The Naked Diplomat

by Tom Fletcher

  In some of my blog posts and speeches in Beirut, I argued that Lebanon lacked such a binding narrative. I tried to write about what a future Lebanon could look like, arguing that to get through the tunnel we had to see the light at the end of it. The danger is that without such a national story, however aspirational or vague, it is harder to keep its fragments glued together.

  The second stage in harnessing magnetic power is understanding how to tell that story.

  Promotion of the national brand will be more credible when carried by sportsmen, artists, royals or businesses, most importantly by people. It is often easier to promote modern British music rather than traditional British values, or the power of Premiership football rather than our position on human rights. Diplomats have to draw on the power of those who can best promote the national brand, while avoiding looking like an awkward uncle dancing at a wedding. Building soft power has to be, in the words of Martin Davidson, the former British Council head, a ‘slow-burn activity’.

  Conchita Wurst, Austria’s transvestite winner of the Eurovision song contest in 2014, a glorious cross between Shirley Bassey and Russell Brand, did more for its reputation as an open and liberal country than years of government speeches and press releases. The Nobel Peace Prize will keep Norway near the top of the soft power league table as long as leaders aspire to win it. The 2014 World Cup in Brazil had a huge impact on Brazil’s reputation, for better or worse.

  To survive in the digital jungle, organisations need a strong ‘big picture’ message, underpinning the entire effort and providing a framework for individual announcements, themes and campaigns. So, for example, British foreign policy is about making our country safer, and creating jobs and growth. American foreign policy is about projecting global power in a way that makes Americans more secure.

  This then creates space for more tactical core messages. In Britain’s case – what do we do to promote national security and prosperity? How do we protect our people? In America’s case, how is US policy in Cuba or Congo helping to make someone in Connecticut more secure? Tools such as Twitter or Facebook are important, but the message matters more than the medium.

  Nations must build trust. Thus Peter Horrocks, former director of the World Service, says that the BBC is ‘no longer people in London saying “This is how the world is” to people around the world. It is a dialogue; it is a debate.’6 It deliberately sets out to be a global institution rather than a British one. The British Museum calls itself ‘a museum of the world, for the world’. The English Premier League is the most international in the world, and therefore the most followed and the richest. Some managers even see themselves as more powerful than politicians. I remember someone asking Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger if he was pleased to be meeting Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy when we held a summit at the club’s Emirates Stadium. His response, only partly tongue-in-cheek, was: ‘They are meeting me.’

  So countries have to promote the national brand in a coherent and punchy way. Yet most still devote too little promoting their influence and attraction. Former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who called himself a dove in uniform, recognises that ‘The United States had to change from exporting fear to inspiring optimism and hope.’7 But the United States spends less than the annual advertising budget of some multinational companies to communicate America’s vision to the rest of the world.8

  Many emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, China – are not making the same mistake, and are now investing massively in media, cultural institutes and scholarships. TV station Russia Today’s annual budget is over $700 million, and China spends over $2 billion a year on China Central Television and the Xinhua News Agency. In the last decade China has set up over 400 Confucius Centres (promoting Chinese language and culture) around the world, over 100 of which are in America. June Liu Yunshan, the official in charge of the network, describes them as ‘spiritual high-speed rail’.

  Governments can and should do more to focus the instruments directly under their control. This starts with greater coherence between development, defence and foreign affairs ministries. Overseas aid should not be tied to foreign policy outcomes, but should amplify a country’s smart power. The fact that Britain funded all the schoolbooks in Lebanon gave me much more political credibility and access. When navies help deliver humanitarian aid following natural disasters, it increases the attraction of their government. Likewise, when diplomats secure and use influence, it is easier to deliver policy changes that help deliver development. There will naturally be tensions between these three arms of overseas work, but they must be creative tensions.

  Any power strategy must also acknowledge that those it is trying to influence are shaped by a different set of narratives, values and beliefs. I frequently bounced into classrooms in the Middle East to talk about British creativity, openness and innovation. Yet what the class saw was the great-grandson of Arthur Balfour, whose declaration is seen as having laid the basis for the Arab world’s humiliation. Or the grandson of Mark Sykes, whose redrawing, with Picot, of the Middle East’s twentieth-century borders is often seen in the region as having created every subsequent problem.9 They see serious imperial baggage.

  Of course, we all have baggage. We can’t wish it away. If we do not acknowledge it, we come across as arrogant, or cultural imperialists. After all, in the Middle East, I engage constructively, you meddle persistently, he is an arrogant neo-imperialist aggressor. Arabic has the same word for intervention and interference. We have to try to see ourselves as others see us, but not be defined, or knocked off balance by that.

  So new power is more likely to work when we can show people that we are genuinely on their side. In the Middle East, the majority of those who joined the Arab revolutions in 2011 did so not just because they wanted democratic institutions, but because they sought their own version of freedom, justice and opportunity. When we made our support just about their right to live exactly like we did, we lost their attention.

  A large part of our media effort in Beirut was to put these historical episodes in a wider context, for example explaining the role of other Brits, such as my wartime predecessor Edward Spears, who did so much for Lebanese independence, albeit with a certain amount of perfidy. There is no point in simply ignoring or dismissing the baggage, given that many who we need to engage cannot see past it. The same applies to other former colonial powers, and to newer global actors. US soft power, from McDonald’s to music, has immense strength. But throughout the Middle East it is still accompanied by great suspicion of US foreign policy.

  Unshakeable myths can also now be created in hours rather than over decades – and diplomats will need to be even more fleet-footed in confronting them. As Mark Twain said, ‘A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.’ Modern governments and their diplomats have to be agile in preventing it from doing so.

  As nations weigh up their comparative advantages in the global power race, any negotiator, business or diplomatic, can confirm the advantage that they are given when discussions are conducted in their language.

  For the next hundred years, at least, English-speaking nations have that advantage. For anyone who wants to succeed in the twenty-first century, English is the language of information, education, opportunity, of the Internet and of globalisation. For traders and travellers, the language of Shakespeare, Facebook and the London and New York stock exchanges is not just useful – it is indispensable. The days when London sought to impose our language on the world are over – now the world is demanding our language, as I find when teaching at the campuses of Shanghai and Abu Dhabi.

  In 2015, 2 billion people spoke English. There are already more conversations in English between people whose second language is English than there are between native speakers of English. Every year, 400,000 international students study in the UK. From 2006–14, the number of pupils in Lebanon learning English grew by 25%. The Lebanese have always been quick to react to changing circumstances. These stat
istics say that they have seen that English is the future. (And the Lebanese should know, of course – the Phoenicians helped give us our alphabet in the first place.)

  A love of English-language teaching is in my DNA. My first job was as an English teacher, to Palestinian schoolchildren. My grandfather spent fifty years in Nigeria, promoting access to English education. And my father has devoted his life to making it easier and more fun for people to learn English. We must maintain our support to the English language profession. We must ensure that our immigration procedures do not push students to study elsewhere. And we must continue to back institutions such as the BBC World Service.

  We can also do more to make English texts available to all. It is easier to find the seminal works in our literary canon translated into Catalan than Arabic. If we want to help reformers in the Middle East and elsewhere win the argument against the sword, we should do more to share with them the pen. Not through some sort of paternalistic or orientalist hangover, but to help others better understand the foundations on which we chose to construct our societies. It is then their choice what to choose for themselves.

  I once brainstormed with Indian politician Rahul Gandhi about how best we could support India’s need for English. I suggested a scheme through which we would send 1,000 young British graduates every year to train teachers and pupils in India. Rahul liked the concept, but derided the ambition – ‘Send us 100,000 a year,’ he said.

  When it comes to projecting global power, the language skills also still matter too. Prussian master diplomat Otto van Bismarck understood this, warning colleagues to ‘beware of Englishmen who speak French too well’. But not every ambassador has sought perfection in foreign languages. Asked why he spoke otherwise perfect French with such a strong English accent, Lord Bertie, the British ambassador to Paris during the First World War, replied: ‘To remind them that I have the fleet behind me.’10

  Each year the World Economic Forum compiles a list of essential skills. For 2015, creativity was ranked tenth. As artificial-intelligence technology becomes more sophisticated, WEF judge that creativity will become more important, so that by 2020 they predict it will rank third.

  New power will also demand that creativity is prioritised. No ministry of foreign affairs has a Department for Creativity. Indeed the very idea is probably a contradiction in terms. Ronald Reagan joked that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help’; likewise, no one needs a civil servant to tell them how to be creative. Yet the countries that will succeed in the Digital Century will develop for themselves an outlook of restless pioneers, an ability to innovate, explore and engage the world around them. Historically, that is when they have always been strongest.

  Marshalled effectively, the technology tsunami that I have described creates more space for that creativity and innovation. This is what makes the Internet so much more influential in social and developmental terms than, for example, television or the telephone. It is our creativity that sets us apart from computers, and what will give us a competitive edge in the global marketplace.

  We also have to protect intellectual property rights if we are to preserve ingenuity and creativity. The counterfeiters have always been a fact of life (although they cannot replace the creators). In a world where anything can be copied, we need a digital Pantheon, a way of branding or kite-marking the genuinely innovative. Quality has to matter. The first attempt to define intellectual property was made in the UK, under Queen Elizabeth I. Globalisation and the Digital Age have made the issues more fiendishly complex and contested in the second Elizabethan Age than the first. Emerging economies such as China’s are going to have to play fairer, and to be part of a rules-based system.

  For the global economy to work, and for our national economies to compete, governments and diplomats need to agree those rules, create the conditions where the best thinkers and ideas can speed-date across national boundaries, and then stand back and let it happen.

  Governments will need to send their diplomats where the innovation and ideas are, and ensure that our best innovators have constant access to the most creative ideas out there, and the tools and networks to benefit from them. They should be constantly scanning the horizon to see where the next innovation is. They should be much more creative in how they bring people together, and in how they use their convening power to drive growth. They need to chart the ways in which people are making connections within and between societies, and be present there, supporting and nurturing exchanges that contribute to the common good, that further genuine diplomacy in its purest form. In the Digital Age, diplomats will need to be able to capture and hold attention, interest, relevance and influence. As veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke used to put it, ‘attack the problem from every angle, and bring in unusual people’.

  To help rediscover the pioneering mindset that we need in order to thrive in the coming period, embassies should also seek out and offer passports to top innovators and business people from overseas, and make the case for greater openness to those who can build our economy. I asked the Nigerian guard at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington why he had come to America. Without missing a beat, he said he was there to ‘make money, think freely and work hard’. The points at which cultures are interacting and fusing are often the points of greatest potential and energy.

  In the Digital Age, power is fluid, unpredictable and diverse. Those who wish to exercise it need to recognise that there are different muscles to flex and sometimes to use. Military power must be deployed sparingly, but never neglected – as President Theodore Roosevelt said, don’t punch unless you have to, but when you do, never punch soft. But hard power alone is insufficient – effective modern power also requires that a nation’s talent, creativity and cultural magnetism is put into battle. Governments need to marshal all the tools at their disposal.

  Military power without soft power fails, and vice versa. You can’t have one without the other. You need boots on the ground and books in the hand.

  As power changes, there will be many snake-oil salesmen catching our attention with new ways of describing it. But it matters less whether you call it soft, smart, new or whatever the next catchy moniker is. What matters is that you call it power. And that you get out there and use it.

  In the Digital Age, you will only be able to do that if you are able to connect.

  10

  Using New Power: Only Connect

  Only Connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer.

  E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910)

  The most effective and influential leaders have always mastered the medium of their age to establish a meaningful connection with the people on whom they relied to keep them in power: Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, Lenin’s pamphlets, Churchill’s radio broadcasts.

  But powerful communication in the Digital Age is different. It will take more than a certain flair with a Twitter handle or a natty blog. We crave authenticity. We are more sceptical, less trusting of authority. So leaders, politicians and diplomats need to respond with greater honesty about what they are trying to do, and how that impacts people’s lives. We want connection, not just connectivity.

  One of the reasons for diplomacy’s slow decline is that it has failed to understand this. It is typified by French diplomat Jules Cambon, who in 1931 lamented the dangers of media and popular interest in diplomacy: ‘The activities of the press, and ignorance of a public that insists on being told everything, do not create an atmosphere favourable to prosecution of political designs.’1

  He was right that the power of the media was set to sweep away many of the comfortable and previously impenetrable levels of secrecy surrounding politics and diplomacy. This transparency would be uncomfortable for many who had plied their trade, their ‘political designs’, behind the curtain. But he was wrong that it was bad for diplomacy.

  Those in public l
ife should now be anti-Cambons – should see the media as contributing to their wider purpose, not as an awkward distraction. They need to be in the arguments, to have a personal media profile, and to be thinking constantly about how to reach and influence the widest possible audience. Transparency now safeguards relevance more than it threatens it. This is not about narcissism or self-promotion. People have a right to expect authentic communication from the people they pay to represent them.

  Yet too much diplomatic communication is patchy. There are moments of excellence, such as during the Kosovo campaign in the 1990s, when the public were given unprecedented insights into the conflict. But too often the effort to explain international relations is confused, patronising or amateurish. Many diplomatic channels have embraced the shift to digital but are sharing too much – hourly updates on what the ambassador is doing, and retweets of every mundane statement made by the ministry. Jonah Peretti, founder of BuzzFeed, cautions that brands are harmed when they give their audience content they don’t want. As my grandmother would have said, if you’ve nothing good to say, say nothing.

  The Digital Age presents other big challenges to powerful, authentic communication. The 24/7 news cycle destroys the ability to be strategic, exposes areas of weakness to opponents, and makes it harder to compete for attention for the business that actually matters. The London G20 summit in April 2009 – at the height of the world financial crisis – was one of the few international conferences in recent history that actually made a difference to people’s lives. Yet it lasted a media cycle at most, and was rapidly overtaken – ironically by the resignation of a spin doctor, Damian McBride.