As practiced by Hillary Clinton first lady diplomacy was much more than an exercise in symbolism

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First lady Hillary Clinton and Leia Maria Boutros Boutros-Ghali, wife of U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, at a panel discussion on women's health and security at the U.N. Women's Conference in Beijing, Sept. 5, 1995.


Hillary Rodham Clinton’s first trip abroad as first lady was accompanying President Bill Clinton to the G-7 economic summit in Japan in July 1993. In early 1994 she made her first official trip abroad without the president leading the American delegation to the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. Later that year, in May, the first lady joined Vice President Al Gore as a last minute replacement for the president as a member of the U.S. delegation to the presidential inauguration of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. March 1995 would see Hilary Rodham Clinton take her first extended trip abroad without the president when she traveled to South Asia. In September she traveled to China where she served as honorary Chair of the American delegation and delivered a key address at the United Nations Fourth World Conferences on Women. In November, 1995 she would join the president on an official trip to England, Ireland, Germany, and Spain. The next summer she would partner with United Nations Ambassador Madeline Albright on a tour of Eastern and Central Europe. Accompanied by Chelsea as she often was on her foreign travels, the first lady returned to Africa in March 1997. In July Hillary Rodham Clinton accompanied the president to a NATO Summit in Madrid where she was the keynote speaker at Vital Voices: Women in Democracy meeting. Before the year ended she traveled to Great Britain and Northern Ireland for a “Third Way” meeting and to Central Asia. 1998 saw the Clintons visit Africa, China, Russia, Ireland, and the Middle East. They returned to the Middle East in January, 1999 for the funeral of King Hussein of Jordan. The first lady would also make trips that year to Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and the Balkans.

As practiced by Hillary Rodham Clinton first lady diplomacy was much more than an exercise in symbolism. Her diplomacy was consistent with the manner in which diplomacy is conducted in the contemporary international system. At the same time her diplomacy was the product of the interaction of a set of personal and institutional forces that are not universally present in every administration. There is thus no reason to expect that all first ladies that follow her will engage in non-symbolic diplomacy.

Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye identified complex interdependence as a prism through which to understand world politics today. It is organized around three characteristics: multiple channels of interaction, an absence of hierarchy among issues and the lessened utility of military force to achieve policy ends. Together these three characteristics hold profound implications for diplomatic activity. They leave unchanged the notion that the fundamental purpose of diplomacy is to lessen conflicts among states and promote peace. And, as Hans Morgenthau argued, it continues to be the primary mechanism for determining goals, strategies and power relationships. What they have done is has make diplomacy “messier” by permitting officials in one state to more readily reach citizens in another and to interact with each other more directly. Complex interdependence has enlarged the universe of political actors who can engage in diplomacy and the goals whose realization diplomacy can advance.

With these observations in mind we can take a new look at the global travels and diplomacy of First Lady Hilary Rodham Clinton. The first point to stress is that her diplomacy was conceived of as part of a larger whole. It was never seen in isolation from the broader foreign policy goals of the Clinton administration. At one extreme this took the form of being told to avoid Cuba’s Fidel Castro “at all costs” at a diplomatic function so as not to enrage anti-Castro factions in Florida. It also meant being sent to places the State Department felt was “too small, too dangerous, or too poor” to send the president. A case in point was being sent to Bosnia-Herzegovina to show American support for the Dayton Peace Process. Other times it meant carefully considering the pluses and minuses of a trip to China when U.S.-Chinese tensions were running high due to conflicts over Taiwan, nuclear proliferation and human rights violations and having her speech gone over in advance by UN Ambassador Madeline Albright, Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord and National Security Council human rights specialist Eric Schwartz.

But with increased political resources and activism also comes the potential for pursuing one’s own foreign policy agenda. The first signs of this taking place came following her speech in Beijing. The first lady notes that “prior to Beijing when we traveled on official visits abroad I accompanied Bill where appropriate and attended spouses programs. In mid November <1996> when we made state visits to Australia, the Philippines and Thailand, I followed my own agenda as well as Bill’s.” She continues, “I usually branched off from Bill’s official delegation… and reinforced the message that a nation’s prosperity is linked to the education and well-being of girls and women.”



Then first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton addresses a state banquet in St. Patrick's Hall, Dublin Castle in Dublin where she urged all sides in Northern Ireland to take risks for peace in this Oct. 30, 1997 file photo.


Hers was a personal diplomacy rather than an institutional diplomacy. It substituted direct and individual contacts with foreign leaders for the carefully scripted interactions between diplomats occurring in an organizational context that characterized traditional diplomacy. In 1994 she accompanied President Clinton on a trip to Russia that was designed to strengthen ties between Bill Clinton and President Boris Yeltsin. During their discussions the first lady met with Naina Yeltsin. While leading U.S. delegation to the Winter Olympics she met with Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland, who would go on to head the World Health organization, and discussed health care issues. Other trips would have her meeting with such leaders as South African President Nelson Mandela, Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Hungarian Prime Minister Guka Horn, Zambian President Benjamin Mlkapa, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain, Ghana’s President Jerry Rawlings , the Dali Lama, Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar of Slovakia.

First Lady Hilary Rodham Clinton’s diplomacy was also public diplomacy. Public diplomacy consists of the statements and actions of leaders that are intended to influence the public rather than the official leadership in another country. It is alien to classic diplomacy that emphasizes secrecy and confidential bargaining among like-minded elites. Public diplomacy has been described as the "theater of power.” It is conducted through such varied means as public statements, press briefings, and state visits. Often in the past public diplomacy degenerated into propaganda but new life was breathed into it after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 when it became clear that success in the war against terrorism required that the U.S. find a way to talk directly with the people of the Middle East and other societies in which terrorists recruit people and carry out acts of terrorism.



Then first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton addresses a World Health Organization panel on Women and Health at the U.N. Women's Conference in Beijing in this Sept. 5, 1995 file photo.


In practicing her public diplomacy the first lady’s principal audience was individuals attending a conference or citizens to whom she sought to bring a message of hope. On her visit to Japan for the G-7 summit attended by President Clinton, Hilary Rodham Clinton visited with a group of prominent Japanese women, the first of a dozen meetings of this type she would hold in her travels as first lady. Her trip to South Asia was organized at the request of the State Department that wanted to highlight the administration’s commitment to the region and was unable to arrange for either the president or vice president to make such a trip. In India Hilary Rodham Clinton spoke to the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. In Nepal on that same trip she visited a women’s health clinic. Her most politically visible appearance came at the U.N. women’s conference in China where she asserted “it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights” and ended her speech with a call to action.” The speech was politically charged both for its content and timing, coming shortly after the arrest, imprisonment and then release of Chinese dissident Harry Wu. Later she would deliver the keynote address at a “Vital Voices” forum in Vienna. Vital Voices was an outgrowth of the Beijing trip and was designed to bring together NGOs, U.S. government representatives and private corporations to further democracy, entrepreneurship by women, and peace. A trip to Latin America was designed to highlight U.S. economic development programs and the Clinton administration’s attempt to shift popular perceptions of American foreign policy in the region away from foreign aid to military juntas to support for economic and political progress. In a similar fashion her trips to Africa were intended to highlight the self help efforts of African women as supported by U.S. foreign aid.

Her diplomacy also highlighted the blurring of the boundary between domestic and foreign policy. The issues Hilary Rodham Clinton chose to stress were those which have long been a staple of American domestic politics: health, children, education, and the position of women in society. She saw them as key to America and the world’s future as well. “In the new global economy, individual countries and region would find it difficult to make economic or social progress if a disproportionate percentage of their female population remained poor, uneducated, unhealthy and disenfranchised. The first lady also recognized that differences in the two spheres of action, domestic and foreign, continued to exist. At one point in her memoirs she noted “my message abroad carried few of the political overtones of my proposals for specific policies at home . . .



Then first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton talks with ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo, at Stenkovec refugee camp near Skopje, in this May 14, 1999 file photo.


Here too we see elements of consistency with American activity in world politics. It has long been recognized that American international human rights policy reflects the traditional emphasis on legal and civil rights and to the detriment of economic and social rights. A similar condition exists in American international environmental policy.

We can also see the first lady breaking free of the American experience in her diplomacy in at least two respects. First, her definition of women's rights clearly extended beyond the political and legal. Second, the solutions to the problems she identified were not seen as foreign policy solutions in a narrow sense but solutions that held relevance for the United States as well. Long ago, while Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas she had seen Microcredit projects such as those she toured in Bangladesh as having relevance for helping poor rural communities in that state. A trip to Nicaragua brought attention to Mothers United, a microcredit organization that was supported by USAID. It also brought forward a parallel with the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund that she had advocated creating in 1994 to provide financial assistance to distressed areas that were not being serviced by the established banking system. A visit to an AIDS Information Center in Uganda brought forward the revelation that this organization supported by USAID had pioneered tests at the clinic that were already being put to use in the United States. A final example comes from a trip to China where she saw parallels between the Center for the Women's Legal Studies and Legal Studies of Beijing University with a small legal aid office she had run at the University of Arkansas.

The reasons for this ability to bridge the conceptual gap between foreign and domestic policy lie in one of the commonly noted features of contemporary politics. As individuals from groups that were previously largely excluded from political activity such as women and minorities become active they bring with them experiences and points of reference that do not fit with standard image of the American past. Consequently their definitions of problems and solutions will begin to extend and move beyond traditional conceptualizations. The first lady speaks not only of her long personal involvement in these types of problems of her mother as understanding from personal experience that many children - through no fault of their own- were disadvantaged and discriminated against from birth...she had watched Japanese-Americans in her school endure blatant discrimination and daily taunts from the Anglo students.

What then are the most important variables that influenced Hillary Rodham's foreign policy activism? First, her early life was instrumental in forging her optimism and vision that she so passionately applied to the foreign policy area. Second, her education and knowledge of and commitment to her issues were especially important. They later contributed to her personal international diplomacy. Third, her professional relationship with the president was also very important. Her office was highly integrated with the White House Office. Mrs. Clinton practiced foreign policy in synch with the Clinton Administration but she also achieved a certain amount of independence as her trips to Australia, the Philippines and Thailand demonstrated. Fourth, the interplay between Mrs. Clinton's issues and her alliances of power were crucial to her public diplomacy. She forged alliances with various NGOs and interest groups to advance the cause of issues important to women and children alike on the international level.

Overall the variables that affected Mrs. Clinton's foreign policy activism were personal, institutional, public and issue driven. Mrs. Clinton's foreign policy activism reflected the complex, complicated international environment that she operated within and her own complicated, complex nature.


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A revolutionary declaration from Hillary Clinton at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women.

[Scuba]

1. Which explains why we have universal health-care.

[Autumn]

2. Ha!

[FreakinDJ]

3. and NAFTA