Ministry Statements & Speeches:
Your Worship the Mayor, Deputy Vice Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen. Kia ora tatou. Good evening.
Thank you for inviting me to open the 2016 Otago Foreign Policy School.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has for many years supported the School as an important annual forum for fostering debate on international issues. And our investment goes beyond mere dollars and cents: a good number of our new foreign policy officers are amongst this year’s participants and some of our communications team will present to you tomorrow.
To kick things off I want this evening to offer some thoughts about diplomacy in a digital world. But before exploring that theme, and what it might mean for New Zealand, I want briefly to look at the broader context within which the discussion sits.
International context
The Government’s priorities are clear: to build a more competitive and productive economy; responsibly to manage the Government’s finances; to deliver better public services to New Zealanders; and to support the rebuilding of Christchurch.
Upon these bones the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of Trade have put some flesh, asking the Ministry over the coming year to place greater emphasis on trade and economic opportunities, including with some new partners; to strengthen our traditional partnerships; to place a higher priority on our relationships in the Asia-Pacific region; to make our aid programme more effective and more focused on the Pacific region; and to invest in the multilateral institutions that support our wider objectives.
This flesh and bone represents a Government agenda which for this Ministry is internationalist in its character.
The Prime Minister’s recent speech to the NZIIA made that clear. The future he articulated for New Zealand was based on us being an open, outward-facing country. Fortress New Zealand simply doesn’t work. Trade, investment and migration make New Zealand a better place. We have worked hard to build a reputation as a solid, considered and consistent international voice. In short, the Government’s vision for New Zealand is of a more open, more confident, more integrated and more prosperous country that plays its part on the international stage.
As to what that international stage looks like, we need to weigh the future with a realistic eye.
On one side, global inter-connectedness is increasing, driven by trade and investment, people-to-people links, and the emergence of something resembling a global popular culture. The Paris CoP showed that it is possible for the international community as a whole to favour collective action when the stakes are high enough. And the headline risk of significant inter-state conflict is perhaps as low as it has ever been.
On the other side, major power relationships are in transition. Global rules-based architecture, rooted in values sympathetic to New Zealand’s interests, is in need of renovation. Unregulated people flows are putting states, and in some cases legitimacy, under pressure, as are the threats posed by non-state actors. Competition in the global commons is leading to increased tension and risk. Some regions are troubled by states that are too weak, others by states that are too strong.
I am not attempting anything sophisticated here. Rather, and forgive the mixing of metaphors, I am making the point that international seas are looking higher and smaller corks are at greater risk of being bounced around.
It is up to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to try and reduce the amplitude of the waves, and the bounce.
The Ministry’s objective
The purpose of the Ministry is both simple and clear: we act in the world to make New Zealanders safer and more prosperous.
New Zealand and New Zealanders are at the heart of what we do. It is true that we can, must and do help people in our region and the wider world, but I am in no doubt that our first duty is directly and indirectly to advance the interests of this country and those who live here.
In acting, we work across the Ministry, with state sector colleagues, with our wider constituency, and with partner governments.
By representing New Zealand in the world we leverage what no other entity in the country has: a global network, based on global connections at all levels, safeguarded by international law, able to speak with an authoritative voice, and led by individuals who are formally charged with representing the state.
In seeking to make New Zealanders safer we not only deliver consular services, we also provide meaningful information intelligently assessed, we identify and defuse points of conflict, we pick international trends and position New Zealand to benefit from them, we reinforce good stewardship of the global commons, and we operate at that point of intersection between domestic and international risk.
And in seeking to make New Zealanders more prosperous, we negotiate market access for New Zealand firms, we defend and advance our trade interests at and behind international borders, we build and support the international rules-based trading system, and we bring an international perspective to the domestic economic debate.
It is, moreover, our duty to take both the four and the forty year perspective. That being so, and given the need to reduce amplitude, it is clear that the best way for us to advance New Zealand’s interests is by adopting a balanced strategy.
New Zealand will benefit from building and sustaining effective international architecture which magnifies our weight and influence; from reinforcing international rules which advance our national values and protect our national interests; from leveraging a range of new and old relationships across all regions; and by diversifying our trade (because we have been in an alternate trade universe before and there wasn’t much warmth when the sun disappeared).
This kind of balanced strategy is much more than merely fostering good relationships. A good relationship is a cheap metric if the only reason it is good is because we are asking nothing of it. The reality is that we will best navigate a complex world if we are confident in this country’s values, have a sharp eye to our national interests, and coolly calculate how the deployment of our marginal effort will best add to our national stock of prosperity and safety.
Diplomacy in an information-saturated world
Prosecuting a balanced strategy so as to reduce amplitude has become more challenging in an international environment where the nature, volume and transmission of information continues to change at pace.
Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819 entered into a contract with the Sultan of Johore for the sale of the island of Singapore to the East India Company. No British government can claim to have taken part in that founding moment “except by grudgingly assenting to what had been done, almost without their knowledge, and entirely against their wishes”.
Those days have gone.
Lines of communication between states are now many and varied. BBC and CNN and twitter outpace diplomatic reporting. And while diplomatic channels remain the official lines of communication between states, and foreign ministries remain the government’s formal and expert advisers on foreign policy, they are now only one source of information on international issues.
I do not regret this passing of old familiarities. Monopolies make for laziness. Analysis and judgement are enhanced by contestability. Public trust and confidence needs to be earned not claimed. And in any event: diplomats are not journalists. Both professions might seek to understand, but the primary purpose of my role is to leverage information for national advantage.
Moreover, just as the communication revolution can be used for ill - ISIL publishes upwards of 100,000 tweets a day as part of its recruitment drive – so too it can be used for good.
The 2007 saffron revolution in Myanmar was built and sustained through digital network technologies, as citizen journalists flooded cyberspace with images and videos of monks leading large, peaceful demonstrations against the government. The world then watched as the government cracked down on the demonstrators, generating an international response.
We therefore live in an age where information is a commodity, freely traded in a global market place. We should perhaps worry more than we do about the accuracy of some of that information, about the risks as well as the advantages of transparency, about the erosion of personal privacy, about quantity driving out quality, about privileging speed of delivery over rigour of analysis. But that is the nature of the vibrant information bazaar in which we now live: some stalls are better than others, and some traders are more scrupulous and some less.
For the discerning buyer, however, there is value to be found. And that value can, assuming good will, enrich our national discussions on things that matter.
New Zealand’s digital diplomacy
The Ministry of Foreign and Affairs and Trade is increasingly using social media. But our use is not indiscriminate. New Zealand has long favoured the benefits of modest and moderate collaboration, trying always to come down on the side of common sense and reasonableness, and being sceptical of megaphone diplomacy.
My own view, therefore, is that diplomacy, when it matters most, is often practiced as a private art and not as public theatre. But I am also a realist: the Ministry’s digital footprint and use of social media amplifies our soft power, provides new means to engage an international audience, and can be a powerful way of opening us to different perspectives and giving us pause for thought.
Our UN Twitter account with over 8,000 followers, is one of the most connected and influential in the UN, putting us in the same category of connection as the US, Germany, France, and the EU.
Helen Clark’s social media activity spreads across a number of platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Instagram. In the short time she has been a candidate for the role of United Nations Secretary-General she has gathered over 10,000 followers on Twitter. She is one of a small number of world leaders prepared to take on Snapchat, in which she is gaining a strong following. Most importantly she engages with people online, answering questions personally – even the difficult ones.
As well as our official MFAT twitter account, across our network we have 35 Facebook Pages and over 30 Twitter accounts. In any one week we have close to 2,000 interactions with our network of followers.
And our social media presence also provides immediate, practical value in the provision of consular assistance and travel advice to New Zealand across the globe. In the three months since we have taken SafeTravel – our official advice to New Zealanders travelling overseas – to Facebook, we have attracted over 3,000 followers regularly checking in with us. The role of the diplomat: harnessing tools both new and traditional
Given all of this, you might ask why, in an age characterised by Skype, Twitter and cheaper international travel, making New Zealanders safer and more prosperous requires a foreign service with a global presence.
A basic answer is that formal relations between states, in times of ease but especially in times of tension, benefit from having mutually recognised and respected transmission mechanisms (Embassies and High Commissions), rules (starting, but by no means ending, with the Vienna Convention), norms (the skilled plying of a trade) and representatives who can authoritatively represent the state, negotiate on its behalf, and commit the state to formal undertakings (Ambassadors and High Commissioners).
A more textured answer is that our national interests are best advanced if our negotiating partners trust us, and trust is founded in relationships, and relationships require familiarity (if not always mutual understanding), and familiarity requires a continuity of presence and a constancy of behaviour.
Taking these two answers together, it might be said that diplomacy is the application of intelligence and tact to the conduct of official relations between Governments (as said by Satow). Or you might prefer Napoleon, who said that diplomacy is the police in grand costume. Either way it is a personal art as much as it is a professional science, and as such best conducted face to face.
And having people who understand the culture of the receiving state, who can identify even the smallest fragment of shared interest, and who can leverage such fragments into something bigger is also useful – and these are not things easily or enduringly achieved by sporadic and ‘light touch’ contact from a distance.
Diplomat and social media practitioner par excellence Tom Fletcher has suggested that the “ideal” ambassador of the future will be a “lobbyist, leader, communicator, pioneer, entrepreneur, activist, campaigner, advocate” – and not a career diplomat.
It may not surprise you to learn that I take a somewhat different view. And not just out of narrow self-interest.
I would argue that a career diplomat is already all of those things – and more.
I would also argue that the best of our diplomatic skills are grown over time, and that while my own Ministry is encouragingly a more open and porous organisation than ever before, there is something to be said about recognising people who have spent a professional lifetime understanding at a deep level the sometimes coded norms, rules and practices of international engagement.
As we continue to grow such people I completely accept that the digital world in which we live and the prevalence of social media is not only a professional reality but also an important means by which we can speak - and listen and learn.
But as Douglas Hurd, a former UK Foreign Secretary, put it, the basic methods of diplomacy will continue to hold true in this digital world:
- To listen as carefully as you speak;
- To speak from a background of knowledge;
- To study the character, the background and motives of those with whom you deal;
- To form your own judgement of your interlocutor rather than accept automatically the judgement of others;
- To practise courtesy and patience – unless you decide that harsh words and impatience will help you to your objective;
- To store clearly in your mind your understanding of what that objective is;
- To calculate how much of what in that objective you can abandon in discussion to achieve what is essential; and to explain clearly and truthfully before and after your discussion what you have done and why.
Or as I would put it, even in the world of digital diplomacy and social media there is not much that is new under the sun, but that is only helpful if you have a memory that spans beyond one day.
Thank you