Inflexible to Flexible Diplomacy in Taiwan

Sammanfattning: Taiwan is in many ways an excellent example of how an authoritarian country can overcome much of the associated difficulties of successfully transitioning into a healthy and well-functioning democracy. In spite of this undisputed fact, Taiwan can only be characterized as a diplomatic orphan, an outcast, shunned by the international community because of events dating back to before World War II and the fact that two regimes have for various intents and purposes claimed to represent the one true China. Different foreign policies have been employed by Taiwan to best cope with this situation. The purpose of this thesis is, through the use of a theoretical model situated on the state and individual level, with the added assistance of a number of conducted interviews and material collected from secondary sources, to analyze the foreign policy change (FPC) that Taiwan underwent, starting in the 1980s, and discover why Taiwan decided to implement a foreign policy that would come to be known as ‗flexible diplomacy‘.