Neighbor Policy Research Articles

Telling America's Story to the World

Telling America's Story to the World Harilaos Stecopoulos (bio) The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989. By Nicholas Cull. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 600 pages. $106 (cloth). 560 pages.$43.50 (paper). Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940-1960. By Andrew Falk. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. 264 pages.$34.95 (cloth). Practicing Public Diplomacy: A Cold War Odyssey. By Yale Richmond. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008. 192 pages. $29.95 (paper). Persuader-in-Chief: Global Opinion and Public Diplomacy in the Age of Obama. By Nancy Snow. Ann Arbor: Nimble Books, 2009. 120 pages. $17.60 (paper). U.S. propaganda is hardly a new scholarly topic. Americanists have long written about information, culture, and U.S. diplomacy.1 And with good reason: from George Creel's Committee on Public Information to the Good Neighbor Policy, from the Congress for Cultural Freedom to the National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. state and its various private affiliates or "fronts" have provided scholars with ample material.2 The end of the cold war and the subsequent downsizing of U.S. public diplomacy seemed to augur an end to this trend, but the Bush administration's largely ham-fisted approach to international relations had the inadvertent effect of provoking new academic and lay interest in these issues. Thanks in large part to Dubya's public relations fiascoes, the past ten years has witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of posts, articles, and books on the subject of U.S. propaganda. The war on terror has proved something of a boon for those who study soft power.3 With the exception of Andrew Falk (more on him in a moment), each of the authors under review has played a long-standing role in the making of propaganda studies within and without the academy. Nicholas Cull has [End Page 1025] authored an award-winning study of British propaganda and runs the Public Diplomacy Center at the University of Southern California. Yale Richmond, a retired cultural affairs officer in the U.S. Foreign Service, has published several books on the topic, the best known being Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (2000). And finally, Syracuse University professor Nancy Snow has engaged with the challenge of propaganda in two well-known books and currently blogs on public diplomacy for the Huffington Post.4 Linked through their official or unofficial advisory capacities to various arms of the state, these figures and their confreres—Joseph Nye, Martha Bayles, John Brown, Cynthia Schneider, and Richard Arndt—have proved influential in setting the public terms of the debate about U.S. propaganda during the Bush and the Obama eras.5 Their work tends to promote three main objectives: one, to teach policymakers and American citizens that the U.S. history of public diplomacy offers us valuable lessons for the present; two, to insist that effective public diplomacy can never take a unilateral form; and three, to emphasize that public diplomacy should not be seen as a relatively insignificant supplement to foreign policy but instead be understood as integral to the nation's relations with the rest of the globe. Given that these new millennium arguments emerged partly as outraged liberal responses to the Bush administration's "cowboy" foreign policy, it may seem that these contentions warrant approval. Who would deny, after all, that the United States could work harder to establish connections with Muslims around the world and especially in the Middle East? And who would not hope that both scholars and ordinary citizens might play an important role in forging such connections in an equitable and multilateral manner? There is little doubt we need to spend less time "telling America's story to the world"—as the old USIA tagline had it—and more time listening to what foreign publics have to say.6 Yet revisionist patriotism is hardly the only way to engage with the challenging issue of U.S. propaganda. Other contemporary scholars have examined U.S. information activities with a more jaundiced eye, critiquing not only the Bush administration's contemporary failures but also the long history of U...

Bracero Blacklists: Mexican Migration and the Unraveling of the Good Neighbor Policy

Bracero Blacklists: Mexican Migration and the Unraveling of the Good Neighbor Policy

Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters

Mexico is indelibly imprinted in the collective imagination of the United States as a romantic playground and land of the exotic otherness. Neither the intensity of transnational migration of Mexican workers living in the United States and Mexico, nor the now millions upon millions of American tourists who have traveled, toured, and played in Mexico’s Spanish colonial cities, indigenous markets, pre-Columbian sites, and long tropical beaches have dulled these attitudes. How this came to be is a fascinating story that Dina Berger and Andrew Grant Wood begin to answer in their edited volume Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters.Berger and Wood’s volume counteracts the overwhelming tendency of tourism scholars to focus their research on contemporary, synchronic case studies. Certainly there are exceptions, but most research fails to address tourism from a historical perspective. Over the course of the well-written and interesting chapters, the authors remind us that not all was as new as the first tourism scholars in the 1970s implied. These chapters are bracketed by an introduction and conclusion in which the editors contextualize the contributors’ theoretical perspectives and their specific historical cases.One of the strengths of these essays is that neither the editors nor the chapter authors try to present a unified vision of tourism history and development in Mexico. What they do is present a panorama of Mexican tourism, not an exhaustive study of all kinds of tourism, but a diverse collection of specific tourism histories that tell as much about international politics between the United States and Mexico as about tourism in Mexico. Collectively, the authors illustrate the particular kinds of tourists and the shifting representations of Mexico that are cultivated by the Mexican state as well as regional and local community civic leaders and private entrepreneurs. As Berger’s chapter illustrates nicely, American tourists and Mexican hosts fit into the US “Good Neighbor Policy” of the 1930s, in which tourism played a strong role in fostering positive relations between the two countries. Other essays, notably chapters by Eric M. Schantz (about vice), Jeffrey M. Pilcher (about touristic consumption), and Barbara Kastelein (about ecological and social decline), show some of the darker sides of tourism in Mexico.Indeed, tourism development and its history is both positive and negative as tourists themselves engage in contradictory behaviors, the US and Mexican governments inject their political agendas in the mix, and businesspersons small and large try to gain an advantage and make a profit. Andrea Boardman shows how US soldiers in the US-Mexican War acted like tourists, setting the stage for the tourism growth that followed their return home. While Boardman shows proto-tourist soldiers, other authors show how tourism became democratized, at least for US tourists, following World War II.Essays by Christina Bueno on the reconstruction of Teotihuacán, by Wood about improving health conditions in Veracruz, and by Alex Saragoza about resort development on the Pacific coast describe the monumental acts and finances of the state to develop and promote tourism. Other authors show how tourism politics play out among local businesspersons, the state, and foreigners: Andrew Sackett on the politics of tourism development in Acapulco, Lisa Pinley Covert on transforming San Miguel de Allende into a cultural center, and Mary K. Coffey on the resignification of folk art. Collectively these authors illustrate how massive state capital investment was related to private investment and fostered tense public-private unions.In various essays, notably Wood’s chapter on Carnival in Veracruz and, especially, M. Bianet Castellanos’s chapter about Maya service workers, the authors take a contemporary tourism site or associated tourism activity and then describe the politics that led up to the contemporary situation. Relying primarily on oral histories, Bianet Castellanos reconstructs labor regimes and tourism in Yucatán from the perspective of workers who try to comprehend tourism work, which does not come under ritual control like corn farming. Castellano shows the development of mutual dependency and economic support that exists between a Maya community and Cancún tourism resorts.Berger argues significantly that the tourism gaze is not one way and imperial, and that tourism politics, development, and practices are dialectical. By considering tourism development as representative of power relations — between states, between tourists and hosts, and among politicians and businesspersons — the authors here deepen our knowledge of the history of tourism in Mexico.

The Thirties in America: v.1: Academy Awards-Good neighbor policy; v.2: Goodwin, Benny-Prohibition repeal; v.3: Psychology and psychiatry-Zangara, Giuseppe

The Thirties in America: v.1: Academy Awards-Good neighbor policy; v.2: Goodwin, Benny-Prohibition repeal; v.3: Psychology and psychiatry-Zangara, Giuseppe

China's Multilateral Cooperation in Asia and the Pacific: Institutionalizing Beijing's “Good Neighbour Policy”. Chien-Peng Chung. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. xv + 161 pp. £75.00. ISBN 978-0-415-56914-9

China's Multilateral Cooperation in Asia and the Pacific : Institutionalizing Beijing's Good Neighbour Policy

Debated Whiteness amid World Events: Mexican and Mexican American Subjectivity and the U.S.' Relationship with the Americas, 1924–1936

By the 1920s, anti-Mexican campaigns in the United States had become a major liability for US interests in the Americas, as rival imperial powers attempted to exploit growing anti-American sentiments in Mexico and Latin America against American imperialism. The U.S. State Department sought to curtail animosity in Latin America by contesting discriminatory domestic practices that angered elite Mexicans and Mexican-American leaders who identified as white. After blocking eastern and southern European and Japanese immigration in the 1924 National Origins Act, the eugenics movement turned its attention to excluding Mexicans from entering the US. When legislative attempts at restriction failed because they conflicted with national and international commercial interests, non-legislative avenues were sought, including the Census and the courts. The 1930 Census was the only census that categorized Mexicans as a separate “race.” In the context of a changing racial formation in the United States, this unique category was reversed in 1936 due to Mexican-American leaders leveraging the fragility of the “Good Neighbor Policy” to force the Federal government into action.

China's Multilateral Cooperation in Asia and the Pacific: institutionalizing Beijing's ‘Good Neighbour Policy’– By Chien‐peng Chung

China's Multilateral Cooperation in Asia and the Pacific: institutionalizing Beijing's ‘Good Neighbour Policy’– By Chien‐peng Chung

The Pragmatic Challenge to Indian Foreign Policy

A subversive pragmatic vision is increasingly challenging some of the key foundations of India’s traditional nationalist and left-of-center foreign policy, diluting the consensus that shaped the policy, and raising new possibilities especially for India’s relations with the United States and global nuclear arms control. This debate between two centrist foreign policy perspectives is not yet settled. The two are described here as ‘‘traditional nationalist’’ and ‘‘pragmatist,’’ with the former representing the established and dominant perspective, and the latter as the emerging challenger. 1 Actual Indian policy mostly splits the difference, mouthing traditional nationalist (hereafter referred to as simply nationalist) slogans while following pragmatist prescriptions. One major result has been the widening of political space for closer relations with the United States, even without a stable consensus. These taxonomies are ideal types: it is very unlikely that those characterized as either nationalist or pragmatist would agree with or accept every tenet of these categories. The categorizations are designed to provide an outline of the competing lines of argumentation about Indian foreign policy, rather than identify nationalists or pragmatists per se. It also is important to note that it is difficult right now in India to associate these perspectives with particular political parties, think tanks, or ministries. Thus, these perspectives are individualistic and do not correspond to particular organizations. They do, however, represent the views of important public intellectuals, policy analysts, academics, journalists, diplomats, and government officials.

From Geneva to the Americas: The International Labor Organization and Inter-American Social Security Standards, 1936–1948

AbstractBeginning in the mid-1930s, Western Hemisphere nations turned to social insurance legislation—guided by the new concept of social security—in response to the economic crisis of the Great Depression. Supported by the International Labor Organization (ILO), national-level policy makers introduced a range of measures in recognition of the 1935 US Social Security Act. As Europe descended into a war, inter-Americanism served as way to maintain regional economic, and later military, security. This article describes an era of social welfare diplomacy in the Americas, one in which countries south of the US border projected their own distinct visions of social policy. Regional solidarity served as an integral step in the development of ideas concerning international social and economic rights. Placing President Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy in a wider frame, this analysis of ILO inter-American activities reveals an intriguing moment in history, when leaders from several nations saw economic development, trade, future growth, social security, and labor rights as integrally bound together.

Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution

Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution

Cautious neighbour policy: Canada's helping hand in winding down the Vietnam War

Openly critical at times of the United States for its actions in the Vietnam War, Canada was not for all that in a position to put its continental interests into question, and advocated therefore a conciliatory agenda towards its neighbour in this matter. This was particularly true in 1973 when it accepted an American invitation to take part in the international commission for implementing a ceasefire in Vietnam, thereby providing the US with a chance to withdraw without losing face completely. This article also notes that, in a show of North Atlantic solidarity, as the Cold War went on, Canada's measures were supported all along by Great Britain.

The seduction of Brazil: the Americanization of Brazil during World War II

Following completion of the U.S. air base in Natal, Brazil, in 1942, U.S. airmen departing for North Africa during World War II communicated with Brazilian mechanics with a thumbs-up before starting their engines. This sign soon replaced the Brazilian tradition of touching the earlobe to indicate agreement, friendship, and all that was positive and good - yet another indication of the Americanization of under way during this period. In this translation of Imperialism Sedutor, Antonio Pedro Tota considers both the Good Neighbor Policy and broader cultural influences to argue against simplistic theories of U.S. cultural imperialism and exploitation. He shows that Brazilians actively interpreted, negotiated, and re-configured U.S. culture in a process of cultural recombination. market, he argues, was far more important in determining the nature of this cultural exchange than state-directed propaganda efforts because already was primed to adopt and disseminate American culture within the framework of its own rapidly expanding market for mass culture. By examining the motives and strategies behind rising U.S. influence and its relationship to a simultaneous process of cultural and political centralization in Brazil, Tota shows that these processes were not contradictory, but rather mutually reinforcing. The Seduction of Brazil brings greater sophistication to both Brazilian and American understanding of the forces at play during this period, and should appeal to historians as well as students of Latin America, culture, and communications.

America on film: representing race, class, gender, and sexuality at the movies

America on film: representing race, class, gender, and sexuality at the movies

Central bankers as good neighbours: US money doctors in Latin America during the 1940s

AbstractThis article analyses a set of financial advisory missions led primarily by Robert Triffin of the US Federal Reserve Board to Latin American countries during the 1940s. These missions developed a new approach to international ‘money doctoring’ that rejected both the content and style of the better-known US financial advisory missions led by Edwin Kemmerer during the 1920s. The missions were driven by a number of motivations that emerged from the politics of the New Deal and the Good Neighbour policy. The episode highlights the diversity of international money doctoring experiences, the importance of the financial dimensions of the Good Neighbour policy, and the wider geographical impact of a new kind of financial internationalism that emerged in US foreign policy in the wake of the 1930s.

The “Good Neighbour Policy” in the Context of China's Foreign Relations

China: An International JournalVol. 07, No. 01, pp. 107-123 (2009) Comments and notesNo AccessThe “Good Neighbour Policy” in the Context of China's Foreign RelationsChien-peng CHUNGChien-peng CHUNGDr. Chien-peng Chung is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD in political science at the University of Southern California. His research interests include the politics and history of China, Chinese and Asian foreign and security relations, the dynamics of political change in Asia and the domestic-international nexus of diplomatic bargaining.https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219747209000272Cited by:8 PreviousNext AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsRecommend to Library ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited By 8The Community of Shared Futures: China’s Counter to Indo-Pacific NarrativesDevendra Kumar Bishnoi15 February 2023Bibliographie7 Apr 2022Good Relations with Neighbours: Sustainability of Cities Beyond Their BordersAli Cheshmehzangi31 August 2021China’s new security concept: India, terrorism, China’s geostrategic interests and domestic stability in PakistanRaj Verma13 September 2019 | The Pacific Review, Vol. 33, No. 6China’s peripheral diplomacy: Repeating Europe’s errors in dealing with the neighbourhoodMor Sobol23 August 2018 | Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, Vol. 4, No. 3BibliographieJean-Pierre Cabestan5 Nov 2015Chinese Nationalism, a False Alarm for Korea-The Case of the Beijing Olympics -Jih-Un Kim28 September 2011 | East Asia, Vol. 28, No. 4China and MyanmarRaviprasad Narayanan15 June 2011 | China Report, Vol. 46, No. 3 Recommended Vol. 07, No. 01 Metrics History PDF download

The "Good Neighbour Policy" in the Context of China's Foreign Relations

China's push for regional integration is an attempt to increase its influence throughout its neighbourhood and exhort other states to adopt its state-centric "New International Order" model of conducting foreign relations. The Chinese leadership will look for opportunities for co-management of world and Asia-Pacific economic, financial, security and diplomatic affairs.

The EU's Regional Policy and external aid policy

This paper aims to analyze the effect of the EU's regional policy and the external aid policy toward the neighbour nations in terms of the development of the trade and direct investment between the Euro area and neighbour nations. One of the conditions to be an international currency is that the nation plays a central part of the economic area in the trade and investment. The UK was the central part of the world economy in the gold standard era when the starling pound used to be an international currency, and so has been the USA when the ES dollar is the international currency. Thus, the Euro area also would be a pivotal part of the international economy in order for the Euro to grow as an international currency.As the EU continues to enlarge not only toward the central and eastern Europe and south eastern Europe but also toward Mediterranean nations, the EU has been expanding its trade and foreign direct investment with its new EU members and neighbour nations. Several factors contribute to the development of its international transactions, such as the EU's higher productivity than the neighghbour nations, the non-Euro area nation's open door policy and the free trade policy between the two. This paper focuses the EU's regional policy and foreign neighbour policy as the means to promote trade and FID between the Euro area and its neighbour nations. These EU's policies contribute to funding of social infrastructure, the development of the human capital and to promoting the structure policies to liberalize the goods and service market, capital market and labour market. This paper argues that these economic effects would enhance inflow of FDI from the Euro area, which shapes the intra and extra trade between the Euro area and neighbour nations.In this paper, section 2 examines the 2004 regional policy reform on the structural funds and Cohesion fund to find out the characteristics of the EU's regional policy toward the southeastern European nations. Section 3 reviews the EU's foreign neighbour policy with the Western Balkan Peninsula and analyzes the international division of labour between the Euro area and the neighbour nations. Finally, section 4 concludes the prospect of the role of the Euro as an international currency.

SURVEY OF RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

SUMMARY The 10th anniversary of Soeharto's resignation was coloured by disappointment with the slowness of reform, and with the government's reluctance to confront blatant religious intolerance. Nevertheless, economic growth is strong and investment spending buoyant. Inflation has risen well above target, suggesting that a more effective approach to monetary policy is needed. The recent surge in global rice prices coincided with bountiful domestic harvests, putting the government under pressure to restrict rice exports rather than imports as it has in recent years. However, restricting exports has been recognised as a ‘starve thy neighbour policy’, and the ASEAN trade ministers have jointly agreed ‘to continue fair trade practices and to achieve an orderly regional rice trade’. The government has at last increased domestic fuel prices significantly, mind-ful of the waste of valuable resources and the inequity involved in keeping such prices constant in the face of world price increases. It will implement a cash transfer program to compensate the poor for the resulting increase in living costs. The Ministry of Finance is leading reform of the central government bureaucracy. Its most fundamental initiatives are in human resource management, where it is attempting to match remuneration to skill requirements and responsibilities, and to align the pay structure more closely with that in the private sector–with pay rates rising much more rapidly than hitherto as levels of responsibility increase. It is also encouraging competition to fill vacancies by advertising them internally, rather than continuing to rely on promotion by seniority. At local government level, a small number of heads of government have gained a reputation as pioneers of reform. Two interviewed for this survey are exemplars of precisely what it was hoped would result from bringing government closer to the people through decentralisation, and from the switch to direct election of heads of local government. Both have considerable experience in the private sector, and their success seems related to their more entrepreneurial (as distinct from bureaucratic) way of thinking. ‘Good corporate governance’ has now become the mantra for state-owned enterprises (SOEs). It is recognised that this depends heavily on choosing the right people to manage each firm and to oversee it on behalf of its owner. Accordingly, almost all directors and commissioners of the 11 SOEs indirectly studied here have been replaced in recent months, and there is now a willingness to appoint professionals from private companies and from academia in order to gain access to needed skills. In addition, the initial selection of candidates has been shifted outside the bureaucracy to professional recruitment agencies.

Building the Kingdom of God: Religious Discourse, National Identity, and the Good Neighbor Policy, 1930–1938

This article argues that Protestant modernist discourse framed U.S. foreign relations during the 1930s. The good neighbor policy emerged as part of a rhetorically constructed national identity narrative that reinvigorated Americans' sense of manifest destiny in the face of Great Depression anxiety. U.S. policies ostensibly advocating nonintervention, disarmament, and international cooperation inscribed a religiously oriented national mission centered on international beneficence. These discursive frames altered the form rather than the substance of U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere while rendering the United States militarily inert amid rising tensions in Asia and Europe.

The Redcoat and the Ranger: Screening Bilateral Friendship in Cecil B. DeMille's North West Mounted Police (1940)

On October 21, 1940, world premiere of North West Mounted Police (JWMP) took place in Regina, Saskatchewan, with much fanfare. This epic western, which was producer/director Cecil B. DeMille's first foray into shooting entirely in Technicolor, stars Gary Cooper as Dusty Rivers, a Texas Ranger who crosses 49th parallel in pursuit of Jacques Corbeau (George Bancroft), a ruthless half-breed whiskey smuggler and gunrunner wanted for murder in Texas. (1) In process, Dusty helps North West Mounted Police (NWMP) suppress an uprising led by Corbeau. The story was inspired by 1885 North-West Rebellion: unsuccessful campaign on part of Metis community--mixed-race descendents of French (and some Scottish) male fur traders and Native (largely Cree, Chippewa, and Ojibwa) women--to defend diminishing buffalo hunting lands from Euro-Canadian encroachment into present-day Saskatchewan. However, DeMille intended picture to illustrate theme of friendship between United States and Canada through, in DeMille's words, the uniting of two men on border. (2) This essay argues that from NWMP's pre-production stages through its publicity campaign, DeMille used a distorted vision of North-West Rebellion to frame importance of bilateral amity in context of World War II period. Although United States remained ostensibly neutral in 1940, DeMille hoped that his film would reinforce notion that Canada was a strong and valuable nation--this, at a time when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his administration had endeavored to shore up continental defense system by strengthening hemispheric relationships. To that end, FDR administration designed Good Neighbor Policy to fortify bonds between United States and Latin American republics, particularly Mexico. Likewise, FDR regarded healthy cultural, political, and socioeconomic relations with Canada as vital to U.S. national security. The very public and politically expedient friendship between FDR and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King personified strengthening ties between Canada and United States. Moreover, in summer of 1940, FDR and King agreed to a formal Canadian-American military alliance. (3) However, prior to Pearl Harbor, explicit war-related themes in U.S. motion pictures were uncommon due to that country's Production Code Administration (PCA), film industry's self-regulatory agency. Established in 1934, PCA enforced Production Code, a set of moral standards governing film content based on what constituted appropriate entertainment for an undifferentiated mass audience. According to Code, motion pictures were pure entertainment and not vehicles of social criticism. The Code thus included a Fair Treatment Clause that required films to portray impartially all foreign nations and their citizens. (4) Therefore, studios were leery of outwardly naming a country as hostile to United States, fearing that PCA would withhold its seal of approval and thus prevent film's exhibition. Nevertheless, as global crisis intensified, Hollywood increasingly released films with pro-interventionist, anti-fascist, or war-preparedness themes. (5) In NWMP, friendship between redcoat, as officers of North West Mounted Police were known, and ranger indirectly reveals DeMille's pro-ally sympathies and his fondness for Britain and its Dominions, especially Canada. Though a political supporter of Republican Party, DeMille backed FDR administration's efforts to guide United States away from isolationism and toward preparedness. DeMille later wrote in his autobiography, I never had any doubt, from outbreak of World War II, where America must and eventually would take her stand. In domestic policies, I felt that New Deal had done a certain amount of good and a great amount of harm; but in foreign policy, when Franklin D. …