I will return to a consideration of diplomacy’s prospects in the 21st century in a future posting.

In the meantime, it seems to me that the disaster in Haiti, and the response of the international community, merit some sustained reflection.

In Haiti, do the ethos of guerrilla diplomacy and the imperative of providing emergency medical and humanitarian assistance to those in need intersect?

I think so. But to see how, and as with the role of diplomacy in international relations writ large, it is time both to look back, and to look ahead.

Thirty years ago on a backpacking trip I had the opportunity to travel on both sides of the border which divides the second largest island in the Caribbean, Hispaniola, between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I have been fascinated by the place ever since. There is much to be learned in studying this locale, very little of which is coming out in the frenzy of sensational and heart-rending coverage which has attended the arrival of the legions of mainstream media, a group otherwise conspicuous mainly by their absence.

On the other hand, given the frequency and intensity of natural calamities which have beset Haiti in recent years,  many of those involved in the disaster relief industry must be developing quite a familiarity with the country. Some aspects of it, anyway.

The better hotels and restaurants, for instance…

In the wake of witnessing the machinery of  celebrity in full mobilization in delivering the Hope for Haiti Now telethon – admirable despite the glitz and sometimes forced images – it’s easy to be hard.

And there is certainly plenty of blame to go around.

But the story is more than just complex. It’s tragic, and that makes lapsing into cynicism and despair all too tempting. Yet from knowledge can come the understanding leads to change.

Stepping back a bit, what might be said of the island’s history?

Christopher Columbus founded the first European settlements in the New World on Hispaniola in 1492 and 1493.

It was not, however, considered the new world by the the estimated 400,000 native Amerindian Arawaks (Taino) who were living there before the period of European colonization and the importation of slaves from Africa to work the plantation economies.

The Taino initially welcomed the visitors.  Yet a combination of harsh treatment by the Europeans and exposure to imported diseases to which they had no immunity, such as smallpox, resulted in the near extinction of the island’s original inhabitants.

When the western third of Hispaniola was ceded by Spain to France in 1697 as part of the settlement of the Nine Years War, the French colony quickly came to eclipse its Spanish neighbour in power and wealth, and became known as the “Pearl of the Antilles“. For a time, it was the richest and most prosperous colony in the Caribbean.

Following a successful struggle for independence which concluded in 1804, Haiti became only the second country in the Americas to achieve that status after the United States.  In response, a trade embargo was imposed on Haiti by France, the former colonial master (which for a variety of reasons has never left anywhere that it has not been thrown out of), the USA, where slavery was still legal, and Great Britain, which did not wish to see its Caribbean colonies follow the Haitian example.

This animosity proved costly. In the intervening years, the fortunes of Haiti and the Dominican Republic have been reversed, with the former now the poorest country in the hemisphere, and the latter becoming the largest economy in the region.

Nowhere is this dichotomy move vividly illustrated than in satellite telemetry, which in places shows  relatively lush, green terrain on the Dominican side of the border, and a deforested, over-cultivated, and exhausted land on the other.

Haiti was occupied by the US marines from 1915 – 1934, due mainly to its indebtedness to American banks and concerns over the influence of expatriate Germans. It has experienced many foreign interventions since and has become, in effect, a ward of the international community.

Today it might be best be described not only as a failed state, but, in every sense, as a collapsed one.

That is one set of observations which play into the complex emergency now unfolding on the ground.

But there are many.

For example, it is crucial to distinguish between humanitarian relief, which is immediate and short term; aid, which tends to be technical and project oriented, and; development, which, at its best, is long-term, human-centred, equitable and sustainable. Development is the flip side of security. It is a process, not an end state, and is characterized by a situation in which people have access to social, political and economic opportunities to reach their full potential.

Haiti has much experience with disaster relief, and has received substantial amounts of aid, but has achieved very little over the 200 years since independence in terms of development.

In reference ACTE model of world order set out in Guerrilla Diplomacy, with the exception of a tiny elite and almost non-existent middle class, most Haitians inhabit the T and E worlds.

And it must be asked, in this crisis of colossal proportions, why is it that foreign military forces, especially those of the US, are leading the international response? If the answer is that it is an issue of capacity and resources, then a larger question is begged.

Why is it that the capacity and resources required to respond to complex emergencies are lodged in defence departments, and not in specialized civilian agencies?

Is this the most efficient, effective model for the delivery of emergency humanitarian assistance?  I have real doubts. As institutions, and at the most basic level of analysis, militaries exist to kill or capture enemies. As instruments of international policy they are designed to compel your adversary to submit to your will through the threat, or use of armed force. Sure, they can do other things, but those things – reconstruction, humanitarian assistance, cross-cultural and strategic communications – are not what they were intended for.

So, then. Where are the purpose-built institutions, and why are they not resourced to lead?

Another issue is intelligence. Intimate knowledge of the way things work, and how to get things done in Haiti would greatly expedite relief efforts. How much of that kind of essential, granular intelligence was being generated by the local embassies of the countries now most involved in the relief efforts?  Like the tourists alighting on a heavily guarded beach from the cruise ship Independence of the Seas a few days after the earthquake, were the Port au Prince based diplomatic representatives of Western countries living in a bubble, talking mainly to others of their ilk about what might be going on out there?

Or were they getting out of the compound and finding out for themselves, seeping down like penetrating oil into the interstices of power and influence by navigating pathways inaccessible to others?

Senior officials in sending states and managers in foreign ministries should be asking, and demanding answers to these hard questions.

Finally, there is the matter of the Haitian diaspora communities abroad. Members of this group will know more about what is going on Haiti than a handful of diplomats working out of an embassy in Port au Prince ever can or will.  In Canada, almost 100,000 persons of Haitian origin live in Quebec, mainly in Montreal. Haiti is also the second largest recipient, after Afghanistan, of Canadian development assistance.

Canadian interests are engaged.

With the Haitian diaspora’s dense network of ties back to the old country, it is long past time that foreign service officers were posted to Montreal with the explicit task of openly and transparently getting to know everything about, and all of the key people in that community.

There are huge challenges to be broached in Haiti at the best of times. The situation at present is dire and requires immediate and compassionate redress.

But there is much more to be learned from contemplating the roots of Haiti’s distress than will ever be gleaned from newspaper headlines or the fleeting images crossing television and computer screens.

There is also great potential for improving performance, an imperative which should be front and centre at the donors meeting being convened in Montreal January 25th.

We will delve more deeply into these issues in future posts.

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During my travels in the fall of 2009, and especially while spending time on trains and in airports, I  had many opportunities to reflect on the nature and future of diplomacy and international policy. I concluded that during the first decade of the 21st century, and 20 years after the end of the Cold War, there has been much more continuity than change in the conduct of international relations.

Global governance is still faltering.  States, however diminished in relative stature, and various transnational actors are still relying on the use of force – not simply as the final arbiter in settling disputes, but often as the chosen instrument in addressing their differences.

International policy remains heavily militarized, and the consequences have been calamitious.

Might the arrival of a new decade mark the beginning of diplomacy’s return to the mainstream of international relations from a protracted period of exile in the margins?

The arguments in favour are as persuasive as the track record is discouraging.

Diplomacy at its best is supple, versatile, highly cost-effective, and can produce lasting results.

The military, ironically, works best when it is not used. That was the enduring implication of the Cold War. The sword stays sharpest when left in the scabbard. Take it out, and you can make a terrible mess.

And the blade dulls very quickly.

In Afghanistan, the presence of foreign soldiers, once seen as liberating, has apparently become part of the problem. The Afghan people do not represent a threat to their neighbours or to the West. Like most anyone, however, they do not like to be occupied. They never have, as all who have tried can attest. Yet the burden of history has been ignored.

NATO metes out punishment with one hand, then offers to help and protect the population with the other.

When not rebuilding schools, power dams and hospitals, NATO troops fire on locally registered vehicles that fail to stop when a convoy passes, mistakenly bomb wedding parties, kick down doors looking for arms and Taliban, and incidentally maim and kill children as collateral damage.

This seems more like a formula for making enemies than friends. A percentage of the population will inevitably resist. That highly motivated group has nowhere else to go – they live there, they can wait, and they know the land and its people intimately.

What to do? Casualties are mounting as the ferment intensifies. Yet the US military, supported symbolically by at least some of their NATO allies, is surging. Whatever the window dressing, this may amount to an effort to put out the fire by adding more gasoline.

No one can read the future, and all historical parellels are imperfect, but in this case Viet Nam seems to me a better point of comparative reference than Iraq. Whatever its troubles, and however nasty the leadership and venal the regime, Iraq was an otherwise functioning country now ruined by the misguided application of external force.

Viet Nam, on the other hand, and not unlike Afghanistan today, was poor, had been wracked by civil war, and had a recent history of failed imperial interventions. The US role was divisive, media saturated and increasingly unpopular on the home front.

Legitimacy remains the issue. Karzai now is eerily evocative of Thieu then – weak, surrounded by corrupt cronies and acolytes, and deeply discredited domestically and internationally. A pair of marionettes. ISAF committments to accelerate training and the transfer responsibility to the Afghan National Army and Police sound very much like echoes of Vietnamization.

After a huge expenditure in terms of lives, finance and national reputation, in 1973 a face-saving way out of Southeast Asia was finally negotiated for the USA and its few remaining allies.  A few years later, the inevitable occured.

Diplomacy was used, but only as an exit strategy of last resort.  Sooner or later a replay is to be anticipated in Kabul for whatever remains of ISAF.

Meanwhile, as Iraq is being scaled back and Afghanistan cranked up, the threat conjurers are looking for the next candidate. Hardy perennials Iran and North Korea are again being tried on for size.

Yemen returned to centre stage after another stunning failure of intelligence and near epic tragedy on Christmas day.

Keep an eye on that space.

All of this might be sounding a bit too familiar. Whether restyled as counterinsurgency, stabilization, overseas contingency operations, or whatever, this is a continuation of the Global War On Terror (GWOT) by another name.

Watch what governments do, not what they say, and follow the money.

The GWOT is an open-sided, universal and undifferentiated campaign which may serve the interests of some, but amounts to a prescription for war without end.

British analyst Robert Fisk famously remarked that the only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn. There is a better way.

What if diplomacy was used, in the first instance, as the international policy instrument of choice?

In the next installment, we will cast our gaze backwards in time to look for some clues regarding how diplomacy might be employed to address the drivers of insecurity and underdevelopment in the decade ahead.

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In recent years a spate of books and reports by Jennifer Welsh, Andrew Cohen, Canada 25, and many others have set out in some detail Canada’s recent international performance and perceptions thereof.

To know where to go in international policy, you must know where you have been.

Having a narrative, of course, is one thing; having an assessment is another.  How did this country arrive at what many consider to represent an all time a low tide?

In my estimation, this has occurred, in roughly equal measure:

* By default. That is, the inevitability of a relative decline post-1947 in Canada’s power and influence as other countries rebuilt or emerged; the generally shrinking place of the state in the overall globalization mix, and; the movement of the locus of activity upwards, outwards and downwards to supranational, transnational and sub-national actors, respectively.

* By design. That is, the deliberate reductions in DFAIT resources;  the ascendance of micro-management and centralized control; the nature of recent ministerial appointments; the downsizing of Ottawa’s world-view, and; agglomeration of decision-making function at the executive level.

* As a result of long term domestic trends. That is, the fragmenting of the old middle class, non-partisan consensus which used to exist around a suite of widely-held notions (Pearsonian internationalism, middle power role, generous aid donor, conflict resolver, helpful fixer, peacekeeper, provider of good offices) in favour of a focus on more highly particularistic special interests (climate change, aboriginal issues, weapons of mass destruction, rain forests, terrorism, women’s rights, pandemic disease, genomics, etc.)

This splintering – for better or worse – of international policy values and interests will make it difficult to again catalyze public opinion around broad Canadian objectives. That said, public diplomacy, or PD, as a technique for delivering international policy results through dialogue, plays directly to Canada’s soft power strengths (image, reputation, brand). Equally significant, it minimizes the weaknesses and vulnerabilities associated with diminished hard power, ongoing capacity limitations and this country’s generally shrinking space in the planetary scheme of things.

With an admirable reputation and positive image, public diplomacy is Canada’s strongest comparative advantage in international relations.  It is almost incomprehensible that this function has taken among the hardest of hits in the recent round of resource reductions. Not only is this akin to shooting yourself in the foot when you are in a race, but it forces even greater distortions and misallocations throughout the diplomatic network.

The Public Diplomacy Officers assigned to Canadian missions abroad are on the front lines of reductions, and in some cases the removal of their budgets for programming, travel or representation. The very significant administrative overheads and related costs associated with keeping these people in place is difficult to  justify when in many cases no real work can be done.

How might a compelling value proposition be rebuilt?

The bottom line, I believe, will involve restoring DFAIT in general, and PD in particular to the centre of a whole-of-country, whole-of-government Canadian grand strategy for international policy re-engagement. In this, diplomacy and development would displace defence as the policy instruments of choice.

This strategy would be crafted in explicit response to key contemporary developments in world political economy:

* power shift, in favour of the (re)emerging Asia-Pacific region

* the coming into place of a new suite of global  challenges, distinct from the Cold War threat set in that most of these transnational issues are rooted in science and driven by technology

* the rise of heterpolarity as the basis for world order

Canada is unique in this highly competitive world in that it bridges: to Europe, through our history; to the USA and the Americas, through our present priorities and orientation, and; across the Pacific, to Asia, the largest source of new Canadians and the dynamic centre of the new global economy.

It is long past time for this country to use those bridges, diplomatically, as conduits to a brighter international policy future.

The Copenhagen Climate Change Conference – dealing now with one of the foremost issues, among many, which is rooted in science and driven by technology – will offer manifold opportunities to engage constructively.

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