The Transformation of Foreign Policy: Drawing and Managing Boundaries from Antiquity to the Present

The study of foreign policy is usually concerned with the interaction of states. ‘States’ are, however, a relatively recent phenomenon. As a result, the study of the ‘foreign policy’ of earlier (and of the present) periods either distorts structures of governance - by turning, say, princes, empires, or the European Union into ‘states’ - or steers clear of an analysis of foreign policy that can easily link up with present-day political concerns. This volume offers a way out of this problem by demonstrating that foreign policy results from the creation of (typically unstable) boundaries between political actors that are considered domestic and those considered foreign by combining insights from political science, history and law in case studies extending from ancient Greek cities via the Christianization of Europe, the nineteenth-century great power system, and the aftermath of the Great War to the foreign relations of modern cities and the EU.