reflects a long-established trend in how Britain makes foreign policy.

Communicability has concerned British foreign policymakers for decades. Its

negative consequences appeared with particular clarity during the premiership of Tony Blair,

but Blair was not the first leader to pay attention to public communication, nor will he be the

last. As for the wider generalizability of communicability, its conceptual foundations derive

primarily from research on the US. We would expect to see, in other words, every bit as

much of a role for communicability in US foreign policy as we see in the UK. The media

environment is just as competitive. Policymakers are just as concerned with the implications

of how their policies play out online, on TV and in the pages of the press. Communication

professionals, as James Callaghan’s conversation with Henry Kissinger indicates, are far

more numerous in the US than in the UK system, if not necessarily more influential. Indeed,

every state should exhibit some concern for communicability. Every state is subject to the

same conceptual forces discussed in the first part of this paper. These forces’ practical

implications will vary, naturally, among states of different types. It matters whether the

media market is a free one, or what penalties exist for expressing views at odds with the

official line. Communicability will be easier to achieve in more restrictive states. But that

does not mean it will raise no concerns and have no effect at all on substantive decision-

making. Even in undemocratic states, the substance and communication of foreign policy

inevitably interact.

FPA need not overthrow its existing accounts of how policymaking operates. That is

not the approach advocated here. Rather it should show at least some sensitivity towards the

place of communication in the foreign policy process. This goal can be attained using the

28

concept of communicability. Communicability bridges the gap between abstract theories of

how public communication affects international politics, and the concrete empirical

observations that make up the bulk of FPA. It posits that foreign policy decisions are made

with one eye on how they can subsequently be communicated. Since good communication, in

both abstract theoretical and grounded empirical accounts, requires that communicators

respond to audience ideas and preferences, the introduction of communication advice into

policymaking creates a feedback loop in which public debate and media practices inevitably

affect the nature and timing of specific, substantive decisions. News managers gain access to

substantive decision-making because policymakers believe news management matters to

policy success, and because the speed with which the contemporary media operates makes

strictly separating substantive and communicative elements impossible. In the process they

bring a concern with what the media wants and how it operates to the heart of foreign

policymaking. Most of the time this simply leads to more presentable policies. But it also

opens up new risks. These go beyond the domestic audience costs established in the

neoclassical realist literature to include threats to the (socially constructed) legitimacy of

policies, information deficits driven by the pressure to make decisions quickly in order to

meet media deadlines and the potential for policy advice to be squeezed out by more

imminent presentational concerns. Unless FPA considers communication seriously, it cannot

take these vital dynamics properly into account.

29

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