Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 14, 1994 TAG: 9404190119
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By STEPHEN S. ROSENFELD
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It was a group pained at the thought that the United States had not done what it might to head off that terrible passage. Even in today's vastly different post-Cold War circumstances, Poles can imagine they might again be left to Russian mercies. Hence the embassy's staging of this political-sensitivity session.
Yet I wonder whether our Polish friends, and many others, have caught the new drift.
A foreign-policy revolution has taken place since the war. The whole process of decision-making has been substantially democratized. Perhaps even more than ideological or political shifts, this makes a difference. No longer is control of policy centered in an upper-class elite composed of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his leading advisers. This wartime corps had its undeniable achievements in fashioning a global coalition and triumphing over a determined foe. But its limitations were revealed in crucial decisions affecting the shape of the postwar world.
The replacement of this elite over the decades by a circle of more representative Americans is surely a large part of the reason we have moved - almost without realizing the magnitude of the change - from then abandoning Poland to now putting it in a queue to apply to NATO, the Skull and Bones of international security organizations.
In World War II America, it wasn't simply that policy was run by well-born Anglo-Saxons. They were the ones who got first crack at defining the American national interest. The way they did it had much to do with high strategy, but it also had more than a little to do with bloodlines. There was no conspiracy but a cultural context in which certain favored people did what came naturally.
In the Second World War as in the First, a concern for our Anglo-Saxons' homelands of Britain and Northern/Western Europe came to be identified as a national interest, and American intervention followed. In the Second War, groups well down the social ladder, like the Poles and the Jews, found that their fellow citizens regarded the fate of their kin not as national business but as ethnic or - the ultimate high-policy putdown - humanitarian in nature. It was no small semantic difference. The designation marked an immense political, as well as social, divide. Saving the one became an American war aim, and it was accomplished. Saving the others was not a strategic priority, and it was not accomplished.
The war regenerated American democracy, extending more widely throughout the population its social opportunities, material benefits and political privileges. Thus were sources and directions of foreign policy effected. Not that grand strategy had nothing to do with it. But the fact is, Sovietized Eastern Europe, twice left in the lurch (Munich 1938, Yalta 1945), became the region whose destiny was perceived to be the principal stake of the Cold War.
A factor of historical guilt came to the fore. The importance of guilt in drawing American support to the establishment of Israel as a Jewish homeland is well-known. Less well-known is that, as Robert Gerald Livingston has written, the West finally responded to the centuries-old appeal of Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks to be Catholic Christendom's bulwark against the Orthodox (and Muslim) East.
Understandably, those who stood to lose status (though not security) from this postwar trend have not been entirely comfortable about it. A small but telling sign: I recall hearing the late W. Averell Harriman, a member of the old foreign-policy club, wisecracking of new arrival Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's Polish-born national security adviser, ``He's too Zbig for his zbritches.''
Decision-making on Asia follows a separate pattern. Policy in Europe, whence many Americans come, is more or less open to ethnic politics. Policy in Asia, whence few Americans come, is heavily marked by the play of economic interest groups. Democratization there takes another form.
The extension of foreign-policy privileges to ethnic or racial groups on the edges of power in American society is still incomplete. A look at American policy toward Haiti, for instance, makes plain that blacks still lack the leverage and deference more favored groups enjoy. But there is an unmistakable trend to making policy democratic or, if you will, multicultural. And although the Poles and other East Europeans have their historical reasons to be skeptical, no one has benefited more than they from the change.
Stephen S. Rosenfeld writes for The Washington Post.
The Washington Post
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