The Foreign Service Journal, September 2005

the Report of the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World (2003) notes, “public diplomacy helped win the Cold War, and it has the poten- tial to help win the war on terror.” The advisory group, chaired by former U.S. ambassador and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Edward P. Djerejian, strongly recommends “a new balance between security and engagement, one that prevents U.S. embassies and other facilities from appearing to be ‘cru- sader castles,’ distant from the local population.” On the same theme, in Call for Action on Public Diplomacy (2005), the nonpartisan Public Diplomacy Council out- lined a broad program of exchange programs, language training programs and cultural and media programs as essential to the “security and well-being” of the United States. Even the Defense Department has recognized the urgency of the situation with its recent announcement of a $300-million information program. It certainly is not easy to operate effective cultural pro- grams out of embassies that look like citadels. As Ambassador Djerejian points out in his report, given the current inaccessibility of embassies and consulates, it will only be possible to reach out to the public through newly established libraries, cultural “corners,” American Studies centers. He proposes the Palazzo Corpi, former- ly the U.S. consulate in Istanbul and a building whose future has been the subject of intense debate within the department in recent years, as a prototype for such a cen- ter. Sharing that historic building with the Turkish peo- ple, he says, and allowing it to be used as a meeting place would be a good first step in building better U.S.-Muslim relations. It was not long ago that we were dismantling the libraries in U.S. embassies and declaring them unneces- sary in the age of the Internet. But while unimaginable amounts of information are now available to those who can access the Web, and the State Department can rely on its Web site to handle many questions and even con- duct business that once required personal attention, it is still hard to imagine a world in which place has no mean- ing. So it seems that it is time to step back and take a long look at the importance of “being there.” If he were here today, Daniel Patrick Moynihan would second that suggestion. Even before he served as U.S. ambassador to India in the early 1970s, Senator Moynihan, D-N.Y., was a staunch advocate of openness and quality architecture as symbols of America’s democracy and its commitment to individuality. “Architecture is inescapably a political art, and it reports faithfully for ages to come what the political values of a particular age were,” he declared at a sym- posium sponsored by the State Department and the General Services Administration in 1999. “Surely ours must be openness and fearlessness in the face of those who hide in the darkness,” Moynihan said. “Precau- tion, yes. Sequester, no.” Risk was something Moyni- han was willing to take on behalf of the ideals that he believed in. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer also spoke at that symposium. He was invited to speak because, as Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston, Breyer headed the effort to bring judges, archi- tects, engineers, planners, politicians and members of the general public together as a team to insure best results for Boston’s new award-winning federal court- house (Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, 1998). From that effort, Breyer learned first-hand the importance (and difficulty) of striking a sensible balance between secu- rity and openness. Balancing Security and Openness In a recent interview, Justice Breyer elaborated on those earlier remarks. “People in any government agency who are in positions of authority,” he said, “have to under- stand that the issue of security and the issue of openness are both important and they sometimes argue in opposite directions.” It is simply too tempting, he continued, for officials to turn matters over to security experts. Those experts will always err on the side of security, he noted, because that is their job. It is those in authority who need to “understand the importance of openness, to under- stand that it makes an enormous difference both symbol- ically and practically if a public building is welcoming to the public or if it shuts itself off in a fortress.” For that rea- son, he emphasized, officials have to become informed enough to make intelligent decisions that require balance. They should argue in favor of security “only if they are convinced that the need for security is great enough to warrant a departure from openness.” If they err, he said, they should be prepared to err on the side of openness. According to Breyer, decision-makers in a democracy need perspective and they need courage. “You have to be brave enough to turn them [the security experts] down,” he said, “and if we are not brave enough to say ‘no’ when F O C U S S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 49