The Flip Side of Science Diplomacy: Russia and Ukraine
Gerson S. Sher¹
This is the first installment of a longer essay that I have been writing in my head for about 20 years. Some parts are drawn from my recent book, From Pugwash to Putin: A Critical History of US-Soviet Scientific Cooperation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), which is currently being translated into…Chinese!! For a short synopsis of the book published in the AAAS journal Science & Diplomacy, which however omits the funny and shocking stories from my interviewees, click here.
I have a confession to make. I have been a “science diplomat.”
And I have very mixed feelings about it. Not only today, when the very notion of “science diplomacy” looks increasingly strange as scientists and their institutions around the world cut off ties with Russia, but throughout my forty-year career as a practitioner and manager, promoting scientific cooperation with the former Soviet Union and its successor states by managing and leading cooperative science programs in diverse roles in the public and private sectors.
I have always been troubled by the concept of “science diplomacy” ever since it made its debut some twenty or more years ago. From its beginning, which goes back even farther than that, it has been a morally loaded concept that has illuminated much and inspired many good deeds and projects, but that has also at times obscured the complex nature of international scientific cooperation. It has done much to get the US scientific community, in particular, more engaged in international science and more aware in general of the complex global context in which they work, but it has also tended to generate a sense of self-satisfaction in the community that simply being present on the soil of another country promotes some higher end than science itself. To a certain extent, the concept reflects the historically naïve and superficial nature of peculiarly American perspectives on the world around us, a mirror image of both our isolationist impulses and our messianic visions.
This essay has been cooking in my head for a long time. But today, the importance of unpacking the revered concept of “science diplomacy” has become underscored as never before by the savage invasion by Russia of Ukraine. Granted, this is an especially egregious event, but it is not sui generis. It begs the world scientific community to consider questions of our collective responsibilities, loyalty to our fellow scientists along with commitment to moral principle.
To those who object that moral principle has no role in science, I cannot provide an answer other than to ask, why did you choose this profession in the first place? Why do we place such a great value on the advancement of knowledge through rigorous research, adherence to method and standards of proof and falsification, to rational discourse? Those questions and more are more properly addressed in scholarly work on the philosophy and history of science, which this is not.
“Science knows no country”
A favorite saying in the scientific community is that “science has no borders” or “science does not know boundaries,” or some mixture of the two. I submit that this is more fiction than fact, more aspiration than the real state of affairs. It is a noble thought, but it is wrong.
It seems that it might have been Louis Pasteur who articulated the idea of science knowing no boundaries. And in so doing, he may also have laid bare the internal tensions and pitfalls of the concept.
According to Wikiquote, his biographer cites him as saying this:
Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and it is the torch which illuminates the world.
But the quote directly continues to contradict its own premise:
Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.
Well, here’s a conundrum. “Science knows no country, but…that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.” Let’s unpack that a bit farther.
What about the idea of the “nation” as distinct from “country”? Here, it is useful to consider the late 19th-century context in which Pasteur was writing. The idea of the “nation-state,” ushered in by the French Revolution, was still relatively young. Germany had only recently formed itself from a scattering of independent principalities into a geopolitical state with a distinct national identity. Elsewhere in Europe, unrest was seething against multinational empires, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, where nationalist resentment would ultimately light the fuse of world war.
It is not clear, though, the Pasteur was being so careful with his use of terms. They revealed a basic dichotomy and contradiction — between universalistic aspirations and national pride. He was, after all, a Frenchman.
More than that, he was a religious Frenchman, apparently. He has also been quoted as saying
(to be continued)
¹Gerson S. Sher, PhD is a retired civil servant and foundation executive who has devoted his career to the intersection of scientific cooperation, international affairs, and global security, primarily with the countries of the former Soviet Union. In the public sector, Gerson was Program Coordinator for U.S.-Soviet and East European Programs at the National Science Foundation, from which he is retired. He has also worked in several nonprofit organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, George Soros’s International Science Foundation (as Chief Operating Officer, on assignment from NSF), and the United States Industry Coalition, and he was asked by the NSF Director to serve as the founding president of the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation (now CRDF Global).
Gerson’s publications include From Pugwash to Putin: A Critical History of US-Soviet Scientific Cooperation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019) and other books and articles on US-Soviet and post-Soviet scientific cooperation, Marxist intellectual history, and nuclear security and safety. He received a B.A. Russian Studies (summa cum laude) from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. In June 2008, Gerson was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Moscow Engineering-Physical Institute (now the Russian Federal Nuclear University), Russia’s premier university for educating nuclear scientists and engineers, in recognition of his career work to promote science and technology cooperation between the United States and Russia.
