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Diplomacy II PART TWO The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. government, the Department of Defense, or any of its agencies. Real Diplomats Do Peace: What the Ambassador of 2015 Needs to Understand About War and Peace Today Dazzling as the new technologies are, another sea change sweeping through the political-military world promises to transform the professional climate of the future ambassador far more than the microchips in her wristwatch. --Larry Seaquist During his naval career, Larry Seaquist commanded several warships, including the battleship USS Iowa (BB-61), and served in strategy assignments on the Navy Staff, the Joint Staff, and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He is the founding chairman of an international, nonprofit "do tank," The Strategy Group, a global action network of professional peacebuilders. He heads peacebuilding projects in Central Asia, Sri Lanka, the Middle East, and Colombia, and in U.S. high schools. He invites your e-mail comments to larry@strategygroup.org. As a class, diplomats seem to prefer the tough-guy stance. Cookie-pushers? Not. Well, maybe there is a lot of cocktailing on post, but even there, it's a jungle and the individual diplomat a skilled combatant, going mano a mano across the canapés in the hunt for insight and leverage. And back in Washington, there is a touch of truth to the Pentagon's joke that in a crisis, it is the Department of State that wants to go to war first. Of course, diplomats as a class are peacemakers. It is just that after a twentieth century of big wars, hot and cold, American diplomats are skilled at the superpower politics of shaping peace through war or the threat of war. Macho goes with the territory. Doubtless there are many young diplomats out in junior postings today for whom Amb. Richard Holbrooke models the modern diplomat they hope to be: an alchemist who deploys a combination of aggressive, high-wire improvisation and the threat of immediate military attack to transmute the crisis du jour into peace--or at least into not-war. That model may turn out to be less apt than it appears now. Our future ambassadors will navigate a much different world. The State Department might even have a working computer system by 2015, and who knows what other kinds of new gadgetry will be at the future diplomat's elbow. Dazzling as the new technologies are, another sea change sweeping through the political-military world promises to transform the professional climate of the future ambassador far more than the microchips in her wristwatch. Although not yet reflected in American foreign policy, a profound transformation in the very natures of war and peace is bringing with it a profound change in the nature of peacemaking. Whether future diplomats will have much of a role in that or anything else of relevance hangs on whether the new generation tunes in now. Their success in their future high posts--and the future of many people in the world--hangs on their ability to fashion a practical new diplomacy of peace through peacebuilding to replace our outmoded practices of peace through war and the threat of war. More than obsolete, our current practices are damaging, draining political capital from both our international and domestic balance sheets. But that is peroration. We each need to decide for ourselves whether something new and important is afoot in diplomacy. Let me offer a brief, introductory tour of Community War, or CoWar, because this is going to be so commonplace a part of our lives that we'll need shorthand. Then, we can consider the implications for the diplomat. CoWar--The New Form of Armed Conflict War left the battlefield. While many militaries busied themselves with the so-called "revolution in military affairs," war put on new clothes and moved away. As armies around the world were shopping for computers and missiles, war spent the 1990s mutating into some homely but exceedingly deadly forms, largely immune to modern weapons. Armed conflict no longer has much to do with formal battlefields. Less and less do we see opposing armies take to the field while the Geneva conventions shield civilians on the sidelines. Television journalists show us every day the new characteristic engagement: brutal, neighbor-on-neighbor killing. You still can watch soldier-on-soldier combat or dogfights between supersonic aircraft, but you will need to tune into the History Channel right after the "Battleships Were Beautiful" hour. And if you do spot modern weapons in the news, most likely they are attacking civilian targets--Russian attacks on Chechen cities or NATO's attacks on "military" targets picked out from the civilian infrastructure in Serbia, for example. The new faces of war are a ragtag collection of ne'er-do-wells, teenagers, and ordinary citizens dragooned into service by the local thug-in-chief. Our instinct is to dismiss them. How could a no-tech, no-training, no-discipline "army" threaten anything important to the United States or one of our fellow great powers? And if they rampage among their own citizens, then we should (maybe) intervene only with protective operations other than war to limit the human carnage. These are tragedies, we say, but not threats. We should focus on preventing real war and guarding our vital interests. We need to think again. Reexamined, these lethal rabbles are as destructive in strategic terms as nuclear bombs--but with more lasting aftereffects. Their "organizations" and "doctrine" take forms that trump our superior firepower and confound our diplomacy. In head-to-head encounters with modern Western forces, they often come out the winners. Even in areas we consider our special province, such as the use of advanced information technologies, the rabbles regularly outgun us. In our modern democracies, the first purpose of the military is to prevent war--and to fight and win if prevention fails. But how do you prevent or prevail in these new forms of conflict that have turned many of the world's neighborhoods into bloody battlefields? Our innovations carry us in a different direction. We have attempted to narrow the focus of combat and reduce the killing in battle. Although modern forces deploy hugely destructive firepower, careful target selection and pinpoint strikes maximize weapon payoff and limit enemy casualties. And by attacking from a distance under the cover of electronic razzle-dazzle, it seems we can reduce our own casualties almost to zero. But as we push toward high-tech, low-blood combat, the rabble-warriors are rushing in the opposite direction. Choosing primitive strategies of close-in, person-to-person bludgeoning, they go for maximum death and disruption among civilians. Example: During two days in July 1995 in eastern Bosnia, a hodgepodge of pseudomilitary Serb thugs mixed with a few professionals killed more than 7,000 men trying to break out from Srebrenica, a UN "safe haven." The Serbs won this mobile battle in mountain forest terrain in less than forty-eight hours. Acting also to paralyze the U.S.-dominated command hierarchy of the protecting UN forces, they held the initiative so long that they had time to bury the evidence, evict the Dutch defenders, and "cleanse" the town of residue women and children without being counterattacked. Not since major battles in World War II had Europe seen 7,000 killed in action. Serb casualties apparently were near zero. Nor should we forget the spasm of killing in Rwanda a year earlier. Armed with machetes and a few handguns, rampaging Hutus executed some 800,000 of their neighbors and friends in a hundred days. Compare this lethality to that of professionals: Hitler's specially equipped killer units, the Einsatzgruppen, roamed the eastern front killing Jews and other unwanteds during the war on the Soviet Union. With "cleansing" as their sole mission, it took them years to match what loosely organized gangs, often teenagers, did in weeks in Rwanda. More than body counts are at stake. When neighbor attacks neighbor, the paroxysm of violence destroys the skein of community. Churches and mosques are blown up. Schools are burned. Homes, if left standing, are seized. Rape rains trauma on the female victims, their families, and neighbors, reinforcing the brutality of the attackers. Evicting people from their homes, burning their possessions, and even destroying their identity papers (as the Serbs did to the fleeing Kosovars in 1999), the attackers strip away the sense of self and place that is vital to each of us in our daily lives. There is more. Criminality and extremist politics well up in the chaos, join hands, and grab control. Whatever the contorted slogans about freedom or justice used to justify the violence, old-fashioned greed and police-state brutality take over. The architects of the "liberation" of Srebrenica and the long, deadly siege of Sarajevo were Pres. Radovan Karadjic and Gen. Ratko Mladic. Both became rich. Reportedly, Karadjic is now a billionaire. Although each was forced out of office when the West finally intervened, visitors to the statelet report that they continue to control and profit from the sale of almost everything--cigarettes, gasoline, weapons, drugs, even UN-furnished food supplies. In Colombia, the guerrilla bands that set out in the 1950s to create a purist Marxist revolution are now so tightly intertwined with the narcotics trade that it is hard to tell the difference between a high-minded revolutionary and an ordinary drug thug. In central Africa, control of the diamond trade shapes that huge war as much as political differences. The creation and manipulation of refugees is another innovation. Citizens flee the violence, sometimes in convulsive human avalanches, sometimes in trickles, sometimes pouring into huge refugee camps, often ending up as the near-homeless residents of shantytowns on the fringes of big cities. Wherever they go, refugees generate advantage for the side that expelled them. As they fester in camps and slums, they set in motion the next rounds of anger and retaliation. With schools shut and families scattered, even preteen kids turn to crime and killing. The result is a tangle of profound destruction beyond what any military commander would seek on a traditional battlefield. After World War II, Germany and Japan could pick themselves up from defeat and, with culture and community still intact, transform themselves into powerhouse friends. No such future is open to Bosnia or Kosovo or Rwanda. They, and the forty or fifty other places where community wars now smolder or burn, face years of disorder. It may take decades of expensive outside intervention before these societies can function and generations before they can prosper. In the Cold War we never wavered in our understanding that prevention of a nuclear exchange was our core imperative. Today, the lethalities of neighbor-on-neighbor war are achieving levels of destruction well beyond what we feared from tactical nuclear exchanges. In Kosovo, Serb President Slobodan Milosevic was able to flush most of two million people from their homes and damage two-thirds of their houses without using a single nuke. With more of these cancer-like community wars threatening, prevention must be our first strategy. "Not a problem!" you might say. These are just rabble. If intervention were our assignment, it would not be a demanding mission. These folks couldn't stand up to us if we really took them on. It might not be that easy. Viewed across our television screens and computer terminals, these seem barely armed irregulars, ethnic primitives trapped by genes and custom in cycles of ancient and local violence. That is a dangerous misreading. Our failure to understand these new forms of war and to recognize that they are popping up all over the globe traps us in habits of inaction that feed and accelerate these armed conflicts and steadily erode our own political and military advantages. Here are some "advances" in the arts of war, innovations that can best us in head-to-head encounters. Unlike our high-tech and high-cost inventions, which appear in manufacturers' brochures years before they enter service, these homely tricks are already battle tested and have almost nothing to do with technology--yet. Invisible Infantry A loosely organized mob can achieve astonishing killing rates with whatever assortment of knives and small arms are at hand. "But against us?" ask the U.S. Special Forces. With the fabled Delta Force fighting alongside, they lost a 1993 firefight in the streets of Mogadishu against a mixture of citizens and warlord gangs. Even though the Somalis took heavy casualties--perhaps several hundred killed versus eighteen of our own--the Americans had to withdraw to survive. Their defeat collapsed the entire UN intervention. The innovation? Citizen-warriors. The Somali gunmen (and women) were not soldiers in civilian disguise--they were real civilians. Then-Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic used a variation against us in Kosovo. As NATO aimed a high-tech attack at Serbia, he unveiled a motley force pre-positioned in Kosovo. Unpaid Serb army "volunteers" augmented by paramilitary thugs flushed a million and a half Kosovar Albanians into the hills and across borders into huge, burdensome refugee camps. Operating largely on foot and moving among civilians, they held key towns, roads, and borders for months, keeping the province essentially invasion-proof and themselves untouchable--all in the teeth of an intense NATO air attack. Not until some of their forces began to operate as conventional ground units did NATO inflict any meaningful damage. Pulling out only when ordered, they left with most of their small stock of fighting vehicles undamaged. In both cases, barely organized ground forces trumped the best high-tech, high-firepower, info- and aerospace-dominant military and the most macho diplomats in the world. Could we have won in either place? Yes, eventually, but only with large ground-air forces of our own. In both cases, the politics moved on before we could decide. This is especially significant because it is the exact opposite of what U.S. military leaders claim they are about to achieve. Just keep writing the checks for the new equipment, they say, and we'll create the perfect battlefield. Everything will be seen, everything will be targeted. We'll finish the fighting and hand over to the diplomats a tidy situation in which they hold all the high cards. It's not working out that way. Grappling with invisible opponents--combatants indistinguishable from civilians; regular military equipment, if any, hidden away; operations masked by elaborate deception campaigns--our combat operations typically drain political capital and leave the diplomats with an even more muddled field of action. Wars Without End In contrast to our preference for short, clean wars, those who set neighbor against neighbor find their advantages in chaos. The rogue politicos of community war profit most if the fighting is long and dirty. But they must solve two problems to get there: first, how to keep ordinary citizens fighting when most would prefer to live more or less in peace; second, how to keep us from intervening as their machinations pile up bodies, refugees, and rubble. Fear and brutality are used to create citizen-warriors. Each of us harbors a variety of us-them impulses. Identity politics heats those emotions into hatred and converts them into anger that an "enemy"--formerly your friend and neighbor--has what is rightfully yours. With a spark, the human tinder flashes into violence. The Hutu-on-Tutsi killing in Rwanda models the pattern. In Bosnia, a Muslim refugee told how a stranger, a Serb outsider, pushed into her house, shot her Serb friend in the house across the street, and then left as a "spontaneous" Serb mob mobilized to avenge the killing and drive all Muslims out of town. Once started, the brutality leaves no easy path back to normal, tolerant life. Self-renewing cycles of violence and revenge spin on as the leader-perpetrators harvest power and fill Swiss bank accounts. To keep us from spoiling the game, the offenders market the mob emotions as "historic enmities," which, of course, no intervention could hope to mitigate. Although he later corrected himself, Pres. Bill Clinton made his early decision to stay out of Bosnia because, he said, "These are ancient hatreds. Until these people stop killing each other there is not much we can do"--exactly the line marketed by Milosevic's propaganda apparatus in Belgrade. Then, when we do intervene as peacekeepers late in the spiral of violence, our presence is easily manipulated to sustain what we came to stop. Checkmate. Dominant Knowledge The U.S. military touts its information dominance. No one has an array of satellite sensors, communications networks, and computing power to match ours. Alas, leaders of the local rabble regularly display better awareness of our situation than we of theirs. How? Our information-rich society is both our strength and our vulnerability. Forget spies. Almost everything we know and anything we might be thinking about doing is flashed worldwide minute by minute on global TV channels and the Internet. Dissecting the 1996 Goma refugee crisis in eastern Zaire, BBC journalist and researcher Nik Gowing followed a trail of disinformation to show how the Rwandan government deliberately misled humanitarian organizations in the field so they, in turn, would feed distorted assessments into the media and intelligence services. The result, as intended, was a U.S.-UN decision to stand clear as the Rwandans gained a major tactical victory in confused, neighbor-on-neighbor fighting. The conflict has now drawn seven countries into what some call Africa's first world war. Where is their edge? While we create high-tech systems to track military things on the battlefield--things these fighters do not need--they use our open media to track and shape our thinking. Teflon Command We know little of the decisions and habits of most of the leaders stirring up trouble in various corners of the globe. Even in cases where we know the top dog--like Milosevic or Saddam Hussein--people and politics around them are a mystery. Often, as in central Africa today, we know not even all the names of the parties to the fighting, let alone their politics and allegiances. The consequence: operational immunity for the brigands. Ignorant of their thinking and thus unable to seize the initiative, we stumble into huge mistakes. This turns Sun Tzu on his head: Fail to know your enemy as well as he knows you and you should fear every battle. It is also a personal challenge to every diplomat whose core competencies rest on a rich, personal understanding of what the other fellows are thinking and why. No-cost Combat Armies are expensive. In a democracy, the politics of paying for an army in the field has as much to do with strategy as the generals' plans. The new class of warrior-thugs escapes this constraint. By setting unpaid neighbor against neighbor and helping to ensure that the destruction becomes unforgivably brutal, they create fighting forces that live off their own land and free emotional ammunition. In a nice bit of fiscal judo, they seize the initiative and make a profit while we remain tied up in budget politics, fretting about the impact of one more operation on our force readiness. Diplomacy is left on the sidelines as the domestic politics of money swirl through and confuse the policymaking of the professionals. If these new-age fracases are that tough, what can we do? Clearly, prevention must be our priority. We want to do what we can to avoid letting local brouhahas metastasize into full-scale cancers. But how to do that? It is easy to talk about prevention, difficult to practice it in the gritty climes of realpolitik. How can we make prevention practical? Unless we come up with a practical strategy of prevention, more and more of these nasty wars lie squarely in our future. They will be even more daunting, whether we go in shooting or under blue helmets as armed peacekeepers. Milking the growing interconnections between drugs, crime, and conflict for cash, local warlords will deploy leading-edge electronics, move up from knives and pistols to high-technology lethality, and run ever more sophisticated media-manipulation operations. Coming up are community wars even harder to manage than those that bedevil us now. Credible deterrence in the Cold War hinged on our ability to fight and win should deterrence fail. When it seemed that larger Soviet forces could overwhelm NATO in a traditional war, we threatened the use of a huge nuclear arsenal as a counterweight. By the time the Cold War closed, we had turned the tables. Our high-tech, high-firepower forces could, both sides calculated, defeat the still-huge Soviet military in a head-to-head fight. The result of this armaments duel was a half-century without a world war. But a strategy of military deterrence--prevention through firepower--is no longer an option. No one can defeat the large NATO armies in a traditional fight, but these new neighbor-on-neighbor wars are being fought in ways and places where raw firepower confers no decisive advantage and the diplomat's threat of attack is almost meaningless. The nuclear threat doesn't work either. Nuclear and biological materials are proliferating so fast that almost anyone serious about them--especially these well-funded gangster-politicians--can acquire a bang so deadly that we, with more to lose, must stand clear. So how to prevent, if not through firepower? And if the military is not the primary instrument, what is? We have expected generals to do much of our thinking about security; who should do it now? Here is where I invite the younger diplomats to jump in with their own views. It is they who must equip themselves to be effective when it is their turn to be confirmed as ambassador by the Senate. Starting now, we need to see the new generation working through these problems for themselves. Without preempting that thinking, I close with a coda outlining what we in The Strategy Group have learned about practical prevention in the past few years in the field. Moving Upstream to Peacebuilding One quickly discovers that a policy of prevention is not enough. Prevention is still tinged by reaction--anticipatory reaction, but still reaction. Our work in various at-risk regions shows that you must move all the way upstream to peacebuilding if you are to be effective. Rather than finding peace in the lee of military might, the new generation of diplomats will need to engage directly. Briefly, here are some of the emerging principles:
Our PeaceGames and PeaceLabs are upside-down wargames especially constructed to help map all the players in a potential conflict or the stakeholders in a durable peace. With those maps the role-playing participants design for themselves a workable path to a long-term peace--something that the last-minute, coercive interventions of a Richard Holbrooke, no matter how dramatic, cannot achieve. Famously, the army, fresh from its 100-hour victory on the bare desert battlefields of the Gulf War, said, "We don't do mountains" when presented with the opportunity to engage in the rugged terrain of the Balkans. Would that we had a better, more macho-sounding label than peacebuilding. While the peace-words may sound a bit soft and woolly, our future ambassadors are going to find the work everything they hoped for when they imagined a muscular career in the Foreign Service. Released: July 23, 2001 International Educational Exchange in the Information Age Two dimensions on the Internet cannot substitute for the interaction of cultures--for the taste and feel of foreign lands and for the empathy that develops as one learns to appreciate a new society. --Jody K. Olsen and Norman J. Peterson Judy K. Olsen is the deputy director of the Peace Corps where she previously served as a volunteer, country director, regional director and chief of staff. She has also been senior vice president of the Academy for Educational Development and executive director of the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (which manages the Fulbright Scholar Program). Norman J. Peterson is director of the Office of International Programs at Montana State University, where he develops and directs the university's exchange programs while serving in many national leadership capacities related to international exchange and training. After thorough consideration of the case with our bishops, abbots, princes, dukes, judges, and other noblemen of our Holy Court, we decree this benefit of our grace, that everyone who because of his studies wanders abroad, students and professors of the most divine and holy laws, shall…come in security to the places where the studies are exercised and live there in peace....Who of them is not to be pitied, as they for their love of science long exile and deprive themselves, being already poor of riches, expose their lives to many dangers and sustain corporal injuries by often very villainous people.... --Frederick I, Emperor, Holy Roman Empire, 1158 AD The movement of students and scholars across national boundaries to exchange knowledge has been going on for centuries and is deeply rooted in the culture and traditions of the university as an institution. As the above excerpt from a decree by the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire indicates, medieval scholars frequently spent their entire careers wandering from one center of learning to another. Rome promulgated special rules for foreign students coming from the far reaches of the empire to study at its universities. This global movement of scholars has played a pivotal role in the expansion of human knowledge and the development of civilization. At the initiative of Sen. J. William Fulbright more than a half century ago, the U.S. government embraced this tradition by launching the largest government-sponsored exchange program of its kind. Diplomacy was thought to be too important to be left to diplomats. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the flow of students and scholars to study, teach, and conduct research outside of their homelands has reached enormous proportions and has become an increasingly important dimension of international relations. In Open Doors (2001), the Institute for International Education says that more than a half million students from other nations are currently studying in U.S. colleges and universities alone, and the total number of internationally mobile students across the globe numbers a million and a half. Open Doors also reports that over the past ten years, the number of students from the United States studying abroad has soared from 70 to 129,000. Student exchanges within the European Union have had similar growth. Several major developments have occurred in the post-World War II world to drive this trend, including the growing demand for higher education as human society has become more complex and transportation has developed globally. The movement of people across borders for educational purposes has become a cornerstone of public diplomacy. As the Information Age races forward, however, it is natural to ask, "What is the future of international educational exchange in the era of instantaneous global communication?" Or, more bluntly, "Is there a future for traditional international exchange as technology advances to make electronic communication better and better?" Are we moving toward a day when all this activity will take place virtually through the Internet or its successor technologies? Or will traditional exchange programs and technology be integrated to improve the breadth and depth of global communication? The development of modern communication technologies and their applicability to education make these questions both obvious and inevitable. Information technologies are having a profound impact on all aspects of human life and society, and international educational and cultural relations are certainly no exception. Distance education technologies offer the promise of taking learning to learners, no matter where they are and when they want to learn. Pedagogically, they break the time and space connection between the teacher and the learner. CD-ROM and Web-based educational applications open up exciting new interactive approaches to learning. It is natural to ask whether these technologies can replace the need for learners to travel across the globe to link with their teachers or their learning environment. We believe that technology will not replace the global movement of people for educational purposes but that it will have a profound impact on how such programs are conducted. Modern communication technologies cannot and will not, in most cases, replace traditional international exchange activities, but instead, with planning and understanding of the media, new technologies offer enormous potential to complement and strengthen exchange programs. It is our purpose to encourage those engaged in international educational and cultural programs to focus their efforts on finding ways to effectively blend traditional and technological elements and, working with those in communication technologies, enhance the effectiveness of international educational and cultural communication through the technology. To illustrate our argument with a crude analogy, consider the remarkable development of the erotic dimension of the Internet. It is sometimes argued that sex today represents the largest commercial use of the World Wide Web. Even though this may be the case, no one suggests for a moment that virtual sex will usurp the real thing. While the Internet can transmit erotic material and is certainly capable of arousing desires, it cannot by its very nature provide the immediacy of communication between human beings that is essential to sexual fulfillment. Although this example may seem unrelated, it helps us to see why international intercultural communication mediated by modern technology does not take the place of direct immediate experience of another country and culture. It is obvious to everyone that virtual sex has inherent limitations. The very same limitations prevent virtual communication across cultures from fulfilling the traditional role of actual exchanges involving people moving to live, study, and work in another culture. Only through the immediacy of that experience can individuals directly "encounter" another culture and thereby benefit from the rich base of learning. That is the fundamental reason why international exchange is such a powerful and positive experience. Although we say that technologically based international communication cannot take the place of actual experience in another culture, we also argue that the way new information technologies will be best used is in complementing and enhancing direct experiences in living, studying, and working in other cultures. An exciting example of how traditional international programs and technologies can be integrated to enhance programs is found in the Arabic Language and Middle East/Northern Africa Cultural Studies Program created by one of the authors at Montana State University. Through the support of the National Security Education Program, a federal program that funds innovative programs to increase U.S. knowledge of other languages and cultures critical to U.S. security interests, distance education technologies combined with study abroad provide access to the Arabic language to students at institutions that do not have Arabic language faculty to offer traditional instruction in this increasingly important world language. Making less commonly taught languages available to students across the fabric of U.S. higher education is a major challenge. Most institutions cannot afford the high costs of supporting faculty to teach these languages. As a result, most U.S. university students have access only to Spanish and a few other options (French, German, and maybe Italian or perhaps Japanese), even though languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Swahili are spoken by millions of people. The concept behind the Arabic Language and Middle East/Northern Africa Cultural Studies Program is that new technologies, combined with traditional language learning methods, can make this important language broadly available to U.S. students. Students in the program study modern standard Arabic in the first year through two hours of interactive video instruction with the lead professor located at the University of Washington in Seattle, coupled with two to three hours of instruction from a trained native Arabic-speaking teaching assistant located at each of the five institutions offering the program (Idaho State University, Johnson C. Smith University, Montana State University-Bozeman, South Dakota State University, and the University of Montana-Missoula). Through the interactive video sessions, students at all five institutions can see and hear the instructor, ask questions, and so on. This lays the basis for the face-to-face sessions with the teaching assistants (TAs), who are, in most cases, foreign students from Arabic-speaking countries. All the TAs participate in a week-long training program with University of Washington faculty before the start of the course each fall. In the second year of the program, students continue their study of Arabic in Morocco at Al Akhawayn University. Unlike most study-abroad programs involving language study, however, the Arabic course in Morocco is tightly integrated with the first-year program in a seamless fashion, with students picking up their studies where they left off in the United States. In this way, new technologies (interactive video classrooms and the Internet) are combined with traditional approaches (face-to-face sessions with teaching assistants and study abroad) to offer international education opportunities to students who would not otherwise have them. Results so far are very encouraging. Students taking the first-year program and students taking traditional introductory Arabic classes at the University of Washington perform at comparable levels. The average score after one year of instruction on the ACTFL1 Arabic proficiency examination is "intermediate low," with a few students scoring "novice high." The key to the program's success is that it integrates technology but does not attempt to use it to substitute for critical face-to-face learning. Efforts to teach foreign languages, particularly the so-called "hard" languages, based completely on technological methods will generally not be effective. But combined with study abroad and on-site tutelage, technology can make less commonly taught languages accessible to those who otherwise could not learn them. This, the authors contend, illustrates how technologies can best be utilized in conducting international education programs. More broadly, there are several ways technology can integrate with exchange programs to enhance international learning. Technology enhances student and faculty interest, as is happening in many standard educational exchange programs. As noted, the National Security Education Program (NSEP), begun in 1993, supports students pursuing the study of languages, cultures, and world regions that are critical to U.S. national security and is currently focused on 80 countries and 45 languages. This program has grown in size even as information technology has made communication and information more accessible to U.S. students and scholars. In the early years of the program, which were also the early years of Internet use, a relatively common response from potential applicants was, "I don't know if I need to go. I can get it on the Internet." Officials now note that sentiment is substantially shifting. As students find specific information about languages, cultures, and regions, their eagerness for more layers of information and experience pushes them toward study abroad. They recognize the limits of learning without the actual experience. A student studying the impact of technology and communication in Senegal knew she had to be in the rural village to see the impact. As one student said, "I have to be in China learning Mandarin to know what the people mean to the language." These students had used technology and the power of the Internet and yet understood the uniqueness of being present in a place for additional levels of knowledge and understanding. "I have to live the experience to understand the layers of meaning," they would argue. Seeking the layers of meaning drives the sojourner experience, and now technology offers the opening scenes to that experience. Faculty participants on the Fulbright program express these same interests. Their electronic connections with faculty, university, and student colleagues are heightening their awareness of what the on-site experiences will add. Their comments upon return reinforce their initial hopes, and they continue to be the strongest advocates for international exchange. Technology also affects the experience itself, but we are not yet sure of the outcome of this influence. Electronic communication and instant information are accessible not only before and after the international exchange but throughout the sojourn, shaping the experience itself. One scholar said, "It is no longer as pure as before." A host parent asked, "Is my exchange son really part of our family?" A Peace Corps volunteer said, "I spend an hour on the Internet daily before going to class." To what extent does being able to post digitized host family photos on a personally created Web site and give daily updates to family and friends back in Denmark, or carry on significant personal dialogues with friends in the United States, detract from the totality of the experience? Or does it enhance the experience? We might find that the technology lifeline to one's home culture distracts from the intensity of the exchange experience. Technology has the potential to substantially improve program management systems, making them faster, more efficient and transparent to both managers and participants. Changes will affect the convenience and speed of electronic application processing, as well as the amount of information available to those who apply. Applications, review procedures, international mailings, multinational communications, forms processing, and orientations have been long and cumbersome. Plus, in recent years, a growing number of international decision-makers and new regulations affecting both public and private exchange programs have added to the burden. Now, exchange program managers note excitedly how much more informed applicants are about the programs, how they target their questions and concerns, but most important, how much easier it is to find and reach out to faculty and students who have an interest in the hundreds of existing exchange programs. Little-known colleges teaching relatively obscure languages and cultures are now contacted and told about NSEP, working journalists are recruited for the Fulbright journalism program, English departments with an Emily Dickinson specialty are now found for a visiting scholar with that specialty, a family in Sorrento is located for a high school semester abroad program--all new abilities in the past couple of years. This brings a better fit between the exchange participant and the host community. Technology streamlines application processing. The new Fulbright Faculty Senior Specialist Program is being managed through a software program that allows a deadline-free online application to be sent to reviewers; processes and organizes reviewers' comments for a selection to be made; and once the selection is made, sends participant files to the host country sites. The more traditional exchange programs are moving to online applications, while the ongoing questions, answers, concerns, changes, protests, and reviews are managed by e-mail. By one manager's estimate, communication about the process has increased fivefold, as has impatience with it by the applicants. Added information and its immediacy is forcing changes in rules, regulations, and procedures for most exchange programs, because applicants will not wait for last year's paper-based rules. For example, all in a single day, a faculty member identified a site in a rural town in Japan. He then dropped out, but helped to select a replacement who changed the university department and research subject, which then required a new individual grant. The regulatory procedures for these changes took two months. Tomorrow's programs will have to be quick to thrive. Technology is also affecting the length of programs. By 2015, exchanges will be better tailored to needs. Impatience and speed take many forms, including wanting the exchange experience to happen more quickly. Participants are asking, "Can we do it in a summer? Will two weeks give us enough of an experience? Can we split it into several segments?" Intensified pressures of school, work, finances, family, professional, and community responsibilities are perceived as impediments to building a sojourner experience as it has been traditionally conceived. Program requirements for one- and two-year exchanges are changing to shorter opportunities, with repeated visits and continued connections through technology. Technology is also building a broader base of exchange participation. Exchanges have traditionally been mostly for the young, from high school through graduate programs and early years of professional work. Now, technology is adding opportunities for a larger population. The ease of accessing information, of managing logistical details, of finding host families and communities, of exchanging informal information and building a comfort level before beginning the exchange makes it possible for families, seniors, religious groups, and communities to get involved in exchanges. Elderhostel experiences in the South Pacific, community exchanges between sister cities or states, members of church congregations teaching in African countries, and older volunteer leader exchanges are increasing. Each story that a participant brings back, disseminated through e-mails and Web sites, classrooms and living rooms, encourages others to take the risk:
In conclusion, technology is taking learning to learners--regardless of time or place--changing the relationship between teacher and learners, and creating new interactive approaches to the learning process. Within this learning environment, even as technology has the capacity to greatly enhance and somewhat change the exchange experience, it will not replace the face-to-face personal contact gained in that exchange. Two dimensions on the Internet cannot substitute for the interaction of cultures--for the taste and feel of foreign lands and for the empathy that develops as one learns to appreciate a new society. Senator Fulbright's goal in sponsoring and encouraging exchange will be even more important in 2015: "to assist in the development of friendly, sympathetic, and peaceful relations between the United States and the other countries of the world." Released: July 23, 2001 1. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Being Public: How Diplomacy Will Need to Change to Cope With the Information Society As the world changes, the way countries manage their relationships with others also needs to change. The biggest challenge is the spread of democracy and the increasing constraints that public opinion imposes on government. --Mark Leonard and Liz Noble Mark Leonard is director of the Foreign Policy Centre, an influential independent British think-tank, and coauthor of Going Public--Diplomacy for the Information Society. Liz Noble is director of the Foreign Policy Centre's Public Diplomacy Project. She is on secondment from The British Council, the U.K.'s international organization for educational and cultural relations, where she spent a decade working in information. Diplomats in 2015 will need to increase their reach from communicating mainly with governments and civil servants to communicating with larger audiences and building networks that cut across frontiers and sectors. The economic arguments for public diplomacy are well known. In a global economy, countries compete against one another for investment, trade, and tourism. Obviously, whether you succeed or fail in this marketplace depends on the quality of your product, investment, environment, or tourist destination. But today the products are becoming more alike, so it is becoming difficult to differentiate oneself in terms of quality alone. Businesses have long explored ways of tapping into a deeper sense of identity to develop brands as a way of selling products and differentiating themselves from their competition. The same is true of countries today. If all things are equal, identity can play a key role in deciding what product, destination, or country people go for. Many companies realize this as well. Opinion surveys show that three-quarters of Fortune 500 companies actually see the "national identity" or place of origin as one of the key factors that influence their decisions about buying goods and services. In the 1990s, the German AEG (Algemeine Elektrische Gesellschaft) ran a publicity campaign in Britain based around redefining its initials as "Advanced Engineering from Germany." The centerpiece of its advertising campaign was that it was a "German" company representing brand quality. At the same time, British companies--from British Telecom to British Home Stores--were dropping the word "British" from their names. For example, retail chain Dixons, when it launched its own brand, called it Matsui, to try to make it sound Japanese, because the company's market research suggested that people would not buy British-made televisions and radio sets. The recent foot-and-mouth disease crisis in Britain demonstrated the catastrophic consequences of not managing the message carefully overseas. Prospective foreign visitors, especially Americans, quickly got the message that Britain was "closed" and stayed away in their droves. A single powerful image of the British prime minister on a farm in a yellow protection suit is said to have reinforced that misconception enormously overseas, although it was supposed to demonstrate to the domestic audience the prime minister's concern and involvement in the crisis. But changing global demographics mean that this process will extend beyond a battle for consumers, investors, and visitors. In parts of the developed world especially, the dwindling numbers of workers who must try to support ever more pensioners mean countries are going to have to compete to attract workers from overseas, both highly skilled and unskilled, to fill the gaps in their workforce. Thus, projecting a positive image of a particular country as a good place to live and work in the homelands of prospective migrant workers is going to be a crucial factor in their choice. Quality of life, the state of infrastructure such as public services, affordable housing, existing diasporas, and how "globalized" and outward-looking a country is will all matter at least as much as salary levels in attracting migrant workers to one country above another. All these are issues traditionally linked to a government's domestic agenda, but they will be increasingly important internationally in this context, as will the ability to promote them overseas. But in 2015, the context for political diplomacy will have changed even more. Many of the main issues in the world today--from climate change, drugs, or HIV to international development, corruption, and organized crime--are global issues which cut across borders, across departments and across sectors. Many are so big and complex that they are not just beyond the control of single national governments, but beyond the scope of groups of governments working together. They are crosscutting issues that demand new coalitions of governments, companies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). As the world changes, the way countries manage their relationships with others also needs to change. The biggest challenge is the spread of democracy and the increasing constraints that public opinion imposes on government. The global anticapitalist demonstrations over the past few years have exemplified the new diplomatic environment in which state and nonstate actors compete for the public's attention. The Kosovo conflict saw the most powerful military coalition in history risk defeat at the hands of a tiny rogue state, not in the field but in the media battleground for public opinion. During the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis, the French government, in a breach of European Community law, banned British beef in response to public fears about its safety. There would have been no point, however, pursuing the case through the courts because it was more important to change public opinion--not just toward British beef--but about Britain itself. Public diplomacy cannot force the French to eat British beef--a propaganda campaign for British beef would have been counterproductive. But what public diplomacy can do is change the environment in which the debate takes place, and this has a real effect on its outcome. We will always want to reach certain groups of people whatever the issue--governments, policy units, foreign press, and media. But their views and policy options will be determined by a much wider circle. We need to identify who are our target audiences for each bilateral or multilateral issue in each country and tailor strategies and tools to reach them in a variety of ways. Technology is one driver of this new diplomacy. Technologically facilitated people-to-people contact across borders is increasingly easy and cheap. Counterparts and groups with common interests can identify each other through Web sites, e-mail groups, and chat rooms and can interact with one another on an individual basis or through increasingly loose groupings, completely independent of "official" channels or formal organizations. And if we want to influence kids, teachers, politicians, media, business, and communities overseas, we will need to tap into these new networks. One of the best ways is to put them in touch with their counterparts in our own countries, thereby expanding a relatively small diplomatic corps to include several million budding ambassadors. An increasing international role for governments and centralized bodies will therefore be as "agencies," or go-betweens, that help their nationals to identify individuals or groups overseas, who in turn go on to make contact between themselves and to manage the relationship independently. Increasingly sophisticated technology like specialized Web portals and customer relationship management systems (CRMS) also means that organizations and governments will be able to capture much more data on the interests and requirements of their own target groups overseas, even those that are large and scattered far from an embassy or headquarters, and use them to track their relationships and deliver what these contacts want in an increasingly interactive and tailored way. Not only governments will try to harness the power of public opinion and technology, so will their adversaries. Terrorist and criminal organizations, extremists, and rival powers have also become sophisticated in using technology to promulgate their message and recruit followers. This means in the future, conflict prevention will become a main driver of public diplomacy, because governments will have to play extremists at their own game and counter their messages using the same tools. The lateral "sideways development" of older technologies into countries and regions not reached before for political or developmental reasons means that their populations will be newly open to outside influences. Governments and societies will seize the opportunities offered by these technological inroads to extend their reach and impact. Some of these countries--Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba after the demise of Castro, maybe even Burma one day--will be actively seeking to realign themselves with the international community for economic and security reasons. Their eagerness to fit into international networks, coupled with the ease of access that technology brings, means that the "Western," or industrialized, world will be directing major efforts in public diplomacy and trade promotion, as well as traditional diplomacy, to these heretofore isolated areas. This concentration on "emerging markets for influence" will be at the expense of other parts of the world, because foreign affairs budgets are not limitless. Globalization will also play its part. More people are discovering foreign cultures, values, and products for themselves as they increasingly travel overseas and use technology to interact with those abroad, which diminishes the need for governments to "open the eyes" of foreign publics to their culture and values. This is especially true of Europe, where in spite of some major policy and cultural differences between, say, the U.K. and France, the flow of visitors between the two countries is so great and their respective cultures are so reciprocally familiar and popular that the two countries are never likely to really come to blows in the same way that the United States and its own close neighbor Cuba might. Surely it is much better to concentrate resources on relationships like the latter that really need to be worked on. Countries will, however, have to work harder to maintain their individual identities within these regional and global alliances, and governments will have to balance the national identity issue against the need to maintain their influence overseas by making sure they are part of such alliances. What is, in fact, likely is that as individual national identities blur, countries will increasingly identify themselves, group themselves, and seek influence on a variety of other levels apart from their nationality and based instead on their values or views--as "Europeans," as "Westerners," as "Muslims," or as proponents or opponents of globalization. So how do we change our existing model of diplomacy to one that matches the demands of the future? Our foreign policy in the future will also be driven by the expectations and demands of our overseas audience in this increasingly sophisticated world. This means that diplomats will need to have a combination of political and communications skills to get the message across to their publics. In an era when people are more sensitized to perceptions of cultural imperialism, it is no longer enough to just send out one-way messages about a country's expertise and attractions. Overseas audiences, in developing countries as well as developed, will increasingly demand two-way communication and interaction through partnership with other countries. Diplomacy will necessarily be about engaging in dialogue and acting as an agent to put together groups with similar interests so that both can learn from each other. Thus, bilateral and multilateral partnerships between NGOs will become a much more important tool in international relations. Many will make their own alliances using their own networks and information sources. So government will have only a small role to play in putting them in touch with each other. Where governments can play a valuable role, according to those from the not-for-profit sector, is in helping NGOs from their countries gain credence in the eyes of foreign governments--particularly in countries like Japan, where the voluntary or nonprofit sector is just developing and local and foreign NGOs do not yet have much standing or influence among government or society in general. In developed countries, diplomacy will need to be more political. As countries increasingly unite into regional and global blocks and organizations such as the European Union, G8, North American Free Trade Agreement, the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization, they will find it less necessary to instill their values on these partners who already share them. In these organizations, diplomacy will become an extension of national politics. This means that governments will need to develop a new type of multilateral diplomacy--retooling embassies to become lobbying and policy-exchange organizations that link political parties and think tanks across borders; using political parties and think tanks to create a genuine policy space; engaging with the domestic politics of other countries; linking with NGOs to change public opinion. This change has dramatic consequences for foreign services. If we need a foreign policy that cuts across government departments and focuses on networks and issues rather than just geography, then every government department becomes a foreign ministry and needs to join with the others to tackle common issues, perhaps even creating temporary departments or units to focus on specific issues such as "conflict diamonds"1 or the Kosovo conflict, and helpfully drawing domestic and foreign policy closer together in the process. This joined-up approach should create a flatter, more flexible and entrepreneurial structure that draws on the best ideas and sources of information from many more sources than are currently harnessed. Other tools to support this approach might include more interchange between "domestic" government departments and the Foreign Service via secondments or greater ease of transfer between jobs in different departments. This approach also includes links and transfers between government departments across different countries. The best way to force civil servants to work together creatively instead of competing for funds or recognition for their own departments is to create interdepartmental teams with shared budgets and challenge funds for particular issues or problems, such as training in diplomacy for domestic government departments. Finally, we will need to focus on informing our citizens, getting people to be more involved with foreign policy and to understand how it affects their lives. Only 7 percent of the British population thinks foreign policy is important, and there is certainly an internationalist deficit in British identity--but probably no more so than in other countries. We need a steep change to reeducate people about global citizenship. We need to add exposure to the global media and to global issues by, for example, encouraging young people to travel abroad more and farther away during their gap years. People are disengaged partly because there is still a perception that foreign policy is about distant events that are irrelevant to our lives and because the institutions and decision-making processes have coveted secrecy for so long. But even more important is the question of agency--the fact that the language of "national interests" and governments disconnects and disempowers people and hides the fact that as consumers and businesses we can change the world. As we have seen from the first part of this article, public opinion does count, but the first step is to link domestic and foreign policy and then redistribute responsibility and give people the information and skills they need to be do-it-yourself diplomats. The Foreign Policy Centre is working on a follow-up to Going Public, which looks at case studies of public diplomacy in six countries and will gather examples of international best practice. Meanwhile, the Centre would very much welcome contact and public diplomacy ideas from readers and practitioners--please e-mail either Mark Leonard or Liz Noble at mark@fpc.org.uk or liz@fpc.org.uk. Released: July 23, 2001 1. 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