Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Politics has many different areas in which to specialise. What made you decide on negotiation?
It’s the thread that ties my life together. As a young diplomat, I worked on the Hong Kong negotiations in the early 80s, the two-plus-four talks on German unification, and the CDE and CSCE processes in the Soviet Union in between. I was chief negotiator for Northern Ireland from 1997 to 2007 and I now work for The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, bringing governments and insurgent groups together.
What for you is the art of negotiation?
I think the key attribute is pragmatism – looking for a solution. Not everyone accepts that as a starting point. Some groups believe it’s a form of sin to compromise. I remember negotiating with the Orange Order in Northern Ireland. They would turn up and say: ‘Here is our position’. I would take it the Catholic nationalists and they would present a different position, which I would take back to the Orange Order, who would say: ‘No, you don’t understand. We told you what our position was. It would be wrong to move from that in principle’. That’s the problem if you have a position of principle that leads you into conflict. If you’re pragmatic, you can negotiate. At the root of it all is a willingness to make concessions and see the other side’s point of view.
And if a group doesn’t want to negotiate?
Another key skill is patience. Like George Mitchell, you have to keep going whatever happens and try to get a solution. You can’t make people compromise or negotiate if they don’t want to. Talking to a terrorist group requires patience because terrorists aren’t used to negotiation or compromise. They can take the hardline view on every issue. You first have to get them accustomed to the idea of seeing other people’s positions.
You definitely need patience for that. Your first choice is The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, which you studied at university.
History students at Oxford have to read The Prince. It has the benefit of being very short and it stuck in my mind. While at Number 10, I was looking for a book on how to wield power in practice. I chose this one. Many books deal with the theory of the British constitution but few look at how power works in practice. It’s almost treated as a dirty subject. Machiavelli was one of the earliest diplomats. Negotiation was his life; he saw it as power. That’s what really got me interested in him.
Do you think the fundamentals he discusses remain the same?
Very much so. The reason we still read the book today is that, like Shakespeare’s plays, it’s based on human nature. Just as you nod along to Hamlet or Macbeth and acknowledge that aspects of human nature in them are present in people today, the same is true of The Prince. Machiavelli broke away from the Augustinian notion of what the world should or ought to be. He wrote about what he observed around him. That’s what makes him so interesting.
The book obviously had a big effect on you because your recent book is The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World.
Yes. Instead of writing another memoir of the Blair years, I did something a little different. I took Machiavelli’s maxims and principles – like the one about a leader being a lion and a fox – and tried to see if they still worked in modern politics. Surprisingly, many of them did. Tony Blair’s negotiating tactics in Northern Ireland were largely based on the lion-and-fox approach. There’s no way he could have moved forward if he’d not possessed some fox-like qualities. He calls it ‘constructive ambiguity’ in his own book: trying to lead people into agreements for which they weren’t necessarily ready. Equally, if he hadn’t been a lion and believed he could do it, he wouldn’t have got there. British leaders like Winston Churchill had given up on Northern Ireland. Because he thought he could solve it, Blair did not. You need both ‘lion’ and ‘fox’ attributes for that.
You were given Harold Nicolson’s Diplomacy when you joined the Foreign Office in 1979. What kind of things did it teach you?
In my time, there was no training to be a diplomat. I think we had a half-day induction course and went straight into a department. They gave us a guide on where to sit at dinner and a copy of Diplomacy, which I still have.
It’s a rather wonderful book but it’s very old-school. It was written in 1939 but we had the 1949 version. It says in the preface: ‘Since this book was first published, many serious events have occurred’. Quite a British understatement.
Nicolson distinguishes between foreign policy, which he says is for politicians, and negotiation, which he says is for diplomatists. He starts with the Greeks and goes all the way through. He claims it was Machiavelli’s fault that diplomacy got a bad name. People misunderstood The Prince, particularly in Britain, and the word ‘Machiavellian’ became an insult that led people to think diplomats were shifty and dishonest. He points out that Henry Wotton, one of James I’s ambassadors, joked that ‘diplomats were honest men sent abroad to lie for their country’. The King was so shocked that he sacked him.
Nicolson has very wise advice on negotiation.
After studying history at Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania, Jonathan Powell worked for the BBC and Granada TV before joining the British Foreign Office in 1979. After Labour’s landslide victory in 1997, Powell was at the heart of the Downing Street machine. He was the only senior member of staff to remain at Blair’s side throughout his time at the top of British politics.
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