In the last few decades we have seen that the traditional Foreign Policy Executive (FPE) in European countries increasingly had to deal with a variety of domestic actors when formulating and executing foreign policy. These include other branches of government than the ministry of Foreign Affairs, private actors such as companies, pressure groups, non-governmental organizations, and parliaments. The increased involvement of domestic actors has been accompanied with a larger variety of opinions on foreign policy among the domestic actors. The situation in which the FPE could effectively determine foreign policy and take domestic support for granted is largely gone. The question is how the rising number of actors and ensuing disagreement has affected the dynamics of foreign policy making. The purpose of this paper is to theorize on how particularly European FPEs has tried to reach compromises amidst a pluralistic landscape of domestic actors with their large variety of wishes and demands. The empirical focus of the paper is on two contentious issues of foreign policy in the Netherlands: peacekeeping operations at the Balkans and in Afghanistan as well as European integration in the last twenty years. A less deferential and more critical public, a growing number of interest groups, and the larger involvement of the parliament increasingly constrain the Dutch FPE in formulating and executing foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. The main empirical question of the paper is how the Dutch FPE has sought more actively domestic support for foreign policy in the two cases mentioned. Based on the empirical findings, the paper presents a tentative theoretical framework on domestic consensus making on foreign policy.
