by Tom Fletcher
The modern summit is not unrecognisable from those of previous centuries. Most disappoint participants and observers. As Oxfam said of the 2005 Gleneagles G8 summit (actually one of the best twenty-first-century summits for moving the argument on poverty and debt forgiveness), ‘If that was a summit, I’d hate to see a valley.’ At a moment when every profession is facing massive transformation, diplomats still find themselves carrying far too much of this cumbersome diplomatic baggage. They retain many of the customs and practices that were first constructed around the diplomatic encounters of the Renaissance and would have seemed very familiar to Talleyrand and Co.
When he wasn’t stitching up the Congress of Vienna or charging American diplomats for meetings with him, Talleyrand opined that ‘only a fool mocks etiquette, it simplifies life’.17
Most of history’s diplomats would have agreed, which was why they were such sticklers for protocol. Even in 1949, the vice marshal of the British Diplomatic Corps, advising new diplomats on coping with a ‘world full of humbugs’, instructed that if faced with two choices, they ‘should always choose the one that is more pompous and old-fashioned’.18 He might have been right then, though somehow I doubt it. He is certainly wrong now.
The international conference or summit has become an exercise in diplomatic and political vanity. Anyone hoping for the failure of the European Union project would be heartened to watch an average European Council. Leaders fix the timing, for example of a G20 or G8, to ensure they get a boost in advance of domestic elections. Yet in reality – as the experiences of Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown and many others show – that poll jump rarely materialises.
Ease of contact combined with increased media interest brought a new challenge for diplomats: the official gift.
Diplomatic gifts no longer have the importance of early diplomatic encounters. Except perhaps for the media, desperate for a bit of colour. As advisers to leaders, we would spend hours debating presents, especially for US presidents. The British media was beside itself with rage when President Obama removed Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office and gave Gordon Brown a box set of the best American TV series – actually quite a good selection. We used to give Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany DVDs of her favourite British TV series, Midsomer Murders. She once asked me for tickets to the Last Night of the Proms, a personal favourite of hers.
The best gifts now have either a personal touch, or – more often – can be used to project innovation and creativity. British prime ministers don’t get to keep the eclectic presents they receive: all those worth more than £140 have to be given away or auctioned, a diplomatic minefield in itself. The 2013 White House gifts register includes a full-size zebra skin from President Kikwete of Tanzania. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell counsels that staffers should always check any gift of a portrait before it is unveiled – he received one from a Balkan leader that made him look like Count Dracula.
Gifts have always been an essential element of statecraft. But one of the more galling sights in modern diplomacy is the exchange of presents among diplomats at the start of any EU presidency. Huge amounts are spent on ties, pens and folders for fellow public servants, all at the public expense of course. The ties are invariably ghastly, polyester, and unwearable. They only intrude on the public consciousness if there is a gaffe. For one UK presidency, schoolchildren were asked to contribute images based on their perceptions of the member states. The Italians were understandably miffed that the history, antiquity and glories of Rome were passed over in favour of a picture of a pepperoni pizza.
The schedule of most modern conferences is heavily pre-cooked. Many diplomats see it as their role to minimise the actual debate among leaders as far as possible, smoothing down any disagreements and producing a lowest common denominator fudge of a public communiqué. The blander the better. What was the last summit conclusions text that anyone outside the drafting team can remember?
Normally, those preparing a summit will throw in a couple of set-piece themes or announcements on the issue of the day – climate change, say, or transparency. These are meant to define the event, and catch the attention of the media and public. Diplomats and leaders will make grandiose claims about the ‘once in a generation’ or ‘historic’ nature of what they have agreed. They want their career-defining Congress of Vienna moment.
Yet these announcements are often ignored by the media, and the population at large. They focus instead on the leader missing from the family photo – it was usually the Canadian former prime minister Stephen Harper for the conferences I helped organise. Or the awkward attempt to dress down at the informal supper – G8 leaders can compete to see who can make chinos and a blue shirt look most abnormal. Or the ridiculous traditional hats that the host makes his grimacing colleagues wear on arrival, normally to placate an indigenous rights lobby, while the visiting leader’s entourage try frantically to prevent the media getting a photo. Former US vice president Al Gore, who must have sat through more dreary summits than most, skewers brilliantly the tedious habit of dressing up in the clothes of the host nation. This ‘recalls the parable of the child who noticed that the emperor has no clothes. Except in this case, the clothes have no emperor.’19
The most important work at any summit is done away from the cameras, in what diplomats call ‘the margins’. There you find a frantic form of diplomatic speed-dating. It can take place in a range of formats that are not as steamy as they sound: plenaries, bilaterals, brush-bys, pull-asides, one-to-ones. Some are carefully choreographed. At one UN General Assembly, I organised an ambush, literally, of the South African president Thabo Mbeki, who wanted to avoid a difficult meeting with the British prime minister over Zimbabwe. We worked out his route based on where South African security were stationed, and emerged from behind a curtain at the crucial moment.
In the summit itself, leaders barely tolerate each other’s lengthy and tedious interventions, often rolling their eyes, working on their papers or playing Angry Birds while colleagues read from prepared scripts. The UN General Assembly, the diplomatic equivalent of the World Cup, is the ultimate form of this hot-air summit diplomacy. As with the football, there is usually some unruly behaviour, although with Hugo Chávez, Gaddafi and Ahmadinejad no longer on the pitch, this is now less likely, sadly. There is also a certain amount of tedium: the hall’s acoustics and temperature, plus a tendency to reduce most crucial issues to platitudes, mean that some speeches can be the equivalent of a grinding nil–nil draw. Before such exchanges, diplomatic advisers will haggle over the length and size of the meeting as well as the substance of any press statement. Even translation can be a contested area, with some delegations adept at using up meeting time to avoid reaching the issues they find awkward.
The type of press conference is also heavily contested. The rough ranking is in descending order of importance and difficulty. A full press conference features podiums, flags, prepared statements and media questions, most agreed in advance. A ‘pool spray’ is more informal, with cameras at the start of the meeting and footage of the leaders discussing the weather. A ‘grip and grin’ is normally a handshake, a rictus smile or two, but no words. Press conferences are the hardest to get right. They present more practical challenges, such as finding a discreet hidden step for shorter leaders. And if the UK media are involved, you have to warn foreign leaders to expect much more personal and provocative questions than they get at home. I will never forget the look on President Sarkozy’s face when I told him the questions on his private life that he was likely to get after a particularly grand UK–France summit at the height of the financial crisis. I tried to suggest that this was a by-product of ‘freedom of the press’. His reply was short, Gallic, descriptive and unprintable.
All this prancing and declaratory diplomacy often gets in the way of the practical, direct and honest diplomacy that is needed to settle the big global questions. As Chris Patten, who must have had to sit through his fair share of summit waffle, points out, ‘I am unconvinced th
at the right place to sort out all of our international problems is at some great international jamboree.’20
Already, the summit to prevent war seems to have faded into history. Take for example the challenges now facing the Middle East, from Iran to Syria. Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt might have camped on Cyprus for a week until they had found some sort of accommodation. Yet the last proper great-power summit was Yalta, 1945. It was fear of the atomic bomb that later prevented the Third World War rather than traditional international diplomacy. Ironically, leaders can now talk more easily to each other, but they lack opportunities for real discussion.
Increasingly, the public are confused and disengaged by summit diplomacy. Despite all the efforts to engage people outside the room, through campaigns in the media and by NGOs who try to drag the agenda towards issues of poverty or climate change, the actual discussion and decisions remain aloof and distant. Few people care to keep track of whether a meeting is G7, G8 (which actually has more than eight members at the table, as the European Union has snuck in two leaders) or G20. For a while during the 2008–9 financial crisis, world leaders debated establishing a G14. As security measures move protesters and campaigners further from the leaders themselves, much of the world feels excluded from these exchanges.
Diplomacy does need its pinch points, when a meeting or conference forces compromise, debate and agreement. But unless we find a way to debate the world’s problems in a more transparent, meaningful and representative way, we will find that other forums make the average G8 or EU summit look like the Congress of Vienna.
So while the diplomats of the late twentieth century stumbled from conference centre to airport lounge, clutching hard-fought communiqués that no one would read or remember, wider leaps in communication technology were already – once again – about to challenge and transform their trade.
5
From E-mail to E-nvoys
Why do diplomats feel the need to let it all hang out?
Oliver Miles, former UK ambassador, Guardian, 12 July 2010
The first email between heads of government was sent on 4 February 1994, from the Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt to the US president Bill Clinton. Bildt congratulated Clinton on the lifting of the Vietnam embargo, and added that ‘Sweden is one of the leading countries in technology, and it is only appropriate that we should be among the first to use the Internet for political contacts and communications around the globe.’
Clinton replied the following day, in hindsight perhaps with less panache than the moment required: ‘I appreciate your enthusiasm for the potential of emerging technologies. This demonstration of electronic communication is an important step toward building the global information highway.’
The language was as clunky as the software, but e-diplomacy was under way.
Traditionally, the main means of communication between diplomats and capitals has been the telegram. In the British system these are always addressed to the foreign minister, and always in the name of the ambassador, although usually written by a political officer. Likewise, instructions from the Foreign Office to embassies always go out above the name of the Foreign Secretary, though it is exceedingly rare that he will actually see them, let alone write them, in advance.
In Paris in 2007 I recall seeing the trolleys of paper telegrams being rolled around the French foreign ministry on the Quai d’Orsay. They would arrive first with the director, and slowly work their way down the corridor. The desk officer, who more than anyone needed to see what was happening in the country he was working on, would normally receive his battered, coffee-stained, cigarette-singed version late at night, long after it had been overtaken by events.
To be fair, this is one area that has evolved rapidly in the last ten years, at least in the UK Foreign Office. We switched to electronic telegrams in the 1990s, and now send e-grams, or diplomatic telegrams – diptels for short. These have the same content, but arrive instantly on the screens of those who need to see them. An average diptel will have a short three- or four-line summary, and seven or eights paragraphs of analysis or advice. Given that whatever is being reported will have been on Sky News in the minister’s office for several hours before the report arrives, the emphasis is increasingly on explaining and analysing the news rather than reporting it. As media cycles accelerate and concentration spans shorten, we cannot be far from a system of ‘diptweets’, quick and dirty analysis on breaking news, aimed to compete with what readers at the headquarters are getting from Twitter or news outlets.
Traditionally, diplomats have always tried to minimise and manage the amount of direct contact between leaders. We encased their exchanges in protocol, prepared lines and statements. I worked for one minister, Chris Mullin, who admirably made a point of not being connected by phone or pager, despite the strenuous efforts of his party’s whips and managers. As I used to tell him, this is a civil servant’s fantasy. But his technological detachment did not seem to stop the world from turning.
New ways of communicating are now breaking down the restrictions that officials put up. Leaders text, email and tweet each other direct. During negotiations, the text messages between them (and between their advisers) are often more important than the conversation at the table. It will become less necessary for them to meet as often, yet they will get to know each other better.
Neither Bildt nor Clinton could have anticipated the speed at which the ‘global information highway’ was being built around them. In terms of diplomacy, it is Twitter and Facebook that have built it.
@jack (aka Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder) sent the first tweet at teatime on 21 March 2006. Within three years, a billion tweets had been sent. Eleven accounts are started every second, and 500m are sent every day. Facebook has 1.55 billion users, and this figure has grown by a third a year. Most of these users are on mobile devices.
Diplomats are among them. Bildt was the first minister to make it compulsory for ambassadors to have social media accounts. Over 80% of world leaders now have a Twitter handle.1 Barack Obama was the first leader to join Twitter, in March 2007, and is the most followed (though he still comes in well behind Lady Gaga). Pope Francis has over 20 million followers on his nine different @Pontifex accounts. Maybe those behind his account are aiming at quality not quantity – he gets retweeted much more than Obama: 11,116 times per tweet, as opposed to Obama’s 2,309.
More leaders are wresting control of their own social media accounts from their staff. They have recognised that if you’re not tweeting yourself, you’re not really on Twitter. In early 2014, John Kerry tweeted ‘It only took a year but @StateDept finally let me have my own @Twitter account’, and used the hashtag #JKTweetsAgain. Increasingly, such accounts – especially those of US National Security Adviser Susan Rice and US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power – are replacing carefully scripted formal statements. ‘It won’t be a substitute for a meeting or a substitute for a phone call,’ explains Douglas Frantz, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs. ‘American foreign policy is probably too nuanced to explain in 140 characters. It will be used to deliver quick messages and amplify existing messages.’2
Diplomats need to pick arguments. Twitter and other social media tools allow them to do that in new ways. One of the pioneering digital diplomats, former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, had online fights with the Russian ministry of foreign affairs over freedom of assembly and speech. He saw it as a way to avoid having his views censored or filtered through traditional Russian media. UN Security Council arguments between permanent representatives are now regularly played out in real-time on Twitter. The brilliant French ambassador to the US, Gérard Araud, regularly takes on US presidential candidates and others in public. This would all have appeared unseemly just a few years ago. But in some ways it is simply a return to the lively political debate of the Roman forum.
The US are the market leaders in this ‘pivot to the people’.3 President Obama was a community organiser long before being elected, and saw the
power of connecting digital communities to policy. States need to build networks and alliances with non-state actors. As a result of the State Department’s ‘21st Century Statecraft’ initiative, US diplomats reach more than the number of subscribers to the top ten US newspapers put together.
Diplomats are putting these tools to increasingly creative use. In Iran, both the US and UK had virtual embassies – allowing them online engagement without the physical risks of locating diplomats. I remember how dangerous it felt to be organising a joint town hall meeting between the UK and Chinese premiers in 2009, the first of its kind in China. There are now virtual town halls everywhere online.
Some of the most innovative digital diplomats are from smaller countries. Perhaps they find it easier to embrace a more fleet-footed, start-up approach. Estonia leads the diplomatic market on use of blockchain technology, and online citizenship. Since its independence in 2008, Kosovo has been recognised by only half the world. So its deputy foreign minister, Petrit Selimi, persuaded Facebook to allow users to place their location in Kosovo, and not in neighbouring Serbia. The success of this effort means that Kosovo’s existence is more widely recognised online than offline.4 It is possible to imagine a similar process with other entities where some want to become sovereign states – Palestine, Catalonia, Scotland, Kurdistan.
Digital media are also increasingly important resources for those responding to humanitarian crises. The idea of consulting refugees on refugee issues sounds obvious, but only now are we able to try. Humanitarian agencies are aiming to get social media channels and devices to those hit by disasters, and use Google Earth to locate survivors. In Lebanon, we used smart cards to deliver cash to the neediest refugees, and sophisticated social media mapping tools to locate them.
