REINTERPRETING THE WESTEAND AFFAIR: THEORIES OF THE STATE AND CORE EXECUTIVE DECISION MAKING

In a seminal study published two decades ago, Graeme Allison developed three alternative interpretations of the Cuban missile crisis and in the process shed a great deal of light upon the operations of the American core executive in foreign policy areas (Allison, 1969, 1971). Yet the contrasting models he compared were all variants of a single theory of the state, pluralism. They differed from each other chiefly in using divergent methodologies and conceptions of the foreign policy process. More substantive differences about who controls the state apparatus and which social interests it serves were excluded from Allison’s consideration. Most of Allison’s critics additionally failed to distinguish between their disagreements with his historical narratives and dissent from the analytic models he discussed (Freedman, 1976; Cornford, 1974; Nossal, 1979; Krasner, 1972). Allison’s later work ran together his ‘governmental politics’ and ‘organisational process’ models into a unified ‘bureaucratic politics’ account (Allison and Halperin, 1972; Halperin, 1974; Allison and Szanton, 1976). This complex model incorporates so many possible influences that it is indistinguishable from any applied pluralist account of decision making. As a result Allison’s method of comparing alternative interpretations of a single historical episode has rarely been followed up (but see O’Leary, 1987a).