[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 57 (Wednesday, May 11, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: May 11, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
THE NATIONAL SECURITY EDUCATION PROGRAM AND THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF
AMBASSADOR SOL LINOWITZ
Mr. BOREN. Mr. President, this week marks an important beginning in
the life of a program that I hope will help pioneer this country's
commitment to international education. For the past several years, I
have talked often about our country falling behind the rest of the
world in preparing the next generation for the new global environment.
As the cold war ended and regional problems became more important, I
feared that we lacked an appreciation of the histories and complexities
of places in the Middle East, the Baltics and Asia. While the world's
economies became increasingly interdependent, I suspected that we
lacked the understanding of markets in Beijing or Prague or Santiago.
Based on these concerns, I proposed the National Security Education
Act. Its aim was simple: To encourage students to study, and schools to
focus on, non-Western languages and cultures important to our country's
future. The bill created a trust fund to support graduate fellowships
for students willing to serve in Government after their studies ended;
scholarships for undergraduates to study in foreign countries; and
language and cultural programs for universities to establish and
maintain. In 1991, the NSEP was created by an act of Congress and
signed into law by President Bush.
This week, after overcoming obstacles to its implementation, the NSEP
began the process of awarding scholarships and fellowships. It hopes to
award the institutional programs this fall. What was once an idea is
now becoming a reality fulfilling the hopes of 173 graduates and 317
undergraduates to study in foreign lands. The students are a diverse
and energetic group, representing all 50 States at over 100 colleges
and universities.
The graduate students will study 47 different languages and at 57
countries, and in numerous areas of study. Many will go to Japan,
Russia, and China--countries most important to our national and
economic security. Many others will go to places like Vietnam, a
country with whom the United States recently normalized economic
relations. Some will go to South Africa where true democracy is now
remarkably taking place.
The undergraduates are no less ambitious than the graduates. From a
pool of 1,811 applicants, over 317 students will learn 34 different
languages at 48 different countries. They will study Spanish, Mandarin,
and Slavic languages. They will also learn Arabic in Yemen and Quechua
in Peru. They will, I hope, be exposed to cultures distinct from their
experiences and ideas different from their own.
With the coming announcement of these awards, I could feel the
excitement in the room at last Monday's NSEP luncheon. Representatives
from higher education, Government, and the private sector convened for
the first NSEP Board meeting. The board is a group of 13 distinguished
individuals from Government and the private sector who advise the
Secretary of Defense, who serves as the administrator of the program,
on policy matters and the selection of awards. I had the honor of
speaking with them on the history of the program and sharing my ideas
about its future. It was a special moment for me.
Many people attended the luncheon who have been instrumental in the
realization of NSEP. One of those present was my dear friend, Sol
Linowitz. In many ways, he personifies the ideals and goals of the
NSEP. He was an Ambassador to the Organization of American States
during the Johnson administration and helped negotiate the very
difficult Panama Canal Treaty and Camp David Accords. He has traveled
widely and understands the great issues of the day. He is one of the
wisest people in our country. I have depended on Sol Linowitz' wisdom
on many occasions.
It was several years ago that I told Ambassador Linowitz about my
idea of an international studies program. He enthusiastically supported
it. When I was developing the bill to create the program, he advised me
on legislation. When the bill faced obstacles, he helped me navigate it
through the political waters. His support was crucial. I ask unanimous
consent to place into the Record the words he gave at the NSEP
luncheon.
There being no objection, the remarks were ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
NSEP and National Security
(By Sol. M. Linowitz)
I am very pleased to be here and to have the opportunity to
say a few words about NSEP. It takes real presumptuousness
for me to undertake to talk with you about the area of your
own responsibility and concern. I am presuming to do so only
because I am so persuaded of the importance and the promise
of your mission, and I'd like to tell you why.
At the outset, I want to pay my respects to the man who is
entitled to our lasting gratitude for his leadership in the
enactment of NSEP--Senator David Boren. Senator Boren is a
friend of mine and I know him to be man of commitment and
dedication who has clearly perceived the importance of
reaching out to the other people of this earth--of coming to
know them and their cultures--if we are to live together
peacefully in today's world. We are all deeply in his debt
for his independence, foresight and wisdom. As President of
the University of Oklahoma later this year, he will be
changing not his focus, priorities, commitments or
involvements--just his geography and work place--and we wish
him well with his university responsibilities.
I think that to get a real sense of what NSEP really means,
it has to be seen against the backdrop of the kind of world
and the kind of time in which we live.
For we are living at a difficult, anxious, uncertain time
in world history--a time which has been called both the Age
of Anxiety and the Age of Science and Technology. Both are
accurate, for indeed one feeds upon the other. As our
scientific and technological competence has increased, so
have our fear and anxiety.
It is also a fateful time. In the past, men have warred
over frontiers. They have come into conflict over ideologies.
They have fought to better their daily lives. Today, however,
each crisis overlaps the other and we find ourselves at an
upheaval that touches every phase of our existence.
Just think what has happened in the past few years.--
The collapse of the Soviet Bloc has fundamentally and
irreversibly transformed international relations for our
time.
The most significant military and ideological adversary of
the United States has ceased to exist. The central principle
U.S. foreign policy for the last half century--the Cold War--
is over, and the foundation of our international alliances,
military strategies, and defense budgets has been swept away.
Regional wars that involved the superpowers--Angola,
Cambodia, Central America--are all winding down. At the same
time, and as the war in the Persian Gulf and the fighting in
the former Yugoslavia and Armenia have made all too clear,
loss of superpower influence, combined with the deadly
proliferation of armaments, could lead to more rather than
less armed conflict in the world.
Economic competition is displacing military conflict as the
main arena of international rivalry. According to recent
polls, most Americans now consider Japan--not the former
Soviet Union or Russia--to be our main adversary.
From Argentina to Poland, authoritarian politics and
centralized economies have been discredited; and the value of
free elections and open markets has been strongly affirmed.
The handling of the Persian Gulf crisis suggested that we
may be entering a new era of multilateral cooperation. But we
can't yet be sure whether a new world order will truly
emerge--or whether we will regress to a fragmented world of
regional power balances and conflicts.
Whatever happens, we have not had to confront such
breathtaking global changes since the end of World War II.
Against this backdrop it is important to recognize some
hard facts:
First, the people of this world are no longer thousands of
miles away--but just down the runway. Whether we like it or
not--the world is pressing in upon us; and we simply can't
isolate ourselves or stop the world and try to get off. For
better or worse, we are all in this together.
This means that problems, misunderstandings, confrontations
involving countries we have never seen or people we have
never met can suddenly and dramatically impinge upon our own
lives and drastically affect our future and the future of our
children.
Second, we are living in an instantaneous world where the
world is as close to us as our TV sets--where we are all part
of a global society in which there is no longer such a thing
as separate areas of concern or a clear division between
domestic and foreign--a world in which peace is truly
indivisible; in which what happens in places like Somalia,
Bosnia, Russia, China is in the truest sense happening to us.
Our lives--our futures--are now inextricably intertwined with
those of the rest of the people in this world.
Third, in such a world national security is inseparable
from global insecurity. We cannot hope to be safe and secure
if the world is unsafe and insecure.
What do we mean when we use the word ``secure''? What does
the word ``security'' mean when we talk of the National
Security Education Program? Let me give you my own view: I
start with the fact that security in the world in which we
live depends on far more than military weapons or economic
strength. Security--real security--also depends on the kind
of relationships we have with other people and other
countries--where we are able to understand them and relate to
them and work with them toward a more stable, peaceful world.
We will not find security for ourselves if we are estranged
from the other people of this world and alienated from them
and their cultures. We will not find peace for ourselves and
our children by continuing to ignore other people and by
arrogantly insisting that the rest of the world must learn
from us what we are willing to teach--and must speak to us
only in our tongue.
In short, we will not be secure if we do not build bridges
of security--bridges of understanding and cooperation and
empathy to the other people on this earth. And that, I
believe, is what NSEP is all about.
In Mexico City there stands the statue of Benito Juarez. On
it are the words: ``Respect the rights of others in peace.''
Respect for the rights of others underlies the whole concept
of NSEP. It means treating others with dignity; respecting
their right to fulfill their own destiny in their own way;
learning their culture and their language.
The Chinese write the word ``crisis''--by combining the
symbol for the word ``danger'' with the symbol for the word
``opportunity''. In these times of crisis, we have been
confronted with both dangers and opportunities--and we have
failed to seize the opportunities to increase our
understanding of the other human beings on this earth.
How bad is the situation? In introducing NSEP legislation,
Senator Boren presented some deeply disquieting facts. Let me
remind you of a few: Last year over 350,000 college
undergraduates came to America from other countries. At the
same time, only about 50,000 American students went to study
at the undergraduate level in the rest of the world; and--if
you exclude Great Britain, France and Germany--only 4,000 or
5,000 American students studied abroad.
In the year 2000, the European community will require
fluency in two foreign languages for all high school
graduates. Japan now requires that all of their students
study at least two years of English before graduating from
high school. (By way of contrast, three-tenths of one percent
of Americans study Japanese.)
At this moment when we should be trying to learn all we can
about the rest of the world, only 8 percent of our college
students are studying any foreign language and over 80
percent of all the universities in this country do not
require a foreign language for an undergraduate degree.
I submit to you that we simply can't live with those
numbers if we expect to build the kind of future we say we
want.
For in the future--as never before in our history--we will
need men and women who are at home in the world--who are
people of perspective and breadth with a far better
understanding of the world than has ever been required
before. We will need men and women who understand where we
have been and where we are going, who knows about the kind of
world in which we live and the future we should be trying to
achieve. We will need men and women able to communicate with
one another and with other people and other places; people
who know how to transmit and stimulate ideas; people who
recognize that things human and humane are even more
important than the computer, the test tube, the IBM or even
the Xerox machine. We will need people who understand that
know-why is even more important than know-how, people who
will see our problems as part of total human experience and
who will be able to understand something of what yesterday
teaches us about today and tomorrow.
In short, we will need people of vision who will be able to
help us find effective solutions to the problems besetting
the world by coming to know and understand the people who
make up that world. I strongly believe that NSEP can do much
to move us in that direction and I wish you Godspeed on your
mission.
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