Failure of US Public Diplomacy in the Middle East

"Failure of US Public Diplomacy in the Middle East":

Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog posts this comment on February 11.

"Jesse Helms did irreparable damage when he succeeded in rolling the United States Information Agency into the State Department. State is always short on funds, and then security had to be beefed up at the embassies, and the USIA got starved. USIA used to have American libraries in the major cities of the Middle East. They were all closed and the books remaindered. Even the libraries that had existed were flawed, since they were English-only."

Read the entire entry -- it deserves it. His comment in turn was triggered by Forfeiting the War of Ideas by Michael Pan and Jeremy Weinstein.

I find my colleagues interested in science for development often think "science" and "natural science" are synonyms. The importance of social science for international development can not be overestimated. Economics, Political Science, Anthropology, Sociology, Organizational Sciences are all critical. The USIA libraries were often seen as cultural entities, but bringing international thought to developing countries is not just cultural. The value of libraries that make the best in philosophy, history and the social sciences available should be recognized.

For many years, USAID had a program to translate textbooks into Spanish. It was run out of Mexico City, and had a considerable impact in making college texts available in Spanish in Latin America. I was most aware of the engineering texts. While, in my experience, college engineering students in Latin America have all studied English, they have seldom mastered it. It is hard enough learning scientific and engineering materials when they are in your own language, much less in a foreign language you have not fully mastered. So this program really did a lot for education. But it was always under fire in the bureaucracy. Its only defense was that it did a lot for the long term development of Latin American nations. It did not, however, provide short term political benefits. Nor did it directly subsidize the poor.

I would suggest that this is a program that should be revisited. The technology has changed, and one could reduce the costs greatly from those of the 1970's. Machine assisted translation would drop translation costs greatly, perhaps to the point that volunteers would step in to do the translations. E-publishing via the Internet would drop those costs as well. I recall that a book publishing program that I monitored for USAID in the old days had a cost of something like US$1.25 each simply for packing books and mailing them abroad.

It would be a great investment for the U.S. government to make serious content available in Arabic, Spanish, French, Chinese, Hindi and other languages. The Internet does reach a lot of developing and transition countries. However, some of the countries that most need the content, censor the Internet. The government could also create cyber-libraries, with on-demand publishing to replace the lost USIA libraries. Wouldn't that be great!