Foreign Policy Decisions: New Zealand Involvement in East Timor 2000–2002 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Of Master of Arts in Political Science in the University of Canterbury by Susannah Gordon University of Canterbury August 2008 1 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Political Science and Communication Department of the University of Canterbury, which provided financial support via the Marsden Fund. Thanks are also due to the Peace and Disarmament Education Trust for their financial assistance for this project. I remain grateful to the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade for allowing access to its archives, and for its helpful Historical Research Grant, as well as for the Ministry’s provision of leave which has enabled me to undertake this project. I remain indebted to all those Ministers and officials, from MFAT and from other government departments, who gave their time to be interviewed, or to discuss this thesis with me. I should note, however, that the analysis, conclusions and opinions contained in this thesis are my own, and do not in any way represent the official view of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. My thanks also go to my supervisor Associate Professor John Henderson, and to other staff and students in the Political Science Department of the University of Canterbury for their advice and encouragement. As always, I am entirely grateful to my husband Murray for his consistent support. SHG 2008 2 Contents CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGY 5 Allison and the study of foreign policy decision-making 6 The East Timor case study 13 Methodology for this study 16 Allison’s models 19 Critical responses to Allison’s models: a literature survey 38 Using Allison’s approach for a New Zealand case study 54 Conclusions 59 CHAPTER TWO: NEW ZEALAND INVOLVEMENT IN EAST TIMOR USING A RATIONAL ACTOR MODEL 60 States as unitary actors 61 The ‘problem’ of East Timor 63 The national interests at stake 65 Government decisions explained using a rational actor model 74 Allison’s Model I proposition tested 83 Conclusions 83 CHAPTER THREE : NEW ZEALAND’S INVOLVEMENT IN EAST TIMOR USING AN ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR MODEL 85 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade 86 Official Development Assistance 99 The New Zealand Defence Force 107 New Zealand Police 115 The New Zealand Customs Service, the Department of Corrections, The Department for Courts 120 Coordination Mechanisms across the New Zealand Government 124 Allison’s Model II propositions tested 126 Conclusions 129 3 CHAPTER FOUR : NEW ZEALAND’S INVOLVEMENT IN EAST TIMOR USING A GOVERNMENTAL POLITICS MODEL 131 The Players 132 The Structure of the Game 143 Government decisions explained using a governmental politics model 146 Allison’s Model III propositions tested 163 Conclusions 169 CHAPTER FIVE : CONCLUSION: 170 The usefulness of Allison’s Models as decision-making theory 170 The usefulness of Allison’s models for this case study 176 Should Allison’s models be used for future studies? 182 Implications for policy-makers 189 Conclusions 194 REFERENCES 195 4 Chapter One: Introduction and Methodology This thesis sets out to examine how New Zealand foreign policy decisions were made with respect to the peacekeeping and peace support intervention in East Timor1 from 2000 to 2002. Examining this intervention requires an attention to theoretical models for explaining foreign policy decision making, an understanding of complex peace support operations and how they work and how the New Zealand government decision-making system operates in particular. The thesis aims to assess whether the popular theoretical models for explaining foreign policy decisions developed by Graham Allison help explain the decisions of a small country’s participation in a regional and peace support multinational operation, and whether they help predict future decisions. The framework used for examining foreign policy decision-making is Graham Allison’s influential work The Essence of Decision, which was first published in 1971, and revised and reissued in 1999 (Allison 1971; Allison and Zelikow 1999). Allison’s work examined the case study of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which was considered “the defining moment of the nuclear age” (Allison and Zelikow 1999: 11). It offered three different models for explaining how the decisions were taken, which Allison hoped would make explicit the conceptual models used by professional analysts of foreign affairs, policy makers and ordinary citizens when they think about problems of foreign and military policy. Allison argued that the “largely implicit conceptual models [currently used] have significant consequences for the content of their thought” (Allison and Zelikow 1999: 3). This first chapter of this thesis explains the centrality of Allison’s work in the modern study of foreign policy decision making, and why his models have therefore been used as the basis for this thesis. It will discuss whether Allison’s models function as 1A note on nomenclature: the country referred to in this thesis as East Timor officially changed its name to Timor-Leste upon independence in May 2002. Because for the majority of the time period covered by this thesis—2000-2002, it was a territory under UN mandate, and was known as East Timor, we have chosen to use this name within this text. However when referring to events in that country in later years (e.g. the violence in 2006) we use the name Timor-Leste. We note that official documents of that country and references to it do not use the hyphen consistently. 5 international relations “theory”. It will then describe Allison’s three models in some detail, before going on to examine some of the ways in which they have been critiqued. Finally the first chapter will then go on to discuss some of the advantages and constraints of these models for analysis of a small country’s foreign policy in a complex peacekeeping context. The subsequent chapters of this thesis take each of Allison’s three paradigms in turn and ‘test’ whether evidence for or against them is apparent from the case study. The conclusion then returns to some of the critiques of Allison’s theories, and discusses whether these are applicable for the case study in question. The overall finding from this study is that on one hand, the three models do indeed offer some useful insights into decision making in the case study. They prove that “light can be shed on the same object from many angles at once” (Welch 1992:142). On the other hand, this thesis cannot conclude that any of these paradigms in itself is a straightforward or universal theory for decision making or that any particular model has unique predictive power for future scenarios. What they do not offer, as some commentators have lamented, is “successful theories that permit general causal inferences, provide cogent explanations and improve predictions” (Welch 1992: 116). Allison and the study of foreign policy decision- making Before discussing Allison’s models in detail, it is important to outline how the study of decision-making fits within the field of the study of foreign policy. The decision making approach to the study of foreign policy was developed in the 1950s and 1960s, with scholars seeking to find a conceptual framework and identifiable variables to test decision scenarios and predict outcomes. Proponents sought to highlight the importance of the internal setting for decision making, social structure and behaviour within a state as well as the decision-making process (Snyder, Bruck et al. 1962; Braybrooke and Lindblom 1963; Rosenau 1967). Some scholars focused on the range of problems or issues which decision-makers must handle (Rosenau 1966; Rosenau 1967), while others looked at variables related to decision makers themselves (Hermann 1978). The approach sought to be positivist science; that is, it aspired to suggest logical propositions which could then be 6 tested by empirical observation of reality.2 In one example, a scholar sought to take all the variables identified in Snyder, Bruck and Sapin’s model and test these in the case of the United States’ decision to enter the Korean war (Paige 1968)3. Despite the important advances it had made, the decision-making approach was criticized in the 1970s for overly narrowing the number of variables studied in order to show clear relationships between variables and outcomes. As one critic noted “this lack of comprehensiveness…resulted in an oversimplification of policy-making behaviour” (Rosati 1981: 239 n 9). Another theme in the American political science literature of the 1950s and 1960s was a focus on bureaucracies and the split (what Allison calls ‘fractionated’) nature of presidential power. Richard Neustadt is most often associated with the focus on bargaining at the intra-governmental level, although Samuel P. Huntington, Warner Schilling, Charles Lindblom and Roger Hilsman also studied these aspects. These scholars sought less to develop schema whereby decisions could be predicted, but rather, they highlighted the complexities of power in the real world. Allison’s 1971 Essence of Decision (Allison 1971) and Morton Halperin’s 1974 Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Halperin 1974) are the two works most often associated with the establishment of the school of “bureaucratic politics” in the 1970s, which focused both on decision-making processes and on bargaining within the bureaucracy and government. Allison’s work importantly aimed to combine both an 2 Positivism is most often associated with nineteenth century writer Auguste Comte, regarded as the first sociologist. By the 1950s, the “received view” of positivism was that science could be presented as a product, that is, as linguistic or numerical statements. Positivists held that these should demonstrate logical structure and coherence and should be testable; i.e. verified, confirmed or falsified by the empirical observation of reality.