The evolving nature and role of the diplomatic mission

Abstract

This article seeks to chart how the role of the diplomatic mission (most often thought of as the embassy) has evolved, primarily since the Second World War, to assess how it can be most useful to the sending state or institution, and to identify some of the characteristics of successful envoys, on the latter score drawing on several interviews. The occasional footnote refers to some personal experience and observations.

Acknowledgements

This article draws on research for an essay in the Oxford handbook of modern diplomacy (OUP, forthcoming). The views advanced here are the author's alone.

Notes

Commonwealth countries exchange high commissioners rather than ambassadors.

While massive United States embassies in Iraq and Afghanistan during the most recent decade have been preoccupied above all with security matters, development staff account for a good share of the overall numbers. And the outsized nature of the United States Embassy in Egypt was long accounted for primarily by its USAID contingent.

I managed a couple of trips a year to each of Nepal and Bhutan from India, often involving travel beyond the capital. In both these small but fascinating countries Canada maintained hybrid offices: in Nepal, a Canadian Cooperation Office reporting to the Canadian International Development Agency, and in Bhutan a small “Office of the Embassy”. My most recent book, a collective effort, addresses Nepal's long-running governance crisis: From people's war to fragile peace in Nepal (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

In these multilateral missions, particularly those at the UN in New York, countries sometimes field more than one ambassador – although only ever one permanent representative – leading to a profusion of delegates viewed, at least by themselves, as being of some importance.

During my tenure in Delhi, of roughly 150 heads of mission, only about 15 appeared to work very hard, with the resources needed to achieve some local effectiveness, thus acquiring a useful network of Indian friends, professional and personal, sometimes throughout the country. The best ones were from immediately neighboring countries, several great powers and from countries developing a strong interest in India. Many of the others displayed few ideas on how to carry forward their mission, relying excessively on the seriously over-worked Indian foreign ministry that could tend to them only minimally. Depressingly, many seemed to engage mostly with each other, perhaps defeated by the challenge of carving out a role for themselves and their nation in a country of continent-scale proportions with a population to match. Their lack of deeper interest in and familiarity with the country constrained them even in interpreting what they read. Their interactions with busy Indians in various walks of life were perfunctory. That said, sometimes an ambassador with modest claims on India's time would become a valued member of the local scene through force of personality and intelligence, or sometimes because of a compelling spouse.

Sharp judgment and foresight aplenty by United States diplomats were on display in many of the wikileaks dispatches, confounding both cynics and reflexive critics of the United States. Some of these reports played a role in discrediting the regimes in Cairo and in Tunis before their fall in early 2011.

Confidential correspondence, January 2011.

At both headquarters and in the field in recent years, I guarded against anything I wrote (as opposed to said over the telephone or in person) being likely to arouse serious controversy were it to be leaked or accessed in part by refraining from classifying it. Alas, “secret” headers remain catnip to many readers, including political ones.

For a sophisticated discussion of both Freedom of Information legislation and operations such as Wikileaks on modern diplomacy, see John McCarthy (2011).

On official hospitality, see Heinbecker (1998, p. 76). In India, my hospitality allowance amounted to less than 10 per cent of my remuneration (as did my well-used travel allowance, vital for familiarization with my dizzyingly diverse countries of accreditation). The notion that vast sums are at stake, relative to the overall costs engendered by international relations is mostly fanciful.

Indeed, standards of training vary dramatically as between foreign services, with media – particularly electronic media – training introduced only in recent decades. As in other types of government work, training even on key foreign languages, often quite expensive if it is to be at all useful, can be the first casualty of budget cutting.

In India, much of the country's political elite, from political supremo Sonia Gandhi on down, would turn out to hear visiting classical artists from Pakistan, whose fan base in India was considerable.

One of my best evenings in New Delhi was provided by my accomplished Pakistani colleague, Shahid Malik, who hosted a dinner for Pakistan's national cricket team to which their Indian counterparts and everyone else worth knowing in Delhi came, many with their star-struck teenagers in tow. If ever there was an opportunity to bridge the deep divide between the two countries, cricket provided one that evening.

Large companies know their own global industries well and engage in thorough market research in the quest for expansion and global reach, but skilled diplomats can help make investment opportunities better known to them in distant places, for example to a Malaysian firm open to investing in Mexico.

Some global worries over optimal conditions for trade recur cyclically. In Renaissance times, Venice was seriously preoccupied about piracy's deleterious effects on commerce. The United States vigorously combated piracy off the “Barbary Coast” of North Africa in the early nineteenth century. Today, leading trading countries patrol the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean to deter and apprehend entrepreneurial Somali pirates.

Some years ago, Mexicans privately complained bitterly after the event about Canadian political show-boating in leading an oversized “Team Canada” trade mission to Mexico that accomplished little while completely exhausting both official and private sector hosts.

Indeed the study of the recent success stories in the developing world is at least as rewarding as that of continuing laggards, both for developing countries but also for mulatilateral and bilateral donors. See for example, the World Bank's interesting and comprehensive “China 2030” report of 2012, challenging much past conventional wisdom. Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is currently engaged in charting key ideas on development since 1945, including with some of the authors of the “China 2030” report, and their translation into practice – with a view to lessons for the future.

Figures provided by the Canadian High Commission in India in January 2011.

Canada's Honorary Consul in Calcutta, Sanjiv Goenka, a very successful business leader with excellent ties to local authorities of all sorts was, in my judgment, much more useful and cost effective to my country during my tenure in Delhi than would have been a battery of Canadian Consuls.

Lawrence Durrell, beyond his serious novels such as those of the Alexandria Quartet, was extremely amusing on military attachés and other diplomatic types in his “Antrobus” short stories, drawing on his diplomatic experience in Belgrade, 1948–1952 (see Durrell 1985).

When serving in Jordan, 1984–1986, one of my United Kingdom colleagues, a quiet but very accomplished one, David Spedding, attracted little attention to himself. He later became the head of the United Kingdom's external intelligence service, MI6, in part due to intelligence accomplishments achieved while serving under diplomatic cover in Amman.

During my years in Cairo as a young diplomatic officer, the local CIA station chiefs were widely known as such not just by a few in-the-loop fellow diplomats, but also by the more alert members of the foreign press corps.

Galvanizing leadership of UN missions by the likes of Lakhdar Brahimi, the late Sergio Vieira de Mello and Ian Martin, stands out. Top-flight international operators also attract the best staffs, with the leadership producing overall higher standards.

Although the cost of diplomatic representation is high, sometimes the inflation in headquarters staff of foreign and trade ministries can be even more impressive. At one point, only 26 per cent of Canadians employed by the country's foreign and trade ministry served abroad.

Correspondence, 24 January 2011.

Skills in managing the diplomatic mission's relationship with its headquarters are also required. Missions abroad may lack a sense of what is urgent at home, while headquarters teams are often ignorant of key features of the embassy's host society or government. Bridging the gap requires not just knowledge but also… diplomacy.

I owe the notion of risk analysis and management as central to the diplomatic craft to a thoughtful anonymous reviewer of this article in draft.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David M. Malone

David Malone is president of Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC). This article draws on his experience as Canada's high commissioner to India and non-resident Ambassador to Nepal and Bhutan, 2006–2008, and his earlier tenure as a Canadian ambassador to the UN. In 2011, he published Does the elephant dance? Contemporary Indian foreign policy (Oxford and New York: OUP) in 2011.