For Ethnic Americans, The Old Country Calls
American ethnics don't just lobby for their ancestral homelands -- they also export American values.
By Yossi ShainLast March, when Marie Jana Korbelova returned to her birth city, Prague, this time as Madeleine Albright, U.S. secretary of State, Czech President Vaclav Havel declared, "I would personally consider it excellent [if Madeleine Albright could succeed me as President of the Czech Republic] because into this rather staid provincial environment this would bring an international spirit, someone who knows the world well, understands it, and would be able to act." In the Czech Republic, the president must be a Czech citizen over 40 years of age. Albright, a naturalized U.S. citizen, qualifies for Czech citizenship under the law that enables those who fled the communist regime after 1948 to reclaim citizenship. Albright smiled and said "I am not a candidate and will not be a candidate. ... My heart is in two places, and America is where I belong."
Havel's vision, that transnational allegiance to both an ancestral homeland and to the U.S. can exist without conflict, is quite remarkable. It represents not only his own liberal-humanistic vision of world affairs -- where boundaries of state and culture are no longer so rigid -- but also the perception that Americans are the best conveyors of this mentality. As members of an open liberal society where multiple ethnic identities are no longer suspect and where, in fact, ancestral identities are welcomed as the cornerstone of multiculturalism, Americans in the post-Cold War world are often perceived as the best representatives of a more flexible concept of citizenship and loyalty.
Havel's extraordinary invitation is just one sign of a changing configuration of national and ethnic loyalties. For the United States, a nation of immigrants, the meaning of ethnic identity is being transformed. Old nativist fears -- that Americans with emotional ties to their ancestral homelands cannot be fully loyal to the United States -- are rapidly disappearing. Those people once disparagingly called "hyphenated Americans" feel increasingly free to organize and lobby on behalf of the "old country." Even within America's foreign policy establishment, one finds increasing acceptance of the legitimacy of ethnic lobbies and full participation by ethnically identifiable players such as Jews and Cuban-Americans.
But what is arguably the most interesting new development is that the flow of political influence is becoming more of a two-way street. American diasporas -- of Arabs, Jews, Armenians, Chinese -- are playing significant roles in their ancestral homelands. They bring American ideologies and influence into the politics of the mother country. At times -- taking up the challenge that Secretary Albright declined -- U.S. citizens have even returned to their countries of origin to play leading political roles.
Diversity and Diasporas
The signs of this more flexible world of multiple loyalties are easy to find. For example, The Washington Post reported this year a sharp increase in the number of young Americans who are spending summers in their parents' homeland. These parents apparently no longer fear that their children will be stigmatized; in fact, many now consider their children's bilingual abilities and familiarity with ancestral culture an asset in a globalized world order. Indeed, as America recognizes the value of diversity, homeland countries that previously restricted their kin abroad to single citizenship now permit them dual nationality. (See article by Peter Spiro, p. 25 of this issue.) These countries have also enabled their kin diasporas to retain broad economic and political rights in their kin states, including absentee voting, even though the individuals have clearly established themselves as loyal citizens in the U.S.
The December 1996 passage of Mexican legislation permitting dual nationality is but one example. That law affects the lives of millions of Mexican-Americans -- the fastest-growing voting bloc in American politics. With Mexican politicians now routinely courting support of the Mexican community in the United States, Mexico has laid to rest the image of the "pocho" -- a derogatory term that questions the loyalty of diasporic Mexicans seen as having abandoned their roots in order to assimilate into American society.
There are many reasons that Mexico and other countries have reversed course and now encourage rather than prohibit dual nationality. Most importantly, they see numerous advantages in cultivating the continued loyalty of their kin diasporas. For countries such as Colombia, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador, remittances and investments from kin communities in the United States play an important economic role. Diaspora money also now influences national politics and political campaigns in many countries, so politicians may want to win the approval of their financial backers abroad. More generally, they want to keep their diaspora's loyalty intact, and thus they use citizenship as an incentive for ethnic or national pride.
Many states also want to use the lobbying power of their kin, especially in the United States. Armenia, for example -- which is involved in a bitter territorial struggle with a neighboring state -- works hard to maintain the intensity of diasporic involvement in the motherland's cause.
During the past decade, Eastern European countries have evoked kinship ties even more dramatically by inviting expatriates in the U.S. to take leading roles in their countries of origin. Consider Milan Panic, a California pharmaceutical industrialist who became the prime minister of Yugoslavia in 1992; Alexander Eiseln, an American Army colonel who became the defense minister of Estonia in 1993; and Valdas Adamkus, a Lithuanian-American who moved to Lithuania in 1997 and was elected Lithuania's president in 1998. In the words of one Lithuanian voter, "He lived in America for a long time. ... He knows how the system works there. I think he will bring democracy from America to us." Also, in Armenia, former foreign minister Raffi Hovannisian and energy minister Sebuth Tashjian are both from California. These are of course rather rare cases of ethnically identified Americans taking posts in their countries of origin at a time when American political and business expertise is sought in nascent states or in new democracies emerging from the shadow of communism. Because of their American experience, these individuals with dual attachments are in a special position to help their ancestral homelands.
Leaders in other countries, realizing that ethnic Americans can be a powerful lobbying force, have at times encouraged their kin to become involved in U.S. foreign policy. However, they fail to recognize that in the process of empowerment, these ethnic Americans may become even more American, and in turn bring back unexpected messages and ideas, such as democratic reforms, much to the chagrin of the kin state. Take, for example, Arab-American relations with Saudi Arabia.
In April 1999, Jeddah's conservative newspaper Al-Madina ran an editorial entitled "A Clinton Victory and Arab Americans." Noting that the peace accord in Ulster showed the great political clout of Irish-Americans, the editorial stated, "The Arab minority in the United States must move toward influential centers in a society where domestic politics [is so crucial]." However, when Arab-American lobbyists like Jim Zogby and Khalil Jashan were welcomed by the Clinton administration as harbingers of peace in the Middle East and subsequently began to contemplate advocating greater openness in the Arab world, they were immediately rebuffed by Arab states, including Saudi Arabia.
Fear of Hyphenated Americans
The question of expatriate loyalty has evolved over the years. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the idea of hyphenated Americans was used by nativists to question the allegiance of immigrants, despite the newcomers' claims that their ancestral identities were not incompatible with their loyalty to America. Even cultural assimilation in America did not shield many immigrants from feeling threatened because of a perceived affinity to their homelands. This was especially the experience of diasporas whose homelands were enemy states at war with the U.S. American fear of transnational allegiance was also behind the exclusionary laws of the late 1910s and the early 1920s. During World War I, the issue of dual loyalties became particularly prominent with the growing suspicion of pan-German organizations, which prompted America's demand for total assimilation and unqualified renunciation of German-American past loyalties. President Woodrow Wilson feared that American involvement against Germany might unleash "serious domestic clashes inside the U.S."
The most vivid example of misguided fear manifested itself during World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The belief that Japanese-Americans might still be loyal to the ancestral homeland resulted in the relocation and internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans. As recently as 1991, this animosity surfaced again (albeit in a much milder form), as Arab-Americans became vulnerable to attack during the Gulf War with Iraq.
During the Cold War years, ethnic Americans who sought a voice in foreign policy matters regarding a country of origin could gain access to decision-makers mostly when their views coincided with America's hostility to communism. Richard Allen, Ronald Reagan's first national security adviser, encouraged Cuban-Americans to build up an ethnic lobby that would serve as a tool furthering the administration's effort to delegitimize the Castro regime. Over time, Jorge Mas Canosa and the Cuban-American National Foundation became a major power broker in American foreign policy.
With the changing nature of America's ethnic mix -- i.e., with the proliferation of non-European immigrants arriving mostly from Latin America and Asia, and with the growing advancement of minority groups, especially African-Americans -- ethnic Americans began to consider a voice in foreign policy an additional form of empowerment. In America today, there are many new ethnic voices making themselves heard. Even groups which are satisfied with their accomplishments in the American economic arena no longer shy away from foreign policy. Thus, in contrast to their historical timidity in American public affairs, the 1.4 million Indian-Americans have found a political voice and are raising the stature of India in Washington.
Ethnic Lobbies' Growing Power
At a time when global foreign relations are no longer defined in strictly East-West terms and U.S. foreign policy is characterized by a diminished cohesiveness, ethnic lobbies are becoming more important in influencing foreign policy makers. The fact that American society and politics permit, or even welcome, expressions of ethnic solidarity and no longer discourage preoccupation with motherlands lends itself to special diasporic influences on the U.S. foreign policy agenda. This reality has raised concerns about the ability of the U.S. to develop foreign policy in the "American national interest." Will its foreign policy be tainted and confused by partisan and divisive ethnic voices? On this point, Samuel Huntington says that by accepting the validity of multiculturalism and by heeding ethnic voices, American decision-makers are at risk of compromising American national interests.
Such concerns are usually exaggerated. In my book, Marketing the American Creed Abroad: Diasporas in the U.S. and Their Homeland, I document that ethnic Americans who engage in U.S. foreign policy are frequently carriers of American foreign policy messages and values, rather than being agents or fifth columns for their countries of origin.
For example, Iranian radicalism is said to be waning as reformist politicians win elections in Teheran. Even Iranian-Americans now see the possibility of building an ethnic lobby without compromising their American loyalties or without being suspected of treason by their kin in Iran. Especially when a homeland is at odds with America, first-generation exiles may feel compelled to remain silent, lest they be accused of being traitors at home or spies abroad. Over time, however, their offspring become sufficiently comfortable to organize as ethnic Americans, and eventually to act as a liaison between the U.S. and their homeland. In the case of the million-strong and economically thriving Iranian-American community, Negar Akhvi has recently noted that after the revolution of 1979, first-generation immigrants were too timid either to speak against Ayatollah Khomeini or to organize as diasporic Americans. Describing the younger generation of Iranian-Americans in Los Angeles, Akhvi maintains, "the fatigue and the stress that enveloped the generation that fled Iran has not been passed on to my own. My generation is less scared by the Revolution and at greater ease in democratic forums. In short, we are American enough to form a lobby, yet Iranian enough to care about what happens in our homeland."
Other American ethnic communities, both newcomers and those of long standing, have discovered they can unify and mobilize their particular community by pursuing goals related to the homeland as well as domestic issues in the U.S. That was certainly true of African-Americans as they effectively protested apartheid in South Africa in the mid-1980s. When in 1988 a number of American black leaders announced their preference for the appellation "African-American" over "black," the Rev. Jesse Jackson declared, "Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African-Americans have hit that level of maturity." Indeed, in recent years African-American activists inside and outside Congress have gained high visibility and importance in the foreign policy arena. When in 1994 President Clinton was hesitant about restoring deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, it was the Congressional Black Caucus and the hunger strike of Randall Robinson, director of the African-American lobby TransAfrica, which forced him to act.
The recent case of Elian Gonzalez is a fascinating example of how disapora community leaders try to safeguard the exile mentality against the atrophy that would be quite natural for a community of immigrants after 40 years in the United States. It appeared that the Cuban-American community found itself at a critical juncture: Was its identity that of exiles and refugees nurturing their old rhetoric and the hope of return -- or were they to become ethnic Americans plain and simple? For Cuban-Americans, the Gonzalez case served as the impetus for reassessing the question of their loyalty, and the community found itself in a precarious dilemma. The difficulty is that if Cuban-Americans are perceived as acting outside the laws of America regarding child custody, or in opposition to congressional tendencies to relax the economic sanctions against Cuba, they endanger the sympathy they enjoy as adherents of American interests and values and opponents of the Castro regime. That struggle over the loyalty and identity of Cuban-Americans is certain to continue.
In today's America it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish between domestic and foreign politics. America's divided government, which empowers single members of Congress and even local municipal leaders in foreign policy, enhances the stature and the clout of well-organized ethnic lobbies. These lobbies also benefit from the declining power of traditional foreign policy elites -- the old "Eastern establishment." For example, the highly mobilized and well-funded Armenian-American community has gained its reputation over the past decade as the most important element in shaping U.S. foreign policy posture toward the newly independent states in the Caucasus and especially toward the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory claimed by both Armenia and Azerbaijan. While Congress continues to support the lobby's position and prohibits direct U.S. assistance to Azerbaijan under Section 907, the Clinton administration strongly opposes Section 907 and has testified in favor of repeal of these sanctions. In his inaugural address in 1998, Armenian President Robert Kocherian emphasized the importance of "the unification of efforts of all Armenians, and ensuring the Armenian diaspora's active participation in the social, political and economic life of our republic. ... Armenia should be a holy motherland for all Armenians, and its victory should be their victory."
Ethnic Americans and the Foreign Service
The growing acceptance of diversity and multiculturalism within U.S. foreign affairs agencies also opens the policy-making process to new influences. Take, for example, the CIA's recent operational imperative to push for diversity in its clandestine branch, the Directorate of Operations. Presently, just 11 percent of the agency's case officers are minorities and 18 percent are women, while the agency's top managers are predominantly white men. But the increasing focus on terrorists, narcotics traffickers, weapons sellers and other "hard targets" has prompted the agency to recognize that non-white spies fluent in many languages are invaluable to furthering the organization's goals. Although CIA officials concede some initial difficulties in fulfilling this new imperative, given the agency's past support for coups in Latin America and the Middle East, CIA officials insist that they are nevertheless able to find recruits who are motivated by a sense of U.S. patriotism.
At the same time that such diversity initiatives are lauded, they have not been universally endorsed. Thus, some critics maintain that opportunities for ethnic Americans continue to be limited to positions of lesser prestige and importance. The U.S. Foreign Service is a case in point. Cresencio Arcos, former U.S. ambassador to Honduras, has charged, in the December 1999 Foreign Service Journal, that the issue of diversity in the Foreign Service has yet to be fully addressed. Although most members of the Foreign Service welcome diversity, and the position of African-Americans and Hispanics has improved in past years, these minorities are often relegated to consular or administrative positions and are still not granted posts of strategic importance to America.
Findings provided by Rodolfo O. de la Garza of the Tom‡s Rivera Policy Institute, a U.S. institute for research on Hispanic issues, further reveal that 54 percent of Hispanic Foreign Service officers say that Anglo officials "treat them differently than they treat other non-Hispanic white officers." Moreover, 44 percent of Hispanic officers felt that their assigned positions in Latin America have hindered their career prospects. Yet 95 percent of Hispanic officers report that they have never felt divided loyalties even though 34 percent of officers have been accused of divided loyalties. Extrapolating from this and other data, the message appears to be one of significant discontent among Hispanic Foreign Service officers with regard to their career prospects.
Despite the discontents expressed by Hispanic FSOs, there is a growing perception within U.S. government agencies that ethnic identities do not really present a threat to the effective work of U.S. foreign affairs professionals. To the contrary, the ethnic origin factor is seen as an asset that may actually augment diplomats' expertise thanks to linguistic capabilities and cultural knowledge -- skills that enable Foreign Service officers to operate more effectively in their posts. Thus, with the passage of time, there is less tendency to suspect or stigmatize the ethnic American Foreign Service employee as having a potential for divided loyalties. This trend is illustrated well by the decline of stigmatization of the Jewish-American diplomatic role in Middle East affairs.
Jewish Americans and Middle East Policy
When U.S. foreign policy was determined by traditional professional elites, there was a tendency to perceive Jewish-American affinity with Israel as a liability, especially since the Foreign Service held that America's close ties to Israel could jeopardize its interest in the Arab world or the oil-rich countries. In the 1950s, U.S. foreign policy-makers under Eisenhower viewed Israel as, at best, a benign presence in the Middle East and, more commonly, as an irritant in America's strategic planning in the region. At the height of the Cold War, Jewish Americans were leery about breaking with the American official line. For instance, during the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Jewish-American lobby emphasized its allegiance to American interests and was reluctant to push Israel's case for fear of being labeled disloyal.
A Jewish-American FSO-01 who joined the service in the 1960s told me that his greatest challenge as an ethnic Jew was adjusting to the normative profile of a Foreign Service officer. Having grown up in New York City and attended a city college, he had to acquire the culture of courtesy and purify New York "Jewish" speech patterns. "Serving in the Near East and Asian Bureau was for me a cultural education into an Ivy League world I was not familiar with," he said. "I never felt, however, that my loyalty was questioned regardless of the Arabist tendencies in the bureau at the time."
The emphasis on American allegiance by Jewish Americans could also be seen in Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's handling of the Middle East conflict. During the Nixon and Ford administrations, Kissinger downplayed his Jewish origin in his work on this policy area. Kissinger was attacked vehemently by the American-Israel Political Action Committee when he attempted to push Israel into a deal with the Arabs. In light of Israel's reluctance to accept an American dictate, AIPAC mobilized the Congress against President Ford's decision to reassess U.S. policy in the Middle East and U.S. relations with Israel. When 76 senators wrote to the president urging him to declare that "the U.S. acting in its own national interest stands firmly with Israel," Kissinger responded angrily. He berated Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz and told him that the letter "will increase anti-Semitism, it will cause people to charge that Jews control Congress." As a result, Kissinger was accused of betrayal and hounded by demonstrators in Israel. His insistent loyalty to the United States thus resulted in his being pulled from both sides of the ethnic bridge.
The allegation that Jews cannot always be both good Americans and good Jews surfaced on various occasions when there was a contest between the White House and the Israel lobby. Today, however, as foreign policy-making in Washington is becoming more dispersed and influenced by, among other things, think tanks, public opinion and the media, ethnic lobbyists are no longer perceived as an inherent threat to the national interest, and the dreaded charge of "divided loyalties" is less and less persuasive. In fact, the end of the Cold War and deep splits within Israel regarding the direction of the Palestinian peace process and the character of the Jewish state have tended to divide the U.S. Jewish community. Thus, when President Clinton wanted to demonstrate his frustration with former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he could call upon certain Jewish-American community leaders to mobilize their constituencies to reprimand the Israeli government for its behavior.
At times, individuals associated with ethnic lobbies have even established themselves as leading experts in their respective kin states and, as such, are mobilized by the American government as more effective messengers in the United States or in their ancestral homelands. When persons of Jewish origins, such as Aaron Miller, Dennis Ross, or Martin Indyk (who was a member of the pro-Israel lobby before he established the Washington Institute for Near East Policy) are situated at the forefront of American foreign policy in the Middle East, the idea that committed Jews cannot be trusted as brokers in the Arab-Israeli peace process is no longer viable. Even Arab leaders and Arab-Americans have grudgingly accepted this as a fact of life, despite ongoing Arab-Israeli conflicts. Take, for example, Daniel Kurzer, America's current ambassador to Egypt, who is a deeply committed and publicly identified Jew. The prominence of these individuals in Middle East policy-making is a clear indication that in America at least, Jewish identity does not provoke serious suspicions of divided loyalties.
Finally, we should not forget that America's generally benign attitude toward questions of ethnic loyalty does have its limits. After Jonathan Pollard, an Israeli-American, was convicted of spying for Israel, it was not surprising that the Jewish-American community was much less merciful toward Pollard than was the Israeli government, which has been trying for years to secure his release from prison. More recently, Wen Ho Lee, the physicist formerly at Los Alamos National Laboratory who is alleged to have passed nuclear secrets to China, has reportedly caused a cloud of suspicion to be cast over other Chinese-American scientists. Despite these rare cases, the overall trend in the United States has clearly moved in recent decades in a more positive direction. There is an ever greater acceptance of the legitimacy of ethnic Americans in national policy-making, as well as a growing appreciation that in the present period of globalization, America's ethnic groups can strengthen and expand U.S. influence around the world.
Yossi Shain is the Aaron and Cecile Goldman Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. His regular appointment is as a professor of political science at Tel Aviv University, His latest book, Marketing the American Creed Abroad: Diasporas in the U.S. and Their Homeland (Cambridge University Press, 1999) recently received the Israel Political Science Best Book of the Year Award.