11. CONCLUSION THE END OF “DIPLOMACY”?

“Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.”

Paul Valéry

All politics, said Tip O’Neill, long-time Speaker of the US House of Representatives, is local. He was wrong.

There is not one aspect of our contemporary lives, save our private emotions, which is not in some way affected by what is going on elsewhere in the world. Perhaps even our emotions are not immune, given the omnipresent and insidious effects of our economic, cultural and physical environment. Globalization has done for the notion of locality what the internet has done for the paper letter. All politics is international.

The spread of global markets and global production has made us familiar with how jobs in south Wales or Pennsylvania are affected by wage levels in the Pearl River Delta. But how is it that a subsidy for cows can affect immigration? (The answer is that agricultural subsidies in Europe and the US reduce export earnings in developing countries, and thus income and employment levels, thereby increasing pressures for migration, legal or, more often, illegal.) Plans for your retirement can be affected by your employer’s need to reduce pensions in order to keep costs as low as its Chinese or Korean competitors (as General Motors has discovered).[59] In the European Union food standards require your morning boiled egg to be of particular color and shape. Worldwide, the food we eat, as well as the quality of the air we breathe, is more and more a function if not of internationally-imposed rules, then of internationally-propagated norms. Everything is connected.

It’s hard now to name one aspect of our contemporary existence that does not have an international aspect. Even things which were once thoroughly local — fashion, celebrity — are more and more international. Benetton or Louis Vuitton are as recognized on the streets of Johannesburg as they are in São Paulo.

Ease of travel and the vast disparity between life in some rich countries and everyone else has created vast flows of migration which are changing societies as fast as any social movement, even revolutions, in their history. Over 200 million people now live outside their country of origin, according to a recent UN survey, up 25% since 1990 (and doubtless accelerating). Global culture not only means that everyone knows Britney Spears or MTV. It also means that street gangs in Sierra Leone (and, in its earlier civil war, its murderous militias) emulate the culture — and the easy violence — of South Central Los Angeles. Our world is in flux.

This observation is now so widely accepted as to be utterly banal. But what is very odd about our globalized world of the twenty-first century is that we still use nineteenth and twentieth-century ways of arbitrating it. The diplomatic machinery and modes of thinking about international relations have hardly changed at all. “International relations” and “foreign affairs” are treated as separate discourses when in reality they are thoroughly intrinsic to — and inseparable from — everything else. Indeed, the separation into a discrete discourse has created an artificiality of thought both among the practitioners and those who study them.

At universities, students attend courses on “international relations” where they are taught theories — liberalism, neo-liberalism, realism — which attempt to give order to this maelstrom. In legislatures, discussion of foreign affairs is sequestered in special committees and debates which few attend, where “specialists” analyze the doings of Iran, Israel or Venezuela as if they were amoebas in a Petri dish (invariably essentialising of course). Meanwhile, rarely bothered by the attentions of those whom they are supposed to be serving, the diplomats, un-named and mostly un-scrutinized, go about their business.

As the international aspect of politics becomes more important, domestic politics has become ever more nugatory and trivial. In the West, the policy differences between political parties have shrunk as they converge around liberal-market policies. Denied meaty policy to argue over, politics focuses on personality (witness Italy’s 2006 parliamentary election) and individual credibility in delivering otherwise almost identical policy. Yet voters feel instinctively that big stuff is going on, and they’re right. Migration, globalization and terrorism have combined to create a deep sense of insecurity. These forces are of course at play all over the world, in China as well as South Africa. And we all need a politics that is able to come to terms with them.

At a theoretical level, we are confronted with Karl Popper’s deficit. Democracy works at the national level: the electorate provides the feedback to government (through elections and other means), thus enabling government to correct inevitably inaccurate policy (policy is inevitably inaccurate because no government can have perfect knowledge). This feedback system — democracy’s greatest virtue — does not function at the international level. Those affected by decisions made in international forums, or those affected in country B by the policies of country A, have no way to inform the decision-makers of the rightness or wrongness of their policies. There is no democracy in international affairs.

There are a number of ways to start to address this deficit, some of them radical, but none of them impractical.

First, and most simply, the discourse of diplomacy needs to be returned to earth. The pretentious and confusing terminologies of diplomacy must be simplified, and if possible, abandoned. When talking of globalization, it might be simpler to talk about the homogenization of global cultures, the liberalization of capital markets, the movement of labor, or whatever it is we mean by the term rather than one that is bandied about without specification. Instead of referring to WMD, we should talk about nuclear, biological or chemical weapons and their vastly different qualities and capabilities, rather than a word designed to confound and terrify.[60] The UN Security Council should refer to “private meetings” rather than “informal consultations of Council members”. And its public meetings should genuinely be public. The public is allowed to attend the legislatures of many democracies around the world; they should be allowed here too. Bureaucrats in places like the European Union must strive at all times to simplify the ludicrously arcane language of multilateral foreign policy machinery (CFSP is the EU’s common foreign and security policy, or GASP, its acronym in German; COREPER, the committee of permanent representatives where much of the real intra-EU bargaining is done).

Second, the world of diplomacy badly needs ventilation, or it may risk extinction (see below). A new non-government organization called Security Council Report[61] now publishes on the web detailed briefings and reports on past and future meetings of the UN Security Council. Its product is outstanding and very helpful to the many who are trying to understand the workings of that secretive organ. But it need not have taken an NGO to do this. The Council itself, and its large and generously-staffed Secretariat, could easily have agreed to provide such a service, which would help reinforce the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Council. The European Union and other major multilateral organs (the World Trade Organization, the African Union) should do the same if they too are not to be seen as closed, unrepresentative and thus illegitimate.

Most simply of all, these institutions should publish lists of which official does what. It is still absurdly difficult to telephone the UN or EU or WTO and speak to anyone with responsibility for any particular issue, from Palestine to banana imports. At the national level, foreign ministries should do likewise. In the British Foreign Office, the office directory is a classified document. This has the effect of preventing the ordinary public from contacting those who are making policy decisions in their name.

The veil of privilege and secrecy that surrounds international diplomacy should be lifted. There is nothing special about diplomacy. It requires no particular genius to practice. The doors of diplomacy are closed in part to obscure this truth. The deference shown to diplomats is no more necessary than the deference shown to ordinary government servants. The arcane nomenclatures of “Your Excellency”, “Minister Counselor” and other ornate titles, the diplomatic uniform, cockaded hats and ribbons worn by ambassadors at formal occasions, can be put into the museum displays where they belong with the other artifacts of previous centuries.

Third, more deliberate means of accountability need to be established. Diplomats should be open to scrutiny and held responsible for their decisions as anyone else. In Britain, the introduction of a Freedom of Information Act sent shudders around the diplomatic service. But in Britain, a very large amount of information is still concealed unnecessarily in the name of national security. Parliament debates foreign affairs in Foreign Office questions (known, obscurely, as “TOPS”) only once a month. It is a ludicrous spectacle, where the Foreign Secretary works through a long list of pre-submitted questions from MPs at a breakneck pace, covering issues of enormous subtlety and complexity (from Palestine to Zimbabwe) with the briefest possible answers. Even then, he or she doesn’t manage to answer all the questions. But at least the Foreign Secretary appears in Parliament, the US Secretary of State doesn’t do questions in the full Senate or House of Representatives.

At least in the US, ambassadors are quizzed by congressional committees before appointment (in Britain, there is no such system). But even here, the Senate and House are kept out of the inner business of the State Department and other agencies of international affairs. Somehow, everyone has grown to accept that it is not the public’s business.

In both America and Britain, the legislatures appoint committees to scrutinize foreign policy. In both countries, reflecting the snobbery and élitism of diplomacy itself, appointment to such a committee is reserved for the most senior and experienced senators and members of parliament (who tend immediately to mimic the pompous intonations of ambassadors and other “statesmen” in their commentaries). In the US, these committees are well-staffed and funded; in the UK, the Foreign Affairs Committee is so under-resourced that it can only manage to examine a few issues every year (it therefore tends to choose issues of meaningless generality like the “war on terrorism” or “globalization”), although its funds, happily for its members, do stretch to vital “information-gathering” visits (where the diplomats organizing them are careful to book expensive hotels and leave plenty of time for “shopping” in the programs). But in both countries their work is limited to the separated territory known as international relations.

If we acknowledge the reality that almost every policy is in some way about what’s going on in the rest of the world, the international element should be integrated both into government and its checks and balances, across the board. Instead, at the moment, it is separated and treated as a special discourse unto itself with its own special rules, words and traditions. Indeed, this élitism is a function of this separation. In order to validate an unjustifiable separation (and immunity from scrutiny), diplomats must constantly affirm their élite status.

Here’s the most radical suggestion. We should consider abolishing the separate cadre of diplomats altogether. When international communication and arbitration is ever more necessary, we should divest ourselves of diplomats.[62] There are ten good reasons why:

1. The existence of diplomats reaffirms the separated nature of diplomacy and international relations from other areas of policy, when in fact they are inextricably connected.

2. Diplomats tend to be generalists and unskilled in the complexities of the global issues, from trade to terrorism, which now dominate our world. (The meager two weeks I spent on induction training before starting work is very revealing in this respect.) Although I spent four and a half years reading intelligence on Iraq’s weapons and arguing about them with other diplomats, my knowledge was inferior to life-long experts.[63] On issues such as global warming, both the science and the policy are beyond the grasp of diplomats who may only be appointed for temporary periods to handle negotiation. On terrorism, I well remember my embarrassment listening to my then ambassador attempting at the UN General Assembly to overcome decades-long argument over the definition of terrorism by offering this designation: “If it looks like a terrorist, if it acts like a terrorist, if it smells like a terrorist, then it is a terrorist” (emphasis was his).

3. It is ridiculous to pretend that the wishes and needs of an entire country can be embodied in a single diplomat, or embassy, or ambassador. The idea that an individual can accurately prioritize or balance these requirements, especially in the absence of any scrutiny, is unjustified. This was conceivable in the eighteenth century when the international needs of a country were much simpler and fewer (and where, absent democracy, the populations had little choice but to accept it); it is inappropriate for the vastly-connected era we now live in.

4. We need instead to promote multiple links at multiple levels between governments, avoiding the narrowing and outdated structures of traditional diplomacy. In some ways this is already happening. (I was struck for instance during my posting in Germany in the early 1990s that the Chancellor refused to see ambassadors — he considered them irrelevant.) In Europe, domestic ministers do a great deal of business directly with one another through the European Union, avoiding the traditional embassies altogether (albeit through the creation of a whole new set of impenetrable multilateral machineries). Ministries of environment now increasingly handle discussion of environmental issues, including global warming or ozone depletion. As international aspects intrude onto domestic policy, domestic ministries are taking over the traditional preserves of the diplomats. This process could usefully be accelerated.

5. Likewise, diplomats on the ground have not proved very skillful at monitoring local political trends. The British embassy in Tehran failed to notice the emerging revolution in Iran in 1979. Despite the lessons from that episode (to his credit, the then British ambassador taught others how to avoid his mistakes[64]), the embassy again failed to predict the electoral victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. Why this happens is easy to see, and has little to do with the personal skill of those individuals concerned. Diplomats tend to be posted for short periods; usually only a minority are trained in local languages. Their need for comfort and, increasingly, security tends to place them in secure, expat enclaves where they have little contact with the “locals”. This is of course especially true in those countries least like our own (Pakistan, China) and where, arguably, we have the greatest need to understand (postings to such “difficult” posts tend to be shorter too). This task is therefore perhaps better performed by real country experts, fluent in local languages and steeped in local custom, than the temporarily-posted diplomat. Already, an NGO called the International Crisis Group[65] (ICG) is deploying such analysts in the trouble spots of the world. The ICG has also taken the radical step of employing local experts (ex-journalists, political scientists and the like) to interpret what’s going on. Thus, the ICG’s reports are often more sophisticated and better informed than the “internal political” telegrams I produced and read as a diplomat (even though the latter are often classified, and the former are available on the worldwide web). After the riots which shook Kosovo in 2004, I accompanied the UN Special Representative around the UN headquarters in New York to explain what had gone wrong. All of those whom we spoke to, including senior members of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) referred to the ICG report (produced by a Briton with years of regional experience and a local Kosovar) rather than the UN’s own reporting from the field. It was more objective (and critical of the UN) and simply better.

6. Diplomats have an existential interest in preserving the secretive traditions of diplomacy, which exclude outsiders, in order to maintain the mystique and status of their rôle. The more threatened by outside intrusion they become, the tighter they will close their doors. This tendency is already evident in the UN Security Council, where those who are resisting calls for more public meetings complain that publicity will drive the “real diplomacy” (i.e. the sort of cantankerous discussion described in chapters 3 and 8) out of these forums and into more private places. This argument is true but it is insufficient. What states want to keep secret they will, and they always have done.

7. The existence of diplomats tends to reaffirm the state-centric “realist” way of thinking about international relations. The diplomat is the international exponent of his state (not his government). This way of thinking accentuates and emphasizes difference by forcing the practitioners to define their positions in terms of nation-states and anachronistic and invented identities (see chapter 5 “Them and Us”). It also rests on and continually reinforces Hobbesian notions of how the world works, i.e. of perpetual chaos without the enforcing hand of the state. These ways of thinking are circular (the state provides security; there is no security without the state) and can exacerbate, not reduce, conflict (the concept of preemptive war stands as the preeminent example). To take one example, in the debate in the UN Security Council on sanctions on Iraq, difference between the diplomats was habitual (and bitter) to the extent that we could barely imagine agreeing. In 2001, we had to agree a “control list” of items to be prohibited for export to Iraq. Such was the technical complexity of the items concerned, the diplomats had to leave the negotiation to experts in dual-use goods and other military technology. To the diplomats’ great surprise, these experts were able quite easily to agree the list, over which the diplomats hitherto had argued for months. To them, it was relatively straightforward to agree what was potentially risky to export to Saddam’s Iraq and what not.

8. This state-centric “realist” way of thinking is inherently amoral, and forces its exponents, including diplomats like me, to abandon their own personal moral sense. In long-serving diplomats, the morality of the state tends to subsume entirely any personal moral sensibility (or submerge it to the point of invisibility). It is continually reinforced in the organs of diplomacy, such as the British Foreign Office, that the morality of the state, which is a form of immorality, is seen as superior to personal morality (raison d’état etc. etc.). This creates the possibility of bad, immoral policy such as sanctions on Iraq, or the Security Council’s treatment of the Western Sahara, which make perfect sense in the “realist” security-centered way of thinking, but very little moral sense in terms of minimizing human suffering or resolving disputes. Ordinary government servants, who lack the elevated status of diplomats, and who tend to be closer to the concerns of ordinary people, one hopes, are better immunized against this amoral sensibility.

9. While we are not about to get rid of the state, we should recognize the importance of, and give more weight to, the many other actors involved in international affairs. The existence of diplomats at the top of the pile tends to squeeze out these other actors, to the detriment of inclusive and thus effective policy-making. Governments like to think that they are in charge of world events. Diplomats exist, and have a strong self-interest, in reaffirming this solipsistic world view. Their dispatches and telegrams (even today, as you will see when they are eventually released) are full of grandiose statements about how this or that world problem might be solved (the omnipotent “we” again). This flatters the egos of the politicians whom they serve; it flatters their own egos. But they are wrong. Governments and diplomats are as much (if not more) impotent witnesses to world events as they are instigators. History suggests that even the ultimate preserve of government — war-making — has myriad and unpredictable antecedents and consequences. Governments are far from wholly in charge. The organization of government internationally and of international affairs generally should better reflect this reality.

We will still need embassies to organize ministers’ visits and look after distressed travelers who lose their passports (indeed, as tourism swells, we will doubtless need more). There’s no reason why embassies cannot still try to provide good on-the-ground analysis of what’s going on, despite their inevitable limitations (indeed, this need is all the greater as decision-making is concentrated in capitals and the remove from reality increases). But already in the European Union (EU), the embassies of other EU members are becoming like bus terminals for visiting delegations of home government servants and ministers as they visit their opposite numbers in ever-increasing numbers. Groups of businesspeople come and go, using the embassy as they would an exclusive club, to impress their customers and business contacts (government-favored businesses, notably the arms industry, tend mostly to benefit from this privilege). The ambassadors in such embassies, who have to put up with streams of official visitors using their residences for accommodation, have become glorified hotel managers, laying out the fancy crockery with tedious frequency.[66] The days of the professional diplomat as it once was conceptualized, the grand plenipotentiary representing in toto the political needs of his country in another state, are numbered if not already past.

10. Meanwhile, for the ordinary public, the self-serving élitism and fake-omnipotence of the world’s diplomats has created a comforting illusion: that they are in control, allowing the rest of us to get on with our lives. We are not entitled to this illusion. The pact of irresponsibility must end. We must correspondingly take more responsibility for our own international affairs. Our votes, and our behavior, have international consequences. Every action, whether buying fruit, employing a cleaner, or choosing where to take your holiday is international, and is, in its way, a form of diplomacy. Everyone is a diplomat.

For obvious reasons, commercial companies have been the first to adapt to this reality. Bosses of big banks and manufacturers now visit China far more often than do our politicians (and thus know much more about it). Multinationals have long ago transcended the bounds of national location and identity. Exxon Mobil has a large political department to monitor and negotiate with the many governments with whom the company has dealings. McDonalds and Google are effectively conducting their own diplomacy, such are the multiple effects (local, international, social, economic, esthetic, environmental) of their decisions. It was notable that during his 2006 visit to the US, Chinese President Hu Jintao visited Microsoft in Seattle before — and for longer than — he visited the Capitol. Watching the visit, I was struck by how Bill Gates squired the President around in the same manner an ambassador would have of old. Shareholders and consumers should be aware of this in their choices.

Some commentators on this trend, notably Thomas Friedman, argue that this massive commercial interaction is bound to have positive effects, that the internet for instance can only promote openness and free speech. Reality suggests that commerce and technology can be as ambiguous in their effects as anything else. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have all been accused by Amnesty International[67] of abetting censorship and repression in China by supplying equipment and adapting their search engines to block certain sites and, in Yahoo’s case, assisting the Chinese authorities in identifying on-line anti-government critics. In response, they have argued that no company alone can change Chinese law, by which they must abide. The solution is therefore obvious.[68]

These forces must be pointed in the right direction if they are to be for the good. Effective foreign policy, whether in promoting labor rights or environmental standards, now requires coalitions of actors — the private sector, civil society and government — acting in concert to be effective.[69] If foreign ministries are to be effective, even relevant, in the future, as propagators of policy and change they must consider how to organize such coalitions, and how to encompass, direct and inform these many different strands and effectors of policy.

The NGO Global Witness has been tracking how wars are fueled by the exploitation of natural resources — timber, diamonds — by unscrupulous governments and traders. Global Witness popularized the notion of “conflict diamonds”, whose extraction (often in conditions of dreadful cruelty) was controlled by warlords in West Africa (Liberia’s Charles Taylor being the most infamous example) but bought by international diamond trading companies and sold on the high street. The proceeds went to buy AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades which were then used in the vicious and destructive wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and elsewhere. Global Witness’s work has done much to highlight a connection that both stimulates and sustains conflict, and as a result, governments and, to a limited extent, the diamond trade itself are having to take action. There is a long way still to go towards global rules and norms to inhibit such trade. The fact that Global Witness is run on a shoestring (its founders raised their first funds by shaking collecting tins at underground stations) and funded by philanthropic foundations illustrates that its ideas are still outside the foreign policy mainstream.

The practice and process of diplomacy, then, needs to change into something much more diverse and eclectic, such that we perhaps shouldn’t give it a collective name — such as diplomacy — at all.

Beyond this transformation of diplomacy, there are other steps too, which involve a conscious abandonment of the state-centered thinking so intrinsic to the nature of international relations and diplomacy today. This touches on the substance, more than the process, of international relations. Here we must step into more idealist territory.

Cosmopolitanism dates from Greek society in the fourth century BC. A cosmopolitan is a citizen of the world — someone whose loyalties transcend a particular state or polity. As argued in more recent expositions,[70] cosmopolitanism embodies the idea that we have obligations to other human beings outside our nation, and that we must take seriously the ways in which people in different cultures choose to live. We may not agree with them, but we have to deal with them.

In a world of massive interaction, it seems we have little choice. In our world today, how the Russian government treats the Chechens may affect our safety riding the subway in London or New York City. Working conditions in Pakistan affect employment in Europe. Carbon emissions in Australia may endanger biodiversity in Sussex or Utah, or cause sea levels to rise in Bangladesh. Less selfishly, our emotions are touched by the suffering in Darfur.

Meanwhile, many of the things that most worry us, and undermine both our sense of well-being and our actual safety, do not fit into the conventional measurement of classical economics or theories of international relations. Our concern for the suffering of others, for instance, is not easily quantified,[71] and nor is our instinct for nature — a profound human characteristic that has no measure in economic theory but has been demonstrated in countless studies. There are things beyond measure, beyond calculation. No one calculating Britain’s or America’s interest in not intervening in Bosnia in the early 1990s would have considered their decision’s effect on the antipathy of Muslims in Egypt (or Leeds), sometimes many years later.

In the morass and confusion of forces at work in the twenty-first century, we need guideposts to steer our path. The intuitions and prejudices of less-connected eras are a help, but insufficient. As Tony Blair has said, we are looking at a world as an ever-changing kaleidoscope. As we are dazzled by its many colors and shapes, we still need criteria by which to make decisions — to guide us.

In contrast to the eclecticism I advocate for the future of diplomacy, we badly need singular if not to say universalist ideas of how to treat one another and arbitrate our global existence: common norms, if not common rules. Such universalism is naturally perilous. Many of our shared problems are classic “tragedies of the commons” where corrective action implies costs for the actor (such as a carbon tax), and where “free riding” is rewarded. Invoking singular standards immediately draws an accusation of the very essentialism I have earlier attacked.

Since Russia’s government bears no cost directly (in electoral terms) for brutality in Chechnya (even if New York City may), what motive does it have to change policy? Put simply, the problem bedeviling international policy is that those deciding it are very often not those affected by it.

Here, Popper might guide us once more. The realist, interests-based model of national foreign policy-making encourages competitive, short-term and ultimately counter-productive policy. Moreover, as Popper demonstrated, it is futile for any government, even on the well-trodden ground of domestic policy, to claim it knows what is right to do: knowledge is inevitably imperfect, so there must inevitably be error in policy-making. Instead, he proposed a simple criterion as the starting point for policy-making: the minimization of suffering. This is an inversion of the normal calculus of policymaking: what do we want? Popper argued it is impossible to know the sum of human wants, they are so varied and sometimes unknowable. Policymaking should therefore start at the other end.

This criterion does not give us specific guidance in each case — how should we minimize suffering in Darfur? — but it orients us on the aim and the starting-point of policy, rather than flailing around in a welter of differing objectives (“security”, “stability” “freedom” — to which the query is always raised, whose?). The details of any policy can only be worked out in the closest possible encounter with the facts, the reality, of any situation, avoiding as much as possible imposed intellectual models and metaphors, beyond this broad objective. It is also a universal objective, un-possessed by any one culture or religion, and therefore one on which the world community can, perhaps, agree. This is not to dispose of the law and mechanisms of human rights, development and the other motors for the betterment of humanity, but to try to regroup them in a new collective heading, to which all can agree. Our present discord needs a new consensus.

Even if such a common aim could be agreed, we would still need some kind of organization to deliver it. Sadly, our institutions for international cooperation, above all the UN, are in bad shape. The scandal of the oil-for-food program has undermined public confidence in the UN, already weakened by the routine criticism of the Right in the US, which is so skeptical of international law and collective action. My own experience working in a UN field mission confirmed that it remains an institution internally riven by favoritism and inefficiency[72] (I remember one senior member of the mission advising me that, if I wanted a career in the UN, to spend my time cultivating senior “friends” in the UN system rather than doing my job). Meanwhile, for many other countries outside the closed circle of the P5, the UN’s authority is weakened by the unrepresentativeness of the membership of its most powerful organ, the Security Council, and, as a result, the arbitrariness and injustice of many of its decisions (or lack of decisions). Its legal and moral authority is thus much the less.

Any reform must therefore tackle these twin problems. The non-western world tends to suspect “management reform” as camouflage for US attempts to weaken the UN (a suspicion fed by the appointment of a US ambassador to the UN who is famously hostile to it) when such reform is urgently necessary. The UN leadership (the Secretary-General and others) claim that much as they wish to reform, they cannot without the membership’s consent (when in fact there is much that they could do internally without seeking political agreement). Reform needs to be packaged, in a new compact (maybe a new San Francisco conference, like the one where the UN was founded), with expansion of the Council membership and constitutional reform of the charter. This might address the sensible conclusions of the Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel, whose recommendations, inter alia to update international law on the use of force, languish unimplemented.

Security Council reform is famously difficult, and has failed at several attempts, mainly because the candidates for membership cannot agree who should join (and for every candidate there is an equally hostile “anti-candidate” who wishes to see them fail, namely India (opposed by Pakistan), Germany (Italy), Japan (China) etc.) and because of the lack of enthusiasm from the P5, who, while often mouthing support for expansion, quietly prefer the privileges of the status quo (their veto power). They must realize that the erosion of the authority of the UN is already the result of this complacency.

As the UN’s Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown has argued,[73] the US recognizes, but all too rarely acknowledges publicly, that it is a major beneficiary of the UN in all kinds of ways (cut-price peacekeeping for one, in places where the US does not wish to send its own troops). More broadly, all democracies have an interest in maintaining the international rule of law: without it, we’re in the jungle. Do we want a world where communist (if that’s the right word) China feels untrammeled by global rules, any more than it does already?

But, as I have argued, the crisis of diplomatic legitimacy has deeper roots than the complaints of mere governments. Our problems are global and we need a global politics to deal with them. The UN is an organization of governments, and as it is currently constituted, it can never become a democratic organ. Even if every member state were democratic, it would still entail the problem of all inter-governmental bodies, namely that it operates at several removes from the reality of those whose lives it arbitrates. Those negotiating its policy would inevitably be required to pay more heed to the needs of other governments than the people affected by the policy. They must, if they are to reach decisions on anything.

Some global conferences — on the environment, and trade — have opened forums for NGOs to participate, albeit with no decision-making power. But NGOs have their own crisis of legitimacy too — whom do they represent? Mass membership organizations (Greenpeace, Amnesty International) have an answer to this challenge, but others do not or they represent positions which are not discussed with their memberships: they are far from democratic. In any case, no government will ever be willing to give NGOs, however democratic, equal influence on policy-making.

Often these NGOs have evolved and express themselves as single-issue campaigns — to ban landmines, or to end poverty. No one can deny the importance of these causes. But they cannot admit the complexity and interlinkage of contemporary problems. The Live 8 campaign was a compelling example of a widely-shared concern expressed as an all-too-simple solution. The multiple dimensions of any serious policy challenge, from ending poverty to tackling terrorism, lend themselves poorly to a narrowly-based campaign. Sending a text message “to the G8” does not amount to real political engagement.

We also must confront Isaiah Berlin’s assumption, which is all the more true in a diverse and complex world, that no priority can always be absolute. Politics is a business of tradeoffs and compromise, where human needs and desires must sometimes yield to one another. This is the essence of good politics — the discussion, the choosing, the decisions — tested against democratic scrutiny. In short, we need a global politics.

Global movements address single issues. Only global political parties can begin to deal with the complex. Only parties, elected in some way, can claim the fullest legitimacy to speak for people, a problem NGOs will always be challenged by. Global political parties may seem hopelessly utopian, but the idea is unavoidably logical. Only parties can legitimately claim to represent those who choose them, or pay their membership dues. Only a global politics can lift us above the zero-sum games of governments short-sightedly arbitrating their “interests” in international forums.

This is not to advocate the immediate establishment of a world parliament. Institutions cannot simply be invented to solve a problem. They have to evolve, and become accepted as legitimate. The European Parliament has suffered from this very problem since its inception: founded as the élite’s answer to the problem of the “democratic deficit” of the European Community (as it was then known), it has struggled for popular acceptance, not helped by the gross extravagance of its procedures and members. Institutions should be wanted, not designed.

A start might be made with the evolution of campaigns into parties. And as they evolve, a chamber might be established to sit alongside the General Assembly of the UN:[74] not (yet) a parliament, but an elected body of individuals, which would offer advisory resolutions on topics under discussion at the Council and GA. It would not have power to decide (this would be too much to ask): as the European Parliament has shown, you do not create legitimate or popular institutions by simply giving them powers; rather, they must develop and become accepted as legitimate first. Elections to this body must be democratic — thus encouraging democracy around the world — and proportional to population in order to avoid the imbalance of the General Assembly, where small countries outnumber the votes of the large, though they are together much smaller in population.

To avoid the grotesque costs (and resulting unpopularity) of the European Parliament, the new body might meet mostly on-line, by video-conference, with only occasional formal meetings in rotating cities, thereby also avoiding the creation of a new cadre of parasitical expatriates located in some expensive international capital. This chamber might have a limited life, ten years perhaps, to see whether it can become a respected and influential forum for international discussion. If it passes the test, a further international conference might grant it initial and limited powers (perhaps starting with co-decision on the UN budget), which might accrete as time goes on (it should be a long process). A massive leap of the imagination, for sure, but a dose of idealism is perhaps what we need right now.

This book has criticized the unwarranted and unscrutinized power of unelected officials who deal — often badly — with ever more of our collective business. The only long-term answer is for elected representatives to take their place. It is odd that this idea should seem today so far-fetched, when our shared problems so urgently demand wise collective decisions by actors we regard and accept as legitimate. The alternative is more bad decision-making, institutions that will continually struggle for authority and effect, and, in parallel, many people whose problems are not addressed, who feel disenfranchized, and thus disposed to violence to air their grievances. Framed this way, the direction we should travel is obvious.

As I end this book, I find myself again offering grandiose solutions to other people’s problems, much as I did as a diplomat. Perhaps I should say simply this. I found that traditional diplomacy — the way the world’s business is done — as I practiced it in the British foreign service, left me, in the old sense of the word, “demoralized” — bereft of my own principles and sense of meaning. The system I helped to manage and defend seemed to me out of kilter with the world’s reality, and what was most important to me. In working for other countries and peoples, and getting to know their needs first rather than imposing “our” chosen solutions (invariably without consulting them), I have found more meaning and value than the exposition of “our” desires, which were in practice often invented, ever did. I can’t offer it as an example for everyone: I wouldn’t assume to know what they are like. But it worked for me.