The Future of Diplomacy

The author argues that the current model of Diplomacy is out of synch with the new participatory model of democracy in the 21st century and needs to be replaced with a more inclusive vision.

The age-old art of Diplomacy was never going to cut it in the 21st cyber century.

Let’s take a closer look at the heart and soul of the traditional model of Diplomacy.

According to Wikipedia, Diplomacy is based on the art and practice of conducting negotiations between representatives of groups or states, including the conduct of international relations through the intercession of professional diplomats, usually relating to matters of peace-making, trade, war, economics, culture, the environment and human rights; with treaties usually negotiated by diplomats prior to endorsement by national politicians.

It also employs a number of techniques to gain a strategic advantage or find mutually acceptable solutions to a common challenge. This is basically a process of vetting, exchanging and assessing information with the overall aim of extracting an advantage by the major players involved. One might sum this up in the modern day context as the informal application of Game Theory as applied to the social sciences.

Diplomacy therefore acts as more of a back channel to the day to day negotiations carried out between politicians, expert advisers and bureaucrats and still operates largely opaquely within the public domain.
Until its European beginnings in Greece, such behind the scenes negotiations were considered beyond the remit of the general population and were conducted largely in secret. The criteria for deciding this cloaking of information interplay were inevitably fuzzy, depending on the perceived political sensitivities of the issues involved. This fuzziness continues today, ranging from outright censorship and obfuscation, to qualified and partial disclosure on a need-to-know basis, to the open and transparent release of all relevant information, albeit governed by a minimum time limit between an event and its disclosure; the rationale being that past decisions with hindsight may prove either embarrassing or adversely impact ongoing resolution.

Of course the semantics of diplomacy have always been fuzzy - as indeterminate in fact as a government finds expedient. And it is argued that this is an inescapable fact of life because human behavior and politics are not precise sciences, but based to a large degree on the shifting sands of perception, uncertainty and personal bias.
Gleaning reliable information at a dinner party on the state of trade, build- up of arms or a county’s UN voting intentions is increasingly unlikely to yield any information of significant value, as the contents of CableGate has demonstrated. Such information, until recently, was supposedly kept safe from public or competitive gaze in encrypted government cyber vaults. Now however the credibility of this scenario is in tatters as ‘state secrets’ are increasingly being disinterred for public consumption by whistle blower organisations such as WikiLeaks. But the sky hasn’t fallen in – primarily because of the limited relevance of this ‘top secret’ data menagerie.

But the primary reason for the rapidly approaching use-by date of diplomacy in its current form is its confliction with the increasing transparency of modern democracy.

At the end of the 20th century 119 of the world’s 192 nations were declared electoral democracies. In the current 2st century, democracy continues to spread throughout Africa and Asia and significantly also the Middle East, with over 130 states in various stages of democratic evolution.
Democracy is supposedly based on the principle that populations should have access to the reasoning behind national policy so as to better participate in the decisions that affect their lives. This principle should therefore extend to the practice and protocols of diplomacy as it provides part of the input to the decision-making process.

In other words, democracy although imperfect, should offer each individual a stake in the nation’s collective decision outcomes and on that basis, behind the scenes diplomatic maneuvering can act to subvert that process. For example 80% of the UK population was against involvement in the Iraq war. At the same time the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was actively working behind the scenes with the US government to impose his own view and counter the groundswell of public opinion. The same counter-democratic process occurs over and over again on critical issues affecting government policy throughout the world, legitimising the covert and often regressive nature of diplomacy.

But democracy, as with all other processes engineered by human civilisation, is still evolving. A number of indicators are pointing to a major leap forward, encompassing a more public participatory form of model, which harnesses the expert computational intelligence of the Web.
By the middle of the 21st century, such a global version of the democratic process will be largely in place.

However the cloak and dagger practices still embedded in standard model of diplomacy is putting it at odds with this more open participatory model. The business of diplomacy is therefore increasingly out of synch with the modernisation of democracy: and increasingly this gap is widening and the rumblings of disquiet are becoming louder.
The evolution of democracy can also be seen in terms of improved human rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and several ensuing legal treaties, define political, cultural and economic rights as well as the rights of women, children, ethnic groups and religions. This declaration is intended to create a global safety net of rights applicable to all peoples everywhere, with no exceptions. It also recognises the principle of the subordination of national sovereignty to the universality of human rights; the dignity and worth of human life beyond the jurisdiction of any State.

Diplomacy has traditionally soft pedaled on such human rights issues in private forums, but it is increasingly seen as the wrong approach and the wrong forum. Issues relating to democratic rights are best delivered in the open forums of the UN or other public institutions open to the media. Even if diplomacy is restricted to pre-vote lobbying, the modus operandi should be made transparent to avoid the potential for a conflict of interest and corruption that has often surfaced for example in Olympic and world sporting venue lobbying.

The spread of democracy is now also irreversibly linked to the new cooperative globalisation model. The EU, despite its growing pains, provides a compelling template; complementing national decisions in the supra-national interest at the commercial, financial, legal, health and research sharing level, openly within the European parliament. While lobbying pressure from voting blocs is still commonly applied, the political and philosophical bias of the lobbying groups is in most cases transparent.

The raison d’etre of diplomacy therefore is to oil the decision wheels of democracy and as such the basis of its operation should be equally available to all members of a democratic state. Diplomats as well as politicians have party allegiances and obligations that can and do create serious conflicts of interest and skew the best of democratic intentions
The global spread of new technology and knowledge not only provides the opportunity for developing countries to gain a quantum leap in material wellbeing, but is an essential prerequisite for a stable democracy, limiting the value of traditional back channel diplomacy. Such cyber-based advances therefore presage a much more interactive and open public form of democracy and mark the next phase in its ongoing evolution.

Web 2.0’s social networking, blogging, messaging and video services have already significantly changed the way people discuss political issues and exchange ideas beyond national boundaries or political controls. In addition a number of popular sites exist as forums to actively harness individual opinions and encourage debate about contentious topics, funneling them to the political process. These are often coupled with online petitions, allowing the public to deliver requests to Government and receive a committed response. As this back channel explodes it leaves little space for former closed room hearsay.

In an age of Google and satellites, no information is sacred- not even the site of a nuclear facility in North Korea, a logging fire in the Amazon or an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. There are also a plethora of specialized smart search engines and analytical tools aimed at locating and interpreting information about divisive and complex topics such as global warming and stem cell advances. These are increasingly linked to Argumentation frameworks and Game theory, aimed at supporting the logical basis of arguments, negotiation and other structured forms of group decision-making. New logic and statistical tools can also provide inference and evaluation mechanisms to better assess the evidence for a particular hypothesis.

By 2030 it is likely that such ‘intelligence-based’ algorithms will be capable of automating the analysis and advice provided to politicians, at a similar level of quality and expertise to that offered by the best human advisers, including diplomats.

It might be argued that there is still a need for the role for foreign affairs apparatchiks and diplomatic staff in lobbying, interpreting, nuancing and promoting the national interest on behalf of their political masters. But this is also rapidly becoming redundant in the modern networked world where every policy decision, utterance, and body language shift among political leaders is recorded, analysed and spread instantly around the world via the social media.

Decisions are being made increasingly in real time and the reasons behind them are also exposed and discussed around the world in real time. The days of closed clandestine meetings are over. News feeds and aggregation, blog and video sites ravenously ingest and recycle every piece of political and economic information captured by smart phones and citizen journalists for popular consumption on an endless 24/7 cycle.

The main argument for maintaining the diplomatic status quo is that making such social substrate information generally available might act against the ‘national Interest’ by providing a non-complying country with a significant negotiating advantage. In other words, not all sovereign states might be equally willing to share their inside knowledge with others.
This of course this is self-serving nonsense.

The National Interest is almost always best served by open discussion and debate within its population and peers, with all information cards on the table, leading to better decision-making whether relating to welfare or war as well as making the policy makers more accountable. The record shows that the opposite almost invariably leads to corruption as well as bad decision-making skewed by political conflicts of interest. Those that don’t comply with future global ethical standards in political or financial dealings, as already with corruption, will pay a heavy price in lost investment and prestige in regional and global forums and accelerate the scourge of global cyber-war.

We are also accelerating towards a globalised society in which all major decisions by any one state will affect all others, whether relating to global warming, financial governance or technology advances. In such a world there can be no free riders. The decisions of every nation will be scrutinized continuously to ensure conformance with global governance norms. The stakes will be too high and the interests too interrelated for it to be any other way.

Information is increasingly spread equally around the world by the ubiquitous power of the web invading traditional walled gardens, using a variety of tools such as video phones, Google Maps and citizen journalism; with the results spread globally within seconds by social media sites. Information captured in this way is far more relevant than recycling snippets of ‘who said what’ at a late night bar.

Of course this shift to the general public’s involvement in the diplomatic process is strongly objected to by the thousands of bureaucrats and technocrats in the diplomacy industry, threatening the mystique of their raison d’etre. But inevitably their future role is more likely to be restricted to implementing policy – not creating or influencing it.
As the expert knowledge and expertise from the 7 billion minds connected to the world’s continuously updated storehouse of knowledge on Web 4.0 begins to permeate all levels of society, the pervasive influence of yesterday’s diplomatic overtures will finally dwindle away.

The recent exposure of gigabytes of leaked diplomatic cables and emails, like the Pentagon Papers before it, is an expression of the fault lines between the old and new worlds of diplomacy. WikiLeaks however is also an expression of the power of real democracy at work, where the connivances and shallowness of the substratum of diplomatic knowledge has been excavated and the Emperor has been found to be stark naked. What it exposed was a mountain of largely banal and uncomplimentary cross-talk relating to foreign governments and their machinations, with little real substance. The exception was video footage of a number of US atrocities including the cold blooded gunning down of Reuters correspondents and many other obscenities that had previously been covered up in the name of maintaining diplomatic relations.

Certainly information of substance such as the strength of a nation’s economy or trade surplus could have been more accurately and cheaply obtained by trawling the Web and in the future will be infinitely more reliable, extracted from a variety of expert sources.
The same could be said of information relating to current or future military conflicts, using Google maps to pinpoint the size and strength of nuclear installations or clandestine buildup of forces. Information relating to sensitive military planning and deployments will need to be kept securely encrypted, much more rigorously than previously, but this is hardly the stuff of diplomacy. It should not be confused with the need in a true democracy for full public transparency and acceptance of the arguments for and against involvement in a conflict in the first place.

As demonstrated in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, governments are not above applying spurious non-sequitor arguments for home consumption to justify their own agendas. Human rights information about political activists is another casualty of the skewing of diplomatic double-speak, distributed still on many news channels. But the web is rapidly reaching the point of knowledge and inference maturity that can expose most diplomatic obfuscation. It is also equipped as mentioned, with algorithms to weigh evidence and the probabilities of truth in future decision processes.

Diplomacy’s future role therefore, if it is to survive at all, is as a complementary subset of the new democratic model, for an open cyber society. As such it must keep in lock-step with democracy’s fast evolving shift towards a more inclusive model, avoiding the artificial disjunction between overt and covert social knowledge management with its divisive overtones and elitist origins.