The Foreign Service Journal, May 2010

M A Y 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 37 tionary roles at maximum effective- ness. The collapse during the early 1990s of Yugoslavia into warring reli- gious and ethnic groups was a clear signal that the “end of history” was not at hand. The foreign attacks on the Ameri- can homeland on Sept. 11, 2001, her- alded yet another new foreign policy era, to which the Foreign Service and State Department would have to adapt to remain relevant. The Debate Is Over That process of adaptation has been under way for the last decade. As in Vietnam, we are once again in- volved in nationbuilding in the midst of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The State Department has been desig- nated as the lead agency and the coordinator for stabi- lization and reconstruction in both pre- and post-conflict situations. Both nationbuilding and democracy promo- tion continue to have overarching policy relevance. Consequently, I believe that the traditionalist vs. ex- peditionary debate of the last half-century is over. The fact is that virtually every current Foreign Service em- ployee at State and USAID has had at least one as- signment involving nationbuilding — whether in the 21 new states that emerged from the collapsed Soviet and Yugoslav empires, in the new democracies of East- ern Europe, as members of Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, or in the failing states of Africa. The last three Secretaries of State have all made their views on this clear. Colin Powell’s emphasis on leader- ship and management, Condoleezza Rice’s call for “trans- formational diplomacy” and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s focus on “elevating development” are all statements that they want a State Department — and Foreign Service — that can perform with excellence in both the traditional- ist and expeditionary areas. As a corollary, all three believe that most Foreign Service generalists should be able to both “field and hit,” performing both as traditional diplomats and managers of complex multiagency programs to achieve foreign policy objectives. Secretaries of State deserve to have the in- stitutional capabilities they need in today’s world. That is the goal of current reform efforts, as it should be. Co-Opting the Structure of Reform It is also important to recognize that the debate over the substance of reform has taken place in the con- text of a changing structure. From 1946 until 1980 the pro- cess was top-down. Our political masters closely supervised the pro- cess. A few senior career persons might be consulted, or they might not. Often, an eminent outsider was called in to manage things. The “poster boy” for this type of reform was Dr. Henry Wriston, president of Brown University, who led a serious State Department reform effort in the mid-1950s. Wris- ton’s major recommendation was that State’s civil servants be merged into the Foreign Service, so that those con- ducting foreign affairs overseas and those supporting those operations in Washington would be part of the same or- ganization and share the same culture. At a distance of more than half a century, that concept does not seem so unreasonable. At the time, however, “Wristonization” was strongly condemned on all sides. FSOs resented the entrance of hundreds of new officers — many at the senior ranks — into the Service who had not paid the “dues” of discomfort and danger in overseas postings. For their part, many Civil Service employees felt they were being dragooned into a life for which they had not signed up. As a result, even though the merger was not fully achieved, the turmoil surroundingWristonization did not fade for many years. Meanwhile, during the mid-1960s the relationship be- tween reform and the people of the Foreign Service began a process of change that has since accelerated. A group of junior and mid-level officers, frustrated by the manage- ment of the State Department and reform efforts from the outside, began to meet and discuss how to reshape the sys- tem from the bottom up. Their first operational step was to contest every officer and board position in the 1967 election of the American Foreign Service Association Governing Board. After their AFSA victory the group was quickly dubbed the “Young Turks” by their colleagues. The Young Turks began informally lobbying State’s management for an internal reform effort. The initiative bore fruit when the department organized scores of offi- F O C U S The terms and tenor of the traditionalist vs. expeditionary debate were changed dramatically and permanently by the Foreign Service Act of 1980.