Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XXXVIII, Part 2, Organization and Management of Foreign Policy; Public Diplomacy, 1973–1976

97. Address by the Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs (Richardson)¹

Denver, April 3, 1974.

Transnational Communications—What’s Happening?

[Omitted here are introductory remarks.]

Interested as you are in world affairs, you are as aware as I am of the growing stream of news reports from beyond our borders which reflect a common theme: reports on Arab oil summits; reports on European solidarity (or lack of it); reports on détente, floating currencies, worldwide inflation, famine and threats of famine, soaring population rates, worldwide pollution; and on and on over the horizon. These news stories teach the same lesson. I don’t think there could possibly be a human being who glances at a newspaper or television screen—much less one who actively tries to keep up with the world—who is not aware of the irreversible interdependence of all nations and all peoples on this tiny globe of ours.

You know much better than I about the great Pike’s Peak or Bust gold rush that led to the founding of Denver in 1859. Many a fortune hunter went “bust” and returned to the East. I’m told these men were known as “go-backs.” Well, in today’s interdependent world, there are no “go-backs.” None of us has any place to go back to, even if we wanted to.

You don’t need to be lectured at by me about economic interdependence. Anyone who has had to inch his way to a gasoline pump, as we all have in recent weeks, has had a basic lesson in international economics. And you are also as aware as I am of the strategic interdependence of nations like ours whose security depends on mutual deterrence—a system uncomfortably like wary scorpions in a bottle. But our interdependence goes beyond economics and beyond security. It has become a matter of simple human survival on Planet Earth as we approach the outer limits of world resources and the carrying capacity of the biosphere.

The foreign policy of your government today is aimed at achieving a world order sufficiently workable to prevent catastrophe, military or ecological, and sufficiently cooperative so that the quality of life in our own country may be enhanced in harmony with the aspirations of others. In pledging the readiness of the United States to work toward the achievement of such a world community, Secretary Kissinger summed up—at the United Nations a few months ago—by asking:

Are we prepared to accept the imperatives of a global society and infuse our labors with a new vision? Or shall we content ourselves with a temporary pause in the turmoil that has wracked our century? Shall we proceed with one-sided demands and sterile confrontations? Or shall we proceed in a spirit of compromise produced by a sense of common destiny? We must move from hesitant cooperation born of necessity to genuine collective effort based on common purpose.

It is a choice no country can make alone. We can repeat old slogans or strive for new hope. We can fill the record of our proceedings with acrimony, or we can dedicate ourselves to dealing with man’s deepest needs. The ideal of a world community may be decried as unrealistic—but great constructions have always been ideals before they can become realities. Let us dedicate ourselves to this noblest of all possible goals and achieve at last what has so long eluded us: true understanding and tolerance among mankind.²

Conscious of our economic, as well as security, as well as ecological interdependence, most intelligent people the world over, I think, are becoming increasingly sensitive to the urgency of the problem of how to effectively communicate with peoples of other nations and other cultures, of how to relate to others so as to engender cooperation in place of conflict. Knowing we can’t return to the days of national self-sufficiency—if, indeed, those days really ever existed—we can appreciate not just the value but the necessity of learning to cope with the variety of social, cultural, and ideological perspectives that directly condition human thought processes and human behavior.

Increase in Transnational Contacts

It is about this quality of communication between peoples and how we can improve it through human interchange that I want to talk with you today, because that’s what’s really happening in transnational communications—we’re beginning to understand what it’s all about!

Simply increasing the number of exchanges of television programs or paintings, teachers or technicians, gadgets or gurus, across boundaries does not guarantee improved communication or understanding. On the contrary, pushing communications to speed-of-light limits, bringing jet travel to within reach of millions, immensely speeding up the print media, bouncing television programs off satellites—all these technological advances have had, and are still having, shattering effects on many cultures around the world. Increased numbers of contacts, while they broaden horizons, can also reinforce old myths and engender new anxieties and frustrations resulting from the technological disruption of traditional patterns of belief, community, and expectation.

In thinking about the title of my talk, “Transnational Communications—What’s Happening?,” I have to admit that the first thought that came into my mind was “Too much!” Because the technological means of communication have improved much faster than the ability of many cultures—I should say, most cultures—to assimilate the consequences.

Looking at the globe the other day, it occurred to me that the diplomatic post most distant from Washington was Perth, Australia, where we have a consulate. Perth is almost exactly halfway around the globe and far south of the Equator. When we were children we always believed that if we dug a hole straight through the earth we would come out in China. In fact, such a hole drilled from Washington would come out in the Indian Ocean just south and west of Perth. I picked up the telephone and called a colleague in the Department of State on the Australian desk and asked him how long it would take to get a telephone call through to Australia on regular commercial lines. He said usually it took only slightly longer than it did to make a local call from my Department to the Pentagon. Even if the circuits were busy, a call to Australia usually went through in a matter of a few minutes, never as much as an hour, he said.

Just a little over a century ago it took four days for the news of President Lincoln’s election to reach Denver by pony express from St. Joseph, Missouri, 600 miles away. Even after telegraph lines reached the city in 1863, the wires were often severed by buffalo herds on the Great Plains when they weren’t by storms.

In the history of mankind, a hundred years is hardly more than the tick of the clock. But in the last century, physical distance between peoples has decreased so much faster than psychic distance as to threaten cultural confrontations—and that may mean political and military confrontations—of potentially disastrous proportions.

If you were to plot a graph of the current increase in all kinds of transnational contacts—that is, the increase in the number of overseas telephone calls, the number of pieces of overseas mail, the number of foreign travelers, the showings of foreign films, the translations of foreign books, the number of students, executives, and technicians living abroad—you would find the curve going straight up off the graph and through the ceiling. The percentage increase in overseas telephone calls alone is around 25 percent annually, I am told.

Some of these contacts are of direct, immediate concern to many governments. For instance, it is technically possible today to beam television programs by satellite directly from one country to home television receivers in nations on the other side of the globe. Many governments concerned about maintaining the cultural integrity of their nations, as well as others committed to walling out uncensored information and ideas, are fearful about the prospect of such direct media contact. (I must say when I think of much of our own television diet in this country, I can appreciate their feeling. So far as international understanding is concerned, unlimited reruns of “I Love Lucy,” “Hogan’s Heroes,” and “Peyton Place,” whether delivered by satellite or by carrier pigeon, may be something less than an unmixed blessing.)

Constructive Interactions

The point I want to make is this: Those of us who value the contribution of educational and cultural interchange to our foreign relations are not mesmerized by the probable very long-term net advantages of an increased quantity of contacts. What we do assert is that if inevitably increasing interchange of all kinds among nations is to result in more cooperation than conflict, more collaboration than chaos, more conciliation than confrontation, in our own and our children’s lifetimes, purposeful effort is urgently required: We must seek to influence the quality of some of the most crucial among those contacts. Our increasingly complicated task, therefore, is to find ways to encourage the most highly constructive interactions we can envisage between the American people and the peoples of other nations. We must, to repeat, focus on quality, not quantity.

I use the word “constructive” to characterize contacts which involve influential or potentially influential human beings with each other in ways likely to stimulate their minds and engage their positive emotions to the ultimate benefit of relations among nations. We are not fundamentally interested in more efficient communication between peoples, even more efficient two-way communication, as such. The messages currently being sent back and forth by patriotic, civic-minded, conscientious citizens of two neighboring nations—Syria and Israel—across the Golan Heights are received on both sides loud and clear—and the feedback is usually immediate and to the point—but while this is efficient communication, it is hardly what we want to encourage.

How do you go about encouraging constructive human interactions? In this welter of willy-nilly people-to-people contacts and this constant bombardment by the media, how can we help ourselves and others to filter out the noise—the distractions—and encourage mutual learning under sufficiently favorable circumstances to engender both realistic appreciation and mutual respect?

It seems to me there are two essential elements in bringing about more cross-cultural human communication of the kind capable, ultimately, of favorably influencing international relations.

First, we should try to bring together people on both sides who are either already favorably inclined toward learning about each other or are sufficiently openminded to make getting to know each other an easy byproduct of activities satisfying other needs, personal or professional.

Note that I said “on both sides.” I doubt that a visitor to Denver from another country will have a truly rewarding experience in human terms here unless those he comes in contact with also are interested in him and his country—or at least have sufficiently open minds to make learning about him and his country a natural consequence of pursuing some common interest here together.

Indeed, any visit, here or abroad, if it is going to mean something, must offer the visitor opportunities for human encounters satisfying substantial emotional as well as professional needs. Whether a foreign student goes home from Denver to become a lifelong interpreter between his culture and ours—or merely with an adequate technical education—depends on whether he has had and used opportunities to become actively involved as a person in various aspects of American life. Whether an American Fulbright professor comes back to the University of Colorado with plans for a continuing interchange of visits, periodicals, and correspondence with his host university—which can produce lifelong linkages and therefore continuing constructive communication involving many people and organizations—depends on the friendships established and the mutual interests identified as well as his scholarly accomplishment during his year abroad.

And whether a future prime minister or business leader or TV commentator returns from a visit to Denver convinced that Americans are not only energetic, technically advanced, efficient, and rich but also straightforward, open, cooperative, sensitive to the needs of others, and easy to get along with—that of course depends on just what his experience was here, as well as on his ability to learn from it.

My second criterion for a really useful visit is this: The visitor must be someone whose personal, professional, or power potential is such that he can make a difference in his own country. Therefore, overall planning of cultural exchange, governmental or private, should, I believe, be based on serious analysis of actual and prospective patterns of interaction, both healthy and unhealthy, between the two societies. Without such an analysis, including the role of mass media, education systems, and other critical institutions within each society, miscellaneous cultural exchange activity will be just that—miscellaneous—with no assurance of significant favorable effect on our international relations.

Purpose and Utility of Cultural Exchange

Underlying these questions of how-to-do-it are the broader issues of purpose and utility. What do we really hope to achieve? Can more and better relationships among individuals, groups, and institutions in different countries really be expected to affect the way their governments ultimately behave toward each other?

One major study of this quite cosmic issue has been made by a group of 16 eminent scholars and statesmen from Japan, Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and the United States. This initiative is part of a continuing project entitled “Cultural Relations for the Future” sponsored by the Hazen Foundation of New Haven, Connecticut, a small private organization.

What the foundation did, through a series of meetings in out-of-the-way places, was to create a sort of mental spaceship where the 16 participants in the two-year study could develop a common wide-angle and long-range perspective on current world conditions. The title of their report, which I urge you to read, is “Reconstituting the Human Community.”³ Any one of them, when they started out, would have rejected such a title as pretentious and absurd. But that is the title they wound up with—“Reconstituting the Human Community.”

After two years of study, thought, and discussion, they agreed on that title, and the following quotation will, I hope, provide at least a glimmer of the level of conviction they came to share and which animates every page of their report:

If men want to move in new directions, they will have to broaden the range of their potentialities and capabilities. They have to be able to manipulate and manage larger political, economic and business units at the same time as they learn to build and preserve smaller communities. Against the depersonalized impact of the laws of science, technology and the larger bureaucracies, men must find and fathom new religious and spiritual depths. There is a need for a new humanism beyond the superficial unity that is imposed upon men by the global communications system. We cannot be kept together to build a new future unless we are linked to our fellowmen by more than survival instincts. What each of us needs is a new moral vision or a new philosophy of history capable of giving us at least some notion of where we may be going and some sense of the value of our place in the changing world in which we live.

In thinking about what I’ve just quoted, it’s important to keep one point in mind: These thoughtful leaders from many countries started out to make a study of cultural relations for the future; what they ultimately produced was a study on how cultural relations could be used to help accomplish what they came to conclude was the really essential task, namely, reconstituting the human community.

They take what may sound at first blush like a wildly optimistic view despite this sentence at the very beginning of the report:

It is no exaggeration to say that all systems on the basis of which the world is organized are facing a dead end, at least if present trends are allowed to continue.

Whether or not you accept this bleak premise, I think you will find three points the report makes—and its conclusion—interesting:

The first point: Perhaps our greatest contribution to developing nations, many of which have only recently emerged from colonial domination, would be to rid ourselves of the so-called European point of view—the idea that Asians, Africans, and other non-Western peoples are or ought to be “consumers” of Western culture. Can we instead learn to look upon other peoples as cultural equals with as much to contribute out of their heritage as we out of ours, and not in terms of strong versus weak, big versus small, developed versus developing? With our myriad social, moral, and spiritual problems in the Western world, can we learn to look upon cultural exchange as a possible means of bringing useful new insights into our own culture?

The second point: We tend to speak of “youth” as though young people were a minority, a problem apart. The opposite is true. We over 30 are the minority. The World Bank reports the median age worldwide is 17 years. And the world population is steadily growing younger. In the United States some 30 million people are between 18 and 25 years of age. What can we in the educational and cultural exchange business do to help young people, the vast majority of the human race today, create a new and better life? If indeed a way must be found to reconstitute the human community, is not the youth of the world our greatest resource—and must we not encourage thoughtful young people to build more networks of relationships across boundaries of all kinds?

The third point: “Of primary importance in future cultural relations,” the report says, “will be a growing network of . . . private organizations, each existing independently and acting autonomously. The present domination of (what we call) cultural relations by nation-states reflects the fact that they are the most powerful components of international society; it does not prove that they are the most effective agencies for the conduct of such relations. We do not suggest replacement of governmental and intergovernmental activities, but the creation of supplementary channels based on particular areas of competence and concern.” I couldn’t agree more. And those private organizations include universities, businesses, professional associations, and service clubs, among others.

Now the conclusion from the Hazen Foundation report: Cultural relations “are the chief means to shape the future of men and nations, to change their directions through creative mutual borrowing and to strengthen an awareness of shared values. . . . Mankind is faced with problems which, if not dealt with, could in a very few years develop into crises world-wide in scope. (This was written before the oil embargo.) Interdependence is the reality; world-wide problems the prospect; and world-wide cooperation the only solution. As a tool for sensitizing people to the reality and the prospect, stimulating them to attempt the solution, . . . cultural relations are, and will increasingly become, a decisive aspect of international affairs.”

Requirements of Interdependence

As I personally see it, we have no choice but to work in practical ways toward the development of a functioning human community, quite apart from the question of whether we will ever have a world government, if we are to survive as civilized human beings. Yet we need much more than any such easy generalization. In order for the world to become a fit place to live, a place where all may have some prospect of enjoying the fruits of civilization, then we must face up to the first imperative of interdependence: to strengthen habits of constructive communication and cooperation across national, cultural, and ideological borders.

We must, in the first place, move urgently to strengthen understanding of that transnational economic interdependence I spoke of at the beginning at the same time we improve the efficiency of multinational business organizations in meeting human needs. Otherwise the holders of economic power, whether government or private, both here and abroad, will be tempted to exploit their shortrun interest, at the cost of our longrun advantage. Please note that awareness of economic interdependence, and the commitment to long-range thinking it entails—as well as understanding of how different it looks, depending on where you are—can readily be increased by planned cultural exchange.

We need also to increase understanding of the indivisibility of peace and the interdependence of each nation’s security, which, again, I mentioned at the outset. In a world neighborhood, armed conflicts are increasingly difficult to isolate. Both knowledge and understanding of these life-or-death matters can be increased through planned cultural exchange. Indeed, it is arguable that without extensive, informal, and mostly unofficial personal contacts among Soviet and American scientists and strategists over many years, there might have been no test ban treaty, no SALT negotiations, no détente.

Another requirement of interdependence: We need to increase the degree of overlap between what decisionmakers in some nations believe to be overriding truths about the ecological dilemma and what is believed by others in other nations. The human race can perhaps physically survive disasters of unprecedented magnitude in particular regions arising from a failure of governments to collaborate to close the gap between population and resources, to overcome the contradiction between pollution and production. It seems to me doubtful that our collective sanity could survive a series of such disasters, all watched in living color by the fortunate few in the richest nations as we eat our meals with our children in front of the family TV set. Here again, cultural exchange can help directly, to accommodate differing perceptions and expectations, facilitate cooperation in devising common strategies—above all, to increase respect and appreciation for differing values, by far the healthiest approach toward reconciliation and convergence of values.

We need also, if we are to meet the challenge of interdependence, to improve the capacity of educational systems, media systems, and communities of faith to strengthen in every nation, beginning with our own, a more sensitive awareness of the human condition as we approach the 21st century. The accelerating velocity of technological change has already torn apart much of the fabric of loyalties, beliefs, and expectations on which societies generally had come to depend. What is to take their place? What will be the patterns of belief and commitment which will motivate world leaders in 2076? Once again, cultural relations can make a difference—perhaps, as the authors of the Hazen Foundation report thought, a lot of the difference.

Such considerations affecting the value we place on cultural exchange may seem to you a long way from the province of conventional diplomacy. If they once were, they are no longer, as the words of Secretary Kissinger quoted earlier suggest.

Furthermore, cultural exchanges play a direct and growing role as well in the day-to-day business of diplomacy, in the day-to-day work of the State Department in pursuing U.S. interests in bilateral relations with 130-odd other governments around the world.

This is no minor asset when diplomacy must struggle with increasingly complex conflicts of interest complicated by ever broader public pressures impinging more and more on traditional diplomatic prerogatives. Whether a U.S. negotiation is with Japan or the U.S.S.R., Panama or South Africa, Iran or Germany, our Ambassadors are greatly aided if two conditions obtain:

—First, they will be greatly helped if there is a substantial proportion of the leadership of the other country made up of individuals with understanding of our society, of our ways of thinking and behaving, derived from compelling firsthand experience.

—Second, our Ambassadors will be in a far stronger position, also, if there is a substantial number of those in our own country interested in the particular issue to be negotiated who can understand the way the other country sees it. Believe me, both advantages are exceedingly important. And cultural exchange, carefully planned and well executed, can provide both.

Here we in America have a resource of incalculable, indeed unique, value: the commitment and skills of some 800 voluntary organizations and of perhaps 100,000 individual volunteers throughout the country. Many of you in this room can testify both to what is given and what is received through cultural exchange in both directions. Many of you have worked and contributed and shared so that Very Important Persons invited by your government, or very important future leaders here to study in our universities, could have an optimum learning opportunity. And each of you who has done so knows, better than I, about the reality of learning from as well as showing to, about the special satisfaction of mutual sharing, mutual enrichment, mutual benefit.

On behalf of our Ambassadors, who are the first to see and feel the benefit of your efforts at the official diplomatic level, as well as on behalf of the Secretary of State, let me thank you for all you have already done and will do.

Of course, it will never be enough. There really is no end to the useful effort which the imagination and energy of concerned citizens can contribute to the achievement of our national goals in world affairs.

Every one of the 150,000 foreign students who come here with curiosity and hope and return home with a sense both of achievement and comprehension, social as well as intellectual satisfaction—every such student will provide initial impetus toward a new and positive dynamic in American relations with his country. So does every visiting scholar, every business trainee, every professional person, and of course every visiting journalist, educator, artist, and performer—all, that is, who have come to know Americans as individuals and our institutions as they really are and who go home feeling that not only do they know, but they are known by, those they encountered here.

That is the challenge of cultural relations to citizens here in Denver. You really can do something about the peace of the world. The successful operation and growth of both private and governmental educational and cultural exchange programs over the past 35 years would have been impossible without the diplomatic skill, the patience, the countless hours, the plain hard work—in short, the commitment—of volunteers such as yourselves.

I hope, in addition, that you are concerned about intercultural and international education—let’s call it world education—in your elementary and secondary school systems. I believe our children—and our country—will be more secure if they grow up knowing from the start that ours is not the only workable system of government, that other peoples are also committed to their own ways and their own systems just as we are to the American way and our system, that we in this country have a monopoly neither on truth nor on resources. Foreign students right here in your colleges and universities can help our children learn this and thereby start them on the road to a true appreciation of our own magnificent heritage, an appreciation gained with the help of an external perspective.

In closing I should like to point out another exceptional opportunity for Americans everywhere to create new linkages with other peoples and to strengthen old ones. That opportunity is the coming bicentennial celebration.⁴

The challenge to us is how we can take advantage of the impetus of the bicentennial toward both reflection and renewed commitment. It seems to me eminently appropriate to focus especially on the chance to build new foundations of mutual understanding on which the human structure of peace can and must be built in the third century of our national life.

I’m confident that you who are gathered here by the International Institute of Education will be in the forefront among those across the country who know that we are still young enough as a nation to dream dreams, still vigorous enough as a people to contribute to great causes, still strong enough as a country to be a leader in world affairs.

I do not exaggerate when I say you can exert far-reaching influence. Success on the road to a more peaceful and just world order depends increasingly, and in no small part, on people and groups outside official foreign affairs establishments.

Progress depends increasingly on people like you and me—as individuals and as members of private organizations—sitting down with our counterparts from other countries, exchanging experience and perspectives, working on common problems, opening new lines of communication, developing vested interests in good relations, strengthening habitual patterns of effective cooperation.

I am convinced, finally, that success in moderating conflict and promoting a more humane and cooperative international system depends more than ever in history upon intelligent men and women of good will here and abroad who are committed to work for it, a hardheaded commitment for the sake of our continued existence, a moral commitment for the sake of our humanity. You—and I—share the opportunity for effective contribution to that end.

1. Source: Department of State Bulletin, May 6, 1974, pp. 489–496. Richardson delivered his address to the Institute of International Education. Richardson’s address evidently stemmed from his September 27, 1973, memorandum in which he urged Kissinger to consider “an early initiative in the area of cross-cultural communication.” Richardson continued, “The goals would be to increase support here and abroad for purposeful efforts of official and unofficial agencies to reduce culture, ideological and other barriers to human communication, to build habits and mechanisms of intercultural cooperation, [and] to strengthen trends toward world community.” Among Richardson’s specific proposals was the cultivation of “a new focus in this country on intercultural education.” On October 3, Kissinger approved the further development of Richardson’s ideas. (Washington National Records Center, RG 59, Records of the Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, Subject Files, 1960–1976: Lot 78 D 184, International Cultural Planning Group (ICPG), 1973)
2. Kissinger’s September 24, 1973, address before the 28th session of the U.N. General Assembly is Document 17, Foreign Relations, 1969–1976, vol. XXXVIII, Part 1, Foundations of Foreign Policy, 1973–1976.
3. Reconstituting the Human Community. New Haven, Connecticut: Edward W. Hazen Foundation, 1972.
4. Richardson amplified his remarks on May 18, 1976, in the midst of the commemoration of the Bicentennial of the American Revolution, in an address, “Preparing for a Human Community,” made before an international convocation sponsored by the Board of Foreign Scholarships in observance of the 30th anniversary of the Fulbright program. For the text, see the Department of State Bulletin, June 14, 1976, pp. 752–759.