My latest piece for DIPLOMAT magazine, this time on diplomatic training. What exactly do up-and-coming diplomats need to know?

In May, I joined international experts pondering such questions at the seventeenth Dubrovnik Diplomatic Forum. Professor Joseph Mifsud of the London Academy of Diplomacy wisely reminded us all of The Ambassadors, the splendid Hans Holbein painting. It features Jean de Dinteville, 29, French Ambassador to England in 1533, and his even younger friend Georges de Selve, variously Ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor and Venetian Republic.

The portrait includes intricately painted objects used by these youthful ambassadors, also denoting their distinguished learning. Celestial and terrestrial globes. A portable sundial and other clever instruments for understanding the heavens and measuring time. A lute and flutes. A hymn book. A book of arithmetic. These items ooze symbolism. The lute has a broken string: discord in Christendom? Plus, of course, the painting has the famous distorted skull. The macabre transience of diplomacy?

Nearly 500 years later, this Dubrovnik conference considered the main division in diplomatic-teaching philosophy. On the one hand there is the traditional formal academic approach, tackling the Vienna Convention, the legal basis for international trade and consular work, plus concepts of multi-polar power and international relations. In short: Theory.

Back in real life, those of us who have worked as professional diplomats like to share vital skills, tips and tricks needed when key visit deadlines loom and the minister is in a foul mood. Negotiating how the minister’s close protection team’s firearms get past customs. Drafting craftily ambiguous records of conversation. Placement for the minister’s private dinner for eight people who do not all speak the same language. Giving the media just enough, but no more. In short: Practice.

Busy new areas of Diplomatic Theory are being invented by the social science industrial complex.  Diplomacy is sliced and diced to create new specialities and plump research grant opportunities. Economic Diplomacy. Commercial Diplomacy. Climate Diplomacy. Once these new specialities float off as part of ‘civil society’ in the balmy seas of the EU or other official funding, they spawn new ‘interdisciplinary’ phenomena. Why not combine Environmental Diplomacy with Gender Diplomacy?

The key thing in all this fermenting useless theory is to insist on strict demarcation lines between these so-called disciplines. We mere, actual diplomats might, for example, think that Economic Diplomacy could tell us about economic sanctions, and how regimes subject to international sanctions duck and weave to avoid them. But no. Sanctions come under Security Diplomacy. Sorry. Wrong course.

Fine – problem. Solution? Teach them some actually useful stuff:

Records of Conversation

Diplomacy is all about top people quietly sharing positions and proposals. When they meet, someone has to record what was said in a way that others might use. There is real art to doing this well, capturing key points of agreement and disagreement while conveying the sense of the meeting (plus, perhaps, leaving out especially sensitive things from the main record and recording them separately for a narrow senior distribution).

Speaking Notes and Public Speaking

Sooner or later all diplomats stand up in front of an audience to convey their basic messages. They need to know how to structure a speech or presentation, and how to deliver it convincingly and engagingly. And how to give a witty but gracious after-dinner speech. Good public speaking can be taught. It’s like riding a bicycle. Once you know how to do it, you can’t not do it.

Steering Meetings

All sorts of subtle points of technique can be taught here. Practical aspects include setting out the table to achieve appropriate formality but with just the right intimacy. Plus setting the agenda, reflecting key words, reframing difficult issues, when to speak and when to keep quiet, summing up elegantly, and (last but not least) agreeing robust arrangements to make sure that decisions taken at the meeting are in fact implemented.

And so on.

What’s This Really All About?

The greatest of all diplomatic skills is judgement. That comes with experience (or not, as the case may be). It’s all about perspective. Robin Renwick, one of the UK’s finest modern diplomats, likes to quote this insight from an earlier veteran diplomatist: “You need to distinguish what’s important from what matters.” Or, as a wily Russian diplomat once said to me: “Nothing is linked – but everything is linked.”

Is your diplomatic training programme organised around such cryptic insights into the philosophical and operational paradoxes of diplomacy? No? Find one that is.

But, they cry in despair, where do we find such brilliant practical diplomatic training and insight?

Here.