My latest piece at DIPLOMAT has another gallop round some of the issues surrounding Mass and Velocity in diplomacy:

The EU’s common foreign policy is particularly prone to piling on Mass but losing Velocity.  Lots of European countries intoning the same policies, but struggling to take decisions to implement any of them. Piles of badly drafted declarations. Feeble, unfocused action to implement them.

Even in Europe itself the EU has a wobbly on/off policy of engagement with Belarus, and cannot unite around the simple task of agreeing whether a fellow European state (Kosovo) actually exists. Maybe that unhappy example shows that when it comes to issues at the heart of world diplomacy, namely recognition policy, Mass should always trump Velocity? Has it been wise for the UK and others to push ahead busily without working up a solid EU approach first and finding a way to accommodate Serbia, Russia, China or India? Either way the policy is inept.

Surely, the Eurofederalists say, in today’s world it makes sense for European countries to pool sovereignty to get more Mass! But why is ‘pooling sovereignty’ likely to be more effective? Countries like China, Russia, Brazil, India and plenty of other states have authority and make their weight felt because they are not part of a sluggish, sovereignty-diluting formation: they are free to act as they decide. Take Norway and (in a very different way) Qatar. Both are smaller countries yet exerting plenty of quiet influence by using diplomatic agility and money to make a difference where they choose to do so.

In some policy areas Mass does look to work better than Velocity. The systematic rolling out of democratic reform to former communist Europe has shown the value of painstaking EU process, in Poland and elsewhere. As we are now seeing, the going is much harder in Ukraine (as in Belarus and other CIS countries) where principles of EU pluralism collide with the entrenched interests of post-KGB structures aimed at maintaining Moscow’s psychological and operational influence. Russia cannot compete with the EU on Mass (or Money), so it is resorting to Velocity: using classic mobile military deployments and various modes of ‘asymmetric warfare’ to collapse Ukraine’s eastern borders and leave NATO looking nervous.

In short, in today’s world Velocity is the way to bet. In just a few months Islamic State fanatics have raced to make devastating gains at the expense of regional stability in and around Syria or Iraq. Imposing as the world’s foreign and defence ministries (and great banks and huge corporations) may look, they are all vulnerable to invisible speed-of-light cyber-attacks or other sabotage created by swarms of wily hackers or solitary leakers.

In a world where fast-moving chaos and confusion can break out anywhere with scarcely a moment’s notice, what do diplomats steeped in process and patience do? Nothing but hope forlornly that somehow the old familiar ways keep going, at least until they themselves reach retirement?

Of course these metaphors take you only so far. But as today’s news brings claims that Western intelligence agencies have been hit hard because of the practical consequences of the Snowden leaks, it’s hard to recall a time when the most central areas of democratic government as understood for most of my lifetime have come across as both so sluggish and so vulnerable. Did I mention the Eurozone?

And not only states. And not only diplomacy. It looks as if Islamist fanatics have succeeded in publicising the home address of Pamela Geller, the US woman who takes an ‘extreme’ anti-Islamist position. How long will it be before we conclude that the state is no longer a credible force for protecting us against each other? And we all grab our 3D printers to get ourselves a little extra firepower?