Foreign Policies of African States in Asymmetrical Dyads

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Abstract
An analysis of the foreign policies of black African states toward industrialized nations in the middle 1960s is employed in a partial test of a theory of the foreign policies of subordinate states in asymmetrical dyads. In this theory, the interaction of two conditions—the state of a nation's economy and the extent of concentration in its linkages with a superordinate power—is used to explain the foreign policy actions of the subordinate state toward the superordinate country. Directed dyads are divided into asymmetrical and nonsymmetrical sets, and the hypotheses are tested over both sets via regression analysis. The findings confirm the importance of structural asymmetry as a scope condition on the theory but offer only limited support for the use of the economic strength and linkage concentration variables in the explanation of foreign policy. The results also reveal that the influence of these two variables on foreign policy is not precisely as stipulated by the theory. For the more developed African states, relative economic strength in combination with highly concentrated linkages is associated, contrary to the theory, with a foreign policy of expanded relations with superordinate partners. For the less-developed states, this combination produces a foreign policy designed to restrict relations within the asymmetrical dyad as predicted by the theory.

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