An end to embassies

The Eurofighter is a beautiful aircraft, perfectly designed for air-to-air combat or attacking tanks and military installations on the ground. But the conflicts for which it was designed are not the type now being fought. It is almost useless for the insurgent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and obsolete even as it enters service.

Conventional embassies and their ambassadors are equally ill-suited to today's challenges. The European foreign service, whose embryonic form already exists in the Council Secretariat, is awaiting its first orders once the EU's Lisbon Treaty is ratified. Like the Eurofighter, it will be elegantly constructed, very expensive and heading for obsolescence even before day one.

Just like weapons designers, those who construct political bureaucracies and institutions must ask what kind of world we are trying to deal with. The 20th century was dominated by states, but this century is already shaping up with an altogether more anarchic prospect.

Nonstate groups dominate military conflicts, with more than 80 percent of the conflicts now before the UN Security Council involving nonstate actors. Al Qaeda is the primary concern of security experts, rather than hostile tanks or nuclear missiles. In the field of development policy, philanthropic foundations are putting unprecedented large resources into such efforts as ending malaria, almost rivaling the aid flows of governments. George Soros' Open Society Institute has, in my view, been as important as the European Union in fostering civil society and building the pillars of democracy in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. The private sector's foreign direct investment and speculative flows outweigh both official and philanthropic funds in determining the economic fate of countries. In global politics, nongovernmental movements and influential figureheads like U2's Bono are proving almost, although not yet wholly, as important as governments, and, according to surveys, are already more trusted.

Given the familiar nature of this analysis, it is surprising that, culturally, there is still a pervasive belief that it is governments with their diplomats and embassies that will sort out the world. It is curious that even global campaigning organizations, like Live8 or Greenpeace, still see governments as the objects of their activism. "End debt" text-message campaigns have targeted G-8 leaders, but in truth the means to affect the world's affairs are slipping from the governments' hands. Take any global problem from the price of oil to migration to climate change and it is clear that governments have less power than before to address them.

While a diplomat in the 1990s and early this century, I found the methods of conventional diplomacy seemed almost deliberately constructed to separate the diplomat from reality - and also from the people diplomats claim to represent. By and large, diplomats speak to other diplomats. Thanks to ballooning bureaucracy, e-mail and security constraints, they are increasingly confined to their embassies, dealing with the real world by computer and telephone rather than directly. Most foreign services are still horribly hierarchical, with the gray heads at the top and most of the energy and ideas ignored at the bottom. Few such institutions make the necessary effort to encourage innovative and contrary thinking. Many of the diplomats I know feel frustrated and stultified by mounting bureaucracy, and some will admit a creeping feeling of irrelevance. This wasn't what they signed up for.

In democratic terms, the actions and the views of diplomats are only tenuously connected to those people whom they allegedly represent. I found it ludicrous to pretend in negotiations that my views, which had in fact been invented by a small group of officials like myself, truly represented those of my whole country. This problem will of course be aggravated for the European foreign service (or European External Action Service, to give it its dreadful full name). As for accountability, one reason why governments elicit so little trust is officials seem never to take responsibility for the failures they perpetrate in their country's name - and, in recent years, there have been many. Diplomatic colleagues regarded it as naive to believe that somehow they were morally responsible for actions they undertook on behalf of their government. This sort of raison d'état may have convinced earlier generations, but when I talk to the so-called Millennial generation born after 1980, they are far from impressed. Less loyal to the nation-state than previous generations, they are equally skeptical of the diplomat's hitherto unquestioned claim - and somewhat snobbish assumption - to represent them.

In short, the good old days of an ambassador are over. Diplomats are going to have to work harder to be relevant and respected in this new world. In an anarchic world, influence in shaping events is going to go to those with the most convincing arguments and the most power, and they are not necessarily going to be working in government. Governments may still make laws that govern their countries and, to a lesser extent, the globe, but these laws will reflect norms and values created by others, and only some of the time will these leaders be governments themselves.

Looking toward a better world

I think this is a very exciting prospect, if slightly scary. A world without automatic deference to governments and their diplomats will be a better one. Forcing our traditional elites to get down and dirty on the ground with the people will improve their ideas, and will also make it more fun to be a diplomat. Foreign services will have to become much more eclectic and less hierarchical if they are to generate the kind of creativity needed to keep up with and even lead an eclectic and nonhierarchical world. In some cases, this is beginning to happen. But in most, I fear it is not.

At root, a fundamental reappraisal of the means of diplomacy is required. The traditional function of communicator and negotiator with other governments will remain, but should no longer be treated as the dominant or sole function to which all other functions are subordinate. Embassies and diplomats are going to have to work in partnership with (i.e. not patronize) a much wider range of actors if they are to understand what is going on around them, and influence this circus. At the Bali climate change talks, NGOs were a powerful presence, and their involvement in international deliberations of this kind will clearly become the norm rather than the exception.

Shaping public opinion

So-called (and ill-named) "public diplomacy" has always been the poorer cousin of the self-regarding hard-core "real" diplomats who do the important stuff like negotiate treaties and start wars. For some reason, diplomats and governments have believed that somehow the message about the role of governments can be separated in the public's mind from what they actually do. The Bush administration's pathetic public diplomacy efforts during its global war on terror illustrates the dangers of believing that you can separate a country's public messaging from perceptions of its actual behavior. People in the Middle East found it difficult to accept the Bush administration's proclamations of its commitment to democracy and human rights while politically the United States busily hopped into bed with virtually every nondemocratic and human rights-abusing tyranny in the region. It is time to abandon the notion of public diplomacy altogether, and replace it with a more interactive and, frankly, humble approach.

I do not mean by this that foreign ministers or ambassadors should start blogging, but rather that if they are to shape public opinion in other countries or even globally, they will need to take a much more sophisticated approach than paying for quasi-corporate PR. The Internet brings with it the likelihood of an immediate chorus of voices to reject overly extravagant claims or political hypocrisies. This means that governments will increasingly be judged by their actions and not by how they themselves describe them. This is a wholly positive development for those who want more accountability, but it requires governments and diplomats to at last realize that no one believes you unless you practice what you preach. As in all good theater, showing is telling. Diplomats should by all means communicate their government's message, but must be aware that thanks to generational changes and new technology the skepticism with which that message will be greeted has never been greater. To those who are smart, of course, this is as much an opportunity as a challenge. We the public must now beware of governments that, just like commercial corporations, infiltrate their messages into otherwise innocent soap operas, chat rooms or movie scripts.

The world is increasingly complicated, fluidly dynamic and, to be honest, resistant to comprehensive analysis. As more and more people live away from the countries of their birth, and more still assume multicultural identities, I find it less and less convincing that national governments, and thus national diplomats, can legitimately claim to speak for and act on behalf of such heterogeneity. This doubt is even greater in the case of an aggregate of national governments like the EU. That diplomats are declining in importance is, I believe, inevitable. Acceptance of this truth is - paradoxically - the only path to relevance for modern diplomats: to be primary no longer but only one among many is an exciting challenge as much as a burden. Success will go to those who use mass networks effectively, build coalitions of states and concerned nonstate actors like corporations and NGOs and can credibly lead opinion.

- The author is a former British diplomat and served as Strategy Coordinator for the United Nations Mission in Kosovo. He now runs Independent Diplomat, a nonprofit diplomatic advisory group. A version of this article appears in the current edition of Europe's World, www.europesworld.org.