Former Maryland Seminar Fellow Named as new Director General of UNESCO

New UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova. (photo courtesy UNESCO)

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - Public Policy Professor Mac Destler remembers Bulgarian native Irina Bokova as an intelligent, active contributor - an "outstanding participant" in fact - to his US Foreign Policymaking Seminar back in 1989 when she spent some six months on campus and in Washington D.C. as a Fellow. Newsdesk asked Destler - currently the Saul I. Stern Professor in Maryland's School of Public Policy - for his thoughts about the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization - UNESCO's - first female Director General:

From 1988 through 1995, I directed what became known as the Maryland Seminar on US Foreign Policymaking.  It brought roughly twenty mid-career scholars, public officials, and journalists to College Park and Washington each year to learn about how the United States makes foreign policy.  Fellows were here for an extended spring term--for Irina's group, it was around six months, January through July.

They took a special course that I developed and offered on the US policy process, audited other university courses, and made weekly visits to Washington institutions such as the National Security Council, federal departments such as State and Treasury, the Senate and the House, think tanks, interest groups, etc.

Irina was an outstanding participant in the program.  Notwithstanding the constraints on a Bulgarian prior to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, she was an active contributor to our discussions--including those with Washington officials--and showed uncommon intelligence in the process.

	Mac Destler is the Saul I. Stern Professor in the School of Public Policy.

Each fellow was required to do independent research on a policy topic.  She chose to write on "U.S. Foreign Policymaking and The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe--the US institution created by Congress to monitor the Helsinki process.  Hers was one of the papers we chose to "publish" (reproduced and circulated) and it stands up quite well when on reads it today.  (I have just found a copy on my shelf.)  I note that Madeleine Albright was one of the experts who she interviewed.

Since then, we have kept in touch.  I visited Bulgaria in 1992, and she hosted me at the national legislature.  I've seen her here a few times since.  She emailed me just last March when she was visiting Washington in connection with her position as Ambassador to France, but we were unable to find a time to meet.  She has a son who lives in New York and an daughter and grand-daughter in Stamford, Connecticut.

Contact Information:

I. M. (Mac) Destler
Saul I. Stern Professor
School of Public Policy
University of Maryland
(301) 405-6357
and Visiting Fellow Peterson Institute for International Economics

Where is the University of Maryland?

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