Blogoir

Today the latest edition of DIPLOMAT magazine arrived.

I opened it to find an article written by me which I could not remember writing(!). So I read it with much enjoyment and appreciation.

Check it out. It describes my attempts as an argumentative young diplomat to persuade the Embassy in Belgrade in 1983/84 that the then Yugoslavia was possibly heading for a breakdown, with unfathomable consequences. To no avail.

Which prompted me at the time to write my legendary MTS, Non-MTS paper - as per one of my very first blog postings here.

My DIPLOMAT article describes what happened next:

I left the post in 1984. Back at HQ I went along to Personnel to discuss my future. ‘You are getting a reputation for being argumentative,’ said the frumpy HR lady. ‘Wouldn’t you argue if you saw disaster looming but everyone else ignored it?’ I replied in some exasperation.

‘See, you’re arguing again,’ came the smug response.

I still remember this conversation so vividly, not least the supercilious but unimaginative female on the other side of the table. I pointed out to her that it had been annoying dealing with senior Embassy colleagues who instructed me to go out and talk to Yugoslav dissidents and get their devasting observations on the fecklessness of the Yugo-communists, but then could not spell when they wrote afterwards that these people were 'obviously dissaffected'.

"I find that hard to believe", she sniffed.

Pshaw.

And so I moved onto the Air Services Desk and then FCO Speechwriting. The Cold War ended. A mere 300 weeks or so after I left Belgrade, Yugoslavia indeed collapsed into appalling violence and ghastly war crimes. Huge British and international resources were poured in to help stop the fighting and pay for post-conflict reconstruction.

Yes, I had been argumentative. I had even been right. What I see now, with the benefit of much more experience, was that I had not been convincing.

Not that it would have made much difference had I been convincing. Finance Ministries don’t want to adjust their plans to warnings of disaster. They prefer to ignore the problem and instead pay out reluctantly as and when disaster creates real problems, which the taxpayer is prepared to fund to clean up.

In Yugoslavia’s case, this was far more expensive than the cost of investing in diplomatic initiatives to bribe the reckless Yugoslavs into calming down.

What are feisty young Chinese or Indian diplomats now drafting in their European Embassies? Maybe a paper entitled ‘The eurozone: MTS, or non-MTS?’

Will they be allowed to send it back to HQ?

Read the whole thing.

The punditry gushes forth re Tony Blair and his memoirs.

Here on the Right is Simon Heffer, quiet Ayn Rand fan and very conservative in all respects, liking Mr Blair (whom he knows) but being baffled by the poor writing:

It appears to be a book written in tune with all the most unpleasant and cynical marketing techniques of modern publishing. Its tenor is often pure Sylvie Krin. The gossip in it will amuse those who like such things – whether about Mr Blair's liking a drink, his lusts for the late Diana, Princess of Wales, or the Queen's being "haughty" (a somewhat off-colour observation for her former first minister to make, we should reflect) – but is hardly becoming of an elder statesman.

How much this is the result of an instruction from his publishers to provide something that will make money, and how much it is the product of Mr Blair's own personality, one cannot be sure.

And on the Left, Mehdi Hasan at the New Statesman who looks with some scorn at the Blair record on Iraq:

Six of the country's top academic experts on Iraq and international security warned TB, in a face-to-face meeting in November 2002, that the consequences of an invasion could be catastrophic.

Cambridge University's George Joffe, one of the six invited to Downing Street, got the impression of "someone with a very shallow mind, who's not interested in issues other than the personalities of the top people, no interest in social forces, political trends, etc".

... No, I just think you're being dishonest, Tony. Seven years on from Iraq, nothing has changed.

One of the odd arguments against the Blair policy on Iraq is that it blames the West in general and Bush/Blair in particular for all the suffering caused by UN sanctions against Saddam's Iraq before the invasion. The Hasan piece drones on in this sense:

No mention here of the sanctions on Iraq, imposed by the United Nations, and enforced by the United States and the United Kingdom. Those sanctions caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, and were described by the former UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq, Dennis Halliday, as a form of "genocide".

As even the Humanitarian Panel of the Security Council noted in March 1999: "Even if not all suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors, especially sanctions, the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivations in the absence of prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of the war".

What is it with Leftists? They say they want multilateralism and non-violent pressure against unjust regimes which brutalise international law and attack their neighbours. In this case they got exactly that.

Saddam invaded Kuwait and the planet more or less united around the proposition that he should be thrown off the premises. With bizarre restraint the first President Bush did not used the US presence in Iraq after Saddam's defeat to topple him.

Which meant that other measures were then needed to keep this madman under control. Including sanctions.

The whole point of sanctions is that they have bad effects. Admittedly the broader the sanctions, the worse the effects on ordinary people and the erosion of middle-class social stability. That, presumably, is again an intended market signal to the masses concerned to rise up and overthrow the regime provoking negative international reaction which is damaging their interests.

In practice odious regimes do well from sanctions and often even manage to blame the sanctioneers for the negative results, as happened in the Iraq case.

The core point is that if ordinary Iraqis suffered pain and deprivation from the sanctions regime, there was a simple answer.

Saddam could have agreed to step down to end the suffering of Iraq and its people, maybe negotiating some sort of immunity guarantees and/or safe passage to a state ready to host him. The international community thereupon could and would have helped Iraq supervise free and fair elections and so bring about a generously supported transition to reasonable modern pluralism.

That approach would have avoided all the misery and violence which happened.

That such misery and violence did in fact happen was squarely attributable not to Bush and Blair but to Saddam's and his national socialist regime's greedy desire to cling to power, no matter what.

Thus Leftish/progressive moaning about Blair's policy on this point at least is trivially dishonest, if not wicked propaganda.

That said, I don't think I'll be buying this book. Mawkishly written, plus the fact that Blair left Brown and so many other misfits in key positions for so long showed that, basically, he put his wretched party's interests (and his own) ahead of those of the UK. I have paid enough for his selfishness already.

Christopher Myers, the newly appointed 'Special Adviser' to Foreign Secretary William Hague, has resigned amidst a gush of crass innuendo from Guido and others re a possible homosexual relationship between Hague and Myers. 

Willaim Hague's statement on the issue has dignity and barely concealed anger - one of the most remarkable (and frank) things ever said by any Foreign Minister anywhere?

Iain Dale is upset, somehow assuming that this a bleak day for blogging and that 'political blogging' as such is diminished by this episode:

For those who doubt it, they forget (probably conveniently) that I spoke out against the bloggers who accused Gordon Brown of having mental problems. I freely admit that I don't get it right all the time, but when I get it wrong big time I try to hold my hands up and apologise.

I hope that happens in this case. The fact that Guido Fawkes has printed the Hague statement with no added comment indicates a growing realisation (I hope) that he called this one wrong.

I am afraid that all of us who blog have been sullied by this experience, even though only one blog was making the insinuations. I said on Radio 4's PM that there was part of me tonight that is ashamed to call myself a political blogger this evening, and I meant it. That may sound a bit holier than thou, but it is how I feel.

A somewhat self-absorbed and self-indulgent view? Why should he think that 'all of us who blog' have been sullied by this experience?

I don't.

Do journalists for serious newspapers feel 'sullied' by the ravings of tabloids? No.

None of this would have happened had Mr Myers not been given a unique and influentual role at the heart of UK foreign policy work. William Hague in his statement defended the appointment of Mr Myers thus:

Christopher Myers has demonstrated commitment and political talent over the last eighteen months. He is easily qualified for the job he holds.

The fact remains that there is not a whisker of evident benefit coming to taxpayers from this appointment. Even if (as some have wondered) Mr Myers is qualified for the job of an FCO Special Adviser, the job (in my view) should not exist in the first place at a time of such a squeeze on public finances.

Guido looks to have blown it on this one, but he is merely the latest and noisiest exponent of a fine tradition of political muckrakers.

See eg this from Zoe Archer, another story of people supposedly sharing a room:

... 18th century scandal rags gave readers plenty of outrageous behavior. Consider, for example Mrs. Crackenthorpe reporting on:

...Madam Slender-sense, who is lately fallen ill of a swelling she receiv'd by a slip the last ball night. Some are so rude as to say that Beau Garsoon, the French dancing master, was the occasion of it; and Mrs. Manlove, who generally searches into the bottom of such an affair, solemnly protests she saw them go up one pair of stairs together. What they did there, she can't tell, but the lady has been ailing ever since.

There was even a European angle:

... the French exile libellistes who flocked to London to publish scandalous or sexually salacious pamphlets in the hope of extorting lavish suppression fees. These ‘smut-mongering’ pamphleteers have become prominent figures in the recent historiography of the French revolution, with many historians contending that their ‘desacralizing’ and frequently pornographic publications sapped the foundations of the monarchy.

Not a bleak day for anything.

Just the unruly and sometimes downright unpleasant din of our hard-won freedom to lambast our leaders, hard at work.

Update: Guido apparently has replied himself on Iain's blog. Scroll down through the comments:

If ever there was a time for our leaders not only to behave with propriety, but to be seem to behave with propriety, this is it. It is disappointing to watch you climb on a moral high horse and go in the wrong direction...

Working on some slides for a Mediation Technique presentation in Geneva next week.

Mediation as a professional discipline has some core assumptions. One of the most noted is the idea that there are three levels in the way people look at disputes, namely PIN:

• Positions
• Interests
• Needs

Thus Kosovo. The Serbs and Albanians alike say noisily "Kosovo is ours!" They have incompatible positions.

Yet 'below' that level there are (it is argued) some areas of common interest - not fighting over the place, moving towards EU membership, getting richer and so on.

And below even that, maybe some common needs: maintaining credibility, not being humiliated, staying alive and so on.

Thus a mediator trying to help Serbia and Kosovo sort themselves out will want to move the discussion from Positions through Interests towards Needs, exploring ideas for building on those areas where existential agreement can be found rather than focusing on implacable differences.

Another way of looking at negotiation is a ZOPA: Zone of Possible Agreement.

• Mary wants to pay between £5000 and £8000 for a new car.
• Nancy is ready to sell her car for as little as £6000 but hopes to get £9000.

Somewhere between £6000 and £8000 is the zone of possible agreement, a price both could accept with more or less satisfaction.

Thus the skilled mediator coaxes the parties to move from their extreme positions and look instead at where interests might overlap.

In the Kosovo case, even the International Crisis Group is now looking at territory swaps as the potential ZOPA:

The international community should facilitate as complete a settlement as is possible, leaving it up to the parties themselves to decide how far and in what direction they can go to achieve the goal of recognition.

The most controversial outcome that might emerge from negotiations would be a Northern Kosovo-Preševo Valley swap in the context of mutual recognition and settlement of all other major issues. Neither Pristina nor Belgrade proposes this openly, but officials in both capitals have begun to speak of it quietly in contacts with Crisis Group.

Many in the international community would be unhappy with this option. Crisis Group believes that ruling out this or any specific mutually-agreed option from the onset, however, would risk freezing the Kosovo-Serbia conflict, with no guarantee of eventual resolution.

So much for theory.

All of this assumes some sort of intrinsic ability of the parties to look 'rationally' at what they want now and in the future. To weigh up options in some sort of calm, cooperative spirit, based upon (ultimately) the motherly comforting notion that we are all human beings on Planet Earth together and that there are better things to do here than fight.

Which is usually fine, or at least good enough.

But there are cases where parties each seemingly have internalised different, incompatible levels of rationality.

Such as, in the Balkans, Inat. Someone playing the Inat card is claiming to gain psychic or negotiating strength from the very perverse intensity of his/her irrationality:

See - you are right to say that what I am doing is against my interests! But that's the point.

The fact that I am prepared to do insane things in response to their antics shows just how strongly I feel about this!

And because I am being driven insane, I can not be reasoned with in your bourgeois/sentimental way. Take it or leave it! 

It may be that it is all a wearying bluff, a highly calculated attempt to extract specific negotiating advantage by feigning wild-eyed lack of calculation.

But what if it is real? Or if the effort of doing all that feigning somehow warps the mind of the feigner and starts to create a genuine level of irrationality if not madness?

Sure, with enough therapy and patient counselling this may be turned round.

Does anyone have a quiet couch big enough for Serbs, Albanians, Macedonians, Bosniacs and Croats to lie on for a couple of decades while they get it all off their chests?  

Here is the full text of President Obama's speech (in fact TV address) on Iraq/Afghanistan.

Conservative-minded commentators in the USA give it mixed reviews (of course). Sample a few over at the Corner.

Ignoring - as far as one can - the substance, what about Technique?

First, it's long. Nearly 2600 words. That gives a large canvas on which to pose different questions and then give convincing answers.

Obama starts by defining the Iraq intervention in what is now a characteristically detached/abstract way:

A war to disarm a state became ... a fight against an insurgency.

Huh?

The words United Nations and Saddam do not figure in the speech. What was the so-called 'insurgency' all about? What did the various 'terrorists' and 'extremists' mentioned in the address want to achieve?

In short, what values were at stake? Not really explained:

The Americans who have served in Iraq completed every mission they were given. They defeated a regime that had terrorized its people. Together with Iraqis and coalition partners who made huge sacrifices of their own, our troops fought block by block to help Iraq seize the chance for a better future. They shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people; trained Iraqi Security Forces; and took out terrorist leaders.

Because of our troops and civilians –and because of the resilience of the Iraqi people – Iraq has the opportunity to embrace a new destiny, even though many challenges remain.

Iraq no longer is terrorised by its own regime:

I encourage Iraq’s leaders to move forward with a sense of urgency to form an inclusive government that is just, representative, and accountable to the Iraqi people.

Does Obama have any view on whether that same sort of governance structure should be rolled out more widely in the region? Who knows?

No message for the neighbouring Iran regime, or indeed for the pro-reform masses there who too are struggling for a better deal? Or for other violent oppressors round the world? No.

Part of the problem with giving such a long address is maintaining a coherent but not boring argument. Speechwriters accordingly put in verbal padding to add colour. The results (if they are not careful) can be clumsy and/or mixed metaphors:

... a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization

our nation’s strength and influence abroad must be firmly anchored in our prosperity at home. And the bedrock of that prosperity must be a growing middle class...

Billions of young people want to move beyond the shackles of poverty and conflict

In announcing the end of US combat missions in Iraq, the President might have offered some thoughts on the wider lessons to be drawn from this episode. Instead we get only one:

... one of the lessons of our effort in Iraq is that American influence around the world is not a function of military force alone. We must use all elements of our power – including our diplomacy, our economic strength, and the power of America’s example – to secure our interests and stand by our allies.

True enough but not especially convincing, the more so since Obama conspicuously did not describe Iraq as an 'ally'.

Given the dire state of the Democrats in the US opinion polls, it maybe is no surprise that the President used this address as a pep-talk for his domestic agenda. But the shift in gear into extended passages about the need for new domestic policies was abrupt and somehow not quite right for this occasion.

Worse, our old enemy the Musty Speech reared its musty head. According to Obama the following are musts:

• we must never lose sight of what’s at stake
• we must use all elements of our power
• we must project a vision of the future
• that effort must begin within our own borders
• our nation’s strength and influence abroad must be firmly anchored in our prosperity at home
• the bedrock of that prosperity must be a growing middle class
• we must tackle those challenges at home
• we must give all our children the education they deserve
• we must jumpstart industries that create jobs
• we must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines
• it must be our central mission as a people
• today’s servicemen and women must have the chance to apply their gifts
• we must earn victory through the success of our partners

As I put it in a quite different context:

Speeches boil down to basic messages. What was the message here? Not really clear (and perhaps that's the Obama post-modern message?)?

Victor Davis Hanson:

Obama warns against “open-ended wars,” as if they are almost animate things. But wars end, not when they reach a rational, previously agreed-upon expiration date, but usually when tough, specific wartime choices are made that lead to victory or end in defeat.

One party must decide – for good or bad reasons – that it doesn’t want to fight to win, or simply doesn’t believe it has the resources for victory.

To say that “open-ended wars” are undesirable is a banality that offers no guidance for these real-life choices. A better truism is that America should not fight wars it does not intend to win.

Quite so.

Update: Roger Kimball magnificently accomplishes something most of us would have considered impossible and few of us would have dared attempt, namely linking this Obama address to the egregious burblings of Spode in Code of the Woosters:

Finally! The 'feedback' compilation arrives from a course I ran a few months ago for EU colleagues in Brussels on the general theme of Ethical Dilemmas in Diplomacy.

Everyone is dutifully tasked to complete these forms at the end of a course. A bundle of these forms show trends. Were the great mass of people pleased with what they heard, or not? What sessions stood out on the day? Any obvious clunkers?

But what catch the eye (of course) are the disobliging but somehow oddly perceptive sneers of the disgruntled few:

Rather patronising and arrogant style, giving examples/descriptions irrelevant to the topic of the training. Rather a stroll down the memory lane of a retired diplomat

For all the impressive scale of the global training industry these days, the whole business is to a large extent hit and miss.

F'rinstance. How many readers here have had professional training courses of some sort since starting work?

Answer: everyone.

What courses actually imparted something memorable and operationally useful?

Which of those courses gave insights you can recall and still use weeks, months or even years afterwards?

Almost none.

Back in the FCO I recall a senior management meeting when I suggested that we freeze 'training' until we had done some sort of survey of which training courses had actually been effective, and what techniques had been especially worthwhile in getting key points across to the punters. Could any one there immediately recall a brilliant training outcome?

Glazed uneasy looks around the table, followed by quick change of subject.

Back in 1992 or so I did a good management course with the London Business School. I can still remember a number of the sessions, but above all one on How to Break Bad News.

You need to tell someone that they have been fired or have not promoted or that a relative has died suddenly? Yes, there are ways to do this which help the person hearing the bad news cope with the bolt from the blue, and which help the person giving the bad news pace the occasion firmly but kindly.

I have had to break bad news to people thereafter, and (on the whole) have done so well, drawing on the practical techniques imparted on that one training session. Really good.

Otherwise I have sat through all sorts of other courses which have made no impact whatsoever, other than to allow the trainers and trainees smugly to tick lots of Investors in People and suchlike boxes.

My own forays into the world of training since leaving the FCO have taught me a lot. Such as the central role of video analysis.

There is just nothing to compare with being filmed then watching yourself in a role-play of some sort, even for just a few minutes. The gripping horror of the occasion is utterly memorable and so has a transformatory effect, as I noted last week in Warsaw.

We ran short mock TV interviews for the senior course members. They seemed to learn more about themselves and about 'communication' in those short role-plays than they had done in years of more formal training based on presentations and principles.

Conclusion?

Sometimes courses generate such seething loathing that participants invent new portmanteau words to express their contempt, in this case damning my tendency to be at once too anecdotal and too toadying:

Much too much anectodiacal (huge loss of time). Need of more time for case studies and exchange between participants.

Fine. Give me more time, and you'll get better training.

Suggestion  Readers! Send in short examples of what training has worked for you and why! Then I'll compile them and we can start to change the world

The Daily Telegraph reports that the new EU Ambassador In Washington Joao Vale de Almeida is bent on elbowing out of the way such diplomatic minnows as HM Ambassador Nigel Sheinwald:

Mr Vale de Almeida has stressed to Washington officials and politicians that under the EU's' Lisbon Treaty, he has more power than his predecessors. "I'm the first new type of ambassador for the European Union anywhere in the world," he said. "I'm supposed to have a wider mandate than my predecessors."

Mr Vale de Almeida said: "Our delegations now cover a wide spectrum of issues well beyond the economic dimension, trade dimension and regulatory dimension, to cover all policies in the union, including foreign policy and security policy...

In a comment that has come to symbolise the American view of the EU, Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, is once said to asked: "When I want to talk to Europe, who do I call?"

In a response to that question, Mr Vale de Almeida declared: "In this area code, you call me." The ambassador insisted that he did not wish to "impose myself" on member states' ambassadors, who will continue to oversee "bilateral matters." But he declared: "Where we have a common position, I am the one leading the show."

Where to start?

Let's start here, with Mr Vale de Almeida's appointment to this top job. A controversial choice.

His mainstream diplomatic and sharp-end overseas credentials? Nil, other than an important job running Commission Chairman Barroso's office in Brussels, reached via the giddy heights of the EU's policies on something called Youth:

Youth, Society, Communication. Particular responsibility for Youth policies and programmes, including White Paper on future of Youth Policy in Europe and Open Method of Coordination on Youth

So when Hillary Clinton picks up the telephone at 0300 hours to ask the new EU Ambassador about a sudden crisis, she is not likely to get an informed and operationally nimble response (unless of course the issue involves Coordinating EU Youth, in which case she has hit the jackpot).

Surely there's more to it than this? As Mr Vale de Almeida himself says, where the EU has a Common Position he leads the show.

But therefore what exactly?

Common Positions tend to be limp, unreadable texts drawn up from lowest common denominator drafting exercises expressing such agreement as might be manageable as between 27 countries.

See eg this one on Cuba which has floated listlessly, dead in the water since 1996(!). The point being that there is no consensus to say anything simple and reasonable such as "The EU calls on the Cuban leadership to hold free and fair elections".

On perhaps the one basic issue where the USA might expect the EU to take a robust and united view, namely which countries in Europe exist, there is no Common Position: various EU member states do not recognise Kosovo.

In other words, if there is a Common Position it probably means that the subject is operationally unimportant or at least politically routine, even if various and not unworthy EU spending activities will flow therefrom.

Moreover, the EU Ambassador in Washington has a tough job in maintaining even that Position. He dare not stray far if at all from it, lest he annoy one or other member state who approved that Position and only that Position.

This means that if Hillary asks him what direction EU policy is likely to take if (say) things get worse in N Korea, he'll have no mandate to have a sensible conversation with her. Because the direction of said EU policy - if there is to be one going beyond mere declaratory noises - will be shaped mainly by the EU Bigs (London, Berlin, Paris and so on) ,as always. As he will have to tell her if she rudely asks.

In other words, the EU has indeed given Washington a single telephone number to call.

But all Washinghton really gets is a telephone answering service with a complicated digitalised menu leading to monotonous readings of assorted Common Positions which the USA already has in its files.

For a sensible conversation looking at a wide range of options including top-level handling of the N Korea portfolio at the UN in New York, here's the place they need to call.

Here's an interesting one.

The German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle is homosexual. He has decided not to take his partner with him on official visits to countries where homosexuality is a prosecutable crime.

His somewhat obscure argument as quoted in the excellent Spiegel Online:

We want to promote the concept of tolerance in the world ...

But we also don't want to achieve the opposite by behaving imprudently. At the same time it is important that we live according to our own measures of tolerance and that we do not adopt the sometimes less tolerant measures of others.

This position prompts an energetic rant from one Henryk Broder:

One doesn't have to read his remark twice to understand what it signifies: Tolerance is a wonderful thing, but we shouldn't push our luck. This is more than the usual hot air from a politician. Westerwelle's words are an example of moral hara-kiri in slow motion, and they're a disgrace for Germany...

When the Soviet Union broke up, an interesting issue emerged: how should the FCO/HMG name (in English) the many new countries which had appeared on the world scene?

Those of us at the policy coal-face had a radical idea. Go for the simplest option, ie the one most easy to spell and more or less resembling how the name was pronounced in English. Thus we preferred Kirgistan to Kyrgyzstan or even Kyrgystan when describing the territory known as the Kyrgyz Republic (Кыргыз Республикасы).

The FCO Department dealing with Geographical Names were aghast and launched a fierce rearguard action, arguing that the 'correct' way to deal with such problems was to use the formal standards for transliterating (or whatever the word is) the original linguistic form into English. Thus here the (to us) somewhat strangled Russian ы vowel is best represented with a y, not an i.

Tricky. To my ear the ы sounds most like the ur sound in murder, or indeed the ir sound as in fir-cone.

This issue also comes round in Polish. Thus the muted uh sound represented by the y in Kaczynski - in Polish the i vowel is prounced quite strongly as a short ee (as in me).

The brave policy officers lost out to the holders of the purist flame, so now we have Kyrgystan on the FCO website.

This looks like a feeble compromise, to avoid scaring English-speakers by removing a z. There is a definite z sound in the local languages - the people there are Kyrgyz - so if anything it ought to be Kyrgyzstan.

There is no logic to any of this. If there were, we would not call Deutschland 'Germany'. Partly it's fashion and partly some sort of linguistic political correctness: once upon a time we had Peking, then we were told that it was Beijing. The Chinese started to get peeved that we were not using the name of their capital correctly, and said so.

Paree anyone?

The only issue in all this of course is the eternal one. Who decides?

Take the FCO. It had and for all I know still has a team of people who are deemed to be the Deciders, and from whom the FCO and the rest of Whitehall and thereby much of the UK media and schools take a lead. This echoes an earlier tradition when decisions of this sort were issued by an unchallenged authority.

But these days things are different. Authorities are challenged. Not only governments make maps. People themselves do en masse, using Google and other technologies.

Which is in part why Google has different names for different places, depending upon where you make the search.

Geography and borders - like everything else these days, becoming more ... elusive?

As usual there are pros and cons:

Unpopular as it may be, such uncertainty has become a central dynamic of life on the Internet. The erosion of traditional authority is followed quickly by anxiety over its absence, from Google to Wikipedia to the lesser-known precincts of PetitionOnline—where millions of people direct their impassioned grievances not to any official arbiter but straight into the ether.

What results is an irony. The digital culture that encourages the inclusion of multiple names for a single feature on a map is the same digital culture that has encouraged hundreds of thousands of Iranians to voice their discontent. The very medium incites nationalism, yet also frustrates it.

... What is Google? Is it a repository for all of our mutually exclusive claims, or is it a higher power to which we appeal? It cannot be both, and yet we seem to treat it as both. This tension may only heighten going forward.

“In a world where mapmaking is cheap and anyone can do it,” Goodchild says, “you would eventually expect things to become more and more local.” In such a future, either we will reconcile ourselves to the lack of a central arbiter, or the conflicts will be all over the map. 

Great article. Read it. Via Browser.

Have you read this production of mine from 2008? An extract:

Recently I was a Harvard-sponsored seminar at which issues of international 'humanitarian intervention' and the Right to Protect were discussed.

I recalled seeing signs as one entered Harvard Square: Cambridge is a Domestic Violence-Free Zone.

I said that if you were walking down the street near Harvard and saw a man beating his wife/child/dog brutally with a stick in his front garden, you were morally and maybe even these days legally obligated to intervene to stop the violence.

Thus we long ago moved on from the idea that the 'sovereignty' of one's home was a shield behind which seriously illegal acts could proceed uninterrupted.

So if it is unacceptable to brutalise one person in one's own garden, why is it acceptable to brutalise millions of people in one's country without fear of being stopped?

Enter the Right to Protect (R2P), the idea (a) that states do have exclusive sovereignty over their own internal affairs but also (b) that that sovereignty is qualified: other members of the international communty may intervene to stop massive crimes against a population when that population's own government is either taking part in the mayhem - or is powerless or unwilling to stop it.

Sounds ok?

This morning I appeared on LBC's Nick Ferrari Breakfast radio programme.

I was invited to join Mehdi Hasan (New Statesman) to talk about the forthcoming visit to the UK of Pakistan's President Zardari.

Mehdi led off, unexpectedly (for me!) praising David Cameron for speaking out about the fact that elements in Pakistan were supporting or engaged in terrorism, even if India might not have been the best place to make such remarks for obvious reasons (Kashmir etc).

I then briefly made some of the points previously made on this website about the What, the How and Why of public pronouncements and the negative way they might be received.

I suggested that far from making the President's visit more problematic, the episode had raised the political intensity of the visit in a way both sides could use to good effect.

There probably would be a private tete-a-tete discussion between the Prime Minister and President to get their personal relationship on track; President Zardari might frankly tell Mr Cameron that he was doing his best to deal with extremist tendencies, and say that he did not need outside statements which made that thankless task more difficult by frothing up populist anti-Western sentiment.

Mehdi eloquently wrapped up by reminding listeners of many other statements of concern from Western leaders about divisions within Pakistan, now brought to the fore by the Wikileaks documents.

* * * * *

The more I do media work (and I do very little), the more I admire the skill of those politicians and pundits who do interviews often and to good effect. You need heroic concentration to maintain focus and not get wrapped up in interesting but confusing detail and/or blurt out supposedly clever things which pop up in your brain when you're talking live on air.

In case you want even more on this business about Cameron/India/Pakistan (or even if you do not), read this businesslike piece by Hasan Suroor in The Hindu.

It reminds us helpfully of one footling British diplomatic error after another:

This is not the first time that a British leader has gone to the subcontinent and returned with a bloodied nose. Indeed, there is a history of British politicians blundering into controversy on their visits to the region, leaving Whitehall to pick up the pieces.

Remember January 2009, when David Miliband, the then Foreign Secretary, found himself thrust into the centre of an ill-tempered row over his tactless remarks on Kashmir and the Mumbai terror attacks?

Or 1997 when Robin Cook, the newly-appointed Foreign Secretary, nearly ended up wrecking the Queen's visit to India by infuriating Delhi with an offer to mediate on Kashmir prompting I.K. Gujral, India's Prime Minister at the time, to tell him to mind his own business dismissing Britain as “a third-rate power”?

More recently, Gordon Brown was involved in a very public spat with Islamabad when on a visit to Afghanistan in the dying days of his premiership he said that two-thirds of all terror plots foiled by British intelligence agencies were hatched in Pakistan...

What is it, then, about the subcontinent that causes the famous British stiff upper lip go all a-quiver?

It is striking that while the more gung-ho Americans seldom put a wrong foot, the British despite their supposedly better understanding of the region and particularly Indian-Pak sensitivities never seem to get it right.

Mr. Cameron is simply the latest casualty of a tendency that, one suspects, has something to do with a mindset which refuses to recognise that the era of Britain lecturing its former colonial subjects while they listened quietly is over.

Yup.

Only tip-top speechwriters need apply for a job involving British oratory in that part of the world.

See the wild reaction on the streets of Karachi, as angry but illiterate crowds protest against the British Prime Minister's remarks about Pakistan and terrorism

Tsk.

It should either be Loo's or Loos'.

See also the distinguished role being played in the drama by HM High Commissioner to Pakistan, Adam Thomson, namely to be 'summoned' and given a severe talking to by the Pakistan government.

I wrote about this sort of thing back in May last year (alas the link to my DIPLOMAT magazine article back then no longer works):

You know the story. Only too well. Your spouse yells at you for what you have done. Or for what you have not done. Or for what you have come to represent in the tumultuous relationship. Frustrated and cross, you yell at your children. And in their frustration and crossness, your children kick the cat.

So it is with foreign ministries. Taking heat from public opinion and the prime minister/president on an awkward foreign policy problem? Frustrated and/or cross? No local cat available? Find a foreign one! Kick (out) a diplomat!

Mind you, Adam has strong family form in that part of the world and so should cope with this situation most decorously.

My piece analysing David Cameron's high-profile speeches in Turkey and India has attracted some attention, and various well-taken comments.

Part of the problem for a speechwriter for a top politician is to work out who the audience is, and craft the words accordingly.

Most speeches of any consequence by (say) a British Prime Minister overseas have several different audiences. They include:

• the people sitting there on the day, among whom may well be some local VIPs whose ears will be closely tuned to note certain policy nuances and inclusions/omissions of familiar diplomatic code-words
• the local media outlets (electronic and newspapers) for the in-country foreign audience
• the UK media - what is the headline you want them to carry?
• the international media: what headlines do you want to see in other countries who maybe follow closely UK policy and the policies of the country you're visiting?
• academics, think-tanks, chattering analytic classes - they'll pore over the text in slower time to see what if anything looks to be new/different and what may lie 'behind' any changes
• the PM's own political allies in his own party and its coalition partner - do some different policy emphases there need acknowledging/fudging?
• the PM's domestic opponents - what will the Opposition look to attack

In other words, it's all very well talking blithely about a speech needing 'key messages'. But getting exactly right different key messages to these different audiences is no easy job.

And let's not forget one other audience: history. How will this speech read in ten or fifty or one hundred years' time?

One other point about Key Messages. In the immortal words of Frank Luntz, It's not what you say - it's what they hear.

The speaker may think that the key messages in the speech are neatly turned for style and significant in policy terms. 

And they may well be. My point in that earlier piece was to suggest that they also might come across - be 'heard' by one or other of the various local audiences - as patronising or trite.

Getting that right is not about being good with words. It's about having a subtle, experienced understanding of what works and does not work for Indians, for Serbs, for Brazilians, for Malaysians and so on. Each community has (for better or worse) its own sense of what British Prime Ministers represent and how they should behave.

Hence the fact that many Bosnians felt insulted when PM John Major appeared in war-torn Sarajevo in a military jumper. That mode of dress may or may not have won some brownie points with TV viewers back in the UK. But it blew the whole visit presentationally in Bosnia. 

He was saying: I have come here to help.

They were 'hearing': This person is treating us disrespectfully - if our leaders can manage to look smart in this ghastly war-zone, so should a British PM! 

See also the bizarre visit of PM Tony Blair to Sarajevo in late 1997, when his spin-doctors refused to let him say a single word to Bosnian media people. The Bosnians 'heard' from this visit: rude, too grand to talk to us, flying in and out in a couple of hours - he doesn't care.

All of which brings us to David Cameron's unwise remarks about Pakistan and terrorism during his India trip. As Andrew Rawnsley describes it:

That remark was not planned. It came in an answer to a businessman at the very end of a Q&A in Bangalore.

It was a gaffe. I am using here the classic definition of a gaffe: it is to say something which is true, but liable to cause controversy, embarrassment or harm if spelled out in public. Scoring him on presentation, he stands tall at home, but is still finding his feet away...

Here is the view of John Elliott who is based in New Delhi:

Cameron was of course on target with his criticism of Pakistan, but India was not the place to say it because it diverted attention from his investment-oriented visit – unless you take the Machiavellian approach that it increased media coverage of a trip that might have otherwise made few headlines.  

It was also unwise to make such a snap remark without planning for the downside – in this case endangering Britain’s links with Pakistan’s intelligence services.

That's mainly right. Pakistan opinion will be all the more likely to be really annoyed by senior British remarks such as this when they are made in India. All sorts of subliminal and other thoughts surge to the fore in Islamabad:

• is he taking India's side in the Kashmir problem?
• why is he saying such things before he's even talked to us, and on the eve of the President's visit to London? Deliberate provocation?
• why is he undermining the people in Pakistan who want to modernise the country? This sort of thing simply allows the extremists to play populist cards against the West and makes a hard job even worse...

Key message for senior speechwriters and speakers?

Remember that there are many audiences listening to or reading your every word.

And that what you are saying and what they are hearing may be quite different.

Update: a very clever piece by Hugo Rifkind over at WSJ muses on what if anything in David Cameron's recent so-called public speaking gaffes was in fact wrong or unwise or ineffective. See eg this:

The spin, from Britain's Conservative Party, is that Prime Minister David Cameron did not commit "gaffes" on his recent, whirlwind world tour, but was in fact just "speaking his mind."

I am always wary of people who say "I speak my mind," as though that was a good thing to begin with. It's a better strategy, surely, to think your mind, pick out some edited highlights, and speak those. Otherwise, what's the point of having a mind at all? You might as well just have your mouth wired up directly to somewhere else entirely...

Yet, which of these messages was really a gaffe? It's a decent rule of thumb in politics that you can always afford to annoy the people who need you the most.

British Conservatives need David Cameron, so he annoyed them to agree with America. Israel needs British support, so he annoyed them to agree with Turkey. Pakistan needs Britain in Afghanistan, so he annoyed them to agree with India.

True "plain speaking" could never manage so many twists and turns. This was David Cameron speaking his mind by speaking the minds of other people. Gaffes aside, to my mind, this was a pretty impressive performance.

Not that I'm speaking my mind, of course. No. This is just the edited highlights.

My recent piece about the feebleness of Peter Mandelson's speechwriters looked ahead to the coming international tour of David Cameron to see if his people would do a better job.

NB folks, what follows is not about policy as such. It's about speechwriting and diplomatic technique, and the way messages are sent/received both explicitly and implicitly.

First, the headlines were caught by the Prime Minister's strong support for Turkey's EU membership:

When I think about what Turkey has done to defend Europe as a NATO ally and what Turkey is doing today in Afghanistan alongside our European allies, it makes me angry that your progress towards EU membership can be frustrated in the way that it has been.

My view is clear: I believe it is just wrong to say that Turkey can guard the camp but not be allowed to sit in the tent.

I will remain your strongest possible advocate for EU membership and for greater influence at the top table of European diplomacy.

Strong meat. But is it quite wise to strike such a forward position within hours of landing in Turkey?

Not according to this scathing review by Barry Rubin:

It is a textbook example of how not to conduct international affairs ... everything should be conditional. The message to be delivered is that it is in your interest to respect my interests.

Cameron did the precise and exact opposite. His message was: The UK needs Turkey. Turkey is wonderful. Its behavior has been perfect. We are desperate for your help.

What is the effect? A man goes into a bazaar, points to a carpet, and says, “That is the most beautiful carpet I have ever seen. I must have it no matter what the price! How much is it?”

In addition, Cameron committed some other howling mistakes, several of which will amaze you...

Which he proceeds mercilessly to describe.

It has to be said. There is a serious point here. To open a speech like this...

Turkey is vital for our economy, vital for our security and vital for our politics and our diplomacy...

... is dubious technique. It gives a gauche hint of subservience, almost desperation. You are vital to us! You are! The effect of which is to suggest deep insecurity  on our part - that we might not be vital to them.

Hmm.

On to the Prime Minister's speech in India:

I come here with a very clear purpose: to show what this new start means for our two countries. I want to take the relationship between India and Britain to the next level. I want to make it stronger, wider, and deeper.

To show how serious I am I have brought with me the biggest visiting delegation of any British Prime Minister in recent years. Members of my Cabinet, our most dynamic business leaders, leaders of industry, social entrepreneurs, civic leaders, figures from our most forward-looking arts institutions and museums, sports men and women, and pioneers of community activism.

Phew! Did anyone ask India if it wanted or needed this sprawling entourage of Busy Brits?

... this country matters to Britain for many reasons beyond your economy too (sic). With over 700 million voters and three million elected representatives at council level, your democracy is a beacon to our world. You have wonderful tradition of democratic secularism; home to dozens of faiths and hundreds of languages, people are free to be Muslim, Hindu or Sikh and to speak Marathi, Punjabi or Tamil. But, at the same time, and without any contradiction, they are all Indian too.

India matters to the world because it is not only a rising power but a responsible power as well...

Lawks - the Mandelson Mistake! Pronouncing on where India fits into the world these days - as if its our natural job to make such pronouncements, and theirs to sit politely and bask in our warm praise. Why should India care if it 'matters' to the UK? Patronising, anyone?

At the height of the industrial revolution in the United States, they said, ‘Go west, young man, in order to find opportunity and fortune.’ For today’s investors and entrepreneurs they should go east.

Another poorly cast paragraph. It seems to say that today's investors and entrepreneurs are where we are, whereas in fact they increasingly are in 'the East' themselves, and doing just fine.

... why should Britain matter to India? I believe our two countries are natural partners; Britain is one of the oldest democracies and India is the world’s largest.

Stop all this 'mattering'! Never say 'I believe'. Let the words themselves bring out your beliefs. And what has comparing the size of our democracies got to do with anything at all?

We have a shared commitment to pluralism and to tolerance; we have deep and close connections amongst our people, with nearly two million people of Indian origin living in the UK. They make an enormous contribution to our country – way out of proportion to their size – in business, in the arts, in sport.

I never like this glorification of ethnic communities as such - it sounds phoney, almost as if it nervously has to be said lest someone accuse you of being racist in expecting them not to make such a wonderful contribution. And what about the bad eggs in their midst?

India and Britain also share so much culturally; whether it’s watching Shari Kahn, eating the same food, speaking the same language, and of course watching the same sport. Many of you in this room will have grown up revering and watching Kapil Dev; I did the same in Britain watching Ian Botham. And Sachin Tendulkar, the Little Master, is so talented that wherever you are from, you cannot help but admire as he hits another century.

Aaargh. How bad a passage is that? The hapless speechwriter ran out of intelligent things to say so slumped into curry and cricket. Raaaacist!

We come at this from different angles. The Indian story is well-known. There is still a huge challenge but on any measure India is on its way, a rising economic power. On any measure, India is on an upward trajectory.

Help - the Mandelson Mistake comes back. Don't tell other people how well they're doing. Especially in a former colony, it sounds like proud teacher patting a diligent pupil on the head.

We in Britain are determined to work even harder to earn our living: attracting more foreign investment to our shores, making more things for the world again, selling ourselves to the world with more vigour than ever. I’m not ashamed to say that’s one of the reasons why I’m here today.

Look how defensive that sounds. All those feeble comparatives:

• work even harder
• attract more foreign investment
• make more things for the world again
• more vigour than ever

Here, more = less. It sounds too striving, too keen to make a point, too anxious.

Tomorrow I’m going to be talking to Prime Minister Singh about how we can work together to develop and deploy new and renewable energy sources, in particular to reach some of India’s poorest communities. If we get this right, it will be a triple win: clean energy, electricity brought to poorest people, new jobs and growth. And it’s precisely the sort of cooperation we need as we move forward in this relationship...

We must be the ones to act and we must act together. Together Britain and India can do the work that is needed. Together our partnership can benefit the world. So together, let us build this new relationship that can meet the scale of our great ambitions together

This passage illustrates what I don't like about this breathless, hyperactive, self-absorbed style of speechwriting. The PM seems to pronounce all sorts of things about what the UK and India could and should be doing together before he's talked to the Indian opposite number to see what he suggests and wants.

Maybe the Indians don't want to work with us to 'do the work that is needed', to benefit the world' in 'partnership'. They certainly seemed happy enough to ignore us in the Climate Summit endgame:

Obama sitting down with the Brazilian, Chinese, Indian and South African leaders to hammer out something or other among themselves, far from the madding crowd of NGOs and all the other leaders.

Thus it came about in spasm of post-modern irony that a small self-proclaimed group of countries defined the main outcome on behalf of everyone else, with the European Unionists (collectively the third biggest CO2 emitter) left outside. Ditto Russia, left holding its cute little red reset button handed over by Hillary Clinton. And Indonesia, a huge emitter. 

The progressive-Left symbolism of this is magnificent: no Dead White Men (especially those sanctimonious Europeans) spoiling the photo-shot!

We decide - Dead White Men pay!

In short, well done the Prime Minister for showing British energy and purpose. But not so well done in how messages are being transmitted. The basic tone as served up by the new squeaky-clean speechwriters is over-keen and unconvincingly over-confident: Hullo, I am your new best friend!

Plus it's characteristic of the speechwriting work of people who know a lot about the UK and political spin here, but next to nothing about Foreigners. It's far too much on Transmit, not Receive. Where are the following thoughts:

• I'm relatively new to this top-level international game. But I do know about the UK's national strengths and comparative advantage
• I know that we have interests. So do you. We traditionally agree on some things. We also disagree on some things. Let's talk
• I see areas where the existing relationship might be enhanced. But before plunging in to all that, I'm here to listen.
• I want to hear for myself your leaders' views, to talk quietly with them about where we might take things forward

Keep a lot more back. Cultivate some mystery. Imply that in some areas we'll be totally inflexible and/or drive a very hard bargain.

That is the oblique and efficient way to compliment your hosts - to hint that you relish disagreeing with them in some areas, because they - like you - are tough too.

Above all, the new government's speechwriters need to stop talking in this febrile paternalistic Mandelsonian way about other countries' successes and achievements.

Because in these days of commercially-minded diplomacy, it's none of our business.

My piece in the Independent:

Belgrade's application in London looked like a weird attempt to cover everything in political slime to make a specious Serbia-favouring syllogism:

All slimy people are guilty

All involved in the Yugoslav imbroglio were equally slimy

Therefore all were equally guilty – and, by the way, equally innocent.

This sits (putting it mildly) uneasily with the facts...

Update: my piece has been picked up by B92 in Belgrade - with added picture!

A London court has rejected Serbia's application to get former Bosnian/Bosniac leader Ejup Ganic extradited to Belgrade to face charges on the infamous Dobrovoljacka Street killings in Sarajevo in 1992.

The word 'rejected' perhaps does not do justice to District Judge Timothy Workman's demolition of Serbia's case. Perhaps 'blew to smithereens beyond all recognition' would be more accurate.

The judge probed behind the Serbian application, exploring not so much the substantive merits of the case itself but rather the implicit and explicit motivations of the plaintiffs. He examined the fact that other substantive and credible war crimes processes (ICTY and in Bosnia) had found no case for proceeding against Dr Ganic:

On the first day of this extended hearing I was satisfied that there was prima facie evidence of an abuse of process and as a result of that ruling evidence has now been adduced in relation to that issue.

No evidence having been adduced to show a striking or substantial change in the evidence available to the ICTY or to Mr Alcock, I have concluded that there is no valid justification for commencing proceedings against Dr Ganic.

But much worse, from Belgrade's point of view, was this: 

I am satisfied from the evidence of Mr Arnaut that during the course of these extradition proceedings attempts were made to use the proceedings as a lever to try to secure the Bosnian Government’s approval for the Srebrenica Declaration.

If indeed the Government [of Serbia] was prepared not to pursue these extradition proceedings in return for Bosnia co-operation, that in itself must be capable of amounting to an abuse of the process of this court. Some corroboration of Mr Arnaut’s evidence could be found in the unusual circumstances in which an application to vary conditions of bail was made to this court to enable Dr Ganic to return to Bosnia.

It would appear that that application was founded upon attempts at diplomatic agreements. I am also satisfied that the descriptions in the request [of the alleged grave breaches of Geneva Conventions] are as described significant misrepresentations.

The combination of the two leads me to believe that these proceedings are brought and are being used for political purposes and as such amount to an abuse of the process of this court.

The Serbia side says it will appeal against the ruling.

My assessment? See (if they use it) my piece for the Independent tomorrow.

But for now...

There is a maxim of Equity which says that equity must come to court with clean hands.

In this case Bosnian/Bosniac hands are far from spotless. The Bosniac leadership wail in rage at anything which suggests that they themselves and their predecessors may have made any unwise or immoral moves in the chain of events culminating in the violent collapse of Bosnia, or in their conduct of the ensuing conflict.

Instead they park on one big principle: that the Serbs (and indeed just Serbs) are Guilty.

Which means - as they see it - that an attempt by Belgrade to open episodes such as the Dobrovoljacka Street killings and cast some blame on senior or any Bosniacs must be at best ill-intentioned, and at worst downright evil.

(For about as reliable a view of what actually happened as we are ever likely to get, see this interview with Jovan Divjak, a senior Serbian JNA officer who bravely decided to fight on the Bosnia side of the conflict.)

Meanwhile the Serbs in Belgrade and Banja Luka try forlornly to salvage something from the wreckage of Milosevic's policies.

They (mainly) accept that Milosevic, Karadzic and the rest of that cast of weird second-raters pursued ruinous immoral policies, but they then froth up arguments that, bad as Belgrade's leaders were, others leaders were not really much better and even, perhaps, worse.

And this argument does have some merit. One of the very best things Robin Cook achieved as Foreign Minister was to act upon the proposition that Croatia's leader Franjo Tudjman was in much the same category as Slobodan Milosevic, ie a zany and pernicious national socialist cum fascist menace to European values. Cook stubbornly held the line against all sorts of EU pressures to 'show flexibility' towards Tudjman. Tudjman then helpfully died, isolated and unmourned by moderate opinion round the planet.

The Bosnian case is a harder one for Belgrade to prove. OK, Izetbegovic was a convinced if (by many standards) moderate Islamist, but he was defending a weak position.

Belgrade had all sorts of options to deal with the BH conundrum, but Milosevic chose to let rip Arkan and all sorts of vicious gangsters as a political tool. Far from using its weight and intellectual resources to show modern leadership, Belgrade went on a massive binge of greedy violent cynicism, seemingly relying at each stage on erratic improvizacija and Western lack of resolve.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that any London court is likely to have in mind the fact that sixteen years on Belgrade has still not arrested General Mladic and thereby confronted the horror of Srebrenica. And that, accordingly, Belgrade's claims to be able to deal fairly with war crimes trials may well be true, but somehow held hostage to deeper political manipulations.

Belgrade here looks to have made a blunder in trying to trade behind the scenes with Sarajevo: 'Ajde bre, we'll end the Ganic extradition application in London if you guys cut us some slack on the Srebrenica declaration going through our Assembly...

Whereas in normal Balkan bazaar terms this sort of thing makes perfect sense, a steely London court not unreasonably could conclude that the whole extradition application had nothing (much) to do with Justice and was more about shady political machinations.

Result?

Serbia has taken a severe tonking in a London court today, following a pretty miserable result at the ICJ last week. The Bosniacs will be exultant, feeling that this represents a historic day of vindication for their core 'narrative'.

All of which said, anyone watching the evasive interviews with Ganic and other leaders on the gripping Fall of Yugoslavia video series will feel that something dark and dishonourable did occur at Dobrovoljacka Street. Not much chance now of justice being done for the victims of that war crime, alas.

Bottom Line?

Belgrade under democratic and fair-minded leadership can make all sorts of important points about the collapse of Yugoslavia. Not all Belgrade's arguments were bad just because Milosevic made them.

But until Belgrade bites the bullet and arrests Mladic, those arguments look contrived and morally hollow.

Washing those dirty hands is much better than pointing with them at the grime on others' dark fingers.

The European Stability Initiative do lots of good solid analytical/policy work.

Have a look at this ingenious proposal for resolving the absurd problem of Greek opposition to Macedonia's name:

How can this conundrum be resolved? It can be done through a constitutional amendment in Skopje that changes the name of the country today, allowing Athens to support the start of accession talks later this year, but that also foresees that the change will only enter into force on the day Macedonia actually joins the EU.

This effectively 'solves' the problem in principle in a way the Greeks should accept, but brings in the solution down the road on Macedonia's EU accession, giving Macedonia the necessary guarantees.

Clever. Mutually reinforcing but asynchronous (ass-'n'-chronic?) incentives towards good behaviour.

And read this one on the constitutional mysteries of Belgium, suggesting that the puny (in comparison) constitutional mysteries of Bosnia and Herzegovina should not be an obstacle to BH's EU membership. See eg Belgium's Constitution:

Article 1
Belgium is a federal State composed of Communities and Regions.

Article 2
Belgium is composed of three Communities: The French Community, the Flemish Community and the German-speaking Community.

Article 3
Belgium is composed of three regions: The Walloon Region, the Flemish Region and the Brussels Region.

Article 4
Belgium has four linguistic regions: The French-speaking region, the Dutch-speaking region, the bilingual region of Brussels-Capital and the German-speaking region. (…)

(Depending on whether the language in which the Constitution is written is French, Dutch or German, the respective Community and Regions are mentioned first.)

Phew.

I was chatting to a senior oil executive the other day (as one does), and I asked how that vast multinational corporation ran its top speech-writing function.

"Oh,we have the usual - a team of young speechwriters, which is what you need these days."

Really? Why do you need young speech-writers?

What books have they read? What hard decisions have they ever had to take? What pain have they suffered? Where have they been? What encounters with senior foreign people have they had - do they know just how to pitch things right?

What experience do they bring to the job, other than the doubtful one of being 'young'?

Today I heard about Peter Mandelson in India from someone who had watched him in action. His visit came soon after the dreadful performance of David Miliband who insulted his much older Indian counterpart by being over-matey with him during their private meeting.

Peter Mandelson by contrast (I was told) insulted on a much bigger and public scale.

He addressed a large gathering of business people at an event also attended by several senior Indian politicians. In his random Nu Labour way, he made a flaccid speech about globalisation, including passages saying just how well India was doing as an 'emerging economy'. He then left the event to move on to 'another engagement'.

I think that this must be the speech concerned:

For a couple of years up until about the middle of last year there was a debate going on in the financial services sector and in the financial media over the extent to which the emerging economies - including India, of course - had ‘decoupled’ from the developed world.

Have India, China and the other emerging economies achieved enough momentum economically to fundamentally break the link between their economic destiny and ours in the EU and the US?

... I welcome the fact that the Indian government remains so committed to liberalization of its financial, legal and accountancy sectors, which will be an important contributor to attracting the foreign investment it wants for its large infrastructure projects.

The Indian knowledge economy has ambitions to cater for a global market. The expansion of Indian manufacturing, which the government rightly sees as central to defining India’s future place in global value chains, will be built on the further opening up of the Indian market to industrial imports.

This sort of thing is in fact very hard to draft well. See especially the absurd and unwise phrase "I welcome ..."

How does one say anything much about someone else's country at such an event without somehow seeming to be assuming to oneself the role of loftily pronouncing on the good marks and not so good marks, like a cargo cult schoolteacher?

Here the ignorant and jejune speechwriter obviously failed to get it right, a high-profile blunder all the more embarrassing for the UK as it came immediately after D Miliband's fiasco.

After P Mandelson had departed, a senior Indian speaker addressed the throng and had them in stitches laughing at Mandelson's patronising style and hollow substance:

"We look at the UK and see it as a sub-merging economy!"

Maybe there should be a new rule.

No politician should have a speech-writer younger than s/he is.

Just think of all those mountains of money and time wasted on so-called diversity training, when simple reminders about Good Manners would have been far more effective.

Let's see if David Cameron can get things back on track.

Here.

Be shocked, as the Truth is revealed.