U.S. Policy towards UNESCO

I attended a seminar yesterday at the AAAS annual meeting titled: “UNESCO: Opportunities Upon U.S. Reentry.” A key concern of the participants was the degree to which U.S. participation in UNESCO could further the interests of the United States. There was a lot of very reasonable discussion about the value of education, the utility of a multilateral agency is promoting exchanges that would be useful and important for U.S. scientists, and the value of protecting tangible and intangible cultural elements.

I could not help thinking, however, that the discussion missed the forest for the trees. UNESCO was created some 60 years ago by people emerging from World War II who were deeply concerned with keeping the peace. Some very wise folk among them believed that war began in the minds of men, and that the long term solution to war was to change the way people think.

UNESCO was created as the U.N. agency focused on the mind of man. First emphasizing education and culture, science was added to the mix. UNESCO is the agency of reason. Its task is the promotion and diffusion of the Enlightenment. For UNESCO's founders, education was a central tool in changing thought processes to promote peace.

There was concern in the seminar that UNESCO’s budget (of some US$600 million for the next two years) is limited. Of course UNESCO will need to define priorities and focus its efforts on these priorities. But that concern underestimates the importance of ideas and the influence that UNESCO can have. The World Heritage program exemplifies the potential to have great influence without having a huge budget. Hundreds of World Heritage sites have been chosen, and for each, many people in the country involved have devoted considerable time and effort to creating the proposal to include the site. The declaration that a site is a World Heritage site changes the way people think about the site, and there seems to be real effort to be sure that the preservation efforts are adequate to pass muster at the periodic reviews of the sites. UNESCO’s funding for the World Heritage program is only a tiny part of the resources the program catalyzes in support of maintenance of the world’s environmental and cultural heritage.

Comparing UNESCO with the bilateral development agencies and the international financial institutions in terms of available funds is misleading. U.N. agencies have experts on the ground offering policy advice. The financing institutions also have experts, but they are fewer in number, and they are involved in managing financial projects. Ideally, UNESCO and the financial institutions should work together, providing complementary services for development. Thus, UNESCO’s staff experts can leverage their advice through cooperation by utilizing the financing from the richer donor agencies (and, more importantly, the financing from within its client countries.)

Science is important in changing the way people think, and ultimately the probability of conflict. Scientific thinking is based on evidence, especially replicated evidence. It depends on relation of observation to theory. It depends on peer review of analysis. It depends on the slow accumulation of scientific paradigms, supported by expanding bodies of evidence. I suggest that the more widely scientific thinking is understood and used in a society, the more free that society will be of the malignant thought processes that lead to war.

Tony Blair has made the reduction of poverty the theme of the U.K.’s term of leadership of the G7. Many more people have died of poverty during the lifetime of UNESCO than died in World War II, and the world has increasingly come to see poverty reduction as the major goal of the U.N. agencies. Clearly education is central to poverty reduction. President Museveni of Uganda recently wrote that scientists deserve more pay than he does as president, since they contribute more to economic development. In the long run, I think that the role of UNESCO is absolutely central to poverty alleviation.

President Bush, in the State of the Union message emphasized the promotion of democracy and liberty as U.S. international policy goals. In this respect, he was in the mainstream of a century of U.S. political thought – an ally of Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter. Certainly UNESCO’s communication program, that fosters freedom of the press and freedom of expression, is instrumental in the spread of democracy and liberty. But more fundamentally, the institutionalization of these ideas depends on the way people in a society think. Liberty and democracy are found in societies with large numbers of educated people, with strong traditions valuing rationality. The development of liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and democracy will be long term efforts, and will depend on the changes promoted by UNESCO.

We know that these goals are strongly interrelated. Poor countries are seldom democratic; rich, democratic countries don’t war among themselves. The efforts to promote peace, reduce poverty, and promote liberty and democracy are synergistic. UNESCO’s approach is central to all three goals. Moreover, UNESCO as a multilateral agency can do things impossible to U.S. bilateral foreign policy.

UNESCO is also the U.N. agency most concerned with culture. While there is a lot of discussion now of the preservation of culture, it is important to recognize that cultures change. The only cultures that don’t change are the dead cultures studied by archaeologists. The most important question for UNESCO, then, is not how to preserve culture but how to help cultures to change in positive ways. Few would challenge that cultures should not change to make their members wiser and more knowledgeable. Ultimately, U.S. foreign policy needs to promote cultural change that promotes peace, discourages terrorism, promotes liberty and democracy, and militates against poverty in all its aspects. Ultimately, a stong and effective UNESCO should be seen as a central tool of U.S. foreign policy!