by Tom Fletcher
It also takes extraordinary and inspirational individuals. I recently met an Englishwoman who was working on sharing the lessons of reconciliation. I asked her how she had become involved. She said that her father had been killed in the IRA terrorist attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984. I turned to the man next to her, with whom she had travelled and would shortly share a platform, and asked him what his story was. He paused briefly before replying, ‘I was the bomber.’
Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff and the principal architect of the Northern Irish peace process, tells a story about sitting down with Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams in Downing Street in 1997. McGuinness tried to break the ice by saying ‘So this is where all the damage was done, then.’ Blair’s team thought this was a reference to the IRA mortar attack on the building in 1991. In fact, McGuinness meant that it was the room in which the Republicans had negotiated with the British government in 1921. Our shared histories are open to different interpretations.
Powell scoffs at the idea that governments should not negotiate with terrorists. They almost always end up doing so. Menachem Begin’s paramilitary group Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing ninety-one, but he was later lauded as a statesmanlike prime minister of Israel. When Jomo Kenyatta, then president of Kenya, arrived for talks with the British government, he reminded them that he had been kept at Her Majesty’s pleasure for many years.3
As William Sieghart, who is involved with many painstaking peacemaking initiatives, told me, ‘Diplomatic conversations in Northern Ireland and South Africa were preceded by twenty years or so of secret conversations, mediated by a priest in both cases. The digital world makes it even harder to disguise contact between officials who aren’t supposed to be meeting and raises the role and importance of unofficial intermediaries. Enemies ultimately have to engage in order to end conflicts. It’s astonishing how many people once demonised can have their horns and tail removed at a later date.’
Unless there is a complete imbalance of force, any negotiator will also need to make concessions. Even in complete victory – the Versailles Treaty being the classic example – the winner may have an interest in doing so. The effective negotiator will have real red lines, and artificial ones. There will be cards that can be conceded. Before any serious negotiation, it is therefore worth building in ‘negotiating fat’.
Good negotiators sometimes let their opponents win. British ex-diplomat Sir John Ure suggests that ‘the best diplomatic victories are those when everyone goes away thinking they have won. Diplomacy is the art of building ladders for other people to climb down.’4 Or as the American writer Sue Monk Kidd puts it, ‘If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you.’5
Compromise has become a dirty word, associated with spinelessness. Heaven forbid that a leader should be presented in the media as like Neville Chamberlain. Yet short of conquering other countries, which we’re less keen on now, compromise is often the only way to make progress. The trick is to ensure that you hold the lines on the issues that matter most, and give way on the ones that do not.
This does not mean weakness. In over two years of watching Gordon Brown negotiate with foreign leaders, I never once saw him offer a concession without establishing in his mind what it would buy him elsewhere. He was constantly in the business of establishing leverage. Even when the concession was in his interests, he would make his counterpart feel that he owed him something, in the manner of a mafia don creating a future obligation from the person he was helping. I once thought I had persuaded him to be gentle with the new and rather timid EU president, Herman van Rompuy, in their one-to-one before a European Council. He came out and told me he had been ‘as charming as any Foreign Office diplomat’. Van Rompuy was spotted leaving by a back door shortly after, pale and trembling.
Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister, argues that as international negotiators we also need to say ‘sorry’ more often. And to do it properly. In our private lives, diplomats rarely say to an angry partner that ‘it is a matter of regret that you feel I have offended you’. Yet in international affairs, the way they describe touchstone issues of national sentiment can often be cold and seem insincere. Evans says that ‘it is difficult to believe that when a wrong has been done, a sincere apology will not have some restorative impact. In public, as in private life, honest apologies are a powerful tool, and should be used less nervously and more often.’6
I agree. In 2010 I worked with David Cameron on his response to the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, and his apology was so powerful because it was authentic and sincere – a defining moment early in his administration, when he moved from being the leader of the largest party to being the prime minister. It recognised the context in which the situation had occurred, but did not blind itself to the hurt caused. He dictated most of it himself, and thought hard about how it would be received not just among the UK military and his own constituencies, but how those on the streets of Derry would react. Sorry seems to be the hardest word, but it is sometimes the best one.
The best diplomatic negotiators also understand the rhythm of negotiations. Not all negotiating contexts are the same. Each dance has its rules. Diplomats who do best at the United Nations in New York are those who don’t put themselves at the centre of the story, who are able to craft the early drafts of written statements and then let others take the credit. They are often negotiating as much with their capital as with their counterparts. You have to build in incentives: there is a study to be done on whether more progress towards agreements is made just before or just after lunch. At the 2009 London G20 financial summit, we used football to get a better outcome. At that time, leaders did not have iPads or smartphones with them. Over dinner, several were desperate for updates on the World Cup qualifiers being played that evening. As the only official in the room, I would receive a piece of paper with the latest scores, and consult – as visibly as I could manage – the prime minister on whether I could update his colleagues. He would often fix those most needy with a fearsome stare, extract a concession, and then nod at me to give them what they wanted, once we had what we wanted.
Much diplomatic negotiation is now shaped before the summit or conference it leads up to. With a classic G8, for example, diplomats will begin working on the outcomes months before the event. Sherpas, supported by their yaks, meet regularly, testing where the real red lines are, and seeking new areas of common ground. But in reality, the sweet spot for the negotiation is at the moment leaders engage. Only then do the real interests emerge. If a negotiator does not leave a nugget that only their leader can deliver, they have not done their job. The worst summit outcomes, and the most boring and frustrating for leaders, are those where everything is agreed by officials beforehand. Most leaders want to feel that they have wrung every last bit of juice from the negotiation.
So, for example, at the London G20 summit in 2009, Gordon Brown secured a much more ambitious set of conclusions than expected because he exiled the sherpas to another building, and then hammered through the communiqué with leaders in person, many of them without the protection of their officials, or in some cases even their translators. As the only official in the room for long periods, my role was to soak up much of the resulting anger, most forcefully from President Kirchner of Argentina. I was fortunate that no translator was present for one of her longer and more dramatic tellings-off, but I got the gist of it. This is probably not an approach to summits that can be pulled off more than once.
The Foreign Office’s current political director, Sir Simon Gass – who led most of the Iran negotiations for the UK in recent years – says that as part of any negotiating process, effective negotiators conserve their energy when it is not needed, marking time or letting others fill the space until the context changes. Much of the Iran nuclear negotiations felt like this, as does most Lebanese politics. As the Iranians have worked out, deadlines are normally more flexible than they appear
. Red lines are often blurred. A good negotiator will assess whether the penalties for missing or crossing them really outweigh the error of a rash or hurried deal. Veteran peacemaker George Mitchell described one lengthy negotiation as ‘700 days of failure and one day of success’. So there are moments to stay silent. As the French put-down of those who have not mastered this art goes, Il a manqué une belle occasion de se taire.† This includes not picking a fight at the wrong time. I switched off one looming row with Argentina over the Falklands in February 2010, because it would have been escalated in unhelpful ways by the fact we had a UK election looming.
The negotiator can then engage with greater vigour at the moments that actually matter. Sir Jon Cunliffe, formerly the UK representative to the EU and now deputy governor of the Bank of England, was the most effective haggler I ever saw in action because he was prepared to be the last person in the room, putting his body on the line for the right outcome. This is not a recipe for popularity with counterparts, but any leader would rather have the negotiator willing to fight longest, most tenaciously and harder for the right outcome. British prime ministers looked at Jon, exhausted from another night wrestling over fish subsidies or derivative swaps, and thought ‘He may be a bastard, but I’m glad he’s our bastard.’7 No one said ‘no’ better than Jon.
Successful negotiations increasingly rely on understanding the interplay between private and public. Most leaders arrive at a negotiation with a clear sense of what is shaping the approach of their counterparts – their local media or polls, pressure groups, public opinion. In a rolling negotiation, they will often offer concessions when counterparts need some relief at home. It is no coincidence that an increasing amount of set-piece summits are hosted within a year of the host’s election.
Increasingly, an EU negotiation or G20 summit will almost immediately be defined by the media and public as either a triumph or disaster. Leaders like Margaret Thatcher have helped to set up each encounter as a diplomatic joust, with clear winners and losers. In reality, any negotiation is much more complex than turning up and swinging a handbag. People win a bit and lose a bit.
To help deliver more victories, it is also worth moulding expectations of what victory looks like. Contrary to Michelangelo’s view, it is better to aim low and reach your mark than aim high and miss it. It was often possible for all leaders to stride to their press conferences after a summit to claim ‘game, set and match’: they were talking about different matches.
The zero-sum approach to international summits is not always the most effective. In my experience, the leaders who used it most tended to be men. The European leader who has most consistently got what they wanted, over a longer period of time and with fewer claims of triumph, is Angela Merkel.
Diplomacy takes time. It is a process, not an event. It helps to build alliances, even if they subsequently shift. Ultimately, for the toughest of peace negotiations, the parties have to own that process. While external support can break the logjam at key points, it cannot alone sustain the process, as US negotiators have often found on Israel/Palestine. The UK would probably not have been able to sit down with Sinn Fein without pressure from the Americans, who could see that we all needed to change the paradigm. The Unionists and Republicans in Northern Ireland would not have been able to work together in the way they did without concerted pressure from the Irish and British governments. Where trust is lacking, there often needs to be a sense of an impartial referee, whether verifying that arms have been destroyed, thinking creatively around problems when both parties want talks to fail, or simply providing a neutral space and standing back. But ultimately we found that in Northern Ireland, the individuals involved – and the communities they represented – had to want it too. And had to own it.
As in business, diplomatic negotiations require protagonists to manage their emotions, and to use them. Many of the most successful diplomats have been good actors. Nikita Khrushchev famously banged his shoe on the table at the UN in 1960, enraged by a speech by Harold Macmillan. There are times when you have to show your fangs. The best negotiators I have seen can pick ferocious arguments, but they make sure that they pick the right ones.
In any diplomatic negotiation, there has to be an incentive for a political outcome. The Northern Ireland peace deal recognised that if you want people to put down their weapons, you have to show that they can better secure their legitimate aims through a political process. In this respect, while I understand the anxiety some feel, I have always said that it is welcome that Hezbollah are becoming more involved in state politics in Lebanon. They have a constituency, and a voice. They, and other parties in Lebanon, should secure their political objectives through legitimate processes rather than violence or threats of violence. As parties across the world have discovered, there is nothing like governing to realise the challenges of government, compared to the tidy comforts of opposition. I never encountered their leader, Hassan Nasrallah. That made me the only British ambassador in the world not to have met the most powerful person in the country in which they served.
Sometimes, though, the deal is simply not worth it. In the heat of a negotiation, diplomats – often inclined by nature to seek consensus – will settle for an agreement that won’t even survive the press conference afterwards. At times it is better to walk away. The American diplomat Philip Habib, talking in the 1980s, saw a number of ‘horrendous and heart-rending’ negotiations where diplomats had put in years of work and yet failed. He cites Vietnam: ‘the length of negotiation and the intensity of negotiation – is no assurance either that it will succeed or that its results will be as they were expected to be’.8
Finally, diplomatic negotiations take resilience. David Lloyd George told Sir Ronald Storrs, his envoy in Palestine, that ‘If either side stops complaining to me, you’ll be dismissed.’ I have often felt the same any time I have tweeted about Israel and Palestine, and most subsequent envoys to the Middle East will have had cause to draw on Lloyd George’s advice. Diplomacy requires a thick skin, especially when you’re the focus for anger from every direction. As a seasoned intelligence officer once told me about working on the Libya nuclear agreement with Gaddafi, ‘Sometimes you have to get between the dog and the lamp post.’ It is unsurprising therefore that the unofficial motto of the United Nations is ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall take flak from both sides.’
Negotiating and peacemaking will remain as important to our collective future as to our past. We are going to need the people to provide the lubricant as states, armies and individuals grind against each other.
When it works, though, it is worth it. I took Lebanese leader Walid Joumblatt, one of the Middle East’s most colourful characters, to Northern Ireland. Reverend Harold Good, the Methodist minister who had overseen the controversial disarmament of the IRA, told him about the visit to the last weapons cache. At his side throughout had been his silent but intimidating IRA minder. As the final weapons were put beyond use, Good said, ‘At last, the gun has gone out of Irish politics.’
His minder quietly stepped forward, broke his rifle over his knee, and said, ‘No, now the last gun has gone out of Irish politics.’
* I’m afraid that the detail of these negotiations falls into the category of ‘best not written down’.
† He missed a good opportunity to shut up.
12
A Naked Diplomat
During my time in Lebanon, many of the themes I’ve described so far came together – the need for diplomats to work for peace, the Arab Spring and the online battle against extremism, the changing relationship between the public and figures of traditional authority, and the opportunity to use digital technology to reach and connect with people in new ways.
I begged for the job, despite the obvious dangers. At my leaving party from No. 10, David Cameron reminded me that I had sometimes argued against trying to rescue Brits kidnapped overseas, if the risks to our servicemen and women were too great. I need not worry, he assured me with what I hop
ed was black humour, the government would leave me chained to the radiator.
The gun has not gone out of Lebanese politics. The country is at the apex of many of the region’s power struggles, a vector for the instability and change that is sweeping the Middle East. The most religiously diverse country in the world, it remains the best place to take the pulse of the Middle East. It is also a relatively free society that could in time help to provide the intellectual underpinning to the Arab Spring. Yet a fearful society that cannot absorb all its Palestinian and Syrian refugees and survive. A fractured society that is on the frontline of the regional power struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran. And a bruised society that could do with a period of benign neglect from its region.
The contrasts of Lebanon are a well-worn cliché, but still hit the new arrival. The brash new market alongside the pockmarked Holiday Inn, a ghoulish remnant of the civil war. Hijabs and hotpants. A broke government, but Ferraris on every corner. It is where we have our most tested maritime evacuation plan, in preparation for the next crisis; and yet it remains a top destination for UK luxury yacht sales. Excess and abstinence. Huge flat-screen TVs and power cuts. Too much political rhetoric, and too little political dialogue. A country famous for its welcome suppers, but feared for its capacity to devour and spit out its guests.