25 - 31 May 2006
Issue No. 796
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
The bearer of the message
The art of diplomacy remains little changed since ancient days, writes Gamil
Mattar*
I recently had the opportunity to spend a day with a group of young people
hoping to pursue diplomatic careers. I was happy to discover that the majority,
10 out of 17, were women. Not that this is particularly remarkable -- a high
ratio of women to men has become the norm among applicants to many types of
occupations.
We are living in an age of "summit diplomacy," which represents a departure
from past practices. In days of old diplomats were messengers, bearing written
or oral communications from one ruler to another. But because of the difficulty
of travel between nations, and the length of time it took for messages to be
conveyed, diplomats were vested with enormous powers. They were able to take
crucial decisions without referring back to their rulers. In Athens, for
example, diplomatic envoys were chosen by popular ballot and were empowered to
declare war and conclude peace. Little wonder that the Athenians considered
diplomacy sacred. It had its own god -- Hermes, the god of messengers.
In the ancient world diplomats were the bearers of messages in the fullest
sense. They not only transmitted them, they had a hand in formulating them, so
much so that they would not convey them to their destined recipient unless they
were themselves thoroughly convinced of the contents of the messages. According
to Harold Nicholson, the famous historian of diplomacy, Sri Krishna, the
messenger of an Indian ruler who lived many centuries ago, would say before
embarking on a mission: "I will go to convey the matter of my master, the
ruler, in the most eloquent manner... I will persuade the men of their court to
accede to his demands. Then, if I fail and war erupts, the world will see how
we were right and how they were wrong... and the world will not judge us
wrongly."
In those distant days rulers didn't do the negotiating; they would take the
final decisions but they would generally not have met face to face with their
adversaries. Their ambassadors were charged with the nuts and bolts of
negotiating, a task deemed too important to leave to the ruler, the
vicissitudes of whose psychological and physical health could affect his
negotiating performance or else be exploited by his adversaries.
Diplomats today maintain that in spite of the rise of summit diplomacy they
continue to play a crucial role. They prepare the reports and background papers
for the high level meetings that are held to prepare for the summits. They take
part in preparing the agendas, drafting the position papers and advising key
participants on the points they should adhere to or the subjects they should
avoid in the course of summit-level negotiations. Then, after the summit
meetings, the diplomats set about implementing whatever resolutions were taken
or else dousing the flames the summit participants fanned.. Arab diplomats have
become particularly adept at the latter, having been forced to develop many
methods for smoothing over the tensions and fissures the summit participants
inadvertently sparked or exposed. Many well-known diplomats, in speeches or in
memoirs, have related the lengths to which they had to go in order to rectify
blunders committed behind closed doors in summit sessions or openly, during
press conferences and speeches, before and after the sessions. Many diplomatic
figures have proven highly adept at keeping heads of state from speaking
extemporaneously on the air, persuading them instead to read from prepared
scripts.
In the US, senior State Department officials equip American presidents with
small index cards on which are written the positions the president must adhere
to during talks with counterparts from other nations. But on the whole
diplomats have had an uphill battle convincing political leaders -- in whose
hands crucial political decisions ultimately rest -- that tough negotiations
with allies or enemies are better left to the experts, regardless of how
clever, experienced and in touch with the facts the politicians are. Indeed,
heads of state who think they can do the job better than diplomats constitute
the biggest headache of many foreign ministries.
In order to keep pace with the boom in summit diplomacy and advances in
communications and transport technologies, new styles of diplomacy have had to
be invented. Traditionally, ambassadors would present themselves to a foreign
court and deliver their missives to court officials, and sometimes to the king
himself. In the Hellenic period, and in certain phases of the Roman Empire,
foreign ambassadors could even deliver their messages directly to the people,
sometimes without obtaining permission from the ruler. That practice fell out
of use in the Middle Ages, a development that was perhaps only natural since
diplomats were recruited mostly from the aristocracy whose members were
expected to associate only with other members of the same class. Such
diplomatic luminaries as Dante, Boccaccio, Vittori and Machiavelli were not in
a position, or even expected, to address the public, with which they had
nothing to do and whose interests probably conflicted with their own.
Yet it would seem America's Condoleezza Rice has stepped in to perform
contemporary diplomacy an enormous favour. Her initiative is founded upon the
largely American presumption that these days national sovereignty is a very
hazy concept and therefore provides plenty of scope, theoretically at least, to
leap over the barriers that would have impeded the actions of a diplomat
accredited to a foreign state in the not so distant past. Accordingly, today's
diplomat -- or at least today's American diplomat -- has the right to address
the people of a foreign nation directly, bypassing all that tedious protocol,
and even the need to obtain official permission, in order to convey his or her
message, even when that message to the people is to overturn their government
because it is not democratic. Some politicians, diplomats and others, hold that
this latest development in the art of diplomacy is fraught with unpredictable
dangers.
Throughout history trans-national and trans- cultural messages have always been
of two sorts. One was generally political, conveyed via diplomatic envoys from
one ruler to another and rarely directly to another people. The other was of a
religious or ideological nature and conveyed directly to the people, in ancient
times via prophets and their apostles and evangelizers or, in the case of
secular messages such as Marxism and the various brands of socialism,
ideologues and their disciples. Among the latter are America's
hell-and-brimstone proselytisers for American-style democracy and free market
economy.
It spent a stimulating day with the diplomatic cadets, who happened to be from
the Emirates. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to respond to some of the
stories that have tainted the reputation of diplomacy. I felt this was
important since it is not just the general public, but also many political
officials, including a few Arab heads of state, that hold the profession in
disdain. Like many of the young men and women I met, they think the life of a
diplomat is one long round of cocktail parties, banquets, receptions and balls
at which, as one of my interlocutors put it, "hands touch arms or at best other
hands".
I took a stab at dispelling this superficial and very widespread impression.
More than once I had to bring my audience's attention to the fact that
diplomatic life, even in its formalities, embraces many cultural differences.
The Indians, Japanese and Sudanese, among others, do not shake hands or make
physical contact in any way. We Arabs, in contrast, are much more effusive; we
don't simply shake hands, we embrace and kiss one another's cheeks, and yet
some of us complain of diplomatic formalities where no more than a handshake is
involved. I have often heard Westerners expressing their amazement, sometimes
critically, at other times in jest, at the way Arab officials wrap their
foreign guests in a warm embrace and cover them with kisses.
Our conversation also turned to the question of gifts and the role they play in
diplomacy and international relations. Few are aware of the importance of the
exchange of gifts within the art of diplomacy. Since the dawn of history gifts
have served as tokens of sincerity and seals of commitment, often taking the
place of the written word. The Tel Amarna stelae, discovered in Upper Egypt,
depict how the gift expressed both the status of the giver and the status of
the receiver and the relations between them. One stele relates that the
Assyrian king sent a message to the Pharaoh reminding him of the presents of
gold the king's father had sent to the pharaoh's father and complaining of how
little the pharaoh had sent in return. "They barely cover the travel expenses
of the diplomats between our countries," the Assyrian king remarked. Another
stele relates that the king of the Methanines wrote to the Pharaoh complaining
that the statues the Pharaoh had sent him as a gift were not even made of gold.
He went on to ask, "Is this intended to signal the beginning of a phase of poor
relations between us?"
Translated into modern terms, we are reminded of the repeated complaints of a
certain Arab government that the aid allocations it had been receiving from the
US were threatened with cuts every time Washington had a disagreement with this
government's policies.
Yet it is the diplomats that remain core to the practice of diplomacy. They
must project the image of their country abroad just as, in the past, the
ambassador projected the image of his ruler in foreign courts. In addition,
consciously or unconsciously, we still gauge the degree of respect in which one
country holds another by the status of its diplomatic representatives.
Governments still express their disapproval by dispatching their greenest and
least polished envoys. Not much has changed since the days when the King of
Babylon transmitted a message to the Pharaoh of Egypt via a delegation one of
whose members was a donkey driver. What more did the pharaoh need to tell him
that Egyptian-Babylonian relations were in decline? On another occasion, the
King of Babylon conveyed his displeasure by dispatching an envoy with no
message to convey whatsoever!
In the course of our discussion of diplomatic signs and symbols, one of my
young interlocutors came up with a very astute observation. She pointed out
that most of Washington's envoys to the Middle East are Zionists or supporters
of Zionist policies. Their visits to the region tend to be preceded or
accompanied by statements that are anti- Palestinian and anti-Arab, or at best
deliberately provocative. And there have been occasions when these envoys had
no message to bare at all, just like the Babylonian ambassador to Egypt 3,000
years ago. Yet the proof of what really was intended, so to speak, is in the
pudding: the current deterioration in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the current
direction of American policy towards the Middle East.
The substance might change, the pace might vary from energetic to sluggish, but
diplomacy, which is the oldest -- or at least the second oldest -- profession
in history, remains a solid and vital career even in this age of summit
conferences.
* The writer is director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic
Research
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