In the previous post, I tried to show that during the 1980s and ‘90s the paradigm for the delivery of Canadian international policy shifted fundamentally. Over the course of those years, there was a deliberate move away from an emphasis on traditional, state-to-state interaction in the direction of public diplomacy (PD). This form of international political exchange features diplomats communicating directly with foreign populations and cultivating partnerships with civil society actors – NGOs, businesspeople, journalists and academics.  I also made the case that the PD formula, in conjunction with the right combination of political will and bureaucratic skill, can produce impressive results, especially if directed towards projects with broad popular and media appeal, such as a land mine ban or efforts to improve the lot of children in conflict zones.

Looking back, it can be seen that Canadian PD reached its apogee under Foreign Minister Axworthy (1996-2000). At a time of severe government-wide cost-cutting, Canada fundamentally down-sized its international ambitions, but that exercise was not translated into a retreat from the field. To be sure, the large scale, long range, potentially world changing projects of the post-war decades  – poverty eradication, conflict resolution, global environmental conservation – were gone. In their place, Canadian officials proposed a series of special projects – for example, curbs on the trading of “blood” diamonds and small arms – designed for implementation within media-friendly diplomatic niches. They did not always succeed, but each initiative featured a defined start and finish. Upon completion, the Minister could simply call a press conference, declare victory and move on.

Minister Axworthy learned, and very quickly, how the use of soft power could make a virtue of necessity. Conventional diplomacy was still necessary, but it was no longer sufficient when it came to influencing foreign governments. That influence was best brought to bear through their publics, and through international public opinion, especially when compulsion was not an option and democratization had expanded the scope for exercising influence indirectly.

The requirements associated with this burst of activism imposed significant costs upon DFAIT’s staff, already struggling under the burden of increased demands and reduced resources.  Moreover, some strategic opportunities were missed. In 1996-97, for instance, the department’s Communications Bureau proposed the launch of an ambitious project which would have vaulted Canada into the digital age by establishing an integrated global presence based upon satellite broadcasting, the internet, public diplomacy, international education and branding.  In the end, however, at a time of diminishing capacity across government, the Canadian International Information Strategy (CIIS) lost out in Cabinet to the campaign to ban land mines (later christened the “Ottawa Process”). Canada might today be more effective and influential in the world had circumstances – particularly timing and the economic environment – been more propitious during that critical period.

In bureaucracy, there is often a lag between action and reflection. The Axworthy years were so frenetic that there was little time to think through the full implications of his program in terms of the design, structure and operations of the foreign ministry. As a result, generic interest in PD within the DFAIT apparatus actually peaked following Axworthy’s departure. For the first five years of the new century, significant efforts were made weave PD into the department’s modus operandi. A new PD Secretariat was established in Washington to coordinate advocacy activities in the USA. The idea of  “mainstreaming public diplomacy” was central to a comprehensive reform package launched by DFAIT’s  Deputy Ministers in 2004 and entitled Building a 21^st Century Foreign Ministry, or FAC21. When Prime Minister Chretien stepped down the same year, the new leader, Paul Martin, commissioned a comprehensive international policy review. In the final, five volume report, A Place of Pride and Influence in the World, PD was highlighted as “the new diplomacy”.

Although it has been scarcely more than a decade since Axworthy left office, the years of Canadian public diplomatic activism now seem long ago and far away. Ironically, despite the many practical successes and, later, some focused internal interest, PD never received the extent of budgetary support which might have been anticipated. This is doubly curious because although Axworthy’s Liberal successors, John Manley, Bill Graham and Pierre Pettigrew, did not share his enthusiasm for human security, they did seem to buy into PD. Manley mandated a public diplomacy working group within the secretariat conducting his – albeit short-lived -  Foreign Policy Update in 2001, and beginning in 2003 Graham used the interactive potential of the internet to reach out to Canadians with his Foreign Policy Dialogue. But political interest in undertaking concrete diplomatic initiatives had waned well before the January, 2006 election of a Conservative minority government. Almost immediately, the previous administration’s policy review was shelved, government communications were centralized and placed under strict control, and DFAIT officials were gagged.

Canadian public diplomacy, already in decline and tainted lethally by its association with the outgoing Liberal government, effectively disappeared.

Memories of independent Canadian leadership on global issues are receding, the drift towards continental integration continues.

In May 2011 the Conservative party was returned with a majority, and John Baird, a prominent and influential Tory insider, was named Foreign Minister. The new minister speaks of the need for a “tough”  foreign policy, and the overall emphasis favours the military over diplomacy and development assistance. Yet there are stirrings within DFAIT of a possible PD renewal. A modest experiment has been launched allowing several of Canada’s European ambassadors to engage foreign audiences using social media platforms Twitter and Facebook, and this enterprise may eventually be expanded to include the participation of all Canadian missions.

That said, even under a best case scenario Canada will still be trailing most of its diplomatic competition, both within the OECD and beyond. Unless and until DFAIT regains the full confidence, trust and respect of its political masters, and is once again called upon to perform, any return to the halcyon days of Canadian PD activism seems unlikely.

I have recently been reviewing a new book entitled Diplomacy in the Digital Age, which is a collection of essays prepared in honour of Allan Gotlieb, a former Undersecretary of State  for External Affairs and Canada’s ambassador in Washington from 1981-89. It is an absorbing anthology, and contains valuable entries penned in some instances by those who worked with Mr. Gotlieb during his time in the USA. Quite apart from eliciting specific reactions to the content of the volume, reading it has also spurred me to reflect on the larger issue of what became of Canada’s once considerable contribution to the study and practice of public diplomacy (PD).

The Government of Canada was until fairly recently regarded as a somewhat of PD pioneer. That reputation would now be difficult to sustain. Indeed, I have come to the rather stark realization that whatever this country may at one time have achieved by way of advancing its interests through PD, those days are now long gone.

In official and political circles in Ottawa today, little or nothing is heard of PD. Diplomatic representatives can no longer connect directly with foreign populations unless their scripts have been pre-cleared, and even the use of the term has been discouraged. Within the foreign ministry (DFAIT), the function has been almost completely de-resourced.

Hence the questions must be put: what, exactly, did Canada manage to achieve in terms of public diplomacy outcomes over the past several decades?  Why has PD fallen from grace? Can any lessons of broader relevance be adduced?

Canadian academics, and several several serving and former diplomats have over time been active in the conceptualization and analysis of PD. Publications such as Allan Gotlieb’s I’ll Be With You in a Minute, Mr. Ambassador, Gordon Smith’s Virtual Diplomacy, Rob McRae and Don Hubert’s Human Security and the New Diplomacy, Andy Cooper’s Celebrity Diplomacy, Evan Potter’s Branding Canada, and perhaps even my own Guerrilla Diplomacy have been seen by some to break new ground in the field.

In addition to these intellectual contributions, the Canadian foreign ministry has been deeply involved in the practical application of PD. Beginning in the 1980s, most of Canada’s major diplomatic undertakings – the 1981 Cancun Summit on North-South relations; Prime Minister Trudeau’s 1984 peace crusade; the acid rain and free trade pacts with the USA;  the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone layer depletion, and; the Commonwealth campaign to end apartheid in southern Africa – included a significant PD component. Even if not labeled as public diplomacy at the time, a willingness to connect directly with foreign populations, the strategic use of the media, and tactics such as forging partnerships with business and civil society were integral to each of these initiatives.

In early in the 1990s, and quite explicitly so by the second half of the decade, PD moved even closer to the centre of Canadian international policy.  In the organization and delivery of the 1992 Rio Summit on Environment and Development,  throughout the so-called “fish war” with Spain in 1994, and particularly during the four year tenure of Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy (1996-2000), PD, and the related notion of soft power, were the order of the day.

Charged with implementing the severe expenditure reductions  associated with the government-wide Program Review exercise of the mid-1990s, Axworthy must have concluded that the page had to be turned on old ways, and that global order projects would accordingly have to be set aside. But he was clearly not prepared to accept that this meant inaction. To the contrary, he demanded that DFAIT officials identify innovative ways for Canada to “make a difference”. He was determined to find opportunity in adversity, even if faced with opposition on the part of the US and other major powers, and indeed of many Canadians.

DFAIT staff rose to the challenge, and came forth with a series of proposals. In the campaigns leading to the signature of the Treaty Banning Land Mines in 1997 and to the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 1998,  Axworthy attained his objectives by nurturing  partnerships with international civil society and similarly-inclined countries. He also reached out in an unprecedented fashion to the journalists, the academic community and NGOs at home, mainly through creation of the Canadian Centre for Foreign Policy Development and the Public Diplomacy Fund at DFAIT.

The same approach, in varying degrees, was seen in initiatives intended to limit the spread of small arms, to underscore the plight of children in war zones and curb the use of child soldiers, and to restrict the sale of “conflict diamonds” through the launch of the Kimberly Process. Canada also sponsored the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, whose final report, The Responsibility to Protect, though initially overtaken by the events of 9/11, resurfaced and was adopted in principle at the UN Millennium Summit in September 2005.

Taken together, Axworthy’s achievements were artfully – and, in part, retrospectively – packaged by officials into a remarkably coherent program which came to be known as the Human Security Agenda. Although that policy direction did not survive for long following the Minister’s departure from office, the record of activity in the second half of the 1990s stands nonetheless as enduring testament to the power and potential of Canadian PD. It was a high point which has not since been revisited. To a significant extent, I would suggest that whatever remains Canada’s positive international reputation – its brand –  still relies on these, and earlier accomplishments.

I will return to an assessment of PD’s decline in the next post.

From the late 1940s  through to early in this century, Canada enjoyed a reputation as a determined, capable and effective internationalist. Regardless of which party formed the government, this country actively engaged with other peoples and states in the in the pursuit of collaborative solutions to the world’s major problems and challenges. From the founding of the UN, post-war reconstruction and the Suez crisis to non-proliferation issues, protection of the global commons and working to address the plight of children in conflict, Canada was always present, and, when appropriate, ready to lead.

As Canada’s relative power and influence inevitably declined with the recovery of Europe and Asia and the emergence of China, India, Brazil and others, the scale of Canadian activism was down-sized.  Grand, long-term goals such as eradicating poverty and bringing peace to the world gradually gave way to to smaller, “niche”  projects such as the land mine ban, conflict diamonds and the construction of innovative new doctrines such as the Responsibility to Protect.  The nature of Canadian internationalism changed with the times, and public diplomacy was mobilized to advance the likes of Human Security Agenda, but a core commitment to internationalism endured.

Today, little remains of that tradition, and international policy decision-making seems related mainly to the quest for future electoral advantage.

What happened?

Changes in the nature and direction of domestic politics have certainly played a part. The Harper Conservatives have tended to conflate internationalism with the foreign policy of the Liberal party, which they have condemned, and not without some justification,  as soft, airy and empty – all talk, no action. The Conservatives  have repudiated the past and embraced a more hard power oriented and militarized approach to international affairs which features a demonstrated preference for fighting over talking. Adulation for the armed forces, and the celebration of all things martial have reached unprecedented heights.

While prepared to join – with minimal public discussion or debate – in aggressive counter-insurgency warfare in Afghanistan or the NATO bombing of Libya, it seems unlikely that this country will ever again undertake anything as ambitious as orchestrating the 1981 Cancun Summit on North-South issues or the 1992 Rio Conference on environment and development, not to mention the exercise of leadership within the Commonwealth to defeat apartheid in southern Africa. Instead, we negotiate trade agreements, promote asbestos exports and boycott major multilateral conferences on racism and disarmament. Canada has walked away from peacekeeping,  dispensed with a balanced approach towards conflict resolution in the Middle East, and received the Fossil of the Year award for our performance on climate change.

In other words, the once familiar helpful fixer, honest broker, provider of “good offices” and boy scout to the world is no more. Canada’s image, reputation and brand are being radically reconstructed. As underscored so painfully by last year’s failure to win an elected seat on the UN Security Council, the rest ot the world has finally taken notice.

Political and ideological changes, exacerbated by a revolving door pattern of ministerial appointments over the past decade,  provide part of the explanation.  Though often overlooked, the running down of this country’s diplomatic apparatus has also hurt. The Department of Foreign Affairs has had great difficulty adapting to the challenges of globalization and has not done well in competition with other departments – especially defence – when it comes to the annual resource auction.  Today the foreign ministry is sidelined, marginalized, and facing yet another round of deep cuts. Deprived of the financial support required and with its representatives effectively gagged, DFAIT’s capacity and influence have been deliberately reduced.

Unlike DFAIT, ministries such as Human Resources and Skills Development, Transport, Infrastructure, Heritage, Industry and many others have large domestic programs, send cheques to their clients, and create jobs. As a result, all enjoy supportive, and sometimes vocal national constituencies. Moreover, while the expansion – or encroachment – of other government departments into areas previously believed to be the exclusive preserve of the foreign ministry has been going on for years, there has been little compensatory effort to insert foreign ministry perspectives into domestic debates, or to underline the Department’s relevance to the national security and domestic prosperity.

Consigned now to the edges of government with few natural or permanent allies, the failure to invest in a  sustained and strategic effort to develop a durable base  has been costly for DFAIT.

The active nurturing of a supportive domestic environment for the formulation of international policy is critical – if messages are to be carried abroad, they must resonate at home. Yet at a time of maximum need, the foreign ministry’s outreach activities have been ratcheted back dramatically. Significant domestic interest in, and support for diplomacy, the foreign ministry and international policy is nowhere now in evidence.

Domestic politics and diminished bureaucratic capacity have both played a part in orchestrating Canada’s departure from its diplomatic past. None of this could have happened, however, if Canadians themselves had strenuously objected. Instead, both during and between elections, there has been barely a peep from the populace.

Those matters warrant further investigation, and will be the subject of a future post.

For the past few weeks I have been lecturing and travelling in the UK and Europe with a group of MA candidates in diplomacy and international business. They are studying at the University of East Anglia’s London Academy of Diplomacy, and the subject of my short course is science, technology and international policy.

Even by Canadian standards, the group is exceptionally cosmopolitan and multicultural, with students from Afghanistan and Albania, South Africa and St. Lucia, Spain and Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Zambia. It’s a mini-UN, and our exchanges are informed and enriched by the diversity of perspectives brought to bear.

Continuous learning and compelling conversation.

Last week at Nyenrode Business University just outside of Utretcht, Holland, we received a very interesting lecture on “Commercial Diplomacy”. The subject also came up a few days later during a briefing at the Dutch Foreign Ministry, where we learned that in response to the Great Recession, the new emphasis for Dutch representatives abroad  is “Economic Diplomacy”. Some missions are being closed (mainly in Latin America), and a few new ones opened (mainly in Asia) with that priority foremost in mind.

My preoccupations have always tended towards the analysis of world politics and global issues, and I have never spent much time reflecting on how best to use diplomacy to advance commercial and economic objectives. Most of what I have seen of this sort of work on my postings abroad seemed rather garden variety and uninspired – organizing visits, delivering programs, participating in trade fairs, making presentations, pitching inward investment. Arranging run-of-the-mill itineraries for business visitors which consist mainly of set-piece, pro forma and predictable encounters with the usual suspects may in some instances be necessary, but will rarely be sufficient to ensure tangible gains.

Obtaining results usually requires something more.

My overall impression, I might add, was that those companies who wanted help with exports generally weren’t ready, and those enterprises who were ready – and often already active in foreign markets – generally didn’t want or need the support or assistance of the state.

From those observations I concluded that while responsibility for the formulation of trade policy should likely stay within government, trade promotion might usefully be privatized, and offered as a service only to those businesses who were prepared to pay. Some countries, such as Denmark and New Zealand, are already experimenting with this sort of model.

That said, many governments are still providing trade and investment services abroad at public expense, so the main issues are value for money and performance improvement. In that respect, I see considerable scope to applying the principles of guerrilla diplomacy to economic and commercial work overseas.

Guerrilla diplomacy is about agility, acuity, and outside the box thinking. From that it follows that effectiveness and results at the end of the day will often have little to do with knowing where the meeting rooms are at the best hotels or having an inside line on VIP room reservations at the airport. What counts most in terms the ability to add value and provide strategic advice will be the quality of networks and contacts – key players, opinion-leaders, facilitators, potential partners. The guerrilla trade commissioner will be expert at cross cultural communications, a source of macro-economic analysis and grass roots market intelligence, and have a sophisticated understanding not only of how their territory works, but or how to work their territory.

Elsewhere I have remarked that the explosion of global issues – climate change, pandemic disease, resource scarcity – has eroded the monopoly of the foreign ministry and implicated the work of line government departments in the management of many critical international policy files. Just as such as the capacity and expertise resident in ministries such as Environment, Health and Natural Resources has made a real contribution to addressing the range of issues rooted in science and driven by technology, responsibility for various aspects of commercial diplomacy is similarly widely dispersed.  Departments such as immigration (recruiting of new members of the labour force), transport (negotiation of air service agreements and infrastructure  links), development assistance (transition from donor-recipient relationship to economic partnership) and industry (process and product innovation) all have an important role to play. So, too, with various regulatory bodies.

Take aways?

Technology, human resources and knowledge are crucial, and highly mobile factors of international production. They will play a major in determining who will prosper in the highly competitive precincts of the 21^st century.

That elevates the place and role of commercial and economic diplomats, and positions them to make a real difference.

Secondly. To ensure a degree of policy coherence in the face of such complex and multi-faceted challenges, there will need to be a focal point for  government-NGO -private sector coordination, and a locus for inter-departmental decision-making.

With a mandate to manage the cross-cutting issues which define globalization, the Foreign and Trade Ministry could be just the place to situate that function.

It’s nobody else’s job, and it is one which desperately needs doing.

It has now been a year since the release of Guerrilla Diplomacy. I have spent much of this time trying to promote the book’s main arguments in support of restoring the diplomatic ecosystem and de-militarizing international policy. Following are a few reflections on those efforts.

In countless presentations in Canada, the USA, UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand,  perhaps the main thing I learned is that diplomacy remains a very hard sell. It is still regarded as somewhat of an exotic, rarely discussed and widely misunderstood, even by those whose job is supposed to be doing it. In the public mind, as in the mainstream media, diplomacy has never recovered from the legacy of Chamberlain in Munich, when it came to be associated with weakness and appeasement. This can be seen in the still popular currency of expressions such as “talk is cheap” and “weasel words”.

Diplomacy suffers from a debilitating image problem, featuring diplomats as spoiled ditherers achieving little while drinking and dining off the public purse. It also faces a very real substance problem, related mainly to the inability of diplomatic practices and institutions to change with the times.

Diplomacy has not adapted well to the challenges of globalization, the defining historical process of our times which integrates economically even as it fragments politically, polarizes socially, and homogenizes culturally. This combination generates chronic instability, and what Chalmers Johnson has so aptly termed blowback. Even as it affords comfort and choice to a relative few, globalization has become a driver of the insecurity and underdevelopment which make for state frailty and, on occasion, state failure.

In the face of a rising tide of suffering, inequality, conflict and unaddressed perils – many rooted in science and driven by technology – the world is suffering from a double diplomatic deficit. This may be attributed to an increasing demand for, but diminished supply of diplomacy world-wide, and the serious performance gap which afflicts foreign ministries and foreign services most everywhere.

That said, diplomacy, by which I refer to international political communications characterized by a reliance upon negotiation and compromise, is still the most effective – and economical – alternative to the use of organized violence. The continuing dependence upon the force of arms, whether under the auspices of the Global War on Terror, or now, counterinsurgency, stabilization and overseas contingency operations, has proven costly and counter-productive.

Defence departments and military organizations exist, in the first instance, for the purpose of exerting power and compelling compliance. Foreign ministries and the diplomatic service, on the other hand, are designed to exercise influence through persuasion by identifying partners with whom to make common cause in the pursuit of shared values and mutual interests. To be sure, radical reform is overdue. Yet skilfully conducted, and notwithstanding the prevalence of misleading cartoon caricatures of men in top hats and women in pearls, diplomacy represents the best possible way forward when it comes to resolving entrenched differences and broaching even the most vexing of transnational threats.

The mitigation of globalization’s tendency to socialize costs while privatizing benefits, and the harnessing of its positive potential, should become the pre-occupation of both diplomacy and grand strategy. I remain convinced that the guerrilla diplomacy (GD) formula, through which messages are not only transmitted but received, and fed back into the policy development process, can deliver on that imperative. GD offers the prospect not only of improving the quality of international political communications, but also of altering behaviour at both ends of the conversation. Therein lies is the essence of the GD’s commitment to meaningful exchange.

In this climate change challenged, pandemic disease ridden, chronically resource short world we live in, diplomacy matters now more than ever, but it remains in crisis. Diplomats still languish in the bleachers as the legions march by.  That is why I have tried in the book to get beyond both traditional and public diplomacy, and why I will continue to advocate in favour of equipping our envoys for the 21^st century and moving them into centre field. Absent that, this small planet is likely to look more and more like a smattering of razor-wire enclosed green zones, with security by Blackwater/Xe and sanitation by Halliburton, precariously vulnerable and exposed while attracting the anger and resentment of the excluded majority.

The continuing carnage in Iraq, multiple setbacks in Afghanistan, and the need to accommodate rising powers without repeating the mistakes of the last century suggest that governments today desperately need to find a better way to deliver international policy.

Guns will never get them there.

A capacity to engage in genuine dialogue, knowledge-based problem-solving, supple analysis and complex balancing just might.