Diplomacy in the Digital Age
- By Brian Hocking and Jan Melissen
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E-mail China.org.cn, October 26, 2015
Attitudes of individual diplomats towards social media vary a great deal. Former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, is a case in point. McFaul (a Stanford academic) was rated amongst the 'Twitterati 100' for 2013, using social media to engage in a 'Twitter war' with the Russian MFA and to engage with the Russian public on both US foreign policy and his personal life. This appears to have changed somewhat following McFaul's' resignation and his replacement by a career diplomat, John Tefft. Unlike McFaul, Tefft has no personal Twitter or Facebook accounts, the embassy being represented on these social media platforms by standard organization accounts on Twitter and the US Embassy Moscow page on Facebook. The fact that as in this case, the individual performance of consecutive ambassadors is being monitored compared and reported in the same social media is new and will probably leave some diplomats worrying about the impact of social media on their day-to-day activities. This should equally apply to an initiative like Diplotwoops, a Twitter account claiming that it tweets all sent messages by individual diplomats across the world which, for one reason or another, they themselves have deleted.
Digitalization and foreign policy organization
The significance of nodality is closely related to how the MFA is organized. What are the critical factors here? One obvious point to make is that digitalization, whilst it might result in cost savings, is not a cure-all for diminished organizational strength. The consequences of financial stringency in the wake of the global financial crisis, a feature of most MFAs, are unlikely to be reversed by digital strategies alone. There are four organisational factors that will determine the extent to which digitalization is embedded in the system and thus contribute to overall performance:
1. Supportive internal structures. Experience appears to demonstrate the importance of creating units to support digitalization within the MFA – as in the US State Department and the FCO Digital Transformation Unit established in 2013. As we have seen with public diplomacy, one task here is to spread the 'message' outside such units to the MFA as a whole. A no less critical concern is to keep the department's top-level management engaged in digital innovation, a sector of the MFA mostly inhabited by people who are outside the informal in-house circuit of career diplomats. Disseminating digital technologies and strategies can also be supported by engagement with international initiatives such as the Stockholm Initiative on Digital Diplomacy (SIDD).
2. The presence of effective digital 'champions'. The relatively short history of digitalization points to the importance of support at several levels. In the US, the role of Hillary Clinton in spreading the digital creed in the State Department, and her appointment of Alec Ross and Jared Cohen to further this, has been extensively discussed. Elsewhere, active politicians in 'twiplomacy' such as Carl Bildt in Sweden and Indian Prime Minister Modi provide significant political support. Equally, the presence of active, or hyper-active, champions within the MFAs itself seems to be important. Alongside former US ambassador McFaul, active promoters can be found in the form of Andreas Sandre in the Italian diplomatic service and Tom Fletcher, UK ambassador to Lebanon. But the definition of the effective digital diplomat is a matter of dispute. Are those tireless operators with thousands or even scores of thousands of followers by definition effective, that is working in the interests of agreed policy aims?
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