Foreign Policy As Adaptive Behaviour

Foreign Policy as Adaptive Behavior: Some Preliminary Notes for a Theoretical Model
Author(s): James N. Rosenau

Source: Comparative Politics, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Apr., 1970), pp. 365-387
Published by: Ph.D. Program in Political Science of the City University of New York
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Foreign Policy
as Adaptive Behavior
Some PreliminaryNotes for a Theoretical Model
James N. Rosenau*
The question of how and why organisms adapt to their environ-

ments has long fascinated the minds of men. Whether the organism
is a single cell, an individual, a small group, or a large aggregate of
people, its struggle both to use and to withstand its environment is
filled with drama. The environment is constantly changing and, as
a result, it always poses a threat to the integrity and survival of the
organism. Can the organism adjust to the changes? Can it take
advantage of them and prosper? Or will it succumb to them and
disappear into its environment? If it is able to remain distinct from
its environment, what price will the organism have to pay for its
survival? Will radical alterations have to occur in its own internal
structure, or can the demands of the environment be readily
absorbed and adaptation smoothly accomplished? Such questions
are fascinating partly because the survival of the organism can
never be taken for granted and its struggles thus attract attention,
partly because the questions evoke feelings about the dignity of
life and thus command sympathy, and partly because the answers
to them are not easily acquired and thus arouse curiosity and tax
the imagination.
Foreign Policy as Adaptive Behavior

All the foregoing questions and the drama inherent in them are at
* This article is a revised section of a much larger set of materials entitled
"The Politics of National Adaptation," which were presented to the Round
Table on the Comparative Study of Foreign Policy of the 65th Annual Meeting
of the American Political Science Association, New York City, September 3,
1969. I am grateful to the Center of International Studies of Princeton Univer-
sity for its support in preparing the original materials and to my wife, Norah,
for her valuable assistance.
365

366 Comparative Politics April 1970
the heart of the study of foreign policy. A host of meanings can be

attached to the phenomena known as foreign policy, but it does not
take much reflection to recognize that their core consists of all the
attitudes and activities through which organized national societies
seek to cope with and benefit from their international environ-
ments. Hence, quite apart from their importance as problems of
morality and citizenship, foreign policy phenomena can be viewed
as adaptive behavior, the comprehension of which fascinates and
challenges the intellect.
This perspective is not easy to maintain. Foreign policy deals
with such important matters that a perspective which treats them
simply as phenomena to be explained can seem quite inappropriate.
Life and death, freedom and slavery, prosperity and poverty-such
are the concerns of foreign policy; and they constantly invite one
to exchange the goal of explaining the nation as an adapting or-
ganism for a perspective in which the goal is that of solving the
problems and realizing the aspirations toward which foreign policy
is directed. "It is all right to take a detached view and satisfy one's
curiosity when the organism is a single cell that can do no lasting
damage," one's conscience seems to say; "but it is quite another
thing when the adaptation of the organism can have grave conse-
quences for all mankind."
The difficulty of maintaining the adaptive perspective is intensi-
fied by the fact that it is unconventional and requires breaking with
some long-standing modes of analyzing foreign policy. Reinforced
by the concern with immediate problems, the conventional ap-
proach is to treat each national society as different and to seek
explanations for its behavior in the historical experiences and
strategic realities by which it has been and is conditioned. The
case study and the problem-solving inquiry have thus been the
hallmarks of foreign policy analysis. They stress the unique factors
of time, place, and people, and as such they are antithetical to the
basic premise of the adaptive perspective-that all nations can be
viewed as adapting entities with similar problems that arise out of
the need to cope with their environments. The adaptive perspective
seeks understanding not in unique factors, but in common factors;
not through the case study, but through the comparative assess-
ment; not through the applied inquiry that solves immediate prob-
lems, but through the theoretical formulation that tests hypotheses
and establishes general principles.
It follows that if the adaptive perspective is to be employed, an
analytic framework needs to be constructed, its theory explicated,

James N. Rosenau 367
its concepts operationalized, and its hypotheses subjected to em-

pirical investigation. Obviously, not all these tasks can be under-
taken here. The present format allows only for an effort to deline-
ate some of the basic components of the adaptive perspective. The
tasks of constructing, operationalizing, and researching a theory
based on these components have been launched,l but their scope
is too great to be included in the ensuing analysis. Rather, what
follows has the more modest purpose, first, of specifying what is
meant by adaptation in a foreign policy context and, second, of
assessing some of the key concepts inherent in the formulation.
The Concept of Adaptation

Although the processes of adaptation are complex and present a
number of empirical difficulties, the concept itself is quite simple.2
Any foreign policy behavior undertaken by the government of any
national society is conceived to be adaptive when it copes with or
stimulates changes in the external environment of the society that
contribute to keeping the essential structures of the society within
acceptable limits. A behavior is regarded as maladaptive when it
copes with or stimulates changes in the external environment that
contribute to changes in the essential structures that are outside
acceptable limits. By essential structures we mean those interre-
lated patterns that constitute the basic political, economic, and
social life of a national society. By acceptable limits we mean those
variations in the essential structures that do not prevent the society
from maintaining its basic forms of life or from altering these forms
through its own choices and procedures.
The essential structures of societies cannot be kept within ac-
ceptable limits unless some kind of behavior is undertaken with
respect to the environment. These structures cannot be sufficiently
self-sustaining for all contact with the environment to be cut off.
To be sure, most of the variation in the essential structures results
from the conduct of life within societies-from what can be called
1 In three unpublished papers by the author: "Adaptive Strategies for
Research and Practice in Foreign Policy," presented at the Conference on a
Design for International Studies (Philadelphia, 1969); "The Politics of National
Adaptation," presented at the 65th Annual Meeting of the American Political
Science Association (New York, 1969); "The Adaptation of National Societies:
A Theory of Political Behavior and Its Transformation" (New Brunswick,
1969).
2 The basic elements of the ensuing formulation were suggested by a read-
ing of W. Ross Ashby, Design for a Brain, rev. (New York, 1960), pp. 58-70.

the integrative-disintegrative dimension of national behavior. The

degree of social unity, the extent of economic prosperity, and the
effectiveness of political authority can vary widely-even beyond
acceptable limits-as a consequence of activities that never extend
beyond the boundaries of the society. Strife among linguistic
groups, paralyzing strikes leading to cutbacks in production and
declines in employment, and prolonged civil wars are examples of
internal trends that can push the basic social, economic, and politi-
cal life of a society toward or beyond acceptable limits. Notwith-
standing the impact of internal developments on internal struc-
tures, however, in this era of modern telecommunications and
transportation every society is dependent on its external environ-
ment. Demands for commercial, fiscal, political, and cultural rela-
tionships originate in the environment and, correspondingly, per-
sons and groups need such relationships to maintain the society's
political, economic, and social life. Thus, there is bound to be a
flow of people, information, and materials across the boundaries
that divide the society from its environment; and although this
flow can be minimized, it cannot be prevented entirely and it is
bound to affect the society's essential structures. Adaptive behav-
ior is directed at controlling the extent and nature of this effect.
Whatever may be transpiring within the society, the boundary-
crossing flow of people, information, and materials must be so
regulated that it contributes to keeping the essential structures
within acceptable limits.
Under static conditions-that is, when little or no change is
taking place at home or abroad-societies seek to maintain control
over their environments through the routine procedures of com-
merce and the standard practices of diplomacy. Visas and pass-
ports are issued to regulate the flow of individuals and groups.
Tariff and exchange rates are imposed to govern the circulation of
materials and money. Embassies and foreign offices are maintained
to facilitate the exchange of information and ideas. These are the
day-to-day activities through which a minimum degree of adapta-
tion is achieved and, in one form or another, they are carried on by
every society in the world.
Modern life is seldom static, however. Change within and among
societies is virtually constant, so that the myriad routinized activ-
ities through which each of them controls its ties to the interna-
tional system are not sufficient to keep its essential structures
within acceptable limits. The day-to-day activities contribute to
adaptation, but they can be offset by a failure to cope with the

demands for new boundary-crossing flows of people, information,

and material that result from changes at home and abroad.Whether
the change is domestic and involves alterations in essential struc-
tures and their acceptable limits, or whether it is foreign and poses
potential threats to the essential structures, it gives rise to de-
mands on the adaptive capabilities of societies that cannot be met
through routinized procedures. Whatever the source of change,
new arrangements have to be promoted in the environment, and
while the routinized procedures may be adequate to preserving
existing arrangements,they cannot promote new ones. Innovation
is required as well as the allocation of resources not previously
used for adaptive purposes. Alliances may have to be built or
broken, military moves threatened or made, diplomatic relation-
ships severed or cultivated, foreign aid offered or sought, sub-
versive and espionage activities initiated or countered, dignitaries
sent abroad or received at home. Since these policy-making activ-
ities take place under changing conditions in which precedent may
be weak and knowledge limited, they are not likely to be as con-
sistently adaptive as the routinized ones. Perceptions of the change
may be faulty, errors in judgment may be made, goals may be
ambiguous, resources may be insufficient or not mobilized in time
-for these and a host of other reasons societies are likely to
engage in maladaptive as well as adaptive behavior in response to
internal or external change.
It follows that the sum of all of a society's adaptive or mal-
adaptive acts at any moment in time constitutes its adaptation for
that moment. As new external behaviors alter its ratio of adaptive
to maladaptive acts, the society moves back and forth on a scale
that runs from perfect maladaptation to perfect adaptation. The
former extreme of the scale is reached when a society's essential
structures are no longer recognizable and the boundaries that
divide it from the international environment cease to exist. Histori-
cally, some actors are temporarily located at or near the extreme
maladaptive end of the scale when, for example, they lose a war
and undergo a period of military occupation. History also records
a few instances when peace conferences did not allow for the re-
emergence of the defeated actors and failure to survive thus proved
to be permanent.3In the modern era few, if any, actors have ever
3 For a discussion and other examples of maladaptation that resulted in

extinction, see David Easton, A Framework of Political Analysis (Englewood
Cliffs, 1965), pp. 82-83.

been located at the adaptive extreme on the scale, an extreme that

is reached either when a society's essential structures remain
statically intact or when changes in those structures are derived
entirely from internal sources. Perhaps in earlier centuries, when
internal and external change was slow to occur and the routinized
procedures of adaptation were sufficient to cope with the environ-
ment, some actors did manage to achieve perfect adaptation; but it
is difficult to cite any twentieth century examples along this line.
The overwhelming weight of modern experience is that of societies
moving back and forth between the two extremes-of nations
coping at least partially with their environments even as they
undergo changes in response to them.
In other words, the acceptable limits within which the essential
structures of societies can vary are considerable, so that normally
the balance between the adaptive and maladaptive foreign policies
of a nation falls within the two extremes of the scale. Through the
years societies move back and forth on the scale because of varia-
tions in their essential structures, because of developments in their
environments, or because of changes at home and abroad. The
greater the degree of internal and environmental change, the
greater the demands on the adaptive capacities of a society and
the greaterits fluctuation back and forth between the two extremes.
This is presumed to be so because the internal changes are likely
to foster a need to alter the environment along compatible lines
and the shifts in the environment are likely to necessitate the
formulation of new policies which, in turn, may require corre-
sponding adjustments in the society's essential structures.
While it is not possible to operationalize here the empirical
referents for the essential structures that societies seek to keep
within acceptable limits through adaptive behavior,4 the meanings
of the words "essential" and "acceptable" do need to be clarified.
At first glance these terms would seem to invite the analyst to
apply his own normative judgments; but they are not intended to
4 Elsewhere an operational formulation of four essential structures has been
developed in terms of the behavior that sustains them and the cutoff points
beyond which the structures are conceived to exist no longer. More specifi-
cally, with the four structures conceived to consist of the patterns whereby
the life and property of societies are preserved and protected, their policy
decisions made and implemented, their goods and services acquired and
distributed, and the cooperation of their members achieved and maintained,
one set of empirical referents for each structure is developed and offered as
representative of the many patterns of which each structure is conceived to be
comprised. See Rosenau, "The Politics of National Adaptation," pp. III 9-
III 20.

be used in this way. The question of what constitutes acceptable

limits and essential structures is strictly an empirical one. Accepta-
bility and essentiality are phenomena to be measured, not values
to be asserted. Although far from easy, measurement is accom-
plished in three stages. First, the analyst specifies those patterns
of a society's political, economic, and social life that he deems
requisite to its continuance as the entity in which he is interested.
Second, he operationalizes the variations that each essential struc-
ture can undergo. Third, he sets the cutoff points beyond which
variation in each structure is deemed to signify its disappearance
and, thus, to render it no longer acceptable.
What the analyst introduces, in short, is not moral judgment as
to what constitutes acceptability, but analytic judgment as to
when a pattern of interaction is no longer recognizable and thus,
presumably, no longer acceptable to the society that sustained it.
If at a moment in time all the essential structures of a society fall
within the cutoff points he has established, for example, the analyst
treats its external behavior as adaptive even though personally he
may regard some of its structures or some of its external behaviors
as abhorrent. While he may be appalled by the apartheid policies
under which the Republic of South Africa subjugates its black
citizens, he would nevertheless classify the resistance of South
Africa to international pressures to abandon apartheid as adaptive
behavior as long as its apartheid policies remained operative.
Similarly, he may view the aggressive acts of Egypt or Israel
toward the other as morally reprehensible, but he would neverthe-
less assess them as adaptive if they contributed to the coherence
of Egyptian or Israeli society. The concepts of adaptation and
maladaptation, in other words, are designed to reflect the values
of the actor and not of the analyst. The latter uses them as tools
rather than as norms, as instruments with which to assess how
societies preserve and enhance their values by adapting to a
changing international environment.
The Salient Environment

Thus far we have referred to the environment of societies as if it
consisted of all the human and nonhuman phenomena external to
their boundaries. From an adaptive perspective, however, the
environment is not as encompassing as the entire international
system. Societies need to adapt only to those changes in the inter-
national system that are salient with respect to their essential

structures. Due to the nature of change and the temporal and

spatial limitations of geography, not all the changes that are
transpiring abroad will be relevant to the life of a society. With the
possible exception of large superpowers which have come to con-
ceive of their international responsibilities as worldwide in scope,
the salient environment of a society is narrower than the interna-
tional system and as such it, too, is subject to change as new
developments become relevant and established patterns attenuate.
For example, under normal circumstances Burmais not likely to be
a part of the salient environment of Bolivia, whereas Cuba and
its other Latin American neighbors are. That is, the flow of men,
ideas, and materiel from Burma into Bolivia is likely to be a bare
trickle, if it exists at all, while the inward flow to Bolivia from
elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere is likely to be substantial.
On the other hand, if a violent revolution were to transform Burma
and its foreign policies radically and swiftly, it might well become
a part of the salient environment of Bolivia.
Obviously the concept of the salient environment presents a
number of empirical and theoretical challenges. Most notably,
there is the empirical problem of tracing the way in which changes
in saliency occur and the theoretical problem of formulating the
relationship between different genotypical societies and the kinds
of environments that are salient for them. Equally challenging is
the question of assessing when the maladaptation of societies arises
out of a failure to recognize that changes in certain aspects of the
international system rendered them salient. For the moment, how-
ever, we will merely state that the concept of the environment in
the adaptive framework refers, unless otherwise indicated, to the
salient environment and not to all events and trends in the world.
Adaptation and Change

However the essential structures of societies may be defined,
change is a central dimension of adaptation. When there is no
change, there is nothing to which a society must adapt. It would
need merely to maintain the existing flow of people, information,
and materials. Only when developments at home give rise to new
needs and wants with respect to their environments, or when
developments abroad give rise to potential threats to their essential
structures, are societies faced with adaptive problems. Internal and
external change are thus so intimately related that both must be
central features of an adaptive perspective.

In order to achieve analytic control over the myriad changes

that can occur within and between societies, it seems useful to
distinguish three basic types of change, each of which can affect
the governmental and nongovernmental leadership roles both in-
ternal and external to any society. Listed in order of increasing
scope, we shall refer to these three types as personnel, political,
and socioeconomic change. In terms of any society, they can be
differentiated as follows:
Internal personnel change involves change only in the iden-

tity of the people who occupy the governmental and nongov-
ernmental leadership roles of the society. Requirements, capa-
bilities, and limitations of the roles remain the same as the
passage of time leads to the replacement of one generation
by another. Personnel change is thus static in political, eco-
nomic, and social terms. Leadership style and rhetoric may
vary as requirement and death bring new individuals to office,
but the goals, interrelationships, and capabilities of the new
leaders remain unaltered in comparison to their predecessors.
Hence, internal personnel change is not change at all from
the perspective of adaptation. Predisposed to follow estab-
lished policies, the new leaders make no new demands on,
concessions to, or formulations of the salient environment.
Internal political change involves change not only in the
personnel of governmental and political institutions, but also
in the requirements, capabilities, and limitations of their role
in relation to each other and to the citizenry. The roles in the
social and economic institutions of the society need not un-
dergo change except as they relate to those responsible for
its governance. Recent events in Greece and Czechoslovakia
are illustrative of internal political change. In the former, a
democratic regime was overthrown and replaced by a dic-
tatorship that altered constitutional arrangements and nar-
rowed the roles of nongovernmental leaders at the expense of
greater governmental prerogatives. In the latter, authoritarian
controls over political life were relaxed when members of the
liberal wing of the Czech Communist Party temporarily took
over the key leadership positions. In neither Greece nor
Czechoslovakia, however, did the personnel and policies of
the social and economic institutions of the society also
undergo change. Election outcomes which bring new parties

as well as new personnel to power also exemplify internal

political change, although to a much lesser extent. Whereas
the relationship of the governmental leadership to the citi-
zenry remains unaltered in comparison to the past, electoral
victories of opposition parties constitute political change in
the sense that the new majority alters the relation of party
and governmental leaders to each other.
Internal socioeconomic change refers to alterations in the
requirements, capabilities, limitations, and relationships of
the leadership roles in the institutions of society other than
the political and governmental. The emergence of new social
classes, the decline of established modes of production, the
enactment of new welfare policies, the intensification of
group conflicts, the introduction of mass media of communi-
cation, the reform of educational practices, the deepening of
economic recessions these are but a few of the innumerable
kinds of socioeconomic trends in a society that can alter the
relationships and responsibilities of its nongovernmental
leadership roles. Such socioeconomic change, of course, can
give rise to (as well as stem from) political change, but there
is no necessary correspondence between the two. If the socio-
economic change unfolds slowly through time, governmental
and political processes may remain unaltered from one time
period to another. Obviously, however, the more rapidly
the socioeconomic change occurs, the more are the roles
of government and politics also likely to undergo change.
Obviously, too, personnel change is likely to increase or
decrease at a rate comparable to that of the socioeconomic
change.
It should be noted that this formulation does not identify the

sources of the various types of internal change. The requirements
and relationships of the leadership roles of a society may be altered
because of the discovery of oil or the demands of a racial minority,
the emergence of a charismatic leader or the introduction of mass
production techniques, the pronouncements of a judicial body or
the opening of new hydroelectric facilities. Although our focus is
on change in human institutions, change in the nonhuman re-
sources available and the technological means for using them is not
discounted. Rather it is assumed that if such developments are
significant, they will eventually culminate in personnel, political,

or socioeconomic change. The same assumption is made about all

three types of external change.
External personnel change refers to shifts in the identity of

the people who occupy the governmental and nongovern-
mental leadership roles in the salient environment of the
adapting society. This includes the personnel of international
organizations as well as of other societies. Like its internal
counterpart, external personnel change does not involve alter-
ations in the requirements, capabilities, and limitations of
the newly occupied roles. Unlike internal personnel change,
however, it does present the society with minor adaptive
problems. For there is always the possibility that the new
personnel abroad will initiate external political and/or socio-
economic change that endangers the society's essential struc-
tures. Highly ritualistic forms of adaptation-such as official
representation at the funerals of foreign leaders and cere-
monial procedures for the presentation of credentials by new
ambassadors-have thus emerged as means whereby societies
attempt to cope with external personnel change and isolate it
from other forms of change in their environments.
External political change is conceived to involve alterations
in the requirements, capabilities, and limitations of govern-
mental roles both within and among other societies and inter-
national organizations in the salient environment. When it
occurs within other societies, it is similar to internal political
change in the sense that it involves shifts in the relationship
of their government officials to each other and their citizen-
ries, but not in the roles of their social and economic institu-
tions. In addition, external political change occurs when
the governmental and political role relationships among soci-
eties abroad undergo alteration. The formation of alliances,
the severance of diplomatic ties, the acquisition of new
capabilities (especially of the nuclear variety) that result in
shifting the patterns of dominance and subservience abroad,
and the flaring of historic enmities between neighbors are
illustrative of the kinds of political changes that can occur
among societies in the salient environment of the adapting
society that is the focus of analysis. Since political change
that occurs within any society in the salient environment may
lead either to new policies toward the adapting society or to

new relationships with other societies in the environment

that in turn pose adaptive problems, the officials of the adapt-
ing society are likely to be equally sensitive to both forms of
external political change. Viewed from the perspective of the
Soviet Union, events in Czechoslovakia during the first eight
months of 1968 offer a good illustration of this point. (From
a Czech perspective, of course, these events constituted
internal political change.) The temporary liberalization of
Czechoslovakia's authoritarian structure constituted salient
external political change for the Soviets not only because
pressure seemed likely to build up within Russia for a similar
liberalization, but also because the new Czech regime seemed
likely to pursue new foreign policies more independent of
Moscow's and, in so doing, to encourage other societies in
Eastern Europe to follow its reformist orientations.
External socioeconomic change involves alterations in the

requirements, capabilities, and limitations of the leadership
roles in the nonpolitical institutions of other societies and
international organizations in the salient environment. The
processes of economic development and decay in neighboring
countries, crippling inflations and revolutionary upheavals
abroad, discoveries of iron ore by foreign competitors, the
adoption or rejection of birth control programs by overpopu-
lated countries, the closing or opening of a waterway connect-
ing markets, the modification of work or health standards
by a world body-these are instances of external socio-
economic change and they illustrate its similarity to internal
socioeconomic change. To a large extent, in fact, the two types
are identical except that the locale of the former is outside
the adapting society. In addition, external socioeconomic
change differs from the internal kind in that it can occur
among other societies as well as within them. Shifts in the
pattern of international trade or in the distribution of gold
reserves are illustrative in this regard. For the same reasons
indicated in the case of internal change, it seems likely that
the more rapidly socioeconomic change occurs in a society's
salient environment, the more is its external world also likely
to be marked by personnel and political change.
Although exceedingly general, this sixfold conception of change

facilitates the analysis of national adaptation in several important
ways. Most notably, it suggests that the nature of the adaptive

behavior in which societies engage is likely to be related to the

nature of the changes with which they must cope. Developmental
loans and not defense treaties, for example, are undertaken to cope
with external socioeconomic change, whereas alliances and not
foreign aid programs are likely to be strengthened in response to
external political change. Conversely, internal political change
seems more likely to give rise to attempts to alter diplomatic
relationships in the salient environment than to efforts to promote
economic development. To be sure, a one-to-one correspondence
between the nature of the change and the contents of the adaptive
behavior may not always prevail; but it does seem reasonable to
presume that the more the analyst knows about the identity and
shifting requirements of the leadership roles caught up in internal
or external change, the more will he be able to anticipate and ex-
plain the adaptive behavior that interests him. Furthermore, the
relationship appears to hold also with respect to the pace of change.
Certainly it is a plausible hypothesis, for example, that the more
rapidly internal socioeconomic change occurs, the more likely it is
to foster demands for corresponding changes in the salient environ-
ment. Castro's Cuba is a case in point. Whatever may be the
ideological and historical sources of its subversive activities in
Latin America, when viewed from an adaptive perspective such
behavior can be readily comprehended as arising out of a need to
render Cuba's salient environment more compatible with the swift
transformation of its essential socioeconomic structures. At least
it seems highly doubtful whether the subversive activities would
have accompanied a slow evolution of a socialist economy in Cuba.
Indeed, it could well be argued that the requirements of adapta-
tion are such that, whenever a society undergoes revolutionary
socioeconomic change, its foreign policy is likely to be charac-
terized by aggressive efforts to promote similar developments
abroad.
Another benefit of this initial breakdown of the forms which
change can take is that it serves to stress the causal interdepen-
dence of internal and external behavior. In responding to changes
abroad, societies may have to adjust the attitudes, resources, and
interaction patterns that sustain their essential structures at home.
It can even be hypothesized that the more extensive the external
changes to which societies must adapt, the greater will be the
corresponding adjustments they make at home. A high degree of
external change can readily require, for example, the raising or
lowering of taxes; the curbing or expanding of domestic programs;
the drafting or releasing of soldiers; the revising or abandoning of

educational curricula; the splitting of political parties or the form-

ing of new ones; the reshuffling or resignations of officials; and
the heightening of domestic controversies and intergroup tensions,
with all the rallies, marches, letter writing, violence, and other
forms of support-buildingactivity that accompany intensive policy
making and new commitments. In a like manner, responses to
internal change will necessitate commensurate alterations in the
attitudes, resources, and interaction patterns through which for-
eign policy is conducted. As implied earlier in the Cuban example,
again it seems reasonable to expect that the degree of internal
change will be related to the extent of external behavior.
To a large extent, in short, the domestic life of societies and their
life in relation to a world of other societies can constitute a seam-
less web, each conditioning the other to the point where a change
in one leads to a change in the other. Stated differently, no society
is endowed with physical resources and psychic energies sufficient
to meet the needs of integration at home and the requirements of
adaptation abroad. The resources must be allocated and the ener-
gies must be redirected, and each allocation and each redirection
has both internal and external consequences.
This is not to say that the causal interdependence of life within
and between societies is necessarily symmetrical, that every mal-
adaptive act has disintegrative consequences, or that every inte-
grative act fosters adaptive results. On the contrary, asymmetries
abound. As illustrated by Egypt's 1967 war on Israel, maladaptive
behavior can often produce domestic integration. And an attempt
to hasten progress at home can lead to a deterioration of relation-
ships abroad, as the recent history of mainland China so clearly
demonstrates. Whether they are symmetrical or asymmetrical,
however, internal and external change are inextricably linked, and
it is this causal interdependence that the framework is in large
measure designed to elucidate.
Four FundamentalModes of National Adaptation

In order to pursue the analysis of the role of change and of the
behavior of societies located at different points on the adaptive-
maladaptive scale, we shall use the distinction between the various
types of internal and external change to divide the scale into four
parts that differentiate four modes of national adaptation. If the
degrees of both internal and external change that societies experi-
ence are dichotomized to fluctuate between low and high, then

four basic types of conditions to which they must adapt can be

distinguished, as shown in the accompanying matrix. These four
types of conditions are hypothesized to foster what we shall call,
respectively, the habitual, deliberative, spirited, and convulsive
modes of adaptation.
EXTERNAL CHANGE
high low
h
1 CONVULSIVE SPIRITED
g
INTERNAL h
CHANGE
1
o DELIBERATIVE HABITUAL
w
The habitual mode refers to the condition in which both internal

and external change are low. It is so designated because, with not
much changing either at home or abroad, the routinized decision-
making processes of governments will suffice to cope with the
course of public and world affairs. There is no need for top-level
officials to deliberate over the most appropriate responses to in-
ternal demands or external pressures. Change is so minimal that
the society's bureaucracy can-and is authorized to-handle any
demand or pressure that may arise by resorting to established
policies and applying established procedures. The international
behavior of Switzerland during the 1920s might be expected to
exhibit this mode of adaptation if data on it were gathered.
The deliberative mode of national adaptation is a response to the
condition in which internal change is low and external change is
high; it is so designated because the absence of new internal
demands on government allows officials to weigh carefully the
appropriate course of action to be followed in meeting the rapidly
changing scene abroad, but at the same time the high degree of
external change involves too much responsibility for the bureauc-
racy to handle alone and the top level of officialdom must thus
participate in the decision-making process. Their participation and

the presence of high uncertainty and change abroad means that

recourse to established policies and procedures will not be suffi-
cient and that, therefore, top officialdom must deliberate informally
over the choices to be made as well as ratify them formally. The
behavior of the United States during the first years immediately
following World War II is an example of deliberative adaptation.
Between 1945 and the school desegregation decision of the early
1950s, for instance, developments at home were slow to unfold,
but considerable change was occurring abroad, with the result that
top leaders of the State Department and the Congress joined with
the President in prolonged, careful, and wide-ranging calculations
designed to cope with such developments as a blockade of Berlin,
a collapse of Europe's economy, an attack in Korea, and a reemer-
gent Japan. Accounts of these episodes reveal a highly reasoned
and innovative quality in American adaptive behavior.5 Perhaps
the epitome of this deliberative mode was achieved during the fif-
teen weeks in 1947 when extended assessments and discussions of
the decaying European economy culminated in the Marshall Plan.6
The spirited mode of adaptation is conceived to characterize
foreign policy behavior in the condition in which internal change
is high and external change is low. It is so designated because the
high degree of change at home leads to demands that officials act
quickly and energetically to alter the unchanging environment in
such a way as to render it more compatible with the unfolding
variations in the society's essential structures. Officials are not free
to handle these domestic demands as deliberatively as they can
when the pressures of change arise in the environment. For these
demands require them to promote rather than to cope with new
situations abroad, and whether the changes are such as to lead to
demands that involve aggressive military conquest of parts of the
environment or whether they give rise to a peace movement that
demands efforts to disarm the environment, they require officials
to act precipitously abroad and to do so in a much more spirited
way than when the internal scene is relatively quiescent. The for-
eign policy behavior of Germany during the 1930s exemplifies this
spirited mode of adaptation. Arising out of the economic and
5 See, for example, W. Phillips Davison, The Berlin Blockade: A Study in

Cold War Politics (Princeton, 1958); Glenn D. Paige, The Korean Decision:
June 24-30, 1950 (New York, 1968); and Bernard C. Cohen, The Political Process
and Foreign Policy: The Making of the Japanese Peace Settlement (Princeton,
1957).
6 See Joseph M. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (New York, 1955).

political dislocation of Germany,it was characterized by persistent

diplomatic claims and insistent military threats that were justified
in moralistic and vigorous terms.
Finally, the convulsive mode of adaptation is hypothesized to
arise out of the condition in which both internal and external
change are high. It is so designated because, with a great deal
transpiringat home and abroad, the top leaderships of governments
must respond quickly to societal demands and internal pressures
that are often contradictory and therefore may necessitate erratic,
unpredictable, and agitated efforts to keep the fluctuating external
environment in balance with the shifting essential structures of
their societies. The combination of high change at home and abroad
tends to make established policies and procedures unreliable and
compels policy makers to fall back on hasty and makeshift judg-
ments that give rise to sudden shifts in external behavior which
may, in turn, create internal tensions that foster the need for
further shifts in policy. Convulsive adaptation is thus more self-
sustaining than the other adaptive modes. It is also a primary
source of tension in the international system. Mainland China's
external behavior in the 1960s is perhaps the most recent and clear-
cut example of convulsive adaptation. Some would say that the
United States also exhibited this mode during the latter half of the
1960s. Certainly it is true that the essential structures of both
societies underwent considerable change during this period and
that constancy did not mark the foreign policy behavior of either.
Images of Change Sequences

Viewed from the perspective of adapting societies, uncertainty is
perhaps the prime characteristic of change. Except for personnel
change, which can occur as quickly as it takes to write a letter of
resignation and which is predictable in the sense that retirements
and deaths accompany the passage of time, the outcomes of un-
folding situations are never so clear that a society can be sure of
their impact on its essential structures. Once political and socio-
economic changes are initiated, their course can be temporarily
diverted, permanently deflected, or even reversed by a host of
factors that are partly obstacles to the changes and partly products
of them. Change, in other words, appears as a series of stages, each
of which proceeds from its predecessor, but all of which contain
their own choice points that determine the direction of future
stages. Thus, uncertainty as to what the processes of change por-

tend for essential structures is a constant aspect of national adapta-

tion, compelling societies to develop images of the sequence of
stages that change may follow. In order to cope with continuing
uncertainty, they must then proceed from the images of change
sequences to actions designed to make the sequences adaptive or
to forestall, interrupt, and divert those sequences that are deemed
likely to have maladaptive consequences.
Stated differently, since each stage of change encompasses choice
points that can affect the sequence of change in the next stage,
the adaptive behavior of societies cannot consist only of efforts
to cope with changes that have just occurred or are in the process
of occurring. It must also be based on conceptions of how essential
structures will be linked to the events that may be forged by future
stages of change. Thus, the connection between the adaptive be-
havior of a society and the consequences of that behavior for its
essential structure exists primarily in the minds of foreign policy
decision makers, who must develop an image of how the behavior
they engage in will prevent future change sequences from unfold-
ing to the detriment of essential structures or of how it will alter
the sequences in such a way that the structures will benefit. The
"domino theory" of international politics in Southeast Asia is a
good example of the role that images of change play in the pro-
cesses of national adaptation. Adherents of the domino theory
see United States acquiescence to the Communist takeover of one
country in Asia as acquiescence to a change that contains the seeds
of the next change, namely, encouragement for Communists else-
where in Asia to take over other countries. In its most elaborate
form the domino theory conceives of each Communist takeover as
increasingly jeopardizing the essential structures of the United
States, such that, if the sequences of change are allowed to proceed
unchecked, American political, economic, and social life will even-
tually be altered beyond acceptable limits. Critics of the domino
theory, on the other hand, are dubious about the connection
between Asian change sequences and American essential struc-
tures. As one critic put it, "Some Americans have the impression
Vietnam lies twenty miles off the coast of California and if we
lose Vietnam, the Vietnamese will soon be in California and cap-
ture Governor Ronald Reagan."7Whatever the merits of such crit-
icism, it should be stressed that it, too, is based on images of change
sequences, albeit these are not conceived to culminate in an impact
7 Louis Fischer of Princeton, quoted in The New York Times, 16 August 1968.

on the essential structures of the United States. Indeed, it takes

little thought to realize that most arguments over questions of
foreign policy are rooted in different conceptions of how future
sequences of change will unfold and thus that images of future
change sequences are no less important than change itself as a
stimulus to adaptive behavior.
From the perspective of empirical research, the relevance of
images of change sequences creates a serious analytic problem.
It means that an assessment of the adaptation of a society that is
confined exclusively to tracing fluctuations in that society's essen-
tial structures will be insufficient or even misleading. At least this
is the case whenever fluctuations do not occur, since their absence
may be due either to the absence of change at home or abroad or
to the adaptive consequences of correct perceptions and corre-
sponding behavior that offset future sequences of change. In other
words, the analyst who looks only at the essential structures can
never ascertain whether a stable location on the adaptive-mal-
adaptive scale results from action or inaction. Even worse, if he
assumes that some adaptive behavior contributed to the stability,
he cannot be sure that the sequences of future change would not
have resulted in the same stable location in the absence of the
adaptive behavior. For years, for example, North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) members sought to build up the organiza-
tion's troop strength in order to divert an imagined sequence of fu-
ture changes that would have culminated in a Soviet attack on
Western Europe. The fact that the physical structure of Western
European nations has remained stable and not been altered by
such an attack during the existence of NATO provides no clue,
however, as to whether the adaptive behavior designed to bul-
wark NATO contributed to the stability of the physical structures
of its members.
Although the problem of "what-would-have-happened-if" can
never be fully resolved, recognition that images of future change
sequences are elements of the problem helps to render it manage-
able. Such a recognition points to the importance of focusing on
variations in the adaptive behavior of societies as well as on fluc-
tuations in their essential structures. The latter constitute the de-
pendent variables of an adaptive framework, but the former com-
prise the intervening variables and tracing the interaction between
the two is just as crucial a matter as analyzing the correlations be-
tween the independent and dependent variables of the framework.
It is obvious that the adaptive behavior that intervenes between

the sources and consequences of foreign policy is, for all practical
purposes, designed to affect sequences of future change, imagined
or real. Hence it is possible-at least theoretically-to analyze
"what-would-have-happened-if" by comparing the relationship
between independent and dependent variables in situations when
particularintervening variables do and do not operate.
Adaptation and Transformation

Notwithstanding the centrality of change in the adaptive frame-
work, the question arises as to whether the framework makes al-
lowance for truly profound change-for change which is so thor-
oughgoing as to amount to transformation. After all, it could be
argued, the notion that adaptation occurs only when essential struc-
tures vary within acceptable limits has a built-in bias in favor of
slow and stable change. Having said that variations beyond these
limits amount to the disappearance of societies into their environ-
ments, does this not mean that at a certain point rapid and extensive
change would be viewed as extreme maladaptation, as the demise
rather than the transformation of a society? Can a society that
experiences a thoroughgoing revolution-and thus a total restruc-
turing of the patterns of interaction among its members-neces-
sarily be said to exist no longer? If the Republic of South Africa
failed to resist the external pressures to end apartheid and the
white minority thereby lost its control over the black majority,
would the Republic of South Africa thereafter be treated as having
been transformed through adaptation to the external pressure or as
having been replaced by a new actor because of extreme malad-
aptation to the foreign demands for basic changes in its social struc-
ture? And what about a society that voluntarily forfeits its
sovereignty by joining a federated union of states? Even though the
patterns whereby such a society governed itself would no longer be
recognizable, how can it be said that the changes exceeded accept-
able limits when in fact the federation was entered into volun-
tarily? In short, quite apart from the empirical difficulties involved
in specifying the cutoff points of essential structures, would such
points be meaningful conceptually?
While these questions may at first glance seem to raise doubts
about the utility of an adaptive framework, more prolonged reflec-
tion yields a contrary conclusion, namely, that transformation and
adaptation are not antithetical, that the former is in key respects a
measure of the latter, and that the problem of determining when
transformation moves beyond adaptation and becomes extinction

is peripheral. This is so because, as implied above and elaborated

elsewhere,8 only a few of the many structures of a society are
conceived to be essential to its continuance and the range of
acceptability within which these can vary is considered to be
extensive. Thus, an adaptive framework allows for far-reaching
change. Governments can fall, ruling elites can be replaced, policies
can be reversed, and economies can founder without the basic
patterns of interaction that comprise a national society and dis-
tinguish it from its environment becoming unrecognizable. Indeed,
governments often fall in order to facilitate the adjustment of these
patterns to trends in their environments. President Lyndon B. John-
son's decision not to run for reelection in 1968 because his unpro-
ductive policies toward Vietnam threatened the basic unity of
United States society is illustrative in this regard. Similarly, if a
revolution results in new leadership that is able to prevent the
fragmentation of key groups in the society and to maintain author-
ity over all the groups governed by the prerevolutionary leadership,
the boundaries of the society would still be recognizable and the
revolutionary changes would not be treated as so maladaptive as
to signify its failure to survive. Moreover, the acceptable limits of
essential structures are not static. It will be recalled that the
adaptive framework also allows for change through the employ-
ment by a society of its own procedures to transform its essential
structures. As long as the society is still recognizable once it has
transformed these structures, then, no matter how profound, the
transformation is conceived to be part of the process of adaptation.
To be sure, some changes do amount to the extinction of the
society and the distinction between extinction and transformation
is not always easy to maintain. While the failure of individuals,
marriages, and business firms to adapt to their environments is
readily determined (through recourse, respectively, to physiologi-
cal measures of death, divorce records, and bankruptcy proceed-
ings), the point at which the adaptation of a national society fails
is not necessarily self-evident. Dismemberment following military
defeat and occupation plainly signifies the collapse of a national
actor into its environment; so does the establishment of new legal
and political entities following successful wars of secession and
other forms of national disintegration. Under other circumstances,
however, the cutoff points are not so obvious and must, to a certain
extent, be arbitrarily drawn. It could be argued, for example, that
the basic patterns of interaction in an apartheid-free South Africa
8 See Rosenau, "The Politics of National Adaptation," pp. III 9-III 20.

386 ComparativePolitics April 1970
would be so different from those presently prevailing that the

change would amount not to the transformation of South Africa,
but to the replacement of one society by another. Similarly, in
the case of the society that voluntarily forfeits some of its sov-
ereignty by entering a federation, it could be argued that the basic
social relations that comprise such a society nevertheless persist
and that, therefore, the federation represents adaptive transforma-
tion and not extinction. Whatever their merits, such arguments
demonstrate that at some point the difference between extinction
and transformation is a matter of semantics. That is, at some point
the distinction between extinction and transformation is so ambig-
uous that it hardly matters where the analyst establishes the cutoff
point as long as he does so explicitly and consistently.
Choice and Adaptation

While it is the main purpose of the adaptive framework to develop
a body of theory that sets forth general principles of adaptation to
which all societies may be expected to conform, it should be clear
from the preceding discussion that such theory allows for choice
on the part of actors. The goal is to anticipate the form adaptation
is likely to take under specified conditions, but this is not to say
that adaptation is a predetermined process to which decision
makers unknowingly succumb. Societies are not like cats which
automatically adjust their distance from a blazing fireplace in such
a way as to stay warm without getting burned.9 Some do get too
close to the fires of world politics and wither, while others remain
too remote from them and freeze. In other words, as previously
indicated, societies can engage in maladaptive as well as adaptive
behavior, and the resulting movement back and forth between the
extremes of the adaptive scale suggests the central role played by
human choice. Such choice is no more random than is any human
choice, but it grows out of historical, cultural, and other immediate
and remote factors. The point being made here is simply that choice
is part of adaptation and not precluded by it.
The Task Ahead

Perhaps the key adaptive choice that societies make concerns their
readiness to become involved in, and dependent on, the interna-
tional system-to maximize or minimize the flow of people, infor-
9 The example is from Ashby, Design for a Brain, p. 12.

mation, and materials across their boundaries. Thus far we have

not taken account of this obviously important directional dimen-
sion of adaptive behavior. To trace the movement of societies along
a scale of adaptation is not to specify whether their location on
the scale reflects involvement in the international system or disen-
gagement from it. Since both isolationism and internationalism can
be highly adaptive (or maladaptive) under certain circumstances,
knowledge that a society is located toward the adaptive end of the
scale does not answer all our questions about its foreign policy
behavior. Similarly, to note a correspondence between the nature
of adaptive behavior and the types of change to which it is ad-
dressed is not to indicate whether the change fosters a predispo-
sition to preserve the prevailing state of the salient environment
or a desire to seek radical alterations in it. To identify a relationship
between the degree of change and the mode of adaptation is not to
specify whether the many adaptive and maladaptive acts in which
a society engages at any moment in time add up to a posture of
leadership, neutralism, or followership toward conflict in the sa-
lient environment. To conceive of societies as trying to cope with
environmental threats to their essential structures is not to predict
whether they will adapt by acquiescing to external demands or by
defying them. To presume that societies must allocate their re-
sources and energies in such a way as to adjust to both internal
and external changes is not to predict the pattern their allocations
will follow when the needs at home and the requirements abroad
are contradictory and cannot both be satisfied.
In short, the concepts and premises set forth in this article
constitute only the foundations on which a theory must be con-
structed. General hypotheses about the overall direction of adap-
tive behavior must be developed if the adaptive perspective is to be
rendered theoretical. Likewise, its components must be operation-
alized and data gathered to test the hypotheses if the theory is to
be perfected and rendered relevant to the analysis of particular
situations. These tasks have been initiated by a team of some ten
colleagues organized as the Inter-University Comparative Foreign
Policy Project, but much remains to be done and all concerned
recognize that the task is awesome. All concerned are equally per-
suaded that a rich payoff in terms of greater understanding lies
ahead.


Foreign Policy As Adaptive Behaviour

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Foreign Policy as Adaptive Behavior: Some Preliminary Notes for a Theoretical Model

Author(s): James N. Rosenau

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Some PreliminaryNotes for a Theoretical Model

The question of how and why organisms adapt to their environ-

Foreign Policy as Adaptive Behavior

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the heart of the study of foreign policy. A host of meanings can be

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its concepts operationalized, and its hypotheses subjected to em-

The Concept of Adaptation

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the integrative-disintegrative dimension of national behavior. The

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demands for new boundary-crossing flows of people, information,

3 For a discussion and other examples of maladaptation that resulted in

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been located at the adaptive extreme on the scale, an extreme that

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be used in this way. The question of what constitutes acceptable

The Salient Environment

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structures. Due to the nature of change and the temporal and

Adaptation and Change

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In order to achieve analytic control over the myriad changes

Internal personnel change involves change only in the iden-

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as well as new personnel to power also exemplify internal

It should be noted that this formulation does not identify the

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or socioeconomic change. The same assumption is made about all

External personnel change refers to shifts in the identity of

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new relationships with other societies in the environment

External socioeconomic change involves alterations in the

Although exceedingly general, this sixfold conception of change

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behavior in which societies engage is likely to be related to the

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educational curricula; the splitting of political parties or the form-

Four FundamentalModes of National Adaptation

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four basic types of conditions to which they must adapt can be

The habitual mode refers to the condition in which both internal

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the presence of high uncertainty and change abroad means that

5 See, for example, W. Phillips Davison, The Berlin Blockade: A Study in

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political dislocation of Germany,it was characterized by persistent

Images of Change Sequences

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tend for essential structures is a constant aspect of national adapta-

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on the essential structures of the United States. Indeed, it takes

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Adaptation and Transformation

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is peripheral. This is so because, as implied above and elaborated

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would be so different from those presently prevailing that the

Choice and Adaptation

The Task Ahead