Diplomacy in the Digital Age
- By Brian Hocking and Jan Melissen
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E-mail China.org.cn, October 26, 2015
3. Roles and skills. The emergence of digital diplomacy requires the development of the skills necessary for its effective use. Digital mainstreaming within the MFA subsystem is one of the key challenges just as it is for government more broadly. But this has to be seen in the general context of what diplomacy is for and how diplomats' roles are adapting and may need to adapt at a faster pace to a changing and more networked environment. This includes the importance of developing strategic visions of global agendas and understanding growing conflicts over norms and rules. It also includes the ability for individual diplomats to establish and manage networks in which they have more pronounced and more externally oriented roles as diplomatic entrepreneurs. In networking terminology, this includes them taking on roles as 'spanners' between diverse groups of actors and network 'weavers', whose business it is to create new interactions among stakeholders – in the pursuit of joint problem solving and co-creating solutions for complex policy challenges. All of these tasks and roles antedate the various conundrums of the digital age. Longer standing 'offline' issues cut across the challenges and opportunities presented by the advent of digital diplomacy. This takes us back to the comment by Secretary of State John Kerry quoted earlier: there is no such thing as digital diplomacy – only diplomacy. However true, this does raise management questions regarding the expectations surrounding an online presence by individual diplomats.
4. Rules and risk management. Every technological innovation brings with it risks. Those attendant on the use of social media by diplomats have received considerable coverage and are sometimes given as reasons why it should be used with extreme caution – although it is notable that the instances cited are limited, such as the experiences of the US embassy in Cairo during the Arab Spring. However, the point is that this is part of broader developments affecting diplomacy, government and society.
More open and diffuse communication patterns supported by technology such as the smartphone are now a feature of foreign policy as they are of politics. But for diplomacy, there is a particular challenge in the shape of the tension between the norms of confidentiality regarded as a functional element of the negotiating environment and the demands for transparency. These build on earlier problems linked to the development of public diplomacy and norms of non-involvement in the domestic affair of other countries. Host governments (as with China) may not respond favourably to embassy staff engaging directly with their populations.
At the other end of the MFA subsystem, governments and bureaucracies may find it hard to adapt to the demands of greater openness and a decreasing sense of control. To take Canada as an example, Roland Paris has argued that the main reason why the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development is 'lagging behind' in adopting digital diplomacy is the dominance in Ottawa of what he terms a 'message control regime' which runs counter to the logic of digitalization. The development of social media guidelines – which a growing number of MFAs now have in place – can offer help here but touch on age-old diplomatic norms as well as time-resistant elements of professional culture. Diplomacy's adaptation to the digital age is bound to take time whilst the compression of time is simultaneously the big issue, compounded by the fact that in the foreseeable future it will remain hard for MFAs to keep up with digital developments outside government.
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