Frankly, I got troubles reading Christopher Hill's "The changing politics of foreign policy" in the last semester, which seemed to be so long, complicated and difficult to read. However, I still enjoyed reading Hill's so far because of the wisdom knowledge of Foreign politics of Hill in the book is really wonderful. The thing is that we need to read patiently all of his complex argument, explanations and examples until suddenly realize the deductive logic of his ideas in the end of each chapter.
In the first chapter, Hill clarified the idea of foreign policy in the past and the present, between non-academic people and specialists- How foreign policy means to them. A formal and orthodox definition of Foreign policy is created by Hill : " Foreign policy is the sum of official external relations conducted by independent actor (usually a state) in the international relations". Moreover, the first chapter tries to explain for readers some basic definitions of high- low politics, foreign policy-makers, politics and coherence...
The second part of the first chapter lists 6 completing approaches of International relations which are: international history, rational choice , realism, neo-realism , country studies, post-positivism as well as the function of FPA (foreign policy analysis)
Hill centrally focuses on the 3 changes of foreign policy which are: The end of Cold War ( created the better relationship among countries in the world and the demand of coherence); The globalization ( raised the link between economic and foreign policy that increase the interstates co-operations) and the Westphalia system (establishes the idea of sovereignty and non-intervention)
The rest of the chapter, Hill spends to argue the challenges of FPA and other structures which seem to be not so important and necessary for the IR test , so I just read it quickly.
Reading Hill's takes me a lot of time, not just understand only but think, guess and link his advanced ideas logically to be easier to simplify. In general, it's a fantastic book for diplomat and diplomatic students as well. There are still more chapters in the IR text book from Hill, which I have to spend more time within this week to finish.
I may be back and write more about Hill's writings (If I am not lazy as normal and Mr.Hill and his work are not too difficult to approach :D)
