Developing Public Diplomacy

Eduardo del Buey
Foto: Afp
La Jornada Maya

Martes 10 de diciembre, 2019

As a Canadian diplomat, my tasks were twofold: to explain Canada to the world and explain the world to Canada.

This required dialogue – exchanging views with the people in the country to which I was accredited, listening to them and understanding what made them tick. Knowing their personal and professional priorities as well as their needs and frustrations.

From the start, I understood that my role was not to preach but instead to find common ground and to develop relationships based on respect and mutual understanding.

When I joined the Foreign Service, opportunities for inter-country dialogue were limited to small groups of people – mostly other diplomats and government officials. Networking was challenging, since it was almost impossible to reach large audiences unless one had access to a major newspaper, radio, or television program, all of which were hardly available to most diplomats.

For the past ten years we have lived in a different world.

Now, more than ever, Governments can communicate directly with large audiences who can spread the message to their own networks. This effectively can broaden the base of diplomatic players to also include a far greater number of opinion makers, academics, business people, legislators, artists and citizens who travel and communicate with people in other countries.

As such, professional diplomats must also be able relate to and to communicate with a wide variety of audiences. They must be prepared to function in a world where traditional hierarchies are getting blurred and where formal and informal communications rule.

The world has evolved to become, to a large degree, more horizontally integrated.

Each of us has our own network on social media – be it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or other platforms.

These tools lie outside of the control of our organizational superiors, making each of us an informal spokesperson for the organization that we represent.

In contrast, older diplomats, the products of an era in which organizations were hierarchical, must learn to function in a world where even the lowest ranking colleague might possess a digital global network of contacts with whom they communicate constantly.

Herein, lies a major challenge for any foreign ministry trying to develop modern public diplomacy strategies. As products of highly stratified working environments, these traditional leaders, in many countries, are not used to being questioned or challenged by subordinates. Rather, they expect to speak and be heard and obeyed.

This new reality provides both dangers and opportunities.

If senior diplomatic officers try to quash these initiatives, they frustrate subordinates and potentially stymie creativity.

However, if they learn to manage social media creatively, the result can be networks of interlocutors who can bring fresh views and ideas that can later be crafted into effective strategies at potentially little cost.

The same goes for bilateral relations, in which the diplomats of one country work to establish ties with the citizens of their own and of other countries in order to learn and share more to better convince others.

In this way, public diplomacy must be an ongoing conversation between a large variety of players and communications strategies must account for and focus constantly on this reality.

As noted above, everyone is networked to some degree. The diplomat’s objective is to become a part of as many of these networks as possible in order to gain insights to share these with their own government so that this information can be massaged into effective policies and strategies.

For instance, when I served at the Canadian Embassy to Mexico from 1995-99, we worked hard to get Canadian and Mexican indigenous peoples to dialogue directly and to create their own communications mechanisms. The result was that with the Embassy as a catalyst, both sides were free to share each other’s ideas and values while they developed ways to build upon this dialogue.

The result is that today there exists understanding and cooperation on a wide variety of issues between the indigenous groups – from protecting their languages and cultures to establishing sophisticated businesses. The resulting dialogue allows them to explore ways to redress historical injustices while sharing learnings in order to better adapt, survive and thrive in the global economy.

With respect to public diplomacy and in the context of the embassy, the diplomat is, indeed, a catalyst. Creating local networks is, in my opinion, the most effective way to engage in a dialogue that can lead to mutual understanding and cooperation that can serve each country’s interests. This is how a country can reach and influence foreign audiences.

What Joseph Nye called “soft power”.

The role of soft power or public diplomacy is to bring peoples together.

While this requires reaching out, it also requires reaching in – applying modern strategic communications techniques within foreign ministries and other government departments.

Diplomatic institutions must be restructured and their underlying corporate behavior patterns modified to be able to function effectively.

The organization must become more horizontal in nature and function. Members must be encouraged to share information constantly. Diplomats must incorporate other government officials, business people, academics, and civil society groups in order to tap into a broader field of knowledge and a deeper well of experience. While diplomats should certainly lead public diplomacy efforts, they don’t have a monopoly on information or ideas, and must be willing to learn from others constantly.

Diplomatic leaders must understand that they have two fundamental roles.

The first is to create a community that works together, that effectively shares information, listens to other parties and engages in constructive dialogue in order to define the best strategies for getting national messages out to foreign audiences.

The second is to craft and shape the discussions so that the final result is based on the considered opinion of the team, based on logical, fact based rationale. This requires input from all stakeholders so that the broadest array of facts and ideas are distilled and shaped into policies and products.

Today’s foreign ministries are the products of their own cultures and histories. Different cultures create different institutions and different hierarchies. However, in a globalized world, there are factors that are universal.

The first is that people appreciate being taken into account. Foreign ministry staff are no different. They appreciate their opinions being valued and their expertise being respected. This is fundamental in creating a productive and motivated team.

The second is that people appreciate a dialogue in which their views are sought, understood, considered, and where a compromise can be reached that appeals to both sides. Win-win is always the goal of successful diplomacy since it helps ensure that both sides will adhere to an agreement.

The third is that efforts and messages must be honest and reflect the reality of the country that one represents.

For example, China is very active building physical and financial networks through its “Belt and Road” initiative. It is also trying to win hearts and minds through its hundreds of Confucius Centers around the world.

But how effective are these efforts in changing the values of other societies when we are daily exposed to the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong and the oppression of millions of Chinese Uyghur Muslims?

Can a country simply ignore its own problems when dialoguing with another when today’s technology provides us all with almost instant information to any developments occurring in any place on the globe?

If diplomats cannot accept the fact that their country is not perfect, share this view, and admit that they plan to learn as much from a dialogue as they do to teach, how can messages and messengers be taken seriously?

How, for example, can U.S. diplomats preach about the benefits of inclusion, diversity, rule of law and the paramountcy of justice when their country is in the throes of a leadership crisis that affects us all?

Public diplomacy cannot hide the sun with a thumb, as they say in Spanish. Rather, it must approach messaging as honestly as possible, stand ready to acknowledge that there is always room for improvement and invite audiences to a dialogue in which each side can learn from the other.

This of course is easy to say but oftentimes difficult to achieve. When a nation’s leaders are unwilling to admit to imperfection or share their power, the ability for that country to practice effective public diplomacy is compromised sometimes severely. Public diplomacy is a two way street and requires an honest dialogue rather a simple monologue.

Public diplomacy today has a wide variety of players. Yet, when it comes to the role of diplomats and embassies, the head of government must support and reinforce the efforts for foreign ministers and subordinates to function effectively. Sometimes the difficulty in public diplomacy lies in obtaining a domestic political consensus for the messages proposed or the strategies to be adopted.

Therein lies the challenge for public diplomacy managers -- to engage in the widest possible consultations and incorporate the views of the broadest array of stakeholders.

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