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The “National Interest” and Contemporary World Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

J. Martin Rochester
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Extract

The “national interest” has proven to be a highly resilient concept, not only in terms of its malleability in the hands of foreign policymakers and various publics but also in terms of its ability to retain currency among several generations of international relations scholars despite repeated efforts to discredit it. There have been several attempts recently to rehabilitate the concept, including one by the Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy which recognized that repudiation of the term by academics did not absolve practitioners from their continuing responsibility to define it. However, the problem with recent attempts on the part of scholars as well as practitioners to reformulate the “national interest” is that they fail to take into account adequately the new realities of world politics which have tended to upset the normal calculus. If the identification of “national interests” has defied precise analysis in the past, it is an even more difficult task today.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , January 1978 , pp. 77 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1978

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References

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