How local issues drive foreign policy - Politics and Foreign Policy in 1996

ORBIS, Wntr, 1996 by Patrick Lloyd Hatcher

Political consultants should kick off their primers for presidential candidates in 1996 with the motto: "It's foreign policy, smarty." Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, American voters not only care about foreign policy, they often generate their own issues quite independently of the latest televised crises. What is more, their foreign policy concerns differ markedly from one region of the United States to another. "All politics are local," said Tip O'Neill. That is no less true of the politics of America's place in the world, and in "normal" times regional interests often have a far greater impact on elections in our federal system than those interests we would regard as national.

The United States, let us recall, was the world's first postcolonial "developing nation." The country grew rapidly from a long, skinny seaboard state of many farms and few cities into an expansive continental polity with few farmers and many urbanites. In the process, she became what political scientist Joel Migdal calls a strong society within a weak state.(1) This weakness in our national government was no accident. Prior to 1776, each colonial government had more contact with London than it did with other colonial capitals. In order to reassure nervous new neighbors, the Virginia planters who wrote America's state documents promised a dispersal of power downward, away from the center, out to the periphery. One need only reread James Madison's Federalist Paper Number 10: "the great and national interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures." The chaos following the revolution only accelerated this devolution.(2)

Defining "Great and National"

Defining "great and national" was as difficult then as it is now. National consensus comes hard, hence nineteenth-century America displayed a clear bias in favor of local and particular politics, foreign as well as domestic, with the result that local interests "entangled" the federal government in foreign policy controversies even more than the European alliances that worried George Washington. These entanglements were an inevitable consequence of American federalism, which stood in such sharp contrast to the highly centralized nation-states emerging in Europe at the same time. Indeed, if the United States resembled any European power of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it would have to be that dinosaur, the Holy Roman Empire (after 1815, the new German Confederation), an agglomeration of jealous, particularistic sovereign states, each of whom pursued their own foreign policies. Consider, for instance, the events that led to the United States's acquisition of Florida in 1819. John Quincy Adams is rightly celebrated for his deft negotiation of the treaty with Spain that transferred Florida, but it would be more accurate to say that the: cession was the result of two decades of foreign policy on the part of the state of Georgia rather than a concerted national effort. It was Georgia's citizens who crossed Florida's frontier, agitated (sometimes with bullets) against the Spanisl authorities, and Finally forced the hand of the Monroe administration.(3) At that time, one would have been hard pressed to find many New Yorkers or Pennsylvanians who cared two hoots about the swamps and Seminoles. But a century later, their descendants had the Georgians to thank for the locus of their winter vacations and retirement homes.

Move now from 1819 to 1995. It makes more sense today to see American relations with Cuba, for instance, as an issue in Florida's foreign policy. At one time, the threat of Latin American communism and Soviet missiles in Cuba made Castro's regime a great and national issue. But now few Americans focus on Cuba, except in South Florida, where a large, dynamic, and politically active Cuban exile community retains its animus against Castro and dreams of liberating Havana.(4) With Florida defined as a key state in President Bill Clinton's re-election campaign, this critical locality constricts American foreign relations.

Haitian policy is another example. Early in this century, Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson could descry in Caribbean disorders a great and national issue: the security of the Panama Canal, the integrity of the Monroe Doctrine, or the protection of American lives and investments. But when the Clinton administration announces its intention to restore democracy to Haiti, it is speaking in code to Floridian voters: don't worry, we're going to put a stop to the influx of undesirable boat people.

Which brings us to the greatest electoral prize - and the most parochial of states in matters of foreign policy - California. Since achieving statehood, California has regularly practiced its own foreign policy, especially with regard to immigration. Starting in 1876, California, Oregon, and Washington held enough electoral votes to swing six consecutive presidential elections, because the major parties were so evenly balanced, even within the three Pacific Basin states.(5) California, by far the largest, took the lead in demanding a foreign policy option in exchange for her vote. In 1882, Congress paid the price in the form of the Chinese Exclusion Act, thereby repudiating a key clause in the Burlingame Treaty and damaging U.S.-Chinese relations. After World War I, California forced Washington's hand again when it lobbied for exclusion of Japanese immigrants. In that case, Californians encountered dogged resistance from Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, who had just made monumental efforts at the Washington Conference (1921-22) to promote disarmament, stability, and the Open Door in the Pacific in cooperation with Japan. But a rock-hearted Republican senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, threw his Foreign Relations Committee behind the Japanese Exclusion Act demanded by California. Congress passed it in 1924, and Hughes's rapprochement with Tokyo began to unravel.