Blogoir: February

This BBC website story burbles on about a car that runs on compressed air.

But it doesn't. It runs on the power used to compress the air. So to say that the car produces 'zero emissions' is silly. The emissions are just produced by a power station of some sort up the road, somewhere less visible.

Is this car, all things considered, more energy and emissions efficient than eg a normal car? No way of telling from this banal article.

Not long before the Dayton Peace Conference negotiations started in November 1995, the Contact Group met in Moscow to discuss how it all should go. The European members of the Contact Group decided to have an informal consultation before we met the Americans and then had the full Group meeting with the Russians.

Thus it was that the British Embassy hosted first a European breakfast, then the Europeans' encounter with the Americans. Pauline Neville-Jones led for the UK. Wolfgang Ischinger (like me and Jay Pollard a former denizen of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy) for Germany. I sat in as the Embassy's Bosnian expert.

The Europeans quickly agreed that the whole Dayton process was being done just too fast. This was to be a once and for all effort to end the Bosnian mayhem, and the documents emerging from it - including a new constitution for a single Bosnia and Herzegovina - would have far-reaching significance. All this could not be pulled together sensibly in the time now available. They agreed to press the US side hard to delay the start of the Conference by a couple of weeks or more, to give a better chance for the vital expert work to be done properly.

Then the Americans showed up at the Embassy, led by Dick Holbrooke and NATO commander (and future Presidential candidate) General Wes Clark. We all clustered in to the small Embassy 'safe room'.

The amazing thing was that the Americans looked twice as big as the Europeans! The US military team of course were bulked up by camouflage jackets, but they looked pretty damn big to start with. Plus Holbrooke is a larger than life character in all senses. So when everyone sat down in the tiny room I had a feeling that already the Americans had an advantage of some hard to define but real sort.

Soon the European side of the table started to make its elegant, firm and reasoned case for starting Dayton rather later.

Dick Holbrooke looked across the table in a friendly way and said something to the effect of, "Well, I've talked to the President. Our dates are in his diary. If you are there for the start, that will be fine. And if you're not, that will be fine too."

That salvo effectively ended the battle, the 'European' position flicked off the table like a wearying crumb.

The rest is history. Or will be one day. 

Back in 1979 when I joined the Service the FCO effectively enjoyed a brilliant and droll monopoly over most of Whitehall for communicating quickly with foreign governments. If eg the Trade Department wanted to send a message to its opposite numbers in Japan, this is roughly what would happen:

• The text would be typed up in the Trade Department
• Then carried over to FCO in a van, or placed in a chunky cylinder and shot by air pressure along a series of tubes under Whitehall to the FCO Tube Room
• FCO messengers would collect up the Tube messages at (very) regular but not necessarily frequent intervals and relay them on foot round to the FCO departments concerned
• There the relevant desk officer would tweak the substance and perhaps add an elegant smirky manuscript correction or two to the grammar ("Egad. Another split infinitive."), before giving it to the ‘girls’ to retype on a special telegram form
• The final version would be walked by messengers to the Communications Centre
• Where the text would be retyped again on to long ticker-tape paper for feeding into the radio system and transmission to Tokyo.
• The Embassy there would get it printed off, then retype it into a neat form fit for passing to the Japanese side.

All that was just fine until the fax machines and emails and cheap telephone calls came along. And Whitehall Departments started to communicate directly with their opposite numbers. The FCO was in effect ‘delayered’ for many key purposes.

Hence all the nervous obsessive attempts now to define the FCO’s role and get ‘Whitehall buy-in’ for its (and their) ever-changing strategic priorities.

The latest internal slogan is ‘More Foreign - Less Office’.

Hmmm.

My own role in this familiar story of technological developments leaving organisational structure far behind has been modest. But I did for a fleeting period act as a high-level FCO pioneer of e-ideas and nifty kit (such as voice-recognition software and the first PalmPilot fold-out pocket keyboard to make it into the FCO), after spending a year at Harvard from 1998-99 focusing mainly on how IT impacts on government.

At a senior management strategy meeting back in 1999 I asked why the FCO was laboriously re-organising itself into defined geographical ‘Commands’ and allocating budgets accordingly. Wasn’t that a bit ... nineteenth century?

Surely (I said) the point was to know how much money was being spent round the world for different purposes in real time so that any surplus in X could be offered promptly to Y and Z who might be able to use it better? If that were set up the emerging apparatus of bickering Resource Management Units in each Command incentivised wastefully to hoard ‘their’ resources could be scrapped, in favour of a tiny group of people watching FCO spending as a whole round the clock on a handful of flickering computer screens.

The point, I insisted, was to use new IT to think quite differently. We should not continue to lurch tediously to and fro in organisational terms between Centralisation and Decentralisation. Instead we should capture the benefits (and avoid the disadvantages) of both - simultaneously.

Everyone under the age of 35 in the meeting (people brought up with computers) smiled and nodded vigorously.

Everyone over the age of 45 looked at me as if I were insane.

The subject was quickly changed. And the people over the age of 45 carried on (not) running the Office.

The modern FCO like other British government departments is awash with ever-changing objectives/targets/priorities/strategies/goals, or whatever new jargon word they plan to seize on.  

In some deep sense a Plot has been Lost - such protean schemes show a striking inability to cope systematically with reality.

Regardless of what the latest dizzy jargon word is, one practical result is that every diplomat is instructed to focus relentlessly on his/her immediate targets, to the exclusion of marginal or less important work. This means activity which can be measured!

Ideally only that.

Nothing else.

One traditional part of an Ambassador's role has been to 'sell' not only British goods and services but also a sense of the British way of life. This is necessarily immeasurable and so, according to FCO/Treasury thinking these days, basically a waste of time and resources.

Take the Marie Curie Great 500 fund-raiser in 2006. This all arose from my being alerted to the fact that in 2004 Edwina Currie was leading a group of some 100 intrepid British cyclists on a Polish charity bike ride from Krakow to Warsaw to raise money for Marie Curie Cancer Care – one point of course being that Marie Curie was born as Maria Sklodowska in Poland.

I duly invited this happy but exhausted group to the Residence for a drink to celebrate their excellent initiative. And when I heard that they expected to raise some 200,000 pounds, I asked why they did not set up five such groups and raise one million instead – the world’s first Million Pound Bike-Ride? If they did so, I would take part myself(!).

Edwina was struck by this reckless ambitious thought. And so after a formidable organizational job by Marie Curie’s team, it happened that in September 2006 well over 400 British cyclists plus myself starting in different centres in five separate wobbling groups set off on a 500km ride towards Warsaw.

Suffice to say that I completed this ordeal and took a week’s leave to do so. But only by applying amazing quantities of Vaseline to obscure and rude parts of my anatomy which I previously had not known I possessed.

This expedition allowed us all to see the glorious early autumn Polish countryside. And last sighted it had raised close to 1.5 million pounds – well beyond the organizers’ best hopes.

So, Ministers.

Isn’t doing stuff like this now and again – selling to foreigners a fine example of Best of British voluntary work plus helping inspire the raising of a huge sum for a vital British charity – also a worthwhile diplomatic Objective? 

One of the great words of our time is the Balkan/Turkish word 'inat'.  Most 'Western' diplomats and politicians dealing with the Balkans of course have never heard of it, even though those who know the region well regularly remind us of the force of inat Serb-style. Thus here. And here. It even makes it into a book title.. 

It is not an easy word to define in English. Inat has numerous elements which, depending on the circumstances, can be positive or negative - or, in some bewildering disconcerting unpredictable way, both at the same time. The core of the idea is stubborn, possibly heroic, maybe self-destructive defiance, often combined with a degree of vainglorious showmanship to make the effect all the more dramatic.

One phenomenon in British culture demonstrating a sort of inat is a crowd of noisily chanting and absurd English football hooligans overseas, who deliberately provoke the local police knowing that they will get a thrashing.

Otherwise we Brits (or at least English?) tend not to behave in an inat way, preferring instead to avoid making a difficult situation worse and/or rather coolly weighing what the best way forward might be. If someone upsets us we may seek to retaliate in some way, or we may inwardly satisfy ourselves that the person concerned is a swine who does not deserve our further attention, and loftily (or meekly) move on.  

But others respond differently. 

In Zagrab last week I asked my Croatian colleagues for their examples of inat. One professional woman promptly replied that her neighbour had complained to the police that her grass-cuttings had gone on his lawn. "Now from inat (od inata) to pay him back I'll make sure that this happens even more!"

Another inat example I have been given is the poor man who can scarcely feed his family and buys a large second-hand Cadillac with his remaining money - just to show the world that he is not weighed down by his problems and can do what the heck he likes. 

My presentation in Belgrade when I left post in 2003 gave my own best inat experience, involving a previous Republika Srpska leader insisting to me that the Bosnian Serb delegation would not go to the 1996 London Conference simply because the nameplates on the table would not be to their liking:

“Is it in your interests to go?”

“Yes”.

“So are you going to go?”

“No”.

“In that case your position is stupid”.

“Serbs are stupid”.

The operational point is that using a classic Carrot and Stick policy when dealing with former Yugoslavia (eg the idea that Serbs should give up Kosovo for faster European integration) implicitly assumes that those offered the choice are going to think hard and sensibly about what is in their interests.

But what if they don't? 

After returning from Zagreb I hit the Eurostar to Brussels to join for the first time as a trainer a good CPDS training course aimed at improving the quality of political reporting and analysis produced by EU officials.

In one exercise the participants had to draft an urgent short report about the implications of an imaginary take-over of the Kirkuk oilfields by Kurdish militia - was this a dramatic lunge for Kurdish independence? I as trainer and former senior diplomat also did the exercise with the course members, to help show them how one 'pro' might do this job.

My version included a bold line at the end to point out that Kurdish aspirations for an independent state had been around for a long time, and that in tackling Kosovo the EU should bear in mind that others round the world would be watching closely the possible precedent set.

One of the EU officials present whispered to me that that sort of observation would go down badly in a real EU report: "the people dealing with Kosovo would be very angry to see it!" 

No doubt true. But therefore what?

Political and diplomatic precedents set in one part of the world are seized upon elsewhere, for better or worse. This of course does pose difficulties for diplomats grappling with one problem, who really do not want to hear that their actions may cause new problems elsewhere. But does the fact that a point may be 'unhelpful' or 'unwelcome' mean that it should not be made?

There is a fair question of professional ethics about who should make what points when. Thus as HM Ambassador in Warsaw I often used my telegrams to London to make big picture points about post-Cold War European trends and problems (not least the signals being sent by Moscow under current management) which went well beyond my immediate formal responsibilities. This did not endear me to colleagues elsewhere in the region. But FCO Ministers did not complain - no-one else was offering them such work. 

Some points are sufficiently wide - but nonetheless important - that they do not fit into existing bureaucratic categories. Hence it is not clear who 'owns' them and the responsibility for thinking about them. Who then makes them? If no-one does, the advice reaching the top level is sub-optimal. A degree of self-delusion may develop. And we may find ourselves ostensibly solving one problem but only at the cost of opening new ones.

When I was a very junior diplomat in Belgrade the then Ambassador asked me for my opinion on a long and obscure piece of work he had written droning on grimly  about Yugoslav self-management. I paused, searching for a phrase which captured politely my thoughts on this turgid if not hopeless text. He said "you think it's pedestrian, don't you!" I said, "Yes!". He generously replied that the one thing I should never do is stop saying honestly and directly what I thought: "all the others here are just yes-men".

"Nothing is linked. But everything is linked."  Deal with it. And don't complain when someone points out linkages.  

Back to sunny Zagreb last week for the first time in some years. I was there to represent ADR Group at the start of a new good EU-funded scheme to help spread modern Mediation practice and procedures in Croatia.

Croatia like many former Communist countries has vast traffic-jams in its justice system, with hundreds of thousands of cases rambling on inconclusively and unhappily for many years. Hence the idea that by developing Mediation - getting the parties to settle their differences themselves with some professional help - they can speed things up a bit.

One no-brainer reason for the courts' backlog lies in a local procedure which to our British jurisprudential ears seems quite bewildering. In Croatia judges first hear the evidence of a witness, then have to dictate that evidence to the stenographer for the official record.

This (I was told by people who know the system) awesomely prolongs everything, both because in itself it is obviously far slower to do this simple job twice, but also because the parties' lawyers can open arguments about whether what the judge said accurately reflected what the witness said.  

Still, even if judicial proceedings in that part of Europe tend to be rather sluggish, at least people keep themselves nice and clean.

Boris Tadic has won Serbia's Presidential elections, defeating the populist Radical Tomislav Nikolic by a close but clear margin on a high turn-out.

Nikolic has conceded defeat in a dignified way. Tadic is making suitably polite noises about his opponent and his supporters.

This is a powerful vote by Serbia for a normal 'European' future. Nikolic campaigned hard on a defiant 'We're Keeping Kosovo' platform seemingly positioning Serbia equi-distant between the EU and Russia. That geographically and philosophically confused notion of course had resonance among voters fed up of feeling that Serbia is always being kicked around by the international community and/or recalling the heady days of Titoist 'non-alignment'.

But a majority of Serbs evidently concluded that after the battering their country had had over the past two decades or so (not to mention the previous seven centuries), the Nikolic option was too risky and would go nowhere. Plus Serbs don't trust Russians much anyway; the hope of visa-free travel to the EU is much more appealing in Belgrade than the metaphysics of Slavic solidarity. .

In any case, as former Serbia and Montenegro former Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic has rightly pointed out, those who voted for Nikolic generally were not primitive morons but people who in many ways for good reason were frustrated by the turn of events in the past seven years since Milosevic fell.

Boris Tadic is a fine, reasonable, honourable European-style leader, with hunky shoulders from his water-polo days. He will need to draw on all his reserves of physical and political strength to deal with the looming drama of a Kosovo declaration of independence.

A win for the nationalist Nikolic would have made the Kosovo Albanians' immediate ambitions far easier presentationally. Tadic's new mandate perhaps will incline leaders round Europe and beyond to be rather more cautious about dumping an explosive Kosovo problem in his lap as his elections victory gift.

I used obnoxiously to opine that when Serbs were confronted with a clear choice between (a) taking a positive, optimistic, steady path to likely success, and (b) a thorny, barren, twisting road probably heading for yet another Disaster, they would ask for an extended time-out to think about it.

This time they chose promptly - and chose well. Cestitam. 

In Warsaw in 2006 I found my way to a Kraftwerk concert, complete with their hit The Man-Machine.

When growing up I somehow missed out completely on the elusive Kraftwerk's musical impact. The show was both artistically and philosophically fascinating.

One highlight was observing one of the robotic (behold that amazing futuristic tie!) Kraftwerkers getting increasingly uncomfortable, before dashing off stage as a song finished for what promised to be a convulsive lavatorial experience - the perils of live rock music in an Ageing Society.

The retro-style and retro-substance of the show was a strange self-parody of a self-parody. As they got going some 30 years ago amidst the post-WW2 German economic boom Kraftwerk blazed a trail for electronic music and an eerie vision of an explicitly Germano-European integrated high-tech future: We want the whole World to know that we are from Germany, because the German mentality – which is more advanced – will always be part of our behaviour. We create out of the German language, the mother-language, which is very mechanical; we use it as the basic structure of our music. 

Hence Autobahn, an electronic but intriguingly lyrical tribute to German motorways before the pressure of traffic we see today. And Trans-Europe Express, extolling the joys of integrated European railway travel.  

But the defining point of Kraftwerk was their zealous admiration of technology in all its forms, plus the explicit idea that humankind would be subsumed by and in it. Hence all sorts of repetitive but drily clever songs about computers, electric cafes, radioactivity, space-labs, titanium, neon lights, numbers, robots and the like. Hard though it is to grasp now, back then even pocket calculators were really cool.

Yet the show in Warsaw some three decades on conveyed little of how technology in fact has evolved, away from Kraftwerk's vision of Big mass standardization towards Small(er) mass differentiation, or at least constantly evolving and unexpected combinations of both. Kraftwerk's backdrops were curiously dated clips depicting bland conformity, such as anonymous healthy cyclists pushing their way across a sunny Europe in Tour de France.

Basically Kraftwerk got it 100% wrong.

We are not becoming more like machines. They are becoming more like us.