A hierarchic structure and resistance to change were defining characteristics throughout my tenure. At a time of organizational flattening, there are today as many levels in the corporate structure as there were when I started out in In this rigid, cloistered environment, process inevitably dwarfs substance. Dissent is discouraged — often with a vengeance — risk averted, unquestioning loyalty and faithful service rewarded. A focus on looking inward rather than looking out means that ideas are often judged more on their provenance than their quality.
Unless very senior officials are involved, failure is not treated as a learning experience. In contrast, blessing the received wisdom and running with the herd, often under the guise of team playing, leads reliably to advancement. The full story may never be told — with so many parties implicated there is no appetite for a searching retrospective — but it is clear that by any reasonable measure, the objectives of the mission were not achieved.
Books will never be written about the enduring legacy of the Kandahar PRT, or the innovative leadership displayed by Canada in pursuing alternatives to defence-dominated counterinsurgency and pacification. In such a militarized environment, insecurity thrived and diplomacy was near impossible. Scarce resources were diverted, self-service rampant, and criticism, for instance concerning the handling of Afghan detainees, was blatantly stonewalled. We certainly live with the results.
Finally, it is often remarked that some large organizations have a tendency to bend, fold and even mutilate those within them. While it is quite possible that there is something inherently twisted about bureaucracies in general, I believe that this observation is particularly apt in reference to foreign ministries. Long service and an insular culture result frequently in employees taking on the values, voice and affectations of the institution.
A new narrative is needed, as is an improved prescription for a smarter, faster, more supple approach to the way we work. Happily, there are many items on the positive side of the ledger. The Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers has made enormous strides, and now clearly serves the interests of its membership rather than those of management. Salaries, benefits, and many of the terms and conditions of foreign service have improved markedly as a result.
Fascinating issues and smart people abound. And the opportunities to travel, live, work, and represent Canada abroad are priceless. It was all of this, and more, that kept me coming back for three decades. As we move inexorably into the messy, dynamic, asymmetrical world order that is heteropolarity , governments will need diplomacy — and diplomats — more than ever.
There simply are no military solutions to the vexing range of transnational issues that constitute the globalization threat set. To address these sorts of challenges, complex balancing, knowledge-based problem-solving, and genuine dialogue remain the best tools in the shed. Tempus fugit: I hope a new generation of Canadian diplomats outperforms my own — we need it.
Get the latest from Open Canada straight to your inbox! Canada's Foreign Policy. By: Daryl Copeland. A burning platform London cabbies are a great source of received wisdom.
Rethinking security Diplomacy is crucial to running our world, but it is in crisis. Greasing the skids… Prior to the current round of reductions, more people were finally being moved into the field — which was clearly needed.
Continuous learning? Within months, student numbers had fallen dramatically, with government figures released in early revealing the number of Indians applying for student visas to Australia had fallen nearly 50 percent. Private government-purchased polling seen by the author also revealed Indian public opinion towards Australia had plummeted dramatically in key areas.
The Australian federal government responded in the same way many governments might. In June , it ordered the National Security Adviser to lead a taskforce examining the attacks. But it was not until early that it had mobilized a comprehensive national response and by then the damage had been done.
It required urgent action for which governments and foreign ministries at present are, mostly, wholly unprepared. When a similar event happened in April , in which a Chinese student was assaulted on a train, Australia responded differently. The student posted a message about the attack on the Chinese social media platform Weibo immediately following the incident, which was quickly reposted more than 10, times. In other instances, the inflammatory use of connection technologies has resulted in deaths.
Next, he did a short interview on CNN, and after that, on July 30, the National Association of Evangelicals, one of the largest collections of such churches, denounced the event and urged Jones to call it off. Still, the stunt caused little commotion domestically, even as senior officials within the FBI, the State Department and U. Crowley said Friday. Other pastors had burned Korans before and posted video on YouTube.
Another lens this controversy was being analysed through was the response to the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper in Indeed the story spread and the consequences on the ground were very real.
Stirred up by three angry mullahs who urged them to avenge the burning of a Koran at a Florida church, thousands of protesters on Friday overran the compound of the United Nations in this northern Afghan city, killing at least 12 people, Afghan and United Nations officials said. In other cases, these events can seem fleeting, doing limited brand damage. However, when there is the perception of a pattern as with the attacks on Indian students or, say, U. For democracies like the United States, responding to some of these crises can be challenging, especially when they involve fundamental freedoms.
When an amateur video attacking Islam was posted online and began to attract attention in September , the U. Embassy in Cairo issued the following statement on its website in an apparent effort to defuse escalating tensions:. The United States Embassy in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims—as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.
Parts of the statement were also tweeted. When protestors subsequently breached the Embassy compound in Cairo later, in Libya, four U. Because information now has the potential to spread so rapidly, the facts are often ambiguous and can be out of direct government control, the response needed by governments is not fact-finding although that is important in the medium term but crisis public relations.
And it is government-led public relations campaigns that need to account for the changes in the way people are communicating and the power of networks. That was already a larger direct reach than the daily subscriber base of the ten largest newspapers in the United States combined although that is not to suggest influence levels or readership equated.
By early August, it had nearly doubled, approaching 15 million. There is quite a bit of nuance to these big-picture numbers. Foremost is the fact that, like any mass medium, not everyone is receiving your message, and in the case of social media probably only a very small proportion.
Facebook is currently the dominant mass reach tool see table with around 13 million fans across nearly pages. Together these four sites account for a little under eight million of these 13 million Facebook fans—with 49 percent of the audience under 24 years of age.
The top ten countries where fans come from are generally non-English speaking meaning content is pitched at a basic level of English literacy. Part of this growth in other sites is explained by a campaign IIP ran, which aimed to help 20 U. There are also several other large Facebook and Twitter feeds see tables below , although eight of the 15 largest Facebook pages and four of the 15 largest Twitter feeds are operated out of Washington see charts showing all sites by region and top 15 tables.
It is also worth noting that these figures exclude other social and digital means of engagement that U. Pictured left is the bottom of the email signature block used by the U. Embassy in New Zealand, which offers a host of ways to engage. The Department maintains a list containing many of these official accounts on its official Facebook site.
Moreover, missions like the U. Embassy in China have had considerable success using Chinese social media platforms with over , Weibo followers and , QQ followers. Several broad categories are sketched out below.
The messages from Public Affairs aim to be the official line and to deal with breaking news. Enormous care is put into ensuring messages accord with official U. This internationally-facing aspect of its work has a public diplomacy component. Our Ambassador to Turkey Francis J. Ricciardone, Jr. Social media offered us a way to do that in real time with much broader reach than we could ever hope for with traditional shoe leather public diplomacy. As a vehicle for providing the world with quick, official lines from the State Department, social media is excellently suited.
It allows State to clarify or push out official lines without the need to organize and host a press conference, as well as to broadcast a wide range of relatively minor events and messages.
Embassy in Antananarivo. The range of platforms managed by Public Affairs also provides considerable flexibility in the way State can respond; for example, in a sentence or two on Twitter, by a video statement on YouTube, or more informally on the blog. And while this report did not include an analysis of the followers, it is likely they include a host of important influencers from around the world, who provide State through their social media connections with far ranging reach.
In this way, it is not always possible to assess the impact of social media platforms by the quantity of followers alone. Social media accounts run by U. With regard to site content, public diplomacy staff members are engaging in a balancing act.
They know they are supposed to focus on the MSRP, but they fear that too great an emphasis on serious issues will make the site heavy, boring, and unable to attract an audience. Some have developed lighter, more creative content, reasoning that if their MSRP goal is to reach a younger audience, anything they do to achieve this automatically falls under the MSRP. Collectively, these platforms reach a large audience, with the single largest embassy account, the U.
Social media is also playing an increasingly important role in consular affairs. It is being used to provide foreign publics with U. This is among the most important topics for many embassies on social media. It draws in big audiences and has a cost saving objective by getting people prepared before they visit a visa officer. In general, however, consular issues are yet to generate the same level of innovative flair State has exhibited elsewhere. Issue Areas Diplomacy, on the one hand, and regional and global governance, on the other, are inextricably intertwined.
Methods The multiplication of actors and issue areas also changes the ways diplomats do their work. Tags public diplomacy globalization reforms diplomacy digitization 21st century. Digital Diplomacy and International Organizations. March 11, Digital Diplomacy in the Time of the Coronavirus Pandemic. March 31, January 17, Diplomacy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. October 31, May 21, The Digital Diplomacy Bibliography. Peoplomacy vs. Diplomacy: The Diplomatic Evolution.
By Kwang-jin Choi Blog. By Alexander Buhmann Blog. Through cultural exchanges and other activities, these countries can also enable the people of target countries to learn more about implementing their culture, thus creating conditions for the production of attractive effects. In addition, if the function of public diplomacy is to change the behaviour of the government of the target country, then such a function lacks particularity.
The ultimate goal of all diplomacy is to pursue changes in the behaviour of the target government. As just one of many diplomatic tasks, however, public diplomacy obviously needs its own unique goals and functions. From the perspective of the uniqueness of diplomatic work, therefore, the function of public diplomacy should be distinct from that of traditional diplomacy. To conclude, the relationship between public diplomacy and soft power is not, as Nye believes, to transform soft power resources into soft power, but to transform general assets into soft power resources Figure 3.
Given that the basic function of public diplomacy is to create soft power resources, could it also play a role in all problem areas by changing the perception or evaluation of the people of target countries?
And if such restricted areas do exist, can the function of public diplomacy be fully realized in areas where it could play a role? The answer to all of these questions is clearly no. This is the utility boundary, and possible influencing factor of public diplomacy. This reminds us that communication and mutual trust are ineffective when it comes to territorial security, especially territorial disputes, where one party gains a zero-sum conflict at the expense of the other.
Second, in the field where public diplomacy could play a role, its effect will still be affected by the following factors. Global View surveys taken in Chicago showed that the Japanese had the lowest level of favourable views on China, behind those of South Korea, Indonesia and Vietnam. The key reason lies in the semi-structured interviews with Dinnie and Lio.
The second factor is that of differences in political systems. People tend to like a particular political system not because it works, but simply because their ideology and values align with it. This means that it is neither possible for China to change its own political system voluntarily nor to win the favour of Western people by demonstrating the effectiveness superiority of its own political system. In this sense, it is difficult to avoid completely the negative impact of the difference in political system on the public goodwill of the target country—that is, on the effect of public diplomacy.
The third factor is political relations between countries. China-US relations have a negative impact on the favourable opinion of the American people towards China. Meanwhile, the political relationship between China and the UK has a positive impact on the favourable opinion of the British people towards China. Further research is undoubtedly needed as to why bilateral political relations should have such opposite effects.
However, with regard to the issue of the effect of public diplomacy as subordinate to that of the level of political and security relations, this should be relatively certain. All of the above variables are likely to influence either drag down or improve to varying degrees the goodwill of people in the target country towards the implementing country. Therefore, when these variables coexist with the public diplomacy activities themselves, we cannot assess whether or not the public diplomacy conducted towards the country is effective based simply on the decline or increase of favourable opinion, but need to control as far as possible the influence of these interfering variables through rigorous research design.
There are two main empirical methods of measuring the effect of public diplomacy: one is the sampling survey method, which is aimed at the general public, namely, the public opinion poll; the other is the unstructured interview with a small group of specific people.
The non-structured interview, also known as the non-standardized interview, is either a semi-controlled or uncontrolled interview, which can be divided into four types: intensive interview, in-depth interview, objective statement, and symposium [ 25 ].
The public opinion poll method and the interview method are two common widely used empirical methods in modern social science research on which there have been many methodological works with regard to their design procedure and implementation steps in the general sense, but which are not discussed in this chapter.
In this regard, there are at least three aspects worth discussing. First, who should be chosen for the investigation? Whether a public opinion poll or an interview, the first question involves the selection of respondents.
This is because the fundamental purpose of our survey is to see whether or not the people of the target country have changed their attitude towards a certain aspect of the implementing country due to a specific public diplomacy project on the part of the implementing country, rather than a general change in attitude. Imagine country A conducting public diplomacy through the medium of international students there from country B.
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