Isabel de Sola
The Fletcher School
Convocation Address
September 2007
Hi, my name is Isabel de Sola, I am a second year student here at the Fletcher School. I also want to welcome everyone to this convocation ceremony and the start of our academic year, especially incoming and returning students. It’s good to see old faces, and new. I was really excited to be asked to address this audience – after all, it’s not everyday I have the attention of so many people I admire and respect!
Which has made this message that much harder to write! The convocation ceremony marks an occasion to celebrate and reflect on the experience that lies ahead for Fletcher students and faculty. I’ve turned ideas over and over in my mind for several weeks, trying hard to condense a whirlwind experience into a coherent message for you. There are too many moments, images, and ideas packed all together during my time here -- making it next to impossible to convey what Fletcher is like from the student perspective.
So, I’ll leave experiencing Fletcher up to each of you, as I don’t think I could do the place justice. Instead, I want to share with you just two thoughts about this time, which I hope may resonate with the students, and maybe a professor or two.
First, Fletcher is a Mecca for internationalists. If you’ve found your way here, it’s likely that you’re interested in the world around you, as well as the worlds far away from you. As a community, we speak many languages, we’ve traveled the world hundreds of times over, we cook all kinds of strange food, we may follow totally different sports, or the same sports but with different names. And amongst all this difference, Fletcher students, staff, and faculty are driven by international affairs and challenges, we share a genuine interest in the way the world works – or more importantly, the way it should work.
New students may discover that Fletcherites make ‘international jokes’ amongst themselves, which other non-Fletchies cannot understand. For example, the birth of a new Fletcher Student Group: the NICS, or the Newly-Independent Countries and Soviet Satellites, formed a student group, rushed to organize a dinner, filled the night with vodka, and declared their freedom in the Fletcher way! Yes, I can tell you that as internationalists, we are safe here at Fletcher. Although I should warn you: at that ‘other school’ down the road, the one that shall go unnamed, well I cannot assure you of your safety.
Second, this international haven, as much as we love how cozy it is, constantly needs a strong dosage of localness. Let me explain what I mean:
The year before I came to Fletcher, I was surveying development aid projects in the northern region of El Salvador, my home country. At the time, the EU was gearing up to invest millions in aid monies. The EU, hoping to expand its foreign policy influence in Latin America, had given the village 1 million euros with which to build a badly-needed access road. Local Salvadoran officials, facing a tight upcoming election, gladly accepted the terms of the project and recruited villagers to build the road. Unfortunately, neither the rushed EU budget timeline, nor the local election calendar, were in synch with El Salvador’s tropical seasons: as the road was being built, biblical rains were already washing it away.
I waited in the hot rain for our truck to be dug out of the mud, and I felt disillusioned: here was another classic case of international intentions thwarted by local conditions – and there was very little I could do about it. Maybe some of you listening to my story have experienced the disillusionment I felt that day. Amongst ourselves, we may tell of countless examples of misunderstandings between international intentions and local realities, which lead to ambiguous results in development, business, trade and the environment.
This is what I mean to say by internationalists getting a needed dose of localness.
This summer I listened to the powerful Democratic Congressmen Charlie Rangel address a dinner party of Washington DC lobbyists and international trade professionals. On the future of free trade and the Doha Round, Mr. Rangel smilingly announced: “I don’t want a balanced playing field for free trade; I want the best conditions to apply for United States’ exporters and industries!” The Colombian Ambassador sitting across from me could not help but raise one perfectly sculpted eyebrow in suspicion. After all, her country’s hopes of a free trade agreement with the US have been quashed by rival political parties outmaneuvering each other before an election. My eyebrows were definitely raised: don’t we learn here in our economics courses that the unicorn called free trade actually loves all the maidens, and not just the almighty powerful ones?
We could go on. These stories illustrate a concern for all us: What is so hard about synchronizing international initiatives with local realities?
In this community of internationalists, our faith in diplomacy, international cooperation, and global solutions may be restored. Yet, at Fletcher, we do not neglect the view from below. Here, we can pursue both the international and local perspectives on global challenges, and we choose to do so. Each year, many students and faculty go abroad, to the farthest, widest, most obscure, most dangerous or most lucrative places, in order to ensure that our community gets its dosage of localness. At Fletcher, the local and the international can meet each other in the papers we write, the theses we defend, the hypotheses we test here. Incoming and returning students bring with them many stories of disillusionment and also of success in this regard – we are, in essence, Fletcher’s dosage of localness.
In a great course taught by Professor Drezner (!!), I learned that a US senator once said: “All politics is local”. Twisting this quote around, Professor Drezner has recently published a book entitled “All politics is Global” (!!). It’s amazing isn’t it – when two opposing statements can be absolutely true, simultaneously. I hope that during our time here at Fletcher, we might keep this in mind. While we research, write, and argue, up on this hill: the global and the local must be understood and addressed, simultaneously.
Finally, I’ll just warn you that Fletcher is adventurous and fast-paced – so don’t forget to enjoy it. You may be overwhelmed by classes, activities, conferences, parties, recruiting events, and more. Around Christmas time everybody starts to look a little pale. So just remember every once in a while: enjoy yourself.
Thank you.