Source: National Journal
For decades, the globe has been shrinking as the lines between domestic and foreign economies blur, the computer literate plug into endless streams of information, and companies go abroad in search of cheaper labor and new markets.
Now a hallmark of Washington culture is going global, too: the think tank. This year alone, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is opening its fourth office abroad, in Brussels, and the Brookings Institution is launching its first overseas outposts, in Beijing and Doha, Qatar.
"It's very odd that think tanks have been way behind the wave of globalization," says Carnegie's president, Jessica Matthews. You would expect them to be on the leading edge rather than the lagging edge."
Although Carnegie and other think tanks -- a loose term for nonprofit research outfits that focus on domestic, military, and foreign-policy matters -- have long studied other parts of the globe and engaged in educational collaborations or exchanges, their opening of offices abroad signals a deeper level of interaction between these almost exclusively Western institutions and the rest of the world.
As technology has sped up the flow of information, it has also raised the bar for scholars of far-off places. "In the past, you could be an armchair analyst," says James McGann, a political science professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia, a think-tank consultant, and the director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program. "Now the view is that you have to be on the ground and in the field" to be credible.
Indeed, earlier this year, the venerable Carnegie Endowment announced its intent to reinvent itself as "the first multinational think tank" and threw a policy wonk's equivalent of a coming-out party: a daylong series of panel discussions and speeches, along with a celebratory lunch. "We're trying to do something no one has done anything remotely like," says Matthews, who came to Carnegie a decade ago. "Building staffs and seating them in [other] societies is a big, big job."
But Carnegie may, in a sense, have had a precursor: the International Crisis Group, whose founders include Matthews's predecessor at Carnegie, former Ambassador Morton Abramowitz, and which opened its headquarters in London in 1995 (later moving it to Brussels). Premised on the view that the international community has a stake in preventing violent conflict, the group delves into the sources of friction in hot spots around the world, reports on its findings, and proposes ways to head off conflict. To do this, it has opened 12 regional offices around the world and has local field representation in another 16 places.
Although the organizations have clear differences -- the Crisis Group, for starters, produces more topical analyses and lobbies more openly for major powers to adopt its recommendations -- both tanks cite the end of the Cold War as the inspiration for going global. Once, the Soviet Union and the Western powers vied for the allegiance of less developed countries. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, says Mark Schneider, the Crisis Group's Washington-based senior vice president, "there was no longer the strategic linkage between what happened in developing countries that brought the same international interest it had in the past."
The group's goal, Schneider says, is to get "the unimportant country to decision makers' attention to prevent tragedy," which requires researchers with "expert knowledge of the country and subregion and a feel for the political dynamics there in a way that's hard to do when you're coming in and out."
Likewise, officials at Carnegie feared that unrivaled U.S. supremacy had brought a dangerous arrogance. The decision to go international, Matthews says, "comes at a moment when U.S. standing is at a historical low ebb" because of a "chest-beating approach that says, 'We'll decide' " what's best for the world. That outlook, she says, was already evident during the Clinton administration and has gotten "far worse" during the Bush years.
Conceived as a global organization, the Crisis Group has often recruited experts to work in their regions of origin and trustees from all over the world; 40 percent of its funding comes from governments of 22 developed countries. For Carnegie, going global is a major departure from its 97-year-old primary role as a home to U.S.-based scholars studying foreign countries and international relations, with an almost exclusively American board of trustees.
Still, the group has learned a thing or two from its nearly 15 years of running a Moscow office, Matthews says. Carnegie is not only staffing its overseas offices largely with scholars native to the regions but also putting greater emphasis on recruiting Washington-based scholars who are fluent in the language of the countries they study. It has also begun changing the complexion of its board by bringing on two well-known diplomats from Africa -- former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and Olara Otunnu, who was U.N. undersecretary-general.
Carnegie has also begun forming regional advisory boards for its various offices, intended to help set the offices' agendas and, more important, to fund them. The local funding matters for two reasons, Matthews says. At an estimated $35 million, the up-front expenses to run the new outposts for a decade are daunting, but also "there is an important sense of ownership that comes with financial support."
Brookings, now pushing 90, is hardly a newcomer to foreign affairs, having played a role in the design of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan. But its focus on globalization has intensified with the hiring of Strobe Talbott as president and John Thornton as board chairman in 2002 and 2003, respectively. Both have career-long interests in the subject, Talbott says: he from his days as a Time reporter and Clinton administration State Department official, and Thornton from expanding Goldman Sachs's international presence and its operations in Asia.
Although Brookings has added a program on the global economy and has several foreign-focused but Washington-based centers, such as the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Talbott plays down the significance of its two overseas branches.
Brookings launched the branches for "very practical reasons," he says. The John L. Thornton China Center office at Tsinghua University in Beijing grew out of the chairman's interests and financial contributions -- Thornton directs a global leadership program at the university. The office also made life easier for the parade of Brookings scholars conducting research or joint projects with Chinese scholars there. The Doha office, scheduled to open soon, is intended mainly to help handle the logistics of Brookings's annual U.S.-Islamic World Forum, which began in 2004.
"I don't see us proliferating mini-Brookings around the world," Talbott says. "Brookings is a collegium, a group who gets together day in and day out just off Dupont Circle. I don't want to fractionate that and scatter it all over the world." Brookings is also just beginning to reach out to overseas magnates and dignitaries for advice and money: It is now poised to add a second foreigner to its board and last year began an annual conclave for its new 25-member International Advisory Council drawn from Ukraine to Brazil.
The German Marshall Fund -- which is devoted to improving trans-Atlantic relations -- describes the opening of six offices across Europe since 2000 as a pragmatic, rather than symbolic, development. The expansion came when the fund converted from a grant-making institution to a policy shop in 2000. That change, in turn, resulted from the expiration of a 25-year agreement by the German government to underwrite the fund as a way to thank the United States for the Marshall Plan.
President Craig Kennedy says that the fund decided to raise more money and expand its presence in vital but underrepresented areas, including Turkey and the emergent democracies of Eastern Europe. More offices improved the logistics of staging local conferences and study tours for American journalists, mayors, and governors, and made it easier to hire European scholars who didn't want to relocate to the United States. The expansion has also been a boon to fundraising, he says.
How are host countries taking to the U.S. think-tank invasion? Do the organizations, despite their best intentions, risk being seen as agents of American interests? In most cases, no, Matthews said, citing surveys that Carnegie conducted before the offices opened. "There's a real interest in these places in having a better understanding of the United States and having the United States understand them," she says.
Operating in authoritarian countries can be tricky: Government officials have occasionally detained Crisis Group researchers. Russia and China have recently imposed new registration requirements, and Russia double-taxes think tanks. But Matthews says that, paradoxically, having an American director in its Russian office has helped to insulate its Russian scholars from the vicissitudes of domestic politics there.
Villanova's McGann calls think tanks the "canary in the mine. If they can operate freely and independently," he says, so too can the other nongovernmental organizations that help to build a thriving civil society.
Spreading Their Wings
Foreign Office Year Opened
Brookings Institution
Beijing 2007
Doha, Qatar 2007
Carnegie Endowment
Brussels 2007
Beirut, Lebanon 2006
Beijing 2004
Moscow 1993
German Marshall Fund
Bucharest, Romania 2006
Ankara, Turkey 2005
Belgrade, Serbia 2003
Brussels 2001
Bratislava, Slovakia 2000
Paris 2000
Berlin (Bonn 1972-1989) 1989
International Crisis Group
Istanbul 2007
Dakar, Senegal 2004
Port-au-Prince, Haiti 2004
Seoul, South Korea 2004
Tblisi, Georgia 2003
Islamabad, Pakistan 2002
Amman, Jordan 2001
Bogota, Colombia 2001
Jakarta, Indonesia 2000
Pristina, Kosovo 1997
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan n/a
Nairobi, Kenya n/a