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H-DIPLO ROUNDTABLE REVIEW

Tony Smith.  _Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the
Making of American Foreign Policy_.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2000. x + 224 pp. bibliographical references and index. $35.00 (cloth),
ISBN 0674002946.

Review Editor: Gerald Horne

Reviewers: Robert Dean, Andrew DeRoche, Mark Lawrence, Elizabeth McKillen
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Review by Elizabeth McKillen
<Elizabeth_McKillen@umit.maine.edu>

In his controversial book, _Foreign Attachments_, Tony Smith advances
three major propositions.  First, he argues that ethnic groups have played
a larger role in American foreign policymaking than has commonly been
recognized.  Second, he suggests that the negative consequences of ethnic
group involvement in foreign affairs currently outweigh the benefits.
Third, he tries to demonstrate that tensions inherent in a pluralist
democracy are "particularly apparent in the making of foreign
policy[.]"(Smith, 2)  Smith's political goal in the book is to forge a
middle ground between multiculturalists and nationalists by asserting that
ethnics have a legitimate right to organize, but that they also have an
obligation to the national community that must sometimes override their
attachment to kinfolk abroad.  Well-versed in debates over
multiculturalism, Smith's knowledge of the historical literature seems
weaker and will likely disappoint those looking for a sophisticated
historical analysis of the roots of U.S. diplomatic tragedies.

One problem stems from Smith's unquestioned assertion that the United
States is a pluralist democracy despite a huge volume of historical
literature documenting the decline of pluralism in the twentieth century
and asserting the increasing importance of corporatist forms of
power-sharing in shaping U.S. diplomatic initiatives.(1)  Smith may
disagree with this literature, but if so he needs to explain why and to
develop a convincing alternative model.  U.S. historians use the term
corporatism to refer to an evolving system of both formal and informal
cooperation between public representatives and private elites from
recognized functional groups such as business, organized labor, and
agriculture.  The system had its origins in World War I, when government
leaders solicited the help of representatives from business, labor and
agriculture in coordinating the war effort.  The venomous reaction by
ethnic groups against Wilson at war's end was inspired as much by their
perception that Wilson had left them out of these power-sharing
arrangements as by their feelings that he had betrayed their former
homelands.  Wilson, they believed, was undermining democracy both in the
United States and abroad.(2)

Despite the objections of ethnic groups, corporatist forms of
business-government collaboration continued to flourish in the 1920s and
profoundly shaped U.S. diplomatic initiatives.  Thus Michael Hogan has
shown how business-government cooperation influenced U.S. economic
diplomacy toward Europe while others have demonstrated the importance of
corporatist arrangements in shaping U.S. policies toward underdeveloped
nations during this period. A good example of the latter is the case of
Liberia during the 1920s and 1930s.  A prime actor in U.S. diplomatic
relations with the African nation was Firestone Rubber, which gave Liberia
a badly needed loan in return for land concessions.  Subsequently
Firestone worked closely with an American financial commission to turn the
country into a virtual protectorate of the United States which offered
lucrative opportunities for U.S. businesses.  By contrast, the Liberian
government, under pressure from the American commission and Firestone,
repudiated land agreements it had earlier made with the Universal Negro
Improvement Association for its colonization schemes.(3)  During the Cold
War, corporatist forms of collaboration were formalized as leading
businessmen and AFL-CIO representatives played prominent roles in agencies
like the International Development Advisory Board which in turn critically
shaped President Truman's economic diplomacy.  Business, government, and
to some degree AFL-CIO leaders, also increasingly collaborated in
undermining socialist governments -- such as that of Salvador Allende's in
Chile--deemed contrary to U.S. economic interests.(4)

The point is not that business interests always control U.S. foreign
policy while ethnic groups are entirely devoid of influence.  Rather, a
careful reading of the literature on American corporatism and U.S.
diplomacy simply suggests that it is problematic to assume that all
special interest groups perform on a level playing field according to
rules established in a mythical pluralist playbook.  Although Smith
occasionally acknowledges the importance of business groups in shaping
foreign policy, he needs to more carefully delineate the kinds of
influence developed by different types of special interest groups over the
course of the twentieth century so as to avoid overstating the case for
the significance of ethnic group influence in Washington D.C.  This holds
true even for the 1990s when Smith asserts that ethnic group influence was
on the rise and extensively details the contorted public posturing of
numerous ethnic lobbies on a wide variety of issues.  A good example of
Smith's tendency to lump all special interests together in an
undifferentiated mass occurs in his discussion of Caspian Sea Oil in the
late 1990s.  Smith mentions oil company lobbies while discussing the
positions taken on an oil pipeline in the Caspian Sea area by Armenian,
Jewish, Turkish and Greek lobbies.  But he fails to consider whether or
how the power wielded by oil companies might have differed from that of
their ethnic counterparts. (Smith 14-15)

If Smith tends to overestimate the influence of ethnic groups in
Washington D.C., he underestimates or neglects the success of many ethnic
groups in influencing foreign affairs through direct transnational
contacts or financial contributions to groups in former homelands, and by
lending support to working-class movements opposing U.S. diplomacy. Smith
notes the evolution of an extensive new literature on "transnationalism"
and diasporas but is critical of it, believing that it is often written by
those sympathetic to multiculturalism and postnational citizenship.  Yet
whether Smith dislikes the political undertones of such work or not, it
would be useful for him to more systematically juxtapose the story of
ethnic group influence in Washington with the direct transnational
contacts that ethnic groups have enjoyed in order to get a fuller picture
of the international influence of ethnic groups. Similarly, the
participation of ethnic groups in working class movements deserves more
attention, as in the case of Irish-American support for the labor party
movement and for militant strike activities during World War I, or
Mexican-American support for U.S. labor campaigns against NAFTA in the
1990s.(5).

Smith's failure to explore the interconnections between ethnic and class
identities contributes to a second problem in the book.  Smith tends to
assume that ethnic groups are narrowly self-interested while those who
define themselves as Americans first are not.  The power elite who have
dominated U.S. diplomacy have unquestionably considered themselves
Americans first.  Yet as Thomas McCormick and others have so ably shown,
this group was not devoid of special interest attachments but rather was
overwhelmingly comprised of "inners and outers" -- mostly white men -- who
moved back and forth between leadership positions in U.S. corporations,
U.S. corporate law firms, and U.S.  government.(6)  Even if not directly
under the influence of corporate sponsors, such men shared common
Anglo-Saxon capitalist values that they used to justify their own
privileged place within U.S. society and the privileged position of the
United States in world affairs.  They overwhelmingly pursued policies
which served the interests of U.S. corporate elites and promoted a
division of labor -- both at home and abroad-- that was undergirded by
assumptions about racial hierarchies, Smith's one line dismissal of
literature about the importance of white ethnicity notwithstanding.  For
many U.S. workers, claims by government leaders that they were promoting
the general welfare of all Americans have thus long rung hollow.(7)

By contrast, many ethnic groups in the United States have claimed to more
accurately represent the "general interest" than government leaders
because their agendas served the interests of the working class in the
United States as well as abroad.  Thus Mexican-American activists in the
World War I era claimed that their agitation against Wilson's meddling in
Mexico also served the interests of the American working class because if
the Mexican revolution were crushed, "[t]he wealth of the magnates of
American industry will flow into Mexico, to then a land of permission for
all the adventurers and all the exploiters" and "the manufacturers of the
United States would be transplanted to Mexico." (8)  Similarly,
Irish-Americans opposed the League of Nations not merely because Wilson
had failed to work on behalf of Irish independence but because it would be
dominated by imperialist governments which were in turn controlled by
"money bosses" seeking to "cement an international control of industry by
the small group of men who manipulate the bulk of the world's wealth." (9)
During the Cold War, Martin Luther King's agitation against the war in
Vietnam surely served the interests of the American working class-- both
white and black--better than did President Johnson's escalation of the war
in the name of national security.  Of course, there have also been
abundant examples of xenophobic ethnic groups whose tactics have divided
the working class and undermined any reasonable working-class concept of a
general interest in foreign affairs.  But a strong case can nonetheless be
made that ethnic groups are no more self-interested or narrow-minded in
their perspectives on international affairs than those who define
themselves as Americans first.

Which leads one back to Smith's political goals.  Smith believes that
ethnic groups are today exerting a negative influence on U.S. foreign
policy and issues a plea for ethnics and multiculturalists to begin to
think more systematically about their obligations as Americans.  He
insists that only those who think of themselves as Americans first should
be allowed to speak for the country, and also suggests that there is
"virtue" in proposals to "increase the power of centralized leadership in
Washington relative to social forces."(Smith, 83-84) Yet history suggests
that the greatest tragedies in American diplomacy have occurred during
times of national consensus when ethnic groups subordinated their
interests to that of a mythical common interest and when government
leaders operated with few social constraints..  Thus during the Cold War,
which Smith praises as a time of national unity, government leaders
purporting to serve the national interest led the United States into a
disastrous war in Vietnam (to which Smith gives scant attention), used the
CIA to overthrow governments with abandon, and helped perpetuate a
world-wide arms race with devastating consequences for international peace
and economic stability.  If ethnic groups are often xenophobic and
self-interested, their activism nonetheless serves as an important check
on the policies of Washington insiders who have historically been
responsible for a far greater number of diplomatic disasters.  Absent a
genuine third party alternative, grass-roots organizing and special
interest lobbying like that pursued by ethnic groups remain the best way
to prevent the United States from repeating its Cold War excesses.

Endnotes

1.  See especially, Michael Hogan, "Corporatism," in _Explaining the
History of American Foreign Relations_ , Michael Hogan and Thomas
Patterson eds., (Cambridge: 1991), 226-236;  idem, _The Marshall Plan:
America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe_, 1947-52 (New
York: 1987); Thomas McCormick, "Drift or Mastery?  A Corporatist Synthesis
for American Diplomatic History" _Reviews in American History_ 10
(December 1982): 318-330.

2.  See especially, Beth McKillen, "The Corporatist Model, World War I,
and the Public Debate over the League of Nations," _Diplomatic History_ 15
(spring 1991): 171-97;  idem, _Chicago Labor and the Quest for a
Democratic Diplomacy, 1914-1924_ (Ithaca, 1995).

3.  Michael Hogan, _Informal Entente:  The Private Structure of
Cooperation in Anglo-American Economic Diplomacy, 1918-1928_ (Columbia,
1977); Emily Rosenberg, _Spreading the American Dream: American Economic
and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945_ (New York: 1982), 133-134.

4.  See especially, Nathan Godfried, _Bridging the Gap Between Rich and
Poor: American Economic Development Policy Toward the Arab East,
1942-1949_ (New York: 1987).

5.  See especially, McKillen, _Chicago Labor_.

6.  See especially, McCormick, "Drift or Mastery," 322 and idem,
_America's Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and
After_, 2nd ed.  (Baltimore, 1995).  See also, William Appleman Williams,
_Tragedy of American Diplomacy_ 2nd edition revised (New York: 1962).

7.  See especially, Michael Hunt, _Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy_, (New
Haven, 1987) and David Roediger, _The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the
Making of the American Working Class_, (London, 1991).

8.  _Regeneracisn_, 3/6/15, 4.

9.  McKillen, _Chicago Labor_, 145; See also McKillen, "Ethnicity, Class,
and Wilsonian Internationalism Reconsidered: The Mexican- and
Irish-American Left and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1914-1924," _Diplomatic
History_, forthcoming.

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