A PARADIGM FOR DIPLOMACY IN THE 21ST CENTURY Harold H. Saunders American Academy of Diplomacy Awards Luncheon
Preface: My purpose in this address is not to preach but to lay out some thoughts for discussion among us designed to crystallize what we have learned from working through a turbulent half-century. You already know the lessons that I will mention. The challenge is to get them right so they can be passed on in a meaningful way to our successors. In that spirit, I proceed while looking forward to a continuing conversation. * * * * * Working for five presidents of the United States and with other world leaders taught me that the conceptual lenses—the paradigm—that they use to interpret events determine how they act. —It made a difference, for instance, in the Arab-Israeli peace process that President Carter and Secretary Vance saw the world through lenses that included a human rights focus that brought the Palestinians to the top of the agenda. —It made a difference that Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat recognized that the primary obstacle to an Egyptian-Israeli peace could not be removed by negotiations between governments. He flew to Israel because he knew that the main obstacle was the deep-rooted conviction of Israeli citizens that no Arab leader would accept a Jewish state in the Middle East. —And it made a difference that President Reagan and Secretary Haig looked at the world primarily through anti-Communist lenses and pushed the post Camp David talks on Palestinian autonomy to the back burner. The same is true of all of us. We all have such lenses. Our mindset—our paradigm— shapes our interpretation of events around us and our responses. Some may think that talking about paradigms is too academic, but whatever we call it, we all have one, and it affects our decisions and our actions. My message today is that until we change our lenses—until we adopt a new paradigm—we’re not going to have as effective a Foreign Service in our dramatically changing world as we would like. My message is strongly stated to make a point. I’m acutely aware of the practical objections to any message so stated. But I also know that nothing changes unless reasons for change are stated cogently but starkly. Most of us grew up professionally with a mindset shaped by what has been called the “realist paradigm”—leaders of nation states amass economic and military power to pursue objectively defined interests in zero-sum contests of power against other nation states. The focus was states, their governments and all the apparatus that surrounds them. The realist paradigm never worked for me. I suppose it was more comfortable for those working on Cold War issues between two superpowers. But in the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian arena where I worked, the relationships were much more complex. One party was not even a state. As one Israeli friend said, “It’s an intercommunal conflict.” I suspect the realist paradigm never worked for many of you: —Some of you worked in Latin America as citizens outside government brought their countries out from under military rule. Some of you may have been in Chile during the “vote not” campaign against Pinochet. —Some of you were in Poland during the Solidarity campaigns, or in Prague as people demonstrated in Wenceslas Square. You saw the Berlin Wall come down. Or later, some may have been in Belgrade when Milosevic was toppled. —Some of you lived through the anti-apartheid movement and the transition to democracy in South Africa. All the people armed with power conventionally defined ended up out of power, removed by people presumably without power. In the traditional paradigm, power has been defined as the ability to coerce and control. In our world, power seemed more the ability to change the course of events. We have lived a different picture of the world. We have lived the evolution of a new paradigm. I would say it is a more realistic one. It embraces whole bodies politic—citizens inside and citizens outside government—rather than focusing primarily on states and their governments. The greatest untapped resources for meeting the challenges of the 21st century are the energies and capacities of citizens outside government. The realist paradigm with its focus on states and their institutions leaves them out. Such a paradigm is unrealistic because it does not take advantage of energies and capacities that could change this world. It is immoral because it leaves out most of the world’s people. Our challenge and responsibility is to articulate the paradigm we have learned from experience and “teach it to our children” and grandchildren. We need to be explicit in arguing the need to change our conceptual lenses. We need to be decisive in defining the implications of a paradigm shift for how we prepare the next generation of Foreign Service Officers to be leaders in a different world. Politics—domestic and international—is not always a zero-sum contest over power. Politics is a cumulative, multilevel, open-ended process of continuous interaction over time engaging significant clusters of citizens in and out of government building relationships to solve public problems. We need to focus on whole bodies politic. We need to focus not just on the pursuit and exercise of material power but on the peaceful conduct and transformation of destructive relationships into relationships that can produce constructive change. That is my statement of an alternative paradigm. I call it the relational paradigm. This is a much more complex picture than the traditional one of a linear series of actions and reactions devised by government decision-makers and traded between institutional actors such as governments and other influential stakeholders. It is about the processes through which citizens as political actors interact—how they relate. It is a far more inclusive—and therefore realistic—reflection of the potential sources of change. It is also continuously moving with change taking place on many levels and in many quarters simultaneously. Not unlike the human body, many interactive processes are at work in the body politic at the same time. What does this mean in practical terms for the entering Foreign Service Officer? Four basic propositions to start our conversation: • First, diplomacy in the 21st century is the constructive conduct of relationships between whole bodies politic not just the representation of one government to another. I have often said to my colleagues and friends in the State Department, “Our job is not to design and conduct policy for the U.S. Government. It’s to design and conduct policy for the United States of America. Thinking that way would turn loose the enormous energy, capacity, compassion, and imagination of this great country. The framework for analysis of relationships between countries must embrace whole bodies politic—the human as well as the institutional dimension of international interactions, citizens outside as well as citizens inside government. The recent Russian outreach to the people of Poland acknowledging responsibility and regret for the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest has done more to improve that relationship than any act of economic or military policy could have. A senior Russian official is reported to have said privately that until Americans see Russia as a genuine democracy with a rule of law, they will not respect or trust Russia. Why do Asian nations 65 years after the end of World War II continue to demand a Japanese apology for atrocities during the war? Why did President Sadat go to Jerusalem? • Second, since relationship is the unit of analysis, we need to teach a precisely defined concept of relationship. Relationship is a comprehensive human concept embracing five components: identity, interests, power, perceptions, interactions. The concept of relationship is both an analytical and an operational tool. • Third, the key to relationship is dialogue. Dialogue must supplement traditional diplomatic discourse. Dialogue is listening deeply and carefully enough to another person to be changed by what one hears. It is a demonstration of respect and openness to a constructive relationship. It enables participants to address the problem behind a problem—often a destructive or dysfunctional relationship that must be changed if the problem it causes is to be resolved. Albert Einstein warned that “a problem is rarely solved by the thinking that caused it.” That is why we must learn to probe the problem behind the problem. There are issues on which citizens outside government presently have more freedom to examine options and their consequences through dialogue than government officials now have through formal negotiation. How to make this resource available to governments on a routine basis is an idea that must be explored urgently and more concretely. The current Dartmouth Conference Task Force on the Russia-U.S. Relationship, for instance, has recommended to the Bilateral Presidential Commission the formation of “nonofficial preventive dialogues” on potential regional conflicts that could bring our countries into confrontation. Citizens not constrained by government positions and with no authority to speak for governments are free to examine contingencies and the possible responses to them in ways that governments cannot without tying their hands. • Fourth, dialogue when sustained systematically can become a process for transforming relationships. A carefully designed process of Sustained Dialogue has been developed and tested through almost three decades in 90 international dialogues. Each year some 1,000 students on college campuses participate in such dialogues. Perhaps a cadre of Foreign Service Officers should experiment with adding this process to their toolkits. Even if they did not, working with the something like the relational paradigm would help them internalize a new way of interacting with the world around them. * * * * * * * That is a large agenda. Starting with a new paradigm, mounting such an agenda will require a conscious overhaul of education for diplomacy in the 21st century in the universities as well as at the Foreign Service Institute. Nothing less will do the job. Now let me conclude by trying to connect with what you are feeling. I know that, in this room, I am speaking to men and women who have instinctively and presciently acted in the mode I describe because it is just human common sense. I can imagine you are thinking: “That’s what I spent my career doing.” Some of you may even be thinking: “That’s what Secretary Clinton’s article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs is all about. That’s what we are saying and doing.” I accept that. But IS that what our system—in government and out—is teaching and doing? We are all in some measure creatures of our upbringing—professional as well as personal. It’s not easy to change inbred mindsets. Yet changing our way of looking at the world is critical. Indeed, in my mind any theory of social change must begin with a change in mindset. Are we explicitly internalizing this new paradigm? Does the system enable us to live it? That is the challenge of preparing diplomats—indeed all Americans—to meet and conquer the challenges of the 21st century. And that must be the subject of a continuing conversation among us.
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