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The Naked Diplomat: Understanding Power and Politics in the Digital Age
Tom Fletcher


Who will be in power in the 21st century? Governments? Big business? Internet titans? And how do we influence the future?Digital technology is changing power at a faster rate than any time in history. Distrust and inequality are fuelling political and economic uncertainty. The scaffolding built around the global order is fragile, and the checks and balances created over centuries to protect liberty are being tested, maybe to destruction. Tom Fletcher, the youngest senior British ambassador for two hundred years, considers how we – as governments, businesses, individuals – can survive and thrive in the twenty first century. And how we can ensure that technology can make it easier of citizens truly to take back control.










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Copyright (#u3b300cf6-c529-5e0a-a3e6-bad96a3209b0) (#u3b300cf6-c529-5e0a-a3e6-bad96a3209b0)


William Collins

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First published as Naked Diplomacy in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

Copyright © Tom Fletcher 2016

Tom Fletcher asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work

‘The Embassy’ (‘Sonnets from China XV’), from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden copyright © 1976 the Estate of W. H. Auden, by permission of Random House Inc.

Extracts from Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister copyright © 1980 Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay, by permission of Alan Brodie Representation Ltd, www.alanbrodie.com (http://www.alanbrodie.com)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover design by Johnathan Pelham

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008127589

Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780008127572

Version: 2017-02-20




Dedication (#u3b300cf6-c529-5e0a-a3e6-bad96a3209b0)


To Louise, without whom this book would never have been written.

To Charlie, Theo and Twitter, without whom it would have been written much faster.

And to the colleagues who march towards the sound of gunfire, in order to try to stop it.




Contents


Cover (#ue47218cf-2589-5b88-a3c2-d370f879f892)

Title Page (#ulink_a766b7dc-7161-5924-846d-4d76a0c844d3)

Copyright (#ulink_eb60a544-a081-53c2-b59d-2ef9163b7ddb)

Dedication (#ulink_d9f61728-ca23-5dce-b5e8-8eb70e1d329a)

Epigraph (#ulink_718a6a65-9e8d-5a89-9ff8-4c8bde368526)

INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION (#uafdd96fc-22b9-56d3-9c26-ed70ed628b68)

PREFACE: The Diplomat Who Arrived Too Late (#ulink_39eb528c-9f57-5fb0-86f0-c8dc7fa4e760)

INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION: Here Lies Diplomacy, RIP? (#ulink_0fc63d44-a991-56ab-8a9e-ef5729d6ef1e)

PART ONE – Glad-handing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Short History of Diplomacy (#ud70626f9-0561-51fb-a3cb-13b6f5030fb3)

1. Early Diplomacy: From Cavemen to Consuls (#ulink_4cac51a0-c4c3-5d13-a831-2d1ca4794e0b)

2. Diplomacy By Sea: From Columbus to Copyboys (#ulink_6fcd4091-7b98-55dc-bf5a-22425c60246e)

3. Diplomacy’s Finest Century (#ulink_169a6ac6-d3b4-5fa0-b765-5c68fef37283)

4. From Telephone to Television (#litres_trial_promo)

5. From E-mail to E-nvoys (#litres_trial_promo)

6. What Makes a Good Diplomat? (#litres_trial_promo)

PART TWO – Statecraft and Streetcraft: Power and Diplomacy in a Connected World (#litres_trial_promo)

7. iDiplomacy: Devices, Disruption and Data (#litres_trial_promo)

8. The End of Secrecy? Assange, Snowden and the Death of Bond (#litres_trial_promo)

9. Building New Power: Bombs, Books and Beckham (#litres_trial_promo)

10. Using New Power: Only Connect (#litres_trial_promo)

11. Selling Ladders for Other People to Climb Down (#litres_trial_promo)

12. A Naked Diplomat (#litres_trial_promo)

13. Envoy 2025 (#litres_trial_promo)

PART THREE – What Next? (#litres_trial_promo)

14. Who Runs the Digital Century? (#litres_trial_promo)

15. The Battle for Digital Territory (#litres_trial_promo)

16. The Case for Optimism (#litres_trial_promo)

17. A Progressive Foreign Policy ‘To Do’ List (#litres_trial_promo)

18. Citizen Diplomacy (#litres_trial_promo)

EPILOGUE: Valedictory (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Epigraph (#u3b300cf6-c529-5e0a-a3e6-bad96a3209b0)


As evening fell the day’s oppression lifted;

Tall peaks came into focus; it had rained:

Across wide lawns and cultured flowers drifted

The conversation of the highly trained.

Thin gardeners watched them pass and priced their shoes;

A chauffeur waited, reading in the drive,

For them to finish their exchange of views:

It looked a picture of the way to live.

Far off, no matter what good they intended,

Two armies waited for a verbal error

With well-made implements for causing pain,

And on the issue of their charm depended

A land laid waste with all its young men slain,

Its women weeping, and its towns in terror.

W. H. Auden, ‘The Embassy’


INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION (#u3b300cf6-c529-5e0a-a3e6-bad96a3209b0)

I would obviously like to claim that 2016 proved this book right. After all, in a post-truth world, we can all claim anything. In my favour, it was a year in which many of the themes of The Naked Diplomat – truth and lies online and offline; coexistence versus wall building; open versus closed societies; the implications of our inability to reach angry and frustrated parts of our societies – have been thrust into centre stage.

But nobody really called 2016. I predicted that of the United Nations, US, France and the UK, two would be run by women in 2017. I may have got the wrong two. It has been a logic-defying, irrational year, in which three acronyms officially entered the dictionary – ‘LOL’, ‘OMG’ and ‘WTF’. And many began to worry that liberalism could be confined to the dictionary.

Among the many ironies of 2016, Germany emerged as the bulwark against Fascism; the Pope emerged as the leading spokesman for freedom; China emerged as the defender of the Davos consensus; and a TV celebrity billionaire emerged as the voice of the ordinary American. Empowered citizens voted for policies they knew would make them poorer; for liars to clean up politics; and to take back control by reducing their global influence. And experts responded to accusations that they were no longer needed by being consistently wrong. Meanwhile, Russia bombed Syrian civilians to save them from terror. George Orwell, take a bow.

The beginning and end of chapters in history books can be pretty arbitrary. But 2016 is the end of the chapter that started in 1989, or maybe even 1945 or 1789. It could be the end of the American Age. It might mark the (hopefully temporary) resignation of America as a driving force for liberty throughout the world. Donald Trump’s election created a vacancy for leader of the free world. For the first time in my life, we can take nothing about the next year for granted, let alone the next decade: because 2016 is the new normal. We are in new and uncertain terrain.

I think three themes run through Brexit, the rise of Trump and the polarisation of political debate that we have seen.

Firstly, the West is in an Age of Distrust. Authority is one more devalued currency. The UK parliamentary vote on military action in Syria in 2013 was rejected because Iraq had destroyed confidence in the establishment’s ability to make sound foreign policy. Likewise, many rejected staying in the EU because MPs’ expenses, the banking crisis and EU mismanagement had destroyed confidence in Westminster, the Square Mile and Brussels. And – ironically for a tycoon and TV personality – Trump is a rejection of the establishment and mainstream media. YouGov report that public trust is plummeting not just in politics, the media and the banks, but also in teachers, doctors and the police.

So, institutions traditionally based on consent, deference and trust are failing, and politics is failing. For the first time in recent history, the challenge is not states with too much power, but too little. Declining powers such as Russia are more disruptive than rising ones. And the great powers don’t seem to want to exert great power. Meanwhile, a Europe used to summits where it discussed other countries as problems – Afghanistan/Pakistan, the Middle East, North Korea – is now finding itself on the agenda. On the global balance sheet, it has moved from being an exporter of solutions to an exporter of problems. And, as US Senator Mike Enzi says, ‘if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu’.

Facing this new context, leaders and politicians are struggling to connect, to get their message through. As Shelley is quoted as saying of a rival, ‘he had lost the art of communication, but not alas the gift of speech’. And the politicians know it. One recent European leader told me: ‘We no longer think it is just the past that is another country. It is now the present that is another country.’ We all feel better connected but less well informed. For the first time, our problem is too much information, not too little. Being more in touch has reduced our ability to ‘reach out and touch people’.1 (#litres_trial_promo) Hence the distrust.

Secondly, we have been reminded of Mark Twain’s nifty observation that history rhymes.* (#ulink_bde031f4-d051-5491-b405-b1ca97e81f41) After economic downturns, nations turn inwards at the moment they should look outwards (and this was, of course, happening before Trump). They become nationalist when they should be internationalist. I now understand why we spent so much time at school studying the Weimar Republic. The consequences of the crash of 2008–9 could be as great as those after the crash of 1929.

And thirdly, as the first edition of this book argued, the flux we are experiencing is just the initial implications of the Internet. How humans interact socially and economically is changing at a faster pace than at any time in history. So how we interact politically is going to change too, as we are seeing in elections throughout the West. Look at the impact of the printing press and scale it up. There will be many losers. At a time of massive prosperity, inequality continues to rise, unleashing the spasms of anger we are seeing at the ballot box and that we will increasingly see on our streets. It was not American poverty that generated Trump but American prosperity.

I have a confession to make: I was on Trump’s mailing list. It started out gently. I took his questionnaire on media bias, just to disagree with it. But then I was sucked further in, like a potential terrorist being slowly radicalised. I received several emails a day addressing me as his key supporter. More questionnaires. I had one asking for debate advice – I suggested a greater focus on tolerance. One from Newt Gingrich asked for personal advice on how to win in November – ‘Change the candidate,’ I offered. So much for experts.

But thanks to my fascination with how his campaign pitched their world view to those they thought shared it – aggressive, macho, divisive, dishonest – I did not unsubscribe from this deluge of direct engagement. It reminded me of two personal experiences as a communicator. Firstly, my Indiana summer selling door to door in the Midwest – ‘Everyone’s buying it,’ we would repeat like a mantra. And secondly, the online arguments with extremists in the Middle East that this book describes. They and the Trump campaign used the same rhetorical and political devices – ‘us and them’, find someone to blame, we can make you great again.

Let’s be honest with ourselves. Many of us have an inner Trump somewhere. The bit of us that is too prone to boastfulness, to anger, that seeks constant competition and that hits out at those we think are weaker than ourselves.

But the difference is that, for most of us, this is not something we’re proud of. And it is something we spend our lives finding ways to contain and restrain. Most people manage to do that at some point between the ages of three and five. But we work at it, and almost all of us get there – we contain our inner Trump. We evolve.

I worked in Downing Street during previous transitions of power – going from the Gordon Brown to the David Cameron era was like trying to master dressage after rodeo. But I also observed close-up four transitions of the crucial and often misunderstood relationship between US president and UK prime minister: Blair/Bush to Bush/Brown to Brown/Obama to Obama/Cameron. They are moments of opportunity and excitement. But they also require great sensitivity and care. Leaders have a sixth sense about political capital, and who has it or doesn’t have it.

When Senator Obama visited Downing Street some months before the 2008 election, he had it in buckets. He was keen to give a suitably presidential statement outside the famous black door. One of my jobs was to keep him in No. 10 as long as possible, so that everyone would see how good the personal rapport was with Prime Minister Brown. So I took him to Margaret Thatcher’s old study to look at the particles of moon rock that President Richard Nixon had gifted Prime Minister Harold Wilson in January 1970. As I showed him these extraordinary and inspiring souvenirs of a more ambitious age, I hoped for a moment of reflection, maybe even an unforgettable piece of Obama rhetoric on America’s future. Instead, the senator recoiled. All day I wondered why – was it mention of Nixon? Was he overwhelmed by the moment? Only later did I realise that my tie had taken some friendly fire while I was changing my son’s nappy that morning. The future leader of the free world had not had the ideal introduction to British hygiene. I hope the special relationship did not suffer too much as a result.2 (#litres_trial_promo)

I think President Obama is a humble man with much to be arrogant about. We will find out whether President Trump is the opposite. Whether he can learn to restrain his inner Trump. And whether we really are set for a period in which the most powerful nation in the world is led by a blond Berlusconi.3 (#litres_trial_promo) Ironically, we are left hoping that he is a politician who doesn’t follow through on his election promises.

More importantly, we will learn fast whether society has evolved, has learnt from history how to contain its own inner Trump. Humankind’s story is one of the gradual – albeit with bad years, and sometimes bad decades – evolution of reason over craziness, expertise over instinct, community over tyranny, and honesty over lies. Painstakingly and with great sacrifices, we built political systems to restrain the dangerous individual who believes that only he – and almost always he – has the answers. As a species, our strength is that we know we are a work in progress.

So we need to remind ourselves how to restrain tyrants. Basic dictatorship is not complicated. It tends to follow very similar patterns: an economic crash, blamed by the aspiring tyrant on elites, minorities and his opponents; the promise of greatness, of bread and circuses (or cookouts and reality TV in the modern version); the gradual undermining of institutions; intimidation of the independent media; the reward (not confined to dictatorships, of course) of loyalty over competence; holding enemies close; the building of a personality cult; and the systematic removal of checks and balances.

At each of those moments, the dictator hopes that we stay silent, argue among ourselves, or become distracted. In the period ahead, we are going to find out if the checks and balances created over centuries to constrain our inner Trumps are being simply tested, or tested to destruction. The painful lessons of the twenty-first century stand before the firing squad, wondering if they will hear the first shot.

And what about Brexit – depending on where you stand, either Independence Day, a ‘quiet revolution’, or a suicide note.

The UK’s role in the twenty-first century will not be defined by the EU referendum itself, but how the British respond to it. The period ahead will require a sense of collective purpose that we have not had since the Second World War.

I spent much of 2016 in places that have entered an uncertain time because of the referendum: Dublin, Belfast, Barcelona, Gibraltar, Berlin, London, Cyprus. The decision of the UK people to leave the EU may have been based largely on local factors, but it is the best example of how decisions in one country now affect everyone. Ironically, our localism made the case for internationalism, because it has placed us in the position of needing to work harder on our international partnerships. It is also part of an even greater irony – a worldwide campaign against globalisation.

These are moments of peril for Europe more widely. For the first time since the Second World War, people are leaving the European centre at an alarming rate, and parties that have dominated are not just losing but being wiped out. W. B. Yeats saw it well at a time of similar upheaval in 1919:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.4 (#litres_trial_promo)

That passionate intensity is at the heart of the third symptom of twenty-first-century change, and a theme of much of this book – the polarisation of debate and the consequent rise of extremism.

As later chapters describe, I was ambassador in Beirut when the Syria conflict began, and lived through the four years in which it developed into the worst war of the twenty-first century. Let’s remember that the Assad killing machine has no pause button. Industrial terror is its factory setting, and it survives only through brutality. I will spend much of my life trying to explain how and why we let it happen on our watch. And much of my time now is spent trying to ensure that Syrian children denied education do not pay the price. They deserve better than the choice between a barrel-bombing tyrant, the box-office barbarity of ISIL, and the perils of a Mediterranean raft. They deserve more than the suicide vest or life jacket. The closing chapters of this book argue for a return to our humanitarian responsibilities.

But we cannot understand the wider challenges facing the world without looking at Syria. There is such a strong connection between breakdown in the Middle East and the polarisation of debate in our own societies. And Syria is the grimmest example of what happens when the international order fails – you get carnage, great power conflicts, and a Petri dish for extremism.

And that extremism will continue to have consequences for all of us. I describe in this book how the three cities in which I have spent most of my adult life – Paris, Beirut and Nairobi – have been victims of terror. The sociopaths with smartphones have reawakened our own versions of extremism. It is a vicious cycle in which those who want to radicalise communities in the West and the Middle East feed off each other’s messages.

So, the scaffolding put up around the twentieth century’s global order is fragile. We are still building the driverless car but seem to have achieved a driverless world. An age of austerity has combined with an age of migration and an age of massive technological change. This brings the mix of immigration, insecurity and inequality that fuels nationalism and extremism.

As a result, I believe we will see new battles in the twenty-first century. Not, like the twentieth century, between East and West, North and South, men and women, black and white, or Islam and Christianity.

Instead we will see four new dividing lines.

Firstly, between coexisters (like the caveman in my first chapter) and wall builders. The target of Islamist extremists is often the ‘greyzone’ – places where people interact across communities and races. This places them on the same side as Western extremists, on the wrong side of the twenty-first-century’s key argument: between those who want to live together and those who don’t. Their publicity machine thrives on Donald Trump, burkini bans, and any measure that makes Western claims of openness, tolerance and respect seem a sham. In the battle for modern Islam, we rely heavily on the moderate voices prevailing. Yet too often we undermine their message by not sticking to our deeply held values. There isn’t a twenty-first-century problem to which the answer is another brick in the wall. Post-US election, there is a bigger battle at stake for all of us: to ensure that it is harder for the next Trump to weaponise intolerance in the way he has.

Secondly, we will see a division between libertarians and control freaks. This will pit the prophets of complete freedom against those who argue we need secrets, in our personal lives and as governments. So we have Julian Assange and WikiLeaks at one end of the spectrum and the North Koreans at the other. Most of us will find our position, issue by issue. But there will be surprises too. Former Commander of Joint Special Operations Command Stan McChrystal is right that it is now more dangerous to share too little information than too much. Governments are beginning to recognise that without opening up they cannot establish the trust necessary to govern. Chapter 8 looks in more detail at this balance between security and liberty.

Thirdly, the line will be between those who want to make the problem bigger and those who want to make it smaller. This book argues that technology has created a significant shift in the power balance between global, regional, national, local and individual. All the talk in Britain at the moment is about our relationship as a nation with Europe. Yet these two entities – the superstate and the nation state – are the two that are going to lose power fastest in the twenty-first century. We’ll need better global systems; more powerful local systems; and we’ll want more individual control. That doesn’t leave the nation state or regional organisation with much. We will need to make the case to a more sceptical public that it is sometimes in the national interest to pool sovereignty.

Finally, we will see a growing chasm between ‘on demand’ winners and ‘on demand’ losers. Many of us are going to love the ‘on demand’ economy. We’ll get more of what we want when we need it. But it will take a lot of people to service that. Their time will be on demand so that ours can be our own. Make that gap between winners and losers too wide, and we create peril. Growing inequality is the biggest geopolitical risk today.5 (#litres_trial_promo) If displaced people had a country, it would be the twenty-first largest in the world.6 (#litres_trial_promo)

We better mind that gap.

So how do we survive the twenty-first century as businesses, individuals and countries?

We can start by getting out of our echo chamber. I only realised the day after the US election that my Twitter timeline had no Trump supporters on it – maybe that’s a sign I’m pretty closed-minded too. One of the ironies of the final twenty-four hours of the campaign was seeing Hillary Clinton’s team singing along to ‘Livin’ On a Prayer’ – I fear Gina and Tommy voted Trump.

Maybe the silver lining of 2016 is that more good people will become activists. As the murder of the inspirational British MP Jo Cox reminded us, we have to defend the progress and freedoms we took for granted with greater urgency and passion.

So the most influential generation in history, empowered by access to information and networks previous generations could never have imagined, will need to summon up fresh will to protect what my generation took for granted. They will need to establish checks and balances on the new emperors, from tech giants to tyrants, just as we learnt to do on the old ones.

Second, we can thrive by investing in education. If America changes tack on climate change, the life expectancy of the next generation just got shorter. Instead we need to better equip them with curiosity, creativity and courage. And kindness. Let’s not forget kindness. For moral and pragmatic reasons, our greatest challenge now is making more people less poor. And an individual’s freedom of opportunity should not be defined by where they are born. Right now it is easier to destroy than to build. But we need to build a global education system that can reach the seventy-five million children not in school, and give everyone equal access to the best we can teach them. Someone needs to write the first global curriculum, with global citizenship at its heart – now there’s an idea …

Third, we can survive by shifting our mindset from maps and chaps to networks and coalitions. If our world view is shaped and defined by hierarchies, organograms and titles, we need to see the world afresh. I tried to apply these lessons in a review of the UK Foreign Office, released by the government in April 2016. Much media reaction focused on a suggestion from one envoy that diplomats should become more like the characters in 24 or Spooks. Hacks imagined an army of social media-savvy, digitally literate e-nvoys, new Internet pioneers putting the OMG into HMG.

But the more important message of the review was that in the Digital Age we need to move our organisations away from prioritising competences, hierarchy and inputs and towards those based on skills, networks and outputs. I hope the future Foreign Office will be less male and pale, more digital, more expert, and more flexible. The buccaneering diplomats on the walls of King Charles Street will soon be joined by portraits of pioneering modern diplomats: the first female and minority ambassadors; the local staff who keep embassies running when events force UK colleagues to flee; the consular staff who rescue Brits in the most difficult of circumstances.

I am now trying to apply similar lessons to innovation at the United Nations. How can we use solar drones for better peacekeeping and provision of education? How can we create digital citizenship to increase security and reduce identity fraud and international crime? How can we use social media to engage and build a new generation of global citizens? How do we build the online rights to match the offline rights we have codified? How do we overhaul the global system for humanitarian giving? How do we respond to the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence? We need to find new ways to make the huge amounts of great work done by the UN more meaningful and accessible to the public. That takes more than a hashtag and a civil society side event. And leaders need to get much better at executing global policy, not simply announcing it.

Fourth, a successful century depends on us winning the argument for openness. There will be a temptation to pull up the drawbridge and focus purely on domestic security or nationalist politics. Let’s be in no doubt: a retreat from the world is the path to irrelevance and drift. Our national interest now depends on our internationalism. Countries are strongest when outward-looking, pioneering, exploring, welcoming. So we must marshal our best national instincts and values, and not our worst. In the battle with more isolationist and intolerant opponents, we have to show that our societies have not themselves become intolerant or isolationist.

This is not just posturing. We need a world view based on actually viewing the world, because our ability to keep pace with the dangerous political and social implications of technological change depends on our brightest minds coming up with ingenious solutions to problems, from climate change to economic instability. We should be unashamedly backing freedom of the Internet, so that the smartest people in the world can create together the extraordinary ideas that we don’t yet know we need. We should be proud when our countries are magnetic, and smart enough to recognise the economic potential of migrants and refugees, from Einstein to Jobs. We were all migrants once, and the twenty-first century might make us migrants again. This will be a century of people on the move: improved communications, the Internet, climate change and conflict will create more migration than any previous era. So we need to learn how to absorb, assimilate, coexist.

However insecure we will feel at times in the coming period, the answer to modern security threats is in fact more liberty, equality, fraternity. Not less. Or as Benjamin Franklin put it at a time of similiar uncertainty: “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

The gadgets we marvel at today will not seem marvellous for long. The changes we wonder at won’t seem wonderful for long. The predictions we think are crazy won’t seem crazy for long. At moments in 2016, it appeared that technology had disrupted democracy. But used properly it still gives us the means to tackle inequality, improve cyber and economic security, outsmart the extremists, ensure that artificial intelligence helps not harms us, and make it easier for citizens to be part of government.

But that all depends on us – whether we are just connected to technology or can truly connect with each other through that technology. Because Facebook and Twitter didn’t create our desire to connect. Our desire to connect created Facebook and Twitter.

Progress zigzagged in 2016. So what can citizen diplomats7 (#litres_trial_promo) do in response?

We can build networks in a time of institutional failure; consensus in a time of arguments; and bridges in a time of walls.

We can strive for expertise, patience, perspective and judgement in a time of fake news, sound bites and echo chambers.

We can aspire to be courageously calm, tolerant and honest in a time of outrage, intolerance and post-truth politics.

We can be internationalist in a time of nationalism, and open-minded in a time of closed minds.

Above all, we must remain curious in a time of too much certainty.

I’m now an ex-Excellency, a recovering ambassador. But I stand by my original conclusion – we need to forge a renewed spirit of global citizenship.

Diplomats will play our part. But naked diplomacy is too important just to leave to diplomats.

* (#ulink_e76bac9a-ef62-5a03-830b-66ebe72d9c32) Perhaps it is appropriate in a post-truth year that there is no strong evidence that either Twain or Shelley actually made these observations.



PREFACE




The Diplomat Who Arrived Too Late (#u3b300cf6-c529-5e0a-a3e6-bad96a3209b0)


Shen Weiqin was the diplomatic adviser to Emperor Qin Er Shi during China’s Qin dynasty. It was a pretty cushy job, with steady access to the many pleasures of the royal court, a fair amount of arduous but interesting travel, and long periods of relative peace in which to study, opine and schmooze.

Shen knew his master’s mind and his master’s foibles, and was well suited to the role we now call a ‘sherpa’, the key adviser who helps the leader prepare for diplomatic summits. In modern statecraft, the sherpa’s assistant is called the yak, a metaphor that would also have meant something to His Excellency Shen Weiqin. The modern yak carries the mountains of paper generated and required by any modern diplomatic negotiation. Shen’s carried him.

Shen must have anticipated a routine month’s work as he set out for the Congress of the Tribes in Xianyang in 208 BC. His emperor’s armies had soundly thrashed the Chu tribe, burying alive all those who surrendered. This is what we now call hard power, though the Geneva Convention discourages such treatment of defeated opponents.

The victory left the field open for a strong peace treaty that would give Qin increased taxes and land rights, and the opportunity to recruit any remaining Chu warriors to fight for him. This would have been straightforward and probably routine business for Shen, who by this time had negotiated three such deals with the unburied survivors of other defeated clans.

Making peace is easier when you have shown you can make war. As he carried out his restorative and silver-tongued victor’s diplomacy, Shen was an early example of the statecraft that President Theodore Roosevelt aspired to many centuries later: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.’ Only the choice of weapon was more deadly.

But Shen was to be rudely awakened from his diplomatic comfort zone. The envoys representing the Chu tribe had developed a new and innovative means of passing messages quickly, by positioning rested horses along the key trade routes. This was the third-century BC equivalent of a decent social media account. As a result, they had gathered intelligence of an uprising in the west and of disquiet within Emperor Qin’s ranks, caused by the despotism of his favourite and most intimate adviser, the flamboyant eunuch Zhao Gao (who deserves his own book). Shen’s diplomatic opponents were able to use this crucial information to hold out for a much better deal than they would otherwise have got.

Shen had been outmanoeuvred at his own game. In modern language, his diplomacy had been disrupted. The chastened and no doubt increasingly saddle-sore envoy returned with trepidation to his master to report the bad news.

As is probably already evident, Emperor Qin was no shrinking violet. The previous year he had tricked his elder brother, the rightful heir to the Qin dynasty, into committing suicide. Mercy had not got him his throne, and was not going to help him keep it.

In this case, Qin decided to punish poor execution with slow execution. Shen was tied to a wooden frame and ‘slow-sliced’, a particularly gruesome demise involving the methodical removal of 999 body parts in random order as drawn from a hat: death by a thousand cuts, give or take. The process, ‘lingchi’, literally means ‘ascending a mountain slowly’, a metaphor that resonated with his pre-summit diplomacy in a way that Shen was presumably unable to relish. His diplomatic failure was classified by the emperor as an act of treason, and so no opium was administered to ease the pain.

It is not recorded at what point in the three-day process Shen passed away. But his grisly exit provided evidence for Lu You, one of history’s first human rights activists, to argue in 1198 for the abolition of lingchi, which is the only reason we now know about the case. Again, probably no consolation to poor old Shen.

Shen discovered the hardest way that diplomacy is Darwinian: its practitioners need to evolve to survive.

In today’s diplomatic services, the consequences for poor performers are more time-consuming yet less draconian than they were for Qin. But given that the alternative to peacemaking is often war, our diplomatic failures and mistakes can still have the gravest fallout.

It matters that we get it right.

Historical tales of grisly deaths aside, formal diplomatic encounters with contemporary Asian governments are friendly but often fairly dry affairs. Perhaps it is the heat, the time difference, or the lengthy delays caused by translation. With our Chinese interlocutors it was often striking that the army of note-takers stopped writing when their leader spoke – not only out of deference, but because they already knew exactly what he was going to say. They would tell me that they found it odd that our prime ministers were so much less well disciplined.

So I was perplexed at one of these heavily choreographed exchanges to see several counterparts on the other side of the table stifling uncharacteristic giggles and passing notes. My diplomatic antennae were well attuned to spotting potential gaffes, especially those that would appeal to our mischievous travelling press lobby, ever ravenous for stories of incompetence – working with the UK media for the UK government is often like playing for a football team whose own fans have decided should be relegated.

Trying not to disturb my prime minister as he made a complex case through a flustered translator for the rebalancing of the global economy, I scoured the room for evidence of a problem, without success. Eventually I called over one of the embassy experts, who after some deliberation pointed out that it was my name plate in front of me (the wording of which was of course visible to everyone except myself) that had caused such confusion and hilarity. Someone had translated my job title – Private Secretary to the Prime Minister for Foreign Affairs – as ‘Intimate Typist for the Prime Minister’s Affairs Overseas’.

There are many, too many, bureaucratic positions around the average modern leader, but few leaders have an official to type out their love letters.

I spent four years in 10 Downing Street in the role of Private Secretary for Foreign Affairs, under three very different prime ministers: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. I also helped to advise Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in his first months in the role, giving me experience of the unholy trinity of major UK political parties.

Though the job involved little intimate typing, it did include briefing the prime minister, joining his official meetings, and circulating an account for ministries and embassies to digest and act on. The unofficial motto of the Private Secretary should be that ‘my job will be done when historians have read what I think he thinks he ought to have said’.

In reality, writing these records was only cover for the real job: a combination of policy adviser, journalist, negotiator, bag carrier and relationship manager. Occasionally I was also a therapist, administering reassurance and encouragement at tougher moments, or urging humility at better ones. Sometimes I was a translator, who could follow a prime minister and a French president to places that the female interpreter could not reach (no doubt happily for her). I was a recruitment consultant, who suddenly found senior ambassadors awaiting news of their next position to be very friendly. And even a bodyguard, as when Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe emerged from a dark corner of a United Nations summit to seek a handshake with Gordon Brown. I wrote speeches, dreamt up policy initiatives, and procured ProPlus for David Cameron from President Obama during a long summit session when two European Commission leaders had droned on for even longer than usual. I was once job-shadowed by a prince.

Few jobs in government are more gruelling than that of Private Secretary. The first voice I heard each morning, and the last each night, was the relentlessly cheerful No. 10 switchboard. The operators could gently ruin another weekend with skills that would be the envy of the smoothest diplomat. The hours meant that I would often bath my son in the Downing Street flat, and once took him to a Top Secret meeting I was chairing – he was only three, so I hope that no official secrets were compromised. During one demanding period, my wife interrupted a long weekend conference call between the prime minister and a head of state to inform us all in undiplomatic language of how fed up she was that I was still on the line. After an awkward moment to digest this, the PM suggested gently that it was probably time to end the call.

But it is worth it. Jobs in Downing Street give you a ringside seat, and often a place in the ring. Having watched the US election result alone in Gordon Brown’s office in the early hours of the morning, I woke him to tell him of President Obama’s victory. I was in the car with Gordon Brown as he left the prime minister’s official country house at Chequers for the last time, and with David Cameron as he arrived there for the first time. I listened in to President Obama’s farewell call to Gordon Brown as I walked to David Cameron’s study to brief Cameron on his imminent congratulatory call from the White House.

Few jobs can be as exciting, and such a privilege. They give you an extraordinary insight into moments of history, and the characters who shape them.

But this is not a book about my time in Downing Street, and nor is it one in which I talk about private conversations between leaders or the confidential issues on which I have worked as a diplomat – I don’t believe that public servants should write ‘kiss and tell’ books, which undermine trust between future leaders and their advisers. The anecdotes I use are purely illustrative, and the tip of the iceberg. The ‘Private’ is more important than the ‘Secretary’.

This is also not a book about foreign policy or international relations in the traditional sense of wars and treaties, maps and chaps, big powers and bigger egos. There are plenty of those written by much smarter and more knowledgeable people, and they won’t enjoy this one much. It is not a classic diplomatic memoir, in which the retired statesman – armed with hindsight, disappointment and accumulated grievance – explains why the world would be a better place if only all the pesky politicians, foreigners or fellow diplomats had listened to him more. Nor is this a classic book on diplomacy written by a leader either anxious to shape or defend their historical record,* (#ulink_6a59f9ce-1626-597f-a40f-0282606c297c) or to burnish their statesperson credentials prior to a run for office.

Instead, I want to explain why diplomacy matters more than ever in the Digital Age, and not just to diplomats.

During my time as Private Secretary I saw technology changing statecraft. I worked for the last paper-and-pen prime minister, Tony Blair; the first email prime minister,† (#ulink_cc362b06-ef50-59b0-bd20-cf8bc86b77fb) Gordon Brown; and the first iPad prime minister, David Cameron.1 (#litres_trial_promo) When I started, we had to consider how policy would look on the Sky News ticker at the bottom of the screen: 140 words. By the time I left, we were judging how it would look on Twitter: 140 characters.

This shift represents wider tectonic shifts in communications, and therefore society. The iGeneration has more opportunity than any generation before it to understand their world, to engage with it and to shape it. In the years since 9/11 the globe has been transformed more by American geeks in dorms than al-Qaeda operatives in caves. Mark Zuckerberg will be remembered long after Osama Bin Laden.

But it has been citizens from Tunis to Kiev who took the ability to network that those geeks created and turned it into something extraordinary. In years to come, people may say that the most powerful weapon in this period of the twenty-first century was not sarin gas or the nuclear bomb, but the smartphone. We have seen the power of the best of old ideas allied with the best of new technology. Regimes can ban iPhones, but the freedom and innovation that they represent will get through in the end.

This new context changes everything. Increasingly, it matters less what a prime minister or diplomat says is ‘our policy’ on an issue – it matters what the users of Google, Facebook or Twitter decide that it is. Set-piece events are being replaced by more fluid, open interaction with the people whose interests we are there to represent.

So, escaping the politics, thrills and tensions of Downing Street, there was only one place to go to maintain the adrenalin. In 2011, I moved to the epicentre of many of the earthquakes shaking the Middle East: Beirut.

My nineteenth-century predecessors as ambassadors to Lebanon went by horse, traversing the Levant region at a civilised pace that modern Lebanese traffic jams try to recreate. My twentieth-century predecessors went by air and road – one, Edward Spears, landed during the Second World War and commandeered at gunpoint the first car he saw.

By the time I got there, communication was digital. Living on the Road to Damascus, I anticipated revelations. From the beginning of my stay, it was clear to me that if we couldn’t win the argument for democracy, politics and coexistence in a country like Lebanon, we’d lose it closer to home. And that social media was a new and vital tool for us in fighting that battle, just as it was a tool for our opponents. We would need to go toe to toe, tweet by tweet.

Celebrity cook Jamie Oliver, as the Naked Chef, sought to pare back cooking to the essentials. In Lebanon, I came to realise that the diplomat needs to do the same (perhaps with an iPad to protect his modesty), while preserving the skills that have always been essential to the role: an open mind, political savvy, and a thick skin. I moved from being an intimate typist to being a Naked Diplomat.

Like the best traditional diplomacy, iDiplomacy is raw and human. The ‘tweeting Talleyrands’2 (#litres_trial_promo) need to interact, not transmit. They will learn the language of this new terrain in the way they have learnt Mandarin or Arabic.

Equipped with the right kit, and the right courage, diplomats should be among the pioneers of the new digital terrain. They are already writers, advocates and analysts, albeit for a rarefied audience. They must now become digital interventionists. The most important thing social media does for us is not information management, or even engagement. It is that, for the first time, we have the means to influence the countries we work in on a massive scale, not just through elites.

This is exciting, challenging and subversive. Getting it wrong could start a war: imagine if a diplomat mistakenly tweeted a link to an offensive anti-Islam film. Getting it right has the potential to rewrite the diplomatic rulebook. A digital démarche,‡ (#ulink_b7a2889b-0a83-5f51-bfad-c30ea20b7d73) involving tens of thousands, will be more effective than the traditional démarche by a single ambassador, because it can mobilise public opinion to change another country’s policy.

The Internet brings non-state actors into the conversation. That’s part of the point. Those we engage with will be a mix of the influential, curious, eccentric and hostile. Once they’re in, they can’t be ignored. Diplomacy is action not reportage, so diplomats will need to show that they can use these new tools to change the world, not just describe how it looks.

I ask colleagues who are not convinced about the power of these new digital tools to imagine an enormous diplomatic reception with all their key contacts. No serious diplomat would delegate such an event, as some delegate their Twitter accounts. None would stand in the corner shouting platitudes about warm bilateral relations, as do too many people via official social media channels. No one would turn up but lurk silently in the corner, as do too many on digital accounts. Better to be in the mix, sharing information in order to get information, hearing the best of the new ideas and confronting the worst. With or without the Ferrero Rocher.

When the way the world communicates changes, so must its diplomats. They transformed the profession when the ground was cultivated, when the stirrup was invented, when sea routes opened up, when empires rose and fell, and when the telephone came along. Someone once said that you could replace diplomats with the fax. They saw off the fax, and – in more recent years – the telegram. (Yes, in that order for the British Foreign Office.)

Now we have to prove that you can’t replace diplomats with Wikipedia, just because it knows more facts. You can’t replace diplomats with Skype, just because you can now speak to far-flung places over a broadband line. And you can’t replace diplomats with Twitter, just because you no longer need to shout from a real balcony to reach crowds of people. Diplomats must adapt their business and their mindset to these extraordinary and revolutionary new digital tools.

Many of us have made mistakes on social media, but the biggest mistake is not to be on it. It is survival of the digitally fittest.

We need to seize our smartphones.

But are we already too late?

* (#ulink_5633a8fe-13f1-55d0-bb77-102776fbfb37) As Churchill said, ‘History will be kind to me, because I intend to write it.’

† (#ulink_591f0f98-1296-5f79-bdb8-b9d2e1d532f8) I once received an email from Gordon Brown at 3.45 a.m. Another time I showed him a document on my BlackBerry. I was pleased when he commented ‘This is good.’ But not for long. He clarified – ‘Not your paper, that’s hopeless, the scroll function.’

‡ (#ulink_7ea6658f-d1ac-5370-b0ee-74cfe224f2b9) French term for a formal diplomatic meeting, in which the ambassador passes on messages from his capital.



INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION




Here Lies Diplomacy, RIP? (#u3b300cf6-c529-5e0a-a3e6-bad96a3209b0)


‘Now listen, Mother dear,’ said Basil, ‘the Foreign Service has had its day – enjoyable while it lasted, no doubt, but over now. The privileged being of the future is the travel agent.’

Nancy Mitford, ‘Don’t Tell Alfred’ (1960)

New York Times columnist Roger Cohen has declared that ‘diplomacy – the kind that produced Nixon’s breakthrough with China, an end to the Cold War on American terms, the Dayton peace accord in Bosnia – is dead’.1 (#litres_trial_promo) He is not alone. Should diplomats be packing up their diplomatic bags and finding something more productive to do?

Diplomacy is easy when you are a country on the up. Representatives of other countries answer your telephone calls, seek you out, expand their embassies and trade delegations. Magazines put you on the cover and talk up your rise. Your leader gets invited to the country houses of his counterparts, keen to bask in his reflected vigour and success. Your business lounges fill up. You have the wind in your sails.

Diplomacy is easy when you have won on the battlefield. Your rivals or opponents are more inclined to see things your way, and your allies to cut you some slack. You can flex your muscles and set the terms.

Diplomacy is easy when your people are in a pioneering mindset. The diplomats who manage empires aren’t the people who build them. They are preceded by traders, explorers, innovators. The great civilisations were all built on great start-ups. Countries succeed when they have a magnetic quality, and an openness to the world around them: when they invest more in bridges than walls. When their world view is formed by having actually viewed the world.

Diplomacy is easy when the rules are clear, when nations are all playing on the same chess board. The subtle dance between the nineteenth century’s great European states had moments of great jeopardy, and in the end could not contain the shifts in the underlying tectonics of power. But, post-Napoleon, the key players all felt a shared interest in preserving a status quo. They spoke the same language, literally and metaphorically – they even ensured with touching but shrewd generosity that it was the language of the vanquished party. There was an elaborate code to their collective work, albeit surrounded by lashings of protocol, gallons of alcohol, fiendishly delicate etiquette, and the occasional deadly duel.

But diplomacy is hard when you are a nation or a region in real or perceived decline, when it becomes more difficult to get that White House meeting, or to schedule that telephone call. Or when your ‘podiums and president’ press conference is downgraded to a brief ‘pool spray’ photo-op. Or worse, a ‘grip and grin’. When the eyes of the world’s leaders flicker over your shoulder at the more hungry or vigorous new powers on the block.

Diplomacy is hard when your military power is on the wane, either because austerity is biting, or because your citizens are less willing to make great sacrifices to impose the nation’s interests, extend its influence or intimidate its opponents. ‘Gunboat diplomacy’ does not get you far without a gunboat. Or aircraft carrier. Threats of military force lose their potency when the dictator being threatened knows that your red lines* (#ulink_53bbe07e-cf3a-592e-8b78-824199896579) are easily erased.

Diplomacy is hard when you are competing with players with greater pioneering zeal, when your nation loses its creative edge or hunger for innovation. Diplomacy is hard when a lack of resources or confidence leads to an introspective national mindset rather than a drive to find new ideas, markets and sources of renewal. When your agenda is set by demagogues and tabloids. When even some on your own side want to throw in the towel and decline quietly and unobtrusively in a corner. When visitors to your embassy or ministry smell the faint whiff of genteel decay.

Diplomacy is hard is when the rules of the game are in flux, when there are players willing to turn the chess board over, when the international system is being disrupted from outside, or degraded from within. It is hard when tyrants and terrorists, pirates and persecutors, are setting the agenda. Diplomacy is hard in the periods when rival sources of power think that diplomacy doesn’t matter.

Yet the periods when diplomacy is hardest are also the periods when it matters most.

Much of the West is therefore in a phase of hard diplomacy. Diplomacy that wears out the soles of your shoes, runs up the air miles and telephone bills, forces you to innovate and adapt. During such periods of change and peril, we don’t need diplomats who arrive on a yak when the opposition has been and gone by horse.

Those who want to hammer the last nails into the coffin of diplomacy fall into three camps: diplomats no longer represent anything; diplomacy has been disrupted by technology; diplomacy has failed.

There are elements of truth in each of these arguments. If Google is more important than many states, is it not more important to be a Google ambassador than a national one? Aren’t diplomats simply courtiers, moving between hierarchies without recognising they are part of the past? Can’t diplomats be replaced by sentiment analysts with Skype accounts? If diplomats did not exist, why would we need to invent them in the twenty-first century?

Diplomacy does indeed face a crisis of legitimacy and trust.

Traditionally, representation was the main point of diplomats.2 (#litres_trial_promo) If you were your prince’s person in a rival court, it mattered less what you did than what you were: the symbol of power and prestige. An ambassador’s legitimacy and power depended on the support of a small number of people in his ruling elite, sometimes just one.

In the era of growing democracy in the West – the last 200 years or so – that elite grew, but not dramatically. A British ambassador making pre-posting calls, getting his marching orders, would not need to step outside Westminster.

When states become weaker, so do those who represent and derive authority from them. As the trend continues towards global decision-making for the big global issues on the one hand, and greater localisation and individualisation on the other, where does a state’s representative fit in?

But the reality is that governments and states are not finished yet. Although they no longer have overwhelming dominance of information or even knowledge, they do remain the means through which questions of national interest are determined. As long as we have states, we will still need diplomats to mediate between them. They still have a niche.

So diplomats will need to redefine their legitimacy, and reconnect to the new sources of power. I was proud to be Her Majesty’s Ambassador in Lebanon, and put the letter saying so on the wall. But I also felt that I was Her Majesty’s Government’s Ambassador. And even the Ambassador of the British People. When there were monarchies, diplomats represented kings and queens. When there were great states, they represented great states. Now, with the dispersal of power, can they more credibly claim to represent the people of their countries?

We don’t yet know whether people will respond to the threats of the twenty-first century with more nationalism or less. Diplomats who derive their legitimacy solely from states must secretly hope for the former. Diplomats who see themselves as embodying something more must hope for the latter.

The role of diplomats is being transformed faster than at any point in history. But no one has come up with a better idea. Diplomacy existed before states, and will exist after they have ceased to be the principal form of geographical power. We are in uncharted waters – but we always have been. This book will try to make the case for diplomats to remain on the boat.

The second critique also has elements of truth. Diplomacy does indeed face disruption, by technology, and by others who can do diplomacy more effectively. Being in office no longer means being in power.

Digital technology will transform the way that governments engage with citizens. But while the Internet defies boundaries, most governments find it hard to escape the confines of national responses. Data is not sufficiently shared and regulation struggles to keep pace.3 (#litres_trial_promo) Governments have not yet tackled the big questions on the balance between privacy and transparency, or found the right formula to nurture innovation.

Who disrupts diplomacy? Many analysts, businesses, commentators are already well under way.

Traditionally, diplomats divided their rivals into three groups. First, the obviously hostile, such as great power rivals or aggressor states. In periods such as the run-up to the Congress of Vienna or the Cold War, this was straightforward and neat. We had clear enemies, definable nemeses. You could chart them on a map. You could kill them in a Bond film.

Secondly, the apparently friendly states, such as great power allies, who were nevertheless competing to get a bigger slice of the cake. For the UK, Europe has fallen into this category since the Second World War. We have vastly similar values and objectives, yet still contest resources and influence, and argue over the decisions where we need to pool sovereignty. Je t’aime, moi non plus.

Third, the local rivals for authority and influence – in the case of many ministries of foreign affairs, this was usually the Treasury or the prime minister’s office.

No country faces permanent enemies or can count on permanent allies. The first, most hostile, group are now more likely to be transnational, non-traditional actors – terrorists, renegade states or information anarchists. This could be the throat cutters and concert bombers of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the despots in North Korea, Syria and Zimbabwe, or Julian Assange.

The apparently friendly second group are now more likely to be those competing for business or security influence, including the media, NGOs and multinationals. They will be the disruptors – think tanks, big data analysts, social media gurus – who are replacing diplomats in their ability to analyse or shape foreign policy. A proliferation of organisations now compete with diplomats by selling geopolitical analysis. The best are the Brookings Institution, Chatham House and Carnegie.4 (#litres_trial_promo) Or the service providers who are moving ahead so fast with the way they respond to customer needs that they make government efforts – passports, visas, commercial introductions – look hopeless. I’d also include the new technology companies, with whom governments will increasingly contest key ground.

The local contenders are probably still the Treasury.

Diplomats need to understand those groups of rivals, the tools available to them, and why and how they are deploying them. They need to use social media more effectively than terrorists. They need to understand JPMorgan Chase or Google’s diplomatic machinery in the way that they understand China’s. They should be competing with the best technology they can lay their hands on. They should be on a digital war footing.

I often ask people who they think will have the greatest influence on the twenty-first century – Google or Britain? Increasingly, most say Google. I want to show in this book how they can be proved wrong. Google has been a technological superpower for a decade. Britain has been one for at least 250 years.

There will be many times when digital media feel to professional diplomats an obstacle to traditional diplomacy. We saw over the August 2013 debate on whether to strike Assad for using chemical weapons the way that digital debate makes it harder to play diplomatic poker, with the UK and subsequently US positions shifted as a result of online and offline disagreement. Governments are already much more restrained than a century ago, particularly when it comes to going to war. That is a good thing, but it makes it harder to make the threats necessary to stop our opponents taking territory or killing civilians. Our bluff is too easily called.

New digital media will also create different and sometimes uncomfortable oversight of what diplomats do, including the difficult compromises made in the heat of a negotiation. That’s good. But they will further empower rival sources of influence and power. Digital media will make it harder to gain the consent of those whom diplomats claim to represent, and easier to lose it.

To gain the trust needed to avoid extinction, diplomats will need humility as to the limits of their authority, and a readiness to be more accountable to and more representative of the populations for whom they work.

Technology and society are being transformed, with or without diplomats. This presents threats as well as opportunities. But so did the printing press, the telephone, air travel. Now that anyone can be a diplomat, we have to show that you can’t live without diplomats. When I became an ambassador at the age of thirty-six, some people asked me if I was too young to do the job. Looking at the way the region (and the world) was changing, I sometimes wonder if I was too old.

Yet we still need experts who can really understand the countries with which we are dealing, people who can help us to respond to global changes, to see where the next opportunities are, and from where the next challenges will come. Diplomats, if they are doing their jobs well, are an essential part of that. Technology should enhance rather than diminish that role.

The third argument against traditional diplomacy is that diplomats are not proving to be very good at it.

In this narrative, diplomats lack the skills and resources to put in the hard hours and tough negotiations that are needed to do real diplomacy. America’s inwardness, increased popular and media oversight, and Western public revulsion at military engagement make it harder still.

Diplomacy has always struggled to keep up with events. It has woefully failed to reform the international system it inherited after the Second World War. There has been a lack of collective international graft and realism in fixing some of today’s major conflicts, not least Syria and Israel/Palestine, both abject failures of the UN Security Council.

But for every diplomatic failure – the 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit, the Middle East Peace Process – there are successes such as the Iran nuclear deal or the Dayton peace accords. It is in the nature of diplomacy, an effort to deal with an unpredictable and complex world, that diplomats won’t always get it right. It is not a reason not to keep trying.

There is a pivotal moment in David Puttnam’s brilliant 1981 film Chariots of Fire when sprinter Harold Abrahams is reprimanded, in a typically understated but caustic upper-class English way, by the Master of Trinity College. His crime? Having employed a professional coach to prepare for the 1924 Olympics. The fiercely ambitious Abrahams is having none of this amateurishness. ‘I believe in the pursuit of excellence. And I will carry the future with me.’ He storms out, storms the race, and wins Olympic gold.

Political life, including diplomacy, faces a similar moment. There is a thirst for authenticity and authentic leaders. People feel disconnected from politics, authority, governments and decision-making. We are in an era of distrust, disconnection and detachment. Diplomacy finds itself ill-equipped for this new context. And it faces greater competition than ever before. Like many industries based on institutional authority, diplomacy insufficiently reflects the realities of a world in which the balance of power between citizens, business and government is shifting from hierarchies to networks. It too often prioritises pumping out a message over changing society.5 (#litres_trial_promo) Much of its procedural method – summits and communiqués – was designed in 1815 for an age of monarchies and great states.

There is little that you cannot learn about government from the British sitcoms Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. In one episode, senior civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby is asked by his prime minister how they should react to a bellicose speech by a foreign leader. ‘In practical terms we have the usual six options,’ replies Sir Humphrey. ‘One: do nothing. Two: issue a statement deploring the scene. Three: launch an official protest. Four: cut off aid. Five: break off diplomatic relations. And six: declare war.’ So what to do? ‘Well if we do nothing we implicitly agree with the speech. Two, if we issue a statement we just look foolish. Three, if we lodge a protest it will be ignored. Four, we can’t cut off aid because we don’t give them any. Five, if we break off diplomatic relations we can’t negotiate the oil contracts. And six, if we declare war it might just look as if we’re overreacting.’ In one exchange, Sir Humphrey punctures the utter futility of much modern diplomatic communication, and captures why so many people are simply zoning out of political discourse.

Harold Abrahams would have recognised that while you can respect the competition, you must use it to improve. With power shifting unpredictably, so must the diplomats of the Digital Age. Diplomatic service – the clue is in the name; like the rest of the political class, diplomats have to find news ways to connect with the public they serve. Of course, international relations are much more than simply public relations, but diplomacy is not yet as social, progressive or democratic as it needs to become. It is not yet connected to the new sources of power. Like Harold Abrahams, diplomats no longer have the luxury of being amateurs.

Despite what for some looks like an increasing distance between foreign ministries and the public they represent, I think that there remains an energising, purposeful and revitalising argument in favour of diplomacy.

Diplomats were instruments of the prince when the Florentine diplomat and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli was writing of Renaissance city-state diplomacy, and then servants of the state when Talleyrand and his peers were establishing European interests without the irritating interference of emperors. But Harold Nicolson, writing in 1961, sought a higher cause for his profession: ‘there does exist such a thing as international morality. Its boundaries are not visibly defined nor its frontiers demarcated; yet we all know where it is.’

We need to find it again.

Without doubt, many diplomats throughout history have been driven by something more than realpolitik. They have rarely accepted that their only role is to advance the naked interests of their states. They see themselves as representing the idea of peace – the words for messenger in both Greek (angelos) and Hebrew (mal’ach) have sacred connotations. Bernard du Rosier, a Renaissance Archbishop of Toulouse and commentator on diplomacy, declared that the ‘business of the ambassador was peace’ and that he was ‘sacred because he acted in the general welfare’.6 (#litres_trial_promo) Diplomacy needs to reconnect to this more idealistic sense of collective diplomatic purpose: the promotion of global co-existence.

The sense of a moral dimension to foreign policy was what lay behind former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook’s much derided effort towards an ‘ethical foreign policy’. The problem of his government’s approach was not the aspiration but the execution. The public do not believe that the ethics survived the sands of Iraq.

Diplomats help states to surrender the bits of their authority that need to be surrendered if we are to transition to a system that has more chance of survival. That is never going to be popular, but it is as important a task as ever. Diplomats lubricate the interaction of power, ideas and change to make it as peaceful as possible.

Diplomats have always tried to shape world developments for the better, and we can do so again. We can now connect, understand, engage and influence in ways our predecessors never could. But we also need to understand the rival and disruptive forces that are competing with the efforts to coexist.

Diplomacy needs to reconnect with its sense of optimism, opportunity and idealism. We need diplomats more than ever because the implications of diplomatic failure are more catastrophic than ever. The need is not for something to replace diplomacy, but for better diplomacy.

Many would say that the best era in which to have been a diplomat was the period around 1815, when elite diplomats strutted the halls of Vienna, reshaping Europe. I’d say it is 2016. But two centuries on, someone needs to write the new version of the Vienna Convention, to give fresh shape and purpose to this old business, and to make it fit for a new world.

To do so, we first need to understand what it was that made diplomacy so distinctive and important over the years. What can we learn from the cast of sometimes colourful and often colourless characters who strutted and pranced, connived and blustered on the diplomatic stage? How were their roles changed by previous waves of innovation – language, the printing press, or the plane?

We need to go back to where it all began.

* (#ulink_45ac96ea-a8ff-58a4-8ae2-21fb0ff5cd7b) The origin of the phrase is a 1928 agreement on oil drilling rights as the Ottoman empire collapsed. The French have their own version, the yellow line.



PART ONE



Glad-handing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Short History of Diplomacy (#u3b300cf6-c529-5e0a-a3e6-bad96a3209b0)



1




Early Diplomacy: From Cavemen to Consuls (#u3b300cf6-c529-5e0a-a3e6-bad96a3209b0)


While other sciences have advanced, that of government is at a standstill – little better practised now than three or four thousand years ago.

John Adams, 1813

We don’t know the name of the first diplomat, but let’s call him Ug.

At some point, Ug – perhaps slower or smaller than his peers (diplomats often are) – persuaded a fellow Neanderthal to stop clubbing him over the head for long enough to work together against a common rival. A survival instinct in Ug prioritised co-operation over conflict. He was, probably literally, a naked diplomat.

And so diplomacy is almost as old as humanity.

Centuries later, one of Ug’s many descendants – for Ug had found that diplomacy increased the survival prospects of his otherwise feeble genes – found the beginnings of language. He and his fellow palaeohumans began to communicate sufficiently to begin to create basic societies. The most primitive of these communities quickly developed systems to guarantee freedom of movement for messengers to avoid them being bludgeoned or eaten.1 (#litres_trial_promo) Around 4000 BC they developed basic forms of writing to help divide resources, especially grain and beer. Diplomacy was under way, and alcohol was already playing its part.

The most important difference between humans and the rest of the animal world is that we can cooperate flexibly in large groups.2 (#litres_trial_promo) And not just to feed or protect ourselves. That’s why, for better or worse, we run the globe. Outside of Disney films, the animal kingdom doesn’t do big conferences. There is no Security Council for owls and dolphins. There is no Lion King. We, not the fish, design the treaties on fishing quotas. We have dramatically reduced the threat from our fellow species (bar the mosquito, though thanks to Bill Gates we are getting there too).

Part of our vital biological make-up as humans is that we can cooperate with people we don’t know, or who share little of our DNA. And part of our survival instinct is that there are people able to make the case, not necessarily always true, that cooperation is better for us than killing each other. That means that there is a biological case for diplomacy. All Ug was saying, long before and (slightly) less melodically than Lennon, was give peace a chance. Diplomatic uniforms, titles, protocol and platitudes aside, the basic concept since Ug’s first grunts and gestures has not changed as much as we might think.

Technological innovation always precedes political change and diplomacy. The sickle and plough allowed settled living, and the domestication of animals. Social structure and a basic rule of law followed, creating more space and time for innovation. The invention of the wheel and of writing, several thousand years BC, made diplomacy both more necessary and more possible. Both took place, ironically, in the graveyard of much modern diplomacy, Iraq. Some of the earliest traces of more formal diplomacy are from the bureaucratic records of imperial China, where poor Shen Weiqin plied his trade before he was so slowly sliced up.

In the third century BC, Chanakya, the key adviser to the founder of the Indian Maurya dynasty, wrote in Sanskrit the oldest detailed guide to diplomacy: Arthashastra, or The Science of Politics.3 (#litres_trial_promo) His advice on diplomacy and espionage is pretty robust: violence, torture and spying dominate the text. The best way to deal with neighbouring countries is to appease, bribe, divide, punish, deceive, ignore or bluff, a set of approaches that have dominated Anglo-French relations for most of history. But Chanakya also sees part of the diplomat’s role as preservation of wildlife and the rule of law, an idea retained in much diplomatic work today. In sage advice that could equally apply to modern spies dodging honeytraps, he advises envoys to ‘always sleep alone’, and to avoid strong liquor and hunting.

Diplomacy also started to take root elsewhere. In Egypt, following the battle of Kadesh in 1274 BC, Pharaoh Rameses II and ruler of the Hittite empire Hattusili III created the first known international peace treaties, on stone tablets.4 (#litres_trial_promo) Some of the covenants in these early treaties bear a strong similarity to the Ten Commandments that Moses was given, probably between the fourteenth and twelfth centuries BC – a fairly one-sided diplomatic treaty between God and Man. The messenger was not always welcome. The Bible records envoys of King David having their heads shaved and buttocks exposed by an unimpressed monarch – a punishment self-imposed by many modern football fans when travelling overseas.

Rival Chinese states in the first millennium BC started to draft more detailed treaties to enforce conquest and avoid unnecessary conflict. Others in Asia, such as the Japanese and Koreans, drew from this example, including by establishing temporary embassies. Records remain of Chinese Song dynasty ambassadors who were able to outfox opponents through guile and cunning rather than force. Theories of human interaction, such as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, demonstrate how leaders spent an increased amount of time considering how to subdue their enemies without the cost in blood and treasure of fighting them. As the Chinese empire expanded by sea from the second to thirteenth centuries AD, they sent resident envoys as far afield as India, Persia, Egypt and Africa, often despatching two – as they did to Japan in 653 – in case one never arrived, as was all too often the case. It must have been interesting when both did.

By the time the Chinese invented gunpowder in 900, they had already used diplomacy to create an empire so large that they did not have to use the gunpowder as an instrument of warfare and statecraft. If they had done so, as the Europeans started to do to such devastating effect in the fourteenth century, all our treaties and diplomatic language might now be in Chinese.

In Europe, meanwhile, the first Greek city states also found a need for diplomats to negotiate with rivals and allies. The basic rules and conduct of diplomacy they adopted in the Congress of Sparta in 432 BC were a template for much of the diplomacy of the next twenty-two centuries until the aftermath of Waterloo. The Spartans, in a sign of extreme confidence, even invited the adversaries – the Athenians – that they were considering attacking.

The Greeks tended to send diplomats on short missions rather than making them resident in other countries. Heralds would venture out to pass messages and to report back, if they had not been executed, on the quality of the reception they received. The forefather of the modern consul, often a resident of the city who happens to have a particular link to another, can be found in the Greek proxenos, who acted as informal sources of information and message carriers.

It was the Mongols who first put diplomacy on a more sophisticated footing. In 1287, Prince Arghun sent the first embassy to the West under Rabban Sauma, an elderly monk turned diplomat, as part of his effort to form an anti-Muslim alliance against Syria and Egypt. He promised the French the city of Jerusalem, and generously suggested that he would be ‘very willing to accept any samples of French opulence that you care to burden your messengers with’. He even tried to broker an accord with the distant Edward I of England. But Europe, or the Vatican at least, was clearly well behind their Mongol visitors – Sauma reported back that he was underwhelmed by the ‘lack of worldly intelligence among the cardinals of Rome’.5 (#litres_trial_promo)

As communication, travel and trade developed, it became necessary to establish rules for diplomatic interaction that went beyond protocols on exchanges of gifts. Like the Japanese, the Byzantine and Sasanian (modern Iran) leaders took the precaution of sending messages with two envoys in case one was lost or misplaced in unforgiving new environments. In the thirteenth century, the Mongols took this idea further and developed a new form of diplomatic passport, granting their envoys special status and protection. Genghis Khan, a historical figure usually more associated with ending rather than protecting lives, introduced diplomatic immunity. For messengers to do their job, it helped that they occasionally returned intact. That principle remains in place today, thankfully.

Six hundred years ago, it was the East that could claim to be the centre of diplomatic understanding and political power. But an unknown goldsmith in Strasbourg was about to change everything.



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Diplomacy By Sea: From Columbus to Copyboys (#u3b300cf6-c529-5e0a-a3e6-bad96a3209b0)


At the beginning of the age of European maritime discovery, the Chinese were ahead of the West in almost every respect, not just diplomacy. In 1492, Christopher Columbus set off to discover the Americas with ninety men in three ships. His closest Chinese equivalent, the intrepid eunuch Admiral Zheng He, had an armada of 300 ships, a compass and 27,000 men (including 180 doctors and several envoys). Columbus’s biggest hull was barely twice the length of one of Zheng’s rudders.1 (#litres_trial_promo) This hard-power advantage meant that many of the earliest diplomatic protocols and customs were more Eastern than Western. To this day, diplomats are scathing of colleagues seen as ‘kowtowing’, a deep and humble bow, to representatives of other nations.

Despite this head start for China, Europe took the lead in the centuries that followed, in diplomacy as in harder power. Maybe peninsulas made it easier for small kingdoms to hold out against potential conquerors.2 (#litres_trial_promo) Europe might have had an advantage in this era of climate, topography, resources, culture, politics or religion. Or perhaps it was simply down to short-term accident and chance.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

The Chinese had invented the first newspaper in 748. But German inventor Johannes Gutenberg’s creation of the movable-type printing press in the 1440s allowed humans to capture more accurately and share more widely the most important lessons of their ancestors. We no longer relied on oral histories alone. This created an extraordinary platform for innovation, and more time to explore and create. Gutenberg was the Tim Berners-Lee of his age, generating unprecedented access to knowledge.

Within two generations, Columbus and others were leading the Age of Discovery. When Columbus returned from the Bahamas, eleven print editions of his journey spread around Europe. Within twenty-five years, sailors had circumnavigated the globe, and the Reformation was under way, on the back of the production and distribution of millions of Martin Luther’s pamphlets. Merchants and farmers alike began to question the absolute rule of monarchs, and the political fundamentals of society. There was a new thirst for knowledge, stimulating the Enlightenment, the American Revolution and free-market capitalism. This print revolution contributed to the formation of modern nation states, and therefore the diplomats to represent them. The spread of information in shared languages stimulated the emergence of common and competing national identities. These new European nations – Germany, France, Austria, Russia – needed people to understand their differences, and to mediate between them.

As the Europeans closed the gap on their global competitors, they sought new ways to protect and project their advantage. One manifestation of power was the man on the spot. The first more permanent embassies, expressions of ambition and influence, were started by the states of northern Italy during the Renaissance, with Milan the trailblazer. Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464) became the first semi-permanent ambassador of the city in 1450. Backed by enormous personal wealth, he helped to create a balance of power between his native Florence and the leading Italian city states. He even took his own bank with him, a luxury sadly but sensibly denied by modern treasuries to their diplomats.

Wars are of course another powerful tool for domination, and the Renaissance had plenty of them. But they are also disruptive and costly for leaders. Increasingly, princes wanted people who could build their influence in other ways. They needed local intelligence, and eyes and ears on the ground. Milan sent the first ambassador to the French court, in 1455, and Spain despatched the first permanent representative, to London in 1487. These tended to be noblemen, able to finance the lavish lifestyle meant to come with the territory. An embassy came to mean a physical presence rather than a formal visit.

Advisers such as Machiavelli began to build a theory of power around this work. These early envoy roles were sought-after positions held by the talented innovators and explorers of the age. Men such as Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio were among the first envoys of Florence. This is like making Damien Hirst, Sebastian Faulks and Ian McEwan Britain’s ambassadors today. For these early envoys, diplomacy was not a career but a pursuit, one that reinforced their social position and cultural instincts. Early forms of the word ‘ambassador’ – ambaxade, ambasciatore, ambaxada – seem to have derived from ambactia, meaning charge or office. Or perhaps ambactus, servant. Even at its well-heeled origins, I like to think that there was a sense of public service to the description.

Inevitably, an informal network of travellers and messengers became more structured. Leaders needed to know that the man in front of them – and of course in this era it always was a man – was really representing his prince. So the tradition of presenting credentials on arrival, which continues to this day, began.






Many diplomats are still communicating with their host government and their own capital using these gloriously archaic instruments. On arrival in a country, the ambassador is not meant to meet anyone officially until he has presented his credentials to the head of state, a process that can often undermine his impact during the most important period. While the private sector focuses on the first ninety days of a CEO’s tenure, the ambassador often spends their first weeks marooned in their house, unpacking and waiting for permission to hand over a piece of paper. When it comes, the ceremony can be moving and memorable – the hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I listened to the British national anthem at the president’s summer palace high in the Shouf mountains of Lebanon in August 2011. But the protocol gets in the way of real diplomacy.

Much of the language remains more Renaissance than Digital Age. Here is an extract from my credentials, which perhaps shows that modern diplomats have not travelled as far from our lace-cuffed predecessors as the smartphones in our pockets suggest:

To All and Singular to whom these Presents shall come, Greeting!

Whereas it appears to Us expedient to nominate some Person of approved Wisdom, Loyalty, Diligence and Circumspection to represent Us in the character of Our Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary at Beirut; Now Know Ye that We, reposing especial trust and confidence in the discretion and faithfulness of Our Trusty and Well-beloved Thomas Fletcher, Companion of our Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George, have nominated, constituted and appointed as we do by these Presents nominate, constitute and appoint the said Thomas Fletcher to be Our Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary at Beirut as foresaid.

Giving and granting him in that character all Power and Authority to do and perform all proper acts, matters and things which may be desirable or necessary for the promotion of relations of friendship, good understanding and harmonious intercourse between Our Realm and the Republic of Lebanon and for the protection and furtherance of the interests confided to his care; by the diligent and discreet accomplishment of which acts, matters and things aforementioned he shall gain Our approval and show himself worthy of Our high confidence.

Terrific stuff, but hard to tweet.

The letter of credence was established to show that an envoy was genuinely representing his state, when there were not other ways to check thoroughly. That’s now easier to establish. Credentials can be replaced by a Google search.






Not every historical leader appreciated the new customs either. When Anthony Jenkinson, a sixteenth-century trader, traveller and envoy of Elizabeth I, tried to present credentials to the cosmopolitan Persian emperor Shah Tahmasp, he failed to wear the slippers offered to cover his infidel feet, was thrown out of Isfahan and his footprints back to the port covered in sand. He was Photoshopped out of Persian history.

As the number of diplomats attached to royal courts grew, they inevitably began to compete for attention and influence. With their masters jostling for power and prestige, diplomats in European capitals were ranked on the basis of the power of their monarchs, a fiendishly complex and contested process. This rivalry consumed much of their energies, and would strike terror in the heart of the modern diplomat less used to having to compete so overtly for attention and influence.

According to Samuel Pepys, the Spanish and French embassies in London frequently came to blows in the 1660s over breaches of such protocol and ranking. Asked where he would like to sit at a dinner with the English king, Charles II, the French ambassador answered: ‘Discover where the Spaniard desires to sit, then toss him out and put me in his place.’ I admit that I have attended many diplomatic dinners where such dark thoughts have crossed my mind. But fortunately for less adversarial modern diplomats, ranking is now based on your date of arrival in post.

Another account describes how, during the 1661 arrival of a new Swedish ambassador to London, the French coach (with 150 men, forty of them armed) clashed with that of the Spanish ambassador, similarly tooled up. The Spaniards killed a Frenchman and took down two French horses, forcing the French to reluctantly cede the second position in the procession. Louis XIV of France was so incensed that he told his Spanish counterpart that he would declare war if there were ever to be another such breach of protocol.

But such clashes continued – in 1768, the Russian and French ambassadors to London duelled following a dispute over who should sit where in the diplomatic box at the opera. The modern equivalent is the competition to be seated next to the US president at international summits. Alphabetical orderings can often be the most diplomatic solution. At these moments, British diplomats tend to favour the use of ‘United Kingdom’ over ‘Great Britain’. It gets the leader closer to their American counterpart, and safely clear of the difficult group of countries whose names begin with ‘I’.

Diplomacy can both thrive and suffer in times of intrigue and change. The cold war that followed the Reformation set back the process of statecraft, with Catholic or Protestant ambassadors frequently seen, with some justification, as the centres of intrigue and espionage in rival courts. Yet it forced those envoys still allowed to lurk behind the curtains of those courts to make their communication with their capitals more cunning, and increased their value to their masters.4 (#litres_trial_promo) In the 1630s, Cardinal Richelieu, one of Louis XIII’s most infamous and effective ministers, wrote of the need for ceaseless negotiation, even when – in fact especially when – no fruits are reaped. After 1626, he established a Ministry of External Affairs to centralise the management of foreign relations under a single roof, and – perhaps most importantly to him – to control the information reaching his king. The practice was soon followed all over Europe. A picture of the ‘Red Eminence’ should be on the wall of every modern ministry of foreign affairs.

Maritime expansion by the early European empires created the need for further rules and negotiation, not least because failure to observe increasingly complex protocol could trigger conflict. Elizabeth I was clearly a sharp and perceptive observer of diplomatic vanity, and banned her ambassadors from accepting awards or insignia from other nations – ‘I would not have my sheep branded by any mark but my own.’ The tradition continues to this day, though it is explained to sensitive diplomats in gentler terms.

Diplomacy was increasingly the arena in which to play out wider competition for respect, with failure to observe basic courtesies taken as great insults to a monarch’s dignity. When the Spanish ambassador to the English court of James I refused to dip his colours to his host in the early seventeenth century, the ensuing diplomatic furore nearly triggered a second armada.

Most European envoys sent east had a more commercial brief. British diplomat Anthony Jenkinson, having recovered from his undignified exit from Persia, reported back to Elizabeth I that his 1557 Christmas dinner with Tsar Ivan IV Vasilyevich had laid the foundations for a potentially lucrative trading relationship. Clearly there was no Elizabethan human rights lobby to suggest that emperors who called themselves ‘Terrible’ and had been executing rivals since the age of thirteen might not be appropriate commercial partners. Another envoy, Thomas Roe, recorded having avoided offending the Mogul of India by accepting an attractive female concubine for the duration of his stay, ‘in order to comply with custom’ (an excuse that probably would not work today). Competition between these early European merchant envoys was fierce and the penalties severe – the Dutch tortured eighteen British traders to death in the East Indies in 1623.

Yet, necessary concubines aside, the job of Elizabethan envoys was in many ways recognisable. Sir Jeremy Bowes was the ambassador sent by Elizabeth I to the court of Ivan the Terrible following Jenkinson’s convivial, and clearly successful, Christmas lunch. Apart from staying alive, he had three jobs: to assert the authority of his queen as the equal of the tsar, to obtain important commercial contracts for British merchants, and to establish a commercial office in Vologda. His successors in Moscow today are working on similar projects. Bowes also had to free a British widow whose Dutch husband had been roasted to death, a consular case that is happily less likely to arise in today’s embassy.

The first pioneering diplomats were not setting out across continents on some kind of grand tour or glorified gap year, but to seek new resources and trading opportunities. In the age of maritime diplomacy, consuls would mediate between ships from their countries and port authorities to ensure market advantage. Schoolchildren still learn that ‘trade follows the flag’. But diplomatic history also suggests that the flag often follows trade – the business lobby needed a British embassy in Constantinople in the sixteenth century, and so the Levant Company funded it, an association that continued until the early nineteenth century.






Diplomacy has always had a strong mercantile core, although in recent decades commercial work has tended to come in and out of diplomatic fashion. It was placed at the centre of the British Foreign Office’s priorities after the First World War and in the 1970s. The British post credited with making the best commercial effort in the 1970s was Tehran. They responded to instructions to focus embassy time and resources on supporting business links with Iran. This came at a cost: they were late to spot the warning signs of the overthrow of the shah.

Diplomats tend to enjoy trade promotion because it is more tangible than other elements of their roles. It is hard to measure warm bilateral relations, or the extent to which lobbying on climate change shifts a host government’s position. But a contract with numbers stands out.

So what do businesses want from diplomats? They want hard and relevant political analysis, a good contact book, and the willingness to use it. Businesses know that diplomats can get the right people around the table.

But there are also risks. Diplomats can lose their objectivity about where the national interest lies, and the balance between commercial priorities and our wider equities. This particularly applies to diplomats who would like to make some money themselves at some point, as many will increasingly need to do. Traditionally, the revolving door was more of an exit door. Senior diplomats left their foreign ministries to get highly paid jobs on the boards of oil companies, banks and arms manufacturers.

Increasingly that model will change – diplomats will more often leave in mid career, harassed by spouses angry at the impact of regular moves on family life; needing a financial cushion; and seeking new experiences and oxygen. This is healthy, increasing the pool of diplomats who have tried other professions, and who are flexible and marketable enough to adapt, learn and return. The downside is that it will undermine the sense of diplomats as a cadre, and blur the lines of accountability further. As austerity bites and diplomats get paid less, they risk becoming more reliant on business to keep the ship afloat. This is not easy for modern diplomats, any more than it would have been for the British consul in sixteenth-century Constantinople.

An awkward but unavoidable question for diplomats will be the extent to which we sell our services. The British Foreign Office already hires out ambassadors for commercial events. I’ve made speeches on subjects ranging from ceramic water filters to ornamental garden gnomes. It is a small jump from this system to one where we offer a commercial service for our insights. None of us would want to see diplomacy become too mercantilist or commercial, but the economic realities may dictate that there is no choice.






Diplomats gradually developed a sense of their own craft. As diplomacy took root as a profession, it was codified, analysed and described, mainly by French diplomats. In 1603, Jean Hotman de Villiers (1552–1632), an Oxford professor who led diplomatic missions for Henri IV, produced a guidebook for ambassadors, De la Charge et Dignité de l’Ambassadeur. Abraham de Wicquefort (1598–1682) was a Dutch envoy and spy who, after playing a central role in producing the Treaty of Westphalia, was found guilty of treason. Imprisoned in the water castle of Loevestein, he wrote the huge L’Ambassadeur et ses Fonctions in 1681. This became the handbook for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century diplomacy, and was based on real-world examples of his craft. Much of it stands the test of the time, including his advice that ambassadors need to combine the theatre of their public role with the discretion and often secrecy of their private negotiations. Loevestein was clearly a good place to think big. Another political prisoner was Hugo Grotius, often seen as the father of modern international law. More notable, for diplomats anyway, he went on to become Swedish ambassador to France. François de Callières (1645–1717), a diplomat for Louis XIV, analysed European diplomacy in his 1716 book De la Manière de Négocier avec les Souverains. He agreed with de Wicquefort that the ambassador had to be a good actor.

Diplomats also needed to stay in closer contact with their capitals. When envoys began to create too much information to pass by hand or official messenger, they instigated a mail service for handwritten correspondence, and a Postal Convention (of 1674) to try to protect confidentiality. Documents began to be transported by the more formal system still in use today, the diplomatic bag. This was meant to guarantee that messages between an embassy and its capital could not be interfered with by the curious or hostile. Naturally, this was usually ignored in the atmosphere of intrigue and mistrust surrounding the wars of religion.






The diplomatic bag still exists virtually unchanged today.

The bag has always been dogged by controversy. It is meant to be sealed and inviolate, but that has rarely been the case. Cardinal Wolsey, an adviser to Henry VIII, was a serial violator of its confidentiality, in order to supervise the intrigues of the increasing number of foreign envoys appointed to London. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, the ambassador Lord Curzon exploded with fury when the Turks searched his bags, ‘and condemned them to a thousand hells of eternal fire’. In 1964, Italian authorities violated an Egyptian bag, having heard moans from inside it, to discover a kidnapped Israeli. In the early twenty-first century, British minister Peter Hain described the violation of the bag by Robert Mugabe’s officials in Zimbabwe as ‘not the actions of a civilised country’. (In fact, opening a diplomatic bag was probably one of the more civilised actions undertaken by Mugabe.) I was involved in another African drama when a diplomatic bag seeping blood was found to be carrying bush meat, meant to arrive in London in advance of the visit of a head of state. He was clearly no fan of British cuisine.

With electronic communications more secure, there can be few items that really require such an elaborate means of despatch. (I suspect the modern diplomatic bag is normally filled with orders of DVD box sets.) The diplomatic bag has an important history. But it can be replaced by an email.






Meanwhile, diplomats from the great European states also developed a continental system of rules and processes to match the new confidence and structures of their states. The Treaty of Westphalia, hammered out in Münster and Osnabrück between the Habsburgs, French, Spanish, Swedish and Dutch in 1648, ended the Thirty Years War and explicitly recognised the existence of separate sovereignties. Diplomats and aristocrats – most were still both – from 140 imperial states took part. The treaty drew the new boundaries of Europe, allowed for freedom of worship, and established the principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other states.

Not everyone was happy with a system that prioritised national over transnational rights, especially those who derived their authority from other sources of power – in full flow, Pope Innocent X called the treaty ‘null, void, iniquitous, invalid, unjust, invaluable, reprobate, damnable, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time’. Diplomacy was never meant to be easy or uncontroversial.

Gradually, like all good bureaucrats, envoys involved in such negotiations built up entourages and embassies. And, to manage the networks of egos and prima donnas, capitals had to expand the foreign ministries from Richelieu’s dingy back offices into grander and more impressive buildings. The beginnings of empire brought their own demands. In 1660, Britain established a Council of Foreign Plantations, which grew in the eighteenth century into the Colonial Office. Ernest Satow’s massive Guide to Diplomatic Practice, first published against the undiplomatic backdrop of 1917, traces the first uses of the word diplomacy to mid-eighteenth-century Vienna, and in England in the 1787 Annual Register. But an English satire, The Chinese Spy, was unimpressed by these stirrings of activity: ‘The diplomatic body, as it is called, was at this ball, but without distinguishing itself to any great advantage.’

Nevertheless, the British Foreign Office was established in 1782, the year that the steam engine was invented, one of the building blocks of the British empire. Charles James Fox, the first Foreign Secretary, was backed up by a staff of twelve: ‘nine male clerks, two chamber keepers and a “necessary woman”’. This is roughly the size of the current Foreign Secretary’s Private Office, although the gender balance is now improved.






Dating from this period, many ministries of foreign affairs insist that formal communication between the ambassador and the host government is by a verbose letter covered in stamps and seals: the note verbale. A typical one might run: ‘The embassy of Tajikistan presents its esteemed compliments to the Foreign Ministry of Mali. The embassy respectfully requests that the ambassador be permitted to park his official vehicle in the main courtyard of the esteemed foreign ministry on his next visit. The embassy of Tajikistan takes this opportunity to share its respect and warmest regards with the distinguished ministry.’

Mostly, a note verbale is these days sent by fax, and therefore disappears without trace. An embassy will normally spend a great deal of time on the telephone, checking whether they have arrived and when a reply is likely. The average embassy is also expected to send such a note when the ambassador leaves the country, even temporarily. Many ambassadors even convey such earth-shattering news to their fellow diplomatic colleagues. In Beirut, I regularly received faxes telling me that ambassadors I had never met would be out of the country for three days.

Clearly this is all bonkers. The note verbale can be replaced by a text message.






The US was not far behind Britain. A Cabinet-level Department of Foreign Affairs was created in 1789 by the First Congress. It was later renamed the Department of State and changed the title of its top job from Secretary for Foreign Affairs to Secretary of State. Thomas Jefferson returned from a France in the grip of revolutionary fervour, where he had planted American sweet potatoes and corn on the Champs-Élysées, to take the position. Jefferson would have been staggered by the pace of modern communication, finding it harder to keep his diplomats on a short leash: ‘For two years we have not heard from our ambassador in Spain; if we again do not hear from him this year, we should write him a letter.’ At this point, the US foreign service had just two diplomatic posts and ten consular posts, so the silence of their envoy to Madrid must have been deafening.* (#ulink_c15661e2-5919-5c73-b4c7-85b290827c05)

Gunboat diplomacy could be pretty ambitious, and remained high risk. Not everyone took envoys as seriously as they themselves had started to do. In 1793, Lord George Macartney led a doomed mission of 700 British diplomats and businessmen to try to establish permanent diplomatic relations with the Chinese emperor Qianlong. He failed because Qianlong could not accept the idea of diplomatic relations with a representative rather than the monarch himself. George III’s gifts were accepted merely as tribute, and Macartney was sent home with his tail between his stockinged legs.

Some decided that the whole business was too fraught with peril to be worthwhile. In his 1796 farewell message, US president George Washington counselled his successors against European entanglements: ‘hence therefore it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships, or enmities. Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course.’ Many current US politicians make the same argument for disengagement and splendid isolation.

Some American diplomats struck out nonetheless. Benjamin Franklin challenged protocol in his own way, shocking contemporary society by being the first diplomat to attend the king without a hat when he was received by Louis XVI at Versailles in 1778. He also invented bifocals in order to lip-read the asides and intrigues of his French interlocutors. But Washington’s instincts about dastardly Europeans were also proved right in 1798, when the French demanded that American diplomats pay huge bribes in order to see their foreign minister. The Americans rejected this preposterous offer, and have been making European statesmen pay ever since.

The French had more success elsewhere. In the eighteenth century, French took over from Latin as the language of diplomacy, a position it held until the Second World War. Much traditional diplomatic language is still in French – for example, démarche, chargé d’affaires and entente. The French also seemed to particularly enjoy the physical trappings of diplomacy more than most. Lord Gower, the British ambassador in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century, lamented the local requirement to bow three times to fellow ambassadors and twice to a chargé d’affaires. (Extraordinarily, in some southern European foreign ministries the practice of bowing to colleagues of ambassadorial rank continues to this day.)

Of course, bureaucracies feed themselves, and foreign ministries gradually expanded their back offices. The Duke of Wellington lamented the consequences. In 1812, while commanding the British army against Napoleon in Spain, he sent an exasperated note, loaded with sarcasm, back to the Foreign Office. It would strike a chord with many modern diplomats:

I have dispatched reports on the character, wit and spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence. Unfortunately the sum of one shilling and nine pence remains unaccounted for in one battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain.

This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstance, since we are at war with France, a fact that may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall.

This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from Her Majesty’s Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties. I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both. Is it 1) To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of accountants and copyboys in London, or perchance 2) To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain?5 (#litres_trial_promo)

The answer from the copyboys is not recorded.

* (#ulink_874afc1e-2ea2-5c5e-9685-cc1460d5b06e) I recently found letters from my nineteenth-century predecessor in Beirut, George Wood, demonstrating the way that envoys, like Jefferson’s in Madrid, took advantage of this distance from the capital to freelance. Wood consulted his Foreign Secretary about arming the local Druze sect, and had done so with gusto by the time the terse reply reached him telling him not to proceed under any circumstances, so as not to annoy the Turks. By then the 1860 civil war was over. Every modern ambassador to whom I have told this story longs wistfully for the days when diplomacy was less burdened by swift communication with the centre.



3




Diplomacy’s Finest Century (#u3b300cf6-c529-5e0a-a3e6-bad96a3209b0)


The nation state … is not a quaint and anachronistic holdover but a compromise written in blood that just about managed in the second half of the last century to bind the demons that attend power to a peaceful and progressive policy.

Chris Patten, What Next? Surviving the Twenty-First Century (2008)

Wellington might have been exasperated by the bureaucratic and penny-pinching procedures of the Foreign Service. But the hundred years that followed the Congress of Vienna of 1815, while ending in the diplomatic failure of the First World War, were European diplomacy’s finest century.

Only with the continent at peace could European powers expand their global reach and build their empires. Armies provided the blood that established the era of the nation state. Diplomats provided the compromises. Less of a sacrifice, but no less important.

As ever, technological innovation spurred diplomatic changes. A Frenchman, Claude Chappe, had invented the semaphore in 1791. In 1819, the first steamship crossed the Atlantic. In 1837, Brits William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone invented the telegraph (using just twenty letters, which must have been awkward for diplomats in Quebec or Yugoslavia). All were to play their part in the evolution of statecraft.

This was the period in which the word ‘diplomacy’, from the Greek term for a twice-folded document, began to be used more frequently. This reminds us that there was a sense of purpose to diplomacy. It was not just about a discussion, relationship management or information-gathering, but about an outcome – the ‘diploma’ on which an agreement was written, or what we now often call the ‘deliverable’. Diplomacy had a point.

When backed up by force, diplomacy could deliver even quicker results than in the past – the British government could ‘change the balance of the Eastern question by sending a few frigates to Besika Bay’.1 (#litres_trial_promo) Foreign Secretary Viscount Palmerston ordered the British fleet to blockade a Greek port in 1850 because a British subject, Don Pacifico, had been insufficiently compensated for his imprisonment. Defending his actions in Parliament, Palmerston claimed that ‘a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong’.2 (#litres_trial_promo) Modern consular support is less dramatic, and our resources less intimidating, but the principle still applies.

This willingness to project power helped Europe become the centre of international gravity in this period. Diplomatic procedures and standards were developed and exported. Negotiation became more constant, not just based on a division of the spoils after each war. The habits of diplomacy – more frequent conferences and summits, more exchanges of envoys – took root. The great powers used statecraft and diplomatic craft as they jostled for mastery in Europe.

Political change once again increased the need for new rules to govern diplomats and diplomatic interactions. Diplomats started to take themselves even more seriously, and grant themselves new titles.






Diplomacy has retained many of the titles of this era. I frequently observed the frisson which some fellow Ambassadors Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary (to give them their full title, as some prefer to do) felt when addressed as ‘Your Excellency’. Very few who rely so heavily on the title are particularly excellent. Indeed, my standard rule is that the more a colleague tells people of their excellence, the less excellent they are likely to be. When in Downing Street, I dropped the practice of including the full titles of ambassadors (e.g. Sir Crispian Penfold-Thwaite-Penfold GCMG* (#ulink_bce8ea5f-a558-52be-ad50-f93e070c9ca9)) on standard records and minutes of meetings, halving the length of the average distribution list but pricking the vanity of some grander and more impressively titled colleagues.

The Civil Service still retains more confusing job titles from the nineteenth century than most. Hence the mix-up over my role as the prime minister’s intimate typist. I once tried to explain the title ‘Permanent Undersecretary’, the head of the Foreign Office, when introducing the last incumbent, Sir Simon Fraser, to a reception in Beirut. It was the least accurate title I could imagine – Simon was neither permanent, nor under anyone, nor indeed a secretary. Increasingly, we will discover that overdoing the titles acts as a further barrier to communication with those we represent, and therefore to our continued usefulness and relevance.

Once again, Yes, Minister’s Sir Humphrey bursts the balloon when explaining to his new minister the job titles in his ministry: ‘Briefly, sir, I am the Permanent Undersecretary of State, known as the Permanent Secretary. Woolley here is your Principal Private Secretary. I, too, have a Principal Private Secretary, and he is the Principal Private Secretary to the Permanent Secretary. Directly responsible to me are ten Deputy Secretaries, eighty-seven Undersecretaries and two hundred and nineteen assistant secretaries. Directly responsible to the Principal Private Secretaries are Plain Private Secretaries, and the Prime Minister will be appointing two Parliamentary Undersecretaries and you will be appointing your own Parliamentary Private Secretary.’ ‘Can they all type?’ asks his mystified minister. ‘None of us can type, Minister,’ replies Sir Humphrey, ‘Mrs McKay types – she is your secretary.’






The demands of nineteenth-century diplomacy also meant that protocol was further codified, and treaties became longer. Rules were even needed to keep the diplomats apart. Foreign Secretary George Canning duelled with his Cabinet rival Lord Castlereagh in 1809, making today’s National Security Council debates seem somewhat tame. A gifted poet, songwriter and speechwriter, Canning had also shown himself an accomplished warmaker, whose belief that ‘we are hated throughout Europe, and that hate must be cured by fear’ would gladden the hearts of many modern Eurosceptics.3 (#litres_trial_promo) Napoleon had also been happy to ignore the gentlemanly codes of diplomatic immunity and throw British envoys in jail for espionage. But after his fall, the Congress of Vienna of 1815 established a more robust system, for the first time regulating a profession of diplomacy that was distinct from politics and statecraft.

The congress took place against an inauspicious backdrop. Russian Cossacks were on the Champs-Élysées, trying to prevent Napoleon from making another comeback. His reckless ambitions had shattered borders and destroyed institutions. Europe was threatened by decades of conflict and uncertainty, so the powers that had defeated him – Russia, Great Britain, Austria and Prussia – invited the other states of Europe to send their representatives to Vienna. All despatched heavyweight statesmen, the titan diplomats of their age who had spent, or were to spend, decades at the top of the international system.

Austria fielded Prince Klemens von Metternich, a former ambassador to Prussia and France. By this stage diplomacy was firmly established as a sound profession for the upwardly mobile nobility – Metternich’s father and son were also in the family business. Metternich’s relationship with Napoleon must have been complex – he had arranged Napoleon’s marriage to an Austrian princess, but also made the career-threatening mistake of publicly arguing with him at Napoleon’s thirty-ninth birthday party. He also numbered Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat among his numerous lovers, their trysts taking place in what is now the British ambassador’s Residence in Paris, then home of her more scandalous sister Pauline.† (#ulink_8ecd31e9-062e-51cb-88e3-f868ce53cead) Metternich had previously entered a bizarre agreement barring him from diplomacy while his father-in-law was alive. I suspect this is unique among pre-nuptial deals. Like many diplomats of the age, he spoke better French than his native language, and left illegitimate offspring in most of the capitals in which he served.

Britain sent Lord Castlereagh (who had wounded Canning in the thigh in their duel, but escaped unscathed himself). His destructive tendencies were not limited to Cabinet colleagues – he would slice his own throat several years later, after suffering from a mental breakdown and gout. Castlereagh was a principal architect of the system of rolling congresses agreed at Vienna. He divided people in death as in life, prompting Lord Byron to pen the poisonous epitaph ‘Posterity will ne’er survey, A nobler grave than this: Here lie the bones of Castlereagh, Stop, traveller, and piss.’

Prussia sent Karl August von Hardenberg, a former chancellor, more austere perhaps than some of the other rogues around the table, and seen by his contemporaries as too regularly outfoxed by Metternich. Tsar Alexander I, a manipulative autocrat who had succeeded his assassinated father at the age of twenty-three, represented Russia himself, not trusting anyone else to defend his corner. Like George W. Bush almost 200 years later, he would hold prayer meetings with his foreign policy advisers before taking key decisions.

France, the defeated power, sent Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who was to be the star of the show. A former bishop with a justified reputation as a womaniser, he had been prevented from taking his family birthright because of the social embarrassment of a deformed leg. Instead he turned his restless talents to statecraft, with zeal. He had managed by hook or by crook to serve Napoleon and the regime he had deposed, making him ideally suited to the intrigue and drama of the congress. At Vienna, through diplomatic cunning, he prevented the partition of France and repositioned himself in French politics as the saviour of his country.

Talleyrand also saw commercial and personal opportunity – he demanded payment from other states for his services, employed the celebrity chefs of his day, and ate and drank prodigiously. He used to hold meetings in his bedroom so that he could press the advantage of his warm bed over his cold, standing interlocutors. Through guile and skill he turned a weak hand into an advantage. When the king of Saxony challenged France as ‘one of those who have betrayed the cause of Europe’, Talleyrand countered with panache, ‘That, sire, is a question of dates.’

This eclectic array of characters gathered at the end of summer 1814 to reorganise the internal boundaries of Europe, and establish a common position on the abolition of the slave trade, the role of royal families across the continent, navigation of rivers and a new German confederation. A massive agenda, by any standards. There cannot ever have been such a colourful and scandalous cast list at any international conference in history, until perhaps the Big Three summits that Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt bestrode at the end of the Second World War. Few could have survived the media spotlight of the twenty-first century. They make modern diplomatic events seem particularly lame, austere and genteel.

There is no collective noun for diplomats, though people might think up a few when cities are clogged by motorcades, or in Vienna’s case cavalcades. Inevitably, matters of diplomatic precedence and protocol featured heavily in their deliberations. Seating plans alone were feverishly contested, as the leaders competed for influence and power. Hundreds of representatives, and a supporting cast of mistresses and flunkies, were lavishly entertained for months in the capital. To complicate their task, Napoleon escaped from his exile in spring 1815 to retake the French throne, and the powers had to break off their deliberations in order to defeat him again and despatch the vanquished autocrat to distant St Helena.

The negotiations were tortuous. The British wanted to retain the ‘balance of power’ of the preceding century, to ensure future Napoleons could not disturb the equilibrium, and to protect their domination of the seas. Prussia wanted more territory. Austria needed to play off the allies against each other, in order to contain the Russian threat. Russia wanted to use religion to bolster the positions of the continent’s monarchs and to keep the Turkish sultan in check.

Coming to decisions in this context was hard work. Voting was out of the question, given the belief of most royal participants that they had a divine right to be there, and that there could be no question of sharing sovereignty. In reality, as with so many conferences, the key players had stitched up the process in advance. Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia agreed to form an inner circle of negotiations, with other players consulted when necessary, and ideally not at all. Talleyrand saw the danger, and put himself vociferously at the head of those excluded, managing to delay the start of the conference with his histrionic protests of injustice. All four of the big players calculated that they could use France as a counterbalance to their opponents within the inner circle, and so expanded their core group to include the wily Frenchman. Once in the gang, Talleyrand dropped all his demands for issues to be tackled in a larger group, and converted elegantly to the concept of a great-powers deal. This was realpolitik at its most brazen and effective.

Recognising the advantage of being pen-holder, much treasured to this day in the British and French missions to the United Nations and European Union, Castlereagh drafted the most important clause, a mutual-support pact in the face of revolution. Through a conference that lasted months, a new European order was born, with key business now to be managed by the five great powers – Great Britain, Russia, France, Prussia and Austria. This big-power stitch-up was the forefather of the modern United Nations Security Council, where China and the United States have replaced Prussia and Austria.

Unlike previous peace conferences, the architects of the 1815 congress were less concerned with punishing the transgressor – in this case France – than setting in place structures to manage the status quo and reduce the potential for further military conflict. It was a recognition by the monarchies of Europe, shocked by the French Revolution and the insurgent rise of Napoleon, that united they stood, divided they would fall. It was also a response to Napoleon’s abuse of the existing and unnecessarily complex diplomatic procedures to filibuster the Congress of Prague a year earlier.

In many ways the outcomes of the Congress of Vienna were backward-looking – the shoring up of a status quo of elites, reactionary regimes and monarchs. But the diplomatic process that underpinned the decisions was ingenious and creative, and created a system of interdependence that prevented continent-wide conflict for a century. Given its context, it was a supreme act of diplomacy.

The congress also laid the basis for the fastest expansion of diplomacy in history. At the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837, she had permanent ambassadors only in Paris, Constantinople and St Petersburg; by the end, she had almost a hundred.

This was the era of aristocratic diplomacy, ‘outdoor relief for the upper classes’.4 (#litres_trial_promo) Looking back in the second edition of his guide to diplomacy in 1922, Ernest Satow wrote that ‘a good diplomat must in short be an English gentleman. The higher the grade the greater the need for private income.’5 (#litres_trial_promo) Some of those gentlemen, such as Sir Richard Burton, would disappear for months on end, charging around unexplored territories on camel or horseback. Their snug-trousered portraits stare down disapprovingly from the Foreign Office’s walls at today’s diplomats as they complete their risk assessments.

To add to the theatre, diplomatic uniforms were adopted – Lord Curzon later gave meticulous thought to the outfit in which he would call on the emir of Afghanistan, including wellingtons, fake medals, spurs, a cocked hat, and, deliciously, ‘the most gigantic and swashbuckling sword I could find’. He would not have got through the door of today’s diplomatic assessment and recruitment centres, which tend to frown on swashbuckling swords. But such swaggering Flashman diplomats set out to study, adventure and conquer.

The Industrial Revolution was the engine for this Western expansion, giving Europe another surge forward. British entrepreneurs unleashed the power of steam and coal. Factories and gunboats, then later computers and nukes, allowed them to build economic muscle, project power and influence, and strike out.

In 1500, Europe’s future imperial powers – Britain, France, Spain, Portugal – controlled 10% of the world’s territories and generated just over 40% of its wealth. By 1913, at the height of empire, the West controlled almost 60% of the territories, which generated almost 80% of the wealth. While competition and scientific and technological advantage were key to success, the diplomats of the nineteenth century would have added another reason: the ability to spot opportunities, to negotiate a profitable peace, and to hold it together. They knew how to take that technology and turn it into raw power.

The job was still not of course without its dangers. British diplomat Alexander Burnes, a Hindi- and Persian-speaking Scot with a roving eye, was hacked to death by a mob of jealous husbands in Afghanistan in 1841. His colleague Charles Stoddart was imprisoned and executed for spying in Bukhara in 1842, following a failed mission to persuade the emir to free Russian slaves. Bertie Mitford, the grandfather of the famous sisters, was made to watch ritual disembowelment on arrival in Japan as ambassador in 1868 (perhaps it was this that prompted his granddaughter Nancy to ascribe to a character in one of her novels the opinion that ‘abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends’,6 (#litres_trial_promo) a view shared by her father David – and some modern politicians). The entire diplomatic corps was placed under siege during the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. Diplomatic papers record seventeen deaths among the English ‘King’s Messengers’, who transported the diplomatic bag, in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century.

The expectation of diplomatic hospitality also created its own challenges – 14,000 Persian merchants took up uninvited residence at the British legation in Tehran in 1906 as part of their effort to secure constitutional reform. Earlier, 300 of the shah’s wives and eunuchs had made a similar request for sanctuary. Sir Mortimer Durand, the British representative, was, he reported to London, ‘somewhat staggered’.

New rules gave a sense of greater purpose and historical context to diplomats, who could now make war as well as peace at the stroke of a pen. The Prussian chancellor Bismarck famously edited out the diplomatic niceties from a telegram from his emperor Wilhelm I to Napoleon III, thereby leaving its recipient furious, and triggering the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Future diplomats who could spend days negotiating the positioning of a comma in the Maastricht Treaty would have cooed with admiration at Bismarck’s later drafting success, following days of negotiation, in establishing his master as ‘German emperor’ rather than Wilhelm’s preferred ‘emperor of Germany’.

Diplomats and their masters also began to have to take much greater account of public opinion. Advisers started to offer judgements to their leaders as to which of their mistakes the public could accept, and which were unforgivable. These were not always well received by capitals. In 1919, Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon responded furiously to one such missive from his ambassador to Paris, saying, ‘I have always known you to be a cad, I now know you to be a liar.’7 (#litres_trial_promo) It has never been easy for envoys to speak truth unto power.

By the end of the nineteenth century, there was a new and increasingly influential player on the block. America began investing heavily in innovative naval technology. Steam-powered battleships with powerful armaments bought real-world diplomatic clout. They could also drag the new nation into war. When its battleship the USS Maine exploded for undetermined reasons in the harbour of Havana, the American press stoked war fever and blamed Spain. This gave a pretext for America to replace Spain as the dominant power in its own backyard, in countries such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam. America had arrived as a global power to rival the European states that had entrenched their positions at the Congress of Vienna.

Yet America’s ambitions remained opaque. As president, Thomas Jefferson wanted it both ways, to ‘enjoy the fruits of power without falling victim to the normal consequences of its exercise’.8 (#litres_trial_promo) Or as John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State in 1821, put it, America ‘goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.’9 (#litres_trial_promo) This dilemma at the heart of American foreign policy continues to this day.

The diplomatic system in 1815 – constructed with such care and swagger – looked robust enough on the eve of the First World War. Surveying regional tensions, diplomats assessed that there would need to be some accommodations to acknowledge shifts in power, but did not anticipate that conflict would shatter the genteel assumptions that underpinned their interactions. European diplomacy had got fat, entitled, and complacent.

So the British ambassador in Berlin continued his yachting expedition with the German kaiser even after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, triggering the Great War. The ambassador visited key ministers after the outbreak of conflict, and dined as usual that evening at his Residence in Berlin. When his meal was briefly disrupted by pesky protesters, his staff judged that the German emperor’s apology for the inconvenience was tardy. Having not arrived until ten the next morning, it ‘served to show what we had thought, that the emperor was not a gentleman’.10 (#litres_trial_promo)

After diplomacy’s finest century it was one thing to declare war, but quite another to misjudge diplomatic etiquette.

* (#ulink_d33b91d2-cd87-5fc3-8201-1c7e0d4b7d27) Within the FCO, the honour of CMG is known as ‘Call Me God’, and KCMG is ‘Kindly Call Me God’. GCMG is of course ‘God Calls Me God’.

† (#ulink_5f284937-a7f0-577d-8675-13395478d8b4) Pauline’s breast cup, in which she offered drinks to suitors, is still on display in the ambassador’s Residence, thus prompting many an awkward silence at drinks receptions.




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