INDEPENDENT DIPLOMAT: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite by Carne Ross
Hurst £15
I may be wrong; but this dissident diplomat’s fascinating, succinctly
readable, occasionally pretentious, ultimately futile polemic against
contemporary diplomacy reads like an extreme allergic reaction to working in
the weird world of the United Nations. The place would certainly have sent
me barking mad.
When he resigned from the diplomatic service over the Iraq war, Carne Ross was
the Middle East expert at Britain’s mission to the UN. Much of the book is
informed by this experience. There are few places more insulated from the
outside world than the great international institutions. Whenever I walked
into the UN or the EU, it was like entering a cross between a private club
and a space capsule, each with its own mysteries and jargon, impenetrable to
those on the outside.
I can well understand why this turned Ross sour. Multilateral diplomacy —
negotiation within groups of nations — has its moments. But the price is
high: listening to droning diplomatic windbags; crawling line-by-line
through interminable texts; an obsession with procedural points; rooms
stuffy with bad air and the ineffable smugness of a cosy club; and the
painful difficulty of reaching a common decision. Ross’s description of the
UN’s laboured efforts to refocus economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein
so they did not hit the Iraqi people is as depressing as it is illuminating.
But the whole diplomatic experience seems to have been a bad trip. Ross worked
in the Foreign Office and our missions in Germany, Norway and Afghanistan.
He makes trenchant criticisms of the diplomatic service, some justified. The
disappearance of diplomatic reports into the black hole of King Charles
Street, never to be heard of again, is a well-known phenomenon. The Foreign
Office can be smug, timid and stiflingly conformist; and this seems to have
got worse. When I joined in the 1960s, it was stuffed with eccentrics and
suffused with a powerful esprit de corps. Expert knowledge of foreign
countries was highly prized. In today’s Foreign Office there is little place
for the unorthodox while the great clans of Arabists, Japanologists,
Sinologists, Kremlinologists and the like are much diminished in importance.
A Ross hobbyhorse is that diplomacy needs to be demystified; and he is right.
For centuries, diplomats have perpetuated the notion that their profession
is an arcane one, to which only a privileged few are admitted. This is, of
course, rubbish. The Washington embassy has several hundred staff of whom
fewer than 15% come from the Foreign Office. The majority is from a variety
of Whitehall ministries. Home civil servants temporarily seconded to the
diplomatic service are often no less effective than the full-time
professionals of the Foreign Office. These mini-Whitehalls, bringing
multiple skills under one roof, are increasingly the pattern for Britain’s
overseas representation. Here Ross is pushing at a door already open.
As he rightly says, this reflects structural changes in the nature of foreign
policy. For Britain these have gathered pace since we joined the Common
Market in the 1970s. It is no longer possible to draw a clear boundary
between what is foreign policy and what is domestic; or between the
political and the economic. Take the recent bird-flu outbreak, involving
Bernard Matthews’s turkeys and Hungarian poultry farms. Has this been a
public-health problem; a matter of EU policy; or a bad moment in
British-Hungarian relations? Answer: all of the above.
Ross worries that diplomacy is executed by small, unaccountable elites. That
may be the case in international organisations. It should not happen in a
democracy such as Britain’s, where Foreign Office ministers are responsible
to parliament and the electorate for the conduct of their department. Here
one should distinguish between foreign policy (what needs to be done) and
diplomacy (how it should be done). On the former, the government should be
wholly transparent; on the latter not everything, as Ross would wish, can be
done in public without prejudicing the outcome.
So are diplomats fit for purpose in this complicated, swirling world? Ross
thinks not. He would abolish them. He prays in aid a number of straw men and
redundant stereotypes. The British diplomatic service is not the museum
stuffed with pompous toffs Ross here and there suggests (thank God he was
never on my staff: he draws a wicked portrait of what he considers a typical
ambassador, presumably an amalgam of all those for whom he worked). In 36
years, I never came within a country mile of a diplomatic uniform and a
plumed hat. He also appears to object to some pretty fundamental
disciplines, such as clear drafting and a consistent public line on the
issues of the day.
The crux of the book, however, lies elsewhere; and this is where it starts to
go seriously off the rails. What Ross wants is a new world order: one in
which negotiation is not a zero-sum game pursued by competing nation-states;
one where the negotiators abandon the word “we”, because they have no right
to claim to represent their nation; one where a new “global politics”
corrects the “democratic deficit” of contemporary diplomacy.
For the most part, this is utopian, even slightly nutty, stuff. “We need,”
says Ross, “to understand that a state is a mere agglomeration of
individuals, not a singularity.” If this opaque statement is trying to tell
us that the nation-state has had its day, he has it precisely wrong. The
paradox of the modern world is that, while money, people, culture and
electronic information whizz back and forth across porous frontiers, the
sense of nationhood strengthens. Five minutes in Beijing, Delhi, Washington,
Moscow or Tehran will make that plain as a pikestaff. It is in capitals such
as these that the key to progress on the great transnational issues lies;
and it is only by accommodating their national interest that progress will
be made.
Like it or not, it’s a Hobbesian world out there: survival of the fittest, dog
eat dog, race to the swiftest, etc. Foreign policy is not going to be run
anytime soon via e-petitions to a world assembly. We are stuck with the
diplomats, international organisations and nation-states that Ross so
deplores.
But again there is a paradox. In calling for the abolition of the diplomatic
cadre, Ross unconsciously makes the case not just for keeping one, but
reinforcing it. Some of the most powerful passages in his book describe how
little policy in London towards Afghanistan and Iraq has been informed by
expert local knowledge and historical understanding. Even just the other
week, the prime minister again strained these conflicts through the filter
of a global war on terror, ignoring the indigenous tribal and religious
complexities that may, in the end, wreck both military expeditions. By all
means “ventilate” the diplomatic service with outside expertise of all kinds
— but if ever we needed a global network of men and women who understand in
depth the nearly 200 nations on this earth, it is today.
The crude facts
“It is a common misconception,” writes former diplomat Carne Ross, “that the
behaviour and speech used in diplomacy are refined, elegant and measured. In
reality, diplomacy is often crude. For example, I was once told by a senior
Asian ambassador: ‘I would rather be f***ed up the arse with a rusty spoon
than agree with you, Carne.’ ” Ross resigned in 2004, after testifying to
the Butler Inquiry. As a key member of the UK delegation to the UN he was
well placed to observe what he called Britain’s “dishonest” behaviour. He
sent his testimony to the foreign secretary as his resignation note. The
foreign secretary did not reply.
Christopher Meyer was British Ambassador to the USA from 1997 to 2003.
Independent Diplomat is available at the Books First price of £13.50 (inc p&p)
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