Human Rights in American Foreign Policy: From the 1960s to the Soviet Collapse by Joe Renouard (review)

The field of human rights history is rapidly expanding, and new research is bringing valuable insights to our understanding of how human rights evolved after 1945, blending perspectives from government policymaking, social movement activism, human rights defenders, and international organizations while giving attention to multiple geographies, new sources, and a variety of local and international processes that influenced global politics and shaped contemporary human rights work.

Joe Renouard has entered this field with his new book, Human Rights in American Foreign Policy: From the 1960s to the Soviet Collapse, covering the second half of the Cold War. His focus is on "the emergence and institutionalization of human rights in American foreign policy between 1967 and 1991" (p. 5). Renouard's interpretation possesses important nuances, but he has chosen to keep his scope somewhat narrow by leaving out, for example, the role of international organizations such as the United Nations (UN).

The book deals with internal policymaking processes and U.S. bilateral relations with numerous countries that attracted international attention because of their gross violations at a time when human rights was gradually emerging as a more significant element of U.S. foreign policy. The bilateral relationship is presented mainly from the U.S. perspective, and the archives used are all U.S.-based. Renouard has taken advantage of many of the rich materials these archives offer, as other scholars have also done; but in his choice to limit archival research to one country's perspective, he runs the risk of creating a false binary with the relevance of multilateral processes. Toward the end, Renouard concludes that "Helsinki's importance wanes in comparison with America's many other bilateral relationships and concerns outside of Europe" (p. 273). But one wonders whether this is really an either-or question.

Multilateral processes are also enablers of bilateral diplomatic debates, and the evolution of international norms in such settings also entails geographic mobility in terms of the sites of political contestation over these norms. The U.S.-Soviet bilateral wrangling over human rights from the time of the Carter administration onward would seem to have had the Helsinki Final Act as an important foundation. Moreover, Renouard has chosen to limit his treatment of "the 1960s" to a post-1967 story. Although he turns his gaze to the military dictatorships in Greece and Brazil and the shift from Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, he might have considered extending his focus to the United Nations as a relevant forum not least to shed light on the U.S. government's complicated engagement with international human rights throughout the 1960s. It is not obvious why exploring the full period or at least a larger portion of the Johnson presidency was irrelevant to this story. Renouard has a gift for nuance but should have done more to explain the broader international context for how human rights arose as a feature of foreign policy during this decade.

Through this omission the book misses an opportunity to fill a gap in the literature on how the United States handled the increasing international attention to human rights diplomacy and international lawmaking in the 1960s. The fact that the United States "was only a minor participant" (p. 5) in the developments before the late 1960s is a story worth exploring. Absences can sometimes be as telling as engagement when it comes to foreign policy, though in this case the United States was not completely disengaged from the diplomatic debates and was grappling with new global developments in the international human rights field. A more dynamic conceptualization of the relationship between the bilateral and the multilateral domains would have been useful. The book thus leaves ample room for a scholarly work that more fully addresses U.S. politics and diplomacy as they relate to international human rights in the 1960s.

Renouard outlines four "major claims" (p. 12) that defined U...