Staffing For Foreign Affairs: Personnel Systems for the 1980s and 1990s

by William I. Bacchus

Overview

William Bacchus warns that the American Foreign Service is in serious danger of being unable to meet changing responsibilities unless it reforms its present personnel system.

Originally published in 1983.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691613093
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #407
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.60(d)

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Staffing for Foreign Affairs

Personnel Systems for the 1980's and 1990's

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By William I. Bacchus

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07660-7

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CHAPTER 1

Defining Personnel Needs: The Future Foreign Affairs Environment

Personnel systems — the means of providing people to staff organizations — should not be independent of purpose. They cannot exist in a vacuum, attuned only to the desires of their own members or administrators. They must also serve the larger organization; they must provide people who have the skills, experience, and motivation it needs to carry out its mission. In the government's internationally oriented agencies, this minimum condition has too seldom, given the stakes, been met.

It is basic that managers of the government's foreign affairs personnel systems should understand the total policy environment with which they and the people they provide must contend. But the past shows how difficult this has been, and it seems certain to become more so. There has been a profound evolution in the nature of international relations and of American society itself, with major implications for these personnel systems. The way they must be managed, the kinds of people they must provide, how those people must be treated, and how the several governmental personnel systems must relate to each other — all this has changed as well.

A Most Likely Future

One view of the future, as sensible as any, has been summarized in a staff report of the Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy (the Murphy Commission), which reflected the substantial if not complete consensus of a number of academics and government experts:

1. The most pervasive factor in shaping international affairs in the coming decades will be the growing interdependence of societies and nations and their reactions to that interdependence. Separate states, even the largest, will not be able to meet their basic needs for well-being independently.

2. It follows that the capacity to shape significant events will depend on collaboration among states....

3. The requisite cooperation must inevitably include a wide range of other nations....

4. The required collaboration will have to take many forms....

5. Such intimate cooperation will be inherently difficult, especially for the democratic states....

6. Compounding the difficulty will be the weakness or instability of governments or confusion about their purposes over the decades ahead. Social and political tensions will profoundly modify the institutions and outlook of the major states....

7. In this perspective, the tasks of U.S. foreign policy in the coming decades will be two-fold: to help build the processes and institutions for world collaboration and order, and to foster the evolution of the major states in ways conducive to a cooperative order....

8. In order to undertake those tasks successfully, U.S. policymaking will have to embody two features not easy to combine: (a) clear direction and continuity over time; and (b) extensive participation.

9. The leadership must come from the President but these tasks cannot be performed as solos. ... The critical problem is how to extend his reach by utilizing and organizing the efforts of others. To do so will require the reversal of the increasing tendency over the last decade to concentrate the making and executing of policy into a few hands.

10. Foreign Policy will have to be based on a coherent strategy or framework widely understood and supported....

These changes must affect the whole foreign policy-making apparatus of the American government and society. For current purposes, however, the focus of this chapter is upon the demands they will make on career foreign affairs officials and the personnel systems which supply them. These officials do not formally "make" foreign policy, but they are critical in the process, as custodians of the government's expertise and as its institutional memory. They provide continuity of communication with other governments, international organizations, domestic constituencies, and the Congress. How well they meet such demands will have a major effect on the ability of political leaders to conduct an effective foreign policy.

New Issues and Old

To say that we are now entering an era of "complex interdependence" is by now a cliché, as is the growing realization that the future will differ significantly from that assumed in power-oriented models of the international system. Anyone who has ever waited in a line for gasoline or become concerned with Three Mile Island, the MX missile, the effect of synthetic fuel production on the ecology of the American West, or of grain embargoes on the Soviet Union, is likely to accept this fact. When complex interdependence prevails, there are multiple channels of communication connecting societies, many of which are nongovernmental. There are, similarly, numerous international issue-agendas, many of which in earlier times would have been considered solely as matters of domestic policy. As a consequence, they are taken up by many parts of government, not just foreign offices.

The term "global issues" has also been used to categorize such problems. By whatever name they are known, they are particularly difficult for foreign affairs bureaucracies, which are attuned to more traditional political and military strategic issues, to deal with. These new issues typically include:

— situations which could have catastrophic effects if left unattended, but with uncertain probabilities and long time-horizons which defuse a high sense of urgency;

— future uncertainties which are highly dependent upon changes and developments in science and technology;

— issues with major domestic as well as foreign policy implications, meaning that they cross jurisdictional lines and raise difficult problems within governments as well as without; and

— nontraditional modes of confrontation and resolution, featuring diplomacy carried out multilaterally rather than in the more comfortable one-state-to-another fashion to which foreign offices are best suited, as well as a greater linkage of specific issues with more general conditions, such as the global inequity between wealthy, industrialized countries and poorer countries.

Examples of the kinds of issues which are increasingly global include world population growth, nuclear power, satellite communications, ocean pollution, law of the sea, global food management, and intentional and unintentional atmospheric modification. Others include environmental degradation, the transfer of technology, the utilization and distribution of mineral resources, and, cutting across many of these, global energy production and allocation. Such issues require a significant reordering of the thought processes of governments and societies. They can no longer be treated as exceptions.

Obviously, these new or newly important issues have not displaced the fundamental concerns of security and power. Rather, they are an additional complexity in international relations. Thus, proposals that the old organizational and personnel systems now used to carry out foreign policy should be completely replaced are misguided.

A closely related change is the larger part which economic considerations must play in foreign policy. This is underscored by the transformation of the U.S. role in the international marketplace from a position of almost unparalleled dominance in the years immediately after the Second World War to circumstances in which we are arguably more affected by others than affecting them. Yet even as our role has diminished, the sheer volume of foreign trade has increased. After relatively static growth from 1950 to 1960, the percentage of the GNP devoted to exports more than doubled by 1978 (from 5.7% to 12.9%), and imports grew by even more (from 4.6% of the GNP to 12.1%). And if one looks at the quantum leap in import figures because of the dramatic increases in petroleum prices after 1973, our greater degree of involvement in the world economy becomes even more obvious. But along with this greater involvement has come a lesser degree of control. Multinational corporations are now a major factor in international economic interactions, posing complicated new problems of monitoring and control beyond the ability of any single government to solve. Inflation at home has been exacerbated by foreign-determined prices for petroleum and other critical raw materials. And the U.S. market has increasingly become a prize for aggressive producers elsewhere, leading to demands for protection against dumping and for import controls. Perhaps most important are major monetary changes, such as the generally weaker position (over the longer term) of the dollar against other currencies and the breakdown of the international monetary regime which lasted for twenty-five years after World War II.

It is sometimes argued that this kind of economic interdependence is hardly new, and that it is therefore unnecessary to be particularly concerned about the way the government is organized and staffed to deal with such issues. For example, it was written in 1922 that

our people have been taught by events to realize that with the increased intercommunication and interdependence of civilized states all our production is a part of the world's production, and all our trade is a part of the world's trade, and a large part of the influences which make for prosperity or disaster within our own country consist of forces and movements which may arise anywhere in the world beyond our direct and immediate control.

Yet the proliferation of governmental and nongovernmental actors, the emergence of north-south issues, new technologies, declining U.S. productivity, and the destruction of predictable economic relationships all suggest that even such changes of degree, if large enough and if combined with fundamental changes in the international system, make old models and approaches obsolete. Perhaps these changes can be summarized in a single assertion: "During just that period in which the U.S. government, like all other central governments, assumed full responsibility for the nation's economic stability and growth, its power to fulfill that responsibility through autonomous action slipped away."

Multilateral and Functional Diplomacy

One irony of twentieth-century international relations is that general-purpose international organizations, originally established largely for political and security reasons, have proved unsuited to manage or prevent the use of military force; but complex issues of scientific, technical, and economic interdependence cannot be resolved without them. Gaining bilateral agreement among all the pairs of nations involved would be impossible.

Regional and special-purpose organizations have proliferated, supplementing general organizations like the United Nations. Their record is mixed, but one lesson already learned is that all states must learn how to operate through them to pursue their national interests. It is hard to disagree with a private study conducted by a Foreign Service officer with intimate experience in multilateral diplomacy:

If the United States persists in believing that it can protect its interests through traditional bilateral diplomacy alone or through special arrangements with small groups of like-minded countries, we will seriously jeopardize our longterm interests. The United States must overcome a natural distaste for negotiating with a large number of individually weak and sometimes irresponsible countries.

The trend is emphasized by the recent increase in U.S. participation in international organizations and conferences. As of September 1979, it was a member of sixty-two permanent international organizations and a contributor to fifty-two special programs, few of which even existed until after World War II. Official U.S. participation in international meetings has similarly expanded, from 141 in 1946 to 394 in 1960, 588 in 1968, 817 in 1975, and 921 in 1980. In fifteen years, the total number of delegates participating in such meetings — representing no less than forty-six agencies of the U.S. government — expanded from 2,378 in 1964 to 3,656 in 1974, and to 4,525 in 1980.

A caveat is in order. Some assert that the growth of multilateral relationships will make bilateral ones obsolete. But nation-states remain the autonomous institutional actors in the world of politics; international organizations do not qualify even as embryonic world governments. Bilateral relationships have been expanding at the same time as multilateral ones. The number of states with which the U.S. has formal diplomatic relationships has more than doubled in recent years to 149 countries as of May 1982, and the content of such relationships is typically much broader and more varied than in earlier periods. Where the Department of State was virtually the only U.S. agency represented in most overseas missions forty years ago, at last count representatives of some twenty-five agencies now serve in missions abroad.

In short, bilateral and multilateral relationships must be seen as mutually reinforcing. It will be increasingly necessary, with the relative decline in U.S. power (see below), to seek support for American positions on multilateral issues through the bilateral persuasion of other nations. And, since many of the issues in question will be highly technical (law of the sea, food production, resources), greater specialized competence will be required among those carrying out bilateral relationships than typically now exists.

Critiques of the weakness of State's "functional" bureaus (e.g., Economic and Business Affairs, Politico-Military Affairs, Oceans, International Environmental and Scientific Affairs), asserting that the Department is not equipped for these new kinds of responsibilities, are common. These assessments are strongly challenged by some of the Department's most respected senior officers, but they too would agree about the importance of such competence.

George Kennan may have made the definitive statement about the relationship between traditional diplomacy and the new functional needs:

... no one questions the need for expert assistance in the conduct of foreign relations in this age. Many of the problems that arise have highly complex technical or scientific implications of which the policy-maker needs unquestionably to be informed. But the generalist — the person of wide cultural horizons and knowledge of the world at large and experience with its bitter political problems — is needed, too. And of the two, the generalist occupies the more central and essential position; for without his guidance and coordination of their efforts the experts, however admirable, would produce only chaos.

While one may question the relative weights Kennan assigns, it is almost indisputable that the "comparative advantage" of the Foreign Service (although it has many additional responsibilities) lies in its generalist talents and in its knowledge of foreign societies and cultures. How best to link this vital resource to knowledge of specific issues and to the domestic policy process is a major concern of this book.

The Diminishing U.S. Power Advantage

Accompanying the emergence of new issues of interdependence is a decline in the usefulness of military force:

The security of the United States and its allies is still subject to threats, but many are not susceptible to standard military response. For the United States, as for our major allies, the most likely external threats of the next decades concern the denial of important resources (or their supply only at prohibitive prices), or severe environmental change, or attack by terrorists. None are likely to be relieved by conventional military strength. Thus a paradox emerges: much of our military strength is essential without being usable.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Staffing for Foreign Affairs by William I. Bacchus. Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• TABLES AND FIGURES, pg. xi
• PREFACE, pg. xiii
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. xxi
• INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
• ONE. Defining Personnel Needs: The Future Foreign Affairs Environment, pg. 11
• TWO. The Need for Change: Failures of the Current System, pg. 36
• THREE. Obstacles to Reform: Sources of Existing Weaknesses, pg. 69
• FOUR. No Perfect Schemes: Dilemmas of Personnel System Design, pg. 108
• FIVE. Support Systems: Data, Planning, Evaluation, Priorities, pg. 166
• SIX. The Foreign Service Act of 1980: Moving from Diagnosis to Action, pg. 194
• SEVEN. What Remains to be Done?, pg. 221
• APPENDIX: Summary Analysis of H.R. 6790 — Foreign Service Act of 1980, pg. 237
• INDEX, pg. 251