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“A Positive Track of Human Rights Policy”: Elliott Abrams, the Human Rights Bureau, and the Conceptualization of Democracy Promotion, 1981–1984

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The Reagan Administration, the Cold War, and the Transition to Democracy Promotion

Abstract

During its first term, the Reagan administration incorporated human rights into a strategy of rolling back communism through democracy promotion. The State Department’s Bureau for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, under the leadership of Elliott Abrams, played a crucial role in this process. This chapter examines the introductions to the State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, so far largely ignored by historians. In these introductions, Abrams sought to merge human rights with democracy promotion to legitimize the administration’s foreign policy at home and abroad. To this end, the introductions redefined human rights as civil and political rights and argued for the superiority of democratic systems as protectors of human rights, presenting the promotion of democracy as ‘a positive track of human rights policy.’

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science’s Elite Research Initiative and the Carlsberg Foundation funded the research for this article. I wish to thank attendants of the American Politics Group (UK) 2017 Annual Conference as well as Robert Pee, William Michael Schmidli, and Debbie Sharnak for useful suggestions.

  2. 2.

    Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010); Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Harvard University Press, 2014); Mark Philip Bradley, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, Human Rights in History (Cambridge University Press, 2016); Joe Renouard, Human Rights in American Foreign Policy: From the 1960s to the Soviet Collapse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); William Michael Schmidli, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy toward Argentina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  3. 3.

    Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy, Expanded ed. (Princeton, N.J.; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012); Robert Pee, Democracy Promotion, National Security and Strategy: Foreign Policy under the Reagan Administration, Routledge Studies in US Foreign Policy (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2015); Michael Cox, Timothy J. Lynch, and Nicolas Bouchet, US Foreign Policy and Democracy Promotion, Routledge Studies in Us Foreign Policy (2013); Thomas Carothers, In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy toward Latin America in the Reagan Years (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Nicolas Guilhot, The Democracy Makers: Human Rights & International Order (New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2005).

  4. 4.

    Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, Reagan at Westminster: Foreshadowing the End of the Cold War (College Station, Texas, and London; Texas A&M University Press, 2010); Pee.

  5. 5.

    James Peck, Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-Opted Human Rights, 1st ed., American Empire Project (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 85.

  6. 6.

    ‘Republican Party Platform of 1980,’ July 15. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25844.

  7. 7.

    Quoted in Christian Philip Peterson, Globalizing Human Rights: Private Citizens, the Soviet Union, and the West, Routledge Studies on History and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2012), 108.

  8. 8.

    Quoted in American Association for the International Commission of Jurists, ‘Human Rights and United States Foreign Policy, the First Decade, 1973–1983,’ (1984), 33.

  9. 9.

    Ronald Reagan, ‘Remarks at the First Annual Commemoration of the Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust,’ April 30, 1981, Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=43761.

  10. 10.

    Quoted in Jurists, 33.

  11. 11.

    Memo. Summary of the President’s Meeting with President Chun Doo Hwan of the Republic of Korea, February 2, 1981, 11:20–12:05 P.M., Cabinet Room, with Cover Memorandum, Richard V. Allen to President Reagan, February 6, 1981, Subject: Your Meeting with President Chun of Korea. [MDR-Reagan Library] National Security Archive, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB306/doc05.pdf.

  12. 12.

    Editorial, ‘Wrong Turns on Human Rights,’ The New York Times, February 6, 1981.

  13. 13.

    Quoted in Jurists, 31.

  14. 14.

    Edwin S. Maynard, ‘The Bureaucracy and Implementation of US Human Rights Policy,’ Human Rights Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1989): 184.

  15. 15.

    Sarah B. Snyder, ‘The Defeat of Ernest Lefever’s Nomination: Keeping Human Rights on the United States Foreign Policy Agenda,’ in Challenging U.S. Foreign Policy: America and the World, eds. Bevan Sewell and Scott Lucas (Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2011), 136–61.

  16. 16.

    Nomination of Ernest W. Lefever: Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Ninety-Seventh Congress, First Session, on Nomination of Ernest W. Lefever, to Be Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, May 18, 19, June 4, and 5, 1981, 1981, 526.

  17. 17.

    Tsongas, Paul E. N.D. ‘Statement of Senator Paul E. Tsongas on the Nomination of Dr. Ernest Lefever to Assistant Secretary for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs,’ Digital Initiatives @ UML, http://libhost.uml.edu/items/show/48797.

  18. 18.

    Editorial, ‘Semantic Antics over Human Rights,’ The New York Times, May 24, 1981, 18.

  19. 19.

    Ad Hoc Committee of the Human Rights Community, News Release. May 14, 1981, National Conference on Soviet Jewry, records; I-181 and I181A; 290, 11; American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY.

  20. 20.

    Memo, Charles Fairbanks to EUR/HA/S/P, ‘Ideas on Human Rights Policy,’ Jul. 29, 1981. RAC Box 6, Carnes Lord Files, Reagan Presidential Library. For more information, see Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, ‘The Institutionalization of Human Rights: Congress, Reagan and US Foreign Policy’ (University of Southern Denmark, 2016).

  21. 21.

    Ronald Reagan, ‘Nomination of Elliott Abrams To Be an Assistant Secretary of State,’ October 30, 1981. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=43195.

  22. 22.

    Maynard, 184.

  23. 23.

    Interview with Elliott Abrams in Kenneth W. Thompson, Foreign Policy in the Reagan Presidency: Nine Intimate Perspectives: Sterling Kernek, Caspar Weinberger, Max M. Kampelman, Dwight Ink, Paul H. Nitze, John C. Whitehead, Elliott Abrams, Paul H. Nitze, Don Oberdorfer (Lanham, MD; London: University Press of America, 1993), 107.

  24. 24.

    United States, Nomination of Elliott Abrams: Hearing before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Ninety-Seventh Congress, First Session, on Nomination of Elliott Abrams, of the District of Columbia, to Be Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, November 17, 1981 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982).

  25. 25.

    Elliott Abrams, ‘What Is a Liberal – Who Is a Conservative? A Symposium,’ Commentary 62, no. 3 (1976): 32.

  26. 26.

    Judith Miller, ‘A Neoconservative for Human Rights Post,’ The New York Times, October 31, 1981, 7.

  27. 27.

    Quoted in Letter, George Lister to Elliott Abrams. December 10, 1981. George Lister Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin, online: https://law.utexas.edu/humanrights/lister/bureau/bureau.php.

  28. 28.

    The double standards employed by the administration were particularly evident in Central America where brutal but US-friendly regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala were presented as emerging democracies and violent guerrilla groups such as the Nicaraguan Contras were portrayed as “freedom fighters.”

  29. 29.

    According to historian Evan McCormick, Abrams confirmed to him in an interview dated April 27, 2010, that he was the author of the memorandum. Evan McCormick, ‘Freedom Tide? Ideology, Politics and the Origins of Democracy Promotion in U.S. Central America Policy, 1980–1984,’ Journal of Cold War Studies 16, no. 4 (2014): 85.

  30. 30.

    ‘Excerpts from State Department Memo on Human Rights,’ The New York Times, November 5, 1981, A10.

  31. 31.

    ‘Republican Party Platform of 1980,’ July 15, 1980. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25844.

  32. 32.

    ‘Excerpts from State Department Memo on Human Rights,’ A10.

  33. 33.

    Interview with Elliott Abrams in Thompson, 106.

  34. 34.

    Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 290. Ronald Reagan, ‘Address to Members of the British Parliament,’ June 8, 1982. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=42614.

  35. 35.

    Interview with Elliott Abrams in Thompson, 108.

  36. 36.

    Cannon, 263–65.

  37. 37.

    Interview with Elliott Abrams, September 10, 1984. U.S. News of the World Report, The Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, records; I-410, I-410A; 22; 1; American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY.

  38. 38.

    Department of State, ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1983’ (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), 5; Peterson, 113.

  39. 39.

    Department of State, ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1983,’ 2.

  40. 40.

    Memo, State Department, September 14, 1984, National Conference on Soviet Jewry, records; I-181 and I181A; 287, 6; American Jewish Historical Society, New York.

  41. 41.

    David P. Forsythe, Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy: Congress Reconsidered (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1988), 127.

  42. 42.

    Barbara J. Keys, ‘Congress, Kissinger, and the Origins of Human Rights Diplomacy,’ Diplomatic History 34, no. 5 (2010): 848.

  43. 43.

    Memo, Charles Fairbanks to EUR/HA/S/P, ‘Ideas on Human Rights Policy,’ Jul. 29, 1981. RAC Box 6, Carnes Lord Files, Reagan Presidential Library.

  44. 44.

    Congressional Research Service, ‘Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Relations: Six Key Questions in the Continuing Policy Debate,’ (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1981), 31.

  45. 45.

    Department of State, ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1984,’ (Washington D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1985), 3.

  46. 46.

    Maynard, 224.

  47. 47.

    State, ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1983,’ Appendix A, 1470.

  48. 48.

    Memo, Summary of Hearing: Human Rights and International Organizations Subcommittee Hearings, Amnesty International USA. February 23, 1982. Amnesty International of the USA, Inc.: National Office Records, Box II.2.11, and Folder 19; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. ‘New Report Card on Human Rights.’ CQ Weekly, February 16, 1985, http://library.cqpress.com/cqweekly/WR099404254.

  49. 49.

    United States Congress. House. Committee on Foreign Affairs. Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations., Review of State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1981: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-Seventh Congress, Second Session, April 28, 1982 (Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1982).

  50. 50.

    Abrams left the Human Rights Bureau in July 1985 to become assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, but he remained deeply engaged in the administration’s human rights policy.

  51. 51.

    Department of State, ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1981’ (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), 2. The country report for 1985 further divided this category into two separate categories of rights.

  52. 52.

    Ibid.

  53. 53.

    Memo, State Department, September 14, 1984, National Conference on Soviet Jewry, records; I-181 and I181A; 287, 6; American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY.

  54. 54.

    Department of State, ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1979’ (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1980), 2.

  55. 55.

    The administration was not alone in its critical assessment of economic and social rights. One of the administration’s fiercest critics Helsinki Watch co-founder and executive director Aryeh Neier, for instance, shared the view that such rights held a lower status than civil and political rights. Aryeh Neier, Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003), xxx.

  56. 56.

    Elliott Abrams, off-the-record remarks at the Carnegie Endowment, January 19, 1982, Amnesty International of the USA, Inc.: National Office Records, Box II.2.11, and Folder 19; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

  57. 57.

    Elliott Abrams, Interview. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. October 5, 1984. National Conference on Soviet Jewry, records; I-181 and I181A; 281, 1; American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY.

  58. 58.

    State, ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1981,’ 6.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., 5.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., 10.

  61. 61.

    ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1982’ (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983), 9.

  62. 62.

    Ibid. Abrams made a similar argument in the introduction to the report the year before: “It is in such systems that we can most realistically expect the observance of human rights across the board” ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1981,’ 10.

  63. 63.

    ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1983,’ 6.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., 7.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., 10.

  66. 66.

    Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards,’ Commentary (November 1979): 34–45.

  67. 67.

    State, ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1981,’ 9.

  68. 68.

    Abrams likewise rejected the notion of a right to development. Elliott Abrams, off-the-record remarks at the Carnegie Endowment, January 19, 1982, Amnesty International of the USA, Inc.: National Office Records, Box II.2.11, and Folder 19; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

  69. 69.

    State, ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1982,’ 2.

  70. 70.

    Smith, 263–67. According to Tony Smith, “the anti-statist, free-market economic doctrines espoused by the Reagan administration left a deep mark on the transitions to democracy in the 1980s.”

  71. 71.

    For a critique of the impact of neoliberalism on democracy, see Stephen J. Rosow and Jim George, Globalization and Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014).

  72. 72.

    State, ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1983,’ 13.

  73. 73.

    Michael W. Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (July 1983): 205–35; ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 2,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 12, no. 4 (October 1983): 323–53. The notion of a democratic peace became increasingly influential among American policymakers in post-Cold War era, significantly shaping the Clinton administration’s foreign policy. Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, ‘Bill Clinton’s “Democratic Enlargement” and the Securitisation of Democracy Promotion,’ Diplomacy & Statecraft 26, no. 03 (2015): 534–51.

  74. 74.

    State, ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1983,’ 13.

  75. 75.

    Ibid.

  76. 76.

    Ibid., 6.

  77. 77.

    McCormick, 108.

  78. 78.

    Smith, 304.

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  1. Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

    Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard

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  1. Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Robert Pee

  2. Institute for History, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    William Michael Schmidli

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Søndergaard, R.S. (2019). “A Positive Track of Human Rights Policy”: Elliott Abrams, the Human Rights Bureau, and the Conceptualization of Democracy Promotion, 1981–1984. In: Pee, R., Schmidli, W. (eds) The Reagan Administration, the Cold War, and the Transition to Democracy Promotion. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96382-2_2

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