The Future of Diplomacy

Philip Seib

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509507238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Never before has diplomacy evolved at such a rapid pace. It is being transformed into a global participatory process by new media tools and newly empowered publics. 'Public diplomacy' has taken center-stage as diplomats strive to reach and influence audiences that are better informed and more assertive than any in the past. In this crisp and insightful analysis, Philip Seib, one of the world's top experts on media and foreign policy, explores the future of diplomacy in our hyper-connected world. He shows how the focus of diplomatic practice has shifted away from the closed-door, top-level negotiations of the past. Today's diplomats are obliged to respond instantly to the latest crisis fueled by a YouTube video or Facebook post. This has given rise to a more open and reactive approach to global problem-solving with consequences that are difficult to predict. Drawing on examples from the Iran nuclear negotiations to the humanitarian crisis in Syria, Seib argues persuasively for this new versatile and flexible public-facing diplomacy; one that makes strategic use of both new media and traditional diplomatic processes to manage the increasingly complex relations between states and new non-state political actors in the 21st Century

1
Open Diplomacy

To refine one of this book’s central themes, it is worth keeping in mind that while diplomacy is increasingly shaped by tools such as social media, there are limits to this. It is important not to allow fascination with media gadgetry to produce a distorted view of how diplomacy works. The effectiveness of any tool depends on how it is used.

First, let’s be wary about the term “digital diplomacy.” Although it has become highly fashionable, the term is misleading in that it may be taken as ascribing greater significance to technology than is deserved. Diplomacy is at its heart a process dependent on policy and people. Technology – digital or otherwise – provides an array of tools to make that process more efficient. But technology is soulless, and as such its value in diplomacy, while important, has limits.

That said, new technologies are profoundly changing societies and cultures around the world, affecting everything from sports to medicine, and certainly including diplomacy. As for media, a case can be made that the internet is the most transformative phenomenon since the arrival of the movable-type printing press in the fifteenth century. Just as Johannes Gutenberg’s invention allowed dissemination of ideas to ever-growing audiences, today’s internet-based communication fosters an even more widespread and participatory expansion of knowledge.

This is the environment in which the future of diplomacy is taking shape. As the newest media tools come into play, reliance on technology becomes more problematic. Granted, some who rely on digital tools see them as just that – tools. But it is best to embrace only cautiously anything that seems a panacea for reaching global publics. The availability of a service like Twitter – such an easy way to communicate – makes its use irresistible, regardless of how suitable it might be in a particular profession or situation. Such is the problem of putting the virtual cart ahead of the not necessarily virtual horse.

Regardless of how diplomats decide to employ these tools, much of the rest of the world is busy using them. Consider some basic statistics (and note the youthfulness of these transformative enterprises):

• Facebook, born in 2004, and so the oldest of the social media giants, had 1.55 billion active monthly users as of September 2015.
• YouTube, created in 2005, also has more than a billion users, and they upload more than 300 hours of video every minute.
• Twitter, which came onto the scene in 2006, sees 500 million tweets every day, 80 percent of which come from mobile devices. (As of March 2015, the Twitter user with the most followers was singer Katy Perry, with 67 million. She was closely followed by another singer, Justin Bieber, with 61 million, and President Barack Obama, who had 56 million followers.)
• Instagram began in 2010, hosting 70 million photos each day and sharing a total of more than 30 billion photographs.
• Sina Weibo, a Chinese service that combines attributes of Facebook and Twitter, was created in 2009, has 600 million users, 70 percent of whom access it through their mobile devices. (Sina Weibo’s most popular user as of early 2015 was actor Chen Kun, who had 73 million followers.)

So what does all this mean? Are “friends” on Facebook really friends? Only if an exceptionally broad definition of “friendship” holds sway. Are Chen Kun and Katy Perry the two most popular people in the world? Doubtful, but what does “popular” mean today?

What about Instagram and its kin? Have tens of millions of people become exhibitionists and voyeurs, eager to post and peruse photographs of themselves and others? Yes, but most of them probably do not think of themselves that way. They like to say they are “sharing.”

Regardless of motives and judgments, numbers at these levels are evidence of more than just a surge of popular interest in entertainers and visual gossip. People want to receive and produce “information,” defined broadly, and so the social media industry continues to expand. Between when this is written and when it is published, more social media providers will appear. Some will not have the financial stamina to survive for long; some promising ones might be swallowed, in exchange for considerable riches, by established companies; and a few will endure, at least for a while, and perhaps find a viable user base.

Social media have been dismissed by some as just the latest fad of Americans and other Western elites. But statistics about Facebook illustrate geographic as well as numerical growth. In the period from the first quarter of 2013 through the first quarter of 2015, daily active Facebook users worldwide increased from 665 million to 936 million. Of that increase, users in the United States and Canada went from 139 million to 161 million, a growth of 16 percent. Meanwhile, Facebook usage in the rest of the world grew from 526 million to 775 million daily users, a 47 percent increase. The overall distribution of the 936 million daily users is 161 million in the United States and Canada, 225 million in Europe, 270 million in the Asia-Pacific region, and 280 million in the rest of the world.¹ Twitter also reports substantial international growth. The service supports 33 languages and 77 percent of its accounts are outside the United States.²

A significant imbalance clearly remains, but looking ahead it is safe to say that rapid expansion of internet and social media use will continue. Prices of “computers” – especially the mobile versions – continue to drop. As of 2015, a US$40 smartphone was entering the marketplace, and ingenious ways were being devised to bring the internet to previously isolated regions. Google has been working on Project Loon, a way to deliver wireless service by using a high-altitude (about 20 miles up) balloon network. Tests of Loon in 2013 in New Zealand were successful.³

With much evidence pointing to continued expansion of the social media user base, many in the foreign policy establishment look at the numbers and jump into this new world. By summer 2014, the US State Department hosted 230 Facebook pages, 80 Twitter accounts, 55 YouTube channels, and 40 Flickr accounts.⁴ Also in mid-2014, the United Nations’ main Twitter profile had almost 3 million followers and its Facebook page had more than 1.1 million friends. Overall, the UN managed 18 Facebook pages, 25 Twitter profiles, two Tumblr blogs, two LinkedIn pages (including that of the Secretary-General), and also had accounts on YouTube, Pinterest, Google+, Flickr, Instagram, and Weibo.⁵

With this kind of activity, a great temptation exists to celebrate a marriage between diplomacy and social media. But the number and diversity of digital venues being used does not necessarily have anything to do with diplomacy. Volume is nice, but content is what really matters.

This is nothing new. “Revolutionary” communication tools have popped up regularly for centuries. For our purposes, their impact in two areas is worth examining: how they affected the public’s knowledge of the world around them, and how diplomats and those responsible for designing foreign policy responded to that expansion of knowledge.

Some history: communication technology evolves

Depending on how one defines “communication technology,” the timeline can begin many thousands of years ago with the instruments used to paint animals on cave walls and chisel symbols onto stone tablets. For our purposes, we will leap into relatively modern times – the nineteenth century – and use the arrival of the telegraph as the starting point for examining intersections between media and diplomacy. The future is built upon the past.

After many experiments, electric telegraphy came of age in 1837, and in 1866 the first successful trans-Atlantic cable was completed. This soon changed the nature of diplomacy. No longer did news between North America and Europe need to travel on ships, which meant that no longer did wars continue long after peace terms had been agreed upon, as had happened in the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States when news of the Treaty of Ghent took a month to reach combatants.

But was the impact of the telegraph entirely positive? In his study of the telegraph’s effects on diplomacy, David Paul Nickles observes that “delays in diplomacy produced by ship-carried dispatches provided time for tempers to cool and peacemakers to go about their work.” Nickles cites the 1861 Trent affair, during the American Civil War, when a Union warship stopped and boarded the British mail steamer Trent, on which were two Confederate diplomats en route to England. The Union sailors seized the two Confederates and took them to the US mainland as prisoners while the Trent went on its way. When news of the event reached London, the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, and others immediately began talking about war against the Union government of the United States. Nickles writes: “The Trent affair provides an instance when the use of the telegraph in diplomacy, by eliminating periods of delay, would have created more problems than it solved. During intervals of waiting, initial reactions could be questioned, participants could compose themselves, and plans could be reconsidered, all with generally beneficial results.” The British ambassador to the United States, Lord Lyons, had moved cautiously during the controversy and offered a valuable diplomatic axiom, “Never do anything today that can be put off until tomorrow.”⁶

The telephone soon superseded the telegraph. It may be considered the first social media device in that it enhanced the ability of individuals to communicate with one another, regardless of physical proximity, and with a personal directness that the telegraph did not permit.

The telephone’s importance in a political context is that it facilitates communication about ideas and events. Everyday discussion expanded; family and friends, even those at considerable distance, could become members of networks, sharing information and then passing it along. Almost all phone calls were one-to-one, and so those networks remained linear and were nothing like what we see today with Twitter and such. But the methodical, personto-person transmission of information changed the ways people saw themselves and the world. As the phone call pushed aside the letter, a broader kind of literacy developed. The spoken word was no longer just for face-to-face communication. It reached across the street and eventually across the planet.

Diplomats found their work altered by the telephone in several ways. First, the immediacy of telephonic connection tightened the linkage between diplomats in the field and their bosses, and so reduced operational autonomy. More significantly – although harder to grasp and measure – disco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Open Diplomacy
• 2 The Rise of Public Diplomacy
• 3 States and Non-States
• 4 Staying on Track
• 5 Shaping Diplomacy’s Future
• Index
• End User License Agreement