Publications

2007

Written to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Center for International Affairs, Atkinson’s history of the Center’s first twenty-five years traces the institutional and intellectual development of a research center that, decades later, continues to facilitate innovative scholarship. He explores the connection between knowledge and politics, beginning with the Center’s confident first decade—distinguished by groundbreaking research and access to influential policy makers in Washington—and concludes with the second decade, which found the CFIA embroiled in the turbulence of Vietnam-era student protests.

Digging deep into unpublished material in the Harvard, MIT, and Kennedy Library archives, the book is punctuated with personal interviews with influential CFIA affiliates. Atkinson describes the relationship between foreign policy and scholarship during the cold war and documents the maturation of a remarkable academic institution. Notwithstanding Harvard’s initial reticence, the CFIA has endured for half a century and ultimately has grown into the largest international affairs research center in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

This book was published to coincide with the celebration of the Center for International Affairs 50th anniversary.

Emmanuel K. Akyeampong, a social historian of Africa, helped to establish the African Public Broadcasting Foundation to generate television, radio, and Internet programming that would be accessible to ordinary Africans.

A partnership between academic researchers and African broadcasters and producers, the foundation plans to create programming on topics ranging from health and nutrition to democracy and economic development to the impact of African music on jazz.

"The continent most in need of knowledge has been the continent most deprived of knowledge," said Akyeampong, one of the noted innovators from the Boston area slated to speak Thursday at IDEAS Boston 2007, a conference that celebrates innovation across multiple disciplines.

The conference, first organized by the Boston Globe in 2004, resumes at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston after a one-year hiatus during which it was restructured as a nonprofit venture and broadened its roster of sponsors. This year's event will run for a single day, rather than two, and will introduce a fresh cast of innovators in fields ranging from music to physics and architecture to cell biology.

It also features the return of Deborah Henson-Conant, an internationally known musician and performance artist based in Boston. Her participation at the 2005 IDEAS conference led to a series called "Inviting Invention" in which she asked scientists, dancers, and innovators from other fields to appear with her in joint performances. In some, she played the harp while scientists conducted experiments onstage.

"I was totally inspired by the last event," Henson-Conant said. "I would say it was life-changing for me."

But the event will retain the same spirit and approach as the first two IDEAS gatherings, said conference director Kathy Plazak. Unlike industry and academic forums organized around narrow themes, IDEAS showcases emerging concepts, breakthroughs, and Boston-area researchers, performers, and entrepreneurs in a variety of fields.

"It continues the tradition of bringing together the great thinkers connected with this region," Plazak said. "The approach is to highlight cutting-edge thinking and share ideas across cultures. Innovation often happens when ideas are shared or adapted from other cultures. It's a very intellectual cross-disciplinary brainstorming."

This year's IDEAS conference, again moderated by Tom Ashbrook, host of National Public Radio's "On Point" news-talk show, will have an international flavor. Among the speakers will be Akyeampong, a Harvard University professor of history and African studies; David C. Kang, an expert on the history and politics of China and North Korea; and, Bisola Ojikutu, director of international programs at Harvard Medical School's AIDS division.

Sponsors of Thursday's conference are the Boston Foundation, Partners Healthcare, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, Longworth Venture Partners, Plymouth Rock Assurance, McDermott Ventures, Business Wire, and Conventures. Its media partners are The Boston Globe, WCVB-TV, and 90.9 WBUR.

The miscarriage of justice at Jena, La.—where five black high school students arrested for beating a white student were charged with attempted murder—and the resulting protest march tempts us to the view, expressed by several of the marchers, that not much has changed in traditional American racial relations. However, a remarkable series of high-profile incidents occurring elsewhere in the nation at about the same time, as well as the underlying reason for the demonstrations themselves, make it clear that the Jena case is hardly a throwback to the 1960s, but instead speaks to issues that are very much of our times.

What exactly attracted thousands of demonstrators to the small Louisiana town? While for some it was a simple case of righting a grievous local injustice, and for others an opportunity to relive the civil rights era, for most the real motive was a long overdue cry of outrage at the use of the prison system as a means of controlling young black men.

America has more than two million citizens behind bars, the highest absolute and per capita rate of incarceration in the world. Black Americans, a mere 13 percent of the population, constitute half of this country’s prisoners. A tenth of all black men between ages 20 and 35 are in jail or prison; blacks are incarcerated at over eight times the white rate.

The effect on black communities is catastrophic: one in three male African-Americans in their 30s now has a prison record, as do nearly two-thirds of all black male high school dropouts. These numbers and rates are incomparably greater than anything achieved at the height of the Jim Crow era. What’s odd is how long it has taken the African-American community to address in a forceful and thoughtful way this racially biased and utterly counterproductive situation.

How, after decades of undeniable racial progress, did we end up with this virtual gulag of racial incarceration?

Part of the answer is a law enforcement system that unfairly focuses on drug offenses and other crimes more likely to be committed by blacks, combined with draconian mandatory sentencing and an absurdly counterproductive retreat from rehabilitation as an integral method of dealing with offenders. An unrealistic fear of crime that is fed in part by politicians and the press, a tendency to emphasize punitive measures and old-fashioned racism are all at play here.

But there is another equally important cause: the simple fact that young black men commit a disproportionate number of crimes, especially violent crimes, which cannot be attributed to judicial bias, racism or economic hardships. The rate at which blacks commit homicides is seven times that of whites.

Why is this? Several incidents serendipitously occurring at around the same time as the march on Jena hint loudly at a possible answer.

  • In New York City, the tabloids published sensational details of the bias suit brought by a black former executive for the Knicks, Anucha Browne Sanders, who claims that she was frequently called a “bitch” and a “ho” by the Knicks coach and president, Isiah Thomas. In a video deposition, Thomas said that while it is always wrong for a white man to verbally abuse a black woman in such terms, it was “not as much…I’m sorry to say” for a black man to do so.
  • Across the nation, religious African-Americans were shocked that the evangelical minister Juanita Bynum, an enormously popular source of inspiration for churchgoing black women, said she was brutally beaten in a parking lot by her estranged husband, Bishop Thomas Weeks.
  • O. J. Simpson, the malevolent central player in an iconic moment in the nation’s recent black-white (as well as male-female) relations, reappeared on the scene, charged with attempted burglary, kidnapping and felonious assault in Las Vegas, in what he claimed was merely an attempt to recover stolen memorabilia.

These events all point to something that has been swept under the rug for too long in black America: the crisis in relations between men and women of all classes and, as a result, the catastrophic state of black family life, especially among the poor. Isiah Thomas’s outrageous double standard shocked many blacks in New York only because he had the nerve to say out loud what is a fact of life for too many black women who must daily confront indignity and abuse in hip-hop misogyny and everyday conversation.

What is done with words is merely the verbal end of a continuum of abuse that too often ends with beatings and spousal homicide. Black relationships and families fail at high rates because women increasingly refuse to put up with this abuse. The resulting absence of fathers—some 70 percent of black babies are born to single mothers—is undoubtedly a major cause of youth delinquency.

The circumstances that far too many African-Americans face—the lack of paternal support and discipline; the requirement that single mothers work regardless of the effect on their children’s care; the hypocritical refusal of conservative politicians to put their money where their mouths are on family values; the recourse by male youths to gangs as parental substitutes; the ghetto-fabulous culture of the streets; the lack of skills among black men for the jobs and pay they want; the hypersegregation of blacks into impoverished inner-city neighborhoods—all interact perversely with the prison system that simply makes hardened criminals of nonviolent drug offenders and spits out angry men who are unemployable, unreformable and unmarriageable, closing the vicious circle.

Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and other leaders of the Jena demonstration who view events there, and the racial horror of our prisons, as solely the result of white racism are living not just in the past but in a state of denial. Even after removing racial bias in our judicial and prison system—as we should and must do—disproportionate numbers of young black men will continue to be incarcerated.

Until we view this social calamity in its entirety—by also acknowledging the central role of unstable relations among the sexes and within poor families, by placing a far higher priority on moral and social reform within troubled black communities, and by greatly expanding social services for infants and children—it will persist.

TEHRAN—It was during a recent visit to a middle-class beauty salon here, amid the women getting their upper lips threaded and their legs waxed, that I saw what the One Million Signature Campaign is up against. A female volunteer approached another customer and encouraged her to sign a petition, which organizers hope to submit to Iran's parliament along with a request for legal reforms on gender equality. The woman said she supported the demands for equality but shied away from what she considered overt political activity against the regime.

The campaign against gender discrimination is encountering resistance on multiple fronts.

Activists gave themselves two years to collect a million signatures, but tomorrow, the campaign's one-year anniversary, they will not have more than 100,000 to report. But unlike other human rights movements battling repressive regimes, which have traditionally looked to the West for a lifeline, Iran's activists are adamant that for all the gratitude they may feel for their Western supporters, they would prefer that we keep our distance. Their efforts offer a fascinating window on how one aspect of the Iranian democracy movement is struggling to survive in a period of growing government repression and paranoia.

The campaign for the million signatures was born after the arrest of 70 women who staged a demonstration against gender discrimination last year in Tehran's Haft-e-Tir Square. Nine of those women were convicted on charges of "endangering national security" and face lengthy prison sentences, beatings with whips and, in some cases, both. (They are free pending appeal.) The crackdown prompted Iranian women's rights activists to embark on a new strategy based on quiet campaigning, face-to-face organizing—and disavowing any Western help.

With extraordinary tenacity, the activists seek out all possible venues in which to gather support without incurring the wrath of the Ahmadinejad regime. They collect signatures not just in beauty salons but in living rooms and parks, on street corners and at bus stops. In Tehran, they have assembled and trained at least 400 volunteers through private parties at organizers' homes, over popcorn and watermelon.

Yet for all the campaign's efforts to elude government attention—and to disown any connection with the West—the regime has been aware of and has reacted to the activists. In March, 34 members were arrested in front of Tehran's Revolutionary Court, where they had gathered in solidarity for their nine convicted colleagues. Over the past year, 13 others involved in the campaign have been arrested. The campaign's Web site—a key tool in a country that lacks an independent media—has routinely been blocked. Members repeatedly have been denied permission to assemble in public places.

The regime aims to paralyze the movement by instilling fear. Even so, many women are undeterred.

"The regime wants to scare us. But we won't let them win. When they push, we resist," Parvin Ardalan, a journalist who was one of the nine convicted in March, told me this month. She is appealing her three-year sentence.

Despite all the institutional repression, perhaps the trickiest issue for organizers is their relationship with the West. In recent months, a number of prominent Iranian Americans with Western passports—such as Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh—have been charged with conspiring against the Iranian government. Political leaders increasingly voiced charges of a "velvet revolution conspiracy," allegedly aimed at toppling the government and backed by "lackeys of the West."

The omens aren't good. Already, the country's intelligence minister has described the movement as comprised of "elements of soft subversion"—an unsubtle attempt to link them to foreigners. In public statements and in conversations with prospective signers, campaign activists emphasize their Iranian roots and their respect for Islam—if only to avoid giving the regime an excuse to discredit them. "What hurts the most is hearing people who claim to be for democracy and reform accuse us of being tools of the West," said Parastoo Alahyaari, a computer engineer and campaign member. "We want to prove that we can do this on our own."

Financial independence is also important. The movement raises funds through documented membership dues and donations and explicitly states on its Web site that it does not accept financial or other support from organizations or governments. Volunteers are asked to strictly adhere to this rule.

"Our regime has phobia," Nobel Peace Prize winner and campaign advocate Shirin Ebadi told me at her Tehran office. "When people talk about human rights they get immediately accused of being with America. But we are Iranian and want to work for our rights…And we know we are doing something right because we are being persecuted." About aid from the West, Ebadi was just as firm. "No money. Never."

Toft, Monica Duffy. 2007. “Getting Religion? The Puzzling Case of Islam and Civil War.” International Security. International Security. Publisher's Version Abstract
In this article I argue that overlapping historical, geographical, and, in particular, structural factors account for Islam’s higher representation in religious civil wars. Together, the historical absence of an internecine religious war similar to the Thirty Years’ War in Europe (1618–48), the geographic proximity of Islam’s holiest sites to Israel and large petroleum reserves, and jihad—a structural feature of Islam—explain why so many civil wars include Islamic participants.
Ashbrook, Tom, and Peggy Levitt. 2007. “Immigration in America, Now”. Publisher's Version Abstract

“For a nation of immigrants, America has always had a complicated relationship with immigration. Some came in splendor, some came in chains, and everything in between.

In the half century since Ellis Island closed, immigration and the immigrant experience have changed massively, again. Do we still want to absorb? Do they still want to assimilate? Are we open to a permanent underclass? In a globalized world, do immigrants ever really leave the old country?

This hour On Point: the realities of the new American immigrant experience.”

Show's guests:

  • Jim Pethokoukis, senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
  • Ruben Rumbaut, sociology professor at University of California Irvine and author of Immigrant America: A Portrait
  • Hector Tobar, Mexico City bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times and author of Translation Nation
  • Peggy Levitt, sociology professor at Wellesley College and author of God Needs No Passport

Peggy Levitt is a Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Associate; Faculty Co-Director, Transnational Studies Initiative and Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Wellesley College. Her new book, God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape, will be published by The New Press in June.

Ashbrook, Tom, and Peggy Levitt. 2007. “Immigration in America, Now”. Publisher's Version Abstract

“For a nation of immigrants, America has always had a complicated relationship with immigration. Some came in splendor, some came in chains, and everything in between.

In the half century since Ellis Island closed, immigration and the immigrant experience have changed massively, again. Do we still want to absorb? Do they still want to assimilate? Are we open to a permanent underclass? In a globalized world, do immigrants ever really leave the old country?

This hour On Point: the realities of the new American immigrant experience.”

Show's guests:

  • Jim Pethokoukis, senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
  • Ruben Rumbaut, sociology professor at University of California Irvine and author of Immigrant America: A Portrait
  • Hector Tobar, Mexico City bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times and author of Translation Nation
  • Peggy Levitt, sociology professor at Wellesley College and author of God Needs No Passport

Peggy Levitt is a Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Associate; Faculty Co-Director, Transnational Studies Initiative and Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Wellesley College. Her new book, God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape, will be published by The New Press in June.

First they come to America. Then they start changing the world.

It was a puzzling sight: Young women walking in the 80–degree heat, wearing boots and long-sleeved sweaters.

I first saw this in 1992, when I traveled to a village in the south of the Dominican Republic called Miraflores to do research about migration. At the time, at least three–quarters of the 5,000 households in Miraflores had relatives living in the Boston area. And it was this geographic connection, it turned out, that explained the women's choice of clothing. During the winter months in Boston, the women heard, boots and sweaters are fashionable, so they wanted to dress that way too.

What I saw in the Dominican Republic was just a small sign of a powerful phenomenon that has been overlooked in the great debate over this nation's immigration policy. The debate, which is now consuming Washington, has focused largely on the domestic effects of immigration, and particularly on money—on the economic costs and benefits here at home. There has been some discussion of "remittances," the billions of dollars that migrants send back each year to start businesses, build roads, or fund medical care—money that is hailed as the new antidote to underdevelopment. But immigrants also send back social remittances: New ideas from America, and about America, that are changing societies around the world in ways that are far more profound than winter fashions.

Although we usually think of immigration in terms of what immigrants bring to our shores, immigration has in fact become one of America's most effective tools for spreading national values beyond our borders. Immigrants who maintain close ties to their home countries, far from being a threat to American society, are often, in effect, our development workers, sending skills and ideas about good governance, diversity, and equality back to their homelands. They are also our diplomats. They talk about their experiences in the United States, overcoming ignorance and suspicion among people in the countries they come from. And immigrants, having seen what is possible, can be forceful, grass-roots advocates for change.

All across the world, there are migrant hometown committees, made up of immigrants and people who remain behind, that raise money to fund social services and public works projects back home. For example, there are now around 3,000 of these hometown committees working with Mexican immigrants in the United States, according to the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

These committees have become increasingly assertive. They demand that projects be managed openly and fairly, so that everyone knows where the money is going. They require that contracts go to the lowest bidder, not the local power broker. In Miraflores, for example, the committee has raised so much money and become so influential that it was able to pressure the government to pave the village's sidewalks and roads.

Immigrants are also challenging long-standing social inequalities. After hearing stories about how men and women relate to each other in the United States, many young women in Miraflores said that they wanted to spend their lives with someone who would help around the house and take their opinions seriously "like American men do" (an idea some American women might question). These women had also seen women who ran their own businesses and managed their own money in the United States, and so they pressed for that as well.

Even painful experiences in the United States can bring about positive changes. Before migrating, many people from Governador Valadares, in the eastern state of Minas Gerais in Brazil, considered themselves near the top of the Brazilian racial hierarchy. When they arrived in the United States, they quickly realized that Americans often treated them as people of color. This direct experience of prejudice inspired some to tell people back home to treat their darker-skinned neighbors more fairly.

Social remittances also contribute to improvements in education and healthcare. In the small villages outside of Governador Valadares, many people now take for granted ideas that were once foreign: that children should finish high school and newborns should be vaccinated. Why? Because that is what their relatives living in Framingham told them to do. Pakistani and Indian doctors change health behavior by taking time off from their visits home to provide free medical care and by talking to their patients about nutrition and prenatal care. Delegations of Pakistani businessmen and engineers go back each year to speak to ministry officials about labor and education, suggesting changes in the ways the state does business.

How religion is practiced is affected too. Pakistani women tell their relatives that they pray in the same room as their Muslim brothers in the United States, and that they are actively involved in running the mosque. While some women back in Karachi aren't interested, because they consider it their special privilege to pray at home, others are intrigued by the idea of women participating in communal prayers. Their efforts to carve out a new space for women in the Islamic community and to experiment with new rituals creates a wider range of religious alternatives in Pakistan and builds bridges to other Muslim women around the world.

This is not to say that everything that migrants observe and send back is positive. Young people, for example, hear about those who work hard and honestly to get ahead, and others who advance by beating the system. Both strategies have their fans. There are the obvious fears, among people back home, that the flow of ideas from America devalues family, emphasizes materialism, and encourages moral and sexual permissiveness. And the United States is far from a perfect model—witness Hurricane Katrina, the flawed presidential election in 2000, or police brutality in Los Angeles.

And yet, when it comes to the debate about immigration, our focus on economics, and in particular the economic impact in the United States, is far too narrow. Ideas and values matter. Immigrants bring ideas to this country, making our society richer. And they send ideas back, enriching and improving their home countries. Anti–Americanism is at an all–time high, in part because we are waging a war in Iraq to spread values that immigrants spread peacefully. The stories our immigrants tell every day give America a more human face—and an image boost we sorely need.

Peggy Levitt is a Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Associate; Faculty Co-Director, Transnational Studies Initiative and Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Wellesley College. Her new book, God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape, will be published by The New Press in June.

The long-term survival of Israel as a Jewish-majority state, giving political expression to the national identity of the Jewish people, depends on negotiating a fair two-state solution that establishes an independent, viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with its capital in East Jerusalem. Early return to the negotiating table is not a favor to the Palestinians, but an urgent requirement for protecting the vital interests of both peoples.

Under the circumstances, it is counterproductive to impose conditions on Palestinian negotiating partners that are unbalanced, unrealistic, and unnecessary. The three conditions that have been set—recognition of Israel's right to exist, renunciation of violence, and acceptance of prior agreements—are in themselves not unreasonable. Israel cannot be expected to sign an agreement with a partner who does not recognize its right to exist and hence is not committed to ending the conflict; violence contributes to creating an environment that is not conducive to constructive negotiations, and failure to live up to past agreements helps to erode the trust that negotiations require. But if the goal is to promote negotiations, application of these conditions must be guided by the principles of flexibility and reciprocity.

Flexibility in the requirement of Palestinian recognition of Israel relates primarily to the issue of timing. Thus, it is not necessary for Hamas to take the ideologically difficult step of recognizing Israel's right to exist in order for Israel to begin negotiations with a Palestinian unity government, even though such recognition is necessary to conclude a negotiated agreement. Experience suggests that engagement in a serious negotiation process is, in fact, one of the best ways to promote such an ideological shift. In the meantime, the implied recognition represented by Hamas's willingness to negotiate with Israel can move the process forward.

On the issue of renunciation of violence, the key requirement is a commitment by the Palestinian negotiating partner to make every effort to prevent acts of violence. It would be a mistake, however, to make the start or continuation of negotiations contingent on the total elimination of any incidence of violence. Such an inflexible application of this condition for negotiations would hand to the anti negotiation elements the power to block or derail negotiations at will.

As for the third condition, Hamas seems to have met it implicitly by agreeing to “respect” previous agreements, along with international and Arab resolutions. A rigid insistence that Hamas make this concession explicit—admitting, in effect, that it has changed its ideological position—would create an unnecessary impediment to the restart of negotiations. It would be much wiser to accept a degree of ambiguity and leave it to the dynamics of the negotiating process to overcome the ideological resistances.

Along with the need for flexibility in their application, the conditions for negotiations must adhere scrupulously to the principle of reciprocity. Reciprocity is an essential ingredient of a negotiating process that addresses the needs and interests of both parties and can therefore yield an agreement conducive to a stable, lasting peace, mutually enhancing cooperation, and ultimate reconciliation between the two peoples. Furthermore, the principle of reciprocity provides a sound basis for assessing the reasonableness and appropriateness of preconditions: Israel should be prepared to adhere to the same conditions that are being set for its Palestinian negotiating partners.

Thus, Palestinian commitment to end the conflict and recognition of Israel's right to exist in peace and security have to be matched by Israeli commitment to end the occupation and recognition of the Palestinians' right to establish an independent, viable state in the West Bank and Gaza, with its capital in East Jerusalem, living peacefully and securely alongside of Israel. Palestinian commitments to forgo violence must be matched by parallel Israeli undertakings, such as a pledge to maintain a cease-fires and to discontinue military incursions into the occupied territories. Palestinian acceptance of past agreements and commitment to live up to them must be matched by an Israeli commitment to live up to past agreements, such as the understanding—implicit in the Oslo accord and explicit in the road map—that there would be no further building and expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The precise wording of these reciprocal conditions will have to be prenegotiated, perhaps with the facilitation of one or another third party. But the general rule is clear: If negotiations are to be constructive and conducive to a mutually satisfactory outcome, they must be based on the principle of reciprocity. Neither party can ask the other to negotiate under conditions that it is itself unwilling to accept.

Herbert C. Kelman is a Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He is also Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Emeritus, Department of Psychology, Harvard University.

Relations between the United States and Russia have hit their lowest point since the Cold War. Just last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States of igniting a global arms race and blasted those “who want to dictate their will to all others regardless of international norms and law”—a comment clearly aimed at the United States. That comes on top of Putin's remarks earlier this spring, in which he appeared to liken the United States to Germany's Third Reich. Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that Russia, at times, “seems to think and act in the zero-sum terms of another era.”

This growing tension has real and dangerous implications for US security: Washington is struggling to get Russia's help in sanctioning Iran for its nuclear program—one of the top American defense priorities. If we in the United States want that help, we need to offer something in return.

The latest International Atomic Energy Agency report paints a bleak picture: Iran is making faster progress than expected toward uranium enrichment. And our options are limited. A military attack against Iran not only would fail to stop an Iranian bomb, but it also would add to our difficulties in Iraq and the Muslim world more generally. Clearly, robust UN sanctions against Iran offer the best possible chance of persuading Iran to give up or at least slow down its plan to enrich uranium as part of its nuclear program.

But diplomatic efforts to tighten UN sanctions on Iran's nuclear program can only succeed if Russia agrees not to wield its veto in the Security Council. Russia is torn between its interests in non proliferation, its commercial interests in trade (including equipment for nuclear reactors), and its irritation with the United States.

The latest spark for disagreement between the United States and Russia is the American plan to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe. The Bush administration argues that the missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic will help counter Iran and do not endanger Russian security. Technically, that is correct. Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have both pointed out that Russian missiles and decoys could easily swamp our defensive systems.

But the Russians see the situation differently, with Putin accusing the United States of “filling Eastern Europe with new weapons.” They object to the political symbolism of the US advance into former Soviet satellites, and also worry that someday our technological capabilities can develop the system as a threat to Russia. Our efforts to convince Russia otherwise have been fruitless.

Yet these tensions also create an opportunity. We should offer Russia a grand bargain: We would delay our plans for missile defense in Eastern Europe, while the Russians would agree to back stronger sanctions against Iran.

Since our technology is not fully developed and Iran is not on the brink of having long range missiles that can accommodate nuclear warheads, we could afford to offer Russia a delay in deployment while we engage in broader discussions of our military relationship. At the same time, since an Iranian nuclear weapon will undercut Russian security, and Russia has already offered to provide enrichment services to Iran if the Iranians forgo their own enrichment program, Russia might find the bargain tempting.

Critics might worry that we would give away too much. But we can afford to buy ourselves a little time. It's not likely that Iran could develop missiles capable of reaching Europe or the United States for at least a decade. Therefore, we can take our best shot at blocking Iran's nuclear ambitions without compromising our immediate security.

The United States clearly intends for any missile defense in Eastern Europe to protect against Iran, as well as any other hostile states. But we have the opportunity right now to prevent Iran from getting the nuclear bomb we're trying to defend ourselves against. By striking a deal with Russia to support sanctions against Iran, we would get a chance to make our strongest bid yet to prevent Iran from becoming the newest nuclear state. Everything else should be second to that goal. Although the administration will be reluctant to alter its missile defense plans, Rice often speaks of transformational diplomacy. What better example than for Bush to suggest this bargain to Putin when they meet at Kennebunkport this summer?

Joseph S. Nye Jr., is a Faculty Associate and Executive Committee member of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He is also Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations, John F. Kennedy School of Government, and University Distinguished Service Professor, Harvard University and author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics.

Levitt, Peggy. 2007. “The Global in the Local.” Boston Globe Magazine. Publisher's Version

In Vichy France, there were few diversions; among them were Hollywood musicals and comedies, such as those starring Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, which helped lift the spirits of French audiences. One great success was Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the story of a decent, average citizen who unexpectedly finds himself in the U.S. Senate, where he stubbornly persists in his ultimately victorious fight against a corrupt group in power. Although they controlled much of daily life, the German occupiers could not stop the French audiences from identifying with James Stewart as Mr. Smith. “They came to applaud,” says Stanley Hoffmann, who as a young boy was among those applauding.

Now 78 years old, Hoffmann has been, since 1997, Buttenwieser University Professor; he ranks as one of the world’s preeminent authorities on international relations, with specialties in French politics and history and American foreign policy. He has written 18 books and countless articles, including, since 1978, regular essays in the New York Review of Books. Having taught at Harvard since 1955, Hoffmann also founded what is now the University’s Gunzburg Center for European Studies (where his recorded voice greets callers) and was among those who created the social-studies concentration in the College. “He probably holds the record for the greatest number of different courses taught in Harvard’s Core curriculum,” says Bass professor of government Michael Sandel, who has known Hoffmann for more than 30 years, taught a course on globalization with him, and calls him a “towering figure. Stanley has voracious intellectual interests and a range of knowledge of politics, history, and culture that is unrivaled in the academic world, as far as I know.”

Rarely does a scholar’s life show such an intimate connection between personal experiences and academic pursuits as Hoffmann’s does. “It wasn’t I who chose to study world politics,” he wrote in a memoir published in a 1993 festschrift, Ideas and Ideals: Essays on Politics in Honor of Stanley Hoffmann.“World politics forced themselves on me at a very early age.”

Born in Vienna in 1928, he grew up in the early 1930s in Nice, France, with his Austrian mother (his distant American father returned to the States and had scant contact with his son thereafter). “Nice was filled with foreigners,” he recalls. “Russian émigrés, people from Central Europe who had retired to the Riviera.” In 1936 Hoffmann mère et fils moved to Paris. “My mother thought the schools would be tougher there,” Hoffmann says. “She was right. For me, it was like moving from paradise to purgatory: the sky was gray, there was no sea, and Hitler was beginning to spread his wings.” On May 10, 1940, acute appendicitis afflicted the boy just as the radio reported the German attack on Belgium, Holland, and France. “I was under the knife in between air raid sirens,” he wrote.

Hoffmann was baptized at birth as a Protestant, but his anti-clerical mother’s family fit the Nazi racial definition of Jews, and so the two of them, essentially stateless people, fled Paris. “My mother and I were two small dots in that incredible and mindless mass of ten million people clogging the roads of France,” he wrote. They finally reached Lamalou-les-bains, a tiny spa in Languedoc—and then, as the school year began, they returned to Nice, by then part of Vichy France. Once they left Paris, “my fate had become inseparable from that of the French,” Hoffmann wrote. “It wasn’t simply the discovery of the way in which public affairs take over private lives, in which individual fates are blown around like leaves in a storm once History strikes, that had marked me forever. It was also a purely personal sense of solidarity with the other victims of History and Hitler with whom we had shared this primal experience of free fall.”

In Nice, after the Germans occupied the city in September 1942, the Gestapo were around every corner. “It was three months of waiting for the bell to ring at 3 a.m.,” he recalls. “Fear never left us.” And the little family had almost no resources; Hoffmann’s mother sold her jewels and borrowed from a friend, though in the empty markets there wasn’t much to eat anyway. Although they remained without citizenship through the war, “I had one great advantage: I was a very good student,” he says. “The French were willing to forgive anybody anything if one was a good student and spoke good French.” But excursions to enjoy the music, films, and walks that the studious Hoffmann loved were made hazardous by the sudden rafles, police and Gestapo round-ups such as the one in which his only close friend, the French-born son of Hungarian Jewish émigré's, disappeared, with his mother, forever.

Carrying French documents that his history teacher had forged for them, Hoffmann and his mother returned to Lamalou-les-bains on a blacked-out night train. There, they found that 1,000 young German soldiers had encamped in the village of 800. The two groups didn’t speak to each other, but there was no Gestapo, it was perfectly safe, and there was no more fear. The villagers somehow found places for them to stay, even if it meant frequent moves as the Germans kept occupying hotels. “There was a basic decency in those French people,” he says, adding a quote from The Plague by Camus, “There is more in man to be admired than condemned.”

Throughout their ordeal, the kindness and protectiveness of so many French countrymen and teachers made an indelible impression and stamped Hoffmann as irretrievably French. The voices of the Free French and General de Gaulle on the BBC helped sustain the hope “that kept one’s soul from freezing,” he wrote. But it was not until 1972, in a review of The Sorrow and the Pity, the Marcel Ophuls film on the Occupation, that Hoffmann spoke publicly of his wartime experiences; he ended the review by recalling the compassionate history teacher who had helped their flight from Nice: “He and his wife were not Resistance heroes, but if there is an average Frenchman, it was this man who was representative of his nation; for that, France and the French will always deserve our tribute, and have my love.”

In 1944, the Lamalou-les-bains villagers flocked to see the first newsreels of the liberation of Paris. Hoffmann, who got his first look at the “tall and imperturbable” de Gaulle, has never forgotten the exhilaration of that moment. The “euphoria of a national general will was palpable,” he wrote, adding, “For the rest of my life, I was going to be stirred by the drama of peoples rising for their freedom, or breaking their chains, more deeply than by any other public emotion and by most private ones.”

Despite his prodigious scholarly output, it is difficult to categorize Hoffmann’s approach to international relations. “There is no ‘school of Hoffmann’—he doesn’t have doctrinal disciples,” says Michael J. Smith ’73, Ph.D. ’82, Sorensen professor of political and social thought at the University of Virginia, who studied with Hoffmann and later co-taught a course with him. “Stanley has a horror of mimesis; he doesn’t want you to ape what he thinks—his students are the polar opposite of ‘dittoheads.’ They aren’t people who share a set of conclusions; they share a mode of inquiry, and come to their own conclusions using the best available arguments.”

 

Hoffmann also is hostile to radical cures, allergic to communism and Marxism, and in fact profoundly “suspicious of anything that smacks of utopia and ideology, of a grand vision for the People with a capital P, or any millennial movement,” says his student Ellen Frost ’66, Ph.D. ’72, an international-relations scholar and former U.S. government official. (Hoffmann himself cites the French philosopher and political scientist Raymond Aron, a critic of French leftists, as a mentor, and calls him “a great anti-utopian.” Hoffmann writes that, like Aron, he naturally tends to “think against,” noting that he has had the “intellectual romps of a fox, and the convictions of a hedgehog.”)

Furthermore, Hoffmann has never been tempted by government service, either as a policy adviser or bureaucrat, explaining that he is temperamentally unsuited for such work and values his independence too highly. “When I’m in Washington, I want to take the next plane out of there,” he says. “People who come back from this Washington world take a good time to become normal again.” He observes that he has remained “too French to be a convincing American policymaker,” adding, with characteristic wit, that his Harvard contemporaries Henry Kissinger ’50, Ph.D. ’54, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ph.D. ’53, didn’t have this problem. And unlike those two, “[M]y reaction to power is more dread than desire,” Hoffmann writes. “I study power so as to understand the enemy, not so as better to be able to exert it.”

Hoffmann’s analysis of American politics may be “more influential overseas than it is here,” says Louise Richardson, Ph.D. ’89, executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute, a former Hoffmann student who studies terrorism. “He is humanistic, and he brings history into the equation and focuses on the importance of individual leaders.” (De Gaulle is his personal hero.) This approach, which eschews the quantitative data and theoretical models now fashionable in international relations, nonetheless, in Hoffmann’s hands, produces astonishingly insightful analyses. “He has an old-fashioned approach to the study of politics that emphasizes history, diplomacy, and political philosophy,” says Sandel. “Some might accuse Stanley of being a dinosaur, but if that’s true, then more of us should aspire to be dinosaurs.”

“He’s been prescient—and right—on all the major issues of the postwar period,” says Smith. Hoffmann opposed the French war in Algeria and supported de Gaulle’s efforts to extricate the French from their colonial past there. In 1963, when John F. Kennedy was commander-in-chief, Hoffmann predicted that the Vietnam War would prove an exercise in futility (and in his memoirs, Pentagon Papers source Daniel Ellsberg ’52, JF ’59, Ph.D. ’63, credits Hoffmann with changing his mind on Vietnam—the two debated at Radcliffe in 1965). In 1975, Hoffmann wrote an article recommending a new foreign policy for Israel to advance the cause of peace there, an essay that he says he could republish today without changing a single word (“At least half” of terrorism would disappear, he believes, if the Israel/Palestine conflict were resolved). And in March 2003, Hoffmann wrote an essay in the Boston Globe on the eve of the invasion of Iraq; all of its gloomy predictions have since come true. In 2004 he advocated a phased military withdrawal from Iraq, an idea that seemed outré at the time but that has since been backed by a majority in Congress.

Experience and learning have combined in Hoffmann to produce a singular outlook on world politics. Start with a brilliant intellect: he graduated at the top of his class at the Institut d’Études Politiques (“Sciences Po”) in 1948 and received tenure at Harvard in 1959, only four years after joining the faculty. And in the life of the mind, powerful ideas often come from those who reside both inside and outside some discipline or community; they combine the fresh eyes of the outsider with the deep knowledge of a participant.

Hoffmann considers himself someone whose nature, choices, and fate have made him “marginal in almost every way.” Having spent his formative years in France, he has now lived in the United States for twice as long as he did there, and has been a citizen of both countries since 1960. His writings, while often critical of American foreign policy, also aim to support the United States in living with greater security and respect in the world. He often provides perspectives that are unavailable to those (there are many) who lack his worldliness and deep historical knowledge.

Take, for example, McGeorge Bundy, JF ’48, LL.D. ’61, a former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and an admired friend, who Hoffmann says “shared the belief of all who have been in the U.S. foreign policy establishment: that America could do practically anything it wanted, because of its combination of force and wisdom.” When Bundy, as national security adviser in the Kennedy administration, was helping to mount the Vietnam War, he had a correspondence with Hoffmann in which the latter questioned whether the United States could succeed in this venture, arguing in part from the French experience in the region. Bundy replied, “We are not the French—we are coming as liberators, not colonialists.” “The only problem,” Hoffmann says, “was the Vietnamese.” He adds that American foreign policy tends to commit “the sin of excessive benevolence: we will make people happy whether they want it or not.”

Americans, he feels, “have to understand the foreignness of foreigners, instead of believing that they are simply misguided Americans or not well-guided Americans.” Even Zbigniew Brzezinski, he notes, “still has this conception that the United States can make decisions for everybody.” Recently, at a Faculty of Arts and Sciences meeting on general education, a young economist rose to declare that people everywhere are pretty much the same and want the same things, so the one course that all undergraduates ought to take is economics. “I exploded,” Hoffmann recalls, “and said, ‘This is why we have been so successful in Vietnam and Iraq.’ The assumption that ‘people everywhere are all alike’ is something you have to get out of your system. In old age, I am more and more convinced that people are intensely different from country to country. Not everyone is motivated by the same things.

“Americans mean well, but they don’t understand that acting with all one’s might to do good can be seen as a form of imperialism,” Hoffmann continues. “Within 10 minutes, these good intentions can turn into a benevolent condescending attitude toward the lesser tribes.”

In one of his early books on U.S. foreign policy, Gulliver’s Troubles (1968), Hoffmann deploys the metaphor of a giant besieged by tiny adversaries who nonetheless fetter him effectively. An apt analogy to the United States’s predicament 40 years ago, it appears nearly oracular today, when there is daily proof that, as Hoffmann says, “Populations with even a small number of rebels can make large armies ineffective.” (His 2004 sequel with Frédéric Bozo, Gulliver Unbound: America’s Imperial Temptation and the War in Iraq, argues that the United States blunders into snares when it lumbers forward, heedless of foreign nations’ histories and indigenous sentiments.) “The people surrounding Paul Bremer [M.B.A. ’66, head of the provisional authority governing Iraq in 2003-04] had never been in the Mideast and knew nothing of the region,” Hoffmann says.

The years since 2001 “have shown the absolute fiasco of unilateralism,” he declares. “We make reality, but if we make it alone, it will boomerang.” The United States seemingly needs to relearn expensive lessons it has already paid for, and forgets things it used to know. “In 1945 and in the immediate postwar period, the United States did respect, within limits, what Europeans wanted,” Hoffmann explains. “We had an enemy, the Soviet Union, which was repressing its satellites, and we had to do better than that. But remove the Soviet Union, and we tried to tell the world what to do—it doesn’t work. And it only got worse with the rise of the neocons.

“The French, for example, get terribly annoyed when Americans and conservative British tell them that France has to cut down on social security and work longer hours,” he continues. “The French know enough about America to know that there are aspects of American life that they don’t want—overwork, short vacations, and rather poor social and public services, for example.” Not long ago, during a taxi ride to Boston’s Logan Airport (Hoffmann was about to fly to Holland), the driver asked how the Dutch were doing. “They are doing fine,” Hoffmann replied. “They are at least as prosperous as we are, maybe even more so.” The driver said, “But that’s not possible! We are the most prosperous country in the world!”

With his dual citizenship, writing in both French and English (he sometimes translates himself), and with strong sympathies toward both nations, Hoffmann is ideally equipped to explain France to Americans and Americans to France. His full-year course, “Political Doctrines and Society: Modern France,” which he taught for more than three decades beginning in 1957 and into which, he has written, “I poured everything I knew and thought about France, and out of which came most of what I have written on her,” he calls the achievement of which he is most proud, because there was nothing like it. “I was, I am, French intellectually,” he wrote. “My sensibility is largely French—I like the frequent obliqueness, indirection, understatement and pudeur [modesty] of French feelings. But in my social being, there is something that rebels against the French harness, style of authority, and of human relations.”

Historical perspectives inform Hoffmann’s explanations of modern France. World War I, for example, was fought in France and the Low Countries—not in England or the United States. In the war, France lost 1.4 million soldiers out of a national population of 40 million; an equivalent loss for the United States today would be 10.5 million troops—nearly 3,000 times the current U.S. military death toll in Iraq. “France had a very, very rocky time after World War I,” Hoffmann explains. “Many came back mutilated, there was general exhaustion, and most people were turning pacifist because they didn’t want another war. In World War II they lost ‘only’ 600,000. But the period after World War II was one of extraordinary creativity in France; they came out of that war less exhausted and with a growing birth rate and much more vitality.”

That postwar vitality energized the young Hoffmann, who as a 16-year-old recharged his energies by spending the summer of 1945 lounging on the benches of the Bois de Boulogne, absorbed in the novels of André Malraux. (“If anybody ever gave me the impression of a genius, it was Malraux,” Hoffmann says, recalling a 1972 meeting he and his wife Inge [Schneier] Hoffmann had with the writer. “You cannot reproduce a conversation with Malraux; he started at 20,000 feet, there was no small talk. He was utterly charming, witty, sardonic.”) Hoffmann became a naturalized French citizen in 1947, enrolled in doctoral studies in law, and went to the Salzburg Seminar in American studies in the summer of 1950, deepening his fascination with the United States.

In 1951 he came to study in Harvard’s government department, receiving an A.M. in 1952. He then returned to France for army service (“sheer boredom”), and when he wrote to Harvard to say he wouldn’t mind returning, the department surprised him by offering, not the chance to write a Ph.D. thesis, but an instructorship. His “rather monstrous” law thesis, published in 1954, sufficed as a credential.

When he came to Cambridge to stay in 1955, Hoffmann decided, “This was a wonderful place. I felt I could live here and remain French. It was a cosmopolitan place in which one could function without anyone wondering where your passport was issued.” He smiles, adding, ”I am French, and a citizen of Harvard.”

Hoffmann is a professor in the grand classical sense, a man of wide learning rather than a discipline-bound specialist. “He’s a profoundly cultured man,” says Ellen Frost. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who, as a visiting lecturer in the government department in 2000, taught a course on globalization with Hoffmann and Sandel, says, “What I like about Stanley’s writings in the New York Review of Books is that he doesn’t engage in these crazy numerical or quantitative analyses of international relations. You live it and breathe it when you listen to him, because it’s really textured by deep knowledge of history, philosophy, sociology—he weaves all the strands together.”

Albert Camus had a major influence on Hoffmann, who this spring gave a new course (in French) on the writer. “His existentialism is the philosophy to which I feel the closest,” he says. He met Camus only once, when the latter was giving a talk to American students in Paris. “He was irresistible,” Hoffmann recalls. “Very charming. He looked like a handsomer version of Humphrey Bogart. Camus’ influence on society and culture was a much greater one [than Sartre’s], because he was much more readable—he wrote unbelievably beautiful French.”

The myth of Sisyphus, which Camus used as a touchstone for an eponymous 1942 essay, also informs Hoffmann’s philosophy. “There are two main ideas I take from Camus,” he says. “One, that there is no such thing as linear progress: the rock has a tendency to roll back down the hill again, and nothing is ever finally accomplished. Second, one has to keep trying anyhow; that the rock will roll down again shouldn’t prevent you from trying to push it back up.” Hoffmann typically closed the last lecture of his course on ethics and international relations (which he first offered in 1980 with Michael Smith, and will give again with J. Bryan Hehir, Montgomery professor of practice of religion and public life, next spring) by reading the two final paragraphs of The Plague, where Camus explains that after the end of the plague, “the rats will return to the city.” The victories won for humanity are always provisional ones.

His mentor Raymond Aron declared that “Anyone who believes that all good things will come together at the same time is a fool,” Hoffmann says. “My quarrel with Thomas Friedman is that he believes that thanks to globalization, individual liberty, democracy, prosperity, and peace will all arrive together. That requires a breathtaking optimism or naïveté, and also explains his initial enthusiasm for the invasion of Iraq. Friedman is not an imperialist, but he does have this conviction that America has this formula for the world that will be good for everybody.”

Hoffmann finds the contemporary international situation grim and much of current U.S. foreign policy both benighted and disheartening. “One reason I haven’t been teaching international relations this year is I find it so discouraging, I can’t face it,” he confides. “If someone told me that after the end of the Cold War, one would hear about nothing but terrorism, suicide bombings, displaced people, and genocides, I would not have believed it.”

Twenty-seven students and auditors, ranging in age from undergraduates to some in their 60s and 70s, sit at their places in Sever this spring for French 190, Hoffmann’s course on Camus. In front of the room, their professor is eloquent, graceful, and gently humorous; when a student opens the window shades, he quotes Goethe’s dying words, “Mehr Licht!” [“More light!”] Hoffmann’s lectures “are finished works in themselves,” says Louise Richardson, noting that Harvard faculty often sit in the back, auditing the artful presentations. “How many international relations scholars will you find teaching Camus?” asks Thomas Friedman. “They don’t make them like Stanley anymore.”

Hoffmann once asked Richardson, who has studied the 1956 Suez crisis in depth, to suggest some relevant readings because he was preparing a lecture that dealt with it. “I recommended five books,” she recalls. “And he read all five!—even though the Suez crisis was only a small piece of the lecture. Stanley takes scholarship and teaching very seriously. He reads an extraordinary amount.”

In true European style, he is also happy to ask his students to do the same, and compiled impressively long reading lists for full-year courses like “War,” which had three lectures per week, plus a section. War and Peace could be the assigned text for just one of those lectures. When asked if that was unreasonable, and if an excerpt from Tolstoy’s magnum opus might not suffice, Hoffmann asked, “Which part of War and Peace summarizes the themes?”

Ellen Frost had Hoffmann for her junior tutorial in social studies. “He was brilliant, and because I was young, that was intimidating,” she recalls. “But he was also very caring. He saw through any kind of pretension, hypocrisy, or bluff, and has a deliciously wicked sense of humor, tinged with paradox. Humor permeates him.” Hoffmann once observed that, “What the classical economists called ‘harmony of interest through accumulation of goods,’ Rousseau summed up in one word: ‘greed.’” Discussing Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, he might casually quote Clemenceau to the effect that “Even God didn’t need 14 points.”

Michael Smith describes Hoffmann’s teaching style as “rigorous presentation of competing points of view at their most persuasive, followed by a devastating critique, followed by his own take on the issue. There are two ways of teaching: provide a suit straight off the rack, so to speak, or plant seeds and let them grow. Stanley plants seeds; he allows you to develop your own arguments.” Smith adds that “one of Stanley’s signal virtues as a teacher is that he treats everyone as an intellectual equal. You can be a freshman or a head of state and you’ll get exactly the same Stanley: he doesn’t dumb anything down and he doesn’t flatter you for the sake of your position. There’s not an ounce of condescension in him.” (Right after earning her doctorate, Frost wrote her mentor a long letter about her first job, working in the U.S. Senate. “Back came the loveliest handwritten letter,” she recalls. “It said, ‘Dear Ellen, Please call me Stanley, unless you want me to call you Dr. Frost.’”)

During the Harvard student protests in the spring of 1969, Hoffmann led teach-ins on Vietnam and became something of a hero to undergraduates. “Some of the students’ grievances were perfectly understandable, and the decision to call the police was an unbelievable mistake. [President Nathan] Pusey said that the confrontation had nothing to do with politics, that this was a problem of ‘manners.’ On the right, some conservatives in several departments were on a rampage. At the first faculty meeting after the University Hall occupation, [economic historian] Alexander Gerschenkron explained that the students were exactly like the Bolsheviks in Russia, and that there was only one thing you could do with such students: ‘Beat them! Beat them! Beat them!’”

At the same time, Hoffmann didn’t countenance the left-wing students’ ambition to shut down the University, and felt it was important “to prevent the ‘ultras’ [extremists] from taking over. I was really concerned with trying to keep it together,” he recalls. “Stanley is passionately committed to open debate and free intellectual exchange,” Frost explains. “To him, that is the soul of a university.” That, and of course, its students. “What mattered [in 1969] was that one listened to what the students had to say,” Hoffmann says, “because students were what the University was about.”

Hoffmann listens carefully to his own students, who frequently end as colleagues and friends. “I’ve been a teacher first, and a writer second,” he says, notwithstanding his 18 books. “I like writing, but it’s a lonely job and I am happier in front of a classroom than a blank page. I need the input and the stimulation that the students provide. They are fun. I am not ready to give up yet—or rather, I am ready, each time I am away from my students. But when I am with them, I want to go on forever.”

A traditional debate among international-relations scholars pits “realists,” who believe that national self-interests and power considerations ought to guide decisions, against “cosmopolitans,” who emphasize universal values like human rights over national self-interest. Hoffmann, a complex and subtle thinker, does not fit easily into either camp. “I’ve always considered Stanley a liberal realist,” says Sultan of Oman professor of international relations and former dean of the Kennedy School of Government Joseph Nye, a Hoffmann student. “He has always understood both dimensions.”

Like Camus, Hoffmann has a passion for human rights, broadly conceived, and a powerful ethical sense. Ellen Frost contrasts the pragmatism of the realist Henry Kissinger with Hoffmann’s cosmopolitanism. “Kissinger feels that the American public accepts foreign-policy initiatives only if they are tied to some ethical rationale,” she says. “Stanley has a different approach: he thinks foreign policy should be infused with universal ethical principles.” Smith notes that Hoffmann “was influential in bringing the study of norms and ethics to mainstream international relations. It had been marginalized.”

“As an academic, I have had one thread to guide me in my divagations: concern for world order,” Hoffmann writes. He defines world order as including how states arrange their relations to prevent a permanent state of war, and how they orient themselves in the postwar international system. That said, he is not a pacifist, and if he generally favors international cooperation, it is not so much for moral reasons as because, as Frost explains, “Things are more likely to work if you have other countries helping out.”

Though Hoffmann disagreed with his domestic policies, he feels that President George H.W. Bush did a “masterful” job managing the transition to the post-Cold War era. “Without gloating, he handled the Soviet breakup, the reunification of Germany, even the Gulf War very well,” Hoffmann says.

In his estimate, the greatest statesman of his lifetime was Charles de Gaulle. “There is no exact equivalent for the word ‘leadership’ in French,” Hoffmann says. “I recently reread de Gaulle’s speeches and marveled at the eloquence of his style, the pedagogical talent he had—he was the son of a schoolteacher. For the French, leadership means pedagogy: the capacity to explain the world, and to make people feel that the leadership takes them seriously. We haven’t had a real teacher since de Gaulle, and that has produced a funk in France. One component of leadership is making people feel that they are intelligent, that they understand. It’s something that has been missing in both France and America for a long time. People want to be enlightened. If you don’t do that, if it is all electoral tricks, or canned speeches, then there is going to be nothing but contempt and distrust of the people in power.”

Similarly, “In the old days, international relations was understood by average people, and today it is not,” Hoffmann declares. “Jargon has invaded everything and the relationship of theories to reality has faded. There are all these wonderful equations, but how are they affected by a real-world phenomenon like death? When I came to Harvard, American foreign policy was near the top of the hierarchy of subjects taught here. Today, there is no tenured government professor teaching American foreign policy. At present, the hierarchy of prestige values everything that is abstract and theoretical, and you cannot do that with foreign-policy studies. They have to be concrete and deal with concrete issues.”

Reality, with its complexities and paradoxes, continues to absorb him. He enjoys welcoming former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin to Harvard as much as he does teaching a freshman seminar on “Moral Choices in Literature and Politics.” The best word for Hoffmann’s thinking and writing might be “nuanced,” reflecting his deep reading of the facts, including those that seem to have escaped everyone else’s attention. His goal is always to understand, and, on a good day, perhaps exert a bit of influence as well, but never to reach fixed conclusions. In Hoffmann’s festschrift, the late Judith Shklar, former Cowles professor of government and Hoffmann’s close friend, summed up the pleasures of teaching and learning with him. Her essay tried, she said, to give an idea of “what it was like to have gone on a long intellectual journey with him that contemplates no arrival, but only the pleasures of the open road.”

Stanley Hoffmann is a Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He is also Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University.

Craig A. Lambert ’69, Ph.D. ’78, is deputy editor of Harvard Magazine.

Stanley Hoffmann is a Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He is also Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University.
Allison, Graham T., Jr. 2007. “The Lobster Summit”. Publisher's Version Abstract

President George W. Bush's decision to award President Vladimir Putin the unique distinction of a weekend in Kennebunkport with two American presidents flummoxed supporters and critics alike. Over the past year, no international leader has been more critical of the president than his Russian guest.

From his January State of the Union reference to “Comrade Wolf,” to his recent comparison of Bush's America to Hitler's Third Reich, Putin has many chattering about a new Cold War. Moreover, in preparing for election of a new parliament in December and new president next March, Putin has tightened Kremlin's grip on all instruments of power, from the economy to the press. Why then did Bush decide to reward what most American opinion leaders believe he should be condemning? Senator John McCain, for example, has called for Russia to be evicted from the G-8 club of leading industrial democracies.

Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice made the right decision in inviting Putin on the basis of a sound assessment of how best to advance American national interests. Four considerations informed their judgment.

First, hysterics aside, Russia is not the Soviet Union, and the United States is not entering a new Cold War.

For four decades the Soviet Union was America's focal enemy. A Communist totalitarian government consumed 40 percent of its gross national product in a military-dominated state whose troops occupied what Ronald Reagan rightly called an “evil empire.”

Today, Russia's borders have shrunk back to territory controlled by Catherine the Great 200 years ago. Russia now spends $1 on defense for every $11 in the American defense budget. In short, this is not his father's Soviet Union.

Second, President Bush understands that Russia is a former superpower struggling to recover its balance.

For Russia, the 1990s were a traumatic roller coaster ride that turned the society upside-down and inside out. Over the decade, the Soviet Union disappeared to be replaced by Russia and 14 newly independent states; a centrally commanded and controlled economy was destroyed in an economic depression worse than the great American depression; and Communism was buried.

A superpower rival of the United States became a supplicant, groveling for economic assistance. Under Putin, Russia's economy has grown at 7 percent per year; Russia's debt has been repaid; Russia has emerged as a petro-power.

Third, as a fellow politician, Bush understands the power of public symbols.

In both countries, baiting the former Cold War adversary is politically productive. Especially in a society that felt humiliated and thus craves to be proud of their country, Putin's readiness to stand up to the world's sole superpower has given him the highest approval rating among his fellow citizens of any leader in the world today. Thus especially when cooperating, Putin is always at pains to describe this in his own term—not as concessions to the United States.

Fourth and most important, as the president stated bluntly at the Kennebunkport press conference, the United States needs Russia.

Success in combating the greatest threats to Americans' security and well-being requires Russia's active cooperation. Iran is only the most urgent illustration of the central proposition: Without deep Russian cooperation, the United States has no hope of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, nuclear terrorism, and nuclear war.

Words aside, Putin's hidden hand has been extremely helpful in the current bargaining with Iran: delaying completion of the civilian nuclear reactor at Bushehr, refusing to supply nuclear fuel to Iran, and urging Iran to accept an arrangement in which fuel for its civilian nuclear reactors would be produced by an international consortium outside Iran.

Russia has joined the United States in three UN resolutions calling on Iran to suspend enrichment of uranium and enter negotiations. As Bush underlined at the press conference, when the United States and Russia stand together, Iran takes note.

Bush was right to host Putin in a setting conducive to serious conversation about how they can block Iran's acquisition of nuclear bombs.

In the weeks ahead, expect the two countries to move directly to conduct a joint assessment of the Iranian threat on the basis of which they produce a joint strategy for stopping Iran. The unnecessary controversy over missile defenses against nuclear warheads delivered by Iranian missiles can readily be resolved in that context since such defenses would be required only if the United States and Russia fail to prevent Iran's acquiring nuclear bombs.

The proof of what was achieved at this “lobster summit” will be in Russian and American actions in the months ahead. But if by this invitation, Bush solidified Putin's cooperation as a real partner in stopping Iran, Kennebunkport will be noted by historians as an accomplishment of which two soon-to-be former presidents can be proud.

Graham Allison is a Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He is also Douglas Dillon Professor of Government, and Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Ashbrook, Tom, and Robert D Putnam. 2007. “Diversity and Community”. Publisher's Version Abstract

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam is a self-described full-on liberal who worries a lot about community in America.

He made his name in the 1990s with his finding that hordes of Americans were, in his famous phrase, "bowling alone"—living without the traditional community ties of bowling leagues and Moose clubs that bound people together.

Then he set out on a huge project to find out why. The answer looks like a liberal's nightmare: diversity. Diverse communities, Putnam found, show dysfunction. At least for a while.

This hour On Point: Robert Putnam, Pat Buchanan and Lani Guinier on diversity and community in America.

To listen to this conversation go to:
http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2007/08/20070809_b_main.asp

Robert Putnam is a faculty associate at the Weatherhead Center and Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy.

Ashbrook, Tom, and Robert D Putnam. 2007. “Diversity and Community”. Publisher's Version Abstract

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam is a self-described full-on liberal who worries a lot about community in America.

He made his name in the 1990s with his finding that hordes of Americans were, in his famous phrase, "bowling alone"—living without the traditional community ties of bowling leagues and Moose clubs that bound people together.

Then he set out on a huge project to find out why. The answer looks like a liberal's nightmare: diversity. Diverse communities, Putnam found, show dysfunction. At least for a while.

This hour On Point: Robert Putnam, Pat Buchanan and Lani Guinier on diversity and community in America.

To listen to this conversation go to:
http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2007/08/20070809_b_main.asp

Robert Putnam is a faculty associate at the Weatherhead Center and Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy.

A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life. What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth?

It has become increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam—famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement—has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

“The extent of the effect is shocking,” says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.

The study comes at a time when the future of the American melting pot is the focus of intense political debate, from immigration to race-based admissions to schools, and it poses challenges to advocates on all sides of the issues. The study is already being cited by some conservatives as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to the nation's social fabric. But with demographic trends already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity, the real question may yet lie ahead: how to handle the unsettling social changes that Putnam's research predicts.

“We can't ignore the findings,” says Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. “The big question we have to ask ourselves is, what do we do about it; what are the next steps?”

The study is part of a fascinating new portrait of diversity emerging from recent scholarship. Diversity, it shows, makes us uncomfortable—but discomfort, it turns out, isn't always a bad thing. Unease with differences helps explain why teams of engineers from different cultures may be ideally suited to solve a vexing problem. Culture clashes can produce a dynamic give-and-take, generating a solution that may have eluded a group of people with more similar backgrounds and approaches. At the same time, though, Putnam's work adds to a growing body of research indicating that more diverse populations seem to extend themselves less on behalf of collective needs and goals.

His findings on the downsides of diversity have also posed a challenge for Putnam, a liberal academic whose own values put him squarely in the pro-diversity camp. Suddenly finding himself the bearer of bad news, Putnam has struggled with how to present his work. He gathered the initial raw data in 2000 and issued a press release the following year outlining the results. He then spent several years testing other possible explanations.

When he finally published a detailed scholarly analysis in June in the journal Scandinavian Political Studies, he faced criticism for straying from data into advocacy. His paper argues strongly that the negative effects of diversity can be remedied, and says history suggests that ethnic diversity may eventually fade as a sharp line of social demarcation.

“Having aligned himself with the central planners intent on sustaining such social engineering, Putnam concludes the facts with a stern pep talk,” wrote conservative commentator Ilana Mercer, in a recent Orange County Register op-ed titled “Greater diversity equals more misery.”

Putnam has long staked out ground as both a researcher and a civic player, someone willing to describe social problems and then have a hand in addressing them. He says social science should be “simultaneously rigorous and relevant,” meeting high research standards while also “speaking to concerns of our fellow citizens.” But on a topic as charged as ethnicity and race, Putnam worries that many people hear only what they want to.

“It would be unfortunate if a politically correct progressivism were to deny the reality of the challenge to social solidarity posed by diversity,” he writes in the new report. “It would be equally unfortunate if an ahistorical and ethnocentric conservatism were to deny that addressing that challenge is both feasible and desirable.”

. . .

Putnam is the nation's premier guru of civic engagement. After studying civic life in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, Putnam turned his attention to the US, publishing an influential journal article on civic engagement in 1995 that he expanded five years later into the best-selling “Bowling Alone.” The book sounded a national wake-up call on what Putnam called a sharp drop in civic connections among Americans. It won him audiences with presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and made him one of the country's best known social scientists.

Putnam claims the US has experienced a pronounced decline in “social capital,” a term he helped popularize. Social capital refers to the social networks—whether friendships or religious congregations or neighborhood associations—that he says are key indicators of civic well-being. When social capital is high, says Putnam, communities are better places to live. Neighborhoods are safer; people are healthier; and more citizens vote.

The results of his new study come from a survey Putnam directed among residents in 41 US communities, including Boston. Residents were sorted into the four principal categories used by the US Census: black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. They were asked how much they trusted their neighbors and those of each racial category, and questioned about a long list of civic attitudes and practices, including their views on local government, their involvement in community projects, and their friendships. What emerged in more diverse communities was a bleak picture of civic desolation, affecting everything from political engagement to the state of social ties.

Putnam knew he had provocative findings on his hands. He worried about coming under some of the same liberal attacks that greeted Daniel Patrick Moynihan's landmark 1965 report on the social costs associated with the breakdown of the black family. There is always the risk of being pilloried as the bearer of “an inconvenient truth,” says Putnam.

After releasing the initial results in 2001, Putnam says he spent time “kicking the tires really hard” to be sure the study had it right. Putnam realized, for instance, that more diverse communities tended to be larger, have greater income ranges, higher crime rates, and more mobility among their residents—all factors that could depress social capital independent of any impact ethnic diversity might have.

“People would say, ‘I bet you forgot about X,’” Putnam says of the string of suggestions from colleagues. “There were 20 or 30 X's.”

But even after statistically taking them all into account, the connection remained strong: Higher diversity meant lower social capital. In his findings, Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

“People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle,” Putnam writes.

In documenting that hunkering down, Putnam challenged the two dominant schools of thought on ethnic and racial diversity, the “contact” theory and the “conflict” theory. Under the contact theory, more time spent with those of other backgrounds leads to greater understanding and harmony between groups. Under the conflict theory, that proximity produces tension and discord.

Putnam's findings reject both theories. In more diverse communities, he says, there were neither great bonds formed across group lines nor heightened ethnic tensions, but a general civic malaise. And in perhaps the most surprising result of all, levels of trust were not only lower between groups in more diverse settings, but even among members of the same group.

“Diversity, at least in the short run,” he writes, “seems to bring out the turtle in all of us.”

The overall findings may be jarring during a time when it's become commonplace to sing the praises of diverse communities, but researchers in the field say they shouldn't be.

“It's an important addition to a growing body of evidence on the challenges created by diversity,” says Harvard economist Edward Glaeser.

In a recent study, Glaeser and colleague Alberto Alesina demonstrated that roughly half the difference in social welfare spending between the US and Europe—Europe spends far more—can be attributed to the greater ethnic diversity of the US population. Glaeser says lower national social welfare spending in the US is a “macro” version of the decreased civic engagement Putnam found in more diverse communities within the country.

Economists Matthew Kahn of UCLA and Dora Costa of MIT reviewed 15 recent studies in a 2003 paper, all of which linked diversity with lower levels of social capital. Greater ethnic diversity was linked, for example, to lower school funding, census response rates, and trust in others. Kahn and Costa's own research documented higher desertion rates in the Civil War among Union Army soldiers serving in companies whose soldiers varied more by age, occupation, and birthplace.

Birds of different feathers may sometimes flock together, but they are also less likely to look out for one another. “Everyone is a little self-conscious that this is not politically correct stuff,” says Kahn.

. . .

So how to explain New York, London, Rio de Janiero, Los Angeles—the great melting-pot cities that drive the world's creative and financial economies?

The image of civic lassitude dragging down more diverse communities is at odds with the vigor often associated with urban centers, where ethnic diversity is greatest. It turns out there is a flip side to the discomfort diversity can cause. If ethnic diversity, at least in the short run, is a liability for social connectedness, a parallel line of emerging research suggests it can be a big asset when it comes to driving productivity and innovation. In high-skill workplace settings, says Scott Page, the University of Michigan political scientist, the different ways of thinking among people from different cultures can be a boon.

“Because they see the world and think about the world differently than you, that's challenging,” says Page, author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. “But by hanging out with people different than you, you're likely to get more insights. Diverse teams tend to be more productive.”

In other words, those in more diverse communities may do more bowling alone, but the creative tensions unleashed by those differences in the workplace may vault those same places to the cutting edge of the economy and of creative culture.

Page calls it the “diversity paradox.” He thinks the contrasting positive and negative effects of diversity can coexist in communities, but “there's got to be a limit.” If civic engagement falls off too far, he says, it's easy to imagine the positive effects of diversity beginning to wane as well. “That's what's unsettling about his findings,” Page says of Putnam's new work.

Meanwhile, by drawing a portrait of civic engagement in which more homogeneous communities seem much healthier, some of Putnam's worst fears about how his results could be used have been realized. A stream of conservative commentary has begun—from places like the Manhattan Institute and “The American Conservative”—highlighting the harm the study suggests will come from large-scale immigration. But Putnam says he's also received hundreds of complimentary emails laced with bigoted language. “It certainly is not pleasant when David Duke's website hails me as the guy who found out racism is good,” he says.

In the final quarter of his paper, Putnam puts the diversity challenge in a broader context by describing how social identity can change over time. Experience shows that social divisions can eventually give way to “more encompassing identities” that create a “new, more capacious sense of ‘we,’” he writes.

Growing up in the 1950s in small Midwestern town, Putnam knew the religion of virtually every member of his high school graduating class because, he says, such information was crucial to the question of “who was a possible mate or date.” The importance of marrying within one's faith, he says, has largely faded since then, at least among many mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.

While acknowledging that racial and ethnic divisions may prove more stubborn, Putnam argues that such examples bode well for the long-term prospects for social capital in a multiethnic America.

In his paper, Putnam cites the work done by Page and others, and uses it to help frame his conclusion that increasing diversity in America is not only inevitable, but ultimately valuable and enriching. As for smoothing over the divisions that hinder civic engagement, Putnam argues that Americans can help that process along through targeted efforts. He suggests expanding support for English-language instruction and investing in community centers and other places that allow for “meaningful interaction across ethnic lines.”

Some critics have found his prescriptions underwhelming. And in offering ideas for mitigating his findings, Putnam has drawn scorn for stepping out of the role of dispassionate researcher. “You're just supposed to tell your peers what you found,” says John Leo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “I don't expect academics to fret about these matters.”

But fretting about the state of American civic health is exactly what Putnam has spent more than a decade doing. While continuing to research questions involving social capital, he has directed the Saguaro Seminar, a project he started at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government that promotes efforts throughout the country to increase civic connections in communities.

“Social scientists are both scientists and citizens,” says Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, who sees nothing wrong in Putnam's efforts to affect some of the phenomena he studies.

Wolfe says what is unusual is that Putnam has published findings as a social scientist that are not the ones he would have wished for as a civic leader. There are plenty of social scientists, says Wolfe, who never produce research results at odds with their own worldview.

“The problem too often,” says Wolfe, “is people are never uncomfortable about their findings.”

Michael Jonas is acting editor of CommonWealth magazine, published by MassINC, a nonpartisan public-policy think tank in Boston.

Robert Putnam is a faculty associate at the Weatherhead Center and Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy.

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