by Alex Evans | Jan 18, 2008 | East Asia and Pacific, Influence and networks, UK
Benedict Brogan is off to China with the Prime Ministerial travelling circus, plus various business bigwigs including Richard Branson. But as a sequence of posts on Benedict’s blog yesterday record, all did not appear to be going smoothly as the trip got underway. At 12.27pm , the first indications that all might not be well began to emerge:
Oh dear. Bad enough that Sir Richard Branson has to fly to China on a BA plane, but he’s also fallen out with BAA and Ruth Kelly. There’s been an almighty cock up involving the Dept of Transport’s security guys here at Heathrow, and as a result it’s chaos at the Royal Suite. The business bigwigs were kept sitting in a coach outside the gates for 55 mins. Branson was so cross he called the head of BAA to complain. Mr Brown isn’t here yet, but he may want to have a word with Ruth. This may take quite a lot of in-flight champagne to fix.
But things were about to get worse. 1.13pm, and Brogan is showing that irresistible Daily Mail sangfroid:
It’s not for me to say this trip is cursed, but from where I sit on the PM’s BA charter (fabulous bacon sarnies, do hope Sir Richard likes them) I can see a BA airbus that has just come off the runway due to a lack of undercarriage. It doesn’t look too serious even if it is sitting at an odd angle, but rumour is all flights are grounded. So we are delayed until BAA gets the mess cleared. This is turning into a busy day for Tom Kelly, Tony Blair’s former spokesman, and now head of comms for BAA.
More drama was still to come. 1.35pm:
This gets weirder. The PM’s motorcade was coming up the A4 as the plane approached and at one point his detectives grew alarmed. The suggestion is the stricken Airbus misjudged its approach and nearly took out the PM. I can’t vouch for this, but this trip is getting more eventful by the minute and we’re only now taking off.
Now, fortunately, the intrepid crew are safely ensconced in Beijing, where there’s only one small snag:
For the past three days the Chinese have asked No10 staff to ensure we don’t ask about democracy. It was explained to them that this might not be possible, and sure enough Mr Wen got asked by both Nick Robinson and Tom Bradby why it was taking so long to democratise. I suspect it may take some time: we’ve been issued with a detailed list of what is expected of us, including ” please stand up and applaud when the two PMs enter the venue”. We didn’t, but that may just be because we are fast asleep.
We’ll be watching riveted over the next few days…
by Alex Evans | Jan 18, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system
We’re off to tomorrow’s Fabian Society conference on foreign policy, and will be live blogging it throughout the day. Some tickets still available, apparently. David Miliband’s doing the keynote.
While we’re on the subject of David Miliband, someone at Landmine Action has a nice knack for comms: there’s a huge billboard ad in Westminster tube station that reads ‘Get cluster bombs Milibanned’. Nothing like the personal touch, is there? Should you wish to add your own personal touch, you can send him an email here…
by Alex Evans | Jan 18, 2008 | Global system, Influence and networks
David and I will be working with Demos on a new project over the spring, called The New Public Diplomacy. Here’s the project outline:
Public diplomacy – diplomacy directed at people rather than other diplomats – is a subject of growing fascination for governments. While some in the foreign policy elite hanker for a time when foreign policy was the preserve of a technocratic priesthood, those days are largely gone. Somewhere between the anti-globalisation protestors who closed down the Seattle trade talks in 1999 and the Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the world was disabused of the notion that foreign policy is only conducted by and between professionals.
Today, non-governmental actors of every variety demand a piece of the international action, and willingly use their agility, focus and passion to elbow states aside. The media is an ever more voracious force, even as the stock of human attention remains limited. And it is increasingly difficult to see where foreign policy stops and domestic policy begins, as the great global risks like climate change, terrorism or HIV obliterate geographic, disciplinary and organisational borders.
All this leaves governments in a frustrating position – huge responsibilities, fewer levers than ever to achieve change. They face some tough questions. Are cross-border currents of public opinion uncontrollable, or can they be dammed or redirected? Where are those fomenting future revolutions (benign or otherwise) to be found, and are they amenable to external pressure? What about the ideas, stories and values that people use to make sense of the world? Are they formed merely in reaction to events, or are they imbued with the power to reshape our environment? And where do governments get their own ideas and direction from? Who shapes them?
Answering these questions forces us to think about influence, the core currency of any country overseas. But herein lies a surprising paradox. Despite its importance, few governments have even a rudimentary theory of what influence is and how to exert it.
This gap in governments’ capabilities is relevant to the full gamut of foreign policy issues and more or less every area of activity that governments undertake in foreign policy: from fighting wars to providing aid, and from building coalitions for multilateral agreements to influencing perceptions in a country on the other side of the world.
Tackling them demands a style of diplomacy that is more politically engaged, more ambitious in its aims, more open to outside influences, and more cross-cutting in its approach. No longer can public diplomacy be seen as a fundamentally separate endeavour from the ‘rest of foreign policy’, that can be hived off to a dedicated (but low status) public diplomacy team. Instead, it represents a paradigm for understanding and undertaking foreign policy as a whole in the 21st century, and a skill set in which all foreign policy practitioners – wherever in government they work – need to be fluent.
by Alex Evans | Jan 17, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
Chris Haskins knows a bit about food. He’s the former chairman of Northern Foods and Express Dairies, acted as Tony Blair’s ‘rural tsar’, and he used to run the government’s Better Regulation Task Force. So it’s rather arresting to find him in the pages of this month’s edition of Prospect asking if we’re seeing the return of Malthus (full article only available to subscribers, unfortunately):
Over 200 years ago, Thomas Malthus argued that population would outrun food supply, and that without stern limits on reproduction the world was heading for disaster. So far, he has proved utterly mistaken; the world’s population has increased tenfold and there is less starvation than in his day. But the global population will probably rise from 6.5bn to 9bn by 2050, which will require the world’s farmers to produce more food in the next 40 years than in the past 200. The Malthusian predictions were wrong for 200 years, but might prove right in the next 50.
So what, Haskins goes on, must be done to avoid a “Malthusian catastrophe”? Three things. First, science and technology must be harnessed to improve the output of existing land – and yes, that includes GM crops. Second, we should take a long hard look at policies designed to promote biofuels. And third,
…we, as individuals, must stop using energy at the rate we do, and wasting food to the extent that we do. At present we waste nearly half of the food we produce, throwing perfectly good food away in our kitchens, restaurants and shops. The most virtuous and responsible step of all would be to become vegetarian. About three quarters of the world’s wheat, maize and soya is fed to animals who then convert this, very inefficiently, into meat for us to eat. Something else to bear in mind is that our consumption of milk products maintains demand for millions of cows, each of which, through its burping and farting, does more environmental damage than the average family car.
Just as with climate change, where there’s a heated debate about the difference between ‘luxury’ emissions (trips to St Lucia) versus ‘essential’ emissions (methane from rice paddies), the issue of equity is starting to emerge with food. Water will be next, as scarcity worsens and the concept of virtual water becomes more widely understood. It’s about fair shares, stupid.
by Alex Evans | Jan 17, 2008 | North America
From Slate, this delicious mash-up (hat-tip – Dan Drezner)
