| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Peter Hayes Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 5 of 5
One of the brick walls it would appear you come up against is the power of the media to define issues in a very different way.
To be honest, it's the other way around. We lead the media's view. The power of this strategy [is such that] our daily service goes out now to forty countries and about 4,000 subscribers. Our survey shows that each subscriber, on average, forwards it to about three and a half people, so somewhere around 10,000 to 12,000 readers. We know that includes The New York Times Tokyo Bureau, the Wall Street Journal Beijing Bureau, the Washington Post folks, the L.A. Times -- we've got the media wired. They come to us. Newsweek, News Hour, CNN, NPR -- they come to us and say, "What does this story mean?" I have a whole slew of calls today about North Korea and its reprocessing from journalists all around the planet. I guarantee tonight, they'll all be visiting our website to say, "What on earth is going on?" We'll either be cited, or the information and argument will appear in how they frame their essay.
So, actually, it's not that the media that are the problem for us, although I think they are a problem for policy. It's that the higher you go in the policy apparatus, the more insulated those people are and trapped by the ideologies and information systems, particularly the classified ones that present them with their daily bread. And they're so short of time that it's very difficult to get them wired, or when we've succeeded in doing that, we found that it reaches mostly the younger generation of policymakers, who ten years ago were just starting in their careers and were early [technology] adopters, have now risen to the Assistant Secretary level. Of course, if they can't get what we do at their desks at the State Department, or the Pentagon, or in the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the CIA, or wherever they are located now, or an embassy, they have their Hotmail account and they ask us to send it there, and they check it at home. We've been told by ambassadors that the first thing they turn on in the morning on their computer is not the cable traffic. They go to our daily report, because they get an instant crosscut of what what's going on the region that they need to know about.
So but to reach the very top, I guess the question becomes ...
You have to go them and brief them.
You have to go there and brief them. But the question is, is politics driven by ideology, by emotion, by the irrational elements? How does this strategy succeed in overcoming that? Is it by winning over larger segments of the policy community, or is it by convincing the general public?
It's a bit of both. You're not forced, as you were a decade ago, to choose between those constituencies, in terms of the information systems; you are, in terms of the content. You put out very different content for a policy options paper for someone facing a crises today than you would for helping Korean-Americans come to grips with their identity and U.S. foreign policy -- different kinds of issues. But [Korean-Americans] may be very influential in a particular electorate that may be very important in policymaking on the Hill.
So I don't have a very good answer for that. All I can say is that in our experience, you can shift perceptions of the adversary and introduce innovative policy ideas at a very senior level in more than one capital city privy to the conflict, or party to the conflict, at once. Whether you actually succeed in shifting these ships of state five degrees or even one degree from their current course so that they can slip through a channel between the reefs to the safety on the other side is hard to prove. If you pick exactly the right moment and have just enough leverage, you don't need to shift them 180 degrees, just a few degrees, to at least avert disaster if not actually solve the problem. There have been specific instances where we've played that kind of role -- very few, but perhaps very important.
One final question. When one listens to you and as you talk about the work of your institute, there is a sense of hope that emerges that the world can be changed in the right direction. So I'm curious, how would you advise students to prepare for this kind of work on the one hand, but on the other hand retain that hope in a broader environment that is, for most people, frustrating and with less and less hope?
All I can say is that wars do end and peace is, in fact, constructed day by day in families and in communities. The conditions for peace are accelerating with globalization and with migration, and with many aspects of modernity. The old ways of doing business, which are about violence and domination, are not acceptable either to civil society or to markets. This puts enormous momentum on the side of the peacemaking process.
As states become weaker and weaker in relative terms, the problem will be how to deal with failing states. I don't just mean the Rwandas or Somalias of the world, I mean the United States as a failing state that cannot deliver security at a level that people need. That means that our own civil society organizations have to take that burden on themselves. For example, in the southern border, if you close that border, if you militarize it, you create all sorts of perverse incentives that create insecurity for conducting surveillance and controlling the movement of what goes across the border backwards and forward. Whereas, if you keep it very open, with a lot of movement backwards and forward, you have the maximum possibile security for civil society. So that's the abstract answer level to this very practical question.
There are so many opportunities these days for people who are starting out in their careers both in the for-profit and the nonprofit sector to contribute, and so many choices they can make along the way. I urge them, again, to be completely fearless, figure out their values, find mentors -- mentors are tremendously important. I know they were critical to me, and I'm forever indebted to this campus for providing them. Just don't take no for an answer. Just keep on going.
Peter, on that note, thank you very much for sharing this conversation on your intellectual journey and how one effectively maintains his political activism and idealism in a globalized world. Thank you very much.
Sure, thanks, Harry.
And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.
© Copyright 2003, Regents of the University of California
To the Conversations page