The Naked Diplomat

by Tom Fletcher

  No government is prepared for it. These are six powerful and terrifying words for anyone in politics (and everyone outside politics).

  So the bad news is that we are living in the period of fastest change in history. But that is also the good news. We have the opportunity to shape the first genuinely global community.

  All this change is going to take management. The transfer of power from hierarchies to networks will generate winners and losers. Some will adjust. Others will feel threatened and disempowered. How can that transition be less brutal? If we are dealing with an accelerated Darwinism, how can we ensure that it is not just the fittest who survive? How can digital technology reduce rather than increase inequality? How can we defend societies and communities against the new threats that this massive, accelerated, disruptive change will produce? These are the themes that run through the rest of this book.

  Of course, it isn’t just the good guys competing in this space. Many of those now playing on the same terrain are terrorists, pirates, vandals and international crime syndicates. And we are going to have to fight them for digital territory.

  15

  The Battle for Digital Territory

  This war will be a battle of ideas and values, not just weapons. It will be fought more online than offline. The enemies will not be obvious. The front lines will not be drawn on a map. On one side will be those who believe in coexistence, the ability of humans from different races and religions to live together. On the other side will be those who don’t.

  When I arrived in Beirut in August 2011, it was possible to feel the electrical charge of the change sweeping through the region.

  I’ve described the way that the printing press created the modern world – it was the web of its day. But it didn’t change the Arab world, because the Ottoman empire banned it, rightly fearing the implications for traditional power of the spread of information and knowledge. The Enlightenment took two centuries longer to reach much of the Middle East, the region that had done more than any to protect and develop the cause of progress when the Europeans were in their own Dark Ages.

  The early years of the Arab Spring suggested that the Middle East was not going to make the same mistake twice. These were ‘the Facebook and Twitter revolutions’, with activists sharing news and mobilising themselves online.

  The Arab Spring started in Tunisia, where technology penetration was relatively sophisticated – 40% of people had an Internet connection in 2011, and 20% were on Facebook. Social media contributed to the timing and amplification of the turmoil, undermining traditional sources of authority and repression. Activists seized on this new ability to communicate, and to organise.

  There are plenty of examples from elsewhere in the world of how this works. On 12 March 2014, 100,000 people came to the Istanbul funeral of a fifteen-year-old boy, Berkin Elvan, who had been hit on the head by a police tear-gas canister while on his way to a bakery. The massive turnout was the result of the way his story had spread on Facebook and Instagram. Digital tools make it easy to build massive attention or to organise protest on an issue at lightning speed. They had such effect in Turkey during the 2014 Gezi protests that the then prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, called Twitter a ‘menace to society’ (he is now president, after a campaign that included, of course, Twitter).

  As I tweeted at the time, you don’t have to be pro-Twitter to be pro-freedom, but I can’t see how you can be anti-Twitter and pro-freedom.

  Elsewhere, the Spanish Indignados movement took control of many public squares to protest against austerity. Occupy Wall Street dominated Manhattan in October 2011. And Egypt’s Tahrir Square protests in January 2011 became the talismanic Arab Spring protest. In Ukraine, popular protest was accompanied by massive sharing of photos, videos and texts. Twitter became a real-time newsfeed for Venezuelan protesters, and was the venue for lively exchanges between President Nicolás Maduro and opposition leader Leopoldo López.

  Just as digital technology allows for faster innovation by bringing people together, it also allows them to spread protest. This matters massively to the way we analyse the world, and the way we do diplomacy. The uprisings of the Arab Spring fed off each other. Activists could for the first time watch the simultaneous successes and failures of their counterparts in other parts of the region, document what was happening around them in real time, share it more easily, and organise themselves more effectively. Anyone can now be a broadcaster or commentator. Political action is becoming a franchise rather than a controlled party operation. Global protest politics – from WikiLeaks to Anonymous – is breaking down old power monopolies. This will be hugely empowering, but also hugely destructive.

  Of course, it wasn’t just about social media. In the case of the Arab Spring the underlying grievances were a mixture of economic, social and political – a desire for greater security, justice and opportunity. Those aspirations were there before Twitter, and they will probably be there after Twitter. And traditional media also still played an essential role. In the case of much of the Arab Spring, Al Jazeera, Qatar’s mischievously independent TV station, spread the news of uprisings from country to country, triggering demonstrations of support and fresh uprisings.

  It is too soon to tell whether the Arab Spring will generate the more enlightened government that most people want, or will be derailed by the power struggle between securocrats and Islamists, by sectarianism, or by misguided or cynical external interference. Social media revolutions also don’t always work. They make it easier for activists to mobilise, organise, and to spread information – but that often means that popular protest occurs before the organisation and hard work has been done to turn it into something tangible. The Indignados, Wall Street Occupiers, Syria and Tahrir Square protesters did not in the end win. At least, not yet. The hard men fought back.

  But more battles still lie ahead. Social media will continue to play a part in breaking down barriers everywhere where people are connected to the Internet. Digital media alone did not create the Arab Spring, but it made it less predictable, and more widespread. It is no longer possible to imagine an uprising or revolution that does not deploy social media.

  We have also found that digital technology allows those opposed to basic liberties a platform to suppress them, promote their atrocities, and recruit their foot soldiers. Shrewd authoritarian regimes will crack down on digital freedom, and turn it against activists. Social media campaigns will also be used to fuel extremism and polarise debate – the modern equivalent of the use of hate radio during the Rwandan genocide, or the evil but powerful propaganda of Joseph Goebbels.

  Nowhere is agile, savvy digital diplomacy needed more than in the online and offline war with ISIL and its extremist offshoots and copycats. The three cities in which I have spent most of my adult life – Paris, Beirut and Nairobi – have now all been ripped open by acts of terror. The attack on Paris in November 2015, the largest terrorist atrocity in Europe for a decade, will sear itself onto Western consciousness in the way that 9/11 did. That’s what the sociopaths with smartphones wanted.

  Let’s not be misled about why ISIL targeted Paris. They hit what they call the ‘greyzone’ – places where Muslims and non-Muslims interact. In doing so, they pitched camp on the wrong side of the twenty-first century’s key dividing line – not between Christianity and Islam, East and West, or even haves and have nots, but between those who want to live together, and those who don’t. They have also flushed out some in our own societies, political debates and timelines who don’t either. The effort to close some US and European states to refugees is a propaganda gift to ISIL.

  Those who see foreigners as fundamentally different probably haven’t met many. Most Syrians want what we want – to educate their children and to live in security. As anyone who has visited knows, they are among the most hospitable people in the world. They would not be risking everything to escape unless there was no alternative. Much of the debate is reminiscent of the Twitter spats I had in 2013 in Lebanon, when it de
alt with a much larger influx. ‘They want our comfort.’ Well, try spending a night in a refugee camp. ‘They should go home.’ Well, take a look at a photo of Homs. ‘They are dangerous.’ A tiny minority, maybe. But most are women and kids, themselves fleeing terror. We didn’t blame Jewish refugees for the Nazis.

  However insecure we feel, the answer is in fact more liberty, equality, fraternity, not less. And not just for those of us fortunate to have been born further, or so we thought, from the eye of the storm. The public reaction to the stories of heroism and tragedy of so many refugees has demonstrated that we have not reached the limits of our compassion. We should be proud that our countries are magnetic; generous in our support to vulnerable refugees; and smart enough to recognise the economic potential of migrants. Ask the Pilgrim Fathers.

  Despite seeking to return their territory to the eleventh century, ISIL have no qualms about using the technology that embodies the modernity they claim to despise. They are box-office barbarians. They seek to monopolise the horror genre for the Internet age, and they believe they are better at social media than we are.

  ISIL sent 40,000 tweets in one day as they took Mosul in June 2014. It deploys sophisticated tools to tweet hashtags at key times of the day so that they trend to a far more significant extent than their rivals. Classic propaganda using new tools. Their nimble and unstructured social media use has displaced the clumsier and lengthier speeches of al-Qaeda – even terrorists get disrupted.

  As this market gets more competitive, so will terrorists. They aim to hold digital territory, not just physical territory. If ISIL claim a digital state, will people in Luton and Lagos be able to become members of that state from their bedrooms, paying taxes and pledging allegiance? In the way that children on their iPads can now inhabit imaginary worlds, we will see people spending more time in new imagined communities that increasingly resemble the offline world.

  The same could apply to states that become non-states. A resistance movement driven from its territory would in the past maintain the paraphernalia of the state – flags, titles, an army. It could now take with it the digital infrastructure too – records, data, government. A state can continue without land.

  I saw this battle for digital territory played out, virtual block by block, in Tripoli, northern Lebanon. Young Muslim entrepreneurs told me that what they wanted was the chance to dream big. They wanted help. But failing that, ‘we’ll settle for Wi-Fi and do the rest’. Local Islamists regularly disabled the Internet connections in the entrepreneurs’ club, making it harder to connect with the world outside. ISIL and Co. deliberately target the places where Muslims and non-Muslims interact. They want to kill not just those coexisting, but the idea of coexistence.

  Evidently, we need those entrepreneurs to win. This is the dividing line of our age, and the battle of our age.

  The so-called ‘Islamic State’ run their digital operation like an insurgency, playing to their strengths – an ability to move fast, conduct ‘drive-by’ attacks, and reach out to the vulnerable and angry. We will need to build a digital counter-insurgency that plays to our strengths, including tolerance, numbers and, yes, humour. When given the choice, more people run from ISIL than are running to them. This is not a war we can lose.

  Meanwhile, social media has played more of a role in the Syria conflict than any in history.

  This creates opportunities for diplomats and journalists to understand what is happening on the ground, even when they have been based in Beirut or Istanbul. The flattening of the Syrian city of Homs in 2012 was far better documented than the flattening of the nearby city of Hama in 1982, when just a few buccaneering Western journalists – Robert Fisk, Jonathan Randall, Tom Friedman – were able to tell the world what had happened.

  Those curating the information reliably become more powerful. Brown Moses is an example of an analyst who has made a career from his sofa of being able to comment reliably on YouTube clips of the weapons used. Groups on both sides have been able to create waves of attention on the basis of forged videos or content from other conflicts.

  But social media creates also new challenges. Videos don’t just record conflict. They also drive it, feeding the desire for revenge or emulation.

  As part of the battle for coexistence, social media are also changing the nature of diplomatic negotiations in the Middle East and beyond. They are now a core part of the effort to bring Iran in from the cold, against the efforts of some hardliners in Washington, Tel Aviv or Tehran.

  After his first ever call with President Obama, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran scooped the White House by tweeting the news before it was announced in Washington. The negotiation between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (plus Germany) was the first diplomatic breakthrough to be announced, by John Kerry and Baroness Ashton simultaneously, on Twitter.

  Governments don’t always set the agenda: Rouhani’s online messages meant that he was embraced by the Davos community before the diplomatic and government community. The emergence of his Twitter account after his election, pumping out much more reasonable and moderate positions than anticipated, went a long way to change Iran’s reputation and lay the groundwork for diplomacy.

  Again, of course Twitter cannot take all the credit. The pieces of the kaleidoscope on a better relationship between Iran and the West were already in motion. Realignment of global forces, the impact of sanctions, and fear of the potential of further instability in the Middle East served to drive the two sides together. However, the Iran deal happened faster because of Twitter. The fact that Rouhani was enthusiastically tweeting about the potential for agreement, and retweeting those who had seemed to be his opponents, did change the context. This approach was part of a savvy, agile digital diplomacy plan by Iran, and made it much harder for critics of the agreement to argue that they were monolithic, closed or cynical.

  I donated blood following an attack on the Iranian embassy in Beirut, and released the photo on Twitter. This was at a time when our relations were still in the freezer, and I was unsure what the reaction would be – in Iran and at home. So I was surprised but heartened to be retweeted by Rouhani, and thereafter by hundreds of Iranians. Sometimes in diplomacy, a gesture – especially when amplified widely by social media – is more important than words.

  Of course the challenge for Iran now is to offer this same apparent openness to its own people, lifting controls of the Internet and allowing use of Twitter and Facebook. The government remains reluctant, knowing full well that this would provide Iranians with the access to the rest of the world that many crave. This is one to watch. Social media alone will not create democracy, but it gives those working for change a platform, connections and a voice. Their freedom is in our interest too.

  The battle for digital territory doesn’t just apply to non-state actors, but to wannabe-state actors. Croatia weren’t getting enough recognition from the UN, so they forced Google Maps, through citizen pressure, to mark them on the map as a state. As new states emerge or return – Catalonia? Palestine? Kurdistan? – will their online presence drive their presence on the ground?

  The battle for digital territory will not just be fought between ISIL and its opponents. Just as we faced fundamental questions when diplomats constructed the state-based system, there are key issues to resolve about how we share power online. We are building the plane as we fly it, but amid the cacophony I think there are three guiding principles that can help.

  Firstly, technological change is unstoppable. The genie does not go back into the bottle. We can’t prevent it, even if we want to. What we can do is to ask the right questions about what it means, and what we want from it. The answers should not only be about efficiency, speed and cost.

  Secondly, the overall effect of the Internet is positive, and will give more people the means to understand, engage and influence the world. It is better ultimately to have too much information than too little. But it is not painless. It will also empower some whose impulses are mor
e destructive. We should acknowledge the victims of change, and find ways to ensure that the benefits of connectivity reduce rather than increase inequality.

  Third, we need a genuine public debate about our digital rights, tackling the toughest issues around trust and transparency. We need to find the balance between freedom of expression and the rights of others. We must resist the pressures towards over-sharing and relentless joining-in. We still need a smartphone-free carriage on the train, and a digital-free portion of our brain. Someone has to write the Digital Declaration of Independence. The technology works for us. We don’t work for the technology.

  Our envoy 2025 will need to be as responsive and creative online as her opponents. She will need to take the fight to them. To do this, in the battle of ideas, she will need to be on the side of the rational optimists.

  16

  The Case for Optimism

  Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

  Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

  Every great age is marked by innovation and daring – by the ability to meet unprecedented problems with intelligent solutions.

  John F. Kennedy, 2 March 1962

  People are feeling plenty of reasons to be miserable. We are no longer taking for granted that children’s lives will inevitably be better than those of their parents. Early in 2014, 16,000 young adults from every continent were asked ‘To what extent, if at all, do you feel that today’s youth will have had a better or worse life than their parents’ generation?’: 42% said life would be worse, and 34% said life would be better. In China, 81% were optimistic, but in Europe the figures were abysmal – 16% in Spain, 13% in Belgium and 7% in France.1 As French protesters I witnessed in an – I think and hope – ironic Paris 2011 demonstration, said: ‘Non à 2012.’