美国文化价值观对其对外政策的影响(2)
This book is a thorough study of the functions of bureaucracy. Prof. exploredthe cultural influence on American politics, in her book, she says, “in fact, any structure ofbureaucracy is exemplary of hidden, lasting, and deep cultural factors” (Xing, 2011:110). Prof.Zhang (2012) compiled a book that studies interventionism in which many articles are contributedby professors. By their help of study about interventionism from different perspectives and theeffects of cultural values in the bureaucratic process of foreign policy making, the influence can beanalyzed.America is no exception in the view that a state’s behavior is influenced by its cultural values.American cultural values work for identity; cultural values work as tracker to find out theadversaries; cultural values work as the motivation to act. Cultural values serve as independentvariables and interventionism as the dependent. Yet, no study has shown clearly the exactcorrelation. As constructivism illustrates, culture decides behavior. But not all part of culture influencesinternational agent’s behavior, for example the eating habits. Scholars that start with the view ofculture, end up putting forward too many variables in the study, mainly because the idea of cultureis too big and opaque. A limited number of values are used for the simplification of the study sothat they can be easily distinguished from others relevant to the idea, “culture”.
Only with specificconsideration about culture, by necessarily separating values from others within the spectrum ofculture, can it be more conductible to view the independent variables in the study. So the threecultural values are chosen to study the causality between them and behavior of America, rather thanculture as a whole, for the purpose of controlling limited number of variables, and hence for theconvenience and transparency of the study.Without the consideration of culture, some fail to the understand American foreign policy forlacking of understanding of its culture; as a result, their analysis is full of bias and appears absurdwithout analyzing the cultural cause for American foreign policy. So the paper explores theinfluence of culture on foreign policy to view it more comphrehensively, and accurately bynarrowing down the number of variables.The following part illustrates the generalization of the three values. And the third part argues thatcultural values have influence on foreign policy behavior including interventionism. The forth partexplores how the values actually work theoretically. In the fifth part, positivism is performed in thepaper with two famous and typical examples to testify the previous proposition. The two empiricalexamples of prominence, the Bosnian war and the Iraq war are analyzed to testify that culturalvalues (democracy, human rights and manifest destiny) are the cause and interventionism is theresult in the causality.