I’d like to outline the context for practicing public diplomacy today. You will not be surprised that this is essentially the same as the context for practicing "regular" diplomacy, except that with public diplomacy one throws a bit more communications technology into the mix.

A number of foresightful people in our foreign affairs community - chiefly Barry Fulton, my recent boss and mentor in the Information Bureau at USIA - have observed that the era of the "wise men" has now ended. Diplomacy is undergoing changes as profound as those that established it as an art and science in the sixteenth century. For a host of reasons including the telecommunications revolution, decision-making about foreign policy (and about many aspects of life) is moving away from the center of government and out into society. Foreign affairs is no longer the preserve of a few elites, but increasingly is shared by regions, states, non-governmental organizations, businesses and other non-state actors. (Who is more influential - Bill Clinton or Bill Gates?) Jessica Matthews of the Council on Foreign Relations warns us of a forthcoming "emotional, cultural, and political earthquake" as a result of these changes.

Parallel with the way decision-making is evolving is, of course, the revolution in technology - especially information technology - and the effect of this revolution on the social order. Dr. Fulton has drawn attention to a Canadian scholar, Harold Innis, who observed over fifty years ago that major changes in communications result in social change. He cites how Gutenburg’s invention of moveable type ended up challenging the authority of the Church, and he makes the case that each major change since then has had a similarly profound effect. To test this theory, I invite you to consider how progress in information technology affected human and official reactions to war:

• The U.S. learned about the events of our Civil War 130 years ago through, among other means, newly invented still photography;

• We learned about World War I through documentary film footage;

• We learned about World War II through nearly "real-time" radio bulletins;

• We learned about the Vietnam War from television;

• We learned about the crackdown at Tienanmen Square through the fax; and

• We learned about developments in the former Yugoslavia through e-mail.

I would propose that with each advance of technology, more information became available, the interested public became broader and public opinion rallied faster and more powerfully around the world. I would further propose that this sequence expands citizen participation and enlarges democracy and is therefore, on the whole, a desirable development.

Finally, for further context, I would like to turn again to Dr. Fulton, who constructed a paradigm last year for considering the world now and into the next century. In my view, this paradigm seems more valid than Samuel Huntington’s "Clash of Civilizations" theory, Frances Fukuyama’s "End of History" proposition, or any of the others I have heard of. Dr. Fulton asks that we imagine a three-dimensional space defined on one axis by the terms "integration" and "fragmentation." A second dimension would be bounded by the terms "participatory" and "centralized." And the third dimension would have an axis that runs from "resource abundance" to "resource scarcity." With sophisticated analytic tools and discerning judgment, one could place most of the nations within this cube and one also could map groupings of cultures and civilizations.

If we repeated this same exercise in ten years and if we constructed our map using data from ten years ago as well, we could demonstrate the dynamism of the world, seeing how the units move in relation to each other. No country or group would stay in the same place or in the same relation to other units. While dynamism characterized mapping processes in the past, change was occurring much, much more slowly than it is today. As the rate of change accelerates, former habits of control and of international relationships need to be re-thought.

What this new paradigm suggests is that the geo-political world has become so complex that the notion of national control is obsolete, a useless chimera. Instead, "dynamic stability" is what we should be striving to achieve. This is actually a central thesis of "systems theory," which suggests that stability is strengthened in a rich but loosely connected dynamic system that maintains its integrity through an information flow that is called "feedback."