by Tom Fletcher
Of course, all of this digital diplomacy brings risks. In September 2012, while under direct attack as the result of unrest caused by the rapid spread of a video critical of Islam, the US embassy in Cairo condemned the efforts of some to ‘hurt the religious feelings of Muslims’. The backlash in the US led to the White House disowning the tweet. Separately, the US ambassador in Egypt had to apologise to his sensitive hosts when the embassy Twitter feed retweeted a clip from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that criticised the Egyptian government.
So digital diplomacy is not without its critics. Former British ambassador Oliver Miles wrote in 2010 (when William Hague was Foreign Secretary) that we need to ‘Stop the blogging ambassadors. The immediacy of social media does not lend itself to the measured nature of international diplomacy … The issues with which ambassadors have to deal are better dealt with penseroso rather than allegro.* Blogs by ambassadors were bound to end in tears. Let’s hope William Hague will blow the whistle.’5
The number of blog posts written annually by UK ambassadors has since risen tenfold. If the whistle was blown, it was too ponderosa to hear. Of course there will always be a need for considered diplomacy, but diplomats will also have to be part of the conversations that everyone in the real world is having.
Sir Leslie Fielding, another former UK ambassador, has also lambasted the ‘trivial chirpiness and dumbing down’ of social media, saying that it ‘cuts no mustard when applied to the sheer complexity of many world issues. The global waters are often opaque, even muddy.’6 He is right, of course, about the fiendish complexities of foreign policy, and indeed the inane nature of much social media. But that is not an argument against trying to communicate in new ways, and to use the new tools to make the global waters a little less murky.
The examples of diplomatic digital disasters – inadvertent insults to former opponents, misguided attempts at humour in serious situations, disgruntled hosts – will not seem so dramatic in a few years. There is no other way to pursue digital diplomacy effectively except through loosening the reins of control.
For a trade that relies on communication, diplomacy has obviously had to adapt to successive waves of dramatic technological disruption. This canter through the history of diplomacy suggests that the most important innovations to shape statecraft throughout history were language, writing, ships, rules, the printing press, trains, telephones, and now the Internet.
So the tools of diplomacy are constantly evolving. Diplomats now compete over who has the most Twitter followers rather than where they are placed at a diplomatic dinner. Talleyrand would have been out of his depth in a twentieth-century summit, just as John Kerry would be in a twenty-second-century summit.
While the basics of diplomacy have changed little from Ug’s time, diplomacy had surrounded itself by the late twentieth century with immense paraphernalia – titles, conferences, summits, rules and codes. But strip these away, and we can identify the diplomatic skills that made our ancestors more likely to survive the hostile 200,000 years of hunter-gathering, the eight millennia of the Agricultural Age and the two centuries of the Industrial Age. Maybe these can get us through the new uncertainties of the Digital Age.
The history of diplomacy suggests that diplomats have always been most effective when they have understood, channelled and represented real power. When emperors held power, diplomats were flunkies in their citadels. When monarchs held power, diplomats were courtiers in their palaces. When military leaders held power, diplomats hung around outside their tents. When states became the dominant power brokers, diplomats started ministries and tried to get as close as possible to their elected (or unelected) leaders. As democracy took hold in the West, diplomats reinvented themselves as its most ardent supporters, while trying to ensure that their trade stayed out of its sight. We need to consider what this means for diplomacy in an age when power is once again shifting and diffusing. If diplomats are not where the power is, they are simply slow journalists with smaller audiences.
The history of diplomacy also shows us that, at key points in our collective story, and normally following shocks such as war, shifts in power required diplomats and politicians to work together strenuously to recalibrate systems and establish new rules of coexistence. Modern diplomats are standing on the shoulders of the curious, canny and sometimes courageous individuals behind Westphalia, Vienna, the League of Nations and Bretton Woods. Two centuries after the Congress of Vienna, are we again at such a moment of flux and uncertainty, and do diplomats have the legitimacy and credibility to help manage the next global reset?
Only if they have the foresight to understand diplomacy’s future, and the hindsight to learn from the best of its past.
So what do more than 500 years of formal diplomatic history tell us about the qualities that make a good diplomat?
* A Milton reference. ‘Il Penseroso’ is his poem about sober contemplation, as opposed to the frenetic world of ‘L’Allegro’. Personally, I think Milton would have tweeted.
6
What Makes a Good Diplomat?
Diplomacy is to do and say the nastiest thing in the nicest way.
Isaac Goldberg, The Reflex (1930)
There is nothing dramatic in the success of a diplomatist. His victories are made up of a series of microscopic advantages: of a judicious suggestion here, of an opportune civility there, of a wise concession at one point and far-sighted persistence at another, of sleepless tact, immovable calmness, and patience that no folly, no provocation, no blunder can shake.
Lord Salisbury, 1862
Salisbury was right – diplomacy is about nuance, subtlety and the ability to make the best of a bad hand. It is rarely black and white. There is rarely a right answer and a wrong one. The history of diplomacy is studded with colourful and extravagant characters, plying their craft at key moments of global change, smoothing the rough edges of their leaders’ positions and trying to hold the whole show together. It is also populated by countless greyer or more vanilla individuals, quietly suggesting the odd adjustment, or picking up the pieces after the leaders have left for the banquet or the press conference.
Before we look at how diplomacy can help us get through the twenty-first century, is it possible – after over 500 years of more formal statecraft – to pick out the characteristics of the kind of diplomat we need?
First, let’s junk the ones that we don’t. I suspect that there are four stereotypes of diplomats, particularly ambassadors, which are lodged in the public consciousness. All of them have some link to reality, but an increasingly tenuous one.
Firstly, the ‘Ferrero Rocher ambassador’. A chocolate-covered hazelnut in a gold wrapper has dogged a generation of diplomats. In an incredible piece of 1980s marketing, an Italian chocolate manufacturer managed to associate their brand with a pastiche version of ours. ‘Why Ambassador, with these Ferrero Rocher you are really spoiling us.’ Most ambassadors, I suspect, have a secret wish to be the suave hosts of the cocktail party captured in the famous advert. Waiters in tailcoats and white gloves glide between attractive guests, a string quartet shimmers in the background, the champagne flows, and the ambassador himself is at the centre of an alluring scene of wealth, privilege, intrigue and glamour. Smooth and mysterious diplomats sip cocktails at the bar.
Just occasionally in real life, a diplomatic reception might come close. But it is very rare indeed. With most diplomatic services under intense pressure to reduce costs, the champagne no longer flows, and receptions tend to be more cheap fizz and finger food than champers and canapés.
There is not a single British diplomat in the world that has not been faced with a gag based on Ferrero Rocher, normally accompanied by something on the lines of ‘I bet you hear that all the time.’ ‘Yes. We do,’ we respond through gritted teeth, wondering about the aggressive potential of a small nut-crusted chocolate.
The danger for modern diplomats, competing for resources and relevance, is that the image has stuck fast. It makes us look out of touch, o
verfed and overpaid. It plays to a sense that many have that we are ‘swanning around’ the world. Again through gritted teeth, we are not.
A second stereotype is the aristocratic amateur. Think of the diplomats in television series such as Yes, Prime Minister. Here, the Foreign Office and its ambassadors are presented as a set of decent chaps, almost exclusively male and pale, smug and smooth. They glide between diplomatic encounters, never without a withering put-down, utterly independent of political control and occasionally in the national dress of whichever country they are serving in. Lawrence of Arabia with fewer principles. Most are seen as insufferably pompous, patronising and grand, infused with an unshakeable sense of self-importance. In a recent lecture, retired diplomat Sir Leslie Fielding described the modern British diplomat as ‘a civil servant, albeit of a superior kind’.1 Or as Harold Nicolson wrote in 1961 in reference to the ‘amateurism’ charge, ‘If ambassadors were required to become experts, then surely great confusion would arise.’2
According to this stereotype, the elite foreigners with whom the aristocratic amateur interacts are far more interesting and in all ways more worthy than his own countrymen, especially politicians. Most are assumed to have ‘gone native’ early in their careers, caring more about the country to which they are posted than their own. The story goes that a Whitehall policeman was asked in 1939 for directions to the Foreign Office. ‘Which side is the Foreign Office on?’ He responded, ‘I don’t know sir, but they claim to have been on our side in the last war.’ A number of world leaders, including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, believed that the trouble with their diplomats was that they thought that their role was to represent foreigners. Finance ministries tend to agree, bemoaning diplomatic negotiations or international conferences where diplomats ensure that everyone leaves with something. Veteran US diplomat William Burns recalls Secretary of State George Shultz asking ambassadors to point to ‘your country’ on the globe. They would invariably indicate the country to which they were posted, allowing Shultz to spin the globe back to the United States and remind them that this was in fact ‘their country’. The message would stick.
In reality, diplomats tend to be far more in need of endorsement and love from their political masters than this suggests. There is no doubt that they risk understanding more about the elevated circles of the countries in which they are serving than real life in their own. But they are becoming more representative of the populations from which they are drawn. The British Foreign Office now sends ambassadors who have been away too long on recalibration tours of the UK, where they are encouraged to study populations of the regions that they might not know, so as to represent them more credibly. Most diplomats would bristle at the suggestion that they spend more time representing the countries in which they are serving than the ones they formally represent.
A third stereotype, perhaps even more ingrained in diplomatic folklore, is that of Perfidious Machiavel. It used to be said that to get on in the British foreign service, you had to be an assassin, boffin or boy scout. After all, doesn’t the British national anthem talk of the need to ‘confound their politics, frustrate their knavish tricks’?
There are plenty of folklorish examples of assassins who made it to the top, sometimes pretending to be boy scouts, and who manipulated the careers of others along the way. The legend suggests that they would tend to be as fiendishly cunning in international negotiations. Think of the smooth but untrustworthy British ambassador Lord John, who pops up occasionally in US political drama The West Wing, or any number of louche but despicable diplomats in John Le Carré’s novels. There is a famous story of Sir John Kerr, then British ambassador to the European Union, hiding under the table during one leaders-only discussion during the Maastricht negotiations, in order to pass notes to Prime Minister John Major.
This is a stereotype of British diplomats that persists in parts of the Middle East, most notably Iran. I find that those who see a dastardly British hand behind every twist and turn are disappointed when I explain that we are really not that clever. After all, if we were that cunning, we would still be running the world.
In reality, I suspect that most foreign services are now more boy scout than assassin. Many have introduced assessment centres that, with a strong focus on delivering through others and interpersonal skills, tend to work against the assassin’s less inclusive qualities. Indeed, some would say that we have too few assassins in circulation. To misquote Reagan, diplomacy is the second oldest profession, but should still borrow much from the first.
At the other end of the scale, a fourth stereotype is the hopeless but well-meaning chump who tends to arrive after the key decision has been taken, and invariably lets down any fellow countryman needing consular help. He is frequently drunk, usually inept and sometimes inappropriate. Terry-Thomas played just such an inept diplomat in the Boulting brothers’ 1959 film Carlton-Browne of the FO, with the main protagonist devising a plan to partition an island by painting a white line across it. P. G. Wodehouse also captured this character very effectively. More recently, he was portrayed by David Mitchell in the BBC series Ambassadors – dishevelled, tired, only just about holding it together, trying to do his best but overwhelmed by his job, and indeed by the modern world.
There is no doubt that Hapless Henry exists, and the world is a more amusing place for it. But he is increasingly weeded out by poor-performance procedures and by the much greater oversight that capitals can now exercise over embassies. The gin-soaked amateur is fading from history with a hiccup.
Of course, there is much further to go in most foreign services before diplomats can claim to be as diverse as the populations they represent – there has never been a woman in the plum British ambassadorial postings of Paris, Washington, New York or the EU. But the reality is that, while some increasingly endangered and sulky examples exist of all these stereotypes, they have been replaced by very different types of diplomats. Of the British diplomats in my team in Beirut, there were periods when I was the only white man. The weekly Whitehall meetings of the Foreign Office leadership convened by the Permanent Secretary, which used to be called ‘morning prayers’, have long since ceased to resemble a meeting of public school prefects. There remains work to be done on equality in foreign services, but you are far more likely to meet a Foreign Office director dashing to reach the nursery before it closes than sipping a sherry in his elegant club.
So what really makes a good diplomat?
The poet Robert Frost suggested that ‘A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.’ Maybe that helps. But the diplomatic archives give us plenty of other clues as to the attributes that a diplomat really needs. The consistent themes are courage, curiosity, tact and the ability to eat anything.
The Venetians had no doubt what they wanted in their envoys. In 1566, Ottaviano Maggi, a humanist and diplomat, wrote a treatise on ‘the perfect ambassador’. He described the ideal qualities of a diplomat in the era of the Italian city states as ‘trained theologian, familiar with Greek philosophers, expert in mathematical sciences, competent in law, music and poetry, proficient in Greek, Latin, French, German, Spanish and Turkish, of aristocratic birth, rich and handsome’. A daunting skill set that would make a modern diplomat blanch.
The presentation has always mattered. The seventeenth-century analyst of diplomacy Rousseau de Chamoy judged that ambassadors could be assessed by the magnificence of their table, the nobility of their birth and the quality of their physical appearance. He would not have met the diversity or austerity criteria for modern diplomacy.
Harold Nicolson – an extraordinary character who went from handing the declaration of war to the German ambassador as a junior diplomat in 1914 to politics to writing, and had an ‘open marriage’ to Vita Sackville-West – wrote after the Second World War that the ‘key qualities of the diplomat are truthfulness, precision, calmness and modesty’.3 Most of the best diplomats I’ve encountered master three of those four attribu
tes, but not always the same three. Lord Gore-Booth, head of the British Diplomatic Service in the late 1960s, concluded that the ideal ambassador ‘must be able to contrive anything, eat or drink anything and appear to like it, and to be surprised by nothing. And all this must be done without loss of sensitivity or courage.’4 Anthony Acland, another head of the Foreign Office, used to tell new diplomats to be ‘humane sceptics’.
Sir Christopher Meyer, British ambassador in Washington from 1997 to 2003 and renowned for always wearing bright red socks, lists a more modern set of necessary qualities: insatiable curiosity about other countries, an abiding interest in foreign policy, a willingness to spend half your working life outside the UK, and a profound knowledge and understanding of some foreign countries. He suggests that the diplomat must be able to negotiate, to win the confidence of the powerful and influence them, to understand what makes a foreign society tick, and to analyse information and report it accurately and quickly, including news your own government does not want to hear.* Most of all, a diplomat needs ‘a quick mind, a hard head, a strong stomach, a warm smile and a cold eye’.5
The ledger of qualities gets longer. As another former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, observed: ‘some have listed other qualities such as good horsemanship, good looks and a good head for alcohol. The more qualities you add, the less it looks like the specification of a good diplomat and the more like a combination of King Solomon and Jeeves.’6 We should put that on the recruitment adverts.