History Shock

When History Collides with Foreign Relations

John Dickson

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780700632039
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Diplomacia y tratados

For over twenty-five years John Dickson served the United States as a Foreign Service officer in North America, South America, the Caribbean, and Africa. In History Shock: When History Collides with Foreign Relations Dickson offers valuable insights into the daily life of a Foreign Service officer and the work of representing the United States. Dickson organizes History Shock around a country-by-country series of lively personal experience vignettes followed by compelling historical analysis of the ways in which his inadequate understanding of the host country's history, particularly its prior history with the United States, combined with his lack of knowledge of his own nation's history lead to history shock: where dramatically different interpretations of history blocked diplomatic understanding and cooperation.John Dickson offers these "stories with a history" to highlight the interaction between history and foreign relations and to underscore the costs of not knowing the history of our partners and adversaries, much less our own. In both Mexico and Canada in particular our lack of knowledge and understanding of how our long history of military interventions continues to complicate our efforts at developing mutually beneficial relationships with our two closest neighbors. In Nigeria and South Africa, Dickson experienced firsthand how the history of racism in the United States plays out on a world stage and clouds our ability to effectively work with key African nations. Perhaps the starkest example of history shock, of two nations with deeply conflicted views of their own histories and their shared history, is another country near at hand, Cuba. Not all of the gaps are too wide for bridge building; in Peru, Dickson provides an example of how history can be deployed to mutual advantage.The Foreign Service has long sought to improve its training, to provide some form of "playbook" or "operating manual" with systematic case studies for its officers. In History Shock Dickson provides not only a model for such case studies but also a unique contribution of an interpretive framework for how to remedy this deficit, including recommendations for strengthening historical literacy in the Foreign Service.

1

The Past Is a Foreign Country

When asked in May 2013 why Mexico curtailed cooperation with the United States in combating drug trafficking, Washington Post journalist Dana Priest said, “Well, Mexico has had a history of nationalistic dealing and a feeling of resentment towards the United States. We did invade the country a couple times and they haven’t forgotten that.”¹ She could have just said, “History.” That single word captures at once how deep the memories lie in Mexico of two centuries of interactions with their northern neighbor, who has practically no memories of the same period.

The interview with Dana Priest appeared on the eve of President Obama’s trip to Mexico City that same year. For seven years, under Felipe Calderón, the previous Mexican president, the two countries had enjoyed an unusually high level of cooperation against a backdrop of an enduring, unprecedented level of violence. Helicopters, secure networking equipment, computers, cellphone-tracing technologies, and training formed part of the more than $1 billion package to support Mexico’s efforts to reduce violence and crime. Mexican authorities revamped their police forces by supplementing them with military units and set up vetted units to share information with US law enforcement. After six years of determined effort, the Mexican government arrested the heads of the major criminal organizations, and levels of violence started to decline.

The new Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto, wanted to reduce the imprint of US law enforcement in this effort. He wanted Mexico to exercise its sovereign rights and responsibilities. The Post reporter, though, interpreted this more broadly as history. Ignorance of the history of the relationship between the two countries leads to diplomatic missteps, if not disaster.

Her answer took me back about nineteen years to a visit to the National Museum of Interventions in Mexico City, a visit vividly imprinted in my memory. The year was 1999. I had been in Mexico for only a few months. At the start of my assignment to the US Embassy, my job as a public affairs officer dealt with press matters and cultural exchanges. I had gone to the museum on the recommendation of an American businessman. He was a long-time expatriate. We had discussed, on and off, the daily criticisms of the United States in the media that were so often made effortlessly and with such relish. He mentioned the museum and suggested that I might gain useful insights into how the United States was viewed in Mexico. I might begin to understand, he said, how deeply these feelings were rooted in Mexico’s identity.

Mexico City was then, and still is now, full of important world-class museums. The Anthropology Museum, with its grand chambers illuminating the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mexico, is a wonder. The National Palace and its two-story Diego Rivera murals offer a vivid and colorful representation of Mexico’s rich culture. The murals highlight the history of struggle and conflict in Mexico. Before the businessman mentioned it to me, I had not heard of the Museo Nacional de las Intervenciones (National Museum of the Interventions), in Churubusco in the southern part of the famous sprawl of Mexico City. The name of the museum itself, highlighting interventions, prepped me a little for what I might encounter there. I walked up the worn stone path to the entrance of the ancient monastery that had survived the bloody Battle of Churubusco and was now the museum. I braced myself to see how Mexicans viewed the war with the United States in 1848, when they lost half of their territory. The incongruities could not hide in this beautiful old Franciscan monastery built with walls of stone and rounded red clay tile roofs, with flowering bougainvillea gracing its grounds. Serene.

But no amount of bracing prepared me for this state-run museum, opened in 1981 by President José López Portillo, at Churubusco, the site of one of the last battles of the Mexican-American War. Here Mexican forces made a last courageous but vain attempt to defend the city against advancing, overwhelming US forces. In the museum I encountered people and events about which I had known little or nothing: St. Patrick’s Battalion, a group of Irish and American deserters fighting side by side with the Mexicans 150 years earlier; Texas’s struggle to break away from Mexico; the role of Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson in the overthrow of President Francisco Madero of Mexico, who had launched a revolution to install a democratic alternative to the longtime ruler José Porfirio Díaz in 1910; the siege of Veracruz and General Pershing’s Punitive Expedition in 1916–1917, crossing the border into Chihuahua and trying to hunt down Pancho Villa, who had raided Columbus, New Mexico. The impact was not just the panels or the artifacts. It was the very notion of an entire museum dedicated to memorializing all the slights the United States had inflicted on Mexico, all the aggression, in one place, sanctioned by the government. I was shocked.

My instincts led me to argue with what I was seeing in the exhibits. The United States won the Battle of Churubusco, even though Mexico had St. Patrick’s Battalion of deserters on their side, paving the way for the takeover of Mexico City. In 1916, General Pershing stopped the pursuit of Pancho Villa only because the United States entered World War I to help save the rest of the world! Where was the display on the massacre at the Alamo? Texas remembers the Alamo.

I latched onto and wouldn’t let go of a few displays that strained credibility, as my way to deny the uncomfortable Mexican points of view on the events conveyed in the other exhibits. Only a small corner was given over to the mid-nineteenth-century moment in Mexican history when French emperor Napoleon III installed his Austrian cousin Maximilian as emperor of Mexico. The bullying role of the United States in Mexican affairs dominated the museum’s interpretive themes, but France, in cahoots with Spain and Britain at the time, actually installing an Austrian as emperor in Mexico merited only a corner? And furthermore, the United States could not escape blame even in this display. One of the placards in the exhibit castigated the northern neighbor in this instance for not intervening over France’s Mexican machinations. Here the Museum of Interventions seemed to imply that in this case Mexico wanted the United States to intervene, but only on Mexico’s terms, and that the United States apparently selfishly refused. The label on the placard also omitted any mention that Mexico’s American neighbors to the north were thoroughly distracted by and immersed in their own Civil War! Further still, the last exhibit, chronologically arranged, was dedicated to the most recent intervention: NAFTA. The free trade pact, which had been first posited by Mexico’s President Carlos Salinas in the late 1980s, was here portrayed as a US economic intervention.² NAFTA was official government policy in Mexico, the United States, and Canada, and here was a Mexican government museum decrying the free trade pact as yet another US intervention. I was surprised, angry, and argumentative.

I was still arguing lividly in my head when I went to the exit. I noticed two girls there, in school uniforms, looking at the first display, which showed just a few maps and charts of Mexico before 1846 and after. “No es justo,” one said to the other, pointing to the obvious discrepancy in size of territory. “It’s just not fair.”

My only consolation on leaving the museum was that there were very few visitors, in contrast to the constant heavy traffic in other museums across the city. Perhaps not many people would see what was going on here. At this beautiful Spanish colonial ex-convent, there were signs of disrepair, even neglect. I thought hopefully that these signs meant that the intensity of feeling toward the events depicted in exhibits inside did not reflect the feeling of real Mexican people outside. I was wrong. What led me past the anger to a more troubling, lingering angst was the realization that it was hard, if not impossible, to argue with the simplicity of the conclusion of the two girls. It was just not fair. They echoed Carlos Fuentes in his novel Gringo Viejo: “Haven’t you ever thought, you gringos, that all this land was once ours? Ah, our resentment and our memory go hand in hand.”³

In sharp contrast, much of the American public hardly remembers its role in Mexico, or even the Mexican origins of the southwestern United States. A survey team sponsored by the Lincoln and Mexico Project in San Diego in 2014 traveled the length of the border marking the original boundaries. They encountered “only a few people . . . [who] barely seemed to grasp that Mexico once encompassed all of present-day Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Texas, more than half of Colorado, and smaller portions of Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma.”⁴

While the Museum of Interventions may have lost the immediacy of its hold over the collective Mexican memory, as witnessed by low visitor turnout, the interventions themselves have not. These events form an enduring part of Mexican identity. They are the history that Dana Priest of the Washington Post referred to when describing the reluctance of Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto to continue working as closely with US law enforcement as his predecessor had. They are what gave me History Shock.

History shock is like culture shock in describing the sense of strangeness in engaging the ways of a foreign land. History shock is like future shock in that it causes a similar kind of surprise. But history shock looks backward and sees the present anew through a past differently constructed. The museum was not my first experience with the shock of confronting competing understandings of a shared history, but it starkly captured the notion of history in foreign relations. It clarified my own memories of prior personal encounters with the shock of competing histories; it helped prepare me for subsequent encounters.

I had come to the Foreign Service as an educator. I was a public school social studies teacher. But I had grown up with foreign encounters at a young age, from a summer camp in New Brunswick, Canada, to three years of teaching in the Peace Corps in Gabon, Central Africa. This teaching background led me to self-select the press and cultural track in the Foreign Service, known under the rubric of public diplomacy for its role of engaging foreign publics, in contrast to foreign governments. Initial assignments in Nigeria and South Africa led to more experiences on other continents as I moved to Peru and Mexico before closing out my career in Canada. Full circle.

Like many in the Foreign Service at the time, I felt this was a front-row seat on history. I started in 1984, when there was no certainty as to the outcome of the Cold War. Moving on, I then watched the ripple effects of the fall of the Berlin Wall from as far away as South Africa, which used that opening to launch its transition away from apartheid, again with no certainty as to its outcome. Countries from Rwanda to Somalia, Afghanistan to Yugoslavia, or even Peru and Mexico had not heard of the end of history, as the political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed at the end of the Cold War. Events in those countries and elsewhere quickly filled the void left by the end of US rivalry with the Soviet Union, demanding sustained US engagement. The September 11, 2001, attacks drove that lesson home more starkly, but even our closest partners questioned the extent of the US response to those attacks. Finally, what seemed like a collective sigh of relief around the world, if not embrace, followed the election in the United States of Barack Obama. A country with its troubled history of race relations that could elect as president an African American, who had spent part of his youth overseas, had seemingly put behind its darker adventurism in the world. But then the subsequent rise of the turbulence of Donald Trump and his appeal to nationalist, xenophobic sentiments promised to nullify much of what Obama stood for in the eyes of the world.

Throughout, I knew that of course nations have different histories, which stress their own collective experiences, commemorations of their heroes, and dates of their decisive events in building their identities. Out of these, nations become “imagined communities,” to use the term that the political scientist Benedict Anderson coined in his influential book by the same name. Taken a step further, using the language of social constructivist theory, these identities, composed over time through social interaction, influence how nations define, pursue, and defend their national interests.

History shock grows out of these constructed identities, particularly when nations look at the same event differently. Nations arrive at their own collective understandings through debate and struggle over what the past means. Citizens use those understandings to determine a current course of action. These debates take place in schools and textbooks, in museums and monuments, newspapers, television, and movies, in parades, stamps, and coins. They unfold with little reference to the same struggles taking place in other countries, which have their own sets of issues to grapple with as they create a past to move forward. In such ways, countries pursue their own distinct understandings of events that spill across national boundaries. And in recent times no country seems to spill across its national boundaries as easily as the United States.

The front lines of these misunderstandings occur within the large diplomatic presence of the United States around the world. As diplomats approach their daily routines—processing visas, managing foreign assistance or cultural programs, preparing political or economic reports, advocating to advance and protect US interests, however they define them—they come face to face with history shock. That kind of daily conduct only rarely rises to the level of national import, since many of these interactions are small encounters. Still, a small decision to open the door to protesters outside the gate in Teheran, or a benign press statement from the US Embassy in Cairo, can ripple out and affect long-term policies and even presidential elections.⁵ Moreover, these small human encounters can and should inform the larger issues at stake, and help determine how to approach those larger issues.

History shock occurs when these competing histories obstruct or color present-day events. From a foreign relations perspective, history shock can obstruct efforts to cooperate and engage on issues of mutual interest. In the extreme, it can lead to a total breakdown of diplomatic relations. Perhaps the most striking example was the 1979 takeover of the US Embassy in Iran. In deciding to allow the ailing shah, Reza Pahlavi, to enter the United States on humanitarian grounds, the country misread the depth of resentment in Iran for the US role in overthrowing Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and restoring the shah to power in 1953. So too, though, can the small interactions, repeated over time, have a longer impact. The single denial of a visa to an AIDS activist or a pattern of repeated visa denials from targeted countries have affected US foreign relations. Likewise, the offer of an exchange program to the man who would oversee South Africa’s apartheid government transition or the accumulation of exchange opportunities for young democratic activists can have long-term, unforeseen consequences.

This book is, on the one hand, a ...