Stephen J. Del Rosso an interview

Stephen J. Del Rosso came to Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1999 after working at the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations where he served as program director of one of the country’s largest and most active international affairs forums. Del Rosso also managed The Pew Charitable Trusts “Global Security” grantmaking program for almost six years. A former career diplomat, Del Rosso served nearly ten years in the Foreign Service with overseas assignments in Central America and the Caribbean and also served on the staff of Secretary of State George P. Shultz. He is interviewed here by Susan King, vice president of public affairs for the Corporation.

SK: What was it that led you, both as a former diplomat and someone who understands grantmaking, to the New Dimensions of Security program* and, in particular, to help develop its concern with “the contending norms of self-determination and the sanctity of existing borders”?

SJD: Attempting to make sense of the security challenges in the post-Cold War, or what is now more accurately called the post-post-Cold War era, is an ongoing task for many foundations, and, of course, for the scholars we support and the policymakers we try to influence. The New Dimensions of Security program, or as I prefer to call it, some New Dimensions of Security, is Carnegie Corporation’s most recent attempt to focus on a theme that we and other foundations have been exploring for the last decade in one form or another. The specific subjects we are addressing initially—self-determination and competition over scarce resources, particularly water—follow on some of the previous work of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, which formally ended operations in December 1999. Although a different and equally valid set of issues might have been selected, this particular set strikes me as plausible, topical and important, and is likely to become increasingly so in the decades ahead.

SK: So focusing on ethnic conflict, on real politik, what do you have to do when you start defining a new area for grantmaking?

SJD: First you have to try to get your arms around the subject matter conceptually. In the case of self-determination, we began with a subject that is more amorphous and substantively incoherent than the other issues we have long dealt with in the International Peace and Security Program, such as weapons of mass destruction and Russia, where at least we have a specific geographic focus. Self-determination is also not a field, as such. It involves congeries of fields: politics, history, geography, philosophy, law. When you’re trying to develop a grantmaking program around an issue that is inherently so expansive and complicated, it becomes very important to try to not do too much. At the same time, however, it is essential to try—and this is one of the Holy Grails of philanthropy—to do something meaningful. Because Andrew Carnegie himself was very interested in the practical application of the work that he supported, it is important that there be some kind of practical payoff to what we support. So, in other words, we’re trying to generate new and important insights with practical implications. And that’s a tough task in a world where policy is made in a very non-linear and incremental way. But I strongly believe that good policy needs to be informed by good scholarship, although the connection between the two is not always readily apparent, certainly in the short term.

SK: Some people who are practitioners might say, “You don’t need scholarship. What you need is to really deal with an issue when it’s presented to you and it’s a policy question.” You believe scholarship is important. Why?

SJD: If you’re going to act as a policymaker, you have to act based on a certain set of assumptions and understandings of the world. Some people have the audacity to call that theory. Alexander George, one of the great political scientists, has said that when he used the word “theory” in front of policymakers, their eyes glazed over. But once he dug deeper and discussed with them what they were really talking about, it turns out that they were describing a theoretical framework that influenced their policymaking, however reluctant they were to acknowledge the dreaded “t” word. George called it, instead, generic knowledge, a less pejorative term for policymakers. What he meant was a basic frame of reference, an understanding of the world, cause and effect—all the components of what scholars call theory. Now, before a policymaker can act in a certain situation, he brings with him this framework, and this is informed by lots of things—personal experience, knowledge of the world and, I would contend, scholarship.

SK: So policymakers are not working in a vacuum?

SJD: Most busy policymakers barely have time to read what’s in their in-box, let alone to read scholarly journals. But there are what I would call “trace elements” of scholarship that can be found in the policy realm. The responsibility of scholars and those who support them, like foundations, is to make sure that policymakers have in their intellectual toolkits a range of useful knowledge and ideas to draw upon when needed—even if policymakers themselves don’t recognize the source of those ideas.

SK: Tell me what a trace element would be, theoretically or specifically, in your program. That someone realizes that negotiations can lead to a changed situation, or a conflict resolution can be inserted in an ethnic situation that might change?

SJD: Let me give you an example from the self-determination portfolio. A number of the projects we are supporting right now involve comparative case studies of successes and failures in certain power-sharing arrangements in ethnically-divided countries where national minority groups within a state either want independence, or, in many cases, want more of a stake in the political system in which they find themselves. And all kinds of variations on this theme have been tried, especially in the last ten years. Some of them have succeeded in varying degrees, such as in Northern Ireland, for example. Some of them have failed, as we saw before the crises in Kosovo and East Timor. So the idea is that if scholars can show policymakers that in certain circumstances, a particular formula has a greater chance of working, then it seems to me that this would be a contribution. When a policymaker is faced with the dilemma of what to do in dealing with a particular separatist movement in a particular country, at least there can be some kind of empirical record that demonstrates that a certain arrangement might or might not work, so that policymakers won’t blindly walk into a situation trying something that has been tried before and has failed.

SK: So you’re concerned with supporting the kind of scholarship that builds a framework for looking at a situation.

SJD: I would say so. There are lots of ideas that float around the scholarly world that find their way into the policy realm, but not through the usual means because, frankly, a lot of the scholarship is written for other scholars and is, particularly in political science, sometimes difficult to penetrate. But one of the things that we try to do in our program is to push our grantees to try to make their work accessible through articles in less esoteric foreign policy journals or in op-eds, for example, that can reach a broader audience and will have a better chance of getting the attention of busy policymakers, or at least their influential aides.

SK: Do you focus your work around what would be a flash point, for instance, the Balkans, or Kosovo? Do you say, ìNow we need to go to work because thereís a problem there,î or do you try to be ahead of what becomes the crisis?

SJD: Ideally, we try to be ahead of any flash point. I can’t help believing that if American foundations had been prescient enough, say, in 1980, to have been thinking realistically about post-Communist transitions—none of us were—we would have been better situated when the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended to have responded more effectively. So, thinking ahead, by the time Kosovo or East Timor happens, it’s really too late. This problem of self-determination—the simple fact that there are more national groups in the world that want a state of their own than existing states want to allow—will undoubtedly involve and is involving many flash points. The international community, and the United States not the least among them, still hasn’t figured out how to deal with this challenge. So one thing that we can contribute is some kind of assessment of the lessons learned, what works, what doesn’t work, and a systematic analysis of the most important questions that need to be answered: When to intervene in self-determination disputes, when not to intervene, how to intervene, who should intervene, and a whole other series of questions relating to the impact of this phenomenon called globalization and the constraints and opportunities it presents to the expression of self-determination in the 21st century. So, yes, I think it is our responsibility to look ahead.

SK: Can you talk a little bit about what you’re looking for in a proposal for this area?

SJD: I don’t think it will surprise anyone to learn that there are no sure-fire formulas. There are limitations, not the least being financial, on what we can do. Even if a proposal fits substantively into whatever we’ve said in our guidelines, there are inevitably other implicit and explicit criteria involved. Decisions would also depend, of course, on the quality and clarity of the proposal itself, on the ability to try to build on some of the previous scholarship, and to ideally “break some new ground,” even though, admittedly, that’s a very difficult thing to do.

SK: In other words, you’re looking for the cutting edge.

SJD: Well, I’m not sure what cutting edge really means. But what I do believe about the work we do here—and I know it’s a philosophy that the foundation endorses—is that philanthropy has a responsibility to serve as a catalyst and promoter of good ideas that may contribute, even indirectly, to the public good, and, in some cases, fill a void or advance understanding of an issue in a way that the government can’t or won’t.

I think my own experience bears this out: Although I came to philanthropy from the policy world about a decade ago, I make no claim of having had any effect whatsoever on foreign policy- making. But in my ten years as a Foreign Service Officer, and particularly through some of my work in legislative affairs and on the secretariat staff of Secretary of State George Shultz, I got to see how “sausage” was made up close in ways that I wouldn’t have otherwise. And in the foreign policy realm, this process is not always pretty or easy, and it requires great knowledge, skill and judgement to be done well. So I approach philanthropy with an interest in supporting scholarship not just for the sake of scholarship, and ideas for the sake of ideas, but as a means of affecting policy in some way or another. I believe that a valid argument could be made that even some of the more esoteric, or seemingly esoteric, work that we support has practical value. It may not be always apparent, and, in some instances, much less so than others, but I wouldn’t be interested in doing what I am doing unless I felt somehow that this were the case.

SK: Thank you.

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* The New Dimensions of Security subprogram of the International Peace and Security Program addresses some of the most salient “non-traditional” security threats in the early years of the 21st century. Initially, grantmaking is focusing on the challenge of reconciling the desire of national groups to obtain greater political authority, including a state of their own, and the interests of existing states to maintain the territorial status quo. Grantmaking will also begin this year on the perils and promise of competition over water. Further details on these new initiatives can be found on our web site at www.carnegie.org.

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