Thank you so much for inviting me to participate in this wonderful MSFS Centennial Gala. It is certainly a true honour to take the floor, and a great pleasure to be here tonight at the USIP and share with all of you such a unique occasion.
I have to admit; this event is very special to me. Together with some distinguished classmates I see here −as I look around−, I finished my Master’s program 27 years ago. I only have excellent memories of the time I spent here. All those memories spring to mind precisely at a time like this.
I will spare the details (could easily drift out of focus), but I have to say, I’m thrilled to see so many good Georgetown friends, deans and professors and fellow graduates from around that time; the list would be long!
I would like to congratulate those who have received the special MSFS Centennial “Living our values” Award. But allow me to be a little partial by signalling out, amongst them, my dear Icelandic friend, Ragga Árnadóttir…, since I can personally testify to her merits and to how much −and well− she has lived up to those values we now celebrate. She certainly is “One of Georgetown’s finest, fabulous friends”.
As I was flying over, and thinking about the last time I was in DC three years ago… It dawned to me that… yes, it was soon before we all entered into the horrific time of COVID. We then celebrated another Centennial, that of our mother school at Georgetown, the EW-SFS.
Little did we know what we were heading into a couple of months later. So I am extra happy to see you all after all that ordeal: the anguish, suffering and disbelief… We all lost friends, loved ones or people we worked with or knew. We will always remember and honor those we lost… But here we are again, celebrating a legacy and ready to look ahead with hope and gratitude.
Celebrating a centenary is, indeed, a great opportunity not just to look at the past, at the distance covered, but also a chance to explore what is to come. In fact, I would argue that the true purpose of anniversaries is precisely that they enable us to project ourselves —from our past and present— into the future.
I suggest, therefore, that we take some time —only a few minutes really— to think about the world we are going to inhabit, and to reflect on what that world will demand of our policymakers, our diplomats, civil servants, business leaders and the society at large. More importantly (owing to this Georgetown occasion, one of the world’s preeminent institutions of learning), we should also explore what does all this mean for the role of universities.
Let me be quite direct in my opening statement on the matter: the world of 2022 looks every bit as challenging as that of 1922. I dare say, perhaps even more so. We are entering a period of major changes to the international order. Changes of a scale we have not witnessed for the past three decades when the Iron Curtain came tumbling down.
I will try to capture these changes, and their implications, through the lens of three major features defining global affairs.
The first is a marked increase in the velocity of change. We live in exponentially changing societies. Sometimes we fail to fully grasp just how fast the world is changing around us. Let me just give you one example: we, as a society, created more data in the past 24 months than in the past 20.000 years. Granted, most of this data were photos of people’s cats, or of kids sharing their latest dance moves; but a lot of it was certainly relevant information!
The major driver of this exponential change is technological innovation and disruption. In almost every field we witness revolutionary innovations, whether it is in health and all the bio sciences, or in robotics, cyber and Artificial Intelligence, to mention a few.
These innovations bring with them immense benefits: like increasing life expectancy, or enabling greater access to education, or discovering how to cure severe illnesses. They also bring, however, major challenges: from the tightening of the public space for debate, to shifts in the jobs market, that in turn are leading to imbalances in income generation and distribution; from the emergence of new security threats, to the pervasive exposure to toxic or false information.
What does all of this mean for the future of higher education? Well, I am not sure anyone has a full answer but let me put forward a few points:
1. Strategic foresight should become a central skillset for students going through our universities. A fast-moving world requires individuals who can envision and navigate the future.
2. We should train our leaders to be adaptive and to be open to re-skilling, re-tooling and re-connecting with our fundamental values and sense of purpose in a hyper-connected and accelerated society. Life-long learning will be key…
3. No one should be graduating from college without digital skills. Not understanding how basic technologies work will be a major impediment to effective leadership.
The flip side of this coin is grasping the implications of technologies for society. In the domain of global affairs this means, quite particularly, training people who can lead an effective Technological Diplomacy.
The second feature of global affairs today is interdependence. We are all interconnected in unprecedented ways. The innovation that takes place in Silicon Valley can disrupt entire industries on the other side of the planet.
And yet this interdependence is coming apart as we speak. If the war in Ukraine teaches us anything is that our relations can be easily fractured. The sanctions imposed on Russia in response to its illegal and unjustified invasion of Ukraine have meant undoing over thirty years of slow economic integration. By the time this war is over, the diplomatic, economic, and cultural exchanges between Russia and the rest of the world (in particular between Russia and the EU and the US) will be a fraction of what they were before.
So, our graduates will need to be well equipped and able to navigate both realities. On the one hand, a tightly integrated world. Which will require a global mindset, and the capacity to engage with different cultures and traditions. And yet, also be prepared to navigate the uncertainty of a changing international order.
For this latter challenge, I believe the best advice is to develop an interdisciplinary approach to learning. In fact, it will be growingly hard to understand the world around us without some combination of knowledge from the fields of Economics, Political Science, Sociology and International Affairs. This approach, however, is no surprise for us here, since it is actually something I remember quite vividly from my time at Georgetown’s MSFS.
The third and final feature of global politics today is fragility. Not just fragility of the global order itself but also of many of its parts. And here I would like to make a particular reference to the equity and justice of our societies, and the urgent need to build an economic model that aims to include and lift everyone up. The degree of polarisation we see in the Western World is hard to explain without understanding the social tensions that exist in many countries. The domestic fragility has international implications.
It becomes much more difficult to uphold the international liberal order if there is political discord within the world’s liberal democracies. The implications of this for the way we design an effective education are manifold:
The first is that the frontier between domestic and global issues is growing thinner and, hence graduates of universities should be able to connect the two.
Second, we would do well to instil in students a desire to understand the troubles of others, and to be empathetic. This will make them better leaders, but also better intellectuals, because they will also see the world through the eyes of others; and that might just help them learn, grow, converge or negotiate avoiding the zero-sum game. I am certain the World −human civilization− would gain immensely. It may be utopic, but I think it’s worth the try.
Finally, (and I wish to end my brief speech here) we should make sure graduates leave university with a strong sense of public service. I do not mean here exclusively with a desire to work for government. Public service is about caring for the greater good, desiring to address common challenges and forwarding a shared vision of the world. We need great doses of all of these in the world today.
The program we are celebrating today is a Master in Foreign Service. So much of a life well lived is about service, about working with and for others, and about making life slightly better for those around us. To achieve this, we cannot forget the permanent values that must inspire effective leadership: Commitment and responsibility, ethics and solidarity, effort and honesty.
Thank you once again for giving me the opportunity to share these reflections on the state of the world and the role of universities in addressing the many challenges we face. We have all the tools to navigate what lies before us. And we also have excellent institutions of learning all over the world —like Georgetown University—, which will support us along the way and will surely train the next generation of global leaders. Here is to another 100 years of excellence in education.
And as I said at a GU commencement speech in 2005 (10yrs after I graduated), “Good luck to you all, work hard, enjoy life and congratulations to you and your proud families. Just one last thing, remember how much Georgetown has given us”