Engagement
Jim Murphy Former MP, Minister for Europe, Foreign & Commonwealth Office
Executive summary
Public diplomacy isn't new. The Roman republic invited the sons of neighbouring kings to be educated in Rome.¹ Napoleon, when he invaded Egypt, planned to order the entire French army to convert to Islam to help establish French rule.² During the Second World War, Winston Churchill successfully presented the largest empire the world had ever known as a plucky underdog to win over US hearts and minds. These were three different strategies, each designed for the challenges of its time and place.
The challenge of our own era is to recognise that we can help achieve our foreign policy goals through engagement with foreign publics and that our success depends on cooperation.
Faced with global challenges, many people become fatalistic: there's nothing we can do about global warming, or radicalisation or hunger; so let's do nothing. But governments and diplomats can't stick their heads in the sand and hope that the internet will go away. That carbon emissions will cease overnight. That the 191 million individuals living outside their countries of birth will suddenly pack up and go home.³ That avian flu can be turned away at a border for not having a valid visa.
We can stand against new-age fatalism and assert our ability to change the world for the better - if we engage with others. We need to hone our diplomacy to fit our time, our environment and our challenges.
The hallmark of a successful state, and of a successful diplomat, lies in this capacity to adapt. This isn't new. In 1620, Francis Bacon warned that the invention of printing, gunpowder and the compass had 'changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world' adding that 'it is well to observe the force, virtue and consequence of discovery'.Connecting with the global public
The Foreign & Commonwealth Office's foreign policy priorities respond to the key threats facing our interests today: to stop terrorism and weapons proliferation and tackle their causes; to prevent and resolve conflict; to promote a low-carbon, high-growth, global economy; and to develop effective international institutions.
These objectives - and the threats behind them - are shared with other states. If I substitute for 'Foreign and Commonwealth Office' in the preceding paragraph, the French 'Quai d'Orsay' or the US 'State Department' or the 'Ministry of Foreign Affairs of South Africa', wouldn't these priorities still make sense? The days of diplomacy as a means just of delivering narrow national self-interest are gone. The basis for joint action is unprecedented in peacetime.
More than ever before, publics have become vital players in international policy. Publics are ultimately the winners or losers when the world succeeds or fails in tackling global challenges. A rise in sea levels will affect us all; but it is the poorest people who will be hit first.
But we should not view the public simply as being passive recipients of diplomacy. Today, publics have a much greater say in the decisions their governments make than they have ever had. And terrorism, climate, insecurity, conflict, poverty are man-made problems. The decisions people make about their own lives can have a direct impact on the rest of the world, whether by repudiating terrorism or by changing their own behaviour to prevent climate change.
It's important not to underestimate the extent of this shift. David Kelly, a former British ambassador to Moscow, who served in 1920 as Third Secretary at the British representation in Buenos Aires, set out that the 'primary business [of diplomats] has been and always will be to cultivate whatever groups actually influence policy'.⁴ Kelly was right. But in 1920s Latin America, he concluded, influence was vested in a small cabal of powerful men. So in a sense, his diplomacy was easy. It was about getting access to these men and talking to them. Writing his memoirs in 1952, Kelly derided as a 'pathetic fallacy' the 'notion that the Ambassador should cruise around trying to get contacts with 'the man in the street''.
There are still some states today where this might hold true. But over recent decades, in many countries, power has shifted from the elites to the public. The 'pathetic fallacy' has become a strategic necessity.
Governments still need to talk to other governments. And they will still need to engage small groups of particularly influential individuals. From time to time, governments will still need to bring military force to bear in international affairs. But we need also to reach out to the public - to all those whose actions affect our ability to deliver - and work with them to develop and implement international policy solutions.
Putting the public back into public diplomacy
It's easy to talk about engagement. Who could argue that engagement is a bad thing? But often we claim to be engaging when what we're really doing is broadcasting.
I believe the key is for us to take the model with which the best diplomats are already very familiar, finding and implementing solutions with other governments and small groups, often of elites, outside government, and to apply it to engagement with a more diverse range of stakeholders and, where necessary, with the broader public.
First, foreign ministries must stop seeing public diplomacy as a form of public relations, shouting out core messages and top lines, louder and louder, in the false belief that they haven't been heard clearly enough. To succeed in today's world, we need genuine engagement, not clumsy propaganda.
Second, they must also recognise that adopting an old fashioned nation-branding approach to public diplomacy doesn't change what people really think of other countries. And even if it did, it would not address our real objectives. There is value in niche messaging to specific groups about aspects of our countries, for example to encourage tourism or inward investment. But this only works in tightly circumscribed areas.
Third, we must engage genuinely at all stages in the policy cycle, from research and analysis through policy formulation to policy implementation and finally evaluation. The era of generating policies in a Foreign Office silo has gone. The answers to global challenges are out there in the world.
Foreign ministries and embassies will be at their most valuable as global or local hubs for knowledge and for co-creation and co-implementation of solutions, not purporting to be experts on the detail of the vast range of issues they deal with nor to have themselves the ability to impose fixes on the rest of the world.
Finally, we need to understand that different situations will require different approaches. Sometimes the most effective public diplomacy will be conducted in the media spotlight. But sometimes public diplomacy is more effective when it isn't carried out in public.
The modern public diplomat
So far in this chapter I have talked about the changing environment for diplomacy and the need to bring more people into foreign policy. All this implies change for the way foreign ministries, embassies and diplomats do business themselves.
The best diplomats are specialised generalists, who excel in a range of core skills that equip them to tackle any situation thrown at them. We expect diplomatic staff to move seamlessly from negotiating trade agreements to organising international conferences to evacuating their nationals in a crisis to running development programmes.
These core skills remain as valid as ever. But as the world changes around them, diplomats need to adapt; to find new ways of working and to develop additional skills.
The biggest single challenge for the world's diplomats is to deliver real - and timely - progress on global problems like climate change and poverty.
Of course, this will not be easy. International relations are vulnerable to inertia and the pursuit of the lowest common denominator; too often, legacy counts more than what's on the horizon. This has to change. In the future, the most effective diplomatic services will be driven by a new sense of activism, operating nimbly and flexibly, and able to show clear victories in delivering real-world change.
Identifying key stakeholders was once relatively straightforward. We knew who affected our interests and where to find them - normally in the smart clubs and large houses of capital cities. Now the range of stakeholders on the important issues of the day can be huge - inhabiting every corner of a country - not just the corridors of power, but the slums, the business districts and the suburbs. And it's much more difficult to work out who among them are our key partners - where's the knowledge, where's the influence, who can make things happen? Malcolm Gladwell and Mark Earls have both written fascinating studies on influence and change.⁵ Foreign ministries need to learn from other organisations - particularly campaigning NGOs, which are experts in this field.
Diplomacy is often seen as a secretive business, by both those within and those outside the diplomatic world. This made sense when diplomacy was a zero-sum game of narrow national interest. And of course there will always be diplomatic secrets. But if we want to bring more people, with their knowledge and energy and creativity, into policy-making and policy delivery (for example, in the way that Nicholas Stern has managed to do on climate change),⁶ our default position must be to open up our doors for dialogue.
The most damaging charge that can be made against diplomats is that they have been co-opted by their hosts - no longer seeing the world from the perspective of their own foreign ministries or treasuries. But this ability, to see the world from others' perspectives and to use this knowledge, not just to find better ways of persuading them but to inform our own policy-making, is a vital diplomatic role. When global problems require global solutions, how can we make international policy unless we understand how the world looks standing in others' shoes? Or, put another way, what is peoples motivation to act responsibly on climate security or radicalisation if they have no shoes?
A more interconnected world is becoming more complex. As people are faced with worldwide brands and products, many think more about their own unique heritage and define themselves more by it. So cultural heritage becomes more important, and often more fruitful, as an avenue for engagement. A deep-rooted respect for land, a cultural tradition of justice, an underlying religious pacifism, may be sound bases for discussion of the environment, law or terrorism. Cultural heritage and personal identity are increasingly important drivers of behaviour. Engaged public diplomacy is sensitive to values-based behaviour.
This approach to public diplomacy means that gaining an understanding of other people becomes increasingly challenging. Diplomats need to understand radicalised youth, energy consumers, rainforest loggers. They need to find out what motivates people, where our common interests lie. They need, for example, to know in some detail what might cause an Afghan tribesman to reject the Taleban and buy into a long-term democratic vision for Afghanistan.
Diplomats have traditionally used the same suite of tools to do their jobs. There's nothing wrong with these. Conferences and visits have their place. A busy hour spent at a cocktail party by a junior political officer soaking up information can deliver as much as a week of calls and meetings. Ambassadors' dinner parties, bringing the leading figures on a particular issue around a table for an informal discussion, can still be one of the fastest ways of developing common solutions to shared problems. All of these established diplomatic practices are necessary, but they are no longer sufficient.
But diplomats are less good at engaging larger and more diverse groups. One of the big challenges for diplomats will be to get more creative, to attract interest, to listen, to engage and to explain, to compete against the noise of thousands of other voices. In particular, diplomats need to learn how to use the internet.
Ambassador to the World Wide Web
Engaged public diplomacy is more than internet activism, but better use of the internet is essential. Until now, in common with most diplomatic services, we at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office have used the internet as a cost-effective way of providing services and information. And we have done this very successfully, reaching far more people more cheaply, more quickly and more easily than ever before. But we are only scratching the surface of what's possible.
If the internet were a foreign country - the largest country in the world - our presence in it would be the equivalent of a static information booth. This is fine for those who want a visa, or travel advice, or to see what we've been saying publicly about the UN or the Middle East. But we need to use the internet in an entirely new way - to connect with those who don't get invited to diplomatic dinners and receptions on the policy issues which matter most. We need to use the internet to invite people into the policy-making process, to work with them to implement solutions. And we need to get out and about more on the web, recognising that we need to go to where other people are, rather than expecting them to come to us.
Civilian surge
We have set ourselves an enormous task - genuine engagement with people around the world to solve the challenges of our time. This engagement should be based on ideas and knowledge, on the development of solutions to common problems, rooted in a belief that the future of the world is in the hands of its people.
We must, of course, as in the past, continue to engage with foreign governments, and do so effectively. But we will also work with new partners, understanding and using what our Foreign Secretary has called a 'civilian surge in foreign policy'.
Where in the past diplomacy was often about fissures, in the twenty-first century it will be increasingly about fusion - the fusion of diplomatic challenges into big global issues which affect us all; the fusion of domestic and international agendas; and, if we are successful, the fusion of governments and publics around the world in the pursuit and implementation of solutions. Fusion diplomacy understands that our biggest threat still comes from other states - the states of inertia, inaction, indifference and withdrawal. Here lies the real challenge that the new public diplomacy must address.
1. See chapter 2 in this volume by Nicholas Cull.
2. For a full account of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, see Maya Jasanoff, Edge of empire
(London: Fourth Estate, 2005), pp. 132–48.
3. See UN report, Trends in total migrant stock: the 2005 revision, CD-ROM (New York and Geneva: United Nations, Feb. 2007).
4. David Kelly, The ruling few, or the human background to diplomacy (London: Hollis & Carter, 1952), pp. 117–118.
5. Malcolm Gladwell, The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference (Boston and London: Little, Brown, 2000); Mark Earls, Herd: How to change mass behaviour by harnessing our true nature (New York: Wiley, 2007).
6. Nicholas Stern, The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Executive summary
We need a public diplomacy which fits our time. The policy issues which confront us are increasingly global. Systematic engagement with publics both at home and abroad will be required if we are to identify and implement solutions. Policy-makers and diplomats must work with a wider range of constituencies beyond government, moving towards a more open, inclusive style of policy-making and implementation. Understanding of complexity, difference, networks and cultural heritage will be needed, alongside more imaginative use of technology. Engagement, conducted with energy, ambition and creativity, must be the hallmark of contemporary public diplomacy.
Public diplomacy isn't new. The Roman republic invited the sons of neighbouring kings to be educated in Rome.¹ Napoleon, when he invaded Egypt, planned to order the entire French army to convert to Islam to help establish French rule.² During the Second World War, Winston Churchill successfully presented the largest empire the world had ever known as a plucky underdog to win over US hearts and minds. These were three different strategies, each designed for the challenges of its time and place.
The challenge of our own era is to recognise that we can help achieve our foreign policy goals through engagement with foreign publics and that our success depends on cooperation.
Faced with global challenges, many people become fatalistic: there's nothing we can do about global warming, or radicalisation or hunger; so let's do nothing. But governments and diplomats can't stick their heads in the sand and hope that the internet will go away. That carbon emissions will cease overnight. That the 191 million individuals living outside their countries of birth will suddenly pack up and go home.³ That avian flu can be turned away at a border for not having a valid visa.
We can stand against new-age fatalism and assert our ability to change the world for the better - if we engage with others. We need to hone our diplomacy to fit our time, our environment and our challenges.
The hallmark of a successful state, and of a successful diplomat, lies in this capacity to adapt. This isn't new. In 1620, Francis Bacon warned that the invention of printing, gunpowder and the compass had 'changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world' adding that 'it is well to observe the force, virtue and consequence of discovery'.
Connecting with the global public
The Foreign & Commonwealth Office's foreign policy priorities respond to the key threats facing our interests today: to stop terrorism and weapons proliferation and tackle their causes; to prevent and resolve conflict; to promote a low-carbon, high-growth, global economy; and to develop effective international institutions.These objectives - and the threats behind them - are shared with other states. If I substitute for 'Foreign and Commonwealth Office' in the preceding paragraph, the French 'Quai d'Orsay' or the US 'State Department' or the 'Ministry of Foreign Affairs of South Africa', wouldn't these priorities still make sense? The days of diplomacy as a means just of delivering narrow national self-interest are gone. The basis for joint action is unprecedented in peacetime.
More than ever before, publics have become vital players in international policy. Publics are ultimately the winners or losers when the world succeeds or fails in tackling global challenges. A rise in sea levels will affect us all; but it is the poorest people who will be hit first.
But we should not view the public simply as being passive recipients of diplomacy. Today, publics have a much greater say in the decisions their governments make than they have ever had. And terrorism, climate, insecurity, conflict, poverty are man-made problems. The decisions people make about their own lives can have a direct impact on the rest of the world, whether by repudiating terrorism or by changing their own behaviour to prevent climate change.
It's important not to underestimate the extent of this shift. David Kelly, a former British ambassador to Moscow, who served in 1920 as Third Secretary at the British representation in Buenos Aires, set out that the 'primary business [of diplomats] has been and always will be to cultivate whatever groups actually influence policy'.⁴ Kelly was right. But in 1920s Latin America, he concluded, influence was vested in a small cabal of powerful men. So in a sense, his diplomacy was easy. It was about getting access to these men and talking to them. Writing his memoirs in 1952, Kelly derided as a 'pathetic fallacy' the 'notion that the Ambassador should cruise around trying to get contacts with 'the man in the street''.
There are still some states today where this might hold true. But over recent decades, in many countries, power has shifted from the elites to the public. The 'pathetic fallacy' has become a strategic necessity.
Governments still need to talk to other governments. And they will still need to engage small groups of particularly influential individuals. From time to time, governments will still need to bring military force to bear in international affairs. But we need also to reach out to the public - to all those whose actions affect our ability to deliver - and work with them to develop and implement international policy solutions.
Putting the public back into public diplomacy
It's easy to talk about engagement. Who could argue that engagement is a bad thing? But often we claim to be engaging when what we're really doing is broadcasting.I believe the key is for us to take the model with which the best diplomats are already very familiar, finding and implementing solutions with other governments and small groups, often of elites, outside government, and to apply it to engagement with a more diverse range of stakeholders and, where necessary, with the broader public.
First, foreign ministries must stop seeing public diplomacy as a form of public relations, shouting out core messages and top lines, louder and louder, in the false belief that they haven't been heard clearly enough. To succeed in today's world, we need genuine engagement, not clumsy propaganda.
Second, they must also recognise that adopting an old fashioned nation-branding approach to public diplomacy doesn't change what people really think of other countries. And even if it did, it would not address our real objectives. There is value in niche messaging to specific groups about aspects of our countries, for example to encourage tourism or inward investment. But this only works in tightly circumscribed areas.
Third, we must engage genuinely at all stages in the policy cycle, from research and analysis through policy formulation to policy implementation and finally evaluation. The era of generating policies in a Foreign Office silo has gone. The answers to global challenges are out there in the world.
Foreign ministries and embassies will be at their most valuable as global or local hubs for knowledge and for co-creation and co-implementation of solutions, not purporting to be experts on the detail of the vast range of issues they deal with nor to have themselves the ability to impose fixes on the rest of the world.
Finally, we need to understand that different situations will require different approaches. Sometimes the most effective public diplomacy will be conducted in the media spotlight. But sometimes public diplomacy is more effective when it isn't carried out in public.
The modern public diplomat
So far in this chapter I have talked about the changing environment for diplomacy and the need to bring more people into foreign policy. All this implies change for the way foreign ministries, embassies and diplomats do business themselves.The best diplomats are specialised generalists, who excel in a range of core skills that equip them to tackle any situation thrown at them. We expect diplomatic staff to move seamlessly from negotiating trade agreements to organising international conferences to evacuating their nationals in a crisis to running development programmes.
These core skills remain as valid as ever. But as the world changes around them, diplomats need to adapt; to find new ways of working and to develop additional skills.
The biggest single challenge for the world's diplomats is to deliver real - and timely - progress on global problems like climate change and poverty.
Of course, this will not be easy. International relations are vulnerable to inertia and the pursuit of the lowest common denominator; too often, legacy counts more than what's on the horizon. This has to change. In the future, the most effective diplomatic services will be driven by a new sense of activism, operating nimbly and flexibly, and able to show clear victories in delivering real-world change.
Identifying key stakeholders was once relatively straightforward. We knew who affected our interests and where to find them - normally in the smart clubs and large houses of capital cities. Now the range of stakeholders on the important issues of the day can be huge - inhabiting every corner of a country - not just the corridors of power, but the slums, the business districts and the suburbs. And it's much more difficult to work out who among them are our key partners - where's the knowledge, where's the influence, who can make things happen? Malcolm Gladwell and Mark Earls have both written fascinating studies on influence and change.⁵ Foreign ministries need to learn from other organisations - particularly campaigning NGOs, which are experts in this field.
Diplomacy is often seen as a secretive business, by both those within and those outside the diplomatic world. This made sense when diplomacy was a zero-sum game of narrow national interest. And of course there will always be diplomatic secrets. But if we want to bring more people, with their knowledge and energy and creativity, into policy-making and policy delivery (for example, in the way that Nicholas Stern has managed to do on climate change),⁶ our default position must be to open up our doors for dialogue.
The most damaging charge that can be made against diplomats is that they have been co-opted by their hosts - no longer seeing the world from the perspective of their own foreign ministries or treasuries. But this ability, to see the world from others' perspectives and to use this knowledge, not just to find better ways of persuading them but to inform our own policy-making, is a vital diplomatic role. When global problems require global solutions, how can we make international policy unless we understand how the world looks standing in others' shoes? Or, put another way, what is peoples motivation to act responsibly on climate security or radicalisation if they have no shoes?
A more interconnected world is becoming more complex. As people are faced with worldwide brands and products, many think more about their own unique heritage and define themselves more by it. So cultural heritage becomes more important, and often more fruitful, as an avenue for engagement. A deep-rooted respect for land, a cultural tradition of justice, an underlying religious pacifism, may be sound bases for discussion of the environment, law or terrorism. Cultural heritage and personal identity are increasingly important drivers of behaviour. Engaged public diplomacy is sensitive to values-based behaviour.
This approach to public diplomacy means that gaining an understanding of other people becomes increasingly challenging. Diplomats need to understand radicalised youth, energy consumers, rainforest loggers. They need to find out what motivates people, where our common interests lie. They need, for example, to know in some detail what might cause an Afghan tribesman to reject the Taleban and buy into a long-term democratic vision for Afghanistan.
Diplomats have traditionally used the same suite of tools to do their jobs. There's nothing wrong with these. Conferences and visits have their place. A busy hour spent at a cocktail party by a junior political officer soaking up information can deliver as much as a week of calls and meetings. Ambassadors' dinner parties, bringing the leading figures on a particular issue around a table for an informal discussion, can still be one of the fastest ways of developing common solutions to shared problems. All of these established diplomatic practices are necessary, but they are no longer sufficient.
But diplomats are less good at engaging larger and more diverse groups. One of the big challenges for diplomats will be to get more creative, to attract interest, to listen, to engage and to explain, to compete against the noise of thousands of other voices. In particular, diplomats need to learn how to use the internet.
Ambassador to the World Wide Web
Engaged public diplomacy is more than internet activism, but better use of the internet is essential. Until now, in common with most diplomatic services, we at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office have used the internet as a cost-effective way of providing services and information. And we have done this very successfully, reaching far more people more cheaply, more quickly and more easily than ever before. But we are only scratching the surface of what's possible.If the internet were a foreign country - the largest country in the world - our presence in it would be the equivalent of a static information booth. This is fine for those who want a visa, or travel advice, or to see what we've been saying publicly about the UN or the Middle East. But we need to use the internet in an entirely new way - to connect with those who don't get invited to diplomatic dinners and receptions on the policy issues which matter most. We need to use the internet to invite people into the policy-making process, to work with them to implement solutions. And we need to get out and about more on the web, recognising that we need to go to where other people are, rather than expecting them to come to us.
Civilian surge
We have set ourselves an enormous task - genuine engagement with people around the world to solve the challenges of our time. This engagement should be based on ideas and knowledge, on the development of solutions to common problems, rooted in a belief that the future of the world is in the hands of its people.We must, of course, as in the past, continue to engage with foreign governments, and do so effectively. But we will also work with new partners, understanding and using what our Foreign Secretary has called a 'civilian surge in foreign policy'.
Where in the past diplomacy was often about fissures, in the twenty-first century it will be increasingly about fusion - the fusion of diplomatic challenges into big global issues which affect us all; the fusion of domestic and international agendas; and, if we are successful, the fusion of governments and publics around the world in the pursuit and implementation of solutions. Fusion diplomacy understands that our biggest threat still comes from other states - the states of inertia, inaction, indifference and withdrawal. Here lies the real challenge that the new public diplomacy must address.
Notes
1. See chapter 2 in this volume by Nicholas Cull.
2. For a full account of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, see Maya Jasanoff, Edge of empire
(London: Fourth Estate, 2005), pp. 132–48.
3. See UN report, Trends in total migrant stock: the 2005 revision, CD-ROM (New York and Geneva: United Nations, Feb. 2007).
4. David Kelly, The ruling few, or the human background to diplomacy (London: Hollis & Carter, 1952), pp. 117–118.
5. Malcolm Gladwell, The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference (Boston and London: Little, Brown, 2000); Mark Earls, Herd: How to change mass behaviour by harnessing our true nature (New York: Wiley, 2007).
6. Nicholas Stern, The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).