California Could Use a Foreign Policy : The economy: This state’s size and its unique needs merit a homegrown approach to trade and other growth-related areas.

First, there was a piece in the last issue of Foreign Affairs quarterly that provocatively advanced the need for a California foreign policy that would allow the state to independently pursue its interests abroad.

Then, in April, came two conferences, one in Los Angeles and one in La Jolla, in which experts, including many from the East Coast Establishment, debated the changing nature of U.S. foreign policy and explored the grounds for enhancing California’s influence on the national agenda, including the development of its own foreign policy. Both conferences rested on the premise that, with the end of the Cold War, economic issues are at the top of the U.S. foreign-policy agenda, and California is the place where domestic and international issues are blending naturally to form a new and distinct type of agenda.

There is still a notion in many people’s minds that, as former French President Georges Pompidou once said, a nation’s army and its wealth are its foreign policy. Now, in this era of one undisputed military superpower and globalized economic powers, money has won over army, and the emerging consensus is that the old dictums of foreign policy are dead. More than ever, the security of the United States is dependent on its prosperity, which is dependent on the stability of the world’s economy.

In a borderless world, trade is at the core of every nation’s foreign agenda, and trade is, by nature, simultaneously a domestic and an international issue. Furthermore, the distinction between domestic and international gets blurred not only in such obvious areas as trade, immigration or narcotics; such issues as jobs, education, health, culture, transportation, the environment, agriculture and communications, which have long been considered domestic, also have an international character. They are what USC professor Abraham F. Lowenthal calls “intermestic issues.”

California is the place where “intermestic” issues are rapidly evolving, yet California’s voice is hardly audible in the Eastern corridors of power. For instance, as James O. Goldsborough writes in the spring issue of Foreign Affairs, the 1986 immigration reform passed by Congress was a failure for California.

This is a situation that cannot continue, considering that California has the strongest political representation in Congress and an important presence in the White House; that economically, even in the midst of a severe recession, the state is way ahead of the rest and if it were a nation it would be the eighth largest in the world; that the demographic change that is transforming California is pioneering the direction the country will take in the future; that geographically the state is located at the center of the new world trade coordinates that run West and South; and, as the USC conference demonstrated, that the pool of experts on foreign-policy issues based on the West Coast is formidable.

In January, the state government expanded its World Trade Commission to the status of a state agency to “develop relations with foreign countries . . . to promote economic growth.” What is needed is an institution that will bring together expertise to help define the issues and advise the policy-makers, not just on trade, but on all of the matters involving California’s relations with other governments.

USC’s Lowenthal has just such an idea: a center for international affairs on the campus, where the business, labor, political, media and academic communities can connect, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally to debate issues relevant to foreign policy and formulate proposals.

In its blueprint, the center resembles a clearinghouse of information and ideas, which state officials and representatives could draw on to influence national policy. For once, California would have the stature it deserves, by size and economic power, in the East Coast’s corridors of influence. And, at the same time, California would have its own policy base to serve its own unique relations with other states and countries.

There may be hope, as participants at the two conferences seemed to agree, that the new Administration in Washington will be more sensitive to the synthesizing of domestic and foreign policies. But California really must develop a long-lasting base to serve its own needs and interests--a foreign policy made by and for Californians.