Michael J. Glennon
Remarks at Convocation
The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
Tufts University
ASEAN Auditorium
September 12, 2002
Dean Bosworth, Dean Lynch, faculty colleagues, students, staff,
and members of the Class of ’47:
I’ve been invited to say a few words today by way of introduction
and sketch out how I came to be here and what I’ve been working
on. The short answer is that over the last several decades, it’s
seemed that everybody who is anybody that I’ve met in the world
of international relations and foreign policy has ultimately
revealed himself or
herself to have graduated from Fletcher, and
having somehow overlooked the value of being here in my student
days, I’m now making up for lost time.
The more complete answer is that my interest in international
affairs and the route to Fletcher trace back to an incident that
focused the mind wonderfully on the value of clear-eyed analysis
in foreign policy-making—I was tear-gassed in college during an
anti-war demonstration. So after law school I went to work for
the one governmental body where there seemed to be more sympathy
for my viewpoint, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It was
a heady experience for a freshly-minted lawyer to work for
Senatorial giants like Fulbright, Church, McGovern, Muskie, and
Javits, although they were not exactly the peaceniks I had been
expecting; then as now, the Senate was pretty much a hotbed of
tranquility. Still, I had a chance to work on some measures that
meant a great deal to me, and it was a wonderful education,
completely free of bluebooks.
Working in close proximity to members of Congress tends to have
the same effect on all young staffers. Before long, they
conclude: I can do that. Well, I was no exception, yet politics
seemed a bit crass to me, given the need to spend all day calling
people on the phone and asking them for money, so I decided
instead to do something that involved no money at all—I went into
teaching.
Life as a law professor was fine, but—well, some one said that
law school sharpens a one’s mind by narrowing it, so I thought I
had better make my exit while I still had the wits to do so.
Also, I gradually found myself less and less interested in the
blackletter legal rules that are the classroom stock-in-trade and
more and more interested in the “big picture” of policy and
philosophy behind the rules.
One “big picture” question in particular has come to interest me,
and I was privileged to get a fellowship last year to look into
it at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, which is a
government-sponsored think tank. Always concerned about
unintended consequences, the government doesn’t pay people to
think too much, so fellowships are limited to a year. The
question that I thought mostly about concerns the relationship
between hegemony and the rule of law. My thesis was—is—that
there’s a basic tension between the two. The rule of law implies
a willingness to submit to multilateral restraints. But hegemony
implies a desire to be free of restraint. The United States has
had a long-standing commitment to the international rule of law.
But just recently, some Americans seem to have concluded that
we’re so far ahead of every other country, in both hard power and
in soft power, that maybe we don’t really need law as much as we
used to. They believe that we can always count on raw power to
protect ourselves. Well, I hope they’re right. Looking back at
the fate of hegemons past, I have my doubts about hegemony’s
staying power. But who knows—American hegemony today may indeed
be something altogether new and unprecedented and much
longer-lasting.
In any event, it was an interest in these sorts of larger
questions that drew me to Fletcher. Just a glance at the course
schedule reveals that this is a place where just about everybody
seems to think and write and talk about “big picture” issues. Not
only that, but they do it extremely well. From all I can tell
Fletcher is the best foreign affairs school in the United
States—probably the best in the world. Fletcher seems always to
have been on my radar screen. As a young lawyer 30 years ago I
read with great admiration a statement on executive agreements
given by Prof. Ruhl Bartlett of Fletcher before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee. Bartlett was followed by other great
names—Leo Gross, and of course Al Rubin. It’s a terrific honor to
succeed Al. Teaching in the same position that they held is the
international law equivalent of playing center field for the New
York Yankees, in front of statues of Ruth, DiMaggio, and Mantle.
(I’m not sure that’s an entirely safe analogy in Boston.)
But of course the real bedrock of all great universities is the
student body. Fletcher is especially esteemed in this regard
because, I’ve quickly learned, it’s a magnet for students with
real intellectual curiosity who also know how to talk to
policy-makers. That’s a rare combination, in my experience—the
ability to be equally at home in the world of thought and the
world of action. Fletcher is at the crossroads of those worlds in
foreign affairs as almost no other institution is. I think
there’s a reason for Fletcher’s prominence that that goes beyond
excellent students and excellent faculty. The reason is that
Fletcher has committed itself to maintaining a robust marketplace
of ideas. Fletcher is not marked by any official or unofficial
orthodoxy or ideology. It provides a home for multiple, often
conflicting perspectives, all of which are received with respect.
Over the years humanity has found no better formula for
intellectual ferment or social progress than the recognition that
truth emerges from the free play of conflicting ideas. Fletcher
has understood that. And that, is seems to me, is the biggest
reason why people from Fletcher have been so dazzlingly
successful as both thinkers and doers. They’re used to listening
to all sides of an issue and to following questions wherever they
lead. Those questions may not always lead to clear answers, but
the process of looking for those answers is conducted with
civility and intellectual rigor.
That’s a tradition that I’m immensely proud to be a part of, and
I’ll do all I can to help maintain and strengthen it.
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