Carnegie’s diplomatic training for the ‘newer nations’
Carnegie Fellows at the Geneva Graduate Institute during a seminar, early 1960s (Source: IHEID)
In 1959, the Rockefeller Foundation commissioned a study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), to identify the training needs of newly independent states in diplomacy. In the context of the precipitating global collapse of European imperial power and the consequent national independence achieved by anti-colonial nationalist movements earlier than planned for by their metropolitan governments, the CEIP would play a pivotal role in facilitating this training throughout the 1960s. Alongside French and British training programmes, its one-year fellowship programme based in New York (anglophone) and Geneva (francophone) would train over 350 junior diplomats from newly independent states from 1960-1973. The vast majority of these trainees were from African states. Before launching the program, however, the CEIP undertook a consultation exercise to inform the shape and scope of the training they would offer.
The consultation was undertaken by Professor Norman Palmer, an American political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. He travelled to Europe, Africa and Asia for three months from September to December 1959, consulting with well over a hundred high officials in newly- or soon-to-be-independent states, including French and British imperial officials. Throughout the report, the need for diplomatic training was gauged according to different intensities of feeling rather than some more quantitative metric. For example, Palmer wrote that reactions to the proposed training “ranged all the way from the remark of Mr. Sylvanus Olympio, Prime Minister of the Republic of Togo, that assistance in this field would come "as an answer to a prayer", to polite expressions of interest only".
Despite the context for this study being the process of decolonisation, it is striking that Palmer’s study carefully avoids any mentions of the colonial, or the use of words like decolonisation, colony, imperial or empire. Instead, Palmer writes in terms of ‘newer countries’ or ‘newer nations’ gaining independence. This deliberate choice of words does geopolitical work, removing the troubling colonial past from view and setting up a paternalistic discourse of socialisation where the ‘newer nations’ can be welcomed into the ‘free world’ led by the USA and its allies in the Cold War context. Palmer notes:
“This is a sensitive period in the relations of the United States and the “free world” generally with the newer nations of Africa and Asia. It is also a time of great opportunity, a time to give the peoples and leaders of these nations concrete evidence that the “free world” is interested in them and is willing to help them deal with their many problems”
Palmer’s discourse of newness articulates with the CEIP programme’s focus on young diplomats, specifically those under thirty-five, to reinforce the sense of paternalism through tutelage: the pedagogical and political processes where guardianship and instruction are held in tension with increasing independence.
A key focus of the consultation was the location of the proposed training. Arguments for and against basing the training in New York or Geneva were framed in affective terms by Palmer. For Prof Louis Halle of the Geneva Graduate Institute, the US could not “possibly provide the proper atmosphere for a program of this sort and it is bound to be suspect”. Mohamed El Fassi of Rabat University thought “Geneva had more of an international atmosphere”, whilst A.L. Adu of Ghana underlined “the great deal of suspicion … a psychological or pathological condition” amongst African representatives “that one of the objectives [of the CEIP programme] was to orient or to indoctrinate participants in a certain ideology” and so the “safe and neutral place” of Geneva was preferable.
However, voices from the already independent states of Asia were more radical. M. J. Desai of India argued that the training should take place in Africa as it was “the coming area of the world”, and suggested Addis Ababa as a suitable host city. Dr. Subandrio of Indonesia went further, to argue that a complementary training course for Western diplomats in the “revolutionary environment” of the non-Western world should be considered. Such suggestions demonstrate the ability of these ‘newer countries’, whose representatives were of course not naively lacking in understanding of the historical and political contexts from which and into which their newly-independent states were emerging, to imagine alternative visions of international cooperation and socialisation.