Author's Response by Tony Smith
tony.smith@tufts.edu

How grateful I am to H-Diplo for making this exchange on ethnic groups and
US foreign policy a possibility.  I would like to agree with the kind
words of Gerald Horne that my book "is bound to stir widespread interest,"
with Andy DeRoche's assertion that this is "a major contribution to the
study of international relations," and with Mark Lawrence's statement that
"it deserves an audience far beyond the halls of academia. Policymakers
would do well to pay attention to this book..."  But considering how very
little has been written to date on the subject, I fear that the study of
ethnicity and US foreign policy may be marginalized if we do not find ways
to tie it in to more traditional, mainstream concerns.

Several of these concerns are brought up by the reviewers themselves.
Elizabeth McKillen talks about the overlap of ethnic and labor interests
in the history of US foreign relations.  Gerald Horne calls attention to
the need for a comparative study of settler states (one book has appeared
trying vainly if valiantly to do as he asks with Canada, Australia, and
the US) and Horne also reminds us of historical periods and ethnic
activism.  And Robert Dean (as well as others, but no one so strongly)
reminds us that economic interests have long been a domestic source of
foreign policy, implying a parallel might here be found.

The reason for my concern is that so little is actually written about
ethnicity and foreign affairs.  Aside from my book and Alexander
DeConde's, only Yossi Shain's recent book define the field. (Shain's book,
_Marketing The American Creed Abroad: Diasporas in The U.S. and Their
Homelands_, published in 99 by Cambridge UP and available in paper is
quite different than mine, and develops some of the points Lawrence calls
for in his review.  A must read.)  Yes, there are a number of excellent
essays, but usually on individual groups (especially African Americans and
Jews), not on the field itself.  So if we have graduate students who
wanted to write dissertations on the subject, where is the field?  Would
they get jobs?  Thank you for your encouragement, but let us put our minds
to the task, then, of trying to lay out what this field is about so that
younger scholars especially can find good material for their labors.

As a number of the reviewers indicate, the closest parallel for the study
of ethnic influence is with economic interest groups, or let us call them
special interests in general.  Here is a field political scientists are
working on.  Why, then, the intemperate remarks of Robert Dean when he
could have made a constructive argument had he been so moved?  Dean
vigorously lashes out against economic special interests so far as US
foreign policy is concerned, but strangely refuses to see any similarity
with ethnic interests, criticizing me for "chastising the formerly
exploited, disenfranchised, or dispossessed for mustering what power they
can to shape the world..."  And yet he himself does no less.  He derides
"the baneful influence" both CANF and AIPAC but still finds fit to call me
"reactionary," "anti-democratic," having an "elite lament" and so on.

Mr. Dean seems concerned to protect ethnic activists from any criticism
because of his concern for the hitherto marginalized people of color.
Fine, no argument that this marginalization was unjustifiable.  Yet one
need not jump to the conclusion that whatever the previously marginalized
now do is justifiable because of their past suffering. The stance is pure
multiculturalism of a "hard," that is to me dogmatic, sort. Mr. Dean would
apparently adopt a policy of open borders with Mexico (a la Vincente Fox)
and laments from his residence in Tucson all the suffering he has seen on
the part of the wretched of the earth.  How could Mexican Americans
possibly be wrong, he would appear to conclude, in whatever they call for
in US immigration policy.  He "challenges" me to say what I'd do short of
"completely militarizing the region with 2,000 mile string of
fortifications" to stop the current lack of proper border controls.

The answer is not too hard to find, _pace_ Mr. Dean: national identity
cards and employer verification measures with teeth in them. I argue that
this would serve the interest of Mexican Americans themselves, for we also
need national health insurance and a vastly improved educational system
for our disadvantaged. I would have thought this idea with its strictures
on the business community might have occurred to Mr. Dean.

Rather than contributing to the understanding either of US foreign policy
or the meaning of democratic citizenship, we have ad hominem attacks of
the selfrighteous kind that so often make ethnic studies a field to flee.
For the point, I repeat, is to see how special interests in
general--ethnic as well as economic, religious as well as gender, the list
goes on--give the US the kind of foreign policy it has.

Mr. Dean appears to be in good company when he takes out after the Anglo
elite as well. Andrew DeRoche and Mark Lawrence endorse Alexander
DeConde's '92 book, the fountainhead of all this talk about an Anglo elite
determining US foreign policy.  Let me say right away that we owe a debt
of gratitude to DeConde: he got ethnicity and foreign policy on the map.
His book is a valuable resource tool for us all and stands quite alone.
Thank you, Professor DeConde.

Still, the book is responsible--as both the DeRoche and Lawrence reviews
attest--to the contentious notion both that an Anglo elite determined
foreign policy and that it did so for ethnic reasons in a pro-British
fashion.  Indeed, the book is rather breaktaking in its ability to
interpret the entire history of US foreign policy prior to the 1960s in
terms of an Anglo elite.

The first contention, that such an elite existed, has to be empirically
demonstrated.  Mr. Dean is content to accept Eric Alterman's
unsubstantiated assertion that no group "can compare with the power of
Anglo Americans" still today.  Well, who are these people?  Often they are
confused with those who are "white," but of course they are not.  They are
not of Italian, Jewish, Greek, East European, Irish, German, Scandinvian
etc. descent.  Given that all the sources I found agree that American Jews
provide at least half the money for the Democratic party and a quarter for
the Republicans, and that through AIPAC and a variety of other
organizations they keep close tabs on US policy in the Middle East, those
Anglos must be a determined, organized group indeed.  Could Mr.Dean or Mr.
DeRoche or Mr. Lawrence, or indeed Mr. DeConde lui-meme, provide me with
the names of their organizations, their publications, the structure of
their interchanges with London, the exact decisions that are made in
congruence?  Of course they cannot.  It is disconcerting that professional
historians seem to trade in myths.

Suppose you could establish such an elite.  Is it inevitably pro-British?
We could begin with Thomas Jefferson's opinions on England for an answer.
Not only is there abundant evidence of anglophobia in the US, including
among those of English descent, but other reasons can be found to explain
the Washington- London connection.  Thus, it was in US as in British
interests that Europe remain a plurality of states in the 1910s.  German
victory in the war would have been potentially disastrous to long term
security interests.  Thus again, US and British international economic
policy--open door practices--coincided almost exactly.  Thus thrice, the
style of British democracy prompted mutual trust on the part of both
countries (see the John Owen book published by Cornell two years back). In
short, the idea that ethnicity underlay the US- British connection may to
some small extent be true, but it hardly explains US policy in World War
One or Two.  Had the English been green and spoken cheese, we would have
allied with them. (And by the way, why did it take us so long to enter
either War given our alleged ethnic imperative?)

Such arguments are bad history and they are also bad politics.  The bad
history I have tried already to suggest.  The bad politics are equally
obvious:  they are demagogic, inciting Americans now having voice for the
first time in our national discourse to think that since the "whites" have
always done things their way, well, what the hell, now we'll do things
from the point of view of our narrow interests as well.  Dean's third
paragraph is as clear a statement of this view as one can hope to find.

All of which takes us to the notion of "the national interest(s)."  Of
course it is impossible to define with any clarity or finality in most
cases.  But it is an appeal to rise above narrow to general concerns, to
see "the nation" as as real as ethnicity, to realize there is something of
a common past, present, and future.  Most of these reviewers apparently
have no difficulty recognizing that economic interests routinely stomp on
common interests if they can--for example, when they go abroad to pollute,
exploit defenseless labor, transfer secret technology, avoid taxes and the
like.  But should I ask how we discipline ethnic groups, they recoil in
horror: I am reactionary, anti-democrat crooning the elite's lament!

A major theme of the book is the concept of democratic citizenship, its
rights and responsibilities.  Of course ethnic groups have a right to
organize and articulate their interests.  But with the critical exception
of Native Americans and African Americans, nearly everyone else came as a
voluntary immigrant and so presumably has a primary national identity (not
that I deny such to Native and African Americans, but I am silent as to
their obligations, and I most certainly do not agree with Gerald Horne
when he implies Asian and Mexican Americans have been historically
marginalized on a par with these two previously mentioned groups).  To
dismiss as lightly as some of these reviews do the need for unity under
conditions of democracy is to take for granted as easily obtained a
condition that comparative historical analysis will show is far from easy
to accomplish.

Excuse me if I have been a bit intemperate in my own comments.  Email
encourages too much spontaneity, as we all know, and sitting in an
internet cafe in Guatemala probably intensifies the proclivity.  I am
grateful for the time and thoughtfulness of the reviewers (including Mr.
Dean, with whom I happen to agree on several points).  My major concern,
however, is that the study of ethnicity and foreign policy be taken as
more legitimate than it is now.  I have already published a number of
books; I could afford to take up a topic that I was repeately told no one
would care about.  I would like to think we could have enough of a
literature, enough paradigms in conflict, enough contact with more
mainstream arguments that younger people would find work in this area
rewarding intellectually and professionally.  Thanks, then, to H-Diplo,
and to Diane Labrosse who does a great job, for this opportunity.

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