by Alex Evans | Dec 21, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
The last working day before Christmas. Time to brave the streets and get those last few presents? Bah! Here at Global Dashboard we’re made of sterner stuff, so naturally our thoughts are skipping over the festive season altogether and focusing instead on strategic goals for 2008 – and in particular the need, still outstanding, to fix the UK’s foreign policy apparatus.
So here, in what passes for our warped variation on festive cheer, are two stocking fillers to print out and take home with you: the full text of Sir Richard Mottram’s speech on national security, given at Demos earlier this week, and a speech on FCO reform given by William Wallace at Chatham House on 7 December.
There’s now a burgeoning literature on why and how governments need to overhaul their co-ordination structures to deal more effectively with cross-cutting global risks like terrorism, climate change, pandemics, energy security and economic shocks. So early next year, we’ll be launching a ‘canon’ of reading on the theory and practice of reforming foreign policy to deal more effectively with global risks. Please let us know what should be on it and we’ll link to it. (You can find our email addresses on the Contact page.)
2007 has been a rich year for debate of these issues, but consensus on the actual reforms needed lies still in the future. The UK is an especially good country in which to start work on some tangible proofs of concept, given the range of people here thinking actively about these issues, and given Britain’s potential to act as a springboard from which to apply innovations to EU, UN and other international bodies also suffering from a coherence deficit. Given how many global risks are now coming home to roost, 2008 is the year in which debate needs to turn into action.
Happy Christmas.
by Richard Gowan | Nov 15, 2007 | Conflict and security
There seems to be a small revolt in progress at the UN over the ever-growing demand for its peacekeepers. There are currently more than 100,000 of them around the world, a record, and UN-watchers have been muttering darkly about “overstretch” for a while. But now there’s a new mood of frankness among senior officials too. Last week, Ban Ki-moon declared that sending a UN force into Somalia is not “a realistic and viable option” right now. That will have irritated Washington, which badly wants to the UN to go in to take some pressure off its Ethiopian allies, bogged down in Mogadishu.
This week, it’s been the turn of Ban’s Under-Secretary for Peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno to tell it like it is. Reviewing the lack of hi-tech assets like helicopters available for the UN force in Darfur, he told the press that the mission there “may become a failure.” Guehenno has been blunt about such issues in the past. But these two statements, coming so close together, may foreshadow a growing fight over high-risk missions like Darfur and Somalia between a cautious UN Secretariat and those governments (most obviously the US and UK) that strongly favor these deployments.
So it’s worth noting the disconnect between these short-term warnings from the UN and some of the big picture thinking on peacekeeping that Gordon Brown laid out in his Mansion House speech on Monday. As Alex Evans pointed out in his review of the speech on this blog, Brown had much to say about the need for a “a new framework” to handle fragile states and peace operations. And much of it was absolutely right in theory: “Security Council peacekeeping resolutions and UN Envoys should make stablisation, reconstruction and development an equal priority”, for example. The problem is that you can’t make the theory work (or get onto reconstruction or development) if you don’t have the troops and helicopters you need to do stabilization.
In fairness, they know this in London. In a lecture on the EU as “Model Power Not Superpower” today, David Miliband had all the details on rotary wing aircraft:
EU countries have around 1,200 transport helicopters, yet only about 35 are deployed in Afghanistan. And EU member states haven’t provided any helicopters in Darfur despite the desperate need there.
Miliband went on to say that “increasing our capacity to put peacekeepers into the field – whether on UN, EU or NATO missions – is a crucial part of cooperation.” Again, this is absolutely right in principle. But even if the Europeans did have much greater capacity, would they be prepared to risk their assets and personnel in Somalia?
Er, no. Fewer than 2% of UN forces in Africa come from Europe. Give credit where it is due: the Norwegians and Swedes do want to send engineers to Darfur, and the EU is deploying (mainly French) soldiers to Chad alongside UN police. The UN will continue to have to bear the burden of new missions with troops from Africa and Asia. As that becomes ever more difficult and dangerous, the Secretariat may start to do what Bill Clinton told the UN to do after the last Somalia debacle in the 1990s: learn to say no.
by Alex Evans | Nov 10, 2007 | Influence and networks, UK
This week’s Spectator leads with a full scale assault on FCO minister and former UN Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown (also picked up in brief by the Telegraph and the Times). The article dredges up various old canards that aren’t exactly news – Malloch Brown’s friendship with George Soros, the UN oil for food scandal, Malloch Brown’s controversial interview with the Telegraph over the summer – but its chief revelation is that since becoming a Minister, Malloch Brown has been living in a grace and favour flat in Admiralty Arch.
Malloch Brown, astonishingly, has secured one of the three government flats in Admiralty House, where John Prescott used to live. In so doing, this newcomer has leapfrogged 20 full members of the Cabinet who notionally enjoy seniority over him … The Treasury’s National Assets Register values the Admiralty House accommodation at £7.76 million and as worth more than the flats above No. 10 and 11 Downing Street. It is, indeed, fit for a Lord, and one with tastes which are the opposite of frugal. A parliamentary answer earlier this autumn revealed that ‘the floor area of the ministerial residences in Admiralty House is 859 square metres.’ In 2006–07 the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office paid the Cabinet Office no less than £173,000 for John Prescott’s living in one of the flats there.
Er… is that it? For one thing, the charge that Malloch Brown has “leapfrogged 20 full members of the Cabinet” wilts somewhat given that the article admits that “the other two flats in the building are empty, and another government grace-and-favour residence in South Eaton Place, SW1, is being sold off”. Not exactly a queue stretching around the block, then. Besides, is it so unusual for a large organisation to provide relocation assistance to a senior executive joining from overseas? And if not, then what on earth would the cost case be for expending taxpayers’ money on renting an apartment when three apartments that the Government already owns are vacant?
Of course, whether you’re a defender or a detractor of Malloch Brown’s, the flat is no more than a tactical football. The real story here is the resurrection of the unilateralist right’s long-standing vendetta against Malloch Brown, and its migration to this side of the Atlantic. One of the authors of the piece, Claudia Rosett, has long enjoyed attacking not only Malloch Brown but indeed anything to do with the UN, as her blog confirms. Not one, not two, but all of the posts on it are attacks on the United Nations; so this December’s UN climate summit, for instance, becomes in Rosett’s view a “UN climate-crowd pajama party on Bali” at which cocktails begin at 3pm.
What is surprising about the article is to see that the other author of the piece is James Forsyth, the Spectator’s engaging and thoughtful web editor. Forsyth is on the right, to be sure – he’s a climate change sceptic, for instance – but his arguments are usually well thought-through, capable of understanding the opposite view, and generally a very long way from Rosett’s obsessive fulminations. His most recent blog post on the Spectator site, for example – which discusses Deroy Murdock’s defence of waterboarding in the National Review, which David discussed here on GlobalDashboard earlier this week – argues that
Some on the right are so determined to always take the toughest position possible on any war on terror question that they sound like a Stephen Colbert parody of themselves.
Swap “the United Nations and multilateralism” for “any war on terror question” and Forsyth might as well be talking about Rosett. So why the joint article? For what it’s worth, my guess is that Forsyth was simply told to write it with Rosett by Matthew d’Ancona, the Spectator’s editor, who’s been after Malloch Brown’s scalp from the start; way back on the 29th June, before Malloch Brown’s interview with the Telegraph had been published, d’Ancona was already calling it a “dreadful appointment”.
What this is really about, one suspects, is Malloch Brown’s opposition to the war in Iraq and his criticism of the Bush Administration. Fair enough. But shall we all stop pretending that this is about a flat, then?
by Alex Evans | Nov 3, 2007 | Influence and networks
I’m having a lazy Saturday morning in my kitchen, and pottering through Erik Davis’s gloriously out-there tome Techgnosis (it says on the blurb: “writer and cyber guru Erik Davis demonstrates how religious imagination, magical dreams and millennialist fervour have always permeated the story of technology”. Being only 17 pages in, I can’t tell you yet whether he achieves this goal; but I’ve laughed out loud twice with sheer delight, so things are looking promising.)
Reading his musings on the Greek god Hermes, it strikes me that here is a deity who (in contrast to the average 21st century ministry of foreign affairs) does not want for a robust theory of influence. Instead of sending our new diplomatic recruits off on rather dry training sessions like this, they should be dispatched to study the relevance of the Hermetic archetype to their craft:
Of all the godforms that haunt the Greek mind, Hermes is the one who would feel most at home in our wired world. Indeed, with his mischievous combination of speed, trickery and profitable mediation, he can almost be seen as the archaic mascot of the information age. Unlike most archetypal figures, who lurk in the violent and erotic dreamstuff beneath the surface of our everyday awareness, Hermes also embodies the social psychology of language and communication. He flies “as fleet as thought”, an image of the daylight mind, with its plans and synaptic leaps, its chatter and overload. Hermes shows that these minds are not islands, but nodes in an immense electric tangle of words, images, songs, and signals.
You see how ahead of his time young Hermes is? Not only is he already fluent in social network analysis as a core tool for his brand of diplomacy, but he understands that the content that flows through these networks is not just rational analytical discourse: much more fundamentally, he recognises a broader spectrum of “words, images, songs and signals“. This is not a diplomat who considers the (shudder) core script part of his communications arsenal.
[While] Apollo can be considered the god of science in its ideal form – pure, ordering, embodying the solar world of clarity and light – Hermes insists that there are always cracks and gaps in such perfect architectures: intelligence moves forward by keeping on its crafty toes, ever opening into a world that is messy, unpredictable, and far from equilibrium. The supreme symbol for the fecund space of possibility and innovation that Hermes explots is the crossroads – a fit image as well for our contemporary world, with its data nets and seemingly infinite choices.
So Hermes is a trickster, too – and a thief. Sure, he’ll use engagement or shaping strategies, that respectively catalyse or focus a debate, when he needs to; but he’s equally willing to use disruptive (or, dare one speculate, even destructive) strategies when the nature of the debate is not to his liking.
Moreover, he understands that public diplomacy takes place in a context of complexity and instability, where not only the list of players but the very rules of the game are in a constant process of flux. This is a diplomacy that takes place not in the august, Apollonian surroundings of diplomatic receptions on the Ambassador’s veranda or the Locarno Rooms at King Charles Street, but in altogether messier ‘in-between places’, where the role of the diplomat him/herself is constantly adaptive, changing and unstable. And, as Davis goes on:
Crossroads are extremely charged spaces. Here choices are made, fears and facts overlap, and the alien first shows its face: strange people, foreign tongues, exotic and delightful goods and information. Crossroads create what the anthropologist Victor Turner calls “liminal zones”: ambiguous but potent spaces of transformation and threat that lie at the edge of cultural maps. Here the self finds itself beyond the limits of its own horizon. “Through Hermes,” the mythographer Karl Kerenyi writes, “every house becomes an opening and a point of departure to the paths that come from far off and lead away into the distance.”
Ah: give it up for Hermes. He’s all about understanding that ‘in here / out there’ distinctions break down altogether in a world of networks and crossroads. In David and my forthcoming paper The New Public Diplomacy: towards a theory of influence for 21st century foreign policy, we quote the author Michael Gibbons, who argues that the kind of innovative policy entrepreneurs that we need more of in today’s foreign ministries are constantly ‘burrowing out’ of their organisations in search of the ‘grey spaces’ where they meet up with like-minded collaborators.
Being able to do that effectively absolutely relies on being willing and able to participate in conversations fully: not just deploying key messages, but understanding conversation as a fundamentally two way process, in which both sides change and evolve as a result of the conversation (something conspicuously absent from, say, the Karen Hughes school of public diplomacy). So when David Miliband calls (rightly) for a new diplomacy, is that Hermes we can discern just behind his shoulder, whispering mischievously – “there’s nothing new under the sun”?
by Alex Evans | Oct 8, 2007 | Europe and Central Asia
David Miliband’s blog links to something I missed in the FT last week: the formation of a new European Council on Foreign Relations, as a complement / competitor to its American counterpart. The article announcing its launch – penned by Martti Ahtisaari, Joschka Fischer, Mark Leonard and Mabel van Oranje, is candid about the EU’s foreign policy failings:
Despite these successes [single market, generous aid budget, lots of peacekeepers, uses incentives instead of threatening to invade people, leadership on WTO, Kyoto, International Criminal Court and so on], the EU continues to underperform on the world stage. Since the Iraq war and the French and Dutch No votes on the constitutional treaty, the EU has shown the faltering confidence of adolescence. European leaders, who struggle to adapt to a new global environment characterised by a weakened US, a resurgent Russia and a rising China, have too often turned inwards.
Instead, they continue, Europe needs to get its act together on issues like enlargement, Russia and the Middle East. To do this, it needs to rally behind Javier Solana; take a more co-ordinated approach; and think hard about additional incentives to draw the EU’s immediate neighbours into its sphere of influence.
