The foreign-policy consensus: an interim research report.

The article discusses a research on decision-making and consensus-building in foreign policy formulation. Considering that decisions of the government are often perceived as discrete actions with definite beginnings and decisive endings, the author argues that only a few acts of government can be considered as such. Using a model of conflict and consensus-building, the research investigates the diverse and inconsistent objectives of national policies, complexities of policy processes and the bargaining and power in the relations of reconciled policies. The author categorizes the results of the study into: the participants in foreign policies, roles and functions of the participants and the pattern of relationships and workings of the system as a whole.