This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.

Administrator J. Brian Atwood
"Youth at the Crossroads"
University of Texas Law School
Austin, Texas, February 12, 1998
U.S. Agency for International Development

Thank you very much Dean for the kind introduction and the invitation to speak here today.

I understand that the audience for today's event includes students and faculty from the Law School and the Institute for Latin American Studies as well as the LBJ School for Public Affairs. And I am pleased that members of the Austin Foreign Policy Council have also been invited.

I am going to assume that all of us in the room are to one degree or another, students of international relations. Some of you hope to formalize your study with a degree. Others, I am sure, understand that an interest in public policy cannot exclude the international arena.

It is probably obvious to all of you that international relations is not a science. It is a profession that will require you to be a student for the rest of your life. When you believe you have grasped a lesson or a guiding principle, just wait awhile. You will be forced to rethink your assumptions.

The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, said that you can't step in the same river twice. The river is always changing.

That river metaphor reflects a reality that makes the teaching -- and the learning -- of foreign affairs a difficult challenge. We adopt a variety of techniques to overcome the problem. We study historic periods to better understand the political and economic pressures that produced progress or conflict. We study the great decisions to better understand the essence of leadership, We study crises to better understand how they were managed and how they were resolved. If you will, these are the sections between the bends in the river. They help us comprehend the historic periods that have defined our foreign policy.

These techniques are useful. We believe that those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. The real question is how well do these techniques prepare us for the new era we now confront. We call it the post-cold war era because it has yet to define itself in its complexity in a way that would conjure up a title that would fit onto a bumper sticker. Maybe it is the age of chaos, or the information age, or the age of democracy, or the age of ethnic conflict. How does one capture all those phenomena and more on a bumper sticker.

There is something different about the contingencies we face in this era. There is a real need to get out ahead of crises because the crises we face, once the dynamic is created, are so much more difficult to resolve. Today, there is a premium on being able to anticipate.

Today, a reactive policy approach entails serious costs. Today, we have a need to define the elements of preventive diplomacy.

The concept of crisis prevention or preventive diplomacy requires a much better grasp of the realities we face, a much sounder capacity to analyze a potential problem and to take action to mitigate it or prevent its occurrence.

Focussing on the bends in the river may still be important as a teaching method, but today it is equally important to try to understand the currents that are driving the international scene forward, occasionally creating a serious undertow or causing the river to overflow its banks.

Look at Asia today. Look at the falling currencies and the doubts that inflict governments and people. We are battling the forces of contagion, if you will, the new dominoes of Asia, the rising fear that the financial problems of one country will undermine confidence in the economy of another.

Those who wish to prepare themselves to be a foreign policy professional must spend much more time studying international economics than Henry Kissinger ever did in his day. The velocity and quantity of private capital flows, the requirements of efficient and transparent capital markets and banking systems, the need for internationally recognized and enforced trading standards, these are the issues that are creating the prerequisites for stability today.

There are other factors as well. Do we understand the social pressures brought to bear by environmental decay, by the destruction of natural resources, biodiversity and arable land?

Do we see the political pressures created by rapid population growth, urbanization or dehumanizing poverty? All of these conditions create movement, migration across borders from one fragile area to another. And they create conflict.

Today I want to ask you to focus on a powerful force that will inevitably come to dominate our foreign policy in the coming decades. That powerful force is the demographic explosion of young people.

I am not talking about the need to build more playgrounds and movie theaters in the United States. I am talking about half the world's population in the year
2000 -- about 3 billion people who will be living mostly in the developing world in deep poverty.

Right now around the world, we already have more than one billion people who cannot read or write. 60 percent of those people are women. There are more than 180 million children under the age of 14 working as chilo laborers with virtually no hope of getting even the most basic education. There are 100 million street children. 800 million are malnourished.

More than 1.3 billion people are living in absolute poverty, subsisting on less than a dollar a day.

When we look at the 50 poorest countries, we see that they account for only two percent of global income, and that share is actually decreasing, not increasing. Think about this: twenty percent of the world's population living on two percent of its income. That is today. The problem is going to get much worse.

I travel a great deal to these fifty poorest countries. I visit areas of conflict or post-conflict or potential conflict all the time. What I see is abject poverty.

I see child soldiers, kids 13 years old carrying weapons. I see uneducated, idle kids who are looking for some action.

Last week I was in Bosnia. There was plenty of action in Bosnia a few years ago. Today the international community is attempting to rebuild that society.

And it is working. The civilian implementation program is beginning to pay dividends. Most of the vital infrastructure has been repaired: electricity is restored to many towns and neighborhoods, water is flowing, bridges are repaired and economic activity is returning.

We are engaged in Bosnia in a race against those who spend their time preparing for the next war, preparing for revenge. Will they capture the hearts and minds of the young people, or will dreams of normalcy prevail? A job, a good education, a family, perhaps membership in the European club.

One opposition party leader told me last week in Sarajevo that he felt the youth were already looking beyond the politics of hate. He said the old leaders who spend their time looking in the rear view mirror at the animosities that caused the war were in danger of becoming irrelevant to the new generation.

He put it well: "these young people," he said, flare still proud of their ethnic identity, but the difference is that they want to live under their flag, not be buried under it."

Let us hope he is right. Young people should be optimistic about the future. They should be encouraged to dream. But it is undeniable that poverty leads to despair which, in turn, leads to dysfunctional behavior.

There is a clear connection between large populations of young people, a lack of economic opportunity and the potential for societies to collapse in violence.

A variety of prominent organizations ranging from the Central Intelligence Agency to the Carnegie Commission on violence, to the Congressional Budget Office, have looked at the factors that cause nations to erupt into civil war.

While the methodologies used by these organizations in their studies varied, there was a remarkable confluence in their findings.

Those nations at greatest risk were characterized as sharing common dynamics: high infant mortality rates, rapid population growth, high population density, large youth populations, a lack of strong democratic institutions, a history of ethnic disputes, and sharp and severe economic distress. As the Congressional Budget Office study found, there is "A fairly striking correlation between economic malaise on the one hand and domestic unrest on the other."

Now when you consider the 1.3 billion people living on a dollar a day and the three billion people we will have on the planet under the age of twenty, you see that around the globe the ground is extraordinarily fertile for more of the conflicts we
have seen since the end of the Cold War. Equally clearly, the international community needs to do a better job addressing these fundamental underpinnings of social unrest and underdevelopment or we will pay a very high price.

The human, social and economic costs of failed nation states are immense and many of these conflicts have been propelled, in part, by populations of disaffected youth.

The bottom line is: we need to begin thinking in terms of prevention if we are ever going to get ahead of the curve. And we need to pay more attention to these young people.

The problem is that a great many people have a hard time thinking about the world as it is, not as it was. We still spend more time studying the bends in the river rather than its currents. It is still considered soft-headed to examine development problems like poverty, environmental decay and the youth explosion even though it is clear that these phenomena produce war, refugees, terrorists and drug traffickers.

As a nation we find it easier to spend $2 billion on a single Seawolf submarine than to spend $2 billion dollars on a development assistance budget that today may offer more security than a submarine. U.S. foreign aid programs account for less than one half of one percent of the federal budget. The costs of prevention are minuscule when compared with the costs of deadly conflict.

I am not suggesting that this nation does not need a strong and robust national defense. Not by any means. What I am saying is that we need to make sound investments in helping the poorer nations develop because it is in our best interests to do so.

Let's just take one powerful example of what works and why it is so important: education. The education of girls and young women has been acclaimed as the most important investment countries can make to improve their economies and their societies. Female education not only supports increased productivity and incomes but also has important social benefits such as reducing infant mortality and slowing rapid population growth -- all important factors, as I mentioned earlier, in deciding the relative stability of a nation.

Research shows that the children of a mother who has even a single year of education, has a 9 percent better chance to live to the age of five. Gains increase substantially with each additional year of schooling.

I highlight education because it is a very important area in which we work, but it is only one issue that must be tackled if we want to achieve lasting development in many countries. Health, family planning, agriculture, the environment, economic reform, promoting democracy -- all of these issues need to be addressed in countries where the basic human needs are so great.

USAID works in a whole variety of ways to address the specific problems of youth. In Brazil, we have a program to deal with street children. In Angola, Liberia and elsewhere we are working to help demobilize what are known as child soldiers -youth as young as 13 or 14 years old who have fought on the frontlines of their nations' civil conflicts. In countries throughout the world, our microenterprise programs are helping families start small enterprises so their children won't have to be forced into child labor.

Meeting the immense challenges we face in the developing world demands an improved and more vibrant partnership between government, developing countries and their peoples, the corporate community, U.S. and international nongovernmental organizations, universities and concerned citizens. We need to work better and we need to work smarter.

We also need to do a better job getting the American public involved and dispelling some of the old myths about foreign assistance. Poll after poll shows that most Americans still think we spend more on foreign assistance than on defense, medicaid or even social security.

Later this month we will be kicking off an innovative effort to help get America's own youth more involved in what is going on in the developing world. Working with the International Youth Foundation, we will be kicking off an effort called "Operation Day's Work." This idea is directly modeled after a successful Norwegian effort of the same name. Operation Day's Work encourages a high school class to select a developing country to study in depth. Later the students go out and work to raise money for development projects in the country, money that is then matched by the government.

In Norway, Denmark and Sweden, this program has contributed so much to their teenagers' understanding of the problems of the less fortunate and the importance of the world around them. Fostering that kind of understanding is essential to improving a world that we all share.

I am optimistic that this effort could catch on in a large number of American communities.

Again, these are modest efforts, but they can make a world of difference to people living on the margins. And by doing so, we will be dealing with the underlying causes of under-development. This can help prevent the next generation of crises.

In closing, just let me say that collectively we do have the power to shape the world around us. It is within our ability to address problems that might seem impossibly large in scale. But if we fail to exercise this leadership, the world will be a far worse place and we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

So you see, the study of international relations is getting more complicated. It will require more commitment than that entailed in reading a textbook If you want to delve into the river's currents and learn the causes of crisis, you will probably have to get your feet wet! I encourage you to do so. Thank you for your attention.

This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.

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