The Conference

I had never been to a professional conference of this fashion, especially not one that's dominated by UN and ICRC officials. Like most of us, that's just not how I would normally choose to spend my time. It was, however, quite interesting and I will attempt to describe it.

The conference was held at the World Meteorological Organization, a mammoth of a building and quite well done at that. Initially, we saw that there was another conference on arms control running concurrently and we all strongly desired to join that one - migration can only be so interesting. Sadly, we had little choice in the matter.

The room we were located in was a very large auditorium. Rows of tables flanked the room forming one large concentric half-moon. In the front was a raised platform with a long table and a podium off to the right. In front of each seat was a set of headphones, an internet jack, a plug, and, most cool, a microphone. Not that I got to use it, but the idea was entertaining. In the back of the room, on the 2nd level, encased in glass, sat the translators. The conference enjoyed simultaneous English-French translation.

The initial speakers were what you would expect - little more than political figures who primarily served as the face of their respective organizations. That's the technical description of "keynote speaker" actually. The opening was not without controversy, however. The Swiss head of migrant integration essentially described the entire process as one of forced integration. The Swiss are strongly nationalistic and those that immigrate for any reason are required to abandon their indigenous culture (dress, language, custom, etc). The VERY next speaker was a Canadian guy (and a brilliant speaker) who argued strenuously that the Canadian model was superior. Now, normally, I'm not the kind of guy to immediately grant acclaim to America Junior, but this time, he had a point. The implicit value of the Canadian system is one of integration, not assimilation. Which is really the whole debate. People leave their countries for different reasons, but their indigenous culture is an important linkage that needs to be maintained. Systems like America and Canada give those newcomers the freedom and flexibility to maintain those cultural identities while also learning their new culture.

Anyway, I won't belabor the details. There were many such debates about those issues. The organizers did a pretty good job of assembling an impressive group of people who were knowledgeable and articulate. Where the failed was in the volume. Simply, there were too many speakers. The conference was continually running over time to the point that several of the best speakers (and I mean content, not style), people who obviously had important things to say were cut short. That irritated me to no end. But, what really got me fired up was the moderator.

I'm trying to be polite here, but in short, the moderator was a complete clod. In fact, I'm so thankful that I never considered attending the Webster campus in Geneva, because my hatred for this fucker knows no bounds and he's the director of that program. Fundamentally, there were two problems with him throughout: the conference was about him and he tightly regulated things that ultimately meant that few questions were asked and answered.

When I say the conference was about him, I'm not joking. He was the moderator of the whole thing, which is unusual because I'm told that typically at these types of events there will be several moderators over the course of the two days. Not for this guy. Instead, he uses every potential break to explain his reaction to the previous speaker, summarize what the speaker said, and act authoritatively about the material. Not only was this ENTIRELY unnecessary and ENTIRELY unusual (my prof here NEVER does that when he moderates discussions), but it also had the effect of tightening an already tight schedule to the point that some people were unable to finish their speeches.

But even beyond that, he gave the last speech of the whole enchilada (mmm, enchiladas), but after being completely upstaged by the previous speaker (to the point that any response would be really been impossible) that instead of rolling with his prepared remarks, he tried to formulate a coherent response because he took the whole thing personally for some reason. I'll spare y'all the gory details, but essentially, you have 12 hours of speeches about how great migration is and what goes into that followed by a brilliant Dutch economist who proceeds to devastate the entire notion, casting aspersions on the necessity of the conference in the first place. So it makes sense that the chief organizer, the driving force behind the conference was a bit bristly about it all. But he didn't have to get personal about his experiences in the Hungarian army and his migration to Western Europe, etc in a lame attempt to justify ALL migration (which is really the whole issue because the Dutch guy essentially just argued that low skilled migration is a net economic drain and that we should be careful of who we let into developed economies).

The other egregious offense was that this egomaniacal fool insisted that all questions were submitted in writing. This had the effect of ruining the spontaneity of the Q&A sessions - questions were asked at the conclusion of four speeches, so that by the time your question was answered (if it was screened out as being too controversial) you had lost the focus of the speech because three other topics had just been covered. I was ultimately more offended that I got my questions screened out, however. For example, a Chinese scholar made a comment that there are "26 million Chinese in Taiwan," something I wanted to contest because they would NOT identify as Chinese and that is official PRC government propaganda and doesn't reflect reality. Guess which question wasn't answered? Same thing with the Swiss guy who espoused the merits of assimilation. Same thing for the guy that just asserted that war crime tribunals deters future episodes of genocide/ethnic conflict (say what?). Same thing on a half-dozen other topics.

The last, truly offensive thing that this nob did was give the closing speech of the conference. He was presenting findings for a paper he was working on, which isn't such a bad thing, except that his findings were a joke. I spare you the details, but it was laughable, and not just to me. Several other participants, from undergrad to PhD to career professional, were agreed - his "findings" were highly suspect. At any rate, he embarrassed himself when he asserted that, "The Cold War was not about ideology or power, it was about Europe and only about Europe." I don't think I got that memo. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is a PhD holder in not one, but two different disciplines. Bravo.

Other things we did to entertain ourselves included listening to the French translation during really boring speakers. We may have expired had that not been an option. There were several speakers who spoke only in French, so we did have to listen to actual translations from time to time. Those were amusing because the translators were obviously not top shelf. So, during one speech, when the translated would be searching for the right word he would just say "Geneva". I can't tell you how amusing it was to hear the word Geneva spruced about the most boring speech you've ever heard in your life.

All in all, the conference was quite entertaining. I would have much preferred that the format worked out differently and that the content was more political science than sociology and/or anthro(a)pology, but this was a first taste for what that world is like and I liked it. At the macro level, there was a lot of idealistic BS propagated - one speaker even claimed that "international law protects refugees from violence and death" - while completely ignoring Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, etc. But there was a reasonable expectation of such tripe from a predominantly European speaker list. On the whole, however, I was genuinely pleased that the majority of the speakers were not idealogues trumpeting party lines. Instead, most of them were career professionals who had devoted their lives to helping those less fortunate and I applaud their efforts. UNHCR and the ICRC certainly do a good job in their respective roles. For me, however, it's not my area of interest and it's too focused on the micro level. I'm a big picture guy. I want to talk about what causes genocide and how we can stop it, not what types of help we should offer to refugees and how we can integrate them into western societies.

Postscript: Real World thought that Lake Geneva was an ocean - which is particularly galling coming from someone who:

A) Has a college degree,
B) Majored in History with an emphasis on World War II,
C) Is in a master's program in INTERNATIONAL relations, and;
D) For three years lived in a small little land that you may have heard of called Germany that happens to be adjacent to Switzerland.

How it is possible that someone could:

A) Have all of those factors and not know that Geneva has a LAKE and not an ocean,
B) Not be able to look at the Lake and see that it is CLEARLY a lake,
C) Not know that there are only four official oceans in the world, and;
D) Not know that Switzerland is a LAND-LOCKED country

and still refer to the Lake as an ocean boggles the mind. But that's just another day in the life of the Real World.