International and Language Education for a Global Future: Fifty Years of U.S. Title VI and Fulbright-Hays Programs

3. Title VI and National and Global Security: Current Status and Concerns Going Forward

In addressing the relationship between Title VI and national and global security, this chapter offers reflections on four interrelated topics. The first section discusses the importance for security-related concerns of global competence— defined as knowledge, understanding, and skills related to other countries and cultures and to world affairs more generally. It also calls attention to the contribution of Title VI programs in building global competence among ordinary citizens and in ensuring that the country has the foreign area expertise it needs.1 The second section reinforces claims about the importance of global competence, and the programs that help to produce it, by reviewing instances in which policies and actions uninformed by knowledge of other countries and cultures have been detrimental to U.S. national security. Although it is clear that security assessments and foreign policy decisions should be informed by knowledge of other countries and world regions, various constraints have limited the degree to which this occurs in practice. These constraints are discussed in the last two sections of this chapter in order to clarify the context within which Title VI programs operate and to focus attention on problems that must be addressed if these programs and the specialists they support are to contribute as fully as possible to advancing national and global security. The first of these sections reviews debates and disagreement among foreign area specialists C H A P T E R 3 Title VI and National and Global Security: Current Status and Concerns Going Forward Mark Tessler 33 in the United States and the normative considerations that make it difficult to translate indepth knowledge of other societies into unambiguous recommendations about the proper response to security challenges. The final section explores the complicated, and sometimes problematic, relationship between foreign area specialists and government agencies seeking to involve them in national security matters. Particular attention in this section is given to relations with the Defense Department and national security agencies. Global Competence Most of this chapter focuses on the connection between Title VI and the importance of the work it supports, on the one hand, and U.S. national security, with particular attention to American policies and actions relating to foreign affairs and defense, on the other. With the emphasis of Title VI on the production and dissemination of knowledge about other countries and cultures, and about global affairs more generally, this relatively specific focus reflects a desire to address what has been the central rationale for U.S. government support of Title VI programs and to examine the constraints and challenges, as well as the opportunities, that have marked the recent history of Title VI programs and define the context within which they will operate and make their contribution in the years ahead. Although the topic is largely beyond the scope of this chapter, it must nevertheless be acknowledged and mentioned at least in passing that security involves much more than foreign affairs and defense, and also that the policies and actions of the United States are only one part of what is relevant for global security. Issues of economy, health, food, environment, migration, and much more all have national and global security implications. Moreover, the relevance of such considerations has contributed to broadening the way in which national and global security are understood, with the term “human security” often used to connote both an enlarged and more comprehensive perspective and the fact that security pertains to the safety and well-being of individuals as well as nations. In other words, security is defined by the rights and needs of all men and women, not just those of a state or the members of a particular population category. Many international and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) therefore employ the term, and concept, of “human security” as a guide for their programs , formulating policies and taking actions that, as expressed by one analyst, respondto“themultidimensionalrealitiesofeverydayexistence”inaneffortto“bridge the gap between theory and empiricism, analysis and applied policy research.”2 In addition, although this is today something of a truism, the world’s peoples and nations are increasingly interconnected, such that what one country— especially, though not only, the United States—does or experiences often has 34 M A R K T E S S L E R significant security implications for others. The worldwide financial crisis of 2008–2009 is an example with particular significance at the time of this writing. Notwithstanding...