Diplomacy in the Digital Age
- By Brian Hocking and Jan Melissen
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E-mail China.org.cn, October 26, 2015
With more complex patterns of global relations, the list of consular tasks and headaches is growing and the implications for diplomats are testing. Not only have demands on them increased, the provision of consular services has become a test of their legitimacy. Facing increasingly technologically enabled citizens, government failure to respond immediately to crisis situations and to satisfy public and media expectations of support for nationals caught up in them, is now a test of diplomatic effectiveness – and one that governments are acutely sensitive to.
Additionally, consular work places ever-greater demands on scarce diplomatic resources. Take a country with a small population like Norway, with just over 5 million residents, where between one third and half of the population is travelling abroad each year. In 2012, the UK FCO dealt with over 1 million general consular enquiries and 100,000 consular cases, 20,000 of which required consular assistance. These European figures may seem big, but are of course dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of consular work facing much more populous countries such as Indonesia or China, where the consular challenge features high on the agenda of government.
As the Global Consular Forum survey makes clear, MFAs fear that their consular departments are falling behind the expectations of society when it comes to the use of technology, in particular social media. One of the top-five pressures perceived by consular services is to keep up with rapidly evolving technology. The fear of technology failures also ranks high in consular crisis and emergency management scenario's – second to the lack of citizen engagement with their government. Due to the fast pace of technological change, it is hard for consular departments to plan for the long term. In the years ahead for many MFAs in Europe the challenge is that they have to cut their budget whilst not cutting their 'duty of care' to the degree that it would affect citizen satisfaction.
Faced with such dilemmas, MFAs see quick-wins for digitalization in the area of generic travel information as well as more tailor-made customer advice. The short-term consular solution is to have a good website, offer automated services for travelling citizens and make use of social networking sites in emergencies and crisis situations. In Australia, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has developed its Smartraveller website on which it posts travel updates and revisions to travel advisories for 169 overseas destinations. In Finland, the MFA has created 'The World Surprises' map service which enables travellers to share travel experiences and to access MFA information on travel destinations. One of the aims of these developments is to sensitise the travelling public to possible dangers, but also to establish reasonable expectations as to what consular support people can receive overseas. In both the UK and Australia, this message has been reinforced through television documentaries ('The Embassy' on the Nine Network in Australia) that are focusing on consular work in embassies (Box 4.5).
A growing number of governments now offer 24/7 services and communicates via more traditional channels such as call centres and social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Direct communication with citizens-turned-customers is now centred on the various options offered by smartphones. Mexico is one of the leading countries servicing its citizens with a sophisticated travel App – the Mexican Secretaría has fifty consulates in one single country, the United States – whilst others are investing in online wizards offering advice varying from passport enquiries to traveling with children and emergency services. Blue sky thinking on consular services aided by developments in the field of big data includes future or futuristic scenarios with not only people but also their belongings being tracked down by means of GPS tracking. But with the current pace of technological change, predicting future developments is almost impossible.
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