John Shattuck Interview (2004): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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John, welcome back to Conversations.
Proud to be here, thank you.
What was your portfolio as Assistant Secretary?
Well, it was a mouthful -- democracy, human rights, and labor. Essentially, it combined the promotion of human rights in the U.S. foreign policy on human rights with broader issues that ad been explored but not fully engaged in this position earlier. On democracy: how do you build democracy in countries that are emerging from conflict? And then, finally, I had the portfolio of international labor, which meant that I looked at issues of labor rights and the difficulties of embedding those labor rights in trade agreements, things like NAFTA and the WTO.
What background did you bring to these endeavors? A few years back (1997: "Democracy and the Shaping of a Human Rights Agenda") we talked extensively about that, but briefly, tell us a little about your work in civil rights and civil liberties.
I'd been both an international human rights lawyer and activist for a number of years, and before that, a civil rights lawyer and activist. I started my career with the American Civil Liberties Union. I was the National Counsel for the ACLU from 1971 to 1976. I was deeply involved in the Watergate issues at the time, defending many of the people who had been victims of the Watergate abuses of the Nixon administration. I then became the director of the Washington office of the ACLU, and was involved in promoting civil rights and civil liberties through the Congress, lobbying the Congress. I then went to teach at Harvard and was vice president at Harvard for Government, Community and Public Affairs, and taught at the Harvard Law School, civil liberties and international human rights law. I became involved with Amnesty International, and ultimately its vice chair, and did a lot of international human rights work that was not done at the ACLU. In 1993, I was picked by President Clinton to be the Assistant Secretary of State.
Did it surprise you that he asked you to assume that position? I mean, obviously, you had the background, but you were not involved in democratic politics, or at least in his campaign.
Well, I knew him. I wasn't directly involved in his campaign. What was surprising and refreshing in many ways is that he chose someone from outside of the foreign policy establishment. I had not been a Foreign Service officer, and I had not previously been in the State Department or in government service, but I had certainly taught and been involved in human rights work for many years. President Clinton, on the campaign trail in 1992, showed a great deal of interest in the subject of human rights and made many speeches on the subject. During the course of his administration, I think he wanted someone who had come in from the outside in that way.
It was perceptive of Clinton to pick up these issues in the campaign because, of course, the Cold War had ended and the Yugoslavian trauma/tragedy had begun to unravel and so on. He also during the campaign had talked about getting rid of Saddam and not dealing with the "Butchers of Beijing," and so on. So he staked out a position that was, as we will discover in the course of our discussion, much more extensive than the one that he actually would finally commit to as president.
What he found in the campaign was the resonance of human rights rhetoric, and, indeed, the reality of human rights in this post - Cold War period was very popular. We had gone through a period of extraordinary democratic upheaval in the world -- the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, the outbreak of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe and parts of Latin America. Americans thought this might be part of the peace dividend of the end of the Cold War, and indeed, it was a forging of new democracies and new opportunities.
But human rights are always complicated. There were forces at work in the world, and you mentioned them yourself in your comments a moment ago, that became clear quite early, in this post - Cold War period: the failure of states, the breakup of Yugoslavia, the emergence of ethnic and racial conflict in countries where the Cold War tensions had kept a lot of this under control -- Central Africa, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, etc.
At the same time there were problems, clearly, in promoting human rights at the same time as promoting trade, and promoting economic expansion and globalization of market economics, which was another part of the Clinton agenda. So it was much more complicated as the process unfolded.
I want to ask you something up front before we get into the particulars of how policy was handled, and that is about Wilsonianism in the American political tradition. When one tries to look at how we respond to the world, a continuing theme is the ideas of President Woodrow Wilson. What's interesting about that program of Wilson's is that it's something that our leaders can pick up on, and it resonates with who we are as a people and what our goals are as a nation. Talk a little about that and how you relate to that tradition, and how Clinton did.
The Wilsonian tradition is the tradition of expanding democracy and putting the U.S. in the leadership role of promoting democracy and human rights around the world. I happened to serve later as President Clinton's ambassador to the Czech Republic; Wilson, along with a Czech leader, Masaryk, was the father of the Czech-Slovak democracy that emerged at the end of the First World War.
Wilson's experience showed what I was just saying a minute ago about how complicated these subjects are. First of all, you had domestic politics in the United States, politics that aren't necessarily international in their orientation. Wilson ran into terrible problems in terms of the ratification of the treaty on the League of Nations in the Senate, which didn't want to give up U.S. sovereignty toward the kinds of international venture that Wilson was promoting. At the same time, you had U.S. economic interests that began to get in the way of the Wilsonian vision. So the vision is important; it's a clear element of U.S. foreign policy, and it does come from U.S. ideals. They're important ideals, and yet they're ideals that need to be looked at in the context of the terrible, complicated realities both of the world and the realities of American politics.
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