Foreign Policy of States

In the last quarter of twentieth century, two important processes have taken place at the worldwide scale. First one is the globalization and the other one is the collapse of the Warsaw Treaty Organization and USSR. As a result of globalization, any economic, political or socio-cultural crises in the world affected the rest of the world very rapidly and deeply, and the events that followed took a multi-dimensional fashion. The collapse of the Warsaw Treaty Organization and USSR resulted in the vacuum of power in different parts of the world. With the direction of the only super power, USA, a New World Order has been established. As the new International Law Norms, new values and coalitions are formed by New World Order, and significant changes in the existing institutional structure took place.

The aim of this book is to provide the reader with an overview of the foreign policy of 105 states and to close a social scientific gap. There is no handbook in the social science literature on foreign policy regarding the foreign policy of the most important nation states that affords a swift and compact overview of this policy area. The lack of such a basic handbook up to now is even more astonishing in the light of teh increasing interdependence and network character of foreign policy and in the light of the difficulties of the present international order in overcoming structural problems and regional problems.

In order to create compatibility of the individual contributions, the essays have a similar structure. At the coclusion of each article there is a select bibliography.