The role of scientists in a political environment has been dealt with in the literature time and again. This essay takes up some of these thoughts and puts them in a current context. These thoughts shed light on certain constraints that science has to cope with. They portray a rather dark picture about the role of science. It is not to condemn science, but rather to raise awareness for the difficulties of scientists, without painting a rosy picture.
Ivory tower and roller shutters
Berthold Brecht muses in “The life of Galileo” about scientists that they are an inventive species of dwarfs who can be rented for anything. Galileo had to revoke his discovery that confirmed the Copernican worldview. Sure, this was the seventeenth century. For the twenty-first century one should specify, that there are always scientists who could be rented. This dark view might well be true for certain think tanks that dependent on government or corporate funding. They do not give so much policy advise as distribute policy decisions in a more sophisticated way. Research design and even results are frequently presented in a way to satisfy the sponsor. It is documented that many conservative think tanks in Washington, DC are sponsored by the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, or Taiwan. Their reports enlarge the threat of their enemies and downplay their fallacies. Think tanks can have their own political agenda, but most of the time they try to dock on to certain policies of parties or government institutions. This strategy is linked to the expectation that they can nudge politicians more in their direction. Berthold Brecht also says, that it is better to have “dirty hands” than “no hands”!
Scholars, mainly working at universities, writing in peer reviewed journals and striving for project grants, prefer to stay in the ivory tower in order to avoid punishment – financially and publicly. They are afraid that projects would be given to someone else or that they are put in a negative light. Others again keep their conclusions and policy recommendations on such a general level that they are almost never wrong. Or they include too many “on the one side – on the other side” results to avoid criticism to be one-sided.
Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt goes in his novel “The Physicists” one step further. Scientists would have no choice if their knowledge were restricted by a government. They would be caught behind roller shutters. In Dürrenmatt’s novel these are nuclear scientists. It goes without saying that their knowledge can be extremely sensitive. There are time and again killings and arrests of persons endowed with this kind of knowledge, if some national or foreign governments presume it might be used against their interests. The most prominent examples include Robert Oppenheimer, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Abdul Qadeer Khan, and Mordechai Vanunu.
But findings by social scientists can have even more dire consequences. In the film “Planet of the Apes” (first part) a dictatorship of gorillas was established to suppress what chimpanzee-scientists had discovered, that a high human civilization existed in earlier times.
Famous analysts
Having said this, many analysts and intellectuals become famous because they are politically outspoken. Who wouldn’t like to write such an influential article like George Kennan did with his essay signed in 1947 with “Mr. X” about diplomatic containment? Politicians are often tempted to reinterpret results. Even in this case, George Kennan’s idea was later abused by the Washington security establishment and interpreted as military “roll back”.
George Kennan is not the only one whose ideas are being twisted. President Bill Clinton used the academic “Democratic Peace Thesis”, that democracies don’t fight democracies, to support NATO’s Eastern expansion, risking conflict with Russia. George W. Bush used the same thesis to justify the war in Iraq in 2003, which should bring democracy and peace to the Middle East. Alternative academic opinions were ignored. Tens of thousands of scientists and academics signed a letter to George W. Bush in 2002 warning about the consequences of an invasion in Iraq. It did not have any impact on the decision which has been made without consulting external experts.
Sometimes politicians cannot meet their own good intentions. At the beginning of his presidency, John F. Kennedy instructed members of his Cabinet and the National Security Council to read the book by historian Barbara Tuchmann “The Guns of August”. He believed that it described clearly how political leaders stumbled blindly into the catastrophe of World War I. He stressed explicitly: “I never will come in such a situation”. Nevertheless, he drifted into the war in Vietnam. His Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy was the driving force. He followed Shakespeare’s “Henry IV”, who fought the rebels, about who he taught as thirty-four years old Professor at Harvard to understand the American society.
Mundane work
The usual work of scientists is much more mundane, however. They serve mainly as technical experts and sources. They provide data for political decisions, but do not take the decisions. There are various types of expert-advise:
a) Experts regularly provide the decision taker with data. The distinction between qualified and informed civil servants and experts is blurring.
b) Decision takers ask the expert for information about a certain problem.
c) Decision takers read reports provided by analytical institutes and think tanks to find arguments to support certain political decisions.
d) For more substantial support of a certain policy, decision takers fund specific scientific projects.
e) Civil servants attend or organize meetings or events to a specific topic with a limited number of experts to get a variety of opinions.
To a certain extent these experts can claim that they have influence on political decisions. Analyses and ideas are not the priority, however, but data, numbers, technical information and so on. The presentation and description of facts are not identical with creating an idea.
Niccolò Machiavelli illustrated this relationship between the prince and the advisor so eloquently: good advice should be based on the wisdom of the prince, and the wisdom of the prince should not be based on good advice. In other words, what decision-takers want to hear they hear, what they do not want to hear they ignore at best, or suppress it.
The wisdom of the prince is sometimes limited. Austrian Kaiser Franz Josef commissioned a three-year long project to Spanish “scientists”, or alchemists, on how to transform silver into gold. More recent less obvious examples are President Ronald Reagan’s idea of a “Strategic Defense Initiative”, a missile defense system in space, that was endorsed and promoted by the physicist Edward Teller; or Donald Trump’s space army.
It is also possible that an authority commissions an expert to explore a thought or an idea to start a debate, well-meaning or sinister. In Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s novel “Justice”, a convicted local politician, a Swiss Kantonsrat, commissions a young lawyer without a job to re-investigate a murder of a professor he had committed publicly. His research casts doubt on his crime and eventually leads to his discharge. The young lawyer subsequently commits suicide when he finds out that he has been used.
Keep the discourse alive
Are scientists condemned to being dependent, ignored or isolated? This is probably true for many individual researchers, but not for collective discourses. Hedley Bull, a widely recognized international relations Oxford-scholar, took a modest view. It is an honorable task of scientists to keep the discourse about certain issues alive. Ideally, according to Jürgen Habermas, it should be without domination.
There is always the possibility that Victor Hugo’s prediction, that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has arrived, comes true. The catastrophic consequences of the use of nuclear weapons or the impact of climate change are the most obvious examples. In the field of international relations and security policy there are numerous academic concepts, which, less conspicuously, travelled into the policy debate: balance of power, concert of powers, multipolarity, comprehensive security, conflict prevention, securitization, and many others.
Therefore, for politicians and decision takers it would be wise and far sighted to keep an independent academic and scholarly debate alive and to promote it, although it does not bring immediate and applicable results. The scientist, as Hedley Bulls metaphorically put it, has to accept that her/his ideas are like a boat in a stormy sea. Some ideas will never see the land, however. Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” is one of them. This does not mean, however, that it should not be kept alive.
Further Reading
Bertolt Brecht 1963: Leben des Galilei, edition Suhrkamp, Bd. 1.
Bull, Hedley 1968: Strategic Studies and its Critics, World Politics, Vol. 20, 593-605.
Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 1998: Justiz, Bern.
Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 1962: Die Physiker, Arche, Zürich.
Finkenbeiner, Ann 2006: The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite, New York.
Gärtner, Heinz 2000: Einfluss von Intellektuellen auf die Weltpolitik, in: Eva Kreisky (Hg.), Von der Macht der Köpfe: Intellektuelle zwischen Moderne und Spätmoderne, Wien, 275-284.
Goldsmith, Jack L./Posner, Eric A. 2005: The Limits of International Law, Oxford, USA.
Judson, Horace Freeland 2004: The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science, New York.
Keegan, John/Bull, Bartle 2006: What is a civil war?, in Prospect Magazine 129, December 2006.
Kennan, George F. 1947: The Sources of Soviet Conduct, in: Foreign Affairs, 25, July 1947, 566-582.
Kennan, George F. 1971: Memoiren eines Diplomaten, Band 2, München.
Kennan, George F. 1972: After the Cold War: American Foreign Policy in the 1970s, in: Foreign Affairs, October.
Kennedy, John F. 1991: Why England Slept, New York. (Original: 1940)
McNamara, Robert S., Vietnam: Das Trauma einer Weltmacht, München 1997. (Originaltitel: “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” 1995).
Preston, Andrew 2006: The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam, Cambridge, US.
Smith Daniel 2005: Political Science, in: New York Times Magazine, 4. September.
Union of Concerned Scientists 2004: Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: An Investigation into the Bush Administration’s Misuse of Science, Report, February 2004.
Univ. Prof. Dr. Heinz Gärtner is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna and at Danube University. He was academic director of the Austrian Institute for International Affairs. He has held various Fulbright Fellowships and the Austrian Chair at Stanford University. He was Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC. Among other things, Gärtner chairs the Strategy and Security advisory board of the Austrian Armed Forces and the Advisory Board of the International Institute for Peace (IIP) in Vienna. He has published widely on international security, nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, US foreign policy, geopolitics, Iran, and the Middle East.