From Cold War bridge to global mediator: Science diplomacy for a fractured world

For a stretch of the Cold War, when the Iron Curtain still seemed impermeable, the only direct computer link between Moscow and Washington ran not through a ministry but through a baroque palace on the edge of Vienna. Inside, Soviet and American scientists pored over the same equations while their governments traded threats. It was science diplomacy before the term was commonly used: not science in the service of one side's diplomacy, but science creating a space in which opposing sides could continue to work together.

The founding of IIASA was an act of some daring. In 1972, at the Royal Society in London, representatives of the Soviet Union, the United States, and ten other countries from both blocs signed its charter – the fruit of six years that Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin had championed in person, and of a single audacious idea: to build a bridge across the political abyss out of science, of all materials. Its first director was Howard Raiffa, the mathematician who had all but invented decision and negotiation analysis – the study of how to choose wisely under uncertainty, and how adversaries talk their way to agreement. For an institute bent on turning enemies into interlocutors, no better mind existed.

So, did the bridge pay off? To put the question that way is to misunderstand it, for diplomacy does not reduce to a figure on a page. Its dividend lies in what became possible simply because a line of conversation stayed open at all. The Institute's early work, among it a 1978 conference that drew forty authors from eleven countries, helped lay the ground for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988*. Every IPCC report since has carried IIASA's signature, as author and as reviewer; and the scenarios that underpin most of today's climate diplomacy (providing the same numbers for negotiators in Beijing as in Brussels) were devised in Laxenburg and are still stored, maintained, and developed further there. Several of the world's most-cited climate scientists work in that very palace. This is science diplomacy in its finest hour: not a handshake before flags, but a scientific model that reached the negotiating table and stayed.

IIASA’s greatest success, though, is also its quietest: that it survives at all. When the Cold War ended, the member states might have turned off the lights and left the bridge they had built to stand as a monument. Instead, the Institute broadened from an East–West connector into a global mediator, from the old blocs to the widening fault lines between North and South. A bridge is never proved on the day it opens, only when the water rises; that IIASA has outlived the very conflict that called it into being is the finest testament to its worth. Today it draws on nearly five hundred researchers from some sixty countries for a yearly budget of thirty-three million euros – a modest sum for the reach, and, rarer still, ground that answers to no government, which is precisely what grows scarce the moment a crisis begins.

All of which makes the present its most demanding test yet. The world is coming apart along familiar seams: disinformation, hardening camps, technological shock, open war; and the Institute is retooling rather than resting on its past. The conditions that made science diplomacy necessary in 1972 have not returned in identical form, but its central problem has: how to preserve cooperation when trust between governments is low.

Under the leadership of IIASA Director General Hans Joachim (John) Schellnhuber, IIASA now wants to bring its science even closer to where decisions are made, strengthening its role in science diplomacy and decision intelligence: using evidence not simply to understand problems, but to make better choices. The old idea, in other words, is being renewed: keep the evidence shared and the conversation open.

Over the coming months, we will be sharing more about IIASA’s critical and ambitious approach to Science Diplomacy in the modern era. Working with our international members, we will leverage our foundational legitimacy as a science diplomacy actor, apply the scientific credibility of our researchers and models, and convene through our global networks to step up to the challenges of our time.

Fifty-four years is not in itself much of a milestone, but it is long enough to demonstrate that science diplomacy is not merely a Cold War artefact or tool of foreign policy. Its value is clearest when relations deteriorate: in keeping evidence shared, relationships intact, and some ground open on which adversaries can still meet.

While politics goes on bolting doors, an Institute outside Vienna has held one open since 1972. While the anniversary may be incidental, the mandate is not.

* In February 1978, IIASA hosted a workshop co-organised with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), UNEP and the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) on the carbon dioxide (CO₂) released by burning fossil fuels, its effects on climate and environment, and what the state of knowledge then implied for energy strategy. See Williams, J. (1978), Carbon Dioxide, Climate and Society: Proceedings of an IIASA Workshop, February 21–24, 1978. Oxford: Pergamon Press. ISBN 9781483159355.

Note: This article gives the view of the author, and not the position of the IIASA Insights blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.