Diplomacy in the Digital Age
- By Brian Hocking and Jan Melissen
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E-mail China.org.cn, October 26, 2015
Understanding these events requires a perspective broader than that conventionally regarded as diplomacy. Foreign ministries now share the pressures confronting sectoral ministries. This is part of the problem. Diplomacy has become 'domesticated' since the realm of the foreign is far harder to define. Moreover, more forms of diplomacy are developing in response to complex policy agendas comprising a mix of environmental threats, global pandemics, cybercrime and the instabilities presented by fragile states. These issues are far less susceptible to rational policy processes of problem definition, analysis and solution – often because there is no clear and agreed definition of the problem.
In our 2012 report Futures for Diplomacy, we set out what we termed an 'integrative diplomacy' framework for understanding this changing environment. Many of the arguments developed there – such as the growth of complex communication patterns, the importance of networks and the challenges to hierarchical forms and processes – puts in a broader context points underpinning much of the digital diplomacy debate. Our aim then and now is to integrate the online and the offline in order to draw a more balanced picture of where diplomacy stands. Secretary of State John Kerry made the point neatly in the State Department blog DipNote:
Everybody sees change now. With social media, when you say something to one person, a thousand people hear it. So of course there's no such thing anymore as effective diplomacy that doesn't put a sophisticated use of technology at the center of all we're doing to help advance our foreign policy objectives, bridge gaps between people across the globe, and engage with people around the world and right here at home. The term digital diplomacy is redundant – it's just diplomacy, period.
This observation echoes the debate on public diplomacy and the argument that 'PD' has now been 'mainstreamed' into diplomatic practice, and that treating it as a separate category may be reductionist – simplifying a complex picture.
Digital diplomacy categories
We are confronted with varying possibilities regarding the position of diplomacy in the digital age: gradual change and adaptation within the existing frameworks and principles versus a fundamental break with accepted patterns of behaviour, norms and rules so that diplomacy starts to look fundamentally different. The term 'digital diplomacy' covers a multitude of meanings. Table 1 seeks to set these out whilst recognising that the categories overlap and that the implications for diplomacy are by no means solely related to innovations in communications technologies.
The first – and broadest – category relates to the changing foreign policy environment. Here, a key theme is the growing speed of events (how fast they develop) together with their velocity (speed and direction) and the implication that these have for policy makers. These are not unfamiliar ideas since they are part of the established globalization argument. However, they are reinforced by a much more fragmented flow of communications as mobile technologies empower individuals and groups to shape rapidly unfolding events. The capacity of governments to deploy digital resources is a critical component of the digital environment. Equally important is the capacity of governments to control them – as through state intervention in access to and the use of the Internet and social media. Alongside these factors are the changing character of the policy agenda and the rising importance of social power – the capacity to frame agendas through non-hierarchical modes of policymaking – which is reinforced by the dynamics of the digital age.
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