U.S. Diplomacy Urged To Tandem With Faith

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IDN

“Diplomats trained in my era were taught not to invite trouble. And no subject seemed more inherently treacherous than religion.” – Madeleine Albright

By Ernest Corea

IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

WASHINGTON DC (IDN) – The existence of a “God gap” which is said to diminish American foreign policy was recently reported here, and immediately demonstrated that attempting to infuse foreign policy with religious outreach can be a complicated exercise.

The catch-phrase “God gap” did not take full and proper account of two major religions, and could well have irritated followers of both.

Hinduism, with millions of adherents around the world, recognizes not a single god, but a pantheon. Buddhism, another major religion, does not acknowledge the existence of a god at all. In treading the religion/foreign policy path, one has to tip-toe carefully.

As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has pointed out: “Diplomats trained in my era were taught not to invite trouble. And no subject seemed more inherently treacherous than religion.”

TWO-YEAR STUDY

The journalistic shorthand of “God gap” was used to dramatise the thrust of a report, “Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy,” which is the product of a two-year study commissioned by the influential Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

President Barack Obama made his first major foreign policy address as a presidential candidate at the council. First Lady Michelle Obama is a member of its board of directors.

The report was produced by “a task force of thirty-two experts and stakeholders – former government officials, religious leaders, heads of international organizations, and scholars – to bring a diverse perspective to the debate over how to successfully engage religion on an international level.”

It was introduced to the public at Washington’s Georgetown University and was also presented to Joshua Dobbs, head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships.

No official comment was made by the White House but Dobbs has said that his office and national security staff “are working with agencies across government to analyse the ways the U.S. government engages key non-governmental actors, including religious institutions, around the globe.”

POTENT FORCE

The principles and policies laid out in Engaging Religious Communities Abroad rest on the assumption that religion has grown into a potent force in many areas of the world, affecting “virtually all sectors of society from politics and culture to business and science.”

Consequently, the authors of the report believe, the U.S. cannot reach some of its strategic goals — “including development objectives, conflict resolution, and the promotion of social and human rights” – unless their religious context is understood.

To meet this challenge, the U.S. has to develop “a far greater understanding of religion’s role in politics and society around the globe – including a detailed knowledge of religious communities, leaders, and trends – but it must move beyond traditional state-to-state relations to develop effective policies for engaging religious communities within and across nations.”

These thoughts are very much a reflection of what has been said in recent years about the need for Western society – primarily Judeo-Christian – to cultivate a greater awareness of Islam, its traditions, and influence.

The report acknowledges that “engaging Islam” is “a vital task and a laudable beginning.” Beyond that lies the greater challenge of “engaging the multitude of religious communities across the world as an integral part of our foreign policy.

“Without a more serious and thoughtful engagement with religion across a host of issues and actors, U.S. foreign policy will miss important opportunities.”

GOLDEN GHETTO

The case for foreign policy to be buttressed by global religious outreach has not been made before in quite this way.

The “weakness” that Engaging Religious Communities Abroad seeks to counter falls, nevertheless, within the cluster of complaints and criticisms concerning the perceived exclusiveness of American diplomatic staff serving abroad, their ignorance about the societies in which represent the U.S., and their insensitivity to local cultural norms and practices including language.

These criticisms have been made in various forms down the years, and most of them were captured in the runaway best-seller “The Ugly American” by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick just over half a century ago.

Lederer and Burdeck were scathing in their accounts of the introverted social and political life of diplomatic communities. At the social level, this led to diplomatic staff serving a tour in a foreign capital and, on their departure, knowing only about their own lives, loves, and laughter. They were, the authors suggested, practitioners and victims of “social incest in the golden ghetto.”

At a political level, such inbreeding led to bad assessments of local realities, unrealistic reports and recommendations for influencing policy in their home capital, and complete astonishment when departing diplomats finally discovered that their knowledge of local trends that could affect U.S. interests was, at best, minuscule, at worst, disastrously unrealistic.

Similarly, James Reston of the New York Times wrote in 1956 that “fifty percent of the entire foreign service officer corps do not have a speaking knowledge of any foreign language. Seventy percent of the new men coming into the foreign service are in the same state.”

FAR AHEAD

Much has changed since those and related comments were made.

There are holdouts, to be sure, who don’t even bother to learn the correct pronunciation of place names and first or family names of senior officials in the countries to which they are accredited.

Language capacity in the contemporary foreign service is, however, far ahead of what it was in the past, as is the emphasis on acquiring more than just a superficial knowledge of the society in which a diplomat serves. The foreign service, moreover, has grown immensely more diverse than it was when Lederer, Burdeck, Reston and others made their criticisms.

A few years ago, Teresita Schaffer, a foreign service officer who was serving as ambassador to Sri Lanka delivered a speech in impeccable Sinhala, a language that non-Sri Lankans find difficult to master, without an interpreter by her side.

The Sri Lankan president at that time was pleasantly shocked and instructed the state radio service to re-broadcast Schaffer’s speech. Radio service staff were so enthused that they repeated it every hour on the hour for most of the day.

CORE ELEMENT

What Engaging Religious Communities Abroad seeks, however, is more fundamental than a sharpening of knowledge and a change of attitudes. Its goal is to ensure that religious outreach is embedded in foreign policy, as a core element, not as an add-on.

When that has been achieved, the success of American diplomacy will be measured as much by strong inter-governmental contacts as by how effectively American diplomacy can “connect with the hundreds of millions of people throughout the world whose identity is defined by religion.”

And if it is not achieved? “America’s long history of influencing the international understanding of democracy and human rights will be compromised. The U.S. will be absent from crucial conversations about matters such as managing climate change and ensuring that the UN Millennium Development Goals are advanced. Opportunities for resolving conflict and building peace may be lost. Etc.”

It used to be said that if a soldier potentially carries a general’s swagger stick with him from the day of his recruitment, a novice diplomat carries an ambassador’s imaginary letters of credence in his briefcase. To this will now be added a collection of religious tracts – real not imagined.

In due course, no doubt, an enterprising composer will turn out a new hymn, “Onward, pamphlet-waving diplomats,” to replace the old “Onward Christian soldiers.”

PILGRIMAGES

Foreign policy by definition and experience is a state-to-state activity. Here is an online dictionary definition that encapsulates precept and practice: “A government’s policy relating to matters beyond its own jurisdiction: usually relations with other nations and international organisations. Used retrospectively, the sum of a leader or government’s dealings and relations with other nations.”

Foreign ministries that have worked by this or similar definitions down the years will now be surprised, in some cases, agitated, at the sight of their American guests making pilgrimages to local places of worship and seeking to break into diverse religious networks.

The mind simply boggles at the thought of the resident American ambassador calling on a Hindu high priest, paying traditional obeisance to him, then sitting at his feet and suggesting that they should work together at locating commonalities in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s most recent public statement and the priest’s most recent sermon.

The fact, of course, is that in many countries including the U.S. religious organizations and religious networks are among the power groups and pressure groups that exert an influence on the formulation of foreign policy.

Diplomats serving in the U.S. understand that and spend much time cultivating civil society organizations in home constituencies of influential senators and congressmen, and in speaking to church groups about the countries that they (the diplomats) represent. All this is informal, accepted as part of America’s rich tradition of diversity in discourse, and often an effective means of communication that eventually percolates into inter-state arrangements.

Turn this around, however, and insist that American diplomats make religious outreach the core of their responsibilities and host countries — most of which were encumbered by colonial rule for many years — will almost inevitably experience the visceral reaction that perceived expressions of neo-colonialism evoke.

Allegations of “unethical conversions” will quickly fill the air, and a previously calm atmosphere will be rent by the very lack of understanding that Engaging Religious Communities Abroad seeks to eliminate.

So, consider this: Trying to understand how the “other half” lives and learning to respect their beliefs is a noble pursuit. Substituting faith for policy, however, can be confusing and counterproductive. How about leaving inter-state matters to inter-state actors, the diplomats, and leaving religious outreach where it belongs – among compatible elements of civil society, reaching out to each other across air and sea? (IDN-InDepthNews/10.03.2010)

Copyright © 2010 IDN-InDepthNews | Analysis That Matters
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The writer has served as Sri Lanka’s ambassador to Canada, Cuba, Mexico, and the USA. He was Chairman of the Commonwealth Select Committee on the media and development, Editor of the Ceylon ‘Daily News’ and the Ceylon ‘Observer’, and was for a time Features Editor and Foreign Affairs columnist of the Singapore ‘Straits Times’. He is on the IDN editorial board.

This article appears in the writer’s regular column ‘Consider This’ in March 2010 issue of Global Perspectives (www.global-perspectives.info), a monthly magazine for international cooperation, produced by Global Cooperation Council — a non-governmental organisation campaigning for genuine cooperation and fair globalization — in partnership with IDN-InDepthNews.