In an interview on Diplomacy

Finally, David Hannay’s New World Disorder. 

This is a book about the UN, which is the only diplomatic mission on which I still do a good deal of talking and retirement diplomacy. I chose this to give the general reader an idea of what the UN is like after the Cold War. David Hannay stopped being the UK ambassador to the UN in 1995, but he has remained closely connected to it ever since, both on the issue of Cyprus, and as Chairman of the United Nations Association in the UK, and as a member of Kofi Annan’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. 

Hannay tries to explain what the UN does well and what it does less well. He tries – I think successfully – to keep people’s morale up about the fundamental usefulness of the UN, if we understand what its limitations are, and what the limitations of governments are, in their use of the UN. Because the UN is an inter-governmental organisation, not a separate agency to which governments can turn to mend the china when they’ve broken it. 

The UN and the governments are the same agency, in the political and inter-governmental sphere. The UN also has a secretariat and many funded agencies and programs that do magnificent work: it’s a setter of norms, it’s a repository of treaties, it’s a maintainer of international agreements on all sorts of things – aviation, maritime, trade unions, the postal system. Lots of international things happen without you or me knowing about them, or understanding the way states work together in all their machinery. David Hannay brings this out and reminds us that we have reached a higher level of collectivism in this era of mankind, the post-Cold War era, than ever before, but there are still huge flaws in the capacity of our international institutions to deal with all our problems without reform. 

So is he advocating change at the UN or is he saying that it’s always going to be flawed by definition, because it’s all these different countries working together?

He’s actually pointing out what opportunities have been missed since the end of the Cold War in making the UN a more useful forum and structure. He illustrates this by showing how the world turned from the Cold War era to the post-Cold War era, and how governments didn’t see that they had to make an extra effort to clinch the multinational machinery. You can see that over climate change now, after Copenhagen, that is a follow-on subject from what David Hannay is saying. Nation states and the governments themselves are not putting enough investment into the multilateral machinery to ensure that there is lubrication for global peace and security and global relationships, and economic exchange into the future. So there is, to some extent, a pessimistic message in there: we could have got it right, we didn’t get it right, there are things we must do, if we don’t do them, we may well be heading for more trouble. That’s the overall message.

You alluded to it earlier, but do you want to add anything about the relevance of diplomacy in the modern age? 

Yes, I do, because I think the UK is under-investing in diplomacy and as a result is much more likely to need its armed forces, which are also reducing in number as we speak. There is a vacuum opening up in our capacity to protect our own interests and our own affairs as the UK – because we aren’t investing enough in a practice, a profession, a mechanism, which still has just as much value as it ever did, whatever the forms or channels that it uses. Because power always has to be brokered between centres of power – to avoid wars and to come to arrangements and compromises, preferably in a constructive rather than a zero-sum way. And it is the judgments, the negotiation skills, the understanding, the analysis which you get from your diplomatic service as a government, which make that possible. You cannot get that degree of quality from the internet or from the media, from the private citizen or from the corporate sector. There are skills of judgment and of action involved in experienced diplomacy that you can’t get from anywhere else – and those are still as necessary in the modern world as they ever were.