A long and overlooked tradition
American Peace Activists in Iraq? Part of a Long and Overlooked Tradition is an article by Mary Hershberger, drawing parallels with visits to “the enemy” during the Vietnam war and previous engagements.
It was these “forgotten activists” who, time and time again, creatively developed new political forms to promote equity and halt injustice. They were the ones who won the right for Americans to travel to countries that the United States waged war against — a riveting historical and legal story in and of itself. It was people like them who risked their own freedom to help secure rights of speech and association in matters both domestic and foreign, who worked to [get their country to] abandon war in favor of other instruments of foreign policy, who won the right to petition our own government on all issues, even ones as contentious as slavery was in the 1840s and 50s. They worked hard to build a better country and they developed many of the tactics and methods of citizen activism that we take for granted today (and even imagine that our generation created).
The article does draw out the element that the CPT members were visiting groups regarded by “our side” as “the enemy,” or at best enemy collaborators. I hadn’t really thought about it that way, because from what I’ve read, the peacemaker team in Iraq was mostly working with people caught in the middle, e.g., families with people swept up into detention and facing abuse at Abu Ghraib, etc.
One instance Hershberger neglects to mention is the visit to France by James Logan, for which service he had the “Logan Act” named after him:
American citizen diplomats go back to 1798, when a Philadelphia Quaker named George Logan traveled to Europe in a last-ditch effort to prevent the United States and France from going to war. France, which was then battling Britain, had begun attacking American ships because of growing U.S. political cooperation with Britain. To the amazement of everyone, Logan returned to the United States with a decree from France indicating its willingness to end its trade embargo and to free all captured U.S. seamen. Instead of receiving a hero’s welcome, Logan was castigated for his “usurpation of executive authority” by a decidedly pro-British American Congress and President John Adams, who were gearing up for a fight with France and hastily passed a law criminalizing any direct interventions of citizens in foreign affairs.
The Logan Act is still on the books, but it represents only one American political philosophy toward citizen diplomacy. Another philosophy, expressed in the U.S. Constitution and two centuries of court opinions, is that Americans have full rights to travel abroad and speak with foreigners about anything they choose, including relations between nations. The strength of this second philosophy is underscored by the fact that the Logan Act has never been enforced. The government’s misgivings about letting its citizens “meddle” in foreign affairs has been generally outweighed by a laissez-faire attitude toward the travel and activities of its citizens abroad.
From a 1987 article by Michael Shuman, Gale Warner, and Lila Forest, excerpted from the book Citizen Diplomacy.
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