Monocausal, ideological explanations of international relations fail and obscure the proximate dynamics that cause war and violence.

Studies on cultural transmission have opened diplomatic history to new subjects and new interpretations, and constructively complicated its assumptions about what constitutes foreign relations. Some culturalists believe, however, that studies of fashion, tourism, and musical theater fail to address real power relations between nations. Fashion and tourism and musicals, they say, may reveal something about one people’s attitudes toward another; but to understand why nations behave as they do, it is essential to bring the state back into the analysis. How, for example, do such cultural analysands as race, gender, and language help us parse hard power, including the mechanics of empire and the conduct of war? Can the Geertzian approach explain not just the context but the content, and even the cause/effect, of US foreign relations?

To be sure, many of the previously cited books do concern power; and the distinction between “cultural transmission” and “culture as power” may be artificial. Let us consider several specific ways in which historians have tried directly to connect attitudes, images, values, and prejudices to the practice of foreign policy, and the exercise of state power. Begin with race. For some years, scholars have noted that white racism has influenced US policy toward non-white others. For Michael Hunt, racism is one of three main elements of American ideology (1987). Reginald Horsman (1981) and Richard Slotkin (1985) have shown that white acceptance of racist social science during the nineteenth century enabled brutal treatment of Native Americans, Mexicans, and Filipinos, among others. John Dower’s War Without Mercy (1986), a harrowing account of the Pacifi c War, demonstrates that white Americans and Japanese killed and maimed each other remorselessly because of their mutual racism. During the Cold War, US policy toward Africa was guided in part by the assumption that black Africans were unready for, and perhaps incapable of, self-government. In South Africa (Borstelmann 1993), Zimbabwe (Horne 2001), and all across the African continent (Noer 1985), white Americans sheltered too long and lovingly racist white minority governments that frustrated black aspirations to democracy.

Domestic race relations also played a role in US foreign policy. The rising civil rights movement after 1945 exposed American racism and embarrassed a succession of presidents trying to win the Cold War with the claim that communists represented tyranny, the Americans and their allies freedom. African Americans often identifi ed with black freedom fi ghters in Africa, and vice versa, as both groups struggled against white power structures that denigrated and oppressed them. African Americans spoke out against racism at home and racist colonialism abroad, prompting State Department offi cial (and later secretary of state) Dean Rusk to admit that race discrimination in the United States was “the biggest single burden that we carry” into the arena of diplomacy. A good deal of scholarly attention has been paid recently to the impact of domestic race relations on US policy making (Horne 1986; Plummer 1996; Von Eschen 1997; Krenn 1999; Dudziak 2000; Gallicchio 2000; Borstelmann 2001; Anderson 2003).

Along with race, gender has increasingly become an important analysand for historians of foreign relations. Joan Scott’s infl uential essay “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” fi rst published in 1986, questioned why historians seemed to think that gender was “irrelevant to . . . issues of politics and power”; in her view, “high politics itself is a gendered concept” (Scott 1996: 48). Emily Rosenberg responded to this challenge (1990) and gradually thereafter, foreign relations historians began to apply gender analysis to their studies of diplomacy, imperialism, and war. Some saw gender as a way to consider the role of women in international encounters, as occasional makers of policy (Jeffreys-Jones 1995), as agents of foreign relations through non-governmental organizations (Tyrrell 1991), or as those on the receiving end of imperial power (Enloe 1990; Moon 1997; Findlay 1999; Goedde 2003; Shibusawa 2006). Some studies of gender included consideration of sexuality and/or race.

Other scholarship involving gender has concerned the role played by cultural constructions of the masculine and the feminine in shaping images of selves and others in US foreign policy. The United States has typically seen itself as a masculine nation, honor-bound to protect allegedly feminine others, or to discipline those whose fl ighty and effeminate misbehavior threatens international stability. The quest for manliness has been associated with certain American presidents; as Kristin Hoganson has written, “historians have turned Theodore Roosevelt into a virtual poster boy for the utility of gender in foreign relations history” (Hoganson 1998; Bederman 1995; Dalton 2002). Frank Costigliola has discovered signifi cance in the gendered language of Cold Warrior George Kennan, who repeatedly warned against the “penetration” of the “West” by Soviet expansionism (Costigliola 1997). The fear of appearing soft on communism drove John F. Kennedy to insist on masculine toughness in his policy toward the Soviet Union and Vietnam (Dean 2001). Other historians have claimed that the United States is periodically seized by a “crisis of masculinity” that fi nds an outlet in an aggressive foreign policy, regardless of who is president. Rendering international others as feminine has enabled the United States, and other imperial nations, to naturalize or justify interference in others’ affairs. Paternalism guided US policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean; the North Americans sought to control allegedly fl ighty and emotional Haitians, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans (Renda 2001; Perez 1998; Findlay 1999). The annals of US foreign relations are populated by tremulous Chinese, cowering Hindus, tough Muslims and weeping Muslims, manly Israelis, effete Frenchmen, and so forth. The “tough” and “manly” won praise and support from the United States. The “weak” and “soft” required fi rm, masculine guidance.

If foreign relations historians have confirmed that gender is “a useful category of historical analysis” even within realms of power, they have nevertheless found that gender alone, like race alone, has explanatory limits. The challenge for historians, as Hoganson puts it, “is shifting from demonstrating the relevance of gender to situating gender alongside strategic, economic, political, and other factors” (1998: 316). Some historians have opened their cultural analysis to a greater number of variables, by looking carefully at the language of foreign policy makers or those groups that influence them. Language, particularly in its metaphors, can convey a host of meanings inflected by the culture that produces it. Kennan’s language in his famous “Long Telegram” (1946) was gendered – it feminized the Russian people, for whom Kennan had an almost sexual affection, and cast as rapacious the current Soviet leadership – but it also indulged in references to illness, as in the “Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs” and Soviet leaders being “afflicted” with insecurity (Costigliola 1997). Geoffrey Smith has associated gender, pathology, and perceptions of national security in his explanation of the Red (fear of communism) and Lavender (fear of gay people) Scares that swept the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s (Smith 1992). Homosexuality was purportedly a sexual perversion, a disease, and a risk to national security because gays were readily blackmailed by their communist handlers.

Increasingly, historians of foreign relations are trying to do justice to the complexity of culture and the disparate ways it affects perception and decision making. It is never neat work. Who is to say, for example, whether race or religion more insistently conditioned US policy toward Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India during the 1950s? How did interwoven ideas concerning gender, race, and class shape North American initiatives in Puerto Rico or Cuba at the beginning of the twentieth century? A number of scholars have skillfully blended the discrete elements of culture to offer satisfying explanations of American encounters with others (Stephanson 1995; Dower 1999; Bradley 2000; Connelly 2002; Klein 2003).

The most direct result of the poststructural challenge to the history of US foreign relations has been the emergence of postcolonial or subaltern studies, a movement closely associated with the late Edward Said, whose Orientalism (1978) was its foundation text. Postcolonial scholars admired Marx and especially the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, but revealed their poststructural affi liations through their interest in literature, subjectivity, prisons, schools, and discourse, and through their footnotes, which cited more Foucault than Marx. The postcolonialists were emphatically interested in empire and power. While they were clear in their condemnation of colonialism, they looked imaginatively at the relationships empire created between the dominant nation, its agents, and colonized “subalterns” (Subaltern Studies, 1988– 2000). Perhaps the most important contribution of the subaltern scholars was their ascription of agency to the weaker parties in the colonial relationship – men and women who, in spite of having limited power, shaped their own identities and forged resistance despite their subordinate status. Gender and often race figured prominently in these works.

Said and the Subaltern Studies quickly found their way into the arguments (and the footnotes) of foreign relations culturalists. Essays in Cultures of United States Imperialism (Kaplan & Pease 1993) used poststructural theory to expand the horizons of historians more comfortable sorting through diplomatic correspondence than contemplating the prosthetics of empire, stuffed gorillas at New York’s Museum of Natural History, and Tokyo Disneyland – all subjects of essays in the Kaplan–Pease anthology. As Rosenberg has noted, much of the foreign relations history inspired by poststructuralism has focused on the formal American empire: on the Philippines, and especially on Latin America (Joseph et al. 1998; Rosenberg 1999; Rafael 2000; Renda 2001). Adopting postmodern theory, regarding empire as an engagement of cultures, and exploring mutual images and attitudes as displayed in the media, in fi ction, and in travel literature, these scholars have nevertheless combed the archives in search of affi liations between the offi cial language of diplomacy and the broader discourse of encounter.

It would be satisfying to report that culturalism has swept the field, and achieved the stature of realist, revisionist, or even post-revisionist accounts of US foreign relations. There is no question that culturalism has gained a measure of respect, certainly among younger entrants to the fi eld, and with some older scholars as well. Yet resistance remains. Some seems churlish: that cultural infl uence is harder to measure than, say, trade fl ows during the 1930s is self-evident, and hardly disqualifi es culture as a meaningful category of analysis. But there is thoughtful criticism as well. Culture is an elastic concept; if it includes and explains everything, it threatens to explain nothing in particular. Culture, moreover, can occlude the operations of cause and effect. Exploring how selves see themselves and others does not necessarily illuminate why selves or others act as they do [italics in original]. And cultural perceptions are likely to depend on interests: Americans during the Pacific War hated and dehumanized the Japanese, but cherished the Chinese as honest, virtuous, and quaint. Above all, critics have charged, culture in the end has not much to do with power. Oppression is not, they say, about ridicule, stereotype, or ideas based on gender, race, or religion. Language does not kill people; war is not a discourse. In its affection for Geertzian context, its emphasis on image, culturalism neglects what is most important about US foreign relations.