Chapter 1 : Introduction

1. INTRODUCTION

Back at the UN Security Council in New York. A cockpit of world affairs, this is also my workplace. The Council chamber and its maze of adjoining rooms and corridors are familiar to me. I know all its nooks and corners — where to make discreet phone calls reporting discussions back to London (or to my girlfriend), where to twist the arms of colleagues in private (this place was made for corridor diplomacy), the spot to grab a moment’s peace without being bothered by other delegations or journalists (a former French ambassador once wrote a book on the best places to sleep at the UN: there were many). It feels like home ground.

The formal Council Chamber is located deep in the UN complex. To reach it you must make your own way through long corridors. There are no signposts; but I know the route well.

As I enter, I greet the Secretariat staff with whom I have worked for so long, “How are you? Fine.” I recognize a couple of other diplomats; we chat briefly. I smile and wander into the chamber, smell its closed air (there are no windows). Dimly lit and soberly decorated, the Chamber exudes gravitas and high politics. The Council table dominates the room — a large, wooden U-shape surrounded by soft blue seats fixed to the floor in discrete groups (for the fifteen Council members) around it. On the wall behind the table, a huge mural looms. Donated by Norway, it depicts machines and people in an unintelligible panorama, whose meaning, during long meetings, I have often fruitlessly questioned.

Inside the U is a long table, lowered below the rest of the room, where the Secretariat officials sit, barely observed as they annotate and record the meetings. To the side, five yards from the table, is an inclined bank of seats for UN states which are not Council members. Above them, and still further away, is a “public” gallery, though the public is only allowed in when no one is meeting here. A mini-geography of power and influence.

Without thinking I move towards a group of seats at the Council table, where the UK delegation has its place. But I must stop myself. I am no longer a British diplomat. There is no place for me at the table. Today I am a member of the Kosovo delegation. There is not even a nameplate for us here, since Kosovo is not a country recognized by the UN.

I swallow and look for seats at the side of the Council table, where other member states must sit to observe the “formal” Council meetings. On this occasion, and only this one, the Kosovars have been specially permitted to sit here, though no seats have been reserved for them. Even the Prime Minister, Bajram Kosumi, whose first official visit to the Council this is, must hunt for a place among the scattered junior diplomats who take notes at the Council’s sessions. His interpreter, a volunteer from a nearby university, manages to sit behind him and whisper Albanian into his ear. No interpretation is provided for him, though it is the future of his country that is being discussed.

The Prime Minister, though head of a democratically-elected government, participates only as a member of an UNMIK (the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo) delegation, led by an unelected UN official. He is not allowed near the Council table, unlike Boris Tadic, the President of Serbia, a country which was driven from any substantive authority over Kosovo in 1999. Humiliatingly, Tadic welcomes the presence of the “leader of Kosovo’s Albanians” in the UN delegation; Kosumi is not permitted to respond.

Next to the Prime Minister, I sit and fidget in the non-Council seats, far from my former perch. I recall my days as a British diplomat on the Council, when I enjoyed a certain swagger. The P5 (the five permanent Council members) run the Council, and during the Council’s formal meetings (of which this is one), I would march around the formal chamber, gossiping with my friends and colleagues, collecting intelligence on the moves of other Council members, passing notes to my ambassador and chatting with the Secretariat staff. I would go into their side-offices to borrow their computers to write speaking notes for my ambassador or copy draft statements to circulate. I would lounge expansively in the soft chairs provided for the delegations of the Council, fiddling with my notebook or mobile phone, always busy. It was our domain.

As an honorary Kosovar, I immediately feel intimidated by our humble rank in the Council’s hierarchy. Walking by the burly security guards who stand at the doors to the chamber, I worry that my temporary UN protocol badge will not pass muster and that I will be denied entrance. Although I have much to ask the diplomats of the important Council delegations, I suddenly feel too nervous to bother them as they sweep around, as I once did, looking busy. Seated away from and to the side of the Council table, I do not dare approach the delegations seated around it, as one would not interrupt a bishop during a service in his cathedral.

I try to recapture my former élan and confidence, but it is hard to re-muster. Instead, along with my timidity, I find frustration with those who sit at the Council table. Although their faces are anonymous and their expressions bored, the diplomats of the Council annoy me: in them, of course, I recognize my former self. Their indifference was once mine. I feel irritation on behalf of the Kosovars at their treatment. While the delegations of Argentina and Tanzania drone on with their stock phrases applicable to any conflict (“there must be greater efforts for reconciliation between the parties”), the Prime Minister, who had traveled five thousand miles to attend this discussion of his country’s affairs, is not even permitted to speak.

His visit, which I have organized, has been an education. The UN assigned its most junior officials to make the arrangements. Our requests consequently take an age to process, as they must be referred upwards in that towering hierarchy. We ask to use the UN press room to brief journalists on this historic occasion: the first time that a Prime Minister of Kosovo has attended Security Council discussions of his country. We are told this is impossible, only to discover by chance that the UN’s Special Representative is at this moment using the room for his own briefing.

When we request meetings, senior officials melt away (“he has an urgent engagement”) to be replaced by more junior substitutes. The US ambassador refuses to see us: his underling says he has “no interest”. The Austrian mission brusquely refuses to organize a meeting with the European Union’s collected ambassadors (Austria is the EU’s rotating President): “This has no precedent”. We have no recourse but to curse and sigh when we put down the phone. We are provided with no delegation room in which to organize ourselves and instead spend all our time in the delegates’ coffee lounge (where to their relief the Kosovars can at least smoke).

When the British ambassador wants a meeting with the UN Secretary-General, it is always granted without delay. When Kosovo’s Prime Minister wants one, it is not confirmed until the night before (the request was made weeks earlier); the audience itself lasts a brisk ten minutes. The Secretary-General’s staff make clear to us that we are not to linger. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister, his picture taken for the Kosovo history books, is deeply grateful.

There are more subtle distinctions too. When I was with the British mission, officials of the UN or other countries paid attention when we spoke. Doubtless this was often faked, but it was perhaps felt to be required, given Britain’s place in the UN pecking order. With the Kosovars, no such deference is necessary. Junior officials become impatient with our demands and even on occasion allow themselves a perceptible sneer when they talk to us. For them, it is acceptable behavior to interrupt the Kosovo Prime Minister when he is talking, but how would these same people have behaved if the British Prime Minister had been within view? I find it thoroughly depressing. I ask the Kosovars how they feel. They say it is normal and that they are used to it.

On the last night of the visit, the vicissitudes and irritations at last behind us, we celebrate. A ridiculous stretch limo is rented for a couple of hours, and we cruise Manhattan, drinking vodka and dancing in our seats. Later, at an Albanian-American “Italian” restaurant, we drink and eat copiously. Amid the hubbub of Albanian voices, it is as if we are in Pristina. I am the only non-Kosovar there. The Prime Minister sings anthems from his days as a political prisoner in Milosevic’s Yugoslavia.

This is one privilege I had not expected. For the Prime Minister and his delegation, the visit is a proud moment in their country’s progress, an achievement regardless of the frustrations. It is another step on the road to the ultimate liberation of independence.

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Before the French revolution, according to Simon Schama in Citizens, Louis XVI’s palace at Versailles “had been built around the ceremonial control of spectacle through which the mystique of absolutism was preserved and managed. At its center, both symbolically and architecturally, was the closeted monarch. Access to his person was minutely described by court etiquette, and proximity or distance, audience or dismissal, defined the pecking order of the nobility permitted to attend him. The palace exterior facing the town expressed this calculated measurement of space and time by confronting the approaching visitor with a succession of progressively narrowing enclosures. From the stables and the Grand Commun housing the kitchens, where space was at a premium, to the ‘marble court’ at the center of which the King’s bedroom was housed, the visiting ambassador would negotiate a small series of pierced barriers or grilles, each one admitting a further measure of access.”[1]

The United Nations headquarters on Manhattan’s East Side is sadly no Versailles but the tall, slab-like block has a certain emphatic presence: its singular design (by Le Corbusier and others) is the reason why the tour busses pause on First Avenue and the sightseeing cruises dawdle on the East River. As at Versailles, one only enters as a tourist or an invited guest. The latter-day equivalent of Versailles’ barriers and grilles is the glass wall, through which the visitor can glimpse the vast General Assembly hall or the empty Security Council chamber (the public is not admitted when the Security Council is in session, even during its so-called “open” or “public” meetings). Meeting a national diplomat at the UN or a UN official is, like an audience with the King, a more difficult matter, its ease or difficulty a signifier of one’s status in the obscure hierarchies of international diplomacy. Admittance to the UN’s missions (the offices of the member states represented at the UN) or the Secretariat is by pre-arranged appointment only. To see even the most junior official, you must first know who they are (no easy matter in itself) and give them a compelling reason why they should meet you. As an ordinary member of the public, it is unlikely that you will be received by even the lowliest official. To meet an ambassador or an Under-Secretary of the UN, you must yourself enjoy an equivalent rank in diplomacy or politics (a minister or a senior parliamentarian perhaps) or business (in diplomacy, as elsewhere, money has its own special heft). Like Versailles’ inner sanctum, the Secretary-General’s suite lies in the most remote and inaccessible part of the Secretariat building, its summit, or the “thirty-eighth floor” as it is known to UN insiders. A special reserved lift will help you ascend to this peak, where, if your appointment is confirmed and credentials have sufficient weight, you will be ushered into a small waiting room, there to await the gift of the limited time of the Secretary-General.

The revolutionaries of 1789 (like those of 1917) tried to change the nature of their politics and indeed their diplomacy. They succeeded in the first task but not the second. The practice of diplomacy was impervious to revolutionary passion; it remains a closed world, accessible only to an appointed élite, and intelligible only through their codes and terminologies.

This practice is now massive and complex, globally ubiquitous and present in almost every issue that concerns us in the modern world. It covers both the more traditional business of bilateral diplomacy — of one country’s relations with another — and multilateral diplomacy: the world of the United Nations, the European or African Union, the WTO, G8, ASEAN and so on. It is a discourse whose practices have been acquired over decades and centuries, and with these practices have accumulated assumptions and ways of thought which dominate today the way that diplomats think and talk about their work, and indeed the way that others (journalists, academics) think and consider diplomats’ work too. This book’s examination of those practices and assumptions covers both worlds, the multilateral and the bilateral, for in both the manner of thinking is similar, if not the same. The analysis is drawn from my personal experience.

I have eschewed the contemporary controversies over the future of the United Nations, or US unilateralism. These have been well covered elsewhere. My suspicion is that even this debate is problematic in that it makes over-simplistic assumptions of what is going on in the world. In a way, all such theories are deficient, in that they are theories. As the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz put it, all theories are nets through which we strain life (ergo something — perhaps something important — falls through the holes). Contemporary diplomacy is premised on such theories — of how states behave, of realism, or neo-realism, or neo-conservatism — and narrow ones at that, and that is their fundamental problem. If this book offers the reader an alternative theory, it is that there should be no theories, at least not ones that offer universalist explanations of international relations (even if, paradoxically, universalist approaches are just what the world needs, but we shall come to this). My critique maintains neither an internationalist nor a unilateralist view of the world (or it does both). It is aimed not so much at the UN Secretary-General (or the US President) but at the assumptions that inform their thinking and, perhaps above all, the succoring and affirming officials who surround them. These officials, and the way that they think, should be laid open to greater scrutiny and interrogation.

The lattice of multinational bodies and institutions that spans the globe is in some ways diplomacy’s greatest achievement. A multinational, intergovernmental body now exists to arbitrate and sometimes legislate almost every conceivable aspect of our public lives, even the very air we breathe. The lattice is a reassuring presence. Its omnipresent embrace helps us to believe that the world’s problems are being taken care of. The semiotics of these institutions reinforce this impression. A neat globe sits at the center of the UN’s symbol, the world’s disorder ordered into a clear geometric circle and all inscribed upon a safe, neutral azure, suggestive perhaps of the sky, a clean ocean, indeterminate but certainly not ugly, bloody or discordant. In other institutions (the European Union, the World Trade Organization) circled stars, mingled flags or entwined hands symbolize a vague and warm aspiration for cooperation and togetherness, even where none may exist. I am colorblind but even I am calmed by these soft whites, deep blues and uniform tones and patterns.

The lattice has achieved great works: treaties to ban landmines, end global warming or protect children in wartime. Even if these paper promises remain unfulfilled, the international lattice has indeed contributed to ending conflict and to mobilizing help for the poor or the disaster-struck. War is now much less prevalent than in the recent past, as a recent UN study has shown; and many people are richer and live longer and healthier lives than their forebears (although the precise determinants of these successes are of course moot).

However, the lattice incubates one terrible flaw, a harbinger of its own demise. This flaw is a deficit, even identified as such in the European Union as the “democratic deficit”. The institutions which make up the lattice are like vast windowless bastions studding the landscape. Although their purposes may be good, their inhabitants are nameless and invisible, their workings too often unintelligible and hidden. While some may be well-intentioned and others idle or malign, the countless officials who inhabit these bastions share one indivisible characteristic — they are not accountable for their actions; indeed you will not know — with one or two rare exceptions — who they are. This criticism applies not only to the multilateral institutions of international diplomacy but equally to the foreign ministries of the world’s most democratic countries.

Karl Popper spent his life considering the flaws and merits of democracy versus other less participative forms of government such as fascism and communism. He proved beyond argument that democracy was the best, if still imperfect, form of government. But his work concerned only individual states: how a particular country in isolation should be governed.

Today, our problems are global as well as local. We do not have world government but nor do we have world democracy. Instead we have an agglomeration of states cooperating sometimes well and sometimes badly to address their shared problems. Whatever the denizens of these organs of cooperation (the UN, the EU) may pretend, this is no democracy. And the failings that Popper identified in non-democratic governments afflict this system just as surely as they did the communist governments of eastern Europe which he so trenchantly criticized.

In a sentence, these afflictions are a lack of accountability and responsiveness to the problems the system is supposed to address. The governed have very little, if any, access to the governors of this system; still less do they have means to sway or influence them. If international policies go wrong, the mechanisms to feed back information on those failings are imperfect. For Popper this was the crucial component of a democracy: since society is complex and there is no perfect knowledge, government would always make mistakes: no government would always institute the right policies to solve society’s problems. The only way to correct such mistakes was for the governed, through elections and other elements of the open society (a free press, the legal system, civil organizations), to inform the governors that their policies were not working and to propose how they might be changed. Such feedback mechanisms only exist in scant form in the field of international policy.

Those affected in country A by the policies of country B have no means of informing the policymakers of country B what is going wrong (or right). This problem is compounded in multilateral organs, where policymaking countries must perforce pay much more attention to the views of those with whom they must negotiate to make policy, than to those affected by their shared policies on the ground (as I learned negotiating collective policy on Iraq at the UN).

This book is not only a theoretical (and anti-theoretical) analysis of the problems of contemporary diplomacy. It is also a personal account of my slow descent from illusion to disillusionment, followed by a return to belief or perhaps a new illusion — time will tell.

I became a diplomat, after one failed attempt, in 1989, when I joined what was then known as the “fast stream” of the British Foreign Office or Diplomatic Corps. It was the fulfillment of a long-held ambition, fueled in part by a fascination with the world and a desire to escape suburban banality, and in part by pure ambition: for status, esteem and recognition. Diplomacy offered an elegant combination of the two.

I duly loved my work and “the office”, as the Foreign Office was known. Its rituals and habits — the thick green memo paper, the elaborate protocols for visiting statesmen or ministers — delighted me, and I was quick to immerse myself in them. What I failed to notice was my parallel immersion in the ways of thought that permeate such institutions. As my posture became more proudly upright, so too did I begin to talk of how “we” saw the world, “we” being Britain, which I now was encouraged to embody. My self, and its individual conscience, was slowly suborned into the collective, and the collective’s way of thinking, which was of a world of states and interests: something very different from the personal morality and conscience which had hitherto formed my mental architecture.

I undertook the usual round of postings — Norway, Germany, the UK Mission in New York — and jobs: in London I was variously desk officer working on Benelux,[2] the Iraq/Kuwait or “Gulf” war of 1990, the global environment, the Arab/Israel dispute; I was also for a while, and unhappily, speechwriter for the Foreign Secretary. My career prospered, but as it did so a shadow began to form across my experience. I tried to ignore it, and became in response all the more vigorous in the aggressive pursuit of my country’s goals and thus of my career. This conflict came to a head during what was to be my last full posting for the British foreign service when I was First Secretary at the UK Mission to the United Nations in New York (1997 — 2002).

My work in New York was hard; the long hours helped me to conceal, or rather allowed me to deny, some deeper contradictions in my work. Imbued with the self-serving belief of many western diplomats (and, I suspect, particularly British and American ones), I truly believed that “our” policy in the Middle East, for which I was responsible in New York, was good and right. This assumption was helped by the fact that I had only rarely visited the region (and spoke none of its languages), and had never visited (and never did visit) the place for which I was primarily responsible, Iraq itself.

I was directly responsible for Britain’s policy towards Iraq at the UN — mainly in the Security Council, both weapons inspections and sanctions (“responsible” here is a problematic word, because although I was in a direct and personal way responsible, in the way governments and civil servants think about policy, my ministers were responsible and not I myself). This policy, like most policies, was a complicated story, where good and bad were sometimes hard to distinguish. And it is only after years of reflection that I have reached some clarity about my experiences at this time — and even this may be merely a sieving, a reduction, and thus a deception of its own kind.

My job was to prepare and negotiate resolutions — international law — on Iraq, the bits of paper that obliged all countries to stop exports and imports to and from Iraq (sanctions) and for Iraq to prove the disarmament of its Weapons of Mass Destruction.[3] Slowly, I became horribly aware that what “we” were doing in Iraq, namely enforcing sanctions, was achieving the wrong objective, namely harming ordinary people. Saddam’s manipulations contributed to this, but our own policy reinforced this effect. Meanwhile, I became steeped in the complex lore and technologies of unconventional weapons and their delivery systems, all the better to argue that Saddam had not disarmed. I could name the different variants and capabilities of Scud missiles; I could describe the degradation process of VX nerve agent; I knew the units and numbers of Saddam’s special weapons regiments. This knowledge helped me perform my job with vigor — I became proud (to my present shame) of my Rottweiler-like reputation at the Security Council, as the most effective and aggressive defender of British-American Iraq policy, sanctions and all. I could demolish anyone’s contrary arguments with a devastating barrage of carefully-chosen facts. But this knowledge was also to prove my nemesis as a diplomat.

Exhausted and troubled by my work at the UN, I took a sabbatical from mid-2002 at the New School University in New York, to which I am forever grateful. From this close vantage point, and still in close touch with many former colleagues (including diplomats on the Security Council and other experts like David Kelly, with whom I had organized many briefings on Iraq’s weapons), I watched the British and American governments, and my former colleagues in both (diplomats from the two countries worked in very close concert on this issue), deploy arguments for war. Here my knowledge was my undoing, since I was immediately aware that the case for war presented by Washington and London was a gross exaggeration of what we knew (I had said so, in the mild terms employed in officialdom, when asked to comment on the early drafts of what later became known as the infamous Number Ten dossier). Moreover, Britain’s behavior in the Security Council was at best manipulative and at worst dishonest, as one resolution (1441) was sold to the Council as the “last chance for peace” to get the inspectors back in. Then, prematurely and before our own deadlines (which I had helped design and negotiate in the establishment of the weapons inspection agency UNMOVIC[4]), we declared that Iraq was “not cooperating” (another exaggeration, this time of what the inspectors had said). Failing to win the authority from the Security Council with a further resolution (the famously failed “second resolution”), my former colleagues declared that the first resolution (the “last chance for peace”) had given them the necessary authority to go to war in any case.

In all my career, I had been taught and believed that Britain stood not only for a world of rules but also for that more ineffable quality of integrity. Many will think me disingenuous, but this was the rock on which I based myself as a diplomat, even when contradictions presented themselves, as they often had. But this was too much.

However, my attachment to my identity as a diplomat was so great that I could not tear myself away, despite my anguish at the behavior of my government and colleagues. I drafted many resignation letters but did not send them. That summer David Kelly killed himself after telling journalists what I too had been telling them, although his experience as a scientist gave him much more authority than me, a mere diplomat. His suicide appalled and enraged me. My anguish deepened but not my decisiveness. I vacillated between resignation and the self-interest of my career. To postpone the choice, I went to Kosovo on secondment to the UN mission there. In the summer of 2004, I testified to the official inquiry into the use of intelligence on Iraq’s WMD, conducted by Lord Butler. Indicative of my ambivalence, my testimony was delivered in secret (I am listed as a witness with no name) so as not to undermine my career. But the act of testifying was a kind of epiphany. Setting down my views (that the case for war was exaggerated, that there was a viable alternative to war) at last hardened my resolve. Shortly after giving my testimony to Butler, I sent it to the Foreign Secretary as my resignation from the British diplomatic service (he did not reply).

Tempting though it is, it would be dishonest to claim that Iraq was the only reason for my departure. The narrative of the brave official resigning in protest at the dishonesty of his government is a familiar, and seductive, one. But in my case it was only part of the truth (and a part which I have played on). There were other forces at work.

In my sabbatical year, I had investigated the philosophy of knowledge: how it is that we come to claim that certain things are true. This was an exercise designed to help answer my doubts about the whole discourse of diplomacy. Both in its practice and its terms, diplomacy for me had stopped seeming “real”. I was weary, disillusioned and often bored, even though the subjects I was dealing with — Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism — were among the most important and exciting in the world. Diplomacy can seem intensely glamourous. Television crews would chase me down corridors to get the latest on the P5 talks on Iraq; people I met at cocktail parties would nod approvingly when I told them my job. But there was considerable drudgery too. Negotiation in the UN Security Council, but also my day-to-day work as a diplomat in the ministry at home and embassies overseas, seemed both literally and figuratively disconnected from the issues it was supposed to be arbitrating. My life was feeling desiccated and more and more meaningless.

My investigation began into the utility of terms, and thus of language, and indeed of all symbols and theories, to explain reality. This quickly led me to an understanding of their limits and a realization about diplomatic terms: that the words permitted in diplomacy are but a subset of a broader language, itself a subset — a reduction — of reality. A sub-set of a sub-set can feel narrow indeed. And I began to suspect that this narrowness was part of the problem with diplomacy itself, especially when diplomacy was attempting to deal with more and more of the world’s problems: our reality.

My work in New York had revealed other problems too, both personal and political, with the profession of diplomacy. I enjoyed questioning and arguing with senior colleagues and ministers but for my career to reach the peak, I would have to set limits on such behavior. I noticed that the senior members of Britain’s foreign service never questioned the instructions of their ministers (and certainly never the Prime Minister), or if they did, it was in such timid and allusive terms that one could fail to notice that any concern was being raised at all. One ambassador discouraged me from raising questions (internally) about the direction of an item of policy in a telegram (the main form of communication in the Foreign Office) but instead suggested I put my questions in the form of a personal letter which would not of course be seen by ministers or, unlike a telegram, be signed off by him — even though he fully agreed with all that I wanted to say.

The smart suits and ties I wore as a diplomat began to feel more restrictive and more uncomfortable. I realized that the separate identities I had maintained, as me and my professional diplomatic self, would have to merge, and with that union something very important would be lost.

There was also, not only in the British service, but among all of those with whom I interacted as a formal diplomat, a profound commitment to a particular way of talking and thus thinking about things: the discourse. In my first few years as a diplomat, I loved talking about the world in this way — of German interests, of Russia’s next move, of how “we” might outwit the French (a perennial British favorite), of alliances and mutual interests — much as in earlier years, I had loved the boardgame “Diplomacy”: a world of colored pieces, them and us, with discrete interests and options, which could be engineered and moved around to create discord or harmony. When French diplomats told me what France wanted, I took them at their word, as I hoped they would take me at mine when I talked of what “we” — Britain — wanted. But as time went on, this seemed to me more and more ridiculous — a fabrication. And as I reflected on the process that allowed us as diplomats to say “Britain wants this” or “the US wants that”, the more I realized that this was an arbitrary and manufactured process, with little grounding in reality, and certainly only very rarely discussed with those in whose name the whole discourse was being practiced. In other words, something of a sham.

There was a deeper moral concern at play too. The performance of diplomacy is founded on a particular view of the world — one of competition, of nation states, of limited resources, of agreement or contest. And like all political philosophies, this is premised on a singular view of mankind: the “Hobbesian” notion that people just want more, and are ultimately self-seeking and power-hungry (Hobbes is explicit on this point), and that the only source of stability and order and harmony is the state (although paradoxically the state is allowed to do things — like kill and imprison — which are forbidden for individuals).

In my work on Iraq, and later in Kosovo, I began to doubt this view and wondered why I should spend my life working for one group of people — British — when there were others who were suffering much more than we were. Our self-assigned identity as bringers of democracy, rights and other goods was sufficient only up to a certain point (and especially when, as with sanctions against Iraq, it was not clear that we were bringing good at all). This separation of us, my country, from the rest of humanity began to seem false and invidious, elevating “our” needs above “theirs”. Moreover, working in these places I realized something very obvious — that there are a great many people who are ignored and marginalized in the closed world of diplomacy, and often — indeed usually — these are the ones suffering most. When I sat in negotiation with the Kosovars or Palestinians, I began to yearn to be on their side of the table rather than my own. Romantic perhaps, but to me that began to have a greater source of meaning than the predictable ascent up the career ladder (and partly that predictability was a disincentive too).

In my reading on my sabbatical, there was one passage, in one book, which stuck in my mind. In Ray Monk’s outstanding biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, he describes an incident in the early days of the Second World War when Wittgenstein and a colleague noticed a news story that Britain had instigated a recent assassination attempt on Hitler. Wittgenstein’s colleague commented that “the British were too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand, and such an act was incompatible with the British ‘national character’”. Wittgenstein was furious: even five years later, he complained to the colleague at the “primitiveness” of the remark. It occured to me that such beliefs continued to underpin the national self-image chosen and perpetuated by diplomats like me. It followed that it made little sense to choose to serve one group over another: “us” rather than “them”.

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There is something wrong in the state of diplomacy. This book elaborates eight related problems, which are connected and compound one another. Together they have created a discourse which is profoundly flawed and inapposite for the problems of the world.

1. Diplomacy is not democratic, even in democracies. Somehow, and through the accretions of practice and habits of history, it is accepted that diplomats are a separate élite, who are free to arbitrate policy with little outside scrutiny, influence or accountability. We the governed and those affected by their decisions have little idea what the diplomats are doing in our name, or even who they are. This is true of the US State Department; it is even more true of the Chinese foreign ministry. The juxtaposition is deliberate. Even in supposed democracies, it is very difficult to know what our representatives are doing in our name. It is all but impossible to have access to them or influence their decisions; if they make mistakes, which will inevitably happen, it is only very rarely possible to hold these practitioners to account.

2. The identification between the diplomats and their state is a false and arbitrary one. When you become a diplomat, you are encouraged to submit yourself to the collective state: your individual “I” becomes “we”. Members of the diplomatic elite are encouraged and taught to see themselves as the embodiment of their state (not merely their government), as in “We [Britain] believe that Iran should immediately allow access to its nuclear sites.” The justification for such identification — that the diplomats represent the government which represents the state whose population has elected the government — is tenuous. In reality, the identification is a disguise for arbitrary, manufactured and unaccountable decision-making. When a diplomat speaks as “we” that statement only very rarely has anything to do with the real collective wishes of the state concerned. The “we” is also problematic in that it encourages individual diplomats to subsume their own personal morality into that of the state. This therefore permits amoral behavior since by conventional thinking the state has no morality and is free to do things that the individual is not free to do.

3. This problem is closely allied to another. Despite the falsity of the élite’s adoption of the interests of the state as their own, and the appropriation to themselves of the right to decide what is best for that state, the population concerned often seems to accept this role. Their passivity is the necessary corollary. Perhaps this too is an historical inheritance — that many people seem to accept that they should be excluded from the arbitration of their own affairs internationally. But perhaps it also serves their own interest. There is an unspoken, unacknowledged pact at work: the diplomats get on with dealing with the world, whatever the consequences, and we get to live and enjoy our lives. It is a kind of exchange of irresponsibility or, more accurately, a pact between the unaccountable and the irresponsible. This may have made sense when the world was less integrated than now and when affairs of state touched only matters generally far removed from the affairs of ordinary people (and when democracy did not exist in any case). But today, when our lives are inextricably connected to the lives of the other inhabitants of the planet, it makes no sense. Instead this exchange of irresponsibility fortifies and underpins the damaging competitive model of international relations, to the ultimate detriment of all.

4. The way that the diplomatic élites and most commentators and writers still think about foreign affairs is one again inherited from earlier history. States are seen as discrete actors with interests which must be arbitrated and negotiated with other states, sometimes bilaterally, sometimes collectively or multilaterally. Although, particularly in Europe, it is unfashionable to say that states have “interests” (instead, they have “values” which they pursue), even in Europe the behavior of states and the diplomats who represent them reflects the more old-fashioned way of thinking. Germany wants x, France wants y. Negotiation between them, and with others concerned, may produce agreement z. Statesmen, diplomats and the journalists who report on their doings all adopt this model of description and behavior. “US secures good agreement at UN Security Council”; “UK humiliated at EU Brussels summit”. It is as if the states are football teams playing in a tournament. Indeed, sometimes international meetings are reported in this way (particularly relevant for soccer-loving countries) — “ UK 0; France 1” (not a result to gladden the heart of any British Prime Minister). Intrinsic to this way of thinking is the idea that competition lies at the heart of states’ behavior. Each state looks out for its own interests; harmony lies in a balance of interests, secured through negotiation and diplomatic communication. Where interests are in opposition, sometimes armed conflict must result. Self-interest is seen as the driving motor of international relations. It is of course an echo of contemporary economic ideology that the maximation of welfare lies in the individual pursuit of self-interest. But just like that ideology, such a way of thinking about international relations produces flawed results which may have nothing to do with the collective (or even individual) interests of mankind.

5. This model may have been relevant for a time when the collective interests of mankind were rather less obvious than they are now. But at a time when global warming, resource shortage (whether of oil or water), disease (AIDS, bird flu), migration and non-state violence are the most urgent problems facing us as individuals and collectively, it is dangerously inappropriate. Our problems are collective; ergo, the solutions must be collective too. Unfortunately, however, the supranational institutions established to deal with these problems are not producing effective solutions to any of these problems. The reason is that they are not truly supranational institutions at all, and they reflect the same calculus of traditional international relations: that consensus is produced by the bargaining of states’ interests to produce an acceptable agreement. Moreover, the mere existence of these institutions, with their institutional self-interest in claiming that they are effective, predisposes us to complacency about our collective problems: the pact of irresponsibility at work again.

6. Beneath these more institutional and structural problems lie more fundamental problems concerning the way that practitioners think about international relations and diplomacy, in other words what these practitioners regard as acceptable information and what they do not. There is a deep commitment to certain forms of information and a rejection of others. Dispassionately-presented factual information is taken as a superior form of information, and as “objective”, when presentation of all information, including in such form, represents a choice about what is important to us and what is not, and thus brings into play our emotions, personal prejudices and intuitions. This is not to say that all information is equally valid, and that all truth is relative. But it is an odd and problematic deficit in the discourse of diplomacy that certain types of information should be so rigorously excluded. One specific deficit in discussion of international relations is the difference between description and reality. Decisions in foreign policy are invariably taken at several removes from the reality they are trying to affect or arbitrate. Thus such decisions must be based on descriptions. Such descriptions are thus inevitably deficient, and may exclude the essence of what is going on in any particular situation. We need to find ways to account for the irrational, the ineffable and other vital elements of what makes us human and comprises our reality. Diplomacy should take a more eclectic approach to information, and allow discussion and examination of emotion and non-measurable elements of reality, and at the least acknowledge this deficit in its calculations.

7. Related to this is a kind of conceit: that the world is comprehensible at all. The world is now overwhelmingly complex (perhaps it always was so). It is incomprehensible if you rely on any singular theory of how states, or individuals, or indeed anything, behaves. Governments, states and diplomacy are premised on simplification: that the world’s complexity can be described and put into an order about which we can then take decisions. Governments and politicians, and the diplomats who serve them, have a profound interest in claiming that they can understand and order the world in this way. They cannot be anything other than wrong. Simplification, though tempting, must inevitably be inaccurate and wrong and is therefore dangerous. Academics are as guilty of this thought-crime as the politicians, providing glib generalizations with which we can organize our thoughts and dinner-party arguments. The absurdity of theses such as “the clash of civilizations” or the “end of history” (though the latter book admits to a more nuanced analysis) is only revealed at the point that any situation, anywhere, is examined using such templates.

8. At a more prosaic level, contemporary diplomacy is deeply unbalanced and unfair. Its practice and machinery are dominated by rich and powerful states, whose political and economic power is reinforced and supplemented by their less-recognized diplomatic power. Big, rich and established countries have large cadres of experienced, well-trained and well-resourced diplomats who are able to dominate negotiations. They are better informed and more able to turn negotiations to their advantage (for instance, at the UK Mission to the UN in New York, our lawyers frequently prepared the first draft of texts for negotiation whether as resolutions or statements; as any negotiator knows, this is a huge advantage). On the other side of the table, poorer and less experienced countries (and particularly non-state groups) often struggle to get their point of view heard, let alone accommodated. This is obviously disadvantageous to them but nor does it serve the powerful, although they may wrongly think so. For agreements that do not address the interests of all concerned, above all those affected, are not good agreements and they are unlikely to have the desired effects or to endure. Ways need to be found to enable all those affected to be heard and their interests somehow addressed. This is the “diplomatic deficit” that Independent Diplomat, the nonprofit advisory group I founded in 2004, was designed to address.

All of these problems are mixed up in the confused and secretive discourse known as diplomacy and statecraft. The practitioners and analysts of this discourse love to pretend that it is complex and arcane,[5] the better to preserve its privileges and power for themselves. But the business of contemporary international affairs is every-body’s business, because it affects us all.

Moreover, by erecting elaborate barriers to entry and sticking to irrelevant and outdated philosophies of international relations (which we examine later), the diplomats and statesmen have become very confused about the nature of diplomacy and international relations. Academics provide complicated theses about realism, liberalism, neo-realism and neo-conservatism, but overlook the fact that international relations is ultimately about simple effects on simple people: it is merely politics. In their endless struggle to define what their state wants, the diplomats have forgotten that their state, and our common world, is just people and the environment in which they live.

We need a much more critical and intrusive approach to the world of diplomacy and international affairs. The stuff at stake here is nothing less than our future and it is time we paid it some attention. And it is time too to consider abolishing the discourse of diplomacy altogether. The idea that statecraft and international relations form some separated practice that can be removed from other forms of politics and government, with its own separate rules and philosophies, is unjustified in an age where everything is connected.

There is a paradox here. In a world of ever more connected events and phenomena, there is a greater need to discuss than ever before our affairs with our fellow humans. We need more diplomacy! But this book questions whether diplomacy — at least in its current forms — is the best way to undertake this task. Abolishing the restrictions, simplifications, abstractions, inventions and arbitrariness of diplomacy may require abolishing the idea of diplomacy itself.