DAVID T. JOHNSON, MINISTER
Speeches & Remarks
04 November 2005
Remarks at the British-American Project Annual Conference in Birmingham
Good evening, I am delighted to be here, and more so I am honored to have been asked to welcome so many young and influential leaders to the British-American Project's annual conference. I would like to thank Charles Barwell, Liz Loxam and Elizabeth Frank-Jones for organizing the conference, but certainly cannot forget Lucy Armstrong for her work all year long, ensuring that the BAP is the continuing success story that it is.
As you undoubtedly know, working as a diplomat does not mean always working and speaking with like-minded individuals. The very nature of the job demands finding common ground between governments and peoples that frequently don't see eye-to-eye. Working in the United Kingdom tends to be one of the exceptions to the rule: the British and Americans share so much in common and we often find ourselves on the same side. Not always, but quite often. While we do have our differences of opinion, our similarities outweigh our differences.
I think that is why the British-American Project is so important and why it has been such a success. I know that on Sunday morning, you will hear a panel discussion on the state of the "special relationship." That we should discuss the relationship at all implies a certain concern -- perhaps an understandable concern -- but when I think of the British-American relationship, I think of the values we share. Words like "democracy" and "liberty" and "freedom" are invoked so often that they begin to sound like clichés, but I think we all agree that they really are our core values, that everyone in this room does truly believe in them, and in very similar ways. While politics come and go, the British people and the American people remain much the same. We are, steadfast and tolerant, probably in agreement over ¾ of the time.
The theme of "social enterprise" is particularly fitting at a British-American conference. Marrying the twin goals of social change and profitability sets the forces of the market to work with a vigor and sustainability that political fashions can rarely match. When I think of social enterprise in the British-American context, I think of one our shared visions that is succeeding under difficult circumstances. I have been involved with Afghanistan for some time. I did not really come to speak about Afghanistan tonight, but one of my newest colleagues, recently-arrived from Kabul, told me a story that is so apt that I want to share it with you tonight.
We all know that Afghanistan under the Taliban was hurtling backward in time at a stupendous rate - draconian punishments were meted out for minor offenses, female professors and doctors were confined to their homes and forbidden to share their talents, girls were kept from schools and left with no say in their own futures. With the fall of the Taliban at the hands of allied British, Afghan and American forces, the oppression splintered but the task of rebuilding after a 25 year civil war remained. Western efforts to reconstruct Afghanistan couldn't succeed without the Afghans themselves seeing a new future for Afghanistan.
A woman from Michigan, Debbie Rodriquez, decided on her own that she had to do something to help. She isn't Afghan, she had no relatives in Afghanistan, and her only language was English. She owned a beauty shop in Michigan and an adventurous spirit. In 2002, she packed up her life and moved to Afghanistan and saw first-hand the destruction that years of civil war had wrought on Kabul.
Now, you might be asking yourself right now, what does a Midwestern beautician have to offer Afghanistan? And, frankly, what does a Midwestern beautician have to do with social enterprise? Debbie did not go to Kabul to make her fortune and she certainly didn't go to bring peace through cosmetics. In the post-war chaos and the mushrooming of NGOs in Kabul, she originally worked with a medical aid group. Pretty quickly, though, her other talent, her previous work, was recognized. She opened a beauty salon and began training local women and was amazed by the effect it had on their lives. Not because her students were more beautiful, not because they were more confident, but because these women became their families' breadwinners. Their modest incomes were newfound fortunes, fortunes that brought food, shelter, stability, and life's necessities.
Is this social enterprise? In and of itself, probably not. But these newfound fortunes brought one more thing - power. These women could pay for clothing to send theirs sons and daughters to school. They were supporting themselves with their income - and their husbands, their families, their husband's families, and so on. Debbie then began teaching women how to open their own salons - single mothers, war widows, the most powerless of the lot. They learned not only cosmetic feats, but also how to run a business, how to balance the books, how to speak some English and, most importantly, how to fend for themselves. They gained a say in their own destinies. A recent survey of graduates found that the women had increased their family incomes by 400%.
Rebuilding Afghanistan is a monumental task. Building roads and hospitals and schools and the functions of government are enormous responsibilities far beyond the capability of any single man or woman. But I think that for all the efforts of our governments, and NGOs and international organizations - I suspect Debbie's school of beauty will directly improve the lives of more women than all the rest. And that is a different kind of social enterprise and an effective one.
Now, this is the point in the evening where I'm supposed to sit down and be quiet. But I never feel like I'm doing my job in a public gathering unless I take up a tough policy issue. And in this group, in particular, I think it's important to talk a bit about American society, who we are at home, not just what we do abroad.
On that first point, I'd like briefly to talk about the elephant in every foreign policy living room - Iraq.
We see daily things on television, suicide bombings, attacks on police, attacks on children: the brutal acts of an insurgency seeking power. And it is difficult in that environment to be sure that one day we will achieve our objectives. But hard as that is to foresee, we nonetheless know that the struggle in Iraq is essential for security, stability, and democracy not just in that region but worldwide. Success - or failure - in Iraq will help determine the kind of world we pass on to our children, and even their children.
My colleagues in Washington, and particularly Secretary of State Rice, frequently compare the work that we are doing today to the choices faced by the generation after the Second World War when they found themselves confronted by problems at the conclusion of that conflict that seemed even tougher than the ones they had just been through. Today we look at the choices that they made in the late forties and the early fifties as obvious ones. But in fact there were no such certainties. There were no fixed signs and guidelines for that generation's leaders; they had to make decisions based on their values and their principles.
Then as now, the guiding principles that governed their choices and ours are the same. Democracy is an ideal, but it has a utilitarian virtue as well. Democracy not only serves as the best way to govern, but it is also the most stable form of government, one that offers the possibility of frequent small course corrections rather than revolutionary lurches to the right or left.
The President's decision to commit U.S. forces to Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein remains contentious. The hows and whys of the decisions are important, but probably not as important as what we are doing today to bring Iraq to a democratic future.
While we may not like what the evening news brings we do know that the work we are doing in Iraq every day is work that brings a political future to the people there. That the two elections that have taken place, and the one that will take place in December, bring the hope for a new government, one that can represent all the Iraqi people and with which we can work for a positive future.
Our responsibility in Iraq is to help train Iraqi security forces and to provide security in the meanwhile, to work with the new government, and through our taxpayer dollars to help Iraq find the future that it deserves through an aid program that will build the institutions of government, but also the infrastructure of a country that can function on its own.
You and I both know that it is going to be a long task, but we also know - if we are honest with ourselves - that success in Iraq is a responsibility that we have to take, and a promise that we need to keep. Because walking away from our responsibility is something that our children will not forgive us for.
Now, a quick word on American society. This is not about policy issues. It's about the things that governments may not do and sometimes can hardly affect. Tom Wolfe, when asked to name the most important change in his lifetime reportedly answered tersely rapidly and: "Coed Dorms." In 1955 they were impossible to imagine; by 1975 they were on every campus. And it signaled a fundamental change in the way Americans grew up.
Today, too, we are changing; perhaps more rapidly than any of the Americans in this room, certainly by our own observations, might realize. And we are changing in ways that likely make us more different than Europe rather than more like Europe.
Thirty-six million Americans are foreign born, more than at any time in our history. And unlike in previous waves of immigration, they aren't staying in the cities. They have rapidly dispersed throughout the country. Spanish isn't just a second language in South Florida and in urban New Jersey; it's a second language in rural Georgia. And it's not just Mexicans and other Latin Americans spreading Spanish. Indo-Americans, Ukrainian-Americans, and countless other ethnic communities have remained cohesive, but they are spread through the Midwest farm belt as well as the nation's cities.
Second, we are not just moving to suburbs, we're moving beyond, and that movement reflects educational stratification. The meritocracy of America is becoming its demography. America's best educated are moving to what are sometimes referred to as outer suburbs where 90 percent of the office building in the 90's took place. They're doing it for many reasons, but mostly to raise children in an environment they consider safe and orderly. And orderly it is. And raising children they are, because the birth rate in the United States from this population is more than enough for replacement even without immigration.
I grew up hearing my mother say, "go outside and play." My children - and those of my compatriots of all economic levels - have 1/3 less unsupervised play. They play just as much, but it's soccer practice and music lessons, not pick-up football. And the results - as much as it might surprise you - are profoundly good. Teen pregnancy in the U.S. is down by 1/3 since 1970, and youth crime is down 70 percent.
Third, we remain the most mobile society on earth; 42 million Americans move each year.
And fourth, we work harder than any other industrialized country; we are 1/3 more productive than Europeans not just because of efficiency, sometimes in spite of it, but because of time in the harness. And for the first time, the rich work longer than what one once described as the "working class," usually by quite a bit.
What will all of this mean: Maybe even more than coed dorms. I won't pretend to predict how this will change America's government, its foreign policy, or its outlook. But those of you in the British American Project, while you're thinking about social enterprise and foreign policy and the hard issues that we deal with, might want to think about some of these more fundamental changes that are going on in American society - and likely in British society - and what that means for our future as well.
Thank you.
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Speeches & Remarks