Diplomacy, democracy, and the value of a Lawrence education
By Gordon Brown
Lawrence Today magazine, Fall 2005
Christopher W. Murray, ’75, wrote his Lawrence honors thesis on foreign
aid, examining the question of “what kind of foreign aid is going to
be most useful to a particular country, what sectors of an economy do you invest
the most in from the outside, what factors help make that kind of decision.”
Thirty years — and an impressive succession of diplomatic posts — later,
he is deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, and still
is dealing with questions of that complexity and relevance. He credits his
Lawrence
education with providing the tools for the task.
“A Lawrence education enables people to be able to integrate,” he
says, citing the example of his current station.
“In Lebanon, we’re looking at a country that has the highest ratio
of debt to gross national product in the world. With 5,000 years of history
and
fascinating Roman ruins, it has a tourism industry that is keeping the economy
going. It is trying to make a transition from a clan-based feudal political
system to something that more resembles parliamentary democracy as we know
it. Its entrepreneurial class, in many cases, has emigrated, but there still
is enormous talent within the county. It has government institutions that exist
on paper and exist in buildings but are not the institutions that people look
to for anything, whether it’s repairing a hole in the road or telling
them the truth or providing good schools.
“What else but a Lawrence education,” he says, “can enable
you to put all of these factors together and make some kind of a judgment,
not only
about what’s going to be happening in that country but what we should
be doing from the outside to try and get the right things done?”
A government major, Murray graduated from Lawrence and was accepted to the
law school at Cornell University. While on the Washington
Semester Program in his senior year, he had taken and passed the foreign service examination.
By the time his name rose to the top of the list, he was finishing his first
year of law school. Taking a two-year leave of absence from Cornell, he entered
into his first diplomatic assignment, as vice consul at the American embassy
in Kingston, Jamaica.
At the end of his leave, he remembers, with a chuckle, a “grass is greener” attitude
from law school colleagues who never expected him to come back and foreign
service colleagues who never expected him to return to the diplomatic service
after re-entering law school. He surprised both factions, completing his law
degree and then proceeding to a posting as economic-commercial officer at the
American Consulate General in Labumbashi, the Congo.
He then served for four years at the State Department in Washington, D.C.,
first as country-desk officer for Somalia and later as a political-military
officer in the European Bureau’s Office of NATO Affairs.
From 1988 to 1992, he was a political officer at the U.S. mission to the European
Union in Brussels and then went back to Washington, assigned to the Office
of UN Political Affairs, where he was responsible for Middle East issues. He
studied at the Foreign Service Institute’s long-term Arabic-language
training program from 1994 to 1996 (he also speaks French and Dutch) and then
was chief of the political section at the embassy in Damascus, Syria, from
1996 to 1998.
Before assuming his current position in Beirut in September 2004, he was deputy
chief of mission at the embassy in Algiers, Algeria, from 1998 to 2000, and
then returned to Washington, first as deputy director of the Office of European
Union Affairs and, later, as director of the Office of Policy Coordination
in the Bureau of Nonproliferation.
Reflecting on his varied educational and career trajectory, Murray says:
“Many students wonder how useful a law background is in the government,
and there are a couple of things I always mention: it enables you to meet lawyers
on their own turf without being intimidated, and at the same time it teaches
you an ability to assess situations and get to the core of whatever a particular
issue is, whether it’s an investment banking decision or you’re
a petroleum company wanting to invest in North Africa.”
Agreeing with the interviewer’s suggestion that perhaps his Lawrence
education taught him to put things together and his law-school education taught
him to
take them apart, he adds:
“Lawrence taught me that nothing should be looked at in isolation, and
the legal education sharpens the mind by getting you to focus on one issue,
sometimes to the exclusion of others.
“The Lawrence education comes in when there is a whole set of factors
that require you to make a judgment.
“For example, since the Bush administration’s highest priority in
the Middle East and North Africa is promoting democracy, what kind of projects
can we do that are really going to promote democracy in a way that is mutually
beneficial.” Because, he notes,
there are a thousand possibilities of how you could spend a hundred and twenty
million
dollars.
“In Beirut we are looking at progress toward democracy in a part of the
world that has not known a lot of democracy,” Murray says.
“Western countries have been pressuring countries in the Middle East to
make moves toward democracy, not just in the past couple of years but going back
15, 20, 30 years — really since the post-colonial period. Today, there
are institutions — parliaments, elections, ministries — that
are, in theory, responsible for agriculture, education, public health, and
other
necessities, but in point of fact, those institutions neither reflect the
will of the people nor truly represent the people. Although, under pressure
from
the West, many countries have set up parliaments and held elections, neither
the candidates who are elected nor the institutions themselves exert any
real power.”
Which raises, he suggests, the question of at what point do those supposed
institutions of an executive branch or a legislative branch really become
a true democracy rather than a façade of democracy maintained in part
because of pressure from Western democracies.
“Real democracy,” he says, “comes when people can look to the
government to be accountable for their basic needs, the education of their
children, the
health care of the population, the repair of the roads, the equitable resolution
of conflicts. When people stop going to the tribal or clan chief and they start
going to the local court,
then you have democracy. When there is an equitable system of taxation and
when people can go to the government and ask how their tax dollars are being
spent, that’s when democracy happens, when people put their primary
faith in the institutions of their elected government rather than their tribal
chiefs.”
His extensive experience with European affairs leads to a question about
the French rejection of a proposed European constitution, to which he replies:
“Europe has always faced the questions of How far and How fast and To what
end. In our own system, we have debates about what should be decided at the national
level and what should be decided at the level of the states or counties or
localities. Europe is going through the same process, asking ‘At what
level do we want decisions about our lives to be made.’
“One of the words that always pops up in this discussion is federalism — a
word that exists in that form or something close to it in all the European
languages but means something different in each of them. We might think,
or the British might think, of federalism as a devolution of power to the lowest
level for regional autonomy; however, federalism in the French sense of the
word means that power lies at the top. Across 15 or 20 years, Europe has
been
facing and still is facing that question of where to make the day-to-day
decisions that have an impact on people’s lives. I think the French felt
there were too many decisions being implied in the proposed EU constitution that
would be made in Brussels rather than Paris.”
Murray concludes, “In this age of globalization, of international companies,
global communications, foreign direct investments, trends that are going
at an accelerated pace all over the world, a person who is taking part in
this,
whether as a foreign-service officer, a banking executive, or an accountant
advising an investment bank, has to be able to put together a picture of
what’s going on at a particular
place, at a particular time, assessing all the prospects.
“The core issues of our time — globalization and much freer movement
of people and goods and ideas — make the kind of education that Lawrence
gives all the more critical.”