Saturday, March 7, 2009

Definitions of Foreign Policy


There are millions of news and articles talking about foreign policy. International relations students might have been quite familiar with the term. It doesn’t mean to underestimate what have been understood on the terminology. But somehow, we need to know for the very beginning what foreign policy really is. This could be the right commencement before going further on the foreign policy issues. We wish.

Given lots of alternative definition of foreign policy, we would like to pick out some of the straightforward and popular ones. Here you some of the definitions of foreign policy.

  • Based on www.wordnet.edu foreign policy is a policy governing international relations.
  • Wikipedia.org defined foreign policy as a set of goals that seeks to outline how that particular country will interact on an official basis with other countries of the world and, to a lesser extent, non-state actors. Further explanation on the perspective of Wikipedia, you can simply visit the following site: www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Policy
  • Microsoft Encarta 2008 defined foreign policy as simply defined as a course of action or set of principles adopted by a nation’s government to define its relations with other countries or groups of countries.

Concluding the three definitions above, we can outline a few general points on the definition of foreign policy.

1. Governing international relations of a country

2. Goals basis by which a particular country interact with others

3. A set of principles whereby a country manages its relations with others