Storm Signals : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1962-1971 (9781551996806)

by Ritchie, Charles

  John and Anne Maher are staying with us. We are a very companionable quartet. Anne seems to me as young in spirit as when I first knew her forty years ago, and I love her dearly.

  27 September 1971.

  We have left the house and are staying for a brief interlude at the Dorchester. Back last night on the night train from Scotland from staying with the Adeanes at Balmoral. Everything we do is now a last time – most certainly the last time I dine with the Queen at Balmoral.

  25 October 1971. Ottawa.

  The menacing wail of the vacuum cleaner wielded in the inept hands of our new cleaning woman comes nearer and nearer up the passage to my closed bedroom door, seeking what it can devour. The rain has peed itself out and on the still-wet streets the last leaves are falling. It is an autumn morning, still mild before the snow flies.

  I am baffled by all this talk of the cultural opportunities of Ottawa, the Renaissance life one can lead at the Centre for the Performing Arts. I would rather walk the quiet back streets, beyond the cluster of high-rise apartments, down to the poorer quarters where a sort of singsong, ding-dong life crawls along. The old sit on porches and stare. A little girl kicks up leaves in the gutter and chases a grey cat. China ornaments of no cultural significance encumber small windows choked with potted plants. Swarthy, big-bellied Italians park their dirty, dented old cars up wide alleys. Chinese children are playing football on an asphalt yard. On corner lots stand up the grey rock churches of the French-Canadian faith, flanked by priests’ houses and seminaries, cheerless formal repositories, but preferred by me to the hulking red sandstone of the United Church, embodiment of gloomy, dowdy dullness.

  At the cocktail party yesterday someone asked me point-blank across a roomful of people, “To what do you attribute your success as a diplomat?” I was somewhat taken aback by the question and was incapable, or unwilling, to make an answer, like ladies asked to account for the flavour of their curry soup.… “Oh, one just adds a snatch of pepper, a dash of salt and a few condiments.”

  All the same, the question has set me thinking, not so much of success or failure in the diplomatic career as of the profession of diplomacy, and specifically of the Canadian Foreign Service in which I have spent nearly forty years of my life and to which I am now saying goodbye.

  Yet it was to be some time before I set down on paper the following reflections on diplomacy and diplomats – particularly the Canadian variety.

  1 First published in 1938.

  2 Edward Heath – then Leader of the Opposition, subsequently Conservative Prime Minister.

  3 Canadian journalist.

  4 Mr. Pooter is a character in Diary of a Nobody, by George Grossmith.

  5 J. E. G. Hardy – Deputy High Commissioner.

  6 Ham House, Richmond, Surrey – originally the home of Lord Lauderdale, Scottish politician in the reign of Charles II.

  7 Peter Elliston, an old friend from boyhood in Halifax.

  8 Former Deputy High Commissioner, Canada House.

  9 Christian, Lady Hesketh.

  10 Elizabeth Bowen had bought a house in Hythe, Kent.

  11 The Earl and Countess of Bessborough. Stansted is their country house in Sussex.

  12 Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs.

  13 Later published under the title An Appetite for Life.

  14 Lord Thomson of Fleet; Canadian newspaper owner.

  15 Sir Burke Trend, Secretary of the Cabinet.

  16 Rt. Hon. Harold Macmillan, British Prime Minister 1957–1963.

  17 Bob Rae later became leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party, and premier 1990–1995.

  18 Published in 1935.

  19 William Bay Coster, an Oxford friend.

  20 On October 5, Jasper Cross, the British Trade Commissioner in Montreal, was kidnapped by the terrorist Front de Libération du Québec. This was followed by the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Pierre Laporte, Deputy Premier of Quebec.

  21 Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs.

  22 Elizabeth Bowen’s family home in County Cork.

  23 Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, now Hon. Lady Lindsay of Dowhill.

  DIPLOMATIC ATTITUDES

  Diplomacy is a matter of communication. The first diplomats were no doubt the messengers sent from one cave to another to establish friendship or to issue defiance. Like ambassadors today, if the messages they bore were not agreeable to the recipients, they were apt to be unpopular (no doubt on the McLuhan principle that the medium is the message). Sometimes they were decapitated and their heads returned to the senders. Now they are declared persona non grata and are recalled by their own governments in a huff or as a prelude to hostilities. Yet sooner or later, after the war is over, the business of diplomacy is resumed and diplomatic channels are reopened. The process will continue indefinitely unless humanity succeeds in blowing itself off the earth’s surface.

  It is argued that the traditional methods of diplomacy and the system of representation abroad are out of date. Also, that the diplomats themselves are, in training and outlook, out of touch with the realities of today’s world.

  It is certainly true that the role of the diplomat has changed and is changing, and that diplomacy is being conducted in new spheres and by new methods. It would indeed be very extraordinary if, when every social and political institution is changing so rapidly, the diplomatic career remained as a sort of fossil of the past; if it did so, what young man of ability and ambition would wish to enter such a profession?

  Difficult, sometimes painful, problems of adjustment, together with new challenges, face the diplomat of today. His position is a vulnerable one. He is a generalist surrounded by experts. In a period when quantifiable coefficients are the instruments for assessing job performance, how does one measure such qualities as skill in negotiation, coolness in crisis, and experience in international affairs? And how does the diplomat fare in the company of specialists in a technological age? International negotiations cover so many fields undreamed of in the past, whether it be the environment, tariffs, energy, the law of the sea, the protection of human rights, monetary policy, or sport, that one can hardly think of an area of human activity which is not on the agenda of an international gathering.

  Linked with this proliferation of new areas of negotiation has been the development of multilateral diplomacy, where negotiations are not just between two nations but among many. The United Nations is of course the most obvious case, but there are now more than 150 international organizations. Multilateral diplomacy, with its lobbying for support, its dealings with international secretariats, the variety of its subject matter, is a new phenomenon requiring both political skills and expert knowledge.

  It is a strange paradox that while traditional diplomacy is under fire from so many quarters, diplomacy is one of the growth industries of this century. When I returned to Canada House in London in 1967, the number of foreign diplomats and their wives there entitled to varying degrees of diplomatic privileges and immunity totalled more than 3,300 – more than double the number when I had last been stationed in London in 1945. All foreign service offices, like all other branches of bureaucracy, have increased vastly in size. New nations, between sixty and seventy of them since the last war, have come into being and have sent their new diplomats all around the world. In return, older nations have posted their diplomats to the new states.

  Serving Canada abroad is an enlightening experience. The Canadian identity emerges very clearly when seen from the outside and when Canada appears as an actor on the international stage. Any foreign diplomat who has had the experience of negotiating with Canadians would recognize on sight our particular Canadian mix of goodwill and hard-headedness, of friendliness and touchiness. He would also, I think, respect the Canadian instinct for conciliation and realistic acceptance of the limits of the possible, mingled though it is with a strong dose of self-righteousness. These qualities do not seem to be more Anglo-Canadian than French-Canadian. Indeed, seen from abroad, all Canad
ians, whatever their differences of origin, seem much more like each other than like any other race or nation, including the races from which they spring.

  In the longer perspective there also emerges a continuity in Canadian attitudes in international affairs. Despite changes of governments and varying emphasis in our foreign policies, it would be almost possible to foretell a Canadian national reaction to an international problem or crisis. The very vocabulary in which Canadian views are expressed has not much altered. It has a moralistic preaching tone which strives, sometimes inadequately, to express a real strain of idealism. Yet this idealism is inevitably strongly diluted by the realism of a great trading nation with the material interests of its people to safeguard. Any policy which drifted away too far from our national interests into an atmosphere of ideal international aspirations would have no roots at home.

  When I entered it in 1934, the Department of External Affairs was as small as Canada’s place then was on the map of international politics. Since then, of course, it has increased enormously in size and in complexity of organization. At the start we were anxious to differentiate ourselves from traditional Foreign Offices, to eschew diplomatic trappings and to display an almost-ostentatious lack of ostentation. The profession of diplomacy is, however, an international trade union which, whatever the national or individual styles and origins of its members, stamps them all with its hallmark. The Canadian diplomat, like all other diplomats, lives a peculiar amphibious existence at home and abroad. Abroad, one enjoys privileges, allowances, and a special status. At home, one is a civil servant among tens of thousands of others, and the quicker one adjusts to the change the better.

  For the foreign service officer who is interested in policy and the mechanics of power, service at home is more important than service abroad. If he hopes to exert any influence on affairs he must make good his position in the department. The longer he remains abroad, remote from the political and departmental infighting in Ottawa, the more his influence tends to decline. He must first have established a base of trust and friendship at home in order to count on continued support, and this relationship must be steadily maintained. He who forgets this does so at his peril.

  Power is at the centre, as Winston Churchill once remarked. It is in Ottawa that all the decisions are made that affect our policy abroad. Much has been written lately in Canada, as well as elsewhere, about the decision-making process in foreign policy, and much of it has been written by political scientists whose journals explore the subject, sometimes with the aid of graphs or models of behaviour. These methods have produced studies of value, although often couched in language so specialized that those actually involved in the decision-making – the politicians and officials – might find it hard to follow them without taking a language course. Such studies are conducted in a cool climate of reasoned analysis which is remote indeed from the pressure-cooker of politics.

  In reality, decisions are often taken in reaction to unexpected developments in the international field – a sudden revolution, a change in interest rates abroad. At home there are pressures from other government departments with their special interests and responsibilities, and there are waves of public concern and agitation about particular causes. Sometimes policy swerves from its course from the urgent necessity of the government’s winning a by-election, or because of a rash reply given by a Minister to an awkward question in the House of Commons. Then there are the time and human elements. As to the time element, in an age of instantaneous communications it is speeded up to a matter of moments in which a decision may have to be reached or a previous decision reversed. A telephone call from one national leader to another may do the trick. The human element involves not only the personalities of our politicians and their advisers but the effects of strain, fatigue, or ill-health.

  Diplomats, when serving abroad, live in a different world, a world of official immunity. They are outside the law of the country where they are stationed. Diplomatic immunity is far from being an artificial anachronism. Without it, diplomats stationed in hostile countries could easily become the victims of trumped-up charges. Diplomatic immunity is often misunderstood and causes irritation to the local inhabitants. The aspect which causes most irritation is the diplomat’s ability to park his car wherever he likes. In recent years the number of parking tickets issued to diplomats in one capital – London – and left unpaid numbered, over a ten-month period, more than twenty-six thousand. I am glad to say that, although not in law bound to do so, the personnel of Canadian missions abroad are under instruction to pay such fines.

  There is no aspect of diplomatic life which appears to the outsider more artificial, and indeed sometimes more absurd, than that of protocol. There is a type of diplomat to whom matters of protocol come to assume absorbing fascination; there are others who regard them as a necessary evil. Protocol is best understood as a reflection of the extraordinary sensitivity and touchiness of the nation state. Nations, in their relations with each other, of which diplomats are simply the agents, behave very much like temperamental prima donnas. They fear “losing face” or being upstaged. They use the nuances of a snub or the extra cordiality of a gesture as a means of registering the temperature of their relations with other states. At what level of representation is a visiting Canadian Foreign Minister welcomed at the airport on arrival in a foreign country? How many guns are fired in salute for the arrival of a visiting Head of State? What is the degree of warmth or coolness expressed in an after-dinner toast? These apparently trivial things form a sort of code, carefully weighed and noted in the diplomatic community. They may be the first indications, the red or green light, in relations between states indicating degrees of friendship or hostility.

  One of the features that separate diplomats in the higher ranks from others in the communities in which they live is their housing. This has always been a sensitive question for Canadians. Some critics would like the style of life of Canadian representatives abroad to reflect that of the average Canadian middle-class home. In practice, in most countries, ambassadors are housed in conditions quite different from anything that could be afforded by the local inhabitants. This dates back to the days when there were plenty of large private houses staffed by many servants, and the ambassador’s residence was one of many, instead of standing out as an exception. One justification for maintaining these mansions is the necessity for entertaining. How much is diplomatic entertaining justified? Sometimes its value is greatly exaggerated, yet it still goes on all over the world. The Embassy provides a setting for hospitality to visitors from home and the local colony of Canadian residents, for entertaining politicians and officials in the country to which one is accredited and visiting Canadian Ministers. All this requires a certain scale of physical “plant.”

  Perhaps finally this whole way of life will disappear for one very simple reason – there will no longer be servants available – and ambassadors will have to retreat to modest flats and mount their dinners and receptions at the local hotels. They will then be faced by the great and growing problem of physical security. When I was in Washington, the Prime Minister, Mike Pearson, came on a visit and we gave a dinner for him and the President, L. B. Johnson, and their wives. This involved the presence in the Embassy residence and grounds of some twenty United States security men. The cook threatened to leave. “They kept tracking through my kitchen,” she complained, “while I am trying to cook the dinner.” She also resented having to prepare a light repast for the security officers simultaneously with the dinner upstairs.

  Women diplomats in the higher ranks are still something of a rarity in all Foreign Services. In our own Foreign Service we have had a handful of distinguished women diplomats – too few and too far between. The unsung heroines of the Foreign Service are the women in its administrative and secretarial ranks; without whom the whole operation would speedily collapse. The attractions for Canadians of representing their country abroad are less than they once were. With the opening up of missions in so ma
ny new countries, the ratio of unhealthy, remote, and boring posts has increased. Then, too, some wives of foreign service officers – and this is increasingly the case – have interesting, remunerative jobs at home and do not look forward to the prospect of giving them up in order to accompany their husbands to a foreign post. Yet the wife of a foreign service officer can make all the difference to the success or failure of her husband’s posting abroad. If she enjoys the stimulus of meeting a variety of people, if she finds an interest in getting to know other countries and cultures, the husband and wife make a doubly effective team. I do not know how effective Sylvia and I have been as a team – I do know that without her I could not have carried on. She has risen to every occasion with zest and without fuss.

  By its very nature this is a career of adjustments not only to changes of place but to changes of policy and changes of political masters. This involves conformity, but when does the conformity stop? What happens in the process to the personal convictions of the individual?

  It is sometimes suggested that diplomats have suspiciously supple consciences, and accommodate themselves all too easily to changing régimes and switches in policy; that they serve not only their country “right or wrong” but any government in power “right or wrong.” There is a lot of truth in the saying that “there are old diplomats and bold diplomats, but there are no old bold diplomats.” It is not a profession for men of fiery political opinions. They should go into politics and fire them off there – but that does not necessarily mean that all diplomats are a race of spineless time-servers without views of their own. Certainly there has been no lack of debate and dissension over policy in the ranks of our own foreign service. Most of the important – and some of the unimportant – decisions in our foreign policy have been the subject of discussion in which professional diplomats played an active part, sometimes seeing their views prevail, sometimes being overruled by the Foreign Minister or the Prime Minister. If overruled, these same officials proceeded to defend abroad the policies which at home they had tried to alter. This for some was a painful duty, but they had no doubt that it was their duty. If that is what is meant by conformist, a good diplomat is a good conformist. Once a line of policy is adopted, and it is a matter of explaining it and defending it abroad, there is no longer any place for personal differences. It is the diplomat’s role to convey as accurately and as cogently as possible the policy of his government. If he aired his own views to a foreign government or to the press, he would be misleading them. However much he protested that his view was personal, it would be believed that it reflected in some measure the views of his government. An ambassador or a senior official in a Foreign Office is only worth while listening to if his interlocutor believes that he is in close touch with the opinion of his own government and has authority to express it. The ambassador’s personal opinions are of no more importance to a foreign government than those of a taxi driver, and often less interesting.