The bifurcation of American and non-American perspectives in foreign policy analysis is a large topic to which justice cannot be done in limited space. To reduce the subject to somewhat more manageable scope, the focus here is on teaching and. more specifically, on undergraduate courses on American foreign policy. After examining some evidence that might shed light on the question, this essay will suggest some reasons, both within and outside the discipline, for this development, as well as some possible ways of avoiding undue parochialism by ensuring that non-American perspectives get some hearing.

This is not the place to undertake extensive content analyses of foreign policy texts, but even a cursory glance at several recent, widely used volumes indicates that many students are exposed almost wholly to American perspectives. Materials cited in footnotes and as suggested readings are overwhelmingly written by American authors. That pattern also extends to three of the best recent collections of readings on American foreign policy. The first includes 32 essays, not one of which is by a non-American, all nine chapters in the second are by Americans, and only one of 12 essays in the third is co-authored by a foreign scholar. In fairness, it should be pointed out that these materials hardly present a homogeneous viewpoint on the sources, conduct, and consequences of American diplomacy; a collection of readings that includes essays by George Kennan, Carl Gershman, Henry Kissinger, and Stanley Hoffmann can hardly be accused of presenting a single outlook. Moreover, the diversity of choices among available texts provides a broad range of perspectives, from moderately hard-line to distinctly revisionist.

The bifurcation of political science into American and comparative politics impoverishes both. The division parochializes them by encapsulating the study of politics within national boundaries. The result is to deprive each of the theoretical contributions generated by the other and to cut them off from the institutional and policy alternatives each has devised. The loss to the study of American politics is probably the more severe because its practitioners have not been prepared to recognize the limitations of their “area specialty.”

Historical and institutional determinants help to explain the bifurcation. Because academic political science, that is, political science as a discipline and a profession is, as Bernard Crick has shown, American in its origins and early development, it has been less attentive to non-American contexts. More than other academic social science disciplines, political science's intellectual provenance is located in the new world. Unlike the other social sciences, political science lacks eighteenth and nineteenth century European masters. In the belief that America was showing the world its future, post-war behavioral political science like other aspects of the American way of life became an American export to Europe and the third world.

When undergraduates want to study legislatures, more often than not their choice is limited to a course on Congress, although they may find a course on the legislative process which includes attention to state legislatures. This is hardly a cause for student discontent. The first, and often the only, ambition of political science students is to learn about the American system of government. That is why the introductory course in the discipline is usually a course in American government, why courses on state and local politics are entirely concerned with the United States, why courses on political parties are really about the Democratic and Republican parties, and why there are hardly any courses on the executive at all since the only subject in that area which is taught is the American presidency.

It was not always so. A century ago, as curricula in political science developed in American universities, a general, theoretical concept of politics, derived from continental and particularly German approaches to the subject predominated. The focus on American politics came a full generation later, inspired by a concern for citizenship training and by the prospect of large captive audiences in classrooms of students fulfilling teacher certification requirements.

America First was consistent with the mood of the United States in the 1920s, but less so in the 1930s and 1940s. In those decades student interest in non-American politics revived in response to the nation's involvement in world affairs, and this interest was expressed in the curriculum by separate courses, often misnamed “comparative government.” These were frequently courses in a series of major foreign governments, shaped by the writing and teaching of a new cohort of emigré faculty who revived the European influence on American political science. In this form the study of what was called “comparative government” gained a larger place in the curricula of departments of political science. But as a subfield of the discipline, comparative government remained too small, and the approach was too country-specific, to permit sub-specialization except by geographic areas. There was no place in it for courses on non-American legislatures, or executives, or political parties.