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The Issue of State Power: The Council on Foreign Relations as a Case Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Inderjeet Parmar
Inderjeet Parmar
Affiliation:
Inderjeet Parmar is Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, M13 9PL, England. He acknowledges the financial assistance provided by the University and by West London I.H.E. in preparing this paper.
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Extract

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has long been recognised as one of the most influential of modern American institutions. Indeed, for some scholars at least, the relationship between the Council and the federal government has been a troubling one. A private group that is exclusive and unrepresentative in membership, funded by large corporations and foundations, highly secretive about its operations, and ensconced in the centres of state power, raises serious issues of principle for a democracy. At its crudest, the question is who “controls” whom, the state or the unofficial group? Allowing for a more complex relationship between an official policy elite and outside advisors, just what are the points of convergence or divergence between these “internal” and “external” bureaucrats, as Chadwick F. Alger has called them? Such issues draw attention to the nature of the state itself, and, whatever the proper role of the CFR in the American system of government, its existence provides an opportunity to examine a number of major ideas about power and the state.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , April 1995 , pp. 73 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

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