From the Guy Who Brought You the End of History

[Michael Hoover <HooverM@xxxxxxxxxx>]

How Academia Failed the Nation: 
The Decline of Regional Studies 

by Francis Fukuyama


With the decline of regional studies, many U.S.
leaders find themselves unprepared for the demands of
foreign policy in the new century.

 September 11, 2001, was a wake-up call*not just
concerning the threat of terrorism, but also regarding
the way we educate Americans about the outside world.
This event brought home the degree to which events
taking place in troubled, obscure places like
Afghanistan could have major effects on the United
States. It also showed us how poorly prepared we were
in our knowledge of the Middle East, Islam and related
issues to deal with the world we now face.

At the time of the attacks, the entire U.S. government
could call on no more than two or three speakers of
Pushto (the dominant language in Afghanistan); only a
handful of U.S. diplomats know Arabic well enough to
appear on al-Jazeera, the Arabic language channel
famous for broadcasting videos of Osama bin Laden,
without embarrassing themselves. U.S. forces
intervened in Iraq without basic cultural literacy, a
problem that consistently hampered our ability to
collect intelligence on the growing insurgency there. 

The scandal that the media has thus far failed to
cover is the utter failure of the American academy to
train adequate numbers of people with deep knowledge
about the world outside the United States. This
failure is linked to the decline of regional studies
in American universities over the past generation and
the misguided directions being taken by the social
sciences in recent years, particularly political
science and economics.

The story here is one of colonization of the study of
politics by economics. Known as the "queen of the
social sciences," economics is the only discipline
that looks like a natural science. Economists are
carefully trained to gather data and build causal
models that can be rigorously tested empirically. The
data that economists work from are quantitative from
the start and can be analyzed with a powerful battery
of statistical tools.

Economists' powerful methodology has been a source of
envy and emulation on the part of other social
scientists. The past two decades have seen the growth
of what is known as "rational choice" political
science, in which political scientists seek to model
political behavior using the same mathematical tools
(game theory, for the most part) used by economists.
Economists tend to believe that regularities in human
behavior are universal and invariant across different
cultures and societies (for example, the law of supply
and demand is the same in Japan and Botswana).
Similarly, rational choice political science seeks to
create broad, universally applicable laws of political
behavior by generalizing across large numbers of
countries rather than focusing intensively on the
history and context of individual countries or
regions.

As a result, regional studies fell seriously out of
favor in the 1980s and 1990s. Foundations ceased to
fund area studies programs, money for language
training and fieldwork evaporated and requirements
were changed from knowing languages and history to
learning quantitative methods.

Regional studies requires a huge personal investment,
not just in specialized training but also in having to
live in a particular country and building up a network
of contacts to keep one's knowledge fresh throughout a
career. Given shifting incentives, it is not
surprising that the best and brightest graduate
students started shifting into more theoretical or
functional types of political science. Area studies
programs were closed or merged into other units; on
the eve of the September 11 attacks, half of the top
political science departments in the United States did
not have a Middle East studies program.

It is certainly desirable for a social science to be
rigorous, empirical and seek general rules of human
behavior. But as Aristotle explained, it should not
try to achieve a rigor that goes beyond what is
possible given the limitations inherent in the subject
matter. In fact, most of what is truly useful for
policy is context-specific, culture-bound and
non-generalizable. The typical article appearing today
in a leading journal like the American Political
Science Review contains a lot of complex-looking math,
whose sole function is often to formalize a behavioral
rule that everyone with common sense understands must
be true. What is missing is any deep knowledge about
the subtleties and nuances of how foreign societies
work, knowledge that would help us better predict the
behavior of political actors, friendly and hostile, in
the broader world.

Examples abound. In trying to understand what kind of
political actors might emerge in a post-Saddam Hussein
Iraq, we don't need math or game theory; what we need
is an up-to-date understanding of the ethnic,
religious and tribal structure of the country,
knowledge of who the figures of authority are in Iraqi
Shiism, how they relate to their Iranian counterparts
and how the tribes in the Sunni Triangle are
intermarried with one another. Understanding bin
Ladenism requires historical knowledge of the
development in the 20th century of radical Islamism,
from its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
through the Iranian revolution to the Wahhabi imams,
or religious leaders, in Saudi Arabia.

You cannot model European-American differences unless
you understand them, which involves, of all things,
actually talking to Europeans. Anyone who has thought
about great historical events like the outbreak of
World War I or the end of the Cold War recognizes the
role of historical contingency, accident and
personality in the way they eventually played out. If
the German General von Kluck had been able to break
through the French lines at the first battle of the
Marne in September 1914, or if Soviet General
Secretary Yuri Andropov had been in better health, the
history of both the beginning and the end of the 20th
century would have been written very differently.  

Regional studies, of course, has its own limitations.
Area specialists tend to become parochial and
overspecialized; many draw unwarranted general
conclusions from their own limited experience or else
fail to see their own countries as instances of
broader patterns of political behavior. The great
sociologist and political scientist Seymour Martin
Lipset was fond of saying that someone "who knows only
one country knows no countries." Americans tend to be
particularly guilty of this, believing that the way we
organize our institutions constitutes a kind of norm
for modern democracies. In fact, American institutions
are quite exceptional among those of developed liberal
democracies, and it is only through a broadening of
one's horizons that one can come to understand how
exceptional*for good and ill*America is.

Perhaps because it is located in Washington, D.C.,
SAIS always has been a policy-oriented school and has
managed to buck many trends in contemporary academia.
While not ignoring recent methodological approaches,
SAIS has retained a strong commitment to regional
studies throughout its six decades. Economics and
economic methodology remain central to a SAIS
education, but these broad theories must be grounded
in knowledge about real places, people and societies.

With the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War, America has
fallen into a deeply troubled relationship with the
outside world. We cannot hope to navigate our way
through the difficult policy choices in the years
ahead unless we have leaders who understand how the
world beyond our shores works and who are able to see
the United States from the viewpoint of non-Americans.
We cannot cooperate or spread our influence around the
world unless we are able to train non-Americans to see
things from our perspective or help them acquire the
intellectual tools by which dispassionate analysis is
made possible.

We might have responded to recent events by investing
massively in regional studies and language training,
just as we invested in scientists and engineers after
Sputnik in the 1950s. Since we chose to put our money
into baggage screeners instead, we will have to make
do with existing educational institutions and schools
like SAIS that never lost sight of their original
mission.

Francis Fukuyama is the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor
of International Political Economy.
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