The Future FCO Report

On Monday the FCO issued Future FCO a report commissioned by the Permanent Undersecretary in the wake of the November 2015 Spending Review that looks at how the FCO can improve its ‘internal working, policy making and impact’.  Given that the lead author was the FCO’s leading digital diplomacy enthusiast Tom Fletcher it wasn’t surprising that press coverage focused on technology and how the ministry needed to become more like Spooks or 24 and it was hopelessly out of date.  There’s some of that here but surprisingly little.

This is a report the management of the FCO and its staffing not foreign policy.  It is not written for public consumption it assumes a high degree of knowledge of systems and procedures and it rarely bothers to explain its reasoning.  In fact much of the conclusions are foreshadowed in the terms of reference the first of which is ‘identify opportunities for better, flatter and more flexible organization of policy capabilities, including through delayering and greater clarity on roles and responsibilities.’  The report claims that this is the ‘first post-internet review of the FCO’ which is pretty odd given the serial reviews that went on under the Labour government.

I’d pick out three  particularly interesting aspects

1. Shrinking the Whitehall Ambition.  One of the things that leapt out a me was this ‘the FCO should neither seek to lead not dedicate significant standing resource in London to thematic work’.  Non-security thematic work should be brought under a single multilateral directorate.  This isn’t really explained but it does imply a concession of policy space to the National Security Council and to other ministries, it’s not something I can imagine the ministry in Paris or Berlin doing without a big fight.
2. Defend the Embassies.  There is quite a bit in the report about strengthening the capability of the embassies to support all UK overseas functions this is something that has been going on for a while under the banner of One HMG – trying to get as many departments as possible under the same roof.   There is a definite push to get the Embassy to be a more joined up activity with a more of a country plan and a soft power plan.  There are some good ideas for trying to take some of the ‘corporate’ weight off embassies and to provide a better service to other government departments.  If the FCO is conceding policy space to other departments I’m not sure that ambassadors will have much success in keeping those other departments under control in the field.
3. Flexibility at all costs: Since the days of the Know How Fund in post communist Europe the work of the FCO has increasingly been organized around projects.  There’s an interesting discussion in the report about way this works in managerial terms – with strict oversight of relatively small amounts of money  – and some suggestions for reforming ‘programme’ as its referred to here.  Future FCO goes further and suggests that FCO directorates should have 25% of their staff in campaign pools rather than in permanent jobs in order to give more flexibility, in fact in an appendix the possibility is raised that the relationship with some countries (Nigeria is an example) should be managed on a campaign basis.  I can see the argument for flexibility but at the same time one of the features of diplomacy is its permanence.  As a student of British government I can also predict that the campaign pool will be the first thing to be cut when things get tough.

This report is very much in line with the past 20 years of FCO managerialism.  I think the difficulty is that in the UK these reports can be written without any consideration of foreign policy.  In them the FCO inhabits a kind of abstract policy space where what it does is ‘delivers policy objectives’ without any consideration of what the world is like and how well things are going.  In reading French or German reports the ministry is located within a more recognizable geopolitical world which gives some sense of what it has to be configured to do.

From Bruno Latour to British Foreign Policy via Tony Blair: Part 2

Latour refers to diplomacy quite frequently but his most extensive discussion is in his essay The War of the Worlds.  Originally dating from 2000 it was revised in the wake of 9/11. His target is partly Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis but he’s also invoking all kinds of ‘science wars’ and ‘culture wars’ that concern his broader interests.

His argument here extends the line set out in We Have Never Been Modern.  Western modernity sees the world as consisting of a single nature and multiple cultures.  The claim to authority of the West is based on its mastery of science and hence of nature so other cultures are just wrong.  Hence, the export of Western modernity is seen by the West as simply the correction of error but by those outside as a war against them their culture and their nature.

It is not astounding that the modernists managed to wage war all over the planet without ever coming into conflict with anyone, without ever declaring war? Quite the contrary! All they did was to spread, by force of arms, profound peace, indisputable civilization, uninterrupted progress.  They had no adversaries or enemies in the proper sense – just bad pupils.  Yes their wars, their conquests, were educational! Even their massacres were purely pedagogical!

He points out Carl Schmitt’s view that you can only have a real enemy where there is no common mediator.  For the ‘modernizers’ there has always been a common mediator.

Even when fighting fiercely, they always deferred to the authority of an indisputable arbiter, of a mediator far above all possible forms of conflict: Nature and its laws, Science and its unified matters of fact, Reason and its way to reach agreement.  When one benefits from a mandate given by a mediator who oversees the conflict, one is no longer running a war but simply carrying out policy operations, Schmitt says.

Like Huntington he sees that the Western project can no longer proceed unchallenged because other points of view can no longer be ignored but more importantly because the separation between nature/culture/politics can’t be sustained.  Hence the need to recognize the nature of the project and to see that there are other points of view.  You can only have diplomacy where you have an enemy, where other people or entities can’t be simply obliterated or absorbed into the system, that is taking other views seriously.

It is not a matter of replacing intolerant conquistadors with specialists of inter-cultural dialogue.  Who ever mentioned dialogue? Who asked for tolerance? No conquerors should rather be replaced by enemies capable of recognizing that those facing them are enemies also and not irrational beings, that the outcome of the battle is uncertain, and that consequently, it may be necessary to negotiate, and in earnest. While the inter-cultural dialogue implies that ninety per cent of the common world is already common and that there is a universal referee waiting for the parties to settle their petty disputes, the negotiation we should be prepared for includes the ninety per cent—God, Nature and souls included—and there is no arbiter.

Later he points out

 one should add the long-term reason of the diplomat. To be sure diplomats are often hated as potential traitors ready for seedy backroom compromises, but they have the great advantage of getting to work after the balance of forces has become visible on the ground, not before as in the case of police operations. Diplomats know that there exists no superior referee, no arbiter able to declare that the other party is simply irrational and should be disciplined. If a solution is to be found, it is there, among them, with them here and now and nowhere else. Whereas rationalists would not know how to assemble peace talks, as they will not give seats to those they call “archaic” and “irrational,” diplomats might know how to organize a parley among declared enemies who, in the sense of Carl Schmitt, may become allies after the peace negotiations have ended. The great quality of diplomats is that they don’t know for sure what are the exact and final goals—not only of their adversaries but also of their own people. It is the only leeway they possess, the tiny margin of the negotiations played out in closed rooms. The parties to the conflicts may, after all, be willing to alter slightly what they were fighting for. If you oppose rationalist modernizers to archaic and backward opponents, there is no war, to be sure, but there is no possible peace either. Negotiation cannot even start. Reason recognizes no enemy. But the outcome might be entirely different if you pit proponents of different common worlds one against the other. Because then diplomats could begin to realize that there are different ways to achieve the goals of the parties at war, including their own. Nothing proves in advance that modernizers might not be willing to modify theways to achieve their cherished goals if they were shown that the cult of nature makes it impossible to reach them.

This all comes back to Latour’s basic world view we’ve built a world that is incredibly messy filled with all kinds of hybrid constructions but the categories we use to describe it are far too simple with the result that we are constantly confused about what we’re doing.  He makes the point that we like to appeal to Science but in fact that there are lots of sciences.

If you’ve read this far you’ve probably got an inkling of how Tony Blair matches up to this.

Tomorrow: Tony Blair, one world and all good things go together.

Can Non State Actors Do Public Diplomacy?

Is public diplomacy something that is only done by states? Can non-state actors do public diplomacy?   This is a discussion that parallels a debate that has been going on in the Diplomatic Studies community for several years.

The canon of diplomatic theory for instance represented by Nicolson (1963), treats diplomacy as about the relations between states.  The visibility of non-governmental organizations, substate governments, multinational corporations with the space of international policy making has led some scholars to argue that these are also diplomatic actors.  In 2005 Jönsson and Hall published Essence of Diplomacy, this argued that diplomacy was marked by three essential features, communication, representation and the reproduction of the international order. In Contemporary Diplomacy (2010) Geoff Pigman cuts this list down to communication and representation with the consequence that his concern is with the ‘representation and communication between global actors, including (but not limited to) governments, multilateral institutions, civil society organizations and large firms.’ (p. 11).  Some have (eg L’Etang 2009) argued for the overlap between PR and diplomacy.   Indeed former state diplomats port their diplomatic skills into the corporate realm.

If you follow this line of argument that it would make sense to argue that the same applies to public diplomacy and that ‘engaging with foreign publics’ by non-state actors can also be counted as ‘public diplomacy’.  The problem is with that is then any international engagement activity gets moved into the diplomacy column and that almost all international communication becomes public diplomacy. Is it useful to treat the promotional campaign for the new Star Trek movie as public diplomacy?  I would argue that it’s better thought of as marketing.

The Jönsson/Hall/Pigman argument focuses on the processes of diplomacy but I would respond with an analogy from domestic politics.  This is a like saying that because political parties and interest groups both campaign they are engaged in the same activity.  There is certainly an overlap in the activities of parties and interest groups but the objectives, structures, constraints and opportunities of the two types of actor are different.  States and other actors are different types of actors and each has different resources and constraints. PD (or foreign public engagement or whatever you call it) is the way that it is because it is done by states; the response to it is due to the fact that it’s done by France or Israel or the US.  PD is much harder than marketing a movie because states are much more complicated entities.  Some of the processes are the same but the nature of the entities and relationships involved are different and this makes me reluctant to see non-state entities as doing PD unless they are acting on behalf of states.

References

Jönsson, C., and M. Hall (2005) Essence of diplomacy. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nicolson, H. (1963) Diplomacy. 3rd Edition. London: Oxford University Press .

L’Etang, J. (2009) ‘Public Relations and Diplomacy in a Globalized World: An Issue of Public Communication’, American Behavioral Scientist, 53: 607–626.

Pigman, G. (2010) Contemporary Diplomacy: Representation and Communication in a Globalized World. Cambridge: Polity Press.

EEAS and EU’s diplomacy

The European External Action Service (EEAS) entered into a new phase on January 1^st with transfer of staff from the Council and the Commission to EEAS. The new service, which was introduced by the Lisbon Treaty, should help the EU to speak with one voice and conduct a more “ambitious, effective, coherent and visible” foreign policy. This is what Catherine Ashton said about EEAS in the press release

“The service will mark a new beginning for European foreign and security policy as we bring
together and streamline all of the Union’s existing resources, staff and instruments. We will also receive a fresh injection of talent and skills as we incorporate Member States’ diplomats into our team. This combination of staff and resources will be more than the sum of its parts: we will be able to find synergies and develop new ideas, which will enhance our ability to act more creatively and decisively in an increasingly challenging world.”

An interesting observation about the role of EEAS and the public diplomacy component was made by David Hannay in this article where he comments that

“the demands of public diplomacy are clearly overtaking those of the more classical diplomatic tasks, and will require an effective response from the EEAS if it is not to find itself playing second fiddle to national diplomats who have increasingly been getting to grips with this new dimension.”

The idea behind EEAS is not to replace but to complement EU member states’ national embassies. With regards to small states, it will be interesting to see how EEAS will affect the (public) diplomacy of smaller EU members and how will smaller states be represented in this new structure.

More about EEAS, its role and challenges it faces can be found in this article published by Clingendael Institute.