by Tom Fletcher
So, the scaffolding put up around the twentieth century’s global order is fragile. We are still building the driverless car but seem to have achieved a driverless world. An age of austerity has combined with an age of migration and an age of massive technological change. This brings the mix of immigration, insecurity and inequality that fuels nationalism and extremism.
As a result, I believe we will see new battles in the twenty-first century. Not, like the twentieth century, between East and West, North and South, men and women, black and white, or Islam and Christianity.
Instead we will see four new dividing lines.
Firstly, between coexisters (like the caveman in my first chapter) and wall builders. The target of Islamist extremists is often the ‘greyzone’ – places where people interact across communities and races. This places them on the same side as Western extremists, on the wrong side of the twenty-first-century’s key argument: between those who want to live together and those who don’t. Their publicity machine thrives on Donald Trump, burkini bans, and any measure that makes Western claims of openness, tolerance and respect seem a sham. In the battle for modern Islam, we rely heavily on the moderate voices prevailing. Yet too often we undermine their message by not sticking to our deeply held values. There isn’t a twenty-first-century problem to which the answer is another brick in the wall. Post-US election, there is a bigger battle at stake for all of us: to ensure that it is harder for the next Trump to weaponise intolerance in the way he has.
Secondly, we will see a division between libertarians and control freaks. This will pit the prophets of complete freedom against those who argue we need secrets, in our personal lives and as governments. So we have Julian Assange and WikiLeaks at one end of the spectrum and the North Koreans at the other. Most of us will find our position, issue by issue. But there will be surprises too. Former Commander of Joint Special Operations Command Stan McChrystal is right that it is now more dangerous to share too little information than too much. Governments are beginning to recognise that without opening up they cannot establish the trust necessary to govern. Chapter 8 looks in more detail at this balance between security and liberty.
Thirdly, the line will be between those who want to make the problem bigger and those who want to make it smaller. This book argues that technology has created a significant shift in the power balance between global, regional, national, local and individual. All the talk in Britain at the moment is about our relationship as a nation with Europe. Yet these two entities – the superstate and the nation state – are the two that are going to lose power fastest in the twenty-first century. We’ll need better global systems; more powerful local systems; and we’ll want more individual control. That doesn’t leave the nation state or regional organisation with much. We will need to make the case to a more sceptical public that it is sometimes in the national interest to pool sovereignty.
Finally, we will see a growing chasm between ‘on demand’ winners and ‘on demand’ losers. Many of us are going to love the ‘on demand’ economy. We’ll get more of what we want when we need it. But it will take a lot of people to service that. Their time will be on demand so that ours can be our own. Make that gap between winners and losers too wide, and we create peril. Growing inequality is the biggest geopolitical risk today.5 If displaced people had a country, it would be the twenty-first largest in the world.6
We better mind that gap.
So how do we survive the twenty-first century as businesses, individuals and countries?
We can start by getting out of our echo chamber. I only realised the day after the US election that my Twitter timeline had no Trump supporters on it – maybe that’s a sign I’m pretty closed-minded too. One of the ironies of the final twenty-four hours of the campaign was seeing Hillary Clinton’s team singing along to ‘Livin’ On a Prayer’ – I fear Gina and Tommy voted Trump.
Maybe the silver lining of 2016 is that more good people will become activists. As the murder of the inspirational British MP Jo Cox reminded us, we have to defend the progress and freedoms we took for granted with greater urgency and passion.
So the most influential generation in history, empowered by access to information and networks previous generations could never have imagined, will need to summon up fresh will to protect what my generation took for granted. They will need to establish checks and balances on the new emperors, from tech giants to tyrants, just as we learnt to do on the old ones.
Second, we can thrive by investing in education. If America changes tack on climate change, the life expectancy of the next generation just got shorter. Instead we need to better equip them with curiosity, creativity and courage. And kindness. Let’s not forget kindness. For moral and pragmatic reasons, our greatest challenge now is making more people less poor. And an individual’s freedom of opportunity should not be defined by where they are born. Right now it is easier to destroy than to build. But we need to build a global education system that can reach the seventy-five million children not in school, and give everyone equal access to the best we can teach them. Someone needs to write the first global curriculum, with global citizenship at its heart – now there’s an idea …
Third, we can survive by shifting our mindset from maps and chaps to networks and coalitions. If our world view is shaped and defined by hierarchies, organograms and titles, we need to see the world afresh. I tried to apply these lessons in a review of the UK Foreign Office, released by the government in April 2016. Much media reaction focused on a suggestion from one envoy that diplomats should become more like the characters in 24 or Spooks. Hacks imagined an army of social media-savvy, digitally literate e-nvoys, new Internet pioneers putting the OMG into HMG.
But the more important message of the review was that in the Digital Age we need to move our organisations away from prioritising competences, hierarchy and inputs and towards those based on skills, networks and outputs. I hope the future Foreign Office will be less male and pale, more digital, more expert, and more flexible. The buccaneering diplomats on the walls of King Charles Street will soon be joined by portraits of pioneering modern diplomats: the first female and minority ambassadors; the local staff who keep embassies running when events force UK colleagues to flee; the consular staff who rescue Brits in the most difficult of circumstances.
I am now trying to apply similar lessons to innovation at the United Nations. How can we use solar drones for better peacekeeping and provision of education? How can we create digital citizenship to increase security and reduce identity fraud and international crime? How can we use social media to engage and build a new generation of global citizens? How do we build the online rights to match the offline rights we have codified? How do we overhaul the global system for humanitarian giving? How do we respond to the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence? We need to find new ways to make the huge amounts of great work done by the UN more meaningful and accessible to the public. That takes more than a hashtag and a civil society side event. And leaders need to get much better at executing global policy, not simply announcing it.
Fourth, a successful century depends on us winning the argument for openness. There will be a temptation to pull up the drawbridge and focus purely on domestic security or nationalist politics. Let’s be in no doubt: a retreat from the world is the path to irrelevance and drift. Our national interest now depends on our internationalism. Countries are strongest when outward-looking, pioneering, exploring, welcoming. So we must marshal our best national instincts and values, and not our worst. In the battle with more isolationist and intolerant opponents, we have to show that our societies have not themselves become intolerant or isolationist.
This is not just posturing. We need a world view based on actually viewing the world, because our ability to keep pace with the dangerous political and social implications of technological change depends on our brightest minds coming up with ingenious solutions to problems, from climate change to economic instability. We should be unashamedly b
acking freedom of the Internet, so that the smartest people in the world can create together the extraordinary ideas that we don’t yet know we need. We should be proud when our countries are magnetic, and smart enough to recognise the economic potential of migrants and refugees, from Einstein to Jobs. We were all migrants once, and the twenty-first century might make us migrants again. This will be a century of people on the move: improved communications, the Internet, climate change and conflict will create more migration than any previous era. So we need to learn how to absorb, assimilate, coexist.
However insecure we will feel at times in the coming period, the answer to modern security threats is in fact more liberty, equality, fraternity. Not less. Or as Benjamin Franklin put it at a time of similiar uncertainty: “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
The gadgets we marvel at today will not seem marvellous for long. The changes we wonder at won’t seem wonderful for long. The predictions we think are crazy won’t seem crazy for long. At moments in 2016, it appeared that technology had disrupted democracy. But used properly it still gives us the means to tackle inequality, improve cyber and economic security, outsmart the extremists, ensure that artificial intelligence helps not harms us, and make it easier for citizens to be part of government.
But that all depends on us – whether we are just connected to technology or can truly connect with each other through that technology. Because Facebook and Twitter didn’t create our desire to connect. Our desire to connect created Facebook and Twitter.
Progress zigzagged in 2016. So what can citizen diplomats7 do in response?
We can build networks in a time of institutional failure; consensus in a time of arguments; and bridges in a time of walls.
We can strive for expertise, patience, perspective and judgement in a time of fake news, sound bites and echo chambers.
We can aspire to be courageously calm, tolerant and honest in a time of outrage, intolerance and post-truth politics.
We can be internationalist in a time of nationalism, and open-minded in a time of closed minds.
Above all, we must remain curious in a time of too much certainty.
I’m now an ex-Excellency, a recovering ambassador. But I stand by my original conclusion – we need to forge a renewed spirit of global citizenship.
Diplomats will play our part. But naked diplomacy is too important just to leave to diplomats.
* Perhaps it is appropriate in a post-truth year that there is no strong evidence that either Twain or Shelley actually made these observations.
PREFACE
The Diplomat Who Arrived Too Late
Shen Weiqin was the diplomatic adviser to Emperor Qin Er Shi during China’s Qin dynasty. It was a pretty cushy job, with steady access to the many pleasures of the royal court, a fair amount of arduous but interesting travel, and long periods of relative peace in which to study, opine and schmooze.
Shen knew his master’s mind and his master’s foibles, and was well suited to the role we now call a ‘sherpa’, the key adviser who helps the leader prepare for diplomatic summits. In modern statecraft, the sherpa’s assistant is called the yak, a metaphor that would also have meant something to His Excellency Shen Weiqin. The modern yak carries the mountains of paper generated and required by any modern diplomatic negotiation. Shen’s carried him.
Shen must have anticipated a routine month’s work as he set out for the Congress of the Tribes in Xianyang in 208 BC. His emperor’s armies had soundly thrashed the Chu tribe, burying alive all those who surrendered. This is what we now call hard power, though the Geneva Convention discourages such treatment of defeated opponents.
The victory left the field open for a strong peace treaty that would give Qin increased taxes and land rights, and the opportunity to recruit any remaining Chu warriors to fight for him. This would have been straightforward and probably routine business for Shen, who by this time had negotiated three such deals with the unburied survivors of other defeated clans.
Making peace is easier when you have shown you can make war. As he carried out his restorative and silver-tongued victor’s diplomacy, Shen was an early example of the statecraft that President Theodore Roosevelt aspired to many centuries later: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.’ Only the choice of weapon was more deadly.
But Shen was to be rudely awakened from his diplomatic comfort zone. The envoys representing the Chu tribe had developed a new and innovative means of passing messages quickly, by positioning rested horses along the key trade routes. This was the third-century BC equivalent of a decent social media account. As a result, they had gathered intelligence of an uprising in the west and of disquiet within Emperor Qin’s ranks, caused by the despotism of his favourite and most intimate adviser, the flamboyant eunuch Zhao Gao (who deserves his own book). Shen’s diplomatic opponents were able to use this crucial information to hold out for a much better deal than they would otherwise have got.
Shen had been outmanoeuvred at his own game. In modern language, his diplomacy had been disrupted. The chastened and no doubt increasingly saddle-sore envoy returned with trepidation to his master to report the bad news.
As is probably already evident, Emperor Qin was no shrinking violet. The previous year he had tricked his elder brother, the rightful heir to the Qin dynasty, into committing suicide. Mercy had not got him his throne, and was not going to help him keep it.
In this case, Qin decided to punish poor execution with slow execution. Shen was tied to a wooden frame and ‘slow-sliced’, a particularly gruesome demise involving the methodical removal of 999 body parts in random order as drawn from a hat: death by a thousand cuts, give or take. The process, ‘lingchi’, literally means ‘ascending a mountain slowly’, a metaphor that resonated with his pre-summit diplomacy in a way that Shen was presumably unable to relish. His diplomatic failure was classified by the emperor as an act of treason, and so no opium was administered to ease the pain.
It is not recorded at what point in the three-day process Shen passed away. But his grisly exit provided evidence for Lu You, one of history’s first human rights activists, to argue in 1198 for the abolition of lingchi, which is the only reason we now know about the case. Again, probably no consolation to poor old Shen.
Shen discovered the hardest way that diplomacy is Darwinian: its practitioners need to evolve to survive.
In today’s diplomatic services, the consequences for poor performers are more time-consuming yet less draconian than they were for Qin. But given that the alternative to peacemaking is often war, our diplomatic failures and mistakes can still have the gravest fallout.
It matters that we get it right.
Historical tales of grisly deaths aside, formal diplomatic encounters with contemporary Asian governments are friendly but often fairly dry affairs. Perhaps it is the heat, the time difference, or the lengthy delays caused by translation. With our Chinese interlocutors it was often striking that the army of note-takers stopped writing when their leader spoke – not only out of deference, but because they already knew exactly what he was going to say. They would tell me that they found it odd that our prime ministers were so much less well disciplined.
So I was perplexed at one of these heavily choreographed exchanges to see several counterparts on the other side of the table stifling uncharacteristic giggles and passing notes. My diplomatic antennae were well attuned to spotting potential gaffes, especially those that would appeal to our mischievous travelling press lobby, ever ravenous for stories of incompetence – working with the UK media for the UK government is often like playing for a football team whose own fans have decided should be relegated.
Trying not to disturb my prime minister as he made a complex case through a flustered translator for the rebalancing of the global economy, I scoured the room for evidence of a problem, without success. Eventually I called over one of the embassy experts, who after some deliberation pointed out that
it was my name plate in front of me (the wording of which was of course visible to everyone except myself) that had caused such confusion and hilarity. Someone had translated my job title – Private Secretary to the Prime Minister for Foreign Affairs – as ‘Intimate Typist for the Prime Minister’s Affairs Overseas’.
There are many, too many, bureaucratic positions around the average modern leader, but few leaders have an official to type out their love letters.
I spent four years in 10 Downing Street in the role of Private Secretary for Foreign Affairs, under three very different prime ministers: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. I also helped to advise Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in his first months in the role, giving me experience of the unholy trinity of major UK political parties.
Though the job involved little intimate typing, it did include briefing the prime minister, joining his official meetings, and circulating an account for ministries and embassies to digest and act on. The unofficial motto of the Private Secretary should be that ‘my job will be done when historians have read what I think he thinks he ought to have said’.
In reality, writing these records was only cover for the real job: a combination of policy adviser, journalist, negotiator, bag carrier and relationship manager. Occasionally I was also a therapist, administering reassurance and encouragement at tougher moments, or urging humility at better ones. Sometimes I was a translator, who could follow a prime minister and a French president to places that the female interpreter could not reach (no doubt happily for her). I was a recruitment consultant, who suddenly found senior ambassadors awaiting news of their next position to be very friendly. And even a bodyguard, as when Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe emerged from a dark corner of a United Nations summit to seek a handshake with Gordon Brown. I wrote speeches, dreamt up policy initiatives, and procured ProPlus for David Cameron from President Obama during a long summit session when two European Commission leaders had droned on for even longer than usual. I was once job-shadowed by a prince.
