09 October 2008
British Fulbright Scholars Association Autumn Reception, 7 October 2008
Jack Straw has given a speech to scholars studying under the Fulbright programme, which promotes peace and understanding through international educational exchange.
[Check against delivery: this is the prepared text of the speech, and may differ from the delivered version.]
The Right Honourable Jack Straw MP, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice:
Introduction
During my time as Home Secretary, Leader of the House of Commons and now Justice Secretary, I have been granted an unusually privileged look at the 'guts' of Great Britain - the constitutional mechanics, the systems of governance, and the functioning of our parliamentary democracy. But over the five years in which I was Foreign Secretary, I also had the chance to visit a great number of countries and to see Britain through the eyes of others.
I regard this opportunity to view our country from both inside and out as a tremendous privilege. And I am grateful for the perspective it has given me on Britain's rich interconnections with the wider world.
Something which really came home to me during my time as Foreign Secretary was that international cooperation is as much about personal bonds and lasting friendships as it is about formal accords, bilateral agreements and memoranda of understanding.
I was particularly struck by the power of human interaction and relationships to heal division, to stimulate debate and even to change the path of a nation's history for the better.
This is, of course, the very reason the Fulbright Scholar Program was established just after the Second World War.
In my remarks this evening, I am going to argue that the raison d'être of the Fulbright Scholar Program - mutual, cross-cultural understanding - and the means of achieving it - foreign visits and exchanges - is at least as relevant at the beginning of the 21st Century as it was in 1946.
And I can think of no better occasion to speak to this theme than on the return of an illustrious group of Fulbright scholars from their year in the United States, and on the 60th anniversary of the UK-US Fulbright Commission.
Raison d'être of Fulbright Scholar Program
I'd like first to take a moment to pay tribute to Senator Fulbright - a truly remarkable and discerning man whose wisdom, experience and understanding enabled him to help define the United Nations, shape United States foreign policy and have a lasting influence on the field of international relations. Indeed, people still look to Senator Fulbright's writing for guidance and wisdom today.
Many of Senator Fulbright's qualities were formed and developed over the course of his impressive career. But as you will know, one of his most profound experiences was as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. These were three very formative years of his life - years during which he became convinced that if only people could get to know one another and exchange ideas, then they would be less willing and ready to exchange bullets and bombs.
These were, it seems, the first seeds for the programme that now bears his name.
Senator Fulbright's extraordinary vision was approved by Congress and signed into law by President Truman on the 1st of August 1946. The Fulbright Scholar Program is today world renowned and universally respected for the opportunity it gives young people to live in other countries and to gain insight and understanding into other ways of life.
As Alastair Cooke - a close friend of Fulbright's, and himself the epitome of Anglo-American understanding - observed, the aim must be to capture 'in the most vivid terms the passions, manners and flavour of another nation's way of life'.
And of course, the process is not simply one-way: it is mutual understanding - between individuals, institutions, leaders and future leaders - to which the Fulbright Scholar Program aspires.
At the time the programme was established, the need for cross-cultural, mutual understanding was both stark and immediate.Fulbright had himself witnessed the devastation caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and felt compelled towards this kind of international diplomacy as a means of preventing another World War.
He described the raison d'être of the educational exchange programme in this way [in The Price of Empire]:
'… the belief that international relations can be improved, and the danger of war significantly reduced, by producing generations of leaders, who through the experience of educational exchange, will have acquired some feeling and understanding of other peoples' cultures - why they operate as they do, why they think as they do, why they react as they do - and of the differences among these cultures. It is possible … that people can find in themselves, through intercultural education, the ways and means of living together in peace.'
Relevance of foreign exchanges today
It is true that since the Fulbright Scholar Program was brought into being - and even since I was a student, which feels like not so long ago – we've seen changes of an astonishing degree.
Countries around the globe are increasingly connected in virtually all spheres of life, due to the international movement of ideas, communications, media, trade, capital and people.
This global connectedness has been driven by another significant development: the rapid advancement of technology and industry. The Prime Minister can now track me down at all hours of day and night, wherever I am, by mobile phone, BlackBerry and a host of other portable devices. Companies which did not exist a decade ago are now everyday verbs: we 'Skype', we 'Google', and we even 'Facebook'.
We live in an age where vast amounts of information and knowledge are at our fingertips, thanks to the likes of Google and its ilk.
As a younger man I was a keen scholar, or what you might - less charitably - call a 'nerd'. I would pass hours of blissful solitude in the House of Commons library, reading and researching. Naturally, this put me at a certain advantage over those of my colleagues for whom - unaccountably - the library held less allure. Such was the happy situation for many years until the advent of Google. But in the era of 'infobesity' - another new term I heard coined recently - my colleagues can sit at their desktops, effortlessly accessing the same information and much more besides.
The opportunities we have today would have been completely inconceivable in 1946.
One might suppose that in these times of progress - of instant communication, of immediate access to information, of technological innovation - Senator Fulbright's goal would become of diminishing importance.
After all, if we can learn all the facts about a country online, if people of a dozen different nationalities can hold a single conversation over the internet, does not the idea of flying across the globe to get to know someone seem rather antiquated?
Not in the least. The need for foreign exchanges as a way of gaining insight and understanding into the peoples of other nations is by no means diminished by the fact that we now benefit from telecommunications and a knowledge economy.
I say this for two reasons.
First, because there is a danger that as communication becomes easier and information becomes more accessible, there is less incentive for real interaction, and we in fact gain a false sense of proximity to other nations.
There is an astonishing richness to human interaction which electronic communications inevitably, to some degree or other, miss out on - a gesture, the subtlest change in tone of voice, the corner of someone's mouth lifting in a smile, or the furrowing of their brow in a frown. This is why no number of emails, or text messages, or photographs provides a real substitute for time spent in another's company.
But such is the convenience of virtual communication that we risk, without fully realising, a gradual forfeiting of genuine understanding for something much more superficial.
And secondly, the need for foreign exchanges is not diminished because knowing about a person or a people is not the same as understanding them.
The World Wide Web makes it very easy to know all about the population of the country - its cultural traditions, its demographics, its geographical distribution - but to know the character of a people is something entirely different.
Philosophers have long complained that the English verb, 'to know', conflates a number of discrete notions. Painful as it may be to admit, the French tongue has one over the language of Shakespeare in this regard: distinguishing, as it does, 'connaître' - knowing someone, being familiar with them - from 'savoir' - knowing a fact, knowing about someone or something.
This fundamental distinction is why even in the age of videoconferencing, businessmen insist on taking the time and expense to travel halfway around the world to meet someone in person before making a deal.
So in the early part of the 21st Century - just as in the postwar period - foreign travel and exchanges have no substitute as a means of achieving cross-cultural understanding.
Understanding - the basis for honest debate
I want now to take a step back to ask what may seem something of a stupid question. Why is cross-cultural understanding taken axiomatically to be a good thing?
Is it simply that it allows us to say 'live and let live', 'you do your thing and I'll do mine'? Something like this reasoning is implicit in talk of overcoming differences, and in the view that tolerance and acceptance are the cardinal virtues.
Now, I don't want to deny that tolerance is, ceteris paribus [other things being equal], a good quality. But I do want to deny that it is the principal goal of international diplomacy and cross-cultural understanding. Rather, I suggest that the importance of understanding and respect derives from the fact that they form the basis for full and honest debate about our differences.
And I happen to think that William Fulbright - whose Senate career was marked by instances of principled dissent - would have agreed with this sentiment.
In a world as interconnected as the one we live in today, we are not always in a position just to agree to disagree with other countries. Some issues in international policy force themselves upon us. Nations cannot choose completely to 'opt out' of the international community and global development.
The key here is to resist the temptation to regard those who disagree with you as somehow 'other' - to abstract away their humanity, and to reduce them to nothing more than their dissenting opinion.
This is precisely what Senator Fulbright grasped, and expressed so eloquently:
'Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication to the humanizing of international relations. Man's capacity for decent behaviour seems to vary directly with his perception of others as individual humans with human motives and feelings, whereas his capacity for barbarism seems related to his perception of an adversary in abstract terms, as the embodiment, that is, of some evil design or ideology.'
This point is, I think, well understood. But what some fail to grasp is that avoiding argument and debate over differences of opinion is not a way of respecting others. Quite the contrary: such a position is as disrespectful and devaluing of our shared humanity as it is naïve, failing as it does to take seriously the different views we hold.
Relevance of mutual understanding today
I hope I have shown that foreign travel and exchanges as a means of achieving understanding is just as germane, just as relevant in the age of 'infobesity' as they were after the Second World War.
But I am also convinced that Senator Fulbright's aim of realising cross-cultural, mutual understanding - of the sort that stimulates honest dialogue - is at least as, if not more, fundamental to the 21st Century as it was to the postwar period.
This is because mutual understanding and enlightened relationships between the people of different nations is a critical part of our endeavour to forge a new global identity for the 21st Century.
Sixty years ago, when the Fulbright Scholar Program was established, the community of nations was held together by promises, pacts and treaties, and embodied in the young United Nations. At the beginning of my lifetime - in the aftermath of World War II - countries were casting peace in a crucible. In many respects, it was a story of nations looking within themselves to ensure that the atrocities of the deadliest war in human history could never be repeated.
The Book of Remembrance and the Eternal Flame in the foyer of this building - dedicated to the memory of Metropolitan Police Officers and staff who lost their lives in the two World Wars - is a constant reminder of the devastation caused by that conflict.
Sixty years ago, the Fulbright Scholar Program was borne out of necessity, out of the desperate desire to avoid another tragedy. It was established more in the hope of preventing harm than making positive progress.
But 60 years later, the global community is in a process of transformation. National borders, identities and passports are less significant than they ever have been. International relations extend far beyond the formal ties of diplomacy. And the United Nations is no longer the only glue which holds countries together.
Instead, the international community is increasingly characterised by shared experience, mutual understanding and common interest. Countries are beginning to mould international personae, alongside their domestic identities. And just as our individual characters are, in large part, defined by our relationships with those around us; our global identities are defined by our relations with other nations.
The role of Fulbright scholars
This means that your time as Fulbright Scholars is of enormous consequence. In however small a way, you - in the relationships you have formed abroad and in your future roles as intellectual, political, scientific and cultural leaders - are shaping our new global identity.
A new global identity requires global leaders - not just presidents and prime ministers who govern a country and rule the world, but ordinary people in business, in the arts, in education who can share their ordinary experiences and can operate on a scale which transcends their parochial interests.
Governments can cooperate. Politicians can exchange good ideas and sign agreements. But global leaders are people who can view the world in a wider sense, who can help it to become a smaller, safer and more constructive place by sharing their passions, their ideas and their experiences.
And a global identity requires global leadership, of a kind in which countries act together to resolve global challenges - from eradicating poverty and tackling emerging crimes, to reducing the pressures of climate change - and to seize with firm hands new global opportunities.
So you - Fulbright scholars and alumni - have a great privilege and a great responsibility.
We look to you to develop your chosen fields - whether they are the arts, sciences, politics, or business - whilst straddling the globe with confidence as ambassadors for unity and progress.
I only ask that you show a little more commitment to your fields than did the journalist come playwright Tom Stoppard. In his early days as a journalist, Stoppard was interviewed by the editor for a job with the Evening Standard. On his CV he had listed 'politics' as one of his interests. 'Who is the current Home Secretary?' asked the editor. 'I said I was interested,' replied Stoppard, 'I didn't say I was obsessed'.
Thank you.