The State Department's Cultural Attaches Should Report on Culture of the Countries in Which They Serve

Culture is defined as:

1.

a. The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought.
b. These patterns, traits, and products considered as the expression of a particular period, class, community, or population: Edwardian culture; Japanese culture; the culture of poverty.
c. These patterns, traits, and products considered with respect to a particular category, such as a field, subject, or mode of expression: religious culture in the Middle Ages; musical culture; oral culture.
d. The predominating attitudes and behavior that characterize the functioning of a group or organization.

2. Intellectual and artistic activity and the works produced by it.
3.

a. Development of the intellect through training or education.
b. Enlightenment resulting from such training or education.

4. A high degree of taste and refinement formed by aesthetic and intellectual training.

The State Department has a cadre of cultural attaches. They tend to focus their efforts on educational exchanges and on high culture. In part this may be an artifact of the historical tendency in the United States to think of culture in terms of art, music and literature.

We should now recognize that American troops went into a war in Vietnam without much knowledge of Vietnamese culture in the Departments of State or Defense. Americans went into Afghanistan and Iraq again with little understanding of the culture of their peoples in the Departments of State and Defense. The United States has staked its prestige and spent a great deal of money on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with little understanding in State or DoD of the complex cultural networks in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, the Gulf states, and other countries that influence the situation. In each of these cases, our ignorance has gotten the nation into trouble.

American presidents have proclaimed that this nation seeks to promote democracy abroad. Since Eleanor Roosevelt led the process for the creation of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United States has proclaimed our commitment to human rights for everyone. As has recently become clear in a number of countries, elections result in the selection of catastrophically bad governments in country after country, and we are beginning to realize that there has to be a cultural setting for electoral democracy to be effective. So to we should realize that the nations that have signed up for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights attach very different meanings to that Declaration, and understand the responsibilities of their acceptance in very different ways.

Increasingly, economists are realizing that economic progress results not only from good policies and the accumulation of capital, but also from strong institutions, including strong markets and the rule of law. These institutions exist within a cultural matrix, and indeed are part of a societies culture.

I could go on and on. The efficacy of health services depends on aspects of the culture of the society in which they are offered. Environmental protection is a culturally determined value, and the efficacy of environmental programs depends on the culture in which they are embedded. Education programs are especially culturally sensitive.

It seems obvious to me, if not to the State Department, that our cultural attaches should play a key role in an embassy's reporting. I don't think necessarily that they should write books on the general nature of the culture of a country; that is perhaps best done by scholars working specifically on the task. Indeed, the Library of Congress has published many monographs that its staff prepared for the government with such general analyses.

Rather, it seems to me that cultural attaches should be asked to report in response to specific questions. Some examples might be:

1. What are the cultural aspects that are relevant to the likely success or failure of a proposed HIV program in your country?
2. How conducive are the cultural systems in your country to the creation and support of terrorists who would target the United States or U.S. interests?
3. What would be the expected response, given the local culture, to a program intended to promote democracy?
4. What is the likely response within the culture of the country to the predicted impacts of global warming?

It would seem to me that, in order to respond to such questions, the cultural attaches should be experienced professionals with expert backgrounds in areas such as history, area studies, the social sciences, or geography.

In the past, various donor assistance programs required social soundness analysis of investment projects, and indeed there was a time in which there were sector analyses done prior to investments that were intended to examine cultural factors as well as financial, economic and political factors. At the time there was a perception that knowledge was a useful tool for development.

The State Department with its broader responsibility for U.S. interests in an increasingly interconnected global society needs to have the people and to understand the challenge and need to understand the cultures with which we deal. Based on that understanding, we can more far more effectively to bridge the cultural divides between our people and the peoples of other nations,