Education for peace: The UN and new ideas for the ‘information age.’

Mark D. Alleyne

The idea that high schools and universities are bastions of enlightenment that will lead the struggle against racism and other pathologies that cause war has seen its day and now needs to be rethought or even discarded. This provocative, polemical suggestion is not likely to be welcomed at the United Nations where that basic idea was the inspiration for its creation, its Department of Public Information (DPI), and its specialized agency covering education, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The Preamble to the UNESCO Constitution of 1945 says ‘since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.’ And it goes on to say ‘ignorance of each other’s ways and lives has been a common cause, throughout the history of mankind, of that suspicion and mistrust between the peoples of the world through which their differences have all too often broken into war.’

From this premise that ignorance is a cause of war the UN and UNESCO have devoted large portions of their resources to such programs as scholarships, student exchanges, and public information campaigns. For example, in early 1999 the DPI hosted a total of about 5,000 students at UN headquarters for the National High School and National College Model United Nations. Also, the UN now uses the Internet to host question and answer sessions with students in various parts of the world on such issues as UN peacekeeping operations.

Schools and universities are important to the mission of the UN in building world peace because the UN Charter gives the organization the mandate to instil in future generations the values of peace. In addition, the UN has followed a ‘two-step’ model for using communication in political development. This model, which was promoted by American communications consultants in the 1960s, says that the appropriate means of fostering social change is to reach opinion élites first who will then provide the direction for the rest of society below. Schools and universities are not only the places where opinion leaders in the form of professors reside, but also the training grounds for other social leaders, such as journalists, politicians, lawyers, and priests.

We should come to the logical conclusion from such assumptions that this era should be one of the most harmonious and peaceful in human history, at least in the richer countries where the means of mass and interpersonal communication have never been better. Instead what we have are stunning examples of hate that do not indicate world peace will be here anytime soon. Neo-Nazis are using the Internet to organize internationally and obviate European anti-fascist propaganda laws. Violence by these right-wing groups now make certain parts of Europe dangerous places for people of colour to be. Radio was used by Hutu fanatics in Rwanda to goad people of like minds into genocidal killings. In countries as far apart as Australia, Austria, France and the United States resentment over immigration has fuelled racist support for such leaders as Pat Buchanan, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jörg Heider, and Pauline Hanson.

Often activists for such hate are in the universities. This point was poignantly illustrated in the United States in 1999. On Independence Day weekend Indiana University student Benjamin Smith, a follower of the racist World Church of the Creator, shot and killed former Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong and Korean student Won-Joon Yoon.

Months before the famous Tiananmen Square anti-government demonstrations in China in 1989, Chinese universities were the scene of hateful, anti-Black demonstrations. According to media reports, what began in December 1988 as a dispute in Hehai University over an African student refusing to register with authorities the name of his Chinese date at a party soon escalated into violence, false rumours, and then Chinese student mobilization in several cities against African exchange students in general. Then there were reports that the African students were victims of police brutality in the days following the initial incident. Several African governments and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) protested to the Chinese authorities.

British and American news analyses said at the time the demonstrations manifested the severe racism in Chinese culture towards Africans and people of African descent. Another explanation was that (Chinese racism notwithstanding) an underlying current revealed by the demonstrations was the impatience by ordinary Chinese with their material lot in life. The African students on Chinese government scholarships were said to be living better than their Chinese counterparts and even their university teachers.

Progressive myths

This idea that intellectual élites are not as progressive as might be thought is not all that new. In Lies My Teacher Told Me James Loewen makes the point by reporting American poll results on attitudes towards US intervention in Vietnam. A 1971 Gallup poll found that twice as high a proportion of college-educated adults (40%) were hawks (against withdrawal of US troops), compared to 20% of adults with only grade school education. Loewen did surveys that found people likely to believe the opposite — the college-educated would be more likely to be for withdrawal of US troops than the less formally educated. Loewen’s audiences justified such assumptions by giving such reasons as:

∑ Educated people are more informed and critical, hence more able to sift through misinformation and conclude that the Vietnam War was not in our best interests, politically or morally.
∑
∑ Educated people are more tolerant. There were elements of racism and ethnocentrism in our conduct of the war; educated people are less likely to accept such prejudice.
∑
As the years go by this image of universities and students being the leaders of progressive social movements is reinforced by news and documentary film showing campus protests. Also, the people most likely to be recorders of history either work or spend some of their most impressionable years in universities.

Similarly, such myths continue to influence UN policies because UN policy-makers are themselves intellectual élites with strong ties to formal education as students and, in many cases, teachers. Complicating the problem is the fact that universities are often contradictory places. While open-mindedness and liberalism is often professed, ‘high culture’ and the curricula that promote it are often alienating to groups marginal to centres of power in society.

Ignorance of the UN

The problems with the UN’s strategy of educating for peace do not end there. Even if the strategy of cultivating education élites was more on target, there is the problem that the profile of the UN is lower the larger and more powerful a country is. The mouthings of candidates in US presidential debates and discussions in American university classrooms often reveal a stunning ignorance of the UN and what it does. And even when there is some knowledge of the UN, many opinion leaders are likely to view the organization as a threat to national sovereignty rather than as an instrument for maintaining collective security and promoting world peace.

Public opinion polls often reveal that many Americans are unlikely to know the name of the Secretary of State, and so they are even less likely to know the name of the UN Secretary-General. How many Americans know that the UN has maintained peacekeeping operations for more than 20 years in a number of places, including Cypress, the India-Pakistan border, and the Golan Heights? In contrast, people in El Salvador have peace as tangible evidence that their civil war was facilitated by UN diplomacy. In South Africa members of the African National Congress know that the UN was on their side in their generations-long struggle against apartheid, especially in the propaganda war that was conducted by the minority regime. Every year journalists from several poorer countries come to the UN headquarters in New York for training programmes.

Another problem for the UN in its effort to promote human harmony and peace is the moral and legal tug-of-war between the need to promote universalism, on the one hand, and still avoid being accused of disseminating propaganda, on the other. The issue of propaganda is a problem that has engaged the organization since its founding because Nazi propaganda was an important factor in the world war that led to the UN’s creation. Even the League of Nations had been aware of the dangers of propaganda due to the lessons of World War I and conflicts between the World Wars. Members of the League signed the International Convention Concerning The Use of Broadcasting In The Cause of Peace in 1936 in which they undertook to prohibit broadcasting that was ‘to the detriment of good international understanding.’

Two UN documents from 1947 and 1948 have expressed the essence of the organization’s policy towards propaganda for the rest of its existence till now. General Assembly Resolution 110 (II) of 3 November 1947, condemned ‘all forms of propaganda, in whatsoever country conducted, which is either designed or likely to provoke or encourage any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression.’ However, the resolution said governments should use ‘all means of publicity and propaganda’ to promote the UN Charter and international peace. In effect the General Assembly said there were two types of propaganda — good and bad — and the good propaganda should be disseminated.

This distinction was made again in the 1948 Final Act of the UN Conference on Freedom of Information. The Act noted that some countries were using media to ‘disseminate racial and national hatred.’ It said that ideas promoting friendship between races and nations should be propagated within the liberal democratic framework of a free and open marketplace of ideas in which the good are accepted and the bad rejected.

All major UN or UNESCO documents concerning international communication over the past 50 years have referred to Resolution 110 (II) explicitly or repeated the ideas about good and bad propaganda in the 1948 Final Act. These documents include Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), the Preamble to the Outer Space Treaty (1967), UNESCO’s Mass Media Declaration (1978), and the General Assembly Resolution on the principles for the use of Direct Broadcast Satellites (1982).

The problem with saying some propaganda is bad and others good is obvious. Many times it is a simple matter of opinion. Indeed, there are those who say the UN’s propaganda about the need to end ethnic hatred and promote peace are nothing more than camouflage for violations of national sovereignty and the maintenance of unequal relations between nations. On a recent research trip to UN Headquarters, my Pakistani cab driver said as much in reference to the UN and the dispute between India and Pakistan over the state of Jammu and Kashmir. He could not understand why the UN would not suspend India’s membership. A peaceful international system is not necessarily a just one.

The recommendations of the Technical Advisory Committee that advised the establishment of the Department of Public Information and were annexed to the resolution on the organization of the UN secretariat specifically said the DPI ‘should not engage in ‘propaganda’.’ Because of this problem with defining exactly what is propaganda, desirable or not, top UN officials have had to be very careful when speaking about the organization’s public information work. For example, in 1949 the first UN Assistant Secretary-General for Public Information, Benjamin Cohen, said the organization was ‘carefully refraining from so-called ‘propaganda’ in conducting what he said were the three functions of the DPI: disseminating factual information about the UN; surveying public opinion; and education. Similarly, in a 1986 interview for the UN’s oral history archives, Gibson Parker (the BBC broadcaster who was recruited to be the UN’s first head of radio production in 1946) noted that the original mandate to not distribute propaganda had ‘become blurred over the decades.’

In defence of counter-propaganda

The UN is obviously freer to propagate its ideologies in instances where it can deem itself conducting counter-propaganda. Such was the case with UN information activities related to apartheid era South Africa. The white minority regime invested a lot of resources into its international public relations to fend off worldwide criticism of its racial discrimination policies and illegal occupation of Namibia. The Muldergate scandal of 1978 revealed that the government had a slush fund of $74 million for such propaganda work. The UN’s counter-propaganda work with South Africa was extensive, including collaborating with neighbouring countries to produce and broadcast programs into South Africa in native languages and the promotion of Nelson Mandela as the world’s most famous political prisoner.

But the case of the pariah state that was apartheid South Africa was very easy for designers and implementers of UN public information policies. Although South Africa had joined the UN as early 1945, the UN General Assembly had maintained a Special Committee against Apartheid, and the General Assembly had frequently passed resolutions condemning the policy of apartheid. In stark contrast, the UN is more compromised with regards to other violations of human rights, especially those involving its most powerful members. For example, there was no UN campaign in support of the civil rights movement in the United States. Nor were there campaigns against Soviet control of the republics that would later claim their independence as soon as the USSR fell.

These constraints and contradictions notwithstanding, UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan has made public information a priority area for the UN. Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, Kensaku Hogen, said in early 1999 that Anan ‘has stressed that communications policies must be placed at the heart of its [the UN’s] strategic management’ and said there needs to be a ‘communications culture’ throughout the UN.

Technological innovation

It is easy to understand why at this stage in UN history there is this careful attention to the image of the UN and the propagation of its values. TV networks like CNN are now factors in world diplomacy if only because they can relay information about important happenings more rapidly than diplomatic means. The Internet is becoming the main forum of personal international information exchange, especially among intellectual élites in higher education and the media.

The UN has had to play catch-up with this technological challenge. For example, according to Under-Secretary-General Hogen, the UN’s web site operation was launched in the 1990s without being ‘a budgeted activity’ of the Department of Public Information. But in the space of six years from 1994 the organization has made revolutionary moves in terms of public information dissemination. For example, all public UN documents since 1993 and all UN resolutions in history are now available through the UN’s home page on the World Wide Web. UN press briefings and radio programs are also accessible there.

Resolution of the years of rancour over non-payment of dues by the United States raises the possibility that the UN will have more resources for its public information work. Higher education will be a critical site of activity in this ideological struggle the UN is waging for credibility and the promotion of values it deems beneficial to global peace. The organization will be seeking to propagate the future opinion leaders who are today high school and college students. It will also get ideas from universities on how to improve its information strategy.

But just as the universities produced the (now discredited) modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s that guided early UN assumptions and policies concerning world peace and development, they will have to come up with new ideas appropriate to this contradictory ‘information age.’ There are some important questions to consider. Should the focus of UN public information activities be less on higher education and more on popular organizations such as churches and civic groups? Should there not be a special UN campaign against hatred and intolerance on the Internet just as the UN marshalled a successful international campaign against apartheid? Can the UN realistically hope to promote the values of the UN Charter and still respect state sovereignty, especially in instances involving powerful member states?

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Mark D. Alleyne is Research Assistant Professor, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) whose books include International Power and International Communication (St. Martin’s 1995), News Revolution: Political and Economic Decisions About Global Information (St. Martin’s, 1997), and Global Lies (Macmillan Press, London, forthcoming).