Human Rights in American Foreign Policy. Joe Renouard
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the executive and legislative branches. As the bipartisan foreign policy consensus began to unravel in the wake of the Vietnam stalemate, Congress fought to reclaim a central role, and both parties found a convenient weapon in human rights causes. When Democrats controlled Congress and Republicans held the White House, liberals took the lead by attacking American support for right-wing dictators. Conservatives in both parties then adopted this rhetoric and embraced causes of their own. They, too, were sharply critical of presidential foreign policy, and they routinely publicized Soviet abuses in order to attack Nixon’s détente policy and Reagan’s rapprochement with Gorbachev. Conservatives also lambasted Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy as an “abandonment” of anticommunist allies.
Another major spur to human rights policies was a phenomenon that contemporaries dubbed the “ethnic revival.” As a result of long-term social transformations, Americans of a variety of lineages experienced a profound reawakening of ethno-religious pride and identification, and many entered the public arena to assert their identities and lobby on behalf of their overseas kin. This lobbying occasionally took the form of human rights advocacy in communist countries (Poland, the Soviet Union, Cuba) as well as a few noncommunist polities (South Africa, Northern Ireland, Turkey/Cyprus). Because traditional party lines had fractured and the “ethnics” constituted large voting blocs in key districts, both parties paid a great deal of attention to ethnic lobbies and voters.
Changing perceptions of the U.S. foreign aid program were yet another influence. One of the most effective methods by which the United States could penalize abusive regimes was cutting military and economic aid. Aid cuts grew not only from the increasing attention paid to rights violations, but also from growing dissatisfaction with weapons proliferation and the entire U.S. foreign aid program. Congress first approved Marshall Plan aid to Europe in 1948, and in the ensuing years the United States allocated billions in economic and security assistance to dozens of nations. But in the 1960s, legislators engaged in heated debates over the purpose of foreign aid, and they began to tighten the rules governing aid allocation and arms exports. By the time congressional liberals drafted the first human rights laws in the 1970s, aid cuts were deemed acceptable. Unsurprisingly, these cuts were heavily politicized. Liberals were more likely to oppose military aid to authoritarian governments, while conservatives sought cuts in economic aid to poor countries.
Of course, the increasing acceptance of human rights norms did not grow out of the political realm alone; it also grew from newer, contested perceptions of individualism, rights, permissiveness, and racial and sexual matters. The growing interest in human rights abroad paralleled the increasing acceptance of the “mosaic” character of the American nation, as well as the cautious acceptance of ethnic and racial factors in the making of foreign policy. Human rights became a part of the foreign policy process at the same time that the American political system was becoming more pluralistic. By the 1970s, Americans had tackled many of their most troublesome domestic civil rights issues, and they were now willing to cast their reform energies overseas. The Cold War thaw allowed them to do just that. As the scholar-politician Michael Ignatieff has argued, “The international human rights revolution abroad would have been inconceivable without the rights revolution at home.”21 Although domestic racial conflicts persisted, mainstream opinion increasingly rejected racism. It is no coincidence, then, that the two most broad-based human rights efforts of the era—the Soviet Jewry movement and the movement against apartheid in South Africa—were challenges to racially exclusionary policies. Irrespective of the complexities of these cases, Americans generally interpreted them as matters of racial injustice. The changing norms of the post–World War II era were also closely tied to the information revolution, which improved the investigatory process and facilitated the distribution of information to policymakers, the media, and the public. Television humanized faraway suffering, while computers, fax machines, and satellite technology expanded and quickened information gathering, data analysis, and communication.
American human rights policymaking also developed alongside, and often in conjunction with, the era’s other social movements. The 1970s saw the continuation of a robust activist culture amid a variety of new rights claims, from women’s liberation to Chicano Power. Even European American “ethnics” began to claim the language of “rights” and “identity” as a means of distinguishing themselves from white, Protestant Americans. Kenneth Cmiel referred to these movements when he wrote that the 1970s was not “a moment of flagging liberal energy,” but rather “a moment of more basic political restructuring.”22 This restructuring created new possibilities for rights claims in a variety of realms. Yet although some antiwar and civil rights activists did parlay their experiences into other causes, the movements of the sixties hold little explanatory power for the emergence of human rights diplomacy. There are, in fact, few clear connections between the earlier activism and later human rights efforts.23
All of these influences—détente, the Vietnam War, domestic social movements, the ethnic revival—took place against the backdrop of American social and political life in the 1970s. Many remember this decade rather wistfully as the era of leisure suits, disco, and tragicomic popular culture antiheroes like Evel Knievel. (One study of the period was ironically titled It Seemed Like Nothing Happened.)24 The political and diplomatic memories, though, are less sanguine. The Cambodia Incursion, the Fall of Saigon, Watergate, gas lines, the Iran hostage crisis, and stagflation collectively symbolized economic weakness, military impotence, and cultural failure. These disappointments did not create the human rights movement, but they did fuel debates over America’s role in the world. Some “neo-isolationists,” who took these failures as signs that American power was limited, embraced human rights as a cheaper, less invasive form of global involvement. Others continued to see the United States as a superpower with a national mission to spread liberal, democratic values. These observers lamented the “moral weaknesses” that underpinned the political and military losses, and they saw human rights as a way of renewing America’s commitment to its founding principles. Thus political figures who advocated moral concerns were tapping into both the public’s resentment of Washington and the concomitant popular demand for positive ideas.
And indeed, while the human rights policies of 1967–1991 developed from unique contemporary circumstances, they also fell within a much longer tradition of American moralism. This moral strain, which had been a part of American life since the colonial era, began to merge with the nation’s diplomacy early in the twentieth century. After 1945, efforts on behalf of anticommunism, national self-determination, democracy promotion, and international economic development were routinely justified in moral terms, even when many such goals clearly reflected superpower self-interest. In light of this heritage, American interest in persecuted foreign nationals from 1967 onward is easier to understand.
Major Claims
My position in this book is academic rather than activist. I do not presume that moral principles belong, ipso facto, at the center of diplomacy. I acknowledge that humanitarian concerns have arrived relatively recently in the history of international affairs, and I recognize that in centuries past, diplomacy was carried out in pursuit of royal, imperial, tribal, or national interests with little or no regard for such concerns. I also acknowledge that although international covenants define basic rights standards that all governments should respect, they prescribe few effective enforcement mechanisms. After 1945, states chose to be concerned with other nations’ internal practices; they were rarely obliged to do so.
Thus I am implicitly challenging scholars who assert that American human rights policymaking has been defined by inaction, hypocrisy, and double standards. Julie Mertus argues that the divide between Washington’s high-minded rhetoric and its relative inactivity amounts to a political “bait and switch” in conjunction with a high degree of inconsistency and insincerity.25 Clair Apodaca sees “paradox” and an “erratic evolution” in American policies. She asserts that American political leaders have “routinely dismissed, deferred, or rejected human rights issues,” while the public has been willing to ignore faraway violations for “the delusion of security.”26 David Forsythe, too, has found an “ambivalent and inconsistent” record in America’s dealings with authoritarian states.27 Others have highlighted America’s record of nonaccession to multilateral covenants, or have criticized