The US philanthropic foundations as international actors
Carnegie Fellows in Diplomacy pose by the UN building, New York (Source: Carnegie Endowment)
During March, I travelled to the US to further our research. There were several US-based training programmes for African diplomats during the 1960s, whose archives I hoped to find. UNITAR took me to the archives of the UN secretariat. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace took me to their offices in Washington DC and to Johns Hopkins University. The Quaker American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) took me to Philadelphia. Working across several archives in this short period had the advantage of highlighting areas of crossover and interconnectivity between the courses - particularly those involved in organising them, delivering them and funding them. The picture beginning to emerge, which corroborates the findings of Giles Scott-Smith’s work amongst others, is one where the major US philanthropic foundations were not only funders, but were indeed instigators of such programmes.
Since 1952, the Quakers had held ‘Conferences for Diplomats’ in Clarens, Switzerland and elsewhere, aimed at building international peace by gathering diplomats and their families for two weeks of structured debate and collaborative study. These conferences were run with Ford Foundation money. According to the AFSC’s records, the Ford Foundation were willing funders of the Quakers’ diplomatic work, appreciating their ability to act as go-betweens with the confidence and trust of all parties due to their pacifism and neutrality.
The Carnegie Endowment was approached by the Rockefeller Foundation in late 1958 with a proposition to investigate the feasibility of a project for training the diplomats of newly independent states (those that had become independent since 1945). Rockefeller granted the CEIP $25,000 to conduct a scoping exercise, which they used to commission Professor Norman Palmer to travel around Europe, Africa and Asia consulting and to write a report, which he did in 1959-60. Earlier in 1959, funded by the Council on Foreign Relations (itself dependent on Ford and Rockefeller Foundation money), Carnegie Endowment President Joseph Johnson also went on a tour of the continent, subtly making enquiries about the idea.
A ‘Program for Diplomats’
The idea of a 'Program for Diplomats' met with widespread enthusiasm and was almost immediately instituted, with two parallel courses set up. One, francophone, was based in Geneva at the Graduate Institute, under the supervision of Jean Siotis and with contributions from many other professors. The other, anglophone, was based in New York at Columbia University, under the supervision of Harry Psomiades. A former British officer in colonial Nigeria, Reginald Barrett, was employed by Carnegie to coordinates the Program from New York, with support from John Goormaghtigh in Geneva.
Beyond the main Carnegie Endowment courses, there were various 'seminars' in diplomacy instituted in major cities across the world - Washington, New York, London, Paris, and Delhi. The idea was to attract locally posted diplomatic staff for evening classes on international relations. The most successful of these was the John Hopkins Washington Seminars, which ran from 1960 to 1975.
Further to this, the Carnegie Endowment organised a series of what they called 'institutes', which were regional, short courses in diplomacy lasting 8-10 weeks. The first was in Makerere in 1962. These institutes in East and West Africa eventually grew into the Institut des Relations Internationales du Cameroun and the University of Nairobi Diplomatic Training Programme. At a time where Britain and France, the two main former colonial powers, were slowly setting up large and cumbersome training programs for African diplomats in London, Oxford and Paris, the agile and well-funded program of the CEIP was able to run the first training institute for African diplomats, in Africa itself, and with significant input from African trainers. For example, A.L. Adu of Ghana, who was the Gold Coast’s most senior African civil servant and oversaw the beginnings of the Ministry of External Affairs as Ghana gained independence, delivered lectures at the Makerere institute of 1962.
Pre-empting sovereign independence
Off the mark quickly, the Carnegie Endowment and the Quakers both pre-empted the sovereign independence of African states by including diplomatic trainees of non-sovereign governments, and thus ascribing them international recognition.
According to Carnegie Endowment President Joseph Johnson’s ‘Africa Diary’, kept as he toured Africa in early 1959, he made sure not to mention the program for diplomats to any British or French colonial officers: “I just had the feeling that this would not be a good idea".[1] Indeed, the British and French were both alarmed at the time by the Americans ‘muscling in’ on what they saw as their patch, and unhelpfully encouraging what they saw as a rushed independence process.
In 1961, the Carnegie program admitted two candidates from the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), who were still fighting a bitter war of liberation against France. The courses’ directors saw the way that things were developing and made a choice to provide training.
“we recognized that this action would have beneficial consequences with respect to future conduct of Endowment Programs in Diplomacy vis-a-vis Africa and other “neutralist” governments”
This was not done without stoking controversy, as this rejoinder from Stanley Hoffman, a Carnegie Endowment board member at the time, shows:
“for an American foundation to support FLN candidates just at the time when extremely difficult negotiations are under way between the FLN and the French government, would be precisely the kind of endorsement the FLN has wanted to receive from the US, and the kind of blow France has been afraid of receiving from her main ally. It is […] a political act of the first magnitude”
In the end these two FLN diplomats, Ferdjioui and Chaieb Taleb, would study for a year in Geneva, even as across the water in Evian their superiors negotiated the peace treaty with France that opened the way to self-determination.
Mohammed Ferdjioui, a Carnegie Fellow in Diplomacy, 1961-62
Source: Carnegie Endowment
Whilst UNITAR came later than Carnegie programmes, and dealt exclusively with state actors that were members of the United Nations, the US philanthropic foundations were key to its beginnings. Ford and then Rockefeller made large grants to the fledging UN agency, whilst the Carnegie Endowment, from its offices across the street from the UN, offered extensive advice and expertise in setting up its early training.
In these ways, American foundations, with an often closely aligned but still ambiguous relationship with the US State Department, can be seen to have had a strong influence in international diplomatic training in the mid-twentieth century. The US philanthropic foundations appear as international actors, operating without many of the political constraints faced by states, to the point of pre-empting sovereign independence through training. The comparative ease with which they could act across international borders and institutional settings means they left their mark across several of the institutional histories contained in our project, and across early diplomatic training for decolonising states in general.
[1] Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, Joseph E. Johnson Papers: Africa Diary, 19th June 1959