From the Candidates Positions on Foreign Policy

Hillary Clinton

America is stronger when we lead the world through alliances and build our foreign policy on a strong foundation of bipartisan consensus. As president, Hillary will lead by the words of the Declaration of Independence, which pledged "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind."

We know we need global coalitions to tackle global problems like climate change, poverty, AIDS, and terrorism. And to keep our country safe, we need to start engaging our enemies again. During the Cold War, with missiles pointed at us, we never stopped talking to the Soviet Union. That didn't mean we agreed with them or approved of them. But it did mean we came to understand them -- and that was crucial to confronting the threats they posed.

Hillary knows that America must remain a preeminent leader for peace and freedom, willing to work in concert with other nations and institutions to reach common goals. Hillary has put forth an aggressive plan to support public schools in developing countries in an effort to achieve universal primary education for the 77 million children around the world who aren't in school because they are too poor.

John McCain

The United States must lead in the 21st century, just as in Truman's day. But leadership today means something different than it did in the years after World War II, when Europe and the other democracies were still recovering from the devastation of war and the United States was the only democratic superpower. Today we are not alone. There is the powerful collective voice of the European Union, and there are the great nations of India and Japan, Australia and Brazil, South Korea and South Africa, Turkey and Israel, to name just a few of the leading democracies. There are also the increasingly powerful nations of China and Russia that wield great influence in the international system.

In such a world, where power of all kinds is more widely and evenly distributed, the United States cannot lead by virtue of its power alone. We must be strong politically, economically, and militarily. But we must also lead by attracting others to our cause, by demonstrating once again the virtues of freedom and democracy, by defending the rules of international civilized society and by creating the new international institutions necessary to advance the peace and freedoms we cherish. Perhaps above all, leadership in today's world means accepting and fulfilling our responsibilities as a great nation........

Recall the words of our founders in the Declaration of Independence, that we pay "decent respect to the opinions of mankind." Our great power does not mean we can do whatever we want whenever we want, nor should we assume we have all the wisdom and knowledge necessary to succeed. We need to listen to the views and respect the collective will of our democratic allies. When we believe international action is necessary, whether military, economic, or diplomatic, we will try to persuade our friends that we are right. But we, in return, must be willing to be persuaded by them......

There is such a thing as international good citizenship. We need to be good stewards of our planet and join with other nations to help preserve our common home. The risks of global warming have no borders. We and the other nations of the world must get serious about substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years or we will hand off a much-diminished world to our grandchildren.

Barack Obama

In the wake of the Second World War, it was America that largely built a system of international institutions that carried us through the Cold War. Leaders like Harry Truman and George Marshall knew that instead of constraining our power, these institutions magnified it.

Today it’s become fashionable to disparage the United Nations, the World Bank, and other international organizations. In fact, reform of these bodies is urgently needed if they are to keep pace with the fast-moving threats we face. Such real reform will not come, however, by dismissing the value of these institutions, or by bullying other countries to ratify changes we have drafted in isolation. Real reform will come because we convince others that they too have a stake in change – that such reforms will make their world, and not just ours, more secure......

As President, I will double our annual investments in meeting these challenges to billion by 2012 and ensure that those new resources are directed towards these strategic goals.

For the last twenty years, U.S. foreign aid funding has done little more than keep pace with inflation. Doubling our foreign assistance spending by 2012 will help meet the challenge laid out by Tony Blair at the 2005 G-8 conference at Gleneagles, and it will help push the rest of the developed world to invest in security and opportunity. As we have seen recently with large increases in funding for our AIDS programs, we have the capacity to make sure this funding makes a real difference.

Part of this new funding will also establish a two billion dollar Global Education Fund that calls on the world to join together in eliminating the global education deficit, similar to what the 9/11 commission proposed. Because we cannot hope to shape a world where opportunity outweighs danger unless we ensure that every child, everywhere, is taught to build and not to destroy.

The World Heritage Alliance

Breaking the Silence

Breaking the Silence, UNESCOs Associated Schools Project Network (ASPnet) Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project, was launched in 1998. It aims to break the silence surrounding the Transatlantic Slave Trade, while forging new triangular links between over 120 ASPnet schools in 22 countries in Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe.

The website is intended to help teachers and educators to Break the Silence that continues to surround the story of the enslavement of Africa that began over 500 years ago. It is designed to provide teachers with a variety of resources and ideas about how to teach the subject holistically, accurately and truthfully.

UNESCO's Slave Trade Archives

UNESCO Hewlett Packard Partnership in Education

At the end of last year, UNESCO announced a new partnership agreement with Hewlett Packard to strengthen their collaboration around existing education projects. Through the partnership, UNESCO and HP will work together on several projects in the area of education, especially to support UNESCO’s priority of “Education for All". This includes an evaluation on the extension of the existing brain drain project to additional regions in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

UNESCO and HP started to collaborate five years ago in South East Europe to help key universities connect to global research networks. In 2006 the project was extended to Africa. The project fights brain drain by providing universities with an advanced technology called grid computing, which allows top quality researchers to play a key role in international research and contribute to economic development in their home countries.

“UNESCO’s education priorities are very much in line with the goals of HP’s education strategy. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, HP has supported more than 200 education projects in over 20 countries, reaching over 50,000 young people in 2007. On a worldwide level, HP contributed grants to more than 850 schools in 36 countries, worth €30 million between 2004 and 2007,” said Gabriele Zedlmayer, vice president, Global Citizenship HP Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Read more about the initiative.

UNESCO and L’Oréal: Raising AIDS Awareness

Beauty transcends national borders, and a trip to the hairdresser is a ritual in almost every country in the world. When UNESCO was looking for a private sector partner to help educate a mostly female global audience about HIV and AIDS, it turned to L’Oréal Professional Products. In 2005, through the initiative of Lady Owen-Jones, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for HIV/AIDS Prevention Education, the two organizations created Hairdressers Against AIDS, aimed at raising awareness of HIV by sensitizing hairdressers about HIV and encouraging them to talk about personal risk with their customers.

Knowing that hair salons are excellent locations for information sharing and exchange, UNESCO saw a golden opportunity in partnering with L’Oréal–an opportunity to ensure that the company’s network of 190 training centres and 1.2 million professionals are reached with reliable information on HIV and AIDS. Hairdressers in L’Oreal’s 400 000 partner salons around the world take courses at the training centres in more than 50 countries. The UNESCO training module–integrated into L’Oréal’s professional training system–provides simple, factual and accurate information on HIV. Hairdressers who graduate from the training programme UNESCO designed with L'Oréal relay their knowledge to clients in salons in every corner of the world.

Read more about this initiative in

Partnerships with the Private Sector: A Collection of Case Studies from UNAIDS

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Nominations for the Office of Director General

Koïchiro Matsuura (Japan) has been Director-General of UNESCO since November 15, 1999. He was reappointed by the Organization's General Conference to serve a second four-year term. It is expected that a new Director General will be elected in late 2009, when Matsuura has completed his second term.

In keeping with the international nature of UNESCO, there is an informal understanding that the post will rotate among continents. The last three Directors General came from Asia, Europe and Africa, and there were three previous Directors General from Europe and three from North America. It appears likely that the next Director General will be elected from an Islamic member state.

The Topposts blog has a couple of clues on the nominations that have already been made.

Oman has officially nominated her ambassador to UNESCO, Musa Bin Jaafar Bin Hassan for the UNESCO DG......Bin Hassan has some credits, no least of which is his presidency over the 33rd UNESCO General Conference in 2005 - and at that time the Organization celebrated - at the highest level - its 60th anniversary.......

Egypt nominated Culture minister Farouk Hosni, the longest serving member of Mubarak's cabinet and an abstract painter who has exhibited his work around the world......Egypt's foreign minister has already met with the "working group that ran the support campaign for Hosni" (I guess, just the Foreign Ministry's experts - as of now). Considering Egypt's previous successful campaigns, Oman obviously faces a tough challenge.

Musing: UNESCO's Agenda for the 21st Century

Monday's class on UNESCO, focusing on the changes for the future, was very thought provoking. There was general agreement, I believe, that in the coming decades there will be forces that require major changes in UNESCO. If UNESCO does not reinvent itself to make itself more efficient, more effective, and more relevant to the emerging needs of the international system, it may well become irrelevant or even go out of existence. Not only is a reengineering of UNESCO's structure and processes needed, but so too is a restructuring of its relations with the governments of member states and the intellectual communities of educators, scientists and cultural leaders in those states that UNESCO was created to serve.

UNESCO not only is headquartered in Paris, the majority of its employees are there. It was suggested that, as the UN agencies are all concentrated in rich countries, they are seen by the majority of the world's population (which lives in poor countries or emerging economies) as tools of the rich isolated from the interests and concerns of the poor. As part of its reinvention, UNESCO will have to reach out and involve many more people in its work. Indeed, it would be well advised to reach out to make itself known to the majority of the world's population.

In its sixty some years of existence, UNESCO has had some major successes. USAID has been characterized as spinning off its successes in order to concentrate on its failures. Whether that is or is not true, surely UNESCO should emphasize and build upon its successes. These would include the networking of World Heritage sites and of bioreserves, the collaborations UNESCO has catelyzed through its intergovernmental science programs, and development of networks of international laws and agreements through its standards setting instruments in the fields of culture and education.

It was suggested that the governments of rich countries now see UNESCO as irrelevant to their domestic interests, and that UNESCO should seek seriously to again become something valued for its ability to serve its major financial donors domestic interests in education, science and culture.

There is a huge management challenge for UNESCO's management.

• Management should find ways to clean out the dead wood, eliminating programs that don't work, that duplicate those of other agencies, or that would be better implemented by other agencies.
• Management should find ways to either spin off subsidiary organizations that are able to go it alone, and decentralize management of subsidiary organizations that are peripheral to UNESCO's core business, allowing the secretariat and governing bodies to focus their attention narrowly on that core business.
• Management should find ways adopt programmatic innovations that allow it both to respond to changing international needs and demands on the organization and simultaneously to focus on its core values and mission.

While some innovative programs may arise from the secretariat, the history of the organization suggests that the most important innovations have come from outside. Thus UNESCO's roles in Education for All and the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals arose out of the consensus developed in international meetings, while the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Program and the World Heritage Program arose from initiatives of the U.S. delegation, influenced by leaders in the U.S. scientific and environmental communities. UNESCO can play a key role building on its great power to convene leadership from government, education, science and culture and its bureaucratic power and outreach, but it needs to continue to innovate successfully to remain and gain in relevance.

In order for UNESCO to rise to these challenges, it needs a very strong secretariat and leadership. Director General Matsuura will complete his second term of office in a few years, and it is very important that the community of nations select a strong, effective leader to replace him. Many of the senior staff of UNESCO are nearing mandatory retirement age in the United Nations system, and therefore UNESCO will have to restaff by replacing many professionals. One suggestion is that the organization might move toward a system like that of the U.S. National Science Foundation, bringing in senior professional on a rotating basis. A cadre of senior people rotating through UNESCO for three to five year terms might help it to rethink its operations and reinvent itself.

The current governance structure of UNESCO will make major reform, reengineering and restructuring difficult at best. Not only is it expensive, it is unwieldy. When UNESCO was created, the number of nation states was relatively small and the strong Director General could deal effectively with its representatives. In the intervening years, the size of the governing bodies has grown with the number of member states. Moreover, the participation of leaders from the intellectual community has been replaced in governance by representatives of the diplomatic missions of the member states. The long meetings of UNESCO's 193 member state delegations every other year at the General Conference deal with so large an agenda as to overwhelm most delegations' capacities to absorb and analyze information. The Executive Board, now with more members than the original General Conference, is similarly cumbersome and overloaded. The Executive Board and General Conference take up a great deal of the attention of UNESCO's senior staff. Thus, reform of governance seems a precondition to rebuilding and reforming the organizations, and reinventing its programs and ways of carrying out those programs.

It seems clear that the United States must take a leadership role in the reinvention of UNESCO; the United States contributes 22 percent of UNESCO's assessed budget, and the United States has the world's strongest educational, scientific and cultural communities, as well as being a world leader in information and communications. It is important that the United States assume this leadership role, especially because this nation must reemphasize "soft diplomacy" and UNESCO can and should be a key element in America's soft diplomacy. To assume that leadership role, the State Department needs a very strong staff dealing with UNESCO affairs, the U.S. National Commission has to be given a stronger role not only in advising the government but in the governance of UNESCO, and State and the National Commission needs to reach out more effectively to involve the American intellectual community in their and UNESCO's efforts.