Traveling the Road of Baltic Independence: The Joint Baltic American National Committee and US Foreign Policy Rhetorics During the Late Cold War

Abstract

In the wake of the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, much scholarship has examined the role of US foreign policy in shaping the trajectory of the conflict, the reasons why the Cold War came to a close, and its lasting outcomes. Alongside these studies and the field of rhetoric’s interest in examinations of Cold War rhetoric, this dissertation examines the role of the central Baltic lobbying organization in the United States—the Joint Baltic American National Committee (JBANC)—in the development of Baltic independence discourse and US foreign policy regarding the Baltics throughout the 1970s and 1980s. To do this, I assess four elements of Cold War Baltic-American advocacy: (1) JBANC’s responses to the United States’ purported Sonnenfeldt Doctrine of 1975 and the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations’s deportation of Baltic-American citizens; (2) JBANC’s establishment of relationships with many congressional, Baltic, and US governmental actors that strengthened JBANC’s transnational work and the organization’s lobbying capacities; (3) the 1980s promotion and invention of Baltic-American holidays meant to elevate public recognition of the Soviet occupation of the Baltics; and (4) JBANC’s use of the principle of self-determination within its discourse with various state and non-state actors, calling upon the concept as a unifying force. I argue that through its various lobbying efforts, JBANC sought to perpetuate the Cold War through bolstering narratives of East-West hegemony and US war-hawk attitudes for the sake of the Baltics, urging the United States to recenter the Baltics within its Cold War foreign policy in order to ensure their prioritization in the late-Cold War era. Rhetorical cartography reveals how this pro-Baltic position evolved and built upon previous Cold War issues, how JBANC conveniently fed into the US Cold War political machine, and how state and non-state actors became further interlaced during the late-Cold War years. This examination offers a fruitful theoretical and methodological perspective that enlarges and enriches our understanding of networked foreign policy communication, lobbying as public address, and rhetoric’s function as a connector and mediator between civil society and the state.