Council on Foreign Relations December 4, 2009, Washington D.C. Transcript

Speakers:
Stewart M. Patrick, Senior Fellow And Director, International Institutions On Global Governance Program, Council On Foreign Relations
Steven G. Kull, Director, Program On International Policy Attitudes, Worldpublicopinion.org

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MARVIN KALB: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today's Council on Foreign Relations meeting. And I am urged to ask you to please completely turn off -- not just put on vibrate -- your cell phones, BlackBerries, all wireless devices to avoid interference with the sound system. And what we're going to say is actually on-the-record; has nothing to do with the usual Council rules.

I'm Marvin Kalb. I am now the writer-in-residence at the United States Institute of Peace. I'm the Murrow professor emeritus at Harvard; and, once in my life, I was a reporter.

And the people who are on the panel with me here this afternoon, to my immediate left, Stewart Patrick, senior fellow and director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program here at the Council. To my further left -- only geography -- Steve Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, worldpublicopinion.org.

Our subject is, "Does Public Opinion Matter? World Attitudes on Global Governance." And I'm going to quote President Obama as heralding "a new era of global engagement," and the obvious question is, what do publics, both here in the United States and elsewhere around the world, think of this idea; how are the institutional organizations actually coping with them?

We are, though, not politicians rolling out something today. It is a new digest form of existing polling data on many, many questions -- 10 principal questions. And I would like to as Stewart to please start us off with some introduction to this new program.

STEWART PATRICK: Sure. Thank you very much, Marvin. It's a great pleasure to be here with you, and that you're presiding over this event. It's also a great pleasure to collaborate with my good friend Steven Kull, who I've worked with in the past, and the wonderful people at WorldPublicOpinion.org.

This project came about as a core theme of our International Institutions and Global Governance Program because we felt that, although the CFR tends to be an elite-focused organization and doesn't often address itself to what the wider American public, and also the global public might think, we think, for a number of reasons -- which we will get into in the course of this conversation, that what the public thinks matters; that it's an important part of statecraft for American leaders and international leaders to be aware of what their constituents and their fellow citizens actually think about the main issues of the day.

Now, the International Institutions and Global Governance Program looks basically at the requirements for effective multilateral cooperation in dealing with a range of global and transnational challenges. And as we started looking at some of the data, we didn't find any one-stop shop where you could actually find out what people around the world, and in the United States, felt about some of the major international institutions, nor about some of these major problems, ranging from terrorism to climate change, et cetera.

And so we decided to create something that would -- it's main value added is that it takes and integrates in a comprehensive way, and frames in a comprehensive way existing polling data; brings it together; allows you to juxtapose what Americans think versus what citizenry around the world thinks, and perhaps tease out some differences where those exist.

We found some -- if I can give you a sense of some of the headline findings, one of the striking things that we found is just how similar many publics around the worlds are in terms of the sort of world order that they want. They're extremely multilaterally inclined; they believe in a world order based on international law; they believe countries should obey international law even if it goes against their national interests.

They are strongly inclined to make the United States a major -- excuse me, the United Nations the major bedrock of international order. They recognize that it has problems, but they strongly look to the United Nations, and particularly the U.N. Security Council, as the bedrock authority of international legitimacy when it comes to issues, for instance, of the use of force.

In general, publics appear to be less sovereignty obsessed and less concerned about freedom of action for their own countries than you would imagine, than often is the conventional wisdom, and that their -- and that the governments are themselves.

This also, by the way, is important with respect to the United States, because when we think about the United States -- American political culture, American power, et cetera, we think about the United States as being an exceptionalist country, one that is extremely sovereignty inclined.

And when it comes to the data that we see, in most cases that does not tend to be the case, in terms of international law, in terms of the primacy that the American public puts on the U.N. Security Council, for instance, in terms of the desire of the majority of American public to join the International Criminal Court, for instance. And so we think that these are important background things that need to be in (the) policymaker's mind.

If I just might -- I'm not going to go through an entire presentation here, but just to show you how, when you get to this site on the Web, it actually works. You'll see here that we have a landing page -- and you probably can't read it necessarily down below, but it's divided up into a number of chapters. And so, from the landing page, you can pick a particular chapter.

For instance, "World Opinion on Violent Conflict." You could also do the same thing in "U.S. Opinion on Violent Conflict." And then that will take you down to a number of items. For instance: What's the attitude on the use of force? What's the role of the Security Council? What should be the U.N.'s role in peacekeeping, et cetera?

Then you can dive down a little bit more, and here's the chapter on "Responding to Violent Conflict." It gives you a headline about what people around the world think about the use of force, the Security Council's role in it. It gives you, actually, polling data.

And then the "final level of granularity," as our friends in the military say, gets you to the actual polls themselves, so that you can look for yourself and see how the question was framed and what the overall impressions were.

So, thanks.

KALB: Thank you very, very much -- good.

Steve, please.

STEVEN KULL: All right. Well, I'm going to talk a little bit about -- hold on, oops -- did I do this right? No, I didn't. Uh-oh, oops. (Laughs.) Oh yeah, I was using the wrong directions. Here we go.

I'm going to address the question of why policy practitioners should care about public opinion at home and abroad, particularly in regard to the question of international cooperation, global governance and those kinds of issues. And I have a -- I'm going to put out six reasons, and give you some data that might be of interest.

The first that's particularly interesting, I think, is that publics seem to be more cooperative than states. That's not always what people think, as we'll see. Policy practitioners often think that states are restrictive, more afraid of cooperation, more protective of national sovereignty, but that actually proves pretty much to not be the case.

So if policy practitioners want to promote international cooperation, they can pretty much see public opinion as a kind of ally in this process -- not in every case, of course, but this is a tendency on that side. And one of the points of evidence for that is that you can see that, in some cases, the public is really "thinking outside the box" that most states are thinking in these days.

Here are some examples. Asked about having a standing U.N. peacekeeping force selected, trained and commanded by the United Nations, on average, across 22 countries, 66 percent favored that idea, as well as 72 percent of the American public.

Giving the U.N. the authority to go into countries in order to investigate violations of human rights -- 65 percent favor that idea, on average; and the U.S. public, three-quarters favor it.

Giving the U.N. the power to regulate the international arms trade. Even with all the concerns about gun control, there's 60 percent of Americans support that idea, as well as a 22-country average of 58 percent.

As you know, there's been talk about eliminating nuclear weapons by developing some kind of international regime that involves intrusive inspections in all countries. And we asked 21 countries about that and, on average, three-quarters supported that idea, even though it was really emphasized that "there would be intrusive inspections in your country;" as did 77 percent of Americans.

Going into Copenhagen, how are people feeling about, what should their -- should their governments be more flexible, more ready to cooperate, less ready? What we found was, on average, 60 percent say that their government should put a higher priority on dealing with the problem of climate change; and in the U.S., 52 percent say that they should put a higher priority.

So it's not a situation of the public resisting, pulling back, saying -- which is really quite remarkable because they don't really see, can't touch, can't feel the effect of climate change, but still you have a majority saying, 'Do more than you're doing right now.' You would think maybe that the government had to pull people along, but, in fact, they're saying, 'No, you're not quite -- you really should be doing more than you are.'

Okay, second, leaders of other countries may not be as representative of their public as they claim. It's very easy for leaders to say, 'You know, we're representing our public in this issue.' And one of these is about -- that you may have heard about is in regard to developing countries, whether they have a responsibility to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. As you know, many of the developing countries say they don't.

And we presented this argument: Because countries that are less wealthy, produce relatively low emissions per person, they should not be expected to limit their emissions of climate-changing gasses along with wealthy countries; against the view that because total emissions from less wealthy countries are substantial and growing, these countries should limit their emissions of climate-change gasses along with wealthy countries. So what do the developing countries say on this question? Well, as you can see from the blue bars there, in most cases a majority or a plurality said that the developing countries should limit their emissions, contrary to the position of their governments.

Another one is environmental standards and labor standards in trade agreements. Developing countries have taken the position, 'Oh, we don't want that; that's an intrusion on our sovereignty; you're telling us what to do; you're trying to take away our comparative advantage.' But, in fact, a large majority of people in these countries there's -- the labor standards, favor having those standards as part of trade agreements. And when they've done focus groups, they said, 'Oh, yes, we want the international community to put pressure on our government to enforce those laws about the environment and labor standards.'

Okay, policy practitioners don't necessarily understand their own public as well as they think. Now, we did this study, together with the Chicago Council a few years ago, where we had a group of leaders -- from the administration, from Congress, business community, and so on, and we not only asked them what they thought, but we asked them what they thought the public thought.

And here's an example of a question that we used was: The U.S. should be more willing to make decisions within the U.N., even if this means that the U.S. will sometimes have to go along with a policy that is not its first choice. Well, in fact, 66 percent of Americans agreed with that, as did almost 80 percent of all the leaders, except the Republican staffers.

Now, we asked then, though, what do you think -- the majority agrees, disagrees, or views are evenly divided? Well, here you can see down on the bottom there, on average -- overall, only 26 percent even estimated that a majority agreed, and only about 10 (percent) or 12 percent knew that that would be more than 60 percent. So there was a very poor perception of the public.

Let me give you just a few quick other examples: The U.S. participation in the International Criminal Court, 76 percent of the public support that, as do most leaders, but overall, only 30 percent of the leaders knew that that was a majority position, much less a large majority. The same with Kyoto treaty, 71 percent of Americans supported adopting it; only 38 percent of leaders knew that that was a majority position.

Okay, another key dynamic. People generally tend to underestimate the public's readiness to cooperate -- not just the leaders, people in general. That's one of the reasons I think policymakers have this tendency to underestimate the public's readiness. But this, it turns out, is a general human tendency.

If you asked people, "Are you more supportive or less supportive than average?" and you take the whole sample, those that say "more" and those that say "less" should be equal if the public was perceiving itself correctly, right. But, in fact, it tends to lean pretty -- quite heavily to the view that they are more supportive of cooperation than average. We call it the "Lake Wobegon effect" -- we all think we're above average;

"I get it; cooperation's really needed, but see, my friends, my neighbors, they just don't understand these things, you know, they're just too" -- you know, so. (Laughter.)

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