e-Diplomacy in action?

Or e-Diplomacy inaction?

Here is a version of the piece I wrote for the latest issue of DIPLOMAT magazine on how I invented e-Diplomacy and tried to put it into effect in a nervous FCO, too many years ahead of my time…

e-Diplomacy: Who Isn’t My Neighbour?
Where Julius Caesar and Slobodan Milosevic meet transgender vampires on Facebook
I helped invent e-Diplomacy. But, unfortunately, before the world was ready for it.
Back in 1998 after two exhausting years as British Ambassador in Sarajevo implementing the Dayton Peace Agreement I was given a year as an FCO Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University to cool down a bit.
When we International Fellow country bumpkins arrived at Harvard, one of the first things they showed us was this cool thing the Americans had come up with called the ‘Internet’. You logged on to a computer, found a ‘search engine’ (one with the silly name of Google seemed quite good) and typed in a word or two. Then all sorts of things appeared on the screen. Transgender vampires were especially popular.
This impressed me so much that I spent most of my Harvard year sitting in on courses at the Kennedy School about the application of computers to government processes, and/or transgender vampires.
By 1998 a goodly body of academic literature had emerged on the subject of Computerising Organisations. Three categories of outcome were identified: Bad, Ruinous and Calamitous.
The problem we learned was not the kit but the people. What everyone wanted to do was make everything they already did go faster and easier, but otherwise change as little as possible. Top managements didn’t have the imagination to grasp that computerising Dickensian arrangements would cause more trouble than it would solve. The arrival of so much processing power allowed them to do quite new things: to re-engineer an organisation and its objectives on a grand scale.
Armed with all this state-of the art insight I returned to London to be the new FCO Deputy Political Director with special responsibility for the Balkans (while I had been pouring over transgender vampires at Harvard, NATO had been bombing Serbia).
I did my best to share my knowledge with the FCO top management. To little avail. Most of them were of an age to have reached the top of diplomacy without ever typing a word; that tedious task was for PAs. They wanted to do Foreign Policy, not worry about mundane ‘technical’ things like the FCO database, intranets and remote working. Vital design of the FCO’s backbone systems of the future had been given to far-flung junior people, with little if any senior leadership and vision included.
I nagged the system into getting me a laptop. I installed speech recognition software and dictated on to a laptop a record of an important Balkan policy gathering at Wilton Park, which I then managed to send by email to the FCO via my Palm Pilot and a mobile telephone. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook was much impressed. The FCO top brass thought it all a tad too flashy.
The difficulty the FCO and every government department everywhere in the world faced and still faces was simple.
Every day brought on to the open market amazing new gadgets for faster/better communication. How to choose a system right for the department concerned, given security and other concerns? By the time the choice had trundled through the usual approval bureaucracy and all the new kit was ordered and installed, it would be out of date.
Plus we had the familiar problem of change exhaustion. People who had spent months or years building up one set of arrangements were unimpressed with new-fangled ideas for doing things completely differently.
At that stage the FCO was accelerating various decentralisation processes to set up a number of geographical and other Directorates tasked with much more discretionary spending. This coupled with Treasury rules incentivised overbidding for resources (‘Who knows, we might get lucky!’) and inefficient spending patterns (keeping money back ‘just in case’, followed by feverish spending binges as the end of the financial year loomed).
At one meeting I asked about the point of all this. Surely the brilliance of the new IT lay in allowing the FCO to capture the benefits of extreme centralisation and extreme decentralisation simultaneously. Why have separate directorates brooding jealously over their individual resource pots? A few people based in a notional centre could monitor FCO spending in real time and move underspent resources to where they might be needed. Wasn’t the very idea of directorates yesterday’s response to today’s information deficiency issue which need not exist tomorrow?
Everyone in the room under (about) 35 smiled and nodded. People over 45 looked nervous and quickly moved the subject on.
Undaunted I did my best to get the FCO to see that the problem had to be grasped. We could be world leaders in Digital Diplomacy if we responded creatively. My broad thoughts on this subject made it into the Financial Times.
At a Balkan Stability Pact gathering in Greece, I boldly interrupted the final session to complain that every initiative mentioned (new roads, bridges, better government, better markets) would have made sense to Julius Caesar. Where were the new ideas for using the mess created by the former Yugo-conflicts to give the region a technological jump to different forms of democratic integration? Why not involve the Balkans in the emerging EU ideas for digital competitiveness as per the 2000 Lisbon Summit? Make the region Europe’s Silicon Valley!
Stability Pact leader Bodo Hombach was delighted. He took up my ideas with zeal. They led to various attempts (e-South East Europe) to bring the former Yugoslav republics into the latest EU telecoms/IT processes. But it all petered out.
Meanwhile I was helping give digital diplomacy a sharper practical edge. In mid-2000 Milosevic had called elections in Serbia. We knew what he planned: win or lose, he would proclaim victory and carry on regardless. Working with the Otpor student group we and the Americans helped ensure that networks of computers were set up to get the real results out as fast as possible.
It worked. I sat at my FCO computer late on the evening of 24 September 2000 as the first result came in, from a tiny village in the mountains – a strong vote for Vojislav Kostunica and against Milosevic. Milosevic was heading for a crushing defeat.
The news spread like e-wildfire round Serbia. He’d lost! After some days of turmoil he was indeed toppled. The world’s first Internet example of people power, which my FCO team had helped support.
Then in Warsaw as Ambassador I transformed the way people worked by linking the three different Embassy buildings electronically for the first time. And I banished the bulky Duty Officer folder, documents (many out of date) lugged around unhappily by whichever diplomat was on call overnight to deal with consular and other enquiries.
In came a small Palm-type device with everything loaded on it. The oldest member of the Embassy (me) was pushing e-change on younger sceptical colleagues.
Now the US State Department has an office of eDiplomacy. The FCO has moved on to central website and separate websites for each Embassy. Twittering and Blackberrying. Blogs by the Foreign Secretary, a number of Ambassadors and other colleagues: the FCO Harare blog by Philip Barclay and Grace Mutandwa was on the Times’ list of the Top 100 blogs. Much visa processing work is now done remotely. Hubs and spokes. A new generation of supposedly secure laptops is coming along.
Some of these things work better than others. And none of them can replace the sense of trust – or distrust – which comes only from the oldest diplomatic skill of all: sitting privately across a table with someone and talking frankly.
Plus good ideas done badly impress no-one. I have remonstrated with the FCO over crass spelling mistakes on its central website and on different Embassy sites. And what really is the point of all those Ambassadorial blogs? They dare not say anything deviating from official policy, so they end upbeing twee: ‘Yesterday Pandora and I opened the British stand at the Plonka Trade Fair. It was heartening to see so many people fascinated with the latest generation of British electronic mole-repellers.’ Zzzzzz
Technology is, for better or worse (and usually both, in geometrically increasing quantities), a force for empowering people. Global networks help people campaign and mobilise on issues cutting across borders, such as environmental degradation. Decades of patronising development experts have wrecked Africa. Microsoft, Google and cheap mobile telephones are starting to put right that damage, empowering Africans rather than corrupt elites.
But governments and extremist or terrorist groupings too have new fire–power. The Middle East’s ideological wars play out on YouTube. An e-warfare arms race is developing in parts of Asia. Overt cyber attacks on other states are increasing (see organised attempts to disable systems in Estonia and Georgia). The Americans are looking at what they see as e-threats posed by China.
Expect much more of the same. Why invest in a missile to blow up your adversary’s infrastructure? Is it not a rather retro, vulgar and unsubtle thing to do? Much better to implant computer viruses aimed at politely disabling that infrastructure when necessary?
Carne Ross was an up-and-coming British diplomat who resigned in protest at the Iraq invasion. His book Independent Diplomat argues eloquently for making diplomacy less elitist and more democratic – giving ordinary citizens a voice. A fine idea? Yet the more people round a negotiating table, the harder it is to get anything sensible done. So how in practice to ‘give a voice’ to the deafening views of hundreds of millions of people twittering away simultaneously?
No-one knows. But the world of diplomacy has to adjust somehow to the new reality. So does international law.
It is one thing for the UN Security Council solemnly to debate the abstract principles of ‘humanitarian intervention’. Quite another to listen to the screams and watch live video beamed to those diplomats’ iPhones in New York from a village somewhere in Africa or the Balkans, as genocidal killers work their way along the rows of houses.
In today’s networked e-diplomacy world, who exactly isn’t my neighbour?