Cities of Solidarity: Left-Liberal Coalition and the Rise and Fall of Local-Level Foreign Policy

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the rise and fall of “local-level foreign policy” and the local coalitions of leftists and liberals behind these policies. Relying on extensive archival research and interviews, the project shows that, in the decades following 1968, newly elected left-liberal city officials collaborated with leftist, international solidarity activists to use city resources as a means of offering support to social movements in distant parts of the world. In the process, city officials and grassroots activists both aided international movements and drew public attention to the downturn in public funding for social programs in lieu of an expanding military budget. The study refers to these partnerships as “Urban Internationalist Coalitions.” In the 1970s and 1980s, Urban Internationalist Coalitions around the United States passed ballot measures, created sister-city relationships, and organized city-based international delegations designed to challenge and ameliorate the impacts of, what they understood as, the unjust foreign policies of the U.S. federal government towards North Vietnam, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. These initiatives reshaped local politics as strategically capable of tackling problems beyond the city’s borders. By the 1980s, local politicians and grassroots activists’ collaborative engagement around opposing U.S. foreign policy made local-level foreign policy a prevalent aspect of city politics nationwide. As the influence of Urban Internationalist Coalitions and their political strategies expanded, this left-liberal group of collaborators experienced growing pains. By the late 1980s, dozens of cities had replicated local-level foreign policy projects in opposition to the Reagan Administration’s policies towards revolutionary Nicaragua. However, cities’ projects often correlated more with distinct, local political conditions rather than an over-arching, national strategy. Thus, as local-level foreign policies grew in prevalence, a coordinated national strategy became more difficult. When Urban Internationalist Coalitions’ politics did come to inform a national strategy in the form of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns, the increased scale of a national campaign unearthed leftists and liberals’ strategic differences. Organizing across an expanded, national terrain, Urban Internationalist Coalitions confronted the obstacle that neoliberalism’s political and economic impact posed to their political goals and the longevity of their left-liberal alliance. Urban Internationalist Coalitions ultimately experienced Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition organization as a series of political clashes. The political schisms exposed within the Rainbow Coalition frayed at the edges of leftists and liberals’ working relationships locally. Facing substantial political and economic challenges, Urban Internationalist Coalitions unraveled by the early 1990s.