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Overview
Originally published in 1981.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691614823 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #81 |
| Pages: | 440 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America
By Lars Schoultz
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1981 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07630-0
CHAPTER 1
LATIN AMERICA AND U.S. PUBLIC OPINION
Nearly three decades ago Gabriel Almond presented an impressive array of data to support his blunt declaration that the typical U.S. citizen is indifferent to foreign policy issues. With the notable exception of American participation in the Vietnam War, little has been discovered in subsequent years to suggest that his assertion was incorrect.
In the specific foreign policy area of United States-Latin American relations, the data suggest that indifference is a more appropriate description of the pollsters than the polled. In its first thirty-six years (1935-1971), for example, the Gallup Poll did not ask a separate question about any Latin American nation, and during that same period the few existing inquiries by other polling organizations generally focused upon perceptions of major problems of U.S. foreign policy as opposed to Latin America per se — for example, Axis activity in Latin America, communist involvement in the Cuban revolution, and U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic. On the rare occasions when questions have been asked about Latin America, not only have they tended to be oriented toward a broader concern than attitudes toward a Latin American phenomenon, they have often been phrased improperly as well. One example of both of these aspects of polling is the October 1973 Roper Poll query: "What do you think — that his [Allende's] overthrow was good because he was a Marxist, or bad because he was democratically elected?" Given the low quality and scarcity of data, it is not surprising that a recent volume that surveys more than three decades of U.S. public opinion contains not a single mention of Latin America, and no Latin American nation figures among the fourteen countries discussed in the book's chapter on foreign policy.
The limited data that are available have little to demonstrate other than that public opinion on issues of U.S.-Latin American relations varies dramatically, sometimes over fairly brief periods. The April 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic is an excellent example. The event received premier coverage from the media, including multiple television appearances by President Johnson to explain why that sovereign state required a unilateral incursion by 20,000 U.S. Marines. In May, the Gallup Poll found that only 7 percent of the U.S. public had no opinion of LBJ's actions. As used to be true of nearly all major presidential initiatives in foreign affairs, an overwhelming majority of respondents — 76 percent — supported the invasion decision. Six months later, one out of every five U.S. citizens had changed his or her mind about the wisdom of an invasion: 27 percent had no opinion on whether it was a good idea, 52 percent approved, and a nearly stable 21 percent continued to disapprove. In 1975, a decade after the fact, 9 percent thought the invasion was a "proud moment" in U.S. foreign policy, 20 percent thought it was a "dark moment," and 27 percent thought it was neither. A 43 percent plurality held no opinion on what the involvement signified.
The case of United States policy toward the Cuban revolution is also revealing of the public's fluctuating attitudes toward inter-American relations. During the period 1959 to 1963, a substantial majority (about 65 percent) of the population repeatedly rejected the idea that the United States should invade Cuba, but the public's opinion of Fidel Castro dropped from 48 percent unfavorable to 81 percent unfavorable in fewer than ten action-packed months (June 1959 to May 1960). By June 1961, six of ten U.S. citizens thought we should boycott Cuban goods, and a year later 49 percent judged we should do something to rid the island of the Castro government: 10 percent favored the John Birch Society's solution of bombing the government into submission, 13 percent favored the Kennedy approach of an embargo ("starve them out" was the Gallup phrase), and 25 percent favored something short of war. For more than a decade, a substantial majority of the public remained hostile to the Cuban government. In a 1971 Harris Survey, for example, 61 percent of the respondents opposed allowing Cuban cigars to be sold in the United States, while only 22 percent favored such a move. But by the middle of the 1970s, the public had apparently changed its opinion of Cuba. In 1973, 51 percent of the respondents to one survey favored the resumption of diplomatic relations, while 33 percent were opposed. Unfortunately, none of these soundings of public opinion probed the reasons for these attitudes; thus they told policy makers very little about citizens' views of the Cuban revolution other than that they fluctuate.
In addition to the observation that public opinion on issues of U.S.-Latin American relations fluctuates quite dramatically, a number of studies have supported the common proposition that the public is largely uninformed about foreign affairs. To a somewhat lesser extent, this evaluation characterizes opinions on domestic issues as well. In the mid-1970s, Philip Converse portrayed the public's attitudes as "wretchedly informed and feebly structured. ... popular levels of information about public affairs are, from the point of view of the informed observer, astonishingly low." When this low level of knowledge is combined with the observation that opinions about foreign affairs tend to fluctuate more in reference to the passing of time than to observable changes in international relations, it is justifiable to question whether survey results measure public opinion or, indeed, whether public opinion can be said to exist on most questions of United States policy toward Latin America. This questioning has led authorities such as Daniel Yankelovich to conclude that most public opinion polls measure "what the public believes prior to having considered a foreign policy issue in depth." The issue of human rights provides significant support for this interpretation.
Human Rights
There are relatively few data on United States citizens' attitudes toward the international protection of human rights, and estimates of public opinion are therefore highly speculative. Many foreign policy makers believe that citizens are concerned about human rights in an abstract sense but that their level of interest in the issue of U.S. policy toward human rights violations is extremely low. There are some data to support this perception. First, at a fairly abstract level, the public favors government efforts to promote human rights. For example, 85 percent of the respondents to a 1974 Harris Survey said it was important that the United States be a leader in moral values, and 70 percent said the United States should help to bring a democratic form of government to other nations. While this appears to be an impressive commitment to encourage one type of human rights, it is quite possible that these responses indicate less a desire to promote human rights than a perception of the United States as the guardian of values associated with these rights. This is a most important distinction.
The perception of the United States as a self-appointed protector of noble values stems from a peculiar sense of historical innocence, a belief that the United States is not like other nations but rather exceeds them in the nobility of its purpose and the purity of its past. To John F. Kennedy, this special blessing implied an obligation: "We are still the keystone in the arch of freedom," he told his final audience in November 1963. Later that same day he was scheduled to tell a Dallas audience that "we, in this country ... are — by destiny rather than choice — the watchmen on the walls of world freedom." In 1965, his successor reminded a White House audience that "history and our own achievements have ... thrust upon us the principal responsibility for the protection of freedom on earth." Although President Carter altered the established terminology from "freedom" to "human rights," in his inaugural address he associated his administration with the vision of his predecessors: "Ours was the first society openly to define itself in terms of both spirituality and human liberty. It is that unique self-definition which has given us an exceptional appeal — but it also imposes on us a special obligation, to take on those moral duties which, when assumed, seem invariably to be in our own best interest."
This elite perception of the United States as the nation possessed of a historic role to enhance human rights is echoed in public opinion. More than six of every ten respondents to the 1974 Harris Survey agreed that the world was dependent on the United States to set moral examples, conversely, an equal proportion said that the United States was "not at all" dependent upon other nations for moral examples. Similarly, 82 percent of the respondents expressed a belief that the world was dependent upon the United States to supply the learning necessary "to improve the quality of life," while 59 percent asserted that the United States had nothing whatever to learn from the rest of the world about improving the quality of life for its citizens. To many Americans, the protection of human rights is a special moral obligation, accepted in much the same way that Kipling's Britain accepted its burden to civilize the nonwhite people that history had not favored.
And, as with Victorian England, much of the U.S. public does not perceive its role as essentially protective, as a guardian of human rights and a stationary beacon to guide others; rather, citizens believe their government should take positive, aggressive measures to promote human rights. For example, 67 percent of the Harris Survey respondents favored putting pressure on governments that violate human rights, and 62 percent said the United States should not support authoritarian governments that have overthrown democratic regimes. More than seven of every ten citizens agreed that "it is morally wrong to back military dictatorships that strip people of their basic rights, even if that dictatorship will allow us to set up military bases in that country." This question merits particular attention because it forces respondents to consider a potential cost for speaking out against the violation of human rights. Bases or no bases, the public prefers that its government move positively to dissociate itself from and deny support to repressive military dictatorships.
As the following chapters demonstrate, the question has never been phrased in the context of human rights versus military bases in Latin America but rather in terms of human rights versus communism. The loss of a military base is a relatively small price to pay to promote human rights. When the costs are raised to include the loss of a country to communism, however, the public becomes less enthusiastic about the international protection of human rights. More than 80 percent of the 1974 Harris Survey respondents agreed that the containment of communism should be an important component of foreign policy, and 70 percent said that a communist Latin American country would be a threat to the United States. As a result, slightly more than half of the respondents were willing to support repressive governments if a communist takeover were the alternative. When the values of human rights and anticommunism conflict, the latter emerges dominant in United States opinion.
Other data suggest that the threat of communism remains a lodestar of public opinion on foreign policy issues. Using survey data from the Potomac Associates, Watts and Free found that the fear of this threat reached an all-time high of 86 percent in 1964. It then fell to 69 percent in 1974 but subsequently rose to 74 percent in 1976. Given this high level of concern, it is not surprising that U.S. citizens are reluctant to climb out on a limb for human rights in Latin America, at least when the perceived risk is an increased threat of communism. And given this fear, it is certainly no accident that, as the next chapter demonstrates, lobbyists employed by repressive Latin American governments consistently argue that human rights violations are an unfortunate but inevitable response to communist subversion.
In addition to their willingness to aid repressive regimes in order to frustrate communism, a plurality of citizens prefers that the United States not address the human rights issue in such a way that other important foreign policy considerations are jeopardized. In late 1974, for example, 40 percent of the respondents to the Harris Survey said that the Soviet Union's treatment of Jews is none of our business. Two years later, when asked how they felt about the Carter administration's early criticisms of repression in the Soviet Union, 38 percent of the respondents to a New York Times/CBS News Poll disapproved, 26 percent approved, and 36 percent were not sure how they felt. These and similar survey results prompted Yankelovich to conclude that, in relations with the Soviet Union, "there is little support for a sacrifice of vital American interests in defense of human rights."
Not only does support for humanitarian initiatives decline when human rights is placed in conflict with either communism or détente, it also drops somewhat less precipitously when the pursuit of human rights might hamper the functioning of capitalism. As of 1974, a plurality of citizens (44 percent) thought that it is justified for the United States to back governments that believe in free enterprise but not in democracy. In the most glaring human rights issue of the 1970s, apartheid in South Africa, the public was willing to use moderate pressure (halt arms sales, restrain new business investment, make private corporations pressure the South African government) to end apartheid but reluctant to pay a high economic price for such activity. 47 percent of the public were opposed to pushing for black rule in South Africa if it meant a reduction in the supply of vital minerals, compared to 37 percent who approved, and 51 percent of the public opposed forcing U.S.-based corporations to close their operations in South Africa, compared to 21 percent who approved. As the discussion of human rights and the Export-Import Bank in Chapter 8 demonstrates, the high value citizens place upon domestic prosperity affects efforts to increase the influence of human rights in United States foreign policy.
Finally, the large proportion of respondents who are undecided on these human rights-related questions indicates that, as with most foreign policy issues, the issue of human rights is not of central concern to the public. Some policy makers and interest-group activists often overlook this fact when they address the issue. In particular, they argue that a policy of promoting human rights, even one that fails in its primary objective, should nonetheless be pursued since it ennobles the public spirit. Government support of human rights is said to have "an immense emotional appeal because it reflects the hopes and aspirations of mankind", policy makers are urged to "take into account the debilitating effects of the internal dissonance which a policy patently devoid of moral content is bound to generate in the United States." Statements such as these ignore the public's low level of interest in the issue of human rights, its high fear of communism, and the normal economic anxieties that characterize participants m market economies. Given the extent to which human rights violations in Latin America have been justified as a response to communism, and given the extent to which proposals to encourage a stronger U.S. human rights policy have been viewed as harmful to the domestic economy, the dissonance to which human rights activists refer will probably be restricted to a relatively small portion of the public.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America by Lars Schoultz. Copyright © 1981 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- List of Tables, pg. ix
- Preface, pg. xi
- List of Abbreviations, pg. xv
- Introduction, pg. 1
- 1. Latin America and U.S. Public Opinion, pg. 19
- 2. Interest Groups, pg. 48
- 3. Diplomacy and Human Rights, pg. 109
- 4. Economic Aid: Participants and Processes, pg. 135
- 5. Economic Aid and Human Rights, pg. 168
- 6. Military Assistance, pg. 211
- 7. Multilateral Economic Assistance, pg. 267
- 8. Linkages to the U.S. Private Sector, pg. 301
- Conclusion, pg. 344
- Bibliography, pg. 381
- Index, pg. 407