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Ethnic Groups and Foreign Policy

By Charles McC. Mathias, Jr.
Summer 1981
Article Summary and Author Biography

It is doubtful that there has ever been a democratic society--from Periclean Athens to modern America--that lived untroubled by conflict between the preferences and aspirations of groups within the society and the requirements of the general good. If the problem has been more constant and intense in the United States than in other democracies, it is because of the nature of American society--diverse and heterogeneous, a nation of nations, a melting pot in which the constituent groups never fully melted--and because of the American constitutional system with its separated power and numerous points of access thereto.

Charles McC. Mathias, Jr. has been a Senator from Maryland since 1969, and served in the House of Representatives for eight years before that.

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