by Tom Fletcher
The third pressing challenge we face is how to reduce global inequality without destroying the planet.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, published a dramatic and sobering report in October 2014. Failure to reduce emissions will create water and food shortages, natural disasters, refugee crises, flooding and mass extinction of plants and animals.
We have seen the emergence of an overdue and essential understanding that our fate is deeply connected with the ecology of the planet. The Paris Agreement of 2015 is a big step forward. Yet our collective actions to date are barely scratching the surface of the response necessary. I’m struck by how many ecologists already say that we are too late to manage, let alone turn back, the devastating environmental consequences of the industrial age.
We have to win the argument that green growth does not mean slower growth, but rather increases productivity and efficiency, creates space for innovation and new markets, and reduces long-term risks of negative economic shocks.
Every world leader can give the speech about why climate change matters so much, the metaphorical hot air to match the hot air that their travel to climate summits pumps out. But the rhetoric is not matched by any seriousness of intent. Diplomacy must be more assertively part of the effort to set the right global rules, including how best to balance the developing world’s legitimate energy needs and aspirations with the long-term health of the planet.
We have to manage the end of the fossil-fuel era without triggering the kind of major conflict that energy transitions have created in the past. The Middle East creates 31% of the world’s oil, and has 65% of the world’s reserves. Oil is not as much of a factor in policymaking as the conspiracy theorists like to claim, but it is clearly another complicating issue in a region that already has plenty of its own already.
Austerity, insecurity and the decline of nation states have all served to take our minds away from rethinking our energy needs. They should have the opposite effect.
There is also a compelling humanitarian and security case for reducing the gap between rich and poor. The bottom half of the world’s population own less than 1% of total wealth. The top 1% has just under half of the world wealth.8 Without action, the twenty-first century will be the Greatest Migration, with millions more hungry and angry people heading north and west. The annual World Economic Forum global-risk report lists growing inequality as the biggest geopolitical risk today.
Inequality is a serious problem within as well as between countries. In the US, the richest 1% earns more than the poorest 90%, and there are more inherited fortunes than a decade ago on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans. But the bad news is that inequality is increasing faster in China and India than the US and Europe. It has reached a twenty-eight-year high in thirty-two developing economies.9
The better news is that new technology can help us to reduce those gaps.
There are countless examples of individuals or communities in the poorest parts of the world using smartphones to track weather or market conditions, or to secure small-scale investment or banking services, to improve their economic prospects. I spent time with farmers in northern Kenya whose livelihoods had been transformed by an ability to get text messages with weather forecasts and market conditions in nearby trading centres. Global Pulse monitors discussion of food on Twitter in Indonesia to spot shortages and price hikes. Deloitte estimate that expansion of Internet access could increase personal income levels in the developing world by 15%.10 But this will require a greater concert of effort between governments, NGOs and the companies involved. Coalitions of the willing again.
It used to be said that you could give a man a fish and he would not be hungry that day, but give him a fishing rod and teach him to fish and he will never be hungry again. Perhaps the modern equivalent is that we need to give him a smartphone and an Internet connection.
Whether we like it or not, aid is a security issue, at a time when global inequality and insecurity are becoming more of a direct threat to our populations. That means we will need to be firmer in insisting that we do spend on aid, but harder-headed in deciding how we spend on aid.
These issues all require much broader coalitions and debates than has happened in the past – they cannot be fixed simply by summit diplomacy or governments talking to governments.
So I want now to conclude this book to the point at which social media, coexistence and diplomacy collide.
There is lots of talk about citizen journalists, but not enough about citizen diplomats. Behind the ‘Excellencies’ and the protocol, diplomacy is not a mysterious cult. It doesn’t require years of training like medicine or law. Anyone can do it, and many people do so through small acts of resistance against apathy, division, corruption and fatalism.
If we are to get through a century of significant peril and uncertainty, we need the coexisters to fight back. We need citizen diplomacy to kick in.
18
Citizen Diplomacy
To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, to draw closer, to find each other and to feel. That is the purpose of life.
Fictional Life Magazine motto, quoted in James Thurber’s ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ (1939)
I have described in this book the transformation and disruption of everything we thought we knew. I have considered what this means for power, hierarchy and traditional authority, including statecraft and diplomacy, and how technology can help us promote coexistence.
Two hundred years after the Congress of Vienna tackled the huge questions of the day, we need another Congress of Vienna moment. But this time it cannot be diplomats working for months behind palace doors, nor a great-powers stitch-up – it is harder being a great power than it used to be. We need to find a more inclusive, empowering and effective way of marshalling the best instincts of humanity against the worst.
I have argued that diplomacy at its essence is about promoting coexistence – or, to put it more starkly, stopping violence. We are trying to provide the lubricant in the system as continents, states, armies and ideas rub up against each other. We are trying to find ways to agree how best to distribute resources and power without fighting. We are trying to bring reason to an unreasonable world. Technology is disrupting established notions of what is and isn’t political. This requires compromise and debate, and diplomats need to be in those arguments.
But so does everyone else. In the Digital Age, anyone can be a diplomat. Increasingly, everyone will need to be a diplomat. You don’t have to be working for a foreign ministry to do the vital work I’ve described. Indeed most of the people doing it have never crossed the threshold. They are working in communities, in NGOs, in the media, in business, elsewhere in government. They are all, without knowing it, diplomats – citizen diplomats.
Diplomacy is not a creed or a code. It is a basic human reflex. Negotiating access and distribution of resources is as essential to the survival of the species as finding the resources in the first place. A little more conversation, a little less action.
We’ll now need to think harder about how we create citizen diplomats. How can we influence how pupils are taught in schools in order that they are more likely to think diplomatically? Can we learn more about the costs of failure of diplomacy, i.e. wars? Anthony Seldon, the political biographer and former headmaster of Wellington College, has pioneered the teaching of happiness, character, resilience. When teaching the next generation of citizen diplomats, we should be thinking less about how to write a treaty than how humanity has managed to find ways, throughout history, to coexist.
For me, Lebanon was a test case for that idea, a front line for coexistence. If we cannot live together there, across a plethora of races, competing ideologies and religions, we will fail to live together in Madrid, Paris and London. If we cannot better manage the Middle East’s transition towards security, justice and opportunity, we will face a generation of upheaval, with more empty li
fe jackets on our shores, and more suicide vests in our shopping malls. In the end, politics will prevail. The job of diplomats, and therefore all of us, is to help it do so without decades of bloodshed.
So can we summon up a period of citizen diplomacy? Socrates claimed to be ‘not a citizen of Athens or Greece, but of the world’. This sounds naive to our more cynical and worldly twenty-first-century ears, and few leaders get elected by proclaiming themselves global citizens. Yet technology is making it a more imaginable reality. We won’t always need to put our nationality before common humanity. We are going to find ourselves with the ability to organise ourselves in new ways, consistent with John Locke’s definition of community as a state of perfect freedom, with the power to act as one body.
I have argued in this book that the gradual democratisation of making foreign policy, the result of political advancement and technological innovation, has proven positive. The world is, despite plenty of media coverage to the contrary, becoming safer for its citizens.
But if that basic hypothesis on the positive effect of greater public participation is true, we depend as a species on those participating to understand their increased power, and to engage with the issues that they can now shape to such an extent. Only half a century ago, ‘diplomatist’ Harold Nicolson could write with bemused disdain that ‘Now the man in the street is expected to have a view on international problems, yet the complexities are too great.’1 Any diplomat or politician who dared to utter such words now would be pilloried as elitist and out of touch. And rightly so.
The man or woman on the Clapham omnibus, Tokyo bullet train or Dubai monorail now has three things that have never existed in the same way before.
They have the means to disentangle the complexities of international problems, through access to information that was previously either out of reach or confined only to policymakers or elites.
They have access to networks that allow them to form an unmediated view on the information they receive. The public no longer need to wait for a Times editorial or government statement to form an opinion on the latest atrocity in Syria. Indeed, by the time the thunderous denunciation or timid bleat of concern arrives on their television screen or in their newspaper – for the rapidly declining proportion of people who use either – they will normally have moved on to forming a view on the next crisis or debate.
And they have an unprecedented ability to influence and shape how humanity responds. This is what I have described as the smartphone superpower in our pockets.
Economic forces will accelerate this trend. The numbers of economically productive and connected people will continue to rise dramatically, as will their aspirations and expectations. The triumph of the individual.
Yet factors are getting in the way of this vision of diplomatic and therefore social Utopia.
One is our hardwired tendency to form gangs. Already, social media users are migrating towards closed or tribal platforms. Indeed several countries are aiming to create them, dividing and nationalising the Internet.
More corrosive than this desire to retreat into smaller or more exclusive groups are disinterest, apathy and distraction. As anyone with an iPad knows, it can unlock extraordinary and exciting potential. But it can also make us idler, whether through the temptations of cute cats, celebrity churn or ‘FOMO’, the fear of missing out that leads us to need to follow every twist and turn of today’s trend or story. We crave the buzz of the phone in our pocket, and the validation of the Facebook like. I tweet, therefore I am.
On this basis, some of the greatest threats to the coexistence and creativity we need to survive are now banality, extremism, short attention spans, disorder and alienation. Tyrannies have worked this out. They always have – look back at the Romans and their provision of ‘bread and circuses’ to keep the masses amused, fed and subservient. If we really are in the age of the ‘slacktivist’, the bad guys still win.
The world is fiendishly complicated. It is all too easy not to care, to see it all as too difficult, to swallow the easy Internet conspiracy, or simply oppose. It becomes harder to find those ready to fight for something, rather than against something. It is easier to destroy than to build.
How do we ensure, then, that more people use technology to become Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘man in the arena’, not just his ‘critic’?*
The reality is of course that we don’t have to know everything about everything. We don’t need to have an emotional reaction to everything. But, with the world getting smaller, we do need to care.
Why? Because the people in the news are also human. We cannot allow ourselves to be removed from a sense of community with the poorest or most oppressed, just because they happen to be born in a different country or have a different passport.2 It should not just be the world’s billionaires who commit a proportion of their income to humanitarian causes. History suggests that walls and checkpoints don’t last long.
We also need to care because it is pragmatic. We have got to find creative and ingenious ways to fix the twenty-first century’s mounting challenges if we are to thrive as a species. As a global civilisation emerges, our survival will depend to a greater extent to our ability to innovate across traditional boundaries. The threats no longer take the form that they did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Neither therefore must our responses.
And we need to care because history hasn’t finished. War has shown itself exceptionally resilient,3 and able to survive technological innovation and globalisation. Technology is not just empowering the good guy: look at the selfies of beheadings by the self-declared ‘Islamic State’. We read the histories of the past thinking that we know how it ends. But we don’t know how it ends. We’re not finished.4 We have not had the last world war, nor reached a plateau where everyone broadly agrees that liberal democratic values are as good as it gets. We have not got to a final destination. That should fill us with fear. But it should also fill us with hope.
The most influential generation in history will need to summon up fresh will to defend the progress, rule of law and freedoms we take for granted. Those ideas will only survive if we fight for them. We cannot be complacent, put these challenges in the ‘too difficult’ tray, nor wait for someone else to come up with the answers.
We also need to care because we haven’t yet worked out how to convert our incredible new access to information and potential influence into genuine influence. Like all superpowers, the smartphone depends on what we choose to do with it. We can download pictures of cute cats, follow the twists and turns of Justin Bieber’s hairstyle, ‘like’ something on Facebook and flirt with the girl in the class next door. Or we can use it to shape the environment around us.
Citizens can now control the public square, literally and digitally, in a way they never could before. But leaderless programmes, too often against something rather than for something, have so far fallen well short of their expectations. Citizen diplomats must convert that disparate energy into genuine and lasting positive change. As governments become more attuned to online digital opinion, citizen campaigns will matter more. But they must be accompanied by a real effort, by getting outside our comfort zones. They require backbone – organisers and institutions to turn the energy that they generate into something better than we inherited.
At other moments when technological innovation or historical changes have been most acute, leaders have seen the potential to use that change for common good. In President Harry Truman’s inaugural address of his second term in 1949, he argued that, ‘for the first time in history the counsels of mankind are to be drawn together and concerted for the purpose of defending the rights and improving the conditions of working people – men, women, and children – all over the world. Such a thing as that was never dreamed of before.’ President Kennedy saw the same potential in his own inaugural address in 1961. ‘More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery … For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and th
e skill to relieve the suffering of these people.’
We also need to summon up that idealism. Aristotle was not necessarily a diplomat. He counselled his pupil Alexander, in his brief period pre-Greatness, to ‘be a despot’ to his enemies, dealing with them ‘as with beasts or plants’. Yet Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, ‘human flourishing’, was more diplomatic: it was about combining virtue or excellence with reason and practical wisdom to live a better life. He saw this as a natural aim not just of philosophy but of politics and society.
Aristotle was also history’s first great scientist. I think that he would have acknowledged that in the twenty-first century the reason he aspired to is increasingly dependent on the digital tools we are creating. He would have seen access to more and better information as a positive, exciting trend. But he would also have been adamant, and probably tweeted it, that reason is not the property of the tools with which we access it. Our exploration, and the human development it must create, should still be driven by virtue. Otherwise, we’re just the wrong kind of mob.5
Twitter did not create democracy, democracy created Twitter. Facebook did not create liberty. Liberty created Facebook. Google did not create choice. Choice created Google.
This is not a new debate. Pre-smartphone and at a time when different threats seemed to be overwhelming mankind and different technologies changing the world, Charlie Chaplin’s reluctant demagogue changes the script in the final scene of The Great Dictator, telling his listeners that:
We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity … The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men – cries out for universal brotherhood – for the unity of us all … You, the people, have the power – the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure … Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.