| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Elizabeth Jones Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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Help us understand what the distinguishes the work of diplomacy.
I would put it this way: We as diplomats look for any possible area of agreement, no matter how tiny, and maybe even how irrelevant to the issue at hand, and try to build, try to find some common ground that the two sides can work together on, can agree on, and then keep building onto that until you can gain confidence between the two sides, the three sides, whatever number it is. You try to get them closer and closer to the issue at hand, once you've developed some confidence, so that you can resolve whatever the problem is.
What are the skills that make that kind of work possible?
First of all, I think you have to be very positive, you have to be extremely patient. You have to listen very carefully to people, you have to really understand what it is that they're saying (or maybe not saying), and pull that out. Hold onto the positives of what this person said, hold onto the positive of what that person said, and try to put it together in a way that maybe they haven't thought of.
What about the cultural divide? Your tour of duty has been quite extraordinary. You've been in Afghanistan, you've been in Pakistan, you've been in Kazakhstan. How does the cultural divide enter into this problem? Tell us about that.
It's very important for us as American diplomats to understand what philosophies we come from, what is it that makes us the way we are. There are a couple of things -- they're generalizations, which are always dangerous, but nevertheless [these things are] very helpful, when we American walk into a situation, to try to help resolve it.
First of all, Americans are extremely practically minded, compared with other cultures. History is important to us, but it doesn't drive us, it doesn't prevent us from finding solutions. We also think much more in terms of the art of the possible; we tend to be much more positive. Something can be solved, we can move ahead. We are able to leave the past in the past, let bygones be bygones, much more than other cultures can.
I think we're also much better at thinking of ourselves as [individual] people, rather than as representing a particular group. I am American. Nobody knows what religion I am. They know what sex I am by looking at me, but they don't know that much else. And I don't bring that to the table, necessarily, whereas other cultures do. It's those kinds of barriers [on the other side of the negotiating table] that we as Americans need to get past in order to get down to negotiations and problem-solving.
Is it much help that we're the most powerful country in the world, or in an early period, one of the two most powerful countries in the world?
It helps, but it helps in the following way: power brings with it self-confidence, it brings with it the force of personality that I talked about a couple of minutes ago. So when an American diplomat walks in the room, yes, everybody knows that that person represents the United States of America, a powerful country; but if you don't have something to contribute as a person, if you don't have something to say, you're not going to get through the door again, necessarily. So, yes, you represent a powerful country, but you have to as an individual contribute to the issues at hand.
When you're negotiating, it's the problem that you have to focus on. In looking at your postings, I would imagine that some of the characters have been unsavory. We won't name which particular place, but some of the people that you may have to deal with.
That's right. That's right. You have to really focus on what are you trying to accomplish, what are you trying to get done, and why. Who are the people you need to talk to in order to accomplish that? What are the arguments that would work with that person or that group in order to bring them to the goal that you're trying to get to? What we're really doing is, we're trying to change behavior, we're trying to change attitudes, we're trying to accomplish whatever it is that we've set out to do, whether it be persuading governments and countries that it's very important to start working on tragedies like trafficking in women and children, or about counter-narcotics efforts, or about the war on terrorism; whatever it may be, we have to figure out who to talk to in order to get a change in behavior.
How do you map the terrain? Obviously, you have intelligence, but do you also become a junior historian on a particular place, in terms of the kinds of books you have to look at, to really get to know a place?
You do to a degree, but even more important is to understand why people think the way they do or why people act the way they do. History is very important to that, understanding motivation is very important to that. What all of us do in our embassies overseas, in addition to taking care of American citizens, is we really try to understand why the editorial writers write what they do, why the professors in universities say what they say. What about the students on the streets, what are they thinking? What about the prime minister versus the parliamentarians? How do all of those attitudes and all of those responsibilities that each one believes that they carry in their society come together in ways that we can work with as Americans, trying to change a policy, or trying to find common ground in order to gain their support in changing a policy elsewhere?
What are some of the obstacles in being able to do that? There have been cases where we found out in retrospect that we either didn't know what was going on, or, in fact, we knew, but we weren't acting on it. Talk a little about some of those problems.
It's a very important question. It's a very important question. Intelligence, as you mentioned, is always interesting, but it's not by any means the be-all and end-all, because intelligence can't tell you the motivation of a person. Intelligence can tell you that they did X and Y, but why did they do it? That's what you have to try to understand, and that's where the political reporting officers, economic reporting officers, or embassies overseas become very, very important. They can get into what is the motivation.
Then you have to get over these historical impediments that I talked about, because in some cultures, in some societies, it's impossible to, or very difficult, to get at how to resolve, for example, the Middle East question, because everybody is so concerned about the inequities that were visited upon Palestinians over the last twenty, twenty-five years. Israelis, the same way, over the last, you know, several millennia. Those are the conversations you have to get through before you can get to the issue at hand.
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