In December 2010, Foreign Secretary William Hague quietly launched a series of reforms at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) designed to reassert Britain’s “diplomatic excellence.” Observing a “reduction of this country’s influence in the world,” Hague vowed to “transform” the FCO by projecting the message that “Britain is open for business” (cited in Coughlin and Porter 2010). Diplomatic Excellence, which by mid-2011 had become the preferred name for an entire programme of reforms culminating in the creation of a new Diplomatic Academy, signified “a renewed emphasis on policy creativity, on in depth knowledge of other nations, on geographic and linguistic expertise and the enhancement of traditional diplomatic skills in a manner suitable for the modern world” (Hague 2011). He argued,
We will embark on a substantial reinvigoration of the diplomatic network to make it ready for the twenty-first century; to expand our connections with the emerging powers of the world, and to signal that where Britain was retreating it is now advancing. (Hague 2011)
Diplomatic Excellence may be placed in a recent tradition of efforts to reshape Britain’s diplomatic network for the twenty-first century. For example, 1995s Fundamental Expenditure Review (FER) also outlined the reforms necessary for a modern diplomatic network capable of successfully promoting “the influence and prestige of the UK” in the twenty-first century (FCO 1995: 7). It argued that the FCO needed to think of itself as a service provider with clearly communicated aims and objectives, and that it needed to work more effectively, provide better value for money, respond to changing demands and maintain a world-class foreign service. All of this needed to be done in the context of substantial savings, just as Hague demanded 15 years later.
In fact, the 20-year period between the FER of 1995 and the completion of Diplomatic Excellence in 2015 signifies a remarkable series of efforts to transform the FCO. These include Robin Cook’s (1997) “Mission Statement,” the internal “Foresight Report” drafted by the FCO’s disillusioned younger generation (FCO 2000), Jack Straw’s “International Priorities” (FCO 2003) and “Active Diplomacy for a Changing World” (FCO 2006), David Miliband’s “Strategic Framework for the FCO” (FCO 2008), and Hague’s “Structural Reform Plan” (FCO 2011), which lay the grounds for Diplomatic Excellence. Some of these reforms sought to make the FCO more diverse in terms of its employees’ ethnicity, gender and education; others looked to remould the geographical make-up of the network; while others fit within the more general context of the “new institutionalism” or “new public management” techniques that sought to rationalise management practices across the civil service (Hall 2013) (Table 1.1).
Table 1.1
Selected FCO reform initiatives
Reform initiative | Year | Foreign secretary |
|---|---|---|
Fundamental Expenditure Review | 1995 | Malcolm Rifkind |
Mission Statement | 1997 | Robin Cook |
Foresight | 2000 | Robin Cook |
International Priorities | 2003 | Jack Straw |
Active Diplomacy for a Changing World | 2006 | Jack Straw |
Strategic Framework | 2008 | David Miliband |
Structural Reform Plan/Diplomatic Excellence | 2010–11 | William Hague |
Future FCO | 2016 | Philip Hammond |
In this book, I propose an alternative interpretation of the FCO’s transformation between 1995 and 2015. The argument pursued here is that these reforms most fundamentally reflect the re-imagining of British diplomacy in light of the digital communication revolution. This is not to say that other interpretations are incorrect, but rather that they may be seen as symptoms of a more central preoccupation with the evolving communicative basis for diplomacy. A more diverse make-up of staff creates more varied perspectives, broader stakeholder communities and, subsequently, better policy formation and presentation; a rationalised network focuses the ability to collect and distribute knowledge, galvanises inter-connectivity, and improves the quality, speed and distribution of policy decisions; new management practices improve communication within the organisation so that it can better identify, follow and communicate its priorities. Reform of the FCO has at its most profound level been about adapting to the potential of twenty-first-century communication techniques and technologies in order to conduct its work more effectively.
The FCO has remained a relatively obscure and misunderstood institution throughout this period. With the decline of diplomatic correspondents, much of the day-to-day insight behind the scenes of foreign ministries and diplomatic posts has disappeared from foreign policy news coverage. Former Daily Mail foreign correspondent John Dickie’s book The New Mandarins (2004) remains the most recent in-depth analysis of the cultural changes at the FCO at the turn of the millennium, and there are many “insider” memoirs and the like that offer a window into how foreign policy works from the perspective of a single diplomat. However, there has not yet been a detailed, systematic academic study of reforms in the contemporary period and how they have collectively reinvigorated British diplomacy. This book will therefore be of interest to anybody who wishes to better understand how and why the FCO and the broader conduct of British diplomacy is changing in the early twenty-first century, whether as policymakers and advisors, students and researchers, foreign policy or communication specialists, current or future employees, taxpayers, collaborators or rivals. The particular innovation of this study is to link institutional reform to the ability of the organisation to communicate, by integrating debates about the future direction of the FCO into discussions of diplomatic influence, public and digital diplomacy and, more recently, soft power. I argue here that it is the confluence of digitisation and broadened public participation in foreign affairs that has forced the FCO to rethink its role and modus operandi, and thus that this case forces us to rethink our most basic assumptions about how diplomacy, public diplomacy, digital diplomacy, cultural diplomacy, and soft power interact.
Diplomacy for the Digital Age
The 20-year period under consideration provides two bookends in contemporary diplomatic communication history. The FCO created its first website in 1995. In these early days, the belief was that the FCO Daily Bulletin, a full-text compilation of press releases, briefings and ministerial engagements released at 12 pm every day, would revolutionise the relationship between the FCO, opinion leaders and the general public by cutting out the middleman: the print media. That same year, the FER made use of the term public diplomacy for the first time in the FCO policy context, on the understanding that the website represented the future of its information, news and culture activities in the digital era. FER recommended public diplomacy’s inclusion in the FCO’s corporate objectives and went on to define the public part of diplomacy as a “core business” (FCO 1995: 44). Public diplomacy discourse was therefore a signpost pointing to the future mandate and sites of diplomatic practice in the twenty-first century, in distinction to earlier uses of the term associated with the US context.
Two years later, Cook (1997) argued for a “people’s diplomacy to increase respect, understanding and goodwill for Britain,” while Foresight saw public diplomacy as a “core activity” through which the FCO could engage in “two-way flows of information and ideas” with the outside world (FCO 2000: 80, 83). Between these two reports, a series of workshops, publications and committees on Britain’s overseas image (collectively summarised in the tabloids as Cool Britannia) wielded tremendous influence upon how the FCO and its partners in overseas promotion, the British Council (BC) and BBC World Service (BBCWS), saw their roles. Major communication and influence campaigns were commissioned by the FCO and its posts, drawing together the latest thinking on nation brands, marketing and strategic communication to project a more modern image of Britain. Maintaining and projecting a coordinated public profile was increasingly seen as the key to sustained national influence.
The impact of new communication techniques upon the core business of diplomacy quickly moved out of the realm of branding and image, and became part and parcel of policy formation as well as presentation. In the aftermath of 9/11, Jack Straw demanded that “all our Posts see public diplomacy as a central task” (FCO 2003: 51), and convened the Wilton (2002) and Carter Reviews (2005) to investigate how the FCO, BC and other public diplomacy organisations sought to influence foreign citizens in support of the Government’s foreign policy goals. The FCO created a Public Diplomacy Strategy Board (PDSB) to oversee how public diplomacy was deployed across the diplomatic network, but it was incapable of resolving institutional differences. By 2006, the role of the FCO’s staff was defined as supporting “the UK’s strategic priorities through communication, advocacy and engagement with targeted audiences, including key individuals, civil society and community groups and the media” (FCO 2006: 47). The development of techniques for persuasive engagement with these key public groups was considered essential to resolving global challenges. This was supported by a new Public Diplomacy Board (PDB) with greater “clout” and a clearer mandate that ran a series of pilot programmes aimed at changing the way the FCO ran its diplomatic campaigns.
The next wave of reforms instigated by Miliband involved restructuring the Communication Directorate to ensure “genuine engagement. More and more, we need to bring thinking and ideas from outside the FCO into our policy-making processes to create joint solutions, and to work with others to deliver these solutions” (FCO 2008: 96). Miliband saw diplomats as campaigners in the public sphere, capable of drawing upon all tools at their disposal to achieve results. By the end of the Labour mandate in 2010, the communications revolution had effectively been institutionalised into the diplomatic apparatus, as was demonstrated by the major internal change programme “Making Communication Mainstream....