Carne Ross of Independent Diplomat says that old-fashioned diplomacy has had its day:

Conventional embassies and their ambassadors are equally ill-suited to today’s challenges. The European foreign service, whose embryonic form already exists in the Council Secretariat, is awaiting its first orders once the EU’s Lisbon treaty is ratified. Like the Eurofighter, it will be elegantly constructed, very expensive, and heading for obsolescence even before day one.

Just like weapons designers, those who construct political bureaucracies and institutions must ask what kind of world are we trying to deal with? The 20th century was dominated by states, but this century is already shaping up with an altogether more anarchic prospect.

They have been saying that for years, if not decades and centuries. So what does Carne think might be better? George Soros! And Bono! And, of course, so-called NGOs (many of which are lavishly funded by governments so are not NG at all).

George Soros’s Open Society Institute has in my view been as important as the European Union in fostering civil society and building the pillars of democracy in post-Soviet eastern Europe. The private sector’s foreign direct investment and speculative flows outweigh both official and philanthropic funds, in determining the economic fate of countries.

In global politics, non-governmental movements and influentlial (sic) figureheads like Bono are proving almost, although not yet wholly, as important as governments, and according to surveys, are already more trusted…

Embassies and diplomats are going to have to work in partnership with (that means not patronise) a much wider range of actors if they are to understand what is going on around them, and influence this hectic circus. At the Bali climate change talks NGOs were an important and powerful presence, and their involvement in international deliberations of this kind will clearly become the norm rather than the exception.

The thrust of this article is that the world is becoming more unruly and, as Carne nicely puts it, less ‘resistant to comprehensive analysis’. Hence fusty old diplomats have diminishing credibility to be ‘representative’ of anything in particular.

In an anarchic world, influence in shaping events is going to go to those with the most convincing arguments and the most power, and they are not necessarily going to be working in government. Governments may still legislate the laws that govern their countries and, to a lesser extent, the globe, but these laws will reflect norms and values instituted and led by others, and only some of the time will these leaders be governments themselves.

I think this is a very exciting prospect, if slightly scary. A world without automatic deference to governments and their diplomats will be a better one. Forcing our traditional élites to get down and dirty on the ground with the people will improve their ideas, and will also make it more fun to be a diplomat.

Let’s put to one side the central importance of ‘fun’ in public life.

Why would a world without automatic deference to governments be a better one? Not that I am a fan of government. But is there not at least some argument that one of the few unambiguous gains of the past two hundred years or so is a rise in political accountability, and that anything which erodes this merely empowers the unaccountable?

Who, after all, is George Soros? Who gave him a mandate to stick his nose and his money into so many places? Who elected Greenpeace? What possible claim does Bono have to speak sense on anything? Should not the fact that he rubs shoulders with world leaders at Davos embarrass all concerned?

This all boils down to a deep and dangerous proposition: that the strength of feeling (and the feeling of strength) matter far more than the strength of reason. A strong step back to the Dark Ages?

More:

Success will go to those who use mass networks effectively, build coalitions of states and concerned non-state actors, corporations and NGOs and can credibly lead opinion.

I wonder how he measures success. Is not his core point that these days there is no ‘opinion’ to be led?

This sense of confusion may well be the trend we are on. But if so, all the more reason to play up the value of patient, measured professional work done by people representing elected governments as they all try to make the best of a complicated and uncertain situation?

Carne is mainly right about the EU’s new External Action Service. It will be yet another body with a legalistic, ‘formal’ legitimacy but at best uncertain substantive legitimacy and therefore uncertain impact and effectiveness. Its foreign interlocutors will sense that it is unable to project unity of real purpose stemming from what real people want, since that is not what the European Union is all about.

The fact is that Carne is, at root, wrong. Sure, there is a lot swirling away out there. In some cases organisations such as Independent Diplomat can take up issues which are not easily taken up by others.

Yet for all the terrorism and/or nuisance and/or positive energy for change caused on the margins by networked and/or dis-organised and/or post-modern groupings here and there, governments are overwhelmingly the main source of organised power in the world. The resources they deploy leave all the philanthropists and NGOs and even U2 far behind.

If anything government ‘power’ (or at least the assertion of power) is trending worryingly upwards. Look at the gloating in the Western media by people who claim that state intervention has been the key to stopping the world from lurching into economic disaster.

Since governments need to talk to and negotiate with each other, they need people to do it.

And we know who they are.