This thesis is a study of security policy change in Finland in the post-Cold War world. It will investigate what policies have changed in Finland and will explain why they have changed by looking at the politics of security from both within the country and from without. It relies on some of more recent theoretical approaches in the disciplines of Security Studies and International Relations (lR) and uses Finland as a case study to test that theorising. The chosen theoretical approaches come within the Constructivist tradition, and attempt to explain why and how states and their security policies change by looking at the international environment, the domestic political situation, and the actors involved and importantly how they are all mutually constitutive. In doing so, this approach aims firstly to provide a more sociologically and historically attuned account of the state and society in the international environment than given by the more positivist schools of International Relations that dominated western academia through the Cold War. The chosen approach attempts to illuminate the political processes, including both negotiation and conflict, that produces security policy. Secondly the chosen approach plays down the centrality of the divide between internal and external, or domestic and international, in its account of states. As Erikson and Rhinard note (2009) it is becoming increasingly common over the last decade for studies of security to come "to grips with a particularly new, and challenging, aspect of security: the problematic divide between 'the internal' and 'the external"'(ibid:24). The chosen approach for this thesis could be said to be more one of 'world politics' than of 'international relations' in its attempt to go beyond that divide. Thirdly this approach tests how different normative assumptions amongst different security actors produce conflicting worldviews - that loosely can be seen as Hobbesian perspectives of international competition and conflict against Kantian views of transnational cooperation and peace. It considers how a country's security policy results from the various actors attempting to balance such conflicting views, how this balance reflects their political power - and how this negotiation can create aspects of security policies that are contradictory or paradoxical. This chapter will first, ask the fundamental questions of 'why should we study Finnish security policy?', noting the seeming paradox of modem, globally integrated, export- led EU member-state but a state where its security policy seems to have changed little since the Cold War. Next it considers existing literature that attempts to study and explain Finnish security policy, in particular noting the prevalence of geopolitics in these explanations but noting the obvious weaknesses in this popular approach. Thirdly, the chapter considers alternative International Relations theory approaches, rejecting the rationalist accounts of realism and arguing for an approach to this study more in the tradition of constructivism. Fourthly, and following on from the overall theory discussion, this chapter introduces the three hypotheses that form the central questions of this thesis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:534461 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Archer, Toby Michael |
| Publisher | Manchester Metropolitan University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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