Last week we had at Regent's College an interesting and deeply moving event with bereaved families from the Palestinian and Israeli side. Two speakers - one from the Israeli side, Robi Damelin and one from the Palestinian one - Ali Abu Awwad.
Were I to summarize the meeting with Robi Damelin and Ali Abu Awwad in just one sentence, I would say that it was probably the most remarkable lesson on peace and philosophy of life that I ever experienced. Even before attending the event, I was expecting it to be a moving moment that would leave room for thought, but I can say it was even more striking than I had imagined it to be. It’s not every day that one gets to sit face to face with people for whom the Arab-Israeli conflict is not merely a page in a history book, but an intrinsic part of their existence, people whose lives will never be the same because of that very war that most of us analyze and write papers on in a detached way.
The Israeli speaker, Robi Damelin, lost her son David in the conflict. It was a touching moment to hear her read aloud the letter that she had sent to the family of the sniper who killed her son; even though it probably wasn’t the first time she was reading it in front of an audience, I could sense her voice trembling at times, as if it were just about to break into tears. It takes not only a tremendous courage but also an immense empathy to be able to forgive the person who has deprived you from the thing that meant the most in your life. Sitting in that room and listening to her reading the letter, I couldn’t help not wondering if, in her place, I would have been strong enough to do that, to ask for reconciliation with the person that I would probably have been humanly entitled to despise. I still don’t know the answer to that question and I hope with all my heart to never be forced to find it.
As a person who is an outsider to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, hearing about Israeli children who have never met nor talked to a Palestinian in their lives definitely comes as a shock. After reading about the conflict, hearing about it on the news and even writing papers on it, I couldn’t bring myself to believe that these two peoples are each fighting an “invisible” and “abstract” enemy. Just like Robi Damelin convincingly expressed it “For most of the Israeli and the Palestinians there is no face on the other side”.
This is the true narrative that nobody can see, the one that is taking place on a daily basis, beyond the closed curtains of the negotiations and intents of peace agreements. Listening to Robi talking about the way Israeli and Palestinian children never even get to meet each other, I could truly understand why this conflict is still ongoing. Even if peace was signed at international level, it would still take a significant amount of time until people would get to understand and accept each other, simply because at the human level they don’t have any idea what the other side is all about.
Most of the bad things in the history of mankind have come from our fear of the unknown, leading us into destroying others for fear of not being destroyed ourselves. So I cannot help but wonder, how can anyone preach about reconciliation and peace in the Middle East when these two peoples that have co-existed there for more than half a century now still don’t have a minimum knowledge of each other at the individual level?
When in college, I remember reading extensively about the Holocaust and what the Jewish people had to go through. I visited museums of the Holocaust throughout the world and I even have friends whose relatives have lived those dark times. Nevertheless, there was no other moment I could figure out with so much clarity the whole psychology of the Jewish people than the moment I listened to Rubi Damelin talking about her childhood. If at the beginning I was surprised to see how much empathy she was showing for the people on the other side although her son had been killed by one of them, after hearing her speak about her childhood in Germany, I completely understood.
She is one living proof of the fact that a little bit of empathy can go a long way, it can bring lifelong enemies together and make them try to understand each other for maybe the first time. And I also understood the “psychology of fear” that the Jewish people still have entrenched in them, a fear that Robi Damelin experienced herself and therefore can recognize in the people from the other side.
To Palestinians, Hebrew is the despised “language of the occupier”, just like German was the despised language for the Jewish people in the Second World War. One who has experienced a drama can understand another drama. And this is what makes Robi Damelin such an extraordinarily courageous person. However, what can now seem as an admirable and outstanding way of thinking to those from the outside probably took an immense amount of effort from her part. Getting over the death of your own flesh and blood and being able to understand the pain of the people that you deem guilty for his death…that cannot possibly happen overnight. Nevertheless, I truly admire her for reaching the point in which she can identify herself with someone else’s pain, instead of judging it. It takes not only audacity, but also an enormous generosity and will of helping others and ending this painful war.
Even if I am lucky enough to have never experienced anything similar, I could truly relate to her story merely by understanding her philosophy of life. When something as awful as losing a loved one happens, especially in the given circumstances, the first feeling than one experiences is utter anger. Then comes sorrow and eventually, after an endlessly long amount of time, comes the feeling of letting go, but not in terms of forgetting nor renouncing justice, but simply no longer feeling a victim. For most people who have ever lived dramas, letting go of the feeling of being a victim is probably the hardest thing to do, above all because anger and victimhood go together. As long as you carry anger inside of you, you remain stuck in the state of victimhood.
Having this as an anchor point, it is easier to understand from the broader perspective of IR that the peace in the Middle East is not just a question of a cease-fire or of an international truce. People have to make peace with their own feelings and sorrows and to understand the dramas on the other side in order to live together in a peaceful way. Just like the Jewish people carry inside them the same fear they experienced in the times of Holocaust, the Palestinians have the inborn fear of Israel and of all it stands for, because most of them come from refugee-families, just like Ali Abu Awwad.
Their outlook on the people from the other side is influenced by their personal dramas, by their feeling of homelessness and confusion and of not belonging anywhere, of feeling uprooted from their very birth. It’s their personal dramas that add up to the point in which hatred is born. That is why, in my opinion, more people like Robi Damelin and Ali Abud Awwad are necessary in order to make the change happen, people who can go to all the effort of understanding one another and not viewing each other as enemies but merely as people united in a mutual cause – attaining peace.
If Robi Damelin is definitely a courageous and generous woman, Ali Abu Awwad is a just as daring human being, since he was capable of letting go of his past in Intifada, of his bitter childhood in which his mother was repeatedly arrested for being a political leader and even of the death of his brother in the hands of the Israeli. Robi showed tremendous courage in turning her personal tragedy into an engine for helping other people and preventing other similar dramas, while Ali showed just as much courage in turning from a jailed militant who used to fancy violence as a way of solving things into a warden of peace and a fighter for reconciliation.
Beyond the personal tragedies which brought them together, it is that inner strength and capacity of changing themselves and reassessing their fears and their feelings that makes Robi and Ali get along and fight together for their cause. They might come from different sides of the conflict, but they are both of one kind – they are people who chose to be fighters instead of victims and chose, as Robi put it “to sit around a table and talk instead of seating by a grave and cry…”.
Each of them could have turned his personal tragedy into a reason for hating the people on the other side even more; instead of that, they decided to identify themselves with the misfortunes of the people who harmed them and to look beyond what meets the eye. To look for the internal reasons that make people react in a certain way. Just like Robi, instead of pointing to the other side and saying that the enemy comes from there and has to be destroyed, Ali chose to look for peace, to make sure that nobody would go through what him and his family have gone through.
Extrapolating from their two personal tragedies into general IR and leaving aside the guilt and hatred that nourish the conflict from both the Israeli and the Palestinian side, the conflict between the two peoples has one more decisive partaker – the rest of the world. Just like Ali pointed out, as much as other states would try to help the two sides solve the clash, the division of the world into a “Pro Palestinian” and “Pro Israeli” one is not only not going to lead to a positive outcome but will fuel the conflict even more.
On an international level, all states have a more-or-less straightforward position in relation to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but their approach is mainly directed onto the idea of having a “positive” character and a “negative” one respectively; their mere narrative is built in such a way that a solution would have to lead to a win-lose rather than to a win-win situation. The pro-Palestinian embark from the start on the foundation that the Israeli are at guilt and they have to be defeated, while the pro-Israeli start on the premise that Palestinians carry the guilt and that they are the ones who must surrender their fight. In a divided world, peace is unattainable and utterly impossible, as each side awaits the other side’s defeat. This is why Ali’s words are indeed wise, as they have that wisdom that only sorrow and the experience of pain can give one: “Peace is something to work for, not to wait for…”.
After listening to both Rubi and Ali, I share their opinion that peace has to come from both sides and crystallize into a mutual agreement that would provide each of the two peoples with the dignity of ending a chapter and starting a new one, of peace and reconciliation. This is why the agreement should be seen as a compromise, not as the action of the strong imposing on the weak. In fact, nothing should be forced on any of the sides, as any imposition would just defeat its rightful purpose of installing peace.
The best way of expressing the difference between attaining peace and imposing it is by making use of the example of Hebron, where the Israeli reached the point in which they had to put bars on people’s houses, so that they wouldn’t throw stones at the occupiers. In the absence of true peace and will of both peoples, this is what an international agreement with equal; it would be merely the band aid trying to protect a not yet healed wound. It would be the formal and fully-diplomatic way of preventing people from throwing stones, but not the way to do away with the inner tensions that drew those people into stoning their occupiers. No peace can be attained if the solutions only aim at the consequences and not at the causes of people’s actions.
Overall, after hearing Rubi and Ali talking about their projects, about the one-day of hunger strike weekly and after watching “Encounter Point” again on YouTube, I just sat and thought about everything that was said. If one had asked my opinion on the peace perspectives in the Middle East just a couple of months ago, I confess that I would have been skeptical. But after meeting both Rubi and Ali, I truly think that there is a way. It’s just a question of choice and a question of people fighting for the same goal. Just like Robi said in the trailer of “Encounter Point” - “You have only two ways – to seek revenge, hate and continue the same cycle or to try to do something about it”. To that, I would just add what A.J. Muste, the famous pacifist leader used to say - “There is no way to peace, as peace itself is the way”.
P.S. If you are interested in the process for peace in the Middle East, watch the 7-minute trailer of Encounter Point, in which you will also see the two people that I have written about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiZ7vlRf8aI
miercuri, 14 noiembrie 2007
sâmbătă, 10 noiembrie 2007
A girl's inborn right to curls...
Sometimes you need to go around the world and back to find your true self and understand what you're all about. To reassess your feelings and motivations in life, to realize what you want from the others and from yourself, to reconsider your expectations or, quite the contrary, to set them even higher up.
And also, sometimes you can find simple answers to over-complicated questions such as "What am I looking for?", "What do I really want?". You can find them simply floating around you and waiting for you to bring them into your conscientious thought, you can find them while you're reading books or listening to other people speaking...and sometimes you can even find them looking into the mirror and trying to realize what the person looking back at you is really all about.
For as long as I can remember, I've "disapproved" of my curls. I know it's a stiff and formal term, but I don't want to use the word "hate". Cause it wasn't really that bad (although in bad hair days I've used the H word quite a few times...). I always wanted my hair to be straight, probably reminiscing from the Barbie dolls that I used to play with when I was little and who all had shiny straight hair. Probably from the cover of the magazines that I read as a teenager that all claimed straight hair as the no.1 sex-appeal-feature for the opposite sex.
And probably from my own feeling of over-complicating things... I'm not going to lie...I'm no picnic for a guy. I'm actually quite a handful. I'm opinionated, stubborn, I dream big dreams, I know what I want and how to get it...I can be quite a shaky ground for a guy. And probably this is one of the reasons that drove me into considering that my curly hair was over-complicating things even more. There is an episode "Sex and the city"(possibly my favorite episode) in which Mr.Big, the love of Carrie's life, decides to leave her and marry the spiritless and boring Natascha.
Sitting with her friends, Carrie remembers the movie "The way we were" with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, in which Hubbell(Robert Redford) leaves Katie(Barbra Streisand) because she's complicated and she has wild curly hair...and marries a "simpler" girl, dull and straight-haired. Following that thought, in the end of the episode, Carrie asks Mr.Big who has just gotten married to Natascha ,,Why wasn't I the one? Just so that I know". And he just answers "I don't know...it all got so complicated". Which makes Carrie thing again about Hubbell and Katie and to realize that she's "Katie". That the world is made of two types of women - "Katies" and "Simple girls".
That episode is probably my favorite. It has so much truth in it and so much sadness at the same time. When Carrie looks at Mr.Big driving away in his limousine, with his newly-wedded wife, she just concludes that "Maybe some women are just not meant to be tamed.Maybe they need to run free until they meet someone just as wild to run with...".
Every time I watch that episode, I feel "Katie" too. I'm the complicated Katie, with wild curly hair, the one who's a handful for a man, who makes things incredibly complicated...The one to which men prefer "simpler" girls, with straight hair... Everything in life is about curls. Curls imply mistery, ambiguity, surprise, unknown. On the other hand, straight hair is easy to figure out, it's straightforward, it's "comfortable". And what do men want the most? Something easy, comfortable and cosy...
I've had my times when I wanted to be "comfortable", to be a "simple" girl, to be the one that "Mr.Big" would drive away in a limousine with and fade away into the sunset. As career-driven as I've always been, as stubborn and well-spoken...when it came to love, deep inside I've unconsciously wanted to fit the profile of the "simple girl", the one "Mr.Big" and "Hubbell" end up with...Not the one that watches them bitterly driving away. And I haven't succeeded in doing that. I never did.
And you know what? That's perfectly fine. Probably for the first time in my life...that's just fine. Because for the first time I've realized that I don't and cannot possibly be a "simple girl". That no matter how straight I can get my hair to be, deep inside I'll still be a "Katie". I'll still be the complicated, want-it-all Katie. And I'll still be searching for that man who would chose me instead of the simple straight-haired girl...For that man who would chose the hard way out, not the easy way. The one who would have enough courage and manhood to "tame" Katie. To discover what "Katie" is all about, what incredibly loving soul lies underneath her complicated image.
There are people who haven't even known the "wild curly haired" Diana. I've been doing my hair straight for as far as I can remember or, if not straight, just slightly wavy...just hinting at curliness but not admitting it for fear of complication. I even laugh at remembering that a couple of years ago I accidentally ran into one of my ex-boyfriends on the street and it was one of the almost unique days in which I had my hair curled as it naturally is. While we talked, he kept staring at me in a way that I had probably never seen him stare before, not even when we were a couple. In the end, he just almost-whispered something like "I don't know how to put it but you kinda look...radiant. You look...hm...great...".
Any girl knows that there's nothing as reassuring as a compliment from one of your ex-es. It's the best type of ego-boost you could ever find. However, while I was walking away (yes, I must admit, with my ego substantially tickled) it just struck me. In all the months that we dated, he had never seen me with my hair loose. All that time, he had dated the "simple girl". And...incredibly enough...he seemed to like "Katie" better. In the relationship with him, I had always tried to "keep it simple", not to complicate things, not to implicate too much of the real me. Looking back now, I realize that the poor guy never dated ME. He didn't know anything about me, about my dreams, about my way of seeing life. He had dated the girl that I was trying to be at that time, at only 19 years old. He dated the "Simple girl wannabe", the one who thought that love comes at a price. At the price of changing yourself and moulding yourself into a person worth-loving. That 19-year-old girl just couldn't understand that a "Katie" could never become a "simple girl". For as much as she would try to.
At that point, I didn't have the full revelation. I couldn't drive myself into believing that someone would just love me for...me. Not because I ever lacked self-esteem nor self-confidence, but simply because...I always kept my eyes wide open and saw what was going on around me. I saw what boys my age were choosing. I saw the kind of girl that they wanted for themselves. And when you're 19, you don't always think about the philosophy of life and about being loved for who you are. There are lonely days in which you just want to feel loved. Full stop. There are days in which you realize that you're too much of a handful for people to handle. That you're intimidating guys and driving them away. And then you try to change yourself, you try to "fake it"...whether it's about your dreams, your irony, your stubbornness or just your curls.
Now, however...I found myself looking in the mirror and missing "Katie". Being here for all these months really made me realize that "Katies" are hard to find. That the world is full of "simple girls" and that the wheel does turn. That deep inside "simple girls" would just die to be "Katies". It's been a week since I'm sporting my curls. I don't know how nor when I started being the "Wild curly haired" Diana again. I just know that I did. And I also know that I'm never going back to the "simple girl wannabe". Never. It may sound silly, but I feel free...I feel that, for the first time in my life possibly, I really WANT to be 100% true to myself. I don't want to fake anything. I don't want to fake straight hair, I don't want to fake impressions, I don't want to fake relationships.
And the fact is...I truly am a "Katie". I want it all. I want to get my big career and revolution the world...or at least a part of it :). I want LOVE. "Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-each-other-love", not lame and spiritless love. I want that love that can move mountains, not that love that is too "comfortably numb" to move even an inch. And you know what? I deserve it. I CAN handle it, I'm not afraid of it anymore. I'm not afraid of what the man in my life will think of me nor of whether he will want a "simpler" girl. If he wants the simpler girl, than he is definitely not "my man". And if he's not...I will just continue to run free. Until I meet someone just as wild to run with.
And also, sometimes you can find simple answers to over-complicated questions such as "What am I looking for?", "What do I really want?". You can find them simply floating around you and waiting for you to bring them into your conscientious thought, you can find them while you're reading books or listening to other people speaking...and sometimes you can even find them looking into the mirror and trying to realize what the person looking back at you is really all about.
For as long as I can remember, I've "disapproved" of my curls. I know it's a stiff and formal term, but I don't want to use the word "hate". Cause it wasn't really that bad (although in bad hair days I've used the H word quite a few times...). I always wanted my hair to be straight, probably reminiscing from the Barbie dolls that I used to play with when I was little and who all had shiny straight hair. Probably from the cover of the magazines that I read as a teenager that all claimed straight hair as the no.1 sex-appeal-feature for the opposite sex.
And probably from my own feeling of over-complicating things... I'm not going to lie...I'm no picnic for a guy. I'm actually quite a handful. I'm opinionated, stubborn, I dream big dreams, I know what I want and how to get it...I can be quite a shaky ground for a guy. And probably this is one of the reasons that drove me into considering that my curly hair was over-complicating things even more. There is an episode "Sex and the city"(possibly my favorite episode) in which Mr.Big, the love of Carrie's life, decides to leave her and marry the spiritless and boring Natascha.
Sitting with her friends, Carrie remembers the movie "The way we were" with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, in which Hubbell(Robert Redford) leaves Katie(Barbra Streisand) because she's complicated and she has wild curly hair...and marries a "simpler" girl, dull and straight-haired. Following that thought, in the end of the episode, Carrie asks Mr.Big who has just gotten married to Natascha ,,Why wasn't I the one? Just so that I know". And he just answers "I don't know...it all got so complicated". Which makes Carrie thing again about Hubbell and Katie and to realize that she's "Katie". That the world is made of two types of women - "Katies" and "Simple girls".
That episode is probably my favorite. It has so much truth in it and so much sadness at the same time. When Carrie looks at Mr.Big driving away in his limousine, with his newly-wedded wife, she just concludes that "Maybe some women are just not meant to be tamed.Maybe they need to run free until they meet someone just as wild to run with...".
Every time I watch that episode, I feel "Katie" too. I'm the complicated Katie, with wild curly hair, the one who's a handful for a man, who makes things incredibly complicated...The one to which men prefer "simpler" girls, with straight hair... Everything in life is about curls. Curls imply mistery, ambiguity, surprise, unknown. On the other hand, straight hair is easy to figure out, it's straightforward, it's "comfortable". And what do men want the most? Something easy, comfortable and cosy...
I've had my times when I wanted to be "comfortable", to be a "simple" girl, to be the one that "Mr.Big" would drive away in a limousine with and fade away into the sunset. As career-driven as I've always been, as stubborn and well-spoken...when it came to love, deep inside I've unconsciously wanted to fit the profile of the "simple girl", the one "Mr.Big" and "Hubbell" end up with...Not the one that watches them bitterly driving away. And I haven't succeeded in doing that. I never did.
And you know what? That's perfectly fine. Probably for the first time in my life...that's just fine. Because for the first time I've realized that I don't and cannot possibly be a "simple girl". That no matter how straight I can get my hair to be, deep inside I'll still be a "Katie". I'll still be the complicated, want-it-all Katie. And I'll still be searching for that man who would chose me instead of the simple straight-haired girl...For that man who would chose the hard way out, not the easy way. The one who would have enough courage and manhood to "tame" Katie. To discover what "Katie" is all about, what incredibly loving soul lies underneath her complicated image.
There are people who haven't even known the "wild curly haired" Diana. I've been doing my hair straight for as far as I can remember or, if not straight, just slightly wavy...just hinting at curliness but not admitting it for fear of complication. I even laugh at remembering that a couple of years ago I accidentally ran into one of my ex-boyfriends on the street and it was one of the almost unique days in which I had my hair curled as it naturally is. While we talked, he kept staring at me in a way that I had probably never seen him stare before, not even when we were a couple. In the end, he just almost-whispered something like "I don't know how to put it but you kinda look...radiant. You look...hm...great...".
Any girl knows that there's nothing as reassuring as a compliment from one of your ex-es. It's the best type of ego-boost you could ever find. However, while I was walking away (yes, I must admit, with my ego substantially tickled) it just struck me. In all the months that we dated, he had never seen me with my hair loose. All that time, he had dated the "simple girl". And...incredibly enough...he seemed to like "Katie" better. In the relationship with him, I had always tried to "keep it simple", not to complicate things, not to implicate too much of the real me. Looking back now, I realize that the poor guy never dated ME. He didn't know anything about me, about my dreams, about my way of seeing life. He had dated the girl that I was trying to be at that time, at only 19 years old. He dated the "Simple girl wannabe", the one who thought that love comes at a price. At the price of changing yourself and moulding yourself into a person worth-loving. That 19-year-old girl just couldn't understand that a "Katie" could never become a "simple girl". For as much as she would try to.
At that point, I didn't have the full revelation. I couldn't drive myself into believing that someone would just love me for...me. Not because I ever lacked self-esteem nor self-confidence, but simply because...I always kept my eyes wide open and saw what was going on around me. I saw what boys my age were choosing. I saw the kind of girl that they wanted for themselves. And when you're 19, you don't always think about the philosophy of life and about being loved for who you are. There are lonely days in which you just want to feel loved. Full stop. There are days in which you realize that you're too much of a handful for people to handle. That you're intimidating guys and driving them away. And then you try to change yourself, you try to "fake it"...whether it's about your dreams, your irony, your stubbornness or just your curls.
Now, however...I found myself looking in the mirror and missing "Katie". Being here for all these months really made me realize that "Katies" are hard to find. That the world is full of "simple girls" and that the wheel does turn. That deep inside "simple girls" would just die to be "Katies". It's been a week since I'm sporting my curls. I don't know how nor when I started being the "Wild curly haired" Diana again. I just know that I did. And I also know that I'm never going back to the "simple girl wannabe". Never. It may sound silly, but I feel free...I feel that, for the first time in my life possibly, I really WANT to be 100% true to myself. I don't want to fake anything. I don't want to fake straight hair, I don't want to fake impressions, I don't want to fake relationships.
And the fact is...I truly am a "Katie". I want it all. I want to get my big career and revolution the world...or at least a part of it :). I want LOVE. "Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-each-other-love", not lame and spiritless love. I want that love that can move mountains, not that love that is too "comfortably numb" to move even an inch. And you know what? I deserve it. I CAN handle it, I'm not afraid of it anymore. I'm not afraid of what the man in my life will think of me nor of whether he will want a "simpler" girl. If he wants the simpler girl, than he is definitely not "my man". And if he's not...I will just continue to run free. Until I meet someone just as wild to run with.
miercuri, 7 noiembrie 2007
"Always blame the Americans..."
...cause even when you're wrong, you're right..." said the main character in a 1969 Costas Gavras movie. And indeed...why is America viewed so badly worldwide?
The first Chatham House(Royal Institute of International Affairs) event that I attended had an intriguing title that left room for both interpretation and analysis: “What is America doing to improve its image abroad?”. After months spent as a grad student of an American university, I was truly interested in finding out an answer to this question, or at least hearing what a “Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy” such as the speaker Colleen Graffy had to say on the matter.
I will have to admit that I was somewhat biased in my conceptions about the US when I embarked on this Master Program and most of my outlook on what America stands for and on American values and ways of doing things has known significant changes due to the insight that I’ve had for the past three months. Hearing Colleen Graffy speak about encouraging young people from Europe and all over the world to study in American universities or come with study abroad programs in order to discover US from the inside and not through stereotyping and prejudicial thinking really made me think of myself and my former perspective on things.
First of all, from my point of view, the most interesting element of the conference was the analysis of the concept of Public Diplomacy, a new and interesting term that would at a first glance be deemed illegitimate by scholars because of the mere association of “diplomacy” with the word “public”. Diplomacy was never supposed to be public; it was always seen as an art of establishing and maintaining international relations through the intercession of diplomats, people who would negotiate crucial aspects of the inter-state relations in a totally non-confrontational way. Before being endorsed by politicians and government people, treaties and important papers were always analyzed by diplomats, which gradually placed into the public mindset the idea of diplomats as people who are usually not seen, but who help orchestrate the official actions of a country.
However, in our times diplomacy is a process that no longer takes place exclusively “behind the curtains”, but has actually become a public action. Our speaker, Ms.Graffy, stressed this aspect at the beginning of her presentation on America’s image abroad and underlined the role of “public diplomacy” as an art of communicating a country’s values and messages to peoples in other places of the world. As she interestingly formulated it, thanks to public diplomacy “people can disagree with the United States without being anti-American”.
Public diplomacy was heavily used during the Cold War as a way of getting messages thorough, from the Western World onto the Eastern European peoples who were constantly subjected to the Communist propaganda that depicted the West as the one and only enemy of the socialist state and the main hindrance towards reaching the communist goals. Nevertheless, for a brief period after the fall of the Iron Curtain, it was considered futile, as governments thought that their policies will speak for themselves and will freely transmit the message of their states.
This proved to be a wrong move for the Western countries and for US in particular, as Public Diplomacy is a constant process that cannot be “turned on and off” according to the temporary interests of the parties involved. It entails a continuous process of communication within countries, a process that cannot and should not be stopped regardless of what policies are put into practice. Policy-making and public diplomacy should work close together or, the way Coleen Graffy convincingly expressed it – “Public Diplomacy should be there at the take-off, not only at the crash landing”.
Basically, the United States is presently trying to convey its message to the world through a series of channels, the majority of which imply engaging diplomats in an active communication process, in order to get them out of the so-called “Washington Bubble”. This entails a whole range of methods, including providing them with an immediate alert of the narrative overseas through the EUR Alert – a compilation of the news overseas, extracted from the most important newspapers.
Moreover, if traditionally the ambassadors were thought to be the exclusive messengers of a country and the only ones to speak out on behalf of their states, the Public Diplomacy strategy of the US targets all diplomats, who must be present where the public that is absorbing their information is. In order to implement this somewhat theoretical concept, special websites have been set up, with diplomats taking turns blogging about important issues and giving answers to people’s questions and concerns. The main goals of these actions are to have all the embassies officials engaged in communication and to prevent the spread of rumors that have the tendency to harden intro conventional wisdom before they get to be countered through traditional channels.
In order to meet these purposes, the US is presently setting up Media Hubs in Europe and Asia, respectively in Brussels (where a TV studio is to be built as well), London and Dubai. This implies, in Graffy’s opinion, a certain amount of “pre-activity” (a concept situated in between “reacting” and “acting proactively”), of anticipating what the story will be and lining up the voices needed for it to be heard. Moreover, I found very interesting the fact that there are people whose jobs are to log onto Arab blogs (where the information is written 100% in Arabic) and to counter misinformation intended to mislead the population.
From the cultural point of view, US is promoting the English language through language courses in Muslim communities and is trying to engage citizens in the program of “Citizen dialogue”, by which American Muslims travel in Arab countries for organized dialogue with the Muslims abroad. There is also an outreach to women, through the promotion of breast cancer awareness in the Middle East and Latin America and a support for business women in Russia.
From a personal point of view, ever since I first encountered the term of “Public Diplomacy”, the thing that came to my mind was the business-related term of “Public Relations”. Public Relations implies acquiring public sympathy and positive feedback from the public by using of a series of tools that are mainly focused around communicating brand values, engaging the customer and creating a positive image of the company and/or brand. Drawing a parallel between the Public Relations(PR) and Public Diplomacy, I would say that Public Diplomacy does for International Relations what PR does for International Business – bolsters the development of a positive image of a country worldwide.
As a graduate of International Business, I would simply call this “country marketing”. The concept is of utter importance nowadays and it is also essential for building a country’s credibility and image for the ordinary people. Diplomacy itself handles the official ties between countries, but Public Diplomacy is meant not only for officials, but for the entire population, for the ones who are most vulnerable to stereotyping and to absorbing negative aspects that are heavily promoted throughout more or less biased media channels.
From this perspective, US is generally criticized for being too frivolous, having too many religious fixations, lacking values and profoundness of thought, for being too materialistic and too puritanical. Having these traits as anchor points, it is easy to imagine why the term “Americanization”, used in explaining the process of adopting certain features of the American way of life in European countries is always thought to have a bad connotation. I found very interesting a quote from Oscar Wilde that Colleen Graffy used for emphasizing the idea of the bad image of US that must be countered – “America is the only country who went from Barbarity to Decadence without Civilization in between”.
Indeed, America is often seen as the unsophisticated and superficial state that only relates on military and economic power in order to attain its purposes, regardless of the ones who suffer the consequences. However, this image has not emerged solely as a result of a strategy meant to discredit the United States but it came as a consequence of some of the political choices made by the American leaders throughout history.
As much as I have personally appreciated Colleen Graffy’s attempt of depicting US in much brighter colors than its real image, the best example that comes to mind in regard to the way America is viewed by the world can be extracted from her very speech. When asked about the way the war in Iraq is affecting US’ image abroad and attracting negative vibes from the people who are anti-war and who consider America’s intervention in Iraq illegitimate, her answer truly struck me. I have been working in the field of Public Relations for the past 4 years and I perfectly understand that image must be handled with care, that there are aspects that are too delicate to be directly tackled and that there must always be a strategy.
However, I am also aware that the tactic of handling a company or a country’s image must be a sensible and reasonable one in order to attain the goal of shifting the public opinion from the negative to the positive side; it must have the substance and the consistence necessary for rendering it believable.
With this framework in mind, I found Ms.Graffy’s answer not only naïve but dangerous for the credibility of the sheer image that she was trying to uphold: “I may sound idealistic, but America went in Iraq wanting to make a positive difference in the Middle East”. As idealistic as I am myself and as much as I would want to believe the good intentions that led the US into intervening in Iraq, I am also realistic enough to separate economic interests from pure and unconditional humanitarian intervention.
Just as we had debated during the Research Methods class with regard to single-variable explanations, US’ intervention in Iraq cannot possibly be explained by a single-variable; even more when that variable is roughly “making the world a better place”. Clear economic interests, worries regarding weapons of mass-destruction as well as the previous conflict between US and Iraq have all led to the American intervention to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime.
From this standpoint, one of the first rules of Public Relations is that it is better to give a “No comment” answer or simply to remind the person who asked the question that this does not fall within your range of authority than to provide an answer that will clearly be interpreted as fake and inconsistent with the real situation. I truly think that the same principle should apply to Public Diplomacy as well.
Nevertheless, I am by no means in disbelief regarding America’s good intentions worldwide, expressed in the policies that it is promoting throughout the world. While I was listening to Colleen Graffy talking about Radio Free Europe and Voice of America as one of the main tools of American Public Diplomacy, I couldn’t help not thinking about the days when Romanian people were persecuted by the institutions of the Communist Party or even imprisoned for the mere act of secretly listening to Radio Free Europe. My grandparents were politically detained and persecuted during their entire lives for being “anti-communist” and even deported with forced domicile for 10 years because of their political beliefs.
I therefore know what being idealistic means and I know that during the Cold War Radio Free Europe and Voice of America have done more for the people in Eastern Europe than the US can probably imagine. What is today considered a tool of Public Diplomacy was back then a tool of ideological survival for the peoples of Eastern Europe; it was their oasis of mere sanity in a desert of communist propaganda that was meant to make them lose contact with what was happening in the world, keeping them exclusively connected to the Communist rhetoric. From this point of view, I totally agree that Public Diplomacy was acting for bettering the world; however, that does not imply that America itself always is.
Moreover, Public Diplomacy should never be just a one-street approach, as the negative image that America has in Europe is most of the times counterbalanced by the European conception that America itself has a negative image of the rest of the world. The so-called “American exceptionalism”, seen as a sign of superiority is inherently undermining the relations between US and other states of the world.
Just one of the many possible examples with regard to this matter is the reluctance of the United States in signing the Rome Treaty and becoming a state-party to the International Criminal Court at The Hague. The thing that most shocked me while reading about this issue before the visit to the ICC was the assertiveness of the US officials in claiming that “having our American citizens, especially the members of the armed forces, indicted and tried by other than American judges would be unacceptable”. This not only undermines the credibility of a Criminal Court meant to act as a legal guardian for the same world that the US wants to „make better”, but it also sets a double-standard for justice, according to the level of power of the state in question. When a state uses its power to claim a different treatment, the feedback of the rest of the world cannot possibly be a positive one.
Overall, this Chatham House event was extremely interesting for me and I would say interesting for any International Relations student. Public Diplomacy is becoming an increasingly active part of international relations, an aspect that one should be fully aware of when pursuing a career in this field. It was a valuable insight to find out from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy of the US how the mechanisms of Public Diplomacy really work. Nonetheless, it would be also interesting to know how the effects of these actions can be assessed on the long term, if there is a way of quantifying the outcome of the ongoing programs and how they will affect the country’s image in time. If they will truly make the desired change for the better it is still to be seen in the future
Extrapolating from the benchmark of ”American Exceptionalism” and thinking about the final call in Ms.Graffy’s speech, for “leaving the negative conceptions about the US aside and joining in a united effort to face world challenges”, I reckon that America’s image will stop being a negative one in the moment in which the cultural and social actions that it undergoes and its claims for a better world will be supported by an attitude of solidarity with the rest of the world rather than one of domination. For, in my opinion, this is what “united effort” is all about.
The first Chatham House(Royal Institute of International Affairs) event that I attended had an intriguing title that left room for both interpretation and analysis: “What is America doing to improve its image abroad?”. After months spent as a grad student of an American university, I was truly interested in finding out an answer to this question, or at least hearing what a “Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy” such as the speaker Colleen Graffy had to say on the matter.
I will have to admit that I was somewhat biased in my conceptions about the US when I embarked on this Master Program and most of my outlook on what America stands for and on American values and ways of doing things has known significant changes due to the insight that I’ve had for the past three months. Hearing Colleen Graffy speak about encouraging young people from Europe and all over the world to study in American universities or come with study abroad programs in order to discover US from the inside and not through stereotyping and prejudicial thinking really made me think of myself and my former perspective on things.
First of all, from my point of view, the most interesting element of the conference was the analysis of the concept of Public Diplomacy, a new and interesting term that would at a first glance be deemed illegitimate by scholars because of the mere association of “diplomacy” with the word “public”. Diplomacy was never supposed to be public; it was always seen as an art of establishing and maintaining international relations through the intercession of diplomats, people who would negotiate crucial aspects of the inter-state relations in a totally non-confrontational way. Before being endorsed by politicians and government people, treaties and important papers were always analyzed by diplomats, which gradually placed into the public mindset the idea of diplomats as people who are usually not seen, but who help orchestrate the official actions of a country.
However, in our times diplomacy is a process that no longer takes place exclusively “behind the curtains”, but has actually become a public action. Our speaker, Ms.Graffy, stressed this aspect at the beginning of her presentation on America’s image abroad and underlined the role of “public diplomacy” as an art of communicating a country’s values and messages to peoples in other places of the world. As she interestingly formulated it, thanks to public diplomacy “people can disagree with the United States without being anti-American”.
Public diplomacy was heavily used during the Cold War as a way of getting messages thorough, from the Western World onto the Eastern European peoples who were constantly subjected to the Communist propaganda that depicted the West as the one and only enemy of the socialist state and the main hindrance towards reaching the communist goals. Nevertheless, for a brief period after the fall of the Iron Curtain, it was considered futile, as governments thought that their policies will speak for themselves and will freely transmit the message of their states.
This proved to be a wrong move for the Western countries and for US in particular, as Public Diplomacy is a constant process that cannot be “turned on and off” according to the temporary interests of the parties involved. It entails a continuous process of communication within countries, a process that cannot and should not be stopped regardless of what policies are put into practice. Policy-making and public diplomacy should work close together or, the way Coleen Graffy convincingly expressed it – “Public Diplomacy should be there at the take-off, not only at the crash landing”.
Basically, the United States is presently trying to convey its message to the world through a series of channels, the majority of which imply engaging diplomats in an active communication process, in order to get them out of the so-called “Washington Bubble”. This entails a whole range of methods, including providing them with an immediate alert of the narrative overseas through the EUR Alert – a compilation of the news overseas, extracted from the most important newspapers.
Moreover, if traditionally the ambassadors were thought to be the exclusive messengers of a country and the only ones to speak out on behalf of their states, the Public Diplomacy strategy of the US targets all diplomats, who must be present where the public that is absorbing their information is. In order to implement this somewhat theoretical concept, special websites have been set up, with diplomats taking turns blogging about important issues and giving answers to people’s questions and concerns. The main goals of these actions are to have all the embassies officials engaged in communication and to prevent the spread of rumors that have the tendency to harden intro conventional wisdom before they get to be countered through traditional channels.
In order to meet these purposes, the US is presently setting up Media Hubs in Europe and Asia, respectively in Brussels (where a TV studio is to be built as well), London and Dubai. This implies, in Graffy’s opinion, a certain amount of “pre-activity” (a concept situated in between “reacting” and “acting proactively”), of anticipating what the story will be and lining up the voices needed for it to be heard. Moreover, I found very interesting the fact that there are people whose jobs are to log onto Arab blogs (where the information is written 100% in Arabic) and to counter misinformation intended to mislead the population.
From the cultural point of view, US is promoting the English language through language courses in Muslim communities and is trying to engage citizens in the program of “Citizen dialogue”, by which American Muslims travel in Arab countries for organized dialogue with the Muslims abroad. There is also an outreach to women, through the promotion of breast cancer awareness in the Middle East and Latin America and a support for business women in Russia.
From a personal point of view, ever since I first encountered the term of “Public Diplomacy”, the thing that came to my mind was the business-related term of “Public Relations”. Public Relations implies acquiring public sympathy and positive feedback from the public by using of a series of tools that are mainly focused around communicating brand values, engaging the customer and creating a positive image of the company and/or brand. Drawing a parallel between the Public Relations(PR) and Public Diplomacy, I would say that Public Diplomacy does for International Relations what PR does for International Business – bolsters the development of a positive image of a country worldwide.
As a graduate of International Business, I would simply call this “country marketing”. The concept is of utter importance nowadays and it is also essential for building a country’s credibility and image for the ordinary people. Diplomacy itself handles the official ties between countries, but Public Diplomacy is meant not only for officials, but for the entire population, for the ones who are most vulnerable to stereotyping and to absorbing negative aspects that are heavily promoted throughout more or less biased media channels.
From this perspective, US is generally criticized for being too frivolous, having too many religious fixations, lacking values and profoundness of thought, for being too materialistic and too puritanical. Having these traits as anchor points, it is easy to imagine why the term “Americanization”, used in explaining the process of adopting certain features of the American way of life in European countries is always thought to have a bad connotation. I found very interesting a quote from Oscar Wilde that Colleen Graffy used for emphasizing the idea of the bad image of US that must be countered – “America is the only country who went from Barbarity to Decadence without Civilization in between”.
Indeed, America is often seen as the unsophisticated and superficial state that only relates on military and economic power in order to attain its purposes, regardless of the ones who suffer the consequences. However, this image has not emerged solely as a result of a strategy meant to discredit the United States but it came as a consequence of some of the political choices made by the American leaders throughout history.
As much as I have personally appreciated Colleen Graffy’s attempt of depicting US in much brighter colors than its real image, the best example that comes to mind in regard to the way America is viewed by the world can be extracted from her very speech. When asked about the way the war in Iraq is affecting US’ image abroad and attracting negative vibes from the people who are anti-war and who consider America’s intervention in Iraq illegitimate, her answer truly struck me. I have been working in the field of Public Relations for the past 4 years and I perfectly understand that image must be handled with care, that there are aspects that are too delicate to be directly tackled and that there must always be a strategy.
However, I am also aware that the tactic of handling a company or a country’s image must be a sensible and reasonable one in order to attain the goal of shifting the public opinion from the negative to the positive side; it must have the substance and the consistence necessary for rendering it believable.
With this framework in mind, I found Ms.Graffy’s answer not only naïve but dangerous for the credibility of the sheer image that she was trying to uphold: “I may sound idealistic, but America went in Iraq wanting to make a positive difference in the Middle East”. As idealistic as I am myself and as much as I would want to believe the good intentions that led the US into intervening in Iraq, I am also realistic enough to separate economic interests from pure and unconditional humanitarian intervention.
Just as we had debated during the Research Methods class with regard to single-variable explanations, US’ intervention in Iraq cannot possibly be explained by a single-variable; even more when that variable is roughly “making the world a better place”. Clear economic interests, worries regarding weapons of mass-destruction as well as the previous conflict between US and Iraq have all led to the American intervention to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime.
From this standpoint, one of the first rules of Public Relations is that it is better to give a “No comment” answer or simply to remind the person who asked the question that this does not fall within your range of authority than to provide an answer that will clearly be interpreted as fake and inconsistent with the real situation. I truly think that the same principle should apply to Public Diplomacy as well.
Nevertheless, I am by no means in disbelief regarding America’s good intentions worldwide, expressed in the policies that it is promoting throughout the world. While I was listening to Colleen Graffy talking about Radio Free Europe and Voice of America as one of the main tools of American Public Diplomacy, I couldn’t help not thinking about the days when Romanian people were persecuted by the institutions of the Communist Party or even imprisoned for the mere act of secretly listening to Radio Free Europe. My grandparents were politically detained and persecuted during their entire lives for being “anti-communist” and even deported with forced domicile for 10 years because of their political beliefs.
I therefore know what being idealistic means and I know that during the Cold War Radio Free Europe and Voice of America have done more for the people in Eastern Europe than the US can probably imagine. What is today considered a tool of Public Diplomacy was back then a tool of ideological survival for the peoples of Eastern Europe; it was their oasis of mere sanity in a desert of communist propaganda that was meant to make them lose contact with what was happening in the world, keeping them exclusively connected to the Communist rhetoric. From this point of view, I totally agree that Public Diplomacy was acting for bettering the world; however, that does not imply that America itself always is.
Moreover, Public Diplomacy should never be just a one-street approach, as the negative image that America has in Europe is most of the times counterbalanced by the European conception that America itself has a negative image of the rest of the world. The so-called “American exceptionalism”, seen as a sign of superiority is inherently undermining the relations between US and other states of the world.
Just one of the many possible examples with regard to this matter is the reluctance of the United States in signing the Rome Treaty and becoming a state-party to the International Criminal Court at The Hague. The thing that most shocked me while reading about this issue before the visit to the ICC was the assertiveness of the US officials in claiming that “having our American citizens, especially the members of the armed forces, indicted and tried by other than American judges would be unacceptable”. This not only undermines the credibility of a Criminal Court meant to act as a legal guardian for the same world that the US wants to „make better”, but it also sets a double-standard for justice, according to the level of power of the state in question. When a state uses its power to claim a different treatment, the feedback of the rest of the world cannot possibly be a positive one.
Overall, this Chatham House event was extremely interesting for me and I would say interesting for any International Relations student. Public Diplomacy is becoming an increasingly active part of international relations, an aspect that one should be fully aware of when pursuing a career in this field. It was a valuable insight to find out from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy of the US how the mechanisms of Public Diplomacy really work. Nonetheless, it would be also interesting to know how the effects of these actions can be assessed on the long term, if there is a way of quantifying the outcome of the ongoing programs and how they will affect the country’s image in time. If they will truly make the desired change for the better it is still to be seen in the future
Extrapolating from the benchmark of ”American Exceptionalism” and thinking about the final call in Ms.Graffy’s speech, for “leaving the negative conceptions about the US aside and joining in a united effort to face world challenges”, I reckon that America’s image will stop being a negative one in the moment in which the cultural and social actions that it undergoes and its claims for a better world will be supported by an attitude of solidarity with the rest of the world rather than one of domination. For, in my opinion, this is what “united effort” is all about.
vineri, 2 noiembrie 2007
The day I fell in love with autumn..
I never used to like autumn. For as far back as I can remember, autumn always made me feel sad, always gave me a feeling of stillness and utter gloominess, similar to the one that the last chapter of a sad love story leaves on us. The autumn rain, its coldness and its dark clouds always reminded me of Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights", in which the two lovers Heathcliff and Cathy never end up together. I always picture that book in the dim colors of autumn...
Nevertheless...something changed this year. Just like in one of Emily Bronte's books, when the heroine falls in love with the man she used to despise, this year I fell in love with autumn. It happened unexpectedly, there was no moment of revelation in which I said "I think I'm falling in love", it just happened..like it usually happens in life.
I live in London right next to Regent's Park. Although I grew up next to Tineretului Park in Bucharest and I know it by heart...I can truly say that Regent's Park is probably the most beautiful park I've ever seen. It doesn't have statues, such as Vigeland Park in Oslo, it's nor that famous, nor that full of life and people like other parks in the world. It is, however, the park in which I've witnessed...yes...witnessed...the most wonderful autumn ever. It's in this park that I've for the first time in my entire life the urge of laying down on the yellow and reddish carpet of leaves, laid back and facing the sky, counting the clouds in the sweet drunkenness of the fresh autumn air.
It is Regent's Park the place of my morning strolls, with a bag of nuts in one hand, for feeeding the squirrels(that would just look at me with their big curious eyes...)and with the camera in the other, taking photos of this amazingly beautiful nature. Every time I see Regent's Park I feel incredibly lucky just for being there, for being able to lay my eyes on the fresh green grass, on the perfect yellow leaves, on the cloudy but beautiful sky...I truly feel and am blessed...
I forgot to mention, but Regent's Park is actually the park of my college here in London. Webster University is part of Regent's College, along with London School of Business and other 5 academic institutions, so I get to walk through Regent's Park on my way to classes. During the breaks, I just buy a sushi-set from the cafeteria and sit on the green grass to eat it...it's my little way of spoiling myself and enjoying a beautiful sunny day :)
If you've ever seen ,,American Beauty"...being in Regent's Park constantly reminds me of the scene with the plastic bag "dancing" in the air. And the words of the boy: "How can you stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world... Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in...".
And indeed...there is so much beauty in the world. You just have to keep your eyes wide open so that you can notice it. And try to have your heart open as well...
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