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April 2014
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Then there are the many examples of the traditional view of scientific knowledge facilitating diplomatic discourse as occurred in the development of international health organizations. Interstate negotiation for global health goes back over five hundred years, but the modern developments can be traced to the sanitary conferences of the nineteenth century. It was the prevention of epidemics and the impact quarantine practices could have on trade and commerce that were the basic motivation for these early efforts. Quarantine represented not only a hindrance to travel and trade as well as financial losses, but also presented opportunities for bribery and corruption. In the first international sanitary conference of 1851 there were 12 states, each represented by a doctor and a diplomat. The length of the conference: six months, and the arguments by doctors over the merits and demerits of the theories of contagion versus those of sanitation led to the decision that if progress was to be made doctors who represented the scientific opinion of the day should be excluded. Thirteen of these were held and despite the fact that the vibrio of cholera was discovered by Pacini in 1854 and rediscovered by Koch 30 years later and indeed Koch participated in two of the Sanitary conferences, the basic approach of the international effort was dominated by the thesis that the best thing was to keep the infections out of the country and the major debates on how best this was to be done was mainly within the purview of diplomats rather than scientists. The main infectious disease of the Americas: yellow fever, was of little interest to the European nations, so the Fifth Sanitary conference was held in Washington in 1881. This was a meeting essentially of diplomats with four experts in medical matters brought to give a patina of science to the proceedings which were essentially administrative. It was here that carlos Findlay presented a major scientific theory –that yellow fever required a vector and subsequently described that vector as the mosquito that came to be known as Aedes Aegypti, which is still a scourge to the countries of the Americas. But at the First Sanitary conference of the Americas in 1902 at which the Pan American health Organization was created, there appears to have been a different tone. At the opening of the conference, the Surgeon-General of the United States as host was very clear. he said “Our deliberations will relate to scientific investigations which alone enable us to be rational in both quarantine and sanitation and which form the foundation and the iron girders of our hygienic structure”. Goodman describes in detail the evolution of these conferences into the International Office of Public health in Paris. When World War II ended the United Nations was established, WhO was born and some of the impetus for their work would have come from Point 4 of President Truman’s 1949 inaugural address in which he pledged “We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefit of our scientific advances and industrial progress available or the improvement of underdeveloped areas”. The global pattern of disease has changed with increasing dominance of the chronic non-communicable diseases (Ncds) over the communicable diseases. More people now die of Ncds—cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancer and chronic respiratory disease—than of communicable disease and the incidence of these diseases is rising in all countries, among the rich and the poor. The need for joint and cooperative action is just as great as before. The control of the vectors of these new diseases is often beyond the capacity of a single nation state although the responsibility for the health of its citizens is to a large extent the state’s or rather government’s responsibility. This is not to remove individual agency, but the necessary change in many of the factors which affect the health of the population as a whole are outside the capacity of the individual. The social determinants of health as the term implies, are not under individual control. Here I must refer to a caribbean experience which represents one of the outstanding examples of collective caribbean diplomacy leading the world. It was the science of the magnitude of the burden of the Ncds in the caribbean countries that persuaded their heads of Governments to invest political and diplomatic capital in moving the issue from the regional level to the commonwealth and then to the level of the United Nations General Assembly. It is science that will facilitate the diplomatic wrestling with issues such as climate change, antimicrobial resistance and the global preparations for a possible influenza pandemic. The growth of interest in the nexus between health and foreign policy in the United Nations and more generally, is in part due to the ability of the health sector to produce the science that facilitates dialogue. I refer to science generally and must admit that it is disciplines beside those in the STEM world that come into play here, especially the social and behavioral sciences. But the more fundamental question that is rarely debated and has import for the training of all diplomats is whether the essential canons of science are of any relevance in diplomatic practice and discourse. The STEM world in which I dwelt originally would have grave difficulty accepting many of the tenets of diplomacy. I confess that I was weaned scientifically on the works of Sir Peter Medawar and treasured his affirmation that “no scientific theory ever achieves apodiptic certainty”. (That it is demonstrably true) I swore by Karl Popper and his concept of the falsifiability of hypotheses. I believed that science was a logically connected network of theories that represented our current opinion of about what the natural world is like. It is basic to science that assumptions and the data supporting them are subject to review and reassessment and change through criticism from peers and the production of new data. Scientific data and information are public while making information public and inviting validation and possibly rejection is normally anathema to the traditional inter-state diplomacy. This is an extract from a lecture presented at the Institute of International Relations, UWI St Augustine, on March 18, 2014. For the full version please click here. |
can science make a meaningful contribution to diplomacy? There are three aspects that I will address. First, there is the role scientists play as diplomats, and here I refer to the doyen of scientist/diplomats, Benjamin Franklin. I believe that his scientific background and training allowed him to be stoical in the midst of many of the travails he underwent and certainly his scientific credentials gave him access to what were then described as philosophical circles that might have been closed to others less famous. So great was his reputation that on one occasion when he was being criticized in the house of lords, lord chatham referred to him as “one whom all Europe ranks with our Boyles and Newtons, as an honor, not to the English nation only, but to human nature itself.” I would not go as far as saying that scientists make the best diplomats, but I would argue that diplomats should not be ignorant about science and its possibilities for improving human welfare.