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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center 2011 The United States of the World: Human Rights, Political Entrepreneurship, and U.S. Foreign Policy via Affective and Rational Politics Marriah Star The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/4430 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] THE UNITED STATES OF THE WORLD: HUMAN RIGHTS, POLITICAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP, AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY VIA AFFECTIVE AND RATIONAL POLITICS by MARRIAH STAR A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2011 © 2011 MARRIAH STAR All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Political Science in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. September 9, 2011 Professor Andrew Polsky ___________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee September 9, 2011 Professor Joe Rollins ______________________ Date Executive Officer Professor Andrew Polsky___________________ Professor Yan Sun________________________ Professor Charles Tien_____________________ Supervision Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract THE UNITED STATES OF THE WORLD by Marriah Star Adviser: Professor Andrew Polsky This study examines how Political Entrepreneurs in the United States Congress responded to human rights abuses in six countries during the 1970s and 1980s: Cambodia, El Salvador, South Africa, the Soviet Union, Taiwan, and Uganda. It presents a four-point model for approaching the study of United States human rights policy. The key element in all the cases is bonding social capital, also called affective politics. American policy towards the Soviet Union and Uganda both demonstrate the integration of international, transnational, and domestic politics. Taiwan receives special attention because U.S. Taiwan policy continues to exemplify the integration of international relations, transnational relations, and domestic politics. The Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA) represents Taiwanese-Americans who care about promoting democracy on Taiwan and, ultimately, Taiwan’s legal status as an independent country. FAPA cultivates and sustains relationships with members of Congress and their staff to create the Taiwan Caucus in the House and Senate, second in influence only to the Israel Caucus, which is cultivated by the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This study investigates how the Taiwan Independence Movement (TIM) learned, in part from AIPAC, to become politically viable as an ethnic lobby in the 1980s after limited success in the 1960s and 1970s, despite lacking the voting power and financial resources of Jewish-Americans. iv This study examines how bonding social capital (affective politics) is used to compensate for deficiencies in financial capital and voting power (rational politics), thus creating the political capital that political entrepreneurs use to shape U.S. foreign policy. Political entrepreneurs include citizens, congressional staff, and members of Congress, who have an impact on U.S. foreign policy that is greater than we would expect if we studied their resources by using only a rational choice framework. This study demonstrates that scholars of international relations, transnational politics and American politics can analyze the biographies of political entrepreneurs and their emotional relationships to more fully understand U.S. foreign policy. v Acknowledgements For this section I am going to tell the story of the past 35 years. If I don’t tell it, no one will. This dissertation started, in a sense, the day I was born: January 2, 1976. I was the love child of two Hippie parents: my father Clay Adams (“Black Man Clay”) and my mother Vivian Swearingen (“Vivian the White Woman”). He was a black retired United States Air Force Officer who had spent 20 years as a technical sergeant. He left the Air Force after returning from Vietnam. She was a white college graduate, 15 years his junior, who had recently moved out to the west coast of the United States from Indiana and Ohio. As a liberated woman, my mother chose not to marry my father. They also gave me a name that was unconventional: “Marriah”, meaning “the wind”, and “Star”, because they wanted me to be a Star in everything I do. This is normal for Hippie culture: my sister is named Crystal Sunshine Star. This unique name helped me identify as a “flower child.” I was normal in the Hippie community of the American West, but different in other environments. This feeling of being different has stayed with me over 27 years of living in other environments, and has influenced my approach to research and thinking about the world. It has convinced me that, solely because of my name, I must make a unique contribution to society, a contribution that builds on the Hippie critiques of Western society while accepting the benefits of Western society. This dissertation is one element of that contribution. My father left behind his first family to go on his Hippie journey. His first wife, Veda Adams, had four children: Albert, Sandra, Anthony, and Alton. My father’s exodus started a chain reaction of events that has culminated, 35 years later, in me, his middle son out of nine children completing a Ph.D. Veda succumbed to paranoid schizophrenia and her three male children eventually followed. As I moved around the country with my parents, living occasionally in a car, a teepee, a friend’s house, and other places in the Rocky Mountains and the Mohave Desert, my older brothers turned to drugs, gangs, and crime as coping mechanisms. I knew at the age of 8 that my life had to go in the opposite direction. I entered public school at that age and vowed that I would create a new pattern for my family. It is because of this long-term effort that I identify with the political entrepreneurs examined in this dissertation. It takes one to know one! 27 years later, on the exact day I called my stepmother to tell her I finished writing my dissertation, my older brother Albert went to my father asking for money and help because he had stopped taking his medications. My father had no choice but to call the police to put Albert in prison. As I completed editing my dissertation, my father and stepmother searched for ways to put Albert into a hospital so that he would not endanger himself or other people. My father told me that mental illness has plagued his first family since he was in Vietnam, and likely affects his extended family as well. Nothing has changed. I was in junior high in 1989 when Albert first became a menace to my family. I remember when the police came to Albert when he was intruding in my father’s house, where I lived with Alton, Sandra and Anthony. Albert could not remember his name and he did not know what time of the year it was. He was placed in a hospital. Five years later I celebrated getting accepted to Harvard in June 1994. I sat around a camp fire one night with my brother Alton as we talked about how bright my future surely was. I told him that, since I had vi accomplished this great thing, I wanted him to succeed as well. He told me that he knew within five years, by the time he was 40, he would have $10,000. He did not know how he would do this, but he was sure he would be rich. That was the last night I saw him. He is currently living homeless on the streets. Alton had a run-in with the police, which triggered his paranoia, followed by time in a group home. My sister Amber last saw him homeless as she walked to her college graduation in 2009. My siblings have shaped, for better and worse, my entire academic career. It breaks my heart every time I think about them. It was because of them that I refused to give up when my studies seemed too difficult. I knew I had to be the example for my younger brothers and sisters to follow if they also wished to avoid a life of homelessness, drugs, gangs and prison. The Hippie drug culture I grew up in, and the shadow of mental illness in my family, motivated me to constantly verify and measure reality. I had to convince myself that I was neither stoned nor mentally ill if I accepted an argument within academia. This has helped me be comprehensive and thorough as a researcher, always challenging my own assumptions. In the past 20 years, thanks both to my example and the positive values instilled by my parents, I have seen my sister Crystal complete her college education, followed by Amber. Ava is currently embarking on the school of life, developing a range of practical skills that will always help her and other people. My youngest sibling, Austin, is embarking on the same promising academic path that I started at the same high school I attended. He is the same distance from me (4 siblings) that I am from my brother Albert. However, instead of trying to avoid mental illness and drug abuse, Austin can be a healthy, normal teenager -- the kind I never had the freedom to be. My academic efforts for the past 25 years have been my gift to them. This dissertation is, in a very real sense, my love letter to them.

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