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The Inscrutable Americans

I have a short piece, The Inscrutable Americans, on the National Association of Scholars website that discusses the interest, in both China and the United States, of broadening the focus of Chinese scholars of America beyond Sino-American diplomatic history and policy studies.

There are few opportunities for fieldwork in the United States, and scholarly work on American domestic politics is ?woefully inadequate,? according to a Peking University specialist in American studies....

We need to study the economy, society, history, and culture of the United States, not just what Obama said yesterday,? said one Chinese scholar. He and many others are eager to investigate the cultural, ethnic, and religious factors that help to explain America?s behavior and its foreign-policy decisions. As it stands now, ?China equates American diversity with chaos, not realizing it is the strength of the U.S.,? says an American professor.

Does the Ford Foundation, which is pushing this effort, really believe that Chinese scholars will be impressed with the American practice of ?diversity.? I have my doubts, expressed in my NAS piece.

Because it didn?t quite fit there, I agreed to amputate the tail of that piece, but since one of the great benefits of having your own blog is that you don?t have to deal with the judgment of a good (in the case of Peter Wood, NAS president, a very good) editor, I am re-attaching that tail here for the benefit of DISCRIMINATIONS readers. (Never mind that it?s a tail veteran readers with great memories may recall from this post nearly six years ago.)

In my original, tailed version (or entailed ? entail: ?... to fix ... permanently in some condition or status.... to impose, involve, or imply as a necessary accompaniment?), I quoted an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education that in turn had quoted a Chinese foreign-ministry spokesman who said the president should appreciate China?s opposition to Tibetan independence because he is a black president who understands Lincoln?s ?incomparable role in protecting the national unity and territorial integrity of the United States.?

?Most Americans? might indeed find this comparison far-fetched, but many academics whom the Chinese would encounter certainly would not. Although they might regard the comparison to Lenin a bit inflammatory, most historians take Lincoln at his word when he said in an often-quoted letter to Horace Greeley August 22, 1862:

As to the policy I ?seem to be pursuing? as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be ?the Union as it was.? If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause....

Indeed, I hope readers will indulge me if I take this opportunity to recycle a controversy I had over this very point nearly twenty years ago with a celebrated American historian, Eric Foner of Columbia, who had written a piece in The Nation (February 11, 1991, p. 149) favorably comparing Gorbachev's resistance to secessionist tendencies in the then still-existing Soviet Union to Lincoln's response to secession here at home. I replied with the following letter to The Nation (March 25, 1991, p. 362):

As someone who taught American history in one of my former lives, during which I published an article arguing that everyone should have sat out the Civil War, I was intrigued by Eric Foner?s recent editorial, ?Lincoln?s Lesson.?

As far as I can tell, the lesson seems to be that political, moral and even historical arguments are irrelevant to secessionist controversies because great powers will always stamp out separatist movements if they can. Thus, Foner argues, Gorby is no worse for bashing the Baltics than Abe was for crushing the Confederates.

This is a position put forward most eloquently a number of years ago by Edmund Wilson in the introduction to Patriotic Gore, where he treated Lincoln, Bismarck and Lenin as all of a piece and described wars, especially wars like the Civil War, which put down internal separatists, as ?stimulated as a rule primarily by the same instincts as the voracity of a sea slug.? While the implication of Wilson?s (and my) argument is that Abe was no better than Gorby, however, Foner argues that Gorby is no worse than Abe. Coming from someone who in one of his former lives wrote so powerfully of the moral appeal of the Lincolnian platform, Foner?s view is curiously amoral.

Because the argument is amoral, it is also profoundly apolitical. Foner does touch on some of the theoretical dilemmas of self-determination, such as who gets to decide what political ?self? deserves determination and what happens to minorities within the seceding units who want to remain with the larger union. But, perhaps because of those dilemmas, he seems to conclude that political debate and judgments are irrelevant. He asserts that Lithuania has even less justification for secession than Texas had in 1861, but that is almost an aside. His larger point is that the historical, political and moral justifications of the secessionists don?t matter. Whether in Soviet Georgia or Savannah, Georgia, secession ?is something no leader of a powerful nation can be expected to allow.?

That is a curious standard by which to judge political movements, especially in a journal of the left. Would Foner be so quick, for example, to condemn separatist movements launched by Native Americans or Southern slaves? Should the Palestinians pack up and go home, if they have a home, because the Israelis ?can be expected? to reject their demands as disruptive of Eretz Israel? Perhaps in trying to annex Kuwait, Saddam Hussein should be regarded as simply a premature anti-secessionist.

Foner does present one concluding argument besides the predictable response of Presidents, Chairmen, Prime Ministers, etc., for opposing secession. Lincoln passionately believed that, as stated in his first inaugural address, ?the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy,? and Foner concludes by noting that ?Gorbachev would surely agree.?

So he would, but then so would George III.

The Chinese might find America?s toleration (and even enthusiastic encouragement from much of American Studies academia) of the ?diversity? provided by indigenous cultural and even political separatism to be odd, but they would surely also find many academic mandarins here with views of how separatist movements should be treated that are very much like their own.

Full post as published by Discriminations on October 22, 2010 (boomark / email).