Hyphenating Foreign Policy.

• Author: Schlesinger, James R.
• Position: Review

Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 190 pp., $35.

FROM the days of the Founding Fathers, who were forced to contend with a good deal of regionalism, the search for national unity has been a perennial American goal. That aspiration was captured in the happy Latin phrase of Benjamin Franklin, e pluribus unum, inscribed upon our coinage. After the close of the Civil War, the focus of that quest began to shift toward ethnic divisions in the body politic. Indeed, concern about "ethnic politics" can be traced back a long way. In my office in Washington, there hangs a cover from a Harper's Weekly of 1877--with a set of Irish-American protesters, gathered under the banner of Saint Patrick, proclaiming, "we demand in the interest of the Irish people", and a similar group of (potbellied) German-American protesters, gathered under the banner of Saint Gambrinus, [1] proclaiming, "we demand in the interest of the German people." The message is direct: Uncle Sam says, "If you come simply as Americans, this is the place. But if you persist in your distinct nationality, yo u must call at the State Department, where all foreign affairs are considered."

With the explosion of immigration at the end of the century and the emergence in 1898 of the United States as a world power, the challenge presented by ethnic politics began to intensify. [2] At the time of the First World War, it led to considerable bitterness about "hyphenated-Americans."

Now, in the wake of the Cold War, the issue has once again grown more intense--a result of America's dominant position in the world, the loss of interest in foreign policy by the general public, and a new wave of much more diverse immigration. As well, and giving the whole issue a different complexion, the forces that have tended in the past to forge national unity have weakened seriously. At least up until the 1960s, the American consensus was to view askance such ethnic demands, if not to repudiate them outright, as the Harper's Weekly cartoon did. By contrast, in these more recent decades, not only have the centrifugal forces in the United States been strengthened, in what is a substantially new climate of opinion, but they have been legitimized in a way that goes well beyond the acceptance of cultural diversity. It includes an acceptance of the more extreme forms of ethnic politics, such as single-issue constituencies, which are in some quarters treated as having positive merit. Politicians are eager to exploit these tendencies, most notably for fund-raising. Indeed, some politicians even brag about their mastery of "ethnic politics."

IN Foreign Attachments, Tony Smith examines the changing roles and the power...