5. THEM AND US

Essentialism and the Cult of “We”

“Nations! What are nations? Tartars, and Huns, and Chinamen! Like insects, they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.”

Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle

Diplomacy is often compared to games like chess. Indeed, chess pieces frequently adorn the covers of books or websites about diplomacy. Diplomacy is depicted as an intricate sport where victory is the object, and the movements, motives and capabilities of the teams are finite and knowable, even if they can be complex.[23]

In order to play chess, you need two sides, clearly delineated: one white, one black. So it is to play diplomacy. In order for diplomacy to function as a discourse, to make any sense, and to perpetuate itself in its current form, the sides involved are required to delineate themselves into discrete sets: Us and Them.

Essentialising Us

When a diplomat speaks to the microphone outside the UN Security Council or is interviewed on CNN, invariably he or she will talk about “we”. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice does it, the State Department press spokesman does it. Individual diplomats do it.

“We seek the disarmament of Iran and are dissatisfied with their assurances to date.”

“We welcome the recent elections in Ukraine.”

“Our interests in China versus those in Taiwan dictate the continuation of the One-China policy.”

This was how I spoke with journalists. It was how I talked in negotiations with other diplomats: “We do not agree with your proposed text for paragraph 12 of the resolution and instead offer the following words…”. Even in our internal meetings, we spoke in this way: “This morning our objective in the Security Council discussion should be to…”. Our internal telegrams discussing policy discussed what “we” should do about country x or y.

This manner of speaking is a reflection of the way the world is. International relations is seen, and practiced, very much as a business of states interacting with one another, with diplomats the formal exponents of that process, authorized to speak in the name of their state. Chinese diplomats will speak of China’s wishes as those of a single entity, despite the massive size and diversity of that country. It is an expression of the reality that the state remains, for good or ill, the organizing unit of contemporary international affairs.

It may therefore seem naïve — even quixotic — to question whether such a system is the right one. But delving into the process by which a group of people are assigned the right to determine (or even invent) the wishes of the state reveals some troubling insights. In order for the diplomat to articulate his country’s wishes, those wishes must be boiled down into a discrete set of desiderata. This process inevitably involves simplification but, as we see in the next chapter, it is an arbitrary process and one resting on some questionable assumptions of what foreign policy is “about”. The creation of a separate political and moral identity for a group of people — the policymakers of foreign policy — must inevitably risk artifice, arbitrariness and, as I have argued elsewhere, a lack of accountability.

If the diplomatic “we” is arbitrating what the state wants (and thus how the world is run), how is this identity developed and maintained, and what values does it embody? In short, who is “we”?

Before I joined the British diplomatic service, I gave little thought to what it was to be British. I was just me. But by some subterranean and unexplained process when you join the Foreign Office, you begin to identify yourself with the state. In both speech, writing, and — more insidiously — thought, I became “we”. A singular became a plural. How did this transformation take place?

When I entered the Foreign Office in 1989, all new entrants were required to undergo what was called “induction training”. Our group of about a dozen eager twenty-somethings was sent to an otherwise anonymous building off Millbank, near to the Houses of Parliament. Almost as soon as my fellow new entrants and I were sitting in a large gray room where our training took place, our instructor began to talk to us, and he talked about “we”.

“I’m here to tell you about the way we do things in the Foreign Office”, he said. We then learned about the correct way to address ministers, the correct way to compose a minute (not a memo, but a minute), a telegram and a submission. We learned that minutes (not memos) to under-secretaries and above, including ministers, were to be written on “blue” paper, or simply just “blue”. The only twist to this otherwise straightforward procedure was that “blue” paper was in fact green, a lovely twilled paper, rich and textured. Very expensive, it looked, and very green. We were not told why blue was green. My fellow new entrants and I were charmed by these quaint traditions.

But nor were we told who “we” were. It was simply assumed that “we” in the Foreign Office were Britain. This assumption suffused everything we were taught and subsequently did in our Foreign Office careers. It began at the beginning and quickly became a habit of speech and writing. It became a habit of thought: I became “we”. Even after I had resigned from the Foreign Office, I found myself saying “we think that the Zimbabwean government needs to…”. “We” was wired deep.

A feisty young diplomat from the British mission in Pretoria gave us a lecture about how “we” thought sanctions on apartheid South Africa were a bad idea (these were the days of Margaret Thatcher’s policy of “constructive engagement”). A diplomatic dispatch was presented to us as an example of how to write such pieces. In it, the ambassador wrote about how “we” had got this country “wrong” and “we” needed a new approach. In a number of different ways, we were taught how “we” saw the world. What we were never taught, however, was how it was that “we” saw the world that way. That “we” saw it that way and that “we” were the arbiters of what Britain wanted was taken for granted.

Part of our training was a game. The Foreign Office invented a policy exercise about a crisis in a fictional country called Boremeya and what “we” should do about it. It was a good game, and fun. It lasted about a day and consisted of crisis meetings, submissions to ministers (“make sure to use the blue paper!”) and difficult encounters with the Boremeyan Foreign Minister, played by one of our instructors. Throughout the game, the new entrants were told to consider what “we” wanted or needed in the situation. At several points, what we wanted was put into other terms: what are our “interests” in this situation? A British company was negotiating a contract with the Boremeyan government when a political crisis erupted, forcing us to reappraise the situation and advise the minister on what “our” policy should be.

The foreign services of other countries give more extended training to their neophyte diplomats before letting them loose on the world. The German foreign ministry, at the more intensive end of the spectrum, requires its new entrants to spend two taxing years at the Auswärtiges Amt’s training school, where they are taught a great deal of history, diplomatic practice, rules of protocol and, above all, law. Fully-qualified lawyers who join the German diplomatic service, and there are many of them, are excused the second year of training. In other words, all German diplomats have a minimum of one year’s fulltime training in international law. We had none. If we wanted to learn about international law we could, if we wished (it was entirely voluntary) attend a two-week course at Cambridge University.

This thin education in law however did not prevent us from being told, with frequent repetition, that Britain stood for the “rule of law” or a “world of rules”. This was one of the core characteristics which British diplomacy claimed to represent. Never was this statement of belief analyzed; it was presented to us as a given and one furthermore that we should ourselves propagate henceforward. Although we were not taught “the rule of law”, we were taught that British diplomats stood for it.

It was a similar story with economics. German diplomats-in-training spent months learning economics. In the Foreign Office, those without economics training were not encouraged to get any but, if they were so disposed, they could attend another two-week training course which, it was alleged, took the trainee to “degree level”. Again, this did not prevent the repeated assertion of the belief that “Britain” and therefore “we” believed in market economics and the promotion of trade as core values.

Beyond the thought-habit of thinking as “we”, there is another way that new diplomats are inculcated into identifying themselves with the state. In the case of the British Foreign Office, it begins before you even join, when you must undergo a process known as “positive vetting”. There is a similar process in the US and other major foreign services.

After I had passed the many entrance exams and interviews to get into the diplomatic service, the Security Department of the Foreign Office assigned an investigator (in my case, a former policeman) to examine my background, and quiz my acquaintances and friends, in order to ensure that I would not pose a security risk to the government. Without this clearance I could not begin work since much that the Foreign Office does involves access to “Top Secret” material, the compromise of which, in theory at least, poses a grave risk to the security of the state. Others who had gone before told me that the process was straightforward “as long as you don’t tell them anything”. Unfortunately for me, my personal referees had already told my investigator various things, including the fact that I occasionally drank too much at university and that I was sharing a flat with a gay man. I took the naïve view that since I had nothing in my life to be ashamed of, I would tell them the truth. This approach proved to be a mistake.

My vetting took place as the Cold War was ending, in 1989. But the Foreign Office still feared the pernicious attentions of the KGB and others, and it was felt that being homosexual risked exposing the officer to blackmail. It did not seem to have occurred to the mandarins in charge of the Security Department that a blanket prohibition on homosexuality was more likely to force serving or potential Foreign Office officers to lie about their true sexual natures and thus increase their vulnerability to blackmail.[24] So my vetting officer subjected me to a long series of absurd and insulting questions about my sexuality, culminating in the conclusive, “So you’ve never been tempted off the straight and narrow then?”. To which I could honestly answer, “No”.

Meanwhile, my vetting officer had found out from my application forms that my grandmother was Polish. Poland was at that time undergoing its transition to democracy. But the inquisitor felt, following policy, that the mere fact that I had Polish relations posed a security risk, since the KGB might “get at” them and use them to “get at” me (it had happened in the past when Poland was a vassal of the Soviet Union). My family was thus forced to dig up long-buried family records and inform the Foreign Office exactly when, where and how all my Polish ancestors had died (in order that the KGB couldn’t discover their names and impersonate them to “target” me). In the process, they made the upsetting discovery that some of them, as members of the Polish resistance, had died in Auschwitz.

I was obliged to attend several interviews with the investigator in a sparse office in another anonymous building near Parliament Square, furnished with sinister-looking steel filing cabinets. His desk, like that of a film noir interrogator, had no papers and just one government-issue swivel lamp, the only light in the otherwise gloomy room. The interviews would sometimes last for hours. I wouldn’t be told how long. My family and friends were at first amused by his questions, but soon became irritated and in some cases deeply upset (my flatmate was — understandably — especially offended).

My first entry date into the Foreign Office came and went, and I had not passed my “PV” as positive vetting is known. My personnel officer seemed to take pleasure in telling me that it was extremely unlikely that I would eventually be allowed in. I swallowed these humiliations — I wanted too badly to become a member of that rarefied species, a diplomat. Meanwhile, I was forced to find temporary work for a further few months until the next entry date came up when, against expectations, the now-completed investigations had convinced The Office, as my investigator called it (and as I too would come to know it), that I was not gay, communist, a drunk, a drug addict or a debtor, and I was at last invited to attend my first day of work.

The inculcation does not stop there. When you join the Foreign Office, and once you have been “positively vetted”, you are required to sign the Official Secrets Act. This draconian document comprises your agreement never in your lifetime to reveal to outsiders or to publicize in any way the content of your work. With astonishing breadth, the act defines the information that you must protect to your grave as any official business, determined by the government itself. In other words, anything that you do in the course of your work is to be kept secret, forever. Any revelation about what that work entailed (such as this book for instance) is in theory a criminal offense. When I was offered the document to sign (it was mailed to me at home), I did not hesitate. The glamour of secrecy lured me in, and I simply never believed that the day might come when its strictures might seem more a threat than an invitation.

The signature of the Official Secrets Act marks one initiation into the culture of secrecy that pervades government, and particularly those parts of it dealing with foreign policy. When you learn how to handle documents, for instance, you are taught that the originator of the document must classify it, using designations starting with “restricted” up to “top secret”. You are taught that only those documents that would not perturb you if they were handed out to passersby on the street can be designated “unclassified”. Unsurprisingly therefore, almost every document produced inside the Foreign Office is classified “restricted” or above.

This culture is constantly reinforced throughout one’s career. Telegrams are transmitted only when highly encrypted. All computers are hardened against electronic eavesdropping. Telephones carry stickers warning against divulging state confidences. So many and so ubiquitous are these limitations that it is soon clear that the only people one can discuss candidly what “we” are doing are one’s colleagues — other members of the club of “we”. For what “we” are doing is the affairs of state, and other states might try to find out our secrets; therefore one should only talk to people with a “need to know”. This excludes almost everyone, including those in whose name “we” are acting.

The creation of the identity of a British diplomat, the exponent of the state, can seem a process which is innocent, unloaded and necessary. It could be argued that such a process is requisite for the international system the world today enjoys. States interact in this system; therefore the system requires exponents of the state’s wishes, steeped in the richest sense of what their nation stands for. But my experience suggests that intrinsic in this process of diplomatic identity-creation is something dangerous.

In spite of the almost complete absence of outside scrutiny, the British Foreign Office does not “do” self-criticism. Embedded within the acculturation process is a deep sense that “we” are in the right. From the day I stepped into the training department, to the day I left my last full job at the UK Mission in New York, it was part of the air I breathed that what “we” were offering the world was good. The world’s oldest parliamentary democracy, a successful economy, an ancient culture, we represented the acme of what the rest of the world should aspire to. We were moreover pragmatic and “sensible” (never idealist, that was too romantic and therefore silly). American diplomacy, though marked with different emphases (the infinitely variable notion of “freedom”),[25] is little different. Even when our motives were transparently different, we were encouraged, subtly and through imitation, to claim that we were offering others versions of ourselves: our democracy, our laws, our “values”. In Afghanistan in 2002, our policy was framed as the delivery of stability and democracy, even when our motive was solely (and not illegitimately) our own security. I believed this identity: it made me feel better (particularly when defending the effects of sanctions in Iraq) and it gave me purpose. I only stopped believing it when the contrary evidence became too compelling to ignore. And even then the abandonment of this persona was a painful and drawn-out business.

This self-regard breeds a pervasive complacency. If our motives are always pure, it follows that “we” cannot be wrong. When Britain failed to secure the infamous “second” resolution authorizing an invasion of Iraq, officials were very quick to blame France (for threatening a veto), rather than acknowledging the reality of “our” failure to garner sufficient support.[26] Examination of Britain’s failure (with others) to stop the genocide in Bosnia was left to journalists and scholars:[27] no comprehensive internal inquiry was instigated. These are but two of the more blatant examples of a culture that brooks no self-examination while resisting meanwhile the rigor of external scrutiny.

British diplomats are not alone in maintaining a comfortable and flattering self-image. In my experience, diplomats of many other countries rest on similar conceits. An Egyptian might claim that his tradition is one of brokering the pan-Arab view (a Nasserist inheritance) while offering a bridge between East and West (a role claimed too by Turkish diplomats); the Dutch are the hard-headed pragmatists of the European Union; the Singaporeans are the politically-in-correct realists, and so on. No one is the bad guy. Everyone believes they are serving the Good. There is a degree of caricature here, but in that caricature lies an uncomfortable truth: that to a greater or lesser degree, diplomats are required to define themselves, to create an identity, in order to function.

Essentialising Them

Thus is one side of the chess board delineated: “Us”. But for the game to be played, the other team needs to be defined, or essentialised, too: “Them”. Without such delineation, the game cannot be played.[28]

Diplomacy requires a system of ordering to function; thought requires such a system too (or so some philosophers would argue). In diplomacy it is not seen as a mistake to boil the world down to some simple essence; it is mandatory. The easiest way to pretend that you understand the world is to essentialize it. The Arabs (all of them) are this; the Israelis are that. The Thais are a little bit…the Malaysians far too...and the French, well, the French are always incredibly… .

You will see this kind of essentialism practiced every day. You need only open your newspaper. There you will read how the US President describes the aspirations of the Iranian people for freedom and democracy (though curiously in 2006 he no longer does so when talking about the Iraqi people, whose behavior since their “liberation” has suggested that more complicated ambitions may also be at play). Switch on your television and analysts talk about the needs of the “people of the Middle East” or the approach “the Europeans” take to building democracy (often in the American discourse the appellation “the Europeans” carries negative overtones). And it is not only the West which indulges in such characterizations. In April 2006 Egypt’s President Mubarak upset sensibilities across the Middle East by suggesting in an interview that Iraq’s Shia, indeed all Shia in the Middle East, were more loyal to Iran than they were to their own countries.

Twenty years since Edward Said’s Orientalism, his excoriating critique of western characterizations of the Middle East, diplomats still orientalize almost the whole world, reducing its complexities and uncertainties to simple cultural and racial stereotypes. Routinely, you can still hear diplomats talking (and some journalists do it too) about the Arab street, a place where presumably Arabs gather to talk and express opinions (furtively, presumably). (In my Economist this week is a review of three books about “the Arabs”, including one by an Arab, which in different ways analyze why the Arabs have difficulty assimilating democracy. The piece is titled “Not yet, say the Arabs”.) Or you can hear China explained in terms of the way “they”, the Chinese, think, all 1.2 billion of them.

I have been working for some time in Kosovo. When talking about this place, many western diplomats and foreign policy analysts talk about the need for Kosovo to “progress”; that its majority-Albanian culture is “clan-based”, its values are those of “loyalty and revenge” rather than “our” more enlightened ways. As for their political ambitions, they just want a greater Albania. More than one senior UN official told me that “these people” were “primitive”.

Having lived in Kosovo, it is hard to recognize these descriptions. No one I met talked about their “clan”. Many Kosovars I know are among the most hospitable, friendly but also urbane people I’ve met. Many speak several languages (something many American and British diplomats do not). No one has ever mentioned in my hearing a desire to unify with Albania (a very different country from Kosovo). There are also Kosovars who do not share these attractive characteristics, but that is the point. Essentialism always leaves someone out.

The production of these depictions is sometimes trivial, but nonetheless revealing of the mindset. On my first ever overseas posting, to Norway, I wrote a letter — at the encouragement of my boss — to the Western European Department in London analyzing the “Norwegian national character”. This letter was superficial in the extreme, mainly because its observations had been gathered from watching the behavior of Norwegians at the luggage carousel at Oslo airport when I first arrived. I spoke no Norwegian (and never did). This did not however prevent me from sending the letter.

This kind of thing is, I hope, less common today than it was then (in the early ‘nineties). But you will still find ambassadors and embassies routinely generalizing about the cultures and “national characters” of the countries where they are hosted: they do it because, as I was, they are encouraged to. If you are sitting in an office in Whitehall, or Foggy Bottom, you want your embassies to explain the world to you, so that you can feel you understand it. You are part of a pyramid of reductionism and you cannot escape it. As an official, you are required to tell your minister or Secretary of State that you understand the world. If you are a minister or Secretary of State, you are obliged to say to your legislature, or the press, that you understand what is going on in, say, Iran or China. The Secretary of State cannot give a ten-week seminar on China’s complexities; they have to be summed up in a few sentences (or less). In these analyzes, you cannot admit to uncertainty or even complexity. Essentialism is, unfortunately, essential. The question however is whether such reductionism helps or hinders our struggle to understand the world.

As a diplomat, you are moreover abetted by your foreign colleagues in the discourse. Just as the British diplomat essentializes his own country into what “we” want, they will essentialize theirs. Without hesitation the German diplomat, in describing his views about the genocide in Rwanda, or democracy in Russia, will speak as Germany — “we think intervention is impracticable”. The Egyptian will do the same, and the Russian likewise. Thus one can report their views as “Germany’s”, “Egypt’s” or “Russia’s”; and in my telegrams from New York I would describe them in just this way, sometimes without even recording the real names of the individual diplomats I had spoken to, just their countries. Oddly, the only diplomats I have found who don’t indulge in this manner of speaking are those new to the diplomatic scene: the Somalilanders and the Kosovars. They have yet to learn the habit of generalization.

A recent scientific study analyzed the characteristics of different nationalities, asking whether there was any truth to well-worn national stereotypes. Researchers for the National Institute on Aging (NIA) in the US examined the accuracy of national character stereotypes in forty-nine cultures worldwide. They asked nearly four thousand people to describe the “typical” member of their own culture.[29]

When researchers compared the average trait levels, i.e. the cultural group’s true attributes to the stereotypes, there was no agreement. For example, Americans believe the typical American is very assertive, and Canadians believe the typical Canadian is submissive, but in fact Americans and Canadians have almost identical scores on measures of assertiveness. Looking at each other’s personality traits, the researchers found that Indian citizens see themselves as unconventional and open to a wide range of new experiences, but measurements of personality show that they are more conventional than the rest of the people in the world. Czechs believe that they are antagonistic and disagreeable, but when personality is actually observed, they score higher than most people in the world on measures of altruism and modesty.

One of the study’s leaders, Dr Robert McCrae, said “People should understand that we are all prone to these kinds of preconceptions and likely to believe that they are justified by our experience, when in fact they are often unfounded stereotypes. We need to remind ourselves to see people as individuals, whether they are Americans or Lebanese, Gen Xers or senior citizens” (the NIA’s objective was in part to disprove preconceptions about age groups, particularly older ones).

Diplomacy is still often ignorant of this lesson, preferring to talk of national characteristics, countries as single, uniform entities and, if they are not conveniently uniform (like the Japanese or the Dutch), of their subgroups and ethnicities. It would not surprise Said to discover that, in western diplomatic systems like Britain or the US, the tendency to essentialize other countries increases the more unlike us these countries are. In the annual ambassadorial dispatches and telegrams, the ambassador in Germany is much less likely to generalize about “the Germans” or the cultural identity of Germany than the ambassador reporting from Riyadh. In the American discourse, it is routine to generalize about “the Europeans”. Hardly anyone in Europe, notably, even uses the term.

One curious manifestation of this way of thinking is what happens to language when national generalizations fail. Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, British and American diplomats and politicians would routinely talk about the Iraqi people as a homogeneous whole, as in “sanctions are not intended to harm the Iraqi people”, “we have no quarrel with the Iraqi people, just with the leadership”, or, as the invasion approached, “the Iraqi people yearn for their liberation”.

After the invasion, and as sectarian and religious tensions emerged into violent confrontation, the language changed. Commentators and leaders alike began to talk about the “Shi-ites”, “the Baathists”, “the Sunnis” and, just as they did formerly with the “Iraqi people”, they ascribed collective characteristics to these groups, as in “the Sunnis feel threatened by Shia dominance” or “the Kurds want their own state”.

I once attended a lecture by a former British diplomat who found himself, post-invasion, governor of an entire province of Iraq. To explain the complexities of his environment, he began to draw circles on a board, inscribing within them the names of Iraq’s different ethnic groups and then drawing lines and arrows to indicate the relationship between them. He clearly needed such a delineated system to help him understand what was going on. But to realize the deficiencies of any such system, one need only apply it to one’s own reality: Britain’s “middle classes want economic growth and social stability”, “America’s blacks support the Democrats”. We feel insulted when others do it to us. Anti-Americanism is built on simplistic caricatures which grossly misdescribe America’s massive diversity. As a Briton living in America, my hackles rise whenever I hear a sentence beginning, “the Brits are...”. It is crass to describe our own societies in such terms, but this is what diplomats and analysts routinely to do other societies, and it is always inaccurate.

Diplomats don’t think and talk like this because they are racist. Most are not, and love the wider world; they do so because it reduces the world’s complexity to something that can be ordered and put into a system: made sense of.

Moreover this habit of essentialising is a practice that reflects the way the diplomatic world actually is. Diplomats speak of what China wants in a draft Security Council text because the Chinese ambassador says “China wants paragraph 12 deleted…”. It is not only essentialising, it is also a reflection of diplomatic and political reality. But it is a self-reinforcing reality, and for that reinforcement to function there must be a process of essentialising performed both upon ourselves (as I describe above) and upon them. In negotiations at the UN Security Council, I realized that part of the way in which we worked out what we — Britain — wanted was by distinguishing our wishes from those with whom we saw ourselves in natural competition (France or Russia). So subtle and insidious was this process that it is hard to offer convincing proof, except to say that more often than I would want to admit we saw issues such as sanctions on Iraq not primarily in terms of the issue itself but as a means of getting what “we” wanted (this “competitive” model of diplomacy is discussed further in chapter 6). And what “we” wanted was sometimes defined in terms of what they — our opponents — didn’t want.

A paradoxical example of the boiling down of what we and they want is to be found in trade negotiations. International trade talks at the WTO — the most recent being the so-called “Doha Round” — often revolve around the trading of concessions between national delegations (or groups of delegations). One of the most common “concessions” is the granting of trade access to the domestic market of the state offering the concession. Such concessions are offered in exchange for access to others’ markets in the same or different products, in a highly-complex bargaining process. The offering of such “concessions” is however bunkum, because the benefits of free trade flow more to the importer than the exporter: imports of cheaper or better goods give consumers more for their money and, through competition, raise domestic productivity.[30] In other words, what is being offered is not a concession at all — the party offering the concession is proposing something that will benefit it more. But so familiar have the discourse of trade talks and the calculus of concession-based bargaining become that everyone pretends that what is not a concession is one, and vice versa.

It is no coincidence that it is governments that perform this essentialising. They must. It is profoundly in the interest of government, and the politicians who lead it, to claim that only they can speak for the whole country. Equally, therefore, they must affirm the nature of the international system by accepting that other governments speak for their whole countries. A modern diplomat would deny that they are so crass as to essentialize other cultures and countries in the way I have described. Of course, they aver, that when they talk about Iran’s policy, they mean the policy of the Iranian government, and indeed that is often how they will describe it.

But the habit of referring to whole countries in the singular and to their government as the embodiment of that state is one as deep-rooted as the state-based international system itself. To change the nomenclature of the actors would be to remove the assumption that governments represent the totality or indeed the diversity of their countries. This would alter the nature of the international system from one based around states as the unit of agency to one based on some other unit or units. But as long as governments wish to hold sway in international policy and decision-making, they must continually reaffirm not only their own but each other’s legitimacy to speak for their countries, even when the government is as undemocratic as, say, Muammar Gadhafi’s in Libya.

Perhaps one reason why this habit persists is because of the way that diplomacy evolved. From its origins in Classical times, through the Middle Ages and the development of the state-based system of the Peace of Westphalia, diplomats represented — and negotiated between — discrete entities: cities, provinces and later states. In contrast to today, the business between them was limited to relatively narrow areas like war and peace, and trade. These were important but they did not have the character of the massive and diverse contacts and interactions (words which do not by themselves adequately convey the complex and dynamic nature of these flows) of today’s world.

One of the seminal texts that helped define the nature of diplomacy is De la manière de négocier avec les souverains, de l’utilité des negotiations, du choix des ambassadeurs et des envoyez, et des qualitez necessaries pour réussir dans ces employs, published by François de Callières in Paris in 1716. De Callières saw the principal function of diplomacy as moderating and managing the clash of conflicting interests as efficiently as possible. Thus it was important for diplomats to be honest in their dealings. Diplomatic immunity was also to be upheld, not merely because of legal provisions but because the interests of princes compelled it. The diplomatist would be the agent rather than the architect of policy, but would be crucial both in the framing of policy and even more in the business of seeking to persuade representatives of other governments to see matters in this rather than that light. He would be required to assess how the interests of his state and the other state could be met on terms acceptable to both.

From this summary one can see how remarkably similar this conception of diplomacy is to the way it is usually conceived today. Yet the world we live in today is remarkably different. The postwar establishment of new multilateral diplomatic machineries such as the United Nations, NATO and the European Union — while creating new forums for state-to-state interactions — has not altered the fundamental idea that diplomacy is about states identifying their interests and arbitrating them with one another. Indeed, these institutions are premised on the very notion that states can meet there and decide upon their common problems. It is therefore no surprise that diplomats tend to make the world and its myriad problems fall into these shapes. That this process is becoming more and more artificial and disconnected from the reality of the forces at work in the world is not yet evident enough to compel change.

Essentialising the World

It is far too disconcerting a prospect for governments or the diplomats who represent them to analyze or talk about the world as it really is, one shaped and affected by multitudinous and complex forces, among which governments are but one group of many involved. To preserve their own role, and the belief — comforting to us as well to them — that governments are “in charge” of events, they must continually assert that governments are on top of the pile of agents and must determine what is important and what is to be done, and make and enforce the rules.

This may have been appropriate in 1648 or 1945. But today the trouble is that the world is growing more and more complicated. Its problems are ever less susceptible to the essentialising analysis traditional in diplomacy. Everyone, including the diplomats, accepts that many of our most troubling problems are transnational in nature — pollution, bird flu, terrorism — complex in their causes and thus solutions, and require mass action to tackle. The division of the world into the colored pieces of the board game makes less and less sense. It always was a simplification, but it is becoming an ever more absurd one.

Globalization in some respects implies a greater simplicity, for instance the narrowing of the world into one market. But even those who believe this must also acknowledge the world’s continuing if not burgeoning complexity. Was it conceivable thirty years ago that the fury of one young Egyptian over the war in Chechnya would lead him to fly an aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York, an act facilitated by an organization born of Osama bin Laden’s anger against the US occupation of Saudi Arabia, and itself given a base by a fundamentalist regime in Afghanistan, whose assumption of control was a direct consequence of Soviet occupation and slow decline (and this itself is a simplified account of a complex series of causes and events)? This singular act, itself the progenitor of massive, complex and unforeseeable change, was brilliantly anatomized in the 9/11 Commission Report, which took nearly 400 pages to describe the antecedents and chronology of this single event.

The reductionist tendency in diplomacy is reinforced by, and itself reinforces, the commentary we read in the press. Oddly, the more complicated our globalizing world becomes, the more those commenting on it tend to such simplification. Confounded by the world’s complexity, we grope for simplifying metaphors — the big idea — to explain what is going on. Academics and commentators duly oblige, offering up “the world is flat”, “the clash of civilizations” or “the moment” (when America could save the world).

Those consuming these nostrums have perhaps only themselves to blame. The outlets of the mass media are in sharp competition. The measured commentary attracts less attention than the sensational. A recent study by Philip E. Tetlock[31] confirms the suspicion: those offering the most dramatic political predictions attract the most press attention, but are unsurprisingly the most inaccurate. His study examined predictions from thousands of experts about the fates of dozens of countries, and then scored the predictions for accuracy. His team found that the media not only failed to weed out bad ideas, but often favored them, especially when the truth was too messy to be packaged neatly.

Tetlock’s evidence falls into two categories: optimists and pessimists (or “boomsters” and “doomsters”, as he calls them). Between 1985 and 2005, boomsters made ten year forecasts that exaggerated the chances of big positive changes in both financial markets (e.g. a Dow Jones Industrial Average of 36,000) and world politics (e.g. tranquility in the Middle East and dynamic growth in sub-Saharan Africa). They assigned probabilities of 65% to rosy scenarios that materialized only 15% of the time.

In the same period doomsters performed even more poorly, exaggerating the chances of negative changes in all the same places where boomsters accentuated the positive, plus several more (including the prediction of the disintegration of Canada, Nigeria, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Belgium, and Sudan). They assigned probabilities of 70% to bleak scenarios that materialized only 12% of the time. But despite these gross inaccuracies, these “over-claimers” rarely paid any penalties for being wrong. On the contrary, the media showered lavish attention on them while neglecting their more careful (and accurate) colleagues.

There is perhaps something unstated at play here. Our attachment to simple models of the world and grand overstatement may be related to the diplomat’s need — which I could once identify as my own — to attribute to themselves a beneficent rather than a malign persona. We need narratives of ourselves and of the world to explain it. And we are unlikely to choose negative ones (if not for others, at least for ourselves). Just as we need to view ourselves in a positive light, we desperately want the world to make sense, to respond to order and systematization. It is paradoxical that within this innocent-seeming desire lies acute danger.

As we shall see in the next chapters, these biases in the way the world is described to us, and is arbitrated by policymakers, contribute to error. Indeed, they may compound one another and thus compound the failure. A complex system (is it even a system?) is described and governed by those who prefer to see it in simpler terms than it actually is. Unfortunately for its would-be players (and for those who would comment on them), the world is not a chessboard.