1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

know this June the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna is having its 250 th anniversary, but
how about other schools?
MILLER: Oh, yes, we went to all of them, because there's a network and the faculty has
gone through each other's schools, taught at each other's schools, and the diplomats who
become professors either long term or short term move around a bit. There's a community
of interest and exposure, and that's helpful.
Q: Was there a different approach, a European approach or individual approach or not?
MILLER: Of the places I've seen in Europe, there is a difference. Yes, there is a
difference. The Europeans were like their universities. There was far less attention and
more individual freedom. Students were left to their own devices. The American schools
were much better, much better. The academies of actual diplomacy that I've seen in
Moscow and Kyiv, and I saw a little bit of how the British trained their people at the end,
before going A-100 equivalent, or A-100, like ...
Q: Anyone that would be in our basic officer corps.
MILLER: With one exception is that for most of the Europeans, you had to get into the
training school to get into the service, with the exception of England, where Oxford and
Cambridge or London were required to get in. Certainly in recent years, way beyond
Oxford and Cambridge and London.
The specialized education in foreign affairs and of the kind we have at Fletcher, is useful.
One can do advanced work at traditional universities, as well, with equal effect, I would
say, with the exception of the interaction with pros in your line of work. But what was
happening at Fletcher at that time was that fewer people were going into the Foreign
Service, and more and more were going into business, international finance and business,
seeing that path as more lucrative, certainly, but also as more interesting in their minds,
because of a disillusionment with, in some cases with policies, but more often a
disillusionment with bureaucratic life. I don't think that pattern and its dilemmas have
changed.
Q: I don't think so either, no. How about the nongovernmental organizations, excluding
the finance – the other one is not very lucrative.
MILLER: Well, NGO life is very different, it seems to me. It's advocacy, for the most
part, most dramatically evident in the foreign field, in human rights activity. The Human
Rights activists have a special mentality, deeper at work using that compelling moral
sense that some people have. And they're willing to devote their lives to these kinds of
causes. There is a kind of life work that's very important. It certainly was in the Cold War
period, in the time of international tyrannies of the kind we've lived through.
But NGO life, which I know quite well, having spent a number of years doing it, about 10
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