Abstrakt:
Seeking to disentangle what drives the cooperation willingness between
would-be partners, this chapter advances two main assumptions that hypothesize the
cause-effect relationship between the converging strategic goals and strategic roles,
on the one hand, and the scope of cooperation willingness, on the other.
It also theoretically contextualizes, conceptualizes as well as operationalizes the main
three variables hypothesized. Based on the foreign-policy manifestos analysis, the
chapter presents an original approach to the study of strategic goals and salient policy
issues that actors seek to pursue, or tackle, in their external relations. an approached
towards estimating the salience of foreign-policy goals and issues as well as the
scope, direction and degree of their convergence is developed within the chapter as
well. data-intensive matrices of indicators and measures of cooperation willingness,
strategic goals and roles convergence accomplish the effort in theorizing a testable
causal relationship within this dimension of strategic partnerships phenomenon.