by Tom Fletcher
Secondly, the apparently friendly states, such as great power allies, who were nevertheless competing to get a bigger slice of the cake. For the UK, Europe has fallen into this category since the Second World War. We have vastly similar values and objectives, yet still contest resources and influence, and argue over the decisions where we need to pool sovereignty. Je t’aime, moi non plus.
Third, the local rivals for authority and influence – in the case of many ministries of foreign affairs, this was usually the Treasury or the prime minister’s office.
No country faces permanent enemies or can count on permanent allies. The first, most hostile, group are now more likely to be transnational, non-traditional actors – terrorists, renegade states or information anarchists. This could be the throat cutters and concert bombers of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the despots in North Korea, Syria and Zimbabwe, or Julian Assange.
The apparently friendly second group are now more likely to be those competing for business or security influence, including the media, NGOs and multinationals. They will be the disruptors – think tanks, big data analysts, social media gurus – who are replacing diplomats in their ability to analyse or shape foreign policy. A proliferation of organisations now compete with diplomats by selling geopolitical analysis. The best are the Brookings Institution, Chatham House and Carnegie.4 Or the service providers who are moving ahead so fast with the way they respond to customer needs that they make government efforts – passports, visas, commercial introductions – look hopeless. I’d also include the new technology companies, with whom governments will increasingly contest key ground.
The local contenders are probably still the Treasury.
Diplomats need to understand those groups of rivals, the tools available to them, and why and how they are deploying them. They need to use social media more effectively than terrorists. They need to understand JPMorgan Chase or Google’s diplomatic machinery in the way that they understand China’s. They should be competing with the best technology they can lay their hands on. They should be on a digital war footing.
I often ask people who they think will have the greatest influence on the twenty-first century – Google or Britain? Increasingly, most say Google. I want to show in this book how they can be proved wrong. Google has been a technological superpower for a decade. Britain has been one for at least 250 years.
There will be many times when digital media feel to professional diplomats an obstacle to traditional diplomacy. We saw over the August 2013 debate on whether to strike Assad for using chemical weapons the way that digital debate makes it harder to play diplomatic poker, with the UK and subsequently US positions shifted as a result of online and offline disagreement. Governments are already much more restrained than a century ago, particularly when it comes to going to war. That is a good thing, but it makes it harder to make the threats necessary to stop our opponents taking territory or killing civilians. Our bluff is too easily called.
New digital media will also create different and sometimes uncomfortable oversight of what diplomats do, including the difficult compromises made in the heat of a negotiation. That’s good. But they will further empower rival sources of influence and power. Digital media will make it harder to gain the consent of those whom diplomats claim to represent, and easier to lose it.
To gain the trust needed to avoid extinction, diplomats will need humility as to the limits of their authority, and a readiness to be more accountable to and more representative of the populations for whom they work.
Technology and society are being transformed, with or without diplomats. This presents threats as well as opportunities. But so did the printing press, the telephone, air travel. Now that anyone can be a diplomat, we have to show that you can’t live without diplomats. When I became an ambassador at the age of thirty-six, some people asked me if I was too young to do the job. Looking at the way the region (and the world) was changing, I sometimes wonder if I was too old.
Yet we still need experts who can really understand the countries with which we are dealing, people who can help us to respond to global changes, to see where the next opportunities are, and from where the next challenges will come. Diplomats, if they are doing their jobs well, are an essential part of that. Technology should enhance rather than diminish that role.
The third argument against traditional diplomacy is that diplomats are not proving to be very good at it.
In this narrative, diplomats lack the skills and resources to put in the hard hours and tough negotiations that are needed to do real diplomacy. America’s inwardness, increased popular and media oversight, and Western public revulsion at military engagement make it harder still.
Diplomacy has always struggled to keep up with events. It has woefully failed to reform the international system it inherited after the Second World War. There has been a lack of collective international graft and realism in fixing some of today’s major conflicts, not least Syria and Israel/Palestine, both abject failures of the UN Security Council.
But for every diplomatic failure – the 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit, the Middle East Peace Process – there are successes such as the Iran nuclear deal or the Dayton peace accords. It is in the nature of diplomacy, an effort to deal with an unpredictable and complex world, that diplomats won’t always get it right. It is not a reason not to keep trying.
There is a pivotal moment in David Puttnam’s brilliant 1981 film Chariots of Fire when sprinter Harold Abrahams is reprimanded, in a typically understated but caustic upper-class English way, by the Master of Trinity College. His crime? Having employed a professional coach to prepare for the 1924 Olympics. The fiercely ambitious Abrahams is having none of this amateurishness. ‘I believe in the pursuit of excellence. And I will carry the future with me.’ He storms out, storms the race, and wins Olympic gold.
Political life, including diplomacy, faces a similar moment. There is a thirst for authenticity and authentic leaders. People feel disconnected from politics, authority, governments and decision-making. We are in an era of distrust, disconnection and detachment. Diplomacy finds itself ill-equipped for this new context. And it faces greater competition than ever before. Like many industries based on institutional authority, diplomacy insufficiently reflects the realities of a world in which the balance of power between citizens, business and government is shifting from hierarchies to networks. It too often prioritises pumping out a message over changing society.5 Much of its procedural method – summits and communiqués – was designed in 1815 for an age of monarchies and great states.
There is little that you cannot learn about government from the British sitcoms Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. In one episode, senior civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby is asked by his prime minister how they should react to a bellicose speech by a foreign leader. ‘In practical terms we have the usual six options,’ replies Sir Humphrey. ‘One: do nothing. Two: issue a statement deploring the scene. Three: launch an official protest. Four: cut off aid. Five: break off diplomatic relations. And six: declare war.’ So what to do? ‘Well if we do nothing we implicitly agree with the speech. Two, if we issue a statement we just look foolish. Three, if we lodge a protest it will be ignored. Four, we can’t cut off aid because we don’t give them any. Five, if we break off diplomatic relations we can’t negotiate the oil contracts. And six, if we declare war it might just look as if we’re overreacting.’ In one exchange, Sir Humphrey punctures the utter futility of much modern diplomatic communication, and captures why so many people are simply zoning out of political discourse.
Harold Abrahams would have recognised that while you can respect the competition, you must use it to improve. With power shifting unpredictably, so must the diplomats of the Digital Age. Diplomatic service – the clue is in the name; like the rest of the political class, diplomats have to find news ways to connect with the public they serve. Of course, international relations are much more than simply public relations, but diplomacy is not yet as social,
progressive or democratic as it needs to become. It is not yet connected to the new sources of power. Like Harold Abrahams, diplomats no longer have the luxury of being amateurs.
Despite what for some looks like an increasing distance between foreign ministries and the public they represent, I think that there remains an energising, purposeful and revitalising argument in favour of diplomacy.
Diplomats were instruments of the prince when the Florentine diplomat and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli was writing of Renaissance city-state diplomacy, and then servants of the state when Talleyrand and his peers were establishing European interests without the irritating interference of emperors. But Harold Nicolson, writing in 1961, sought a higher cause for his profession: ‘there does exist such a thing as international morality. Its boundaries are not visibly defined nor its frontiers demarcated; yet we all know where it is.’
We need to find it again.
Without doubt, many diplomats throughout history have been driven by something more than realpolitik. They have rarely accepted that their only role is to advance the naked interests of their states. They see themselves as representing the idea of peace – the words for messenger in both Greek (angelos) and Hebrew (mal’ach) have sacred connotations. Bernard du Rosier, a Renaissance Archbishop of Toulouse and commentator on diplomacy, declared that the ‘business of the ambassador was peace’ and that he was ‘sacred because he acted in the general welfare’.6 Diplomacy needs to reconnect to this more idealistic sense of collective diplomatic purpose: the promotion of global co-existence.
The sense of a moral dimension to foreign policy was what lay behind former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook’s much derided effort towards an ‘ethical foreign policy’. The problem of his government’s approach was not the aspiration but the execution. The public do not believe that the ethics survived the sands of Iraq.
Diplomats help states to surrender the bits of their authority that need to be surrendered if we are to transition to a system that has more chance of survival. That is never going to be popular, but it is as important a task as ever. Diplomats lubricate the interaction of power, ideas and change to make it as peaceful as possible.
Diplomats have always tried to shape world developments for the better, and we can do so again. We can now connect, understand, engage and influence in ways our predecessors never could. But we also need to understand the rival and disruptive forces that are competing with the efforts to coexist.
Diplomacy needs to reconnect with its sense of optimism, opportunity and idealism. We need diplomats more than ever because the implications of diplomatic failure are more catastrophic than ever. The need is not for something to replace diplomacy, but for better diplomacy.
Many would say that the best era in which to have been a diplomat was the period around 1815, when elite diplomats strutted the halls of Vienna, reshaping Europe. I’d say it is 2016. But two centuries on, someone needs to write the new version of the Vienna Convention, to give fresh shape and purpose to this old business, and to make it fit for a new world.
To do so, we first need to understand what it was that made diplomacy so distinctive and important over the years. What can we learn from the cast of sometimes colourful and often colourless characters who strutted and pranced, connived and blustered on the diplomatic stage? How were their roles changed by previous waves of innovation – language, the printing press, or the plane?
We need to go back to where it all began.
* The origin of the phrase is a 1928 agreement on oil drilling rights as the Ottoman empire collapsed. The French have their own version, the yellow line.
PART ONE
Glad-handing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Short History of Diplomacy
1
Early Diplomacy: From Cavemen to Consuls
While other sciences have advanced, that of government is at a standstill – little better practised now than three or four thousand years ago.
John Adams, 1813
We don’t know the name of the first diplomat, but let’s call him Ug.
At some point, Ug – perhaps slower or smaller than his peers (diplomats often are) – persuaded a fellow Neanderthal to stop clubbing him over the head for long enough to work together against a common rival. A survival instinct in Ug prioritised co-operation over conflict. He was, probably literally, a naked diplomat.
And so diplomacy is almost as old as humanity.
Centuries later, one of Ug’s many descendants – for Ug had found that diplomacy increased the survival prospects of his otherwise feeble genes – found the beginnings of language. He and his fellow palaeohumans began to communicate sufficiently to begin to create basic societies. The most primitive of these communities quickly developed systems to guarantee freedom of movement for messengers to avoid them being bludgeoned or eaten.1 Around 4000 BC they developed basic forms of writing to help divide resources, especially grain and beer. Diplomacy was under way, and alcohol was already playing its part.
The most important difference between humans and the rest of the animal world is that we can cooperate flexibly in large groups.2 And not just to feed or protect ourselves. That’s why, for better or worse, we run the globe. Outside of Disney films, the animal kingdom doesn’t do big conferences. There is no Security Council for owls and dolphins. There is no Lion King. We, not the fish, design the treaties on fishing quotas. We have dramatically reduced the threat from our fellow species (bar the mosquito, though thanks to Bill Gates we are getting there too).
Part of our vital biological make-up as humans is that we can cooperate with people we don’t know, or who share little of our DNA. And part of our survival instinct is that there are people able to make the case, not necessarily always true, that cooperation is better for us than killing each other. That means that there is a biological case for diplomacy. All Ug was saying, long before and (slightly) less melodically than Lennon, was give peace a chance. Diplomatic uniforms, titles, protocol and platitudes aside, the basic concept since Ug’s first grunts and gestures has not changed as much as we might think.
Technological innovation always precedes political change and diplomacy. The sickle and plough allowed settled living, and the domestication of animals. Social structure and a basic rule of law followed, creating more space and time for innovation. The invention of the wheel and of writing, several thousand years BC, made diplomacy both more necessary and more possible. Both took place, ironically, in the graveyard of much modern diplomacy, Iraq. Some of the earliest traces of more formal diplomacy are from the bureaucratic records of imperial China, where poor Shen Weiqin plied his trade before he was so slowly sliced up.
In the third century BC, Chanakya, the key adviser to the founder of the Indian Maurya dynasty, wrote in Sanskrit the oldest detailed guide to diplomacy: Arthashastra, or The Science of Politics.3 His advice on diplomacy and espionage is pretty robust: violence, torture and spying dominate the text. The best way to deal with neighbouring countries is to appease, bribe, divide, punish, deceive, ignore or bluff, a set of approaches that have dominated Anglo-French relations for most of history. But Chanakya also sees part of the diplomat’s role as preservation of wildlife and the rule of law, an idea retained in much diplomatic work today. In sage advice that could equally apply to modern spies dodging honeytraps, he advises envoys to ‘always sleep alone’, and to avoid strong liquor and hunting.
Diplomacy also started to take root elsewhere. In Egypt, following the battle of Kadesh in 1274 BC, Pharaoh Rameses II and ruler of the Hittite empire Hattusili III created the first known international peace treaties, on stone tablets.4 Some of the covenants in these early treaties bear a strong similarity to the Ten Commandments that Moses was given, probably between the fourteenth and twelfth centuries BC – a fairly one-sided diplomatic treaty between God and Man. The messenger was not always welcome. The Bible records envoys of King David having their heads shaved and buttocks exposed by an unimpressed monarch – a punishment self-impo
sed by many modern football fans when travelling overseas.
Rival Chinese states in the first millennium BC started to draft more detailed treaties to enforce conquest and avoid unnecessary conflict. Others in Asia, such as the Japanese and Koreans, drew from this example, including by establishing temporary embassies. Records remain of Chinese Song dynasty ambassadors who were able to outfox opponents through guile and cunning rather than force. Theories of human interaction, such as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, demonstrate how leaders spent an increased amount of time considering how to subdue their enemies without the cost in blood and treasure of fighting them. As the Chinese empire expanded by sea from the second to thirteenth centuries AD, they sent resident envoys as far afield as India, Persia, Egypt and Africa, often despatching two – as they did to Japan in 653 – in case one never arrived, as was all too often the case. It must have been interesting when both did.
By the time the Chinese invented gunpowder in 900, they had already used diplomacy to create an empire so large that they did not have to use the gunpowder as an instrument of warfare and statecraft. If they had done so, as the Europeans started to do to such devastating effect in the fourteenth century, all our treaties and diplomatic language might now be in Chinese.
In Europe, meanwhile, the first Greek city states also found a need for diplomats to negotiate with rivals and allies. The basic rules and conduct of diplomacy they adopted in the Congress of Sparta in 432 BC were a template for much of the diplomacy of the next twenty-two centuries until the aftermath of Waterloo. The Spartans, in a sign of extreme confidence, even invited the adversaries – the Athenians – that they were considering attacking.
The Greeks tended to send diplomats on short missions rather than making them resident in other countries. Heralds would venture out to pass messages and to report back, if they had not been executed, on the quality of the reception they received. The forefather of the modern consul, often a resident of the city who happens to have a particular link to another, can be found in the Greek proxenos, who acted as informal sources of information and message carriers.
