Blogoir

Lots of things are incredibly complicated and yet oddly simple when you strip down the issues to the basics.

Such as the Eurozone drama.

Amidst all the swirling technical/clever analysis of bonds, treaty provisions, sovereign debts and so on, Marshall Auerback gives us this lively thought:

Germany is in effect also a passenger on the Titanic, as Italian Finance Minister Guilio Tremonti recently noted. It might be in the first-class cabin, rather than steerage (or Irish stowaways, as the Germans no doubt view the former “Celtic Tiger”), but when the boat hits the iceberg, all passengers are affected.

OK, but what's the nub of the problem?

... it is ironic (and more than a touch hypocritical) that Germany chastises its neighbors, like Greece, or its trading partners like the U.S., for their “profligacy”, but relies on these countries “living beyond their means” to produce a trade surplus that allows its own government to run smaller budget deficits.

But ... but ... but the Eurozone has rules to manage these tricky situations. Not only rules. Principles!

... there has been a complete lack of consistency of principle. When larger countries such as Germany and France routinely violated spending limits a few years ago, this was conveniently ignored (or papered over), in contrast to the vituperative criticism now being hurled at the Mediterranean profligates. The EU’s repeated tendency to make ad hoc improvisations of EMU’s treaty provisions, rather than engaging in the hard job of reforming its flawed arrangements, are a function of a silly ideology which is neither grounded in political reality, nor economic logic. As a result, a political firestorm, which completely undermines the euro’s credibility, is potentially in the offing

Huh? What are you talking about? President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel took decisive new action this week. They sent Herman van Rompuy a letter:

The Euro is the basis of our economic success and symbol for the political unification of our

continent. It stands for the will of Europe to consolidate its internal development and to

jointly meet the challenges of our time. Germany and France, consider it their historic mission

and stand united to protect and strengthen the economic and monetary union and thus the

stability of the single currency.

That's pretty clear. Strong stuff, surely?

And to judge from the flaccid statement that accompanied the conclusion of the Merkel-Sarkozy summit yesterday, it appears that even at this late stage, policy makers don’t get it, or just cannot summon up the political will for the huge conceptual leap forward required to save the euro. The Germans are paralysed politically and things are moving too fast for their policy makers to respond quickly. And their political leadership has neither leveled with the electorate in regard to the magnitude of the problem, nor the costs associated with ongoing punishments of the profligates.

Still, at least Marshall Auerback foresees a happy ending if Germany itself can't stand any more of this and abruptly leaps from the Eurozone taking a few honest and efficient states with it:

The Club Med, such as Greece, Italy, and Spain countries are saved because the euro plunges and they get to export their way out of this. The euro becomes a soft currency country again and these countries go back to living with higher inflation, higher exports and probably a generally more comfortable way of life. 

Interestingly enough, the country which really gets screwed in this type of environment is France which is neither a true “Club Med” economy, but has yet to undertake many of the structural reforms of its German counterpart which it is seeking to emulate. Its economy is more akin to that of Italy, but should it seek to become part of the “greater DM bloc”, then its industrial base will likely face a huge competitive threat from Italy.

Read the whole thing. Very carefully. A fine example of clever complex expert work expressed in words and graphs for the rest of us to follow.

Well, sure he's clever. But is he correct to present the choices so starkly and pessimistically? Who knows? I don't.

In this whole accelerating drama over the past couple of years, those who have predicted that things will get worse (and then worse again) have been vindicated by events. Because (in part) the whole Eurozone rests on elemental existential Euro-assumptions about Paternalism, Trust and Solidarity which turn out to be flawed or flimsy - or just not true.

My latest piece over at Dale & Co looks at a possible spiral down into the next global conflagration:

In short, the planet’s legal and moral order looks and feels weak. For the first time in centuries the USA and Europe are increasingly unable to define, let alone set the global agenda. Other powers are slowly coming to the fore. They sense that things are going their way: why not exploit this situation to redraw the map - and rewrite the global rules - as they see fit?

What in fact is stopping a new brazen 'grab what you can' looting attitude emerging? And if it does emerge, what is to stop it? Conventional weapons and tactics are useless against more or less spontaneous bottom-up networked challenges to existing ruling elites.

World Wars One and Two were conflicts with global consequences arising from European power-struggles. But there was at least a clear context, involving classic thematic rivalries in an understandable form. And far fewer countries were global players. World War Three will be different, a crazy free-for-all.

Disintegration in this sense is not pre-ordained. Western uncertainty is matched by Chinese, Russian and Indian hesitation. Yes, those powers see an historic opportunity to move into the philosophical and political space created by the West’s disarray. Yet how best to do it successfully, without doing immense economic damage to themselves or falling prey to destabilizing ‘flash riots’ which seem to come from nowhere in more and more countries?

At least they have options. Including ‘wait and see’. After all, even if they do nothing their relative power improves as Western confidence and reach diminish. Why bother to loot, when sooner or later plenty of juicy apples may well start to fall into your lap?

Maybe one extra point should be made. Any such free-for-all might not necessarily involve massed armies and messy explosions, although in practice no doubt there would be plenty of them. Deft cyberwarfare aimed at sneakily weakening key enemy military and civilian infrastucture installations time after time might be enough...

A handy round up of some of my wise and prescient thoughts from the past year on the state of the European Union.

1   18 October 2010

... Which prompts me to post this extract from my Krakow presentation, a slide entitled Will EU Diplomacy Survive? Indeed, such are the marvels of modern technology that you can see a picture of me staring aghast at my own handiwork here.

The slide asks some questions:

EU in 50,000,000 years' time?   No

EU in 5,000,000 years' time?     No

EU in 50,000 years' time?         No

EU in 5000 years' time?            No

EU in 500 years' time?              No

EU in 50 years' time?                Maybe

EU in five years' time?               Probably

This is a striking idea. It reminds us that over time things just come and go.

I enjoy giving presentations featuring maps of Europe and national borders over the past 800 years, one century at a time. These maps show countries, peoples and powers waxing and waning. Now that the Polish, Holy Roman, Russian, Austrian and Turkish empires have disappeared, in some areas of Europe the map looks quite like what we had many centuries ago.

Why should not this pattern continue? In particular, is not the European Union as presently constituted Too Big to Fail - and thereby doomed to Fail in the not too distant future?

In other words, it is likely that within the lifetimes of the sassy young Poles who comprised much of the audience in Krakow last week the European Union will change into something completely different. Not necessarily worse, not necessarily better. Just different.

This change could come slowly. Or abruptly. The state of the EU's finances because of ill-discipline within the Eurozone means that important parts of the EU financial sector across different countries are vulnerable to sudden crashes in global market confidence which, as we have seen, can come out of a clear blue sky...

2   16 May 2010

... I tend to think that he's correct - that the EU as currently configured can not survive much longer. If only because the measures needed to make the Eurozone work will compel new levels of 'integration' for all EU members which will go well beyond what some countries can accept.

Things are already coming to a head, via Qualified Majority Voting.

Under EU rules decisions in many policy areas and binding on all can be taken by votes of EU member governments. Hitherto voting has not been a decisive factor, since EU member governments mull things over, look at the weight of likely opposition to see if any combination might have a blocking minority, and cut deals.

So there is voting but it in effect usually defines a different way to reach a consensus.

What we can expect soon are proposals put forward for voting which are said to be essential for Eurozone members as such, but may well have negative outcomes for non-Eurozone members. The Eurozone members may then start to push through those votes in the face of outright opposition from many of the others - but especially the UK.

If that starts to happen systematically, the implicit deal based primarily upon a sense of consensus will have been changed irrevocably in favour of majority-led power-plays. The legitimacy of that sort of decision-making and its outcomes will fall to be challenged very hard.

So there has to be a good chance that the result is the emergence of some sort of formalised new arrangements, maybe two or more smaller European unions.

In one group, those countries which are ready to stop being countries and form a new bloc phenomenon, with one currency and the inflexible fiscal, popular voting and other mechanisms needed to make that happen.

And in another, countries which are satisfied with looser and more flexible cooperative arrangements.

Anything really wrong with that, as long as the two groups live nicely together and don't fight?

Not really. But the transaction costs and associated convulsions will be considerable. Which group Germany would now join?

Maybe those convulsions, huge as they must be, are preferable to standing in a swamp watching the slime-level inexorably head north above our knees, no-one able to move because we are all tied together?

3   17 November 2010

This national sovereignty idea is very odd when you think about it. We don't lament the fact that Yorkshire or the west part of London or a quarter of Shanghai don't have the freedom to run their own economic policies.

So why does it really matter if Ireland's small population end up being told what to do by stern German bankers? 80 million Germans seem to be managing fine under that arrangement.

One answer might be that Ireland would have no say in the German decisions, so it wouldn't be 'fair'. True. But it is the Germans' money bailing Ireland out.

Maybe if you decide to take a huge risk and mess up, part of the deal is that you lose your right to decide for yourself until you have been sorted out - on the terms of the people doing the sort out. A bit like a belligerent drunk being incarcerated to sober up.

The really interesting thing about the EU crisis is that as Simon Heffer says, it forces out into the open First Principles and collapses careless assumptions.

I wrote this in 2008. And gosh, it reads nicely now (emphasis added):

Trust grows in subtle unexpected ways, usually slowly and through doses of unhappy trial and error. It can not be created by European elites telling us all what is good for us. Especially when some of them look to be cheating on their expenses which our taxes have paid for.

Another former colleague recently said to me, "the trouble with you is that you reduce everything to first principles!"

He's right. I do. 

The risk for someone who does that lies in sounding like the wily but annoying Irishman who tells a lost traveller trying to get to Dublin that it is "no good starting from here".

The key advantage in looking hard and regularly at First Principles is that one is less likely to build a tall edifice on wobbly foundations. And perhaps more likely to be a better source of advice as to when something tall and imposing is in fact risking collapse.

That former colleague is a prominent LibDem EU fan. QED

Postscript: Or as another former senior FCO colleague put it:

"Huh? It's wrong to reduce things to first principles? What other principles are there?"   

Julian Borger at the Guardian has written a long and well-sourced piece about the hunt for Bosnian war crimes suspects. It even quotes me a couple of times (no great surprises for diligent readers of this site).

The key policy dilemma point is here, tucked away in the middle of the article:

While deciding to go after the criminals, the Nato powers had chosen the more cautious course of going after the smaller fry first, on the grounds that they would be less well-protected, a decision many later regretted because it allowed the bigger fish to go into hiding

In most if not all situations there is a spectrum of policy outcome options, ranging from Utterly Awful to Deliriously Wonderful. Politicians and officials know that they really don't want the former and are unlikely to get the latter, so they settle for a range of options somewhere in the middle.

The thing to understand is that within that range of options (which usually is all about balancing risks and short-term v longer-term likely upsides/downsides of different choices) reasonable people might disagree on where the 'right' choice is, but also agree that another point in that range is in itself a reasonable choice, all things considered.

So in Bosnia in 1996 our leaders had a very tricky operational decision to take.

Do they try to arrest the biggest ICTY indictees first? Upside: they deal with the worst suspects immediately, encouraging lesser suspects to surrender. Downside: the biggest fish are well protected and likely to resist - the operation might go wrong and prompt wider protests which could destabilise the peace process itself.

Or do they go for 'lesser' indictees, get some easy runs on the scoreboard and then work their way briskly up towards the biggest fish? Upside: less risky, therefore more chance to plan harder operations in the light of experience - unlikely to rock the peace process. Downside: suggests lack of resolve - the biggest fish may go underground and make life very difficult as we try to catch them.

In other words, once it was decided in principle to arrest ICTY indictees, all sorts of non-trivial policy and operational issues then presented themselves.

As Julian Borger describes, the steady-as-she-goes cautious option prevailed (as it usually does): 'lesser' indictees first. 

But the predictable (if not quite predicted) result of that was the bizarre spectacle of Karadzic and Mladic evading arrest for a startling 14 or so years, even though they were lurking in the Serbia/Bosnia/Montenegro area.

I don't recall being consulted about the pros and cons of arresting Big v Lesser ICTY indictees first. My instinct, I think (hope), would have been to go for some pretty Big ones, as that would send a signal of determination precisely because it was more 'risky'. But I was pleased when the decison was taken to start arresting lesser indictees, and then delighted when the first operation finally unfolded, even though the ICTY indictee concerned, a Serb called Simo Drljaca, died when resisting arrest by the SAS.

This first operation was notable also because the mad Bosniac/Muslim media in Sarajevo quickly denounced it as a typical British pro-Serb plot, designed to rally Republika Srpska opposition to Dayton by making Drljaca a martyr. These ravings played into the background to Robin Cook's first dramatic visit to Sarajevo in 1997.

Anyway, all ICTY indictees have been taken to The Hague to face justice. The whole process has been staggeringly expensive and in many ways deeply unsatisfactory. 

Yet through ICTY the facts of the former Yugoslavia conflict have been aired and argued about in stunning detail. If anything the unfairness of the process lies in the fact that it was too narrow: many senior Bosniacs and Croats with a case to answer - including Izetbegovic and Tudjman themselves - were never called upon to explain themselves and answer serious accusations against them.

Still. Rough justice better than no justice?

As I peck at the keyboard there is plenty of scrambling in Washington to try to get together the votes needed to pass the 'compromise' package agreed by President Obama and Republican/Democrat leaders.

Hardcore Democrats bewail the 'cuts'. Hardcore Republicans/Teapartyers bewail the fact that the cuts don't go far enough and may bear down too heavily on defence spending. These positions echo public annoyance and confusion as to what it all means.

Leftists like Paul Krugman are furious with President Obama for ceding too much, to the point of near-hysterical babbling about the startling fact that Congress members elected with a clear mandate to cut federal spending have had the temerity to want to do so. Banana republic tactics! Extortion!

What does it all mean? Luckily we puny earthlings have the brilliant Keith Hennessey to explain it all.

And, as he warns, it all gets very complicated:

The key technical detail is that the Committee’s recommendations on taxes will be measured against a current law baseline for taxes. Under current law, certain taxes are scheduled to go up in 2013, most notably the individual income tax rates and rates on capital gains and dividends. Normally Republicans dislike a current law baseline on taxes, but in this case it helps them.

Here’s what that means for the Joint Committee:

• If the Committee allows tax rates to increase in 2013 (aka “raise tax rates in 2013,” or “let the Bush-Obama tax cuts expire,” depending on your point of view), the additional revenues raised will not count toward the Joint Committee’s target since this is already current law
• So raising these tax rates doesn’t help the Committee meet their $1.5 T deficit target.  That doesn’t mean they can’t include them in their legislation (they can), just that they can’t get any numeric benefit for doing so. That is incredibly important.

Hmm.

OK, Keith. You win. It's complicated. But what does it basically mean?

While the Joint Committee process does not preclude tax cuts, it is tilted pretty heavily against them and toward spending cuts. That is huge.

That sounds OK. Anything else?

Senate Democrats get to punt this year and next on passing a budget resolution and making any politically difficult choices in the open. This is for me the only unequivocally bad part of this bill. It is process abuse, in which Senate Democrats are avoiding taking responsibility for proposing solutions to America’s biggest economic policy problems.

Everyone wants to blame the other side. No change. Next?

I think Team Obama thinks, because a failed Joint Committee would cause the trigger to cut defense spending an additional 10% and nondefense discretionary spending “only” an additional 8%, that Republicans will pay anything to get a new law, including agreeing to tax increases.

I think Congressional Republicans think this judgment is wrong, and this difference of opinion allows both sides to agree to this trigger and this new law

OK. High stakes political poker. No change:

I am reminded of the familiar scene in an action movie. The bad guy holds a hostage and a hand grenade while our hero, five feet away, points a gun at the bad guy. The bad guy threatens to pull the grenade pin and kill himself, the hostage, and our hero. He points out that the hero may not care about himself, but surely he doesn’t want to risk the life of this innocent young girl.

The hero, who we know is a kind and compassionate man, looks the bad guy straight in the eye and says, “Go ahead. Blow us all up. I don’t care about her, and I don’t care about myself, as long as you’re killed in the process as well. We both know you won’t pull that pin because you won’t kill yourself. So let her go and let’s end this peacefully.”

The bad guy backs down because the hero has demonstrated the threat provides no relative advantage. As long as the exploding grenade would do sufficient damage to the bad guy (death), it doesn’t matter that the hero suffers a greater loss (death X 2). The bad guy doesn’t want to carry through with his threat any more than the hero does.

NB: Superb passage on negotiating technique and 'relative advantage'.

But is the underlying problem of dangerously high public spending in the USA solved by this compromise? Or not?

$2 trillion of spending cuts is big for Congress but small relative to our underlying fiscal problems. If this bill becomes law and if the fall Joint Committee process is successful, the remaining spending problem will be more than an order of magnitude larger than this accomplishment.

If you think this summer has been painful or dread the battle of this fall, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Wait until Congress wrestles with the big stuff.

As I expected. Important step in the right direction, but a long hard road ahead.

Read Keith's three magnificent posts in full. You'll learn something.

Here we are, back from Turkey after the Mother of All Horrible Flights thanks to Thomson Airways, which diligently contrived an 18-hour information-free delay. Details to be written up when I have the strength.

For now have a look at my latest DIPLOMAT piece on Diplomatic Technique. It helpfully includes the answers to the three questions I posed back in May:

You are supervising the seating of VIPs in the two front rows at the theatre at a gala production sponsored by the ITO. As guests arrive you are told that two key VIPs allocated the best centre front-row seats are not expected to attend. Do you:

a)         do nothing

b)                   offer these seats to the two most senior VIPs seated in the second row

c)                   quickly try to find the Head of Mission to see what should be done

d)                   ask other VIPs in the front row to move along so that there is no awkward ‘gap’ in the front row, leaving a seat empty at both ends of the row

e)                   give the seats to two friends who were sitting in the aisle because of the crush

You are the mission’s lead Communications Policy officer. The HoM is busy and gives you several complicated oral instructions in English needing early action. You understand most of them, but not all. Do you:

a)         go back to interrupt the HoM and ask her/him to clarify exactly what he/she meant

b)                   start to carry out those instructions you did fully understand, and leave the others until the HoM is less busy

c)                   ask the Deputy HoM for advice

d)                   do nothing until the HoM is free to confirm exactly what she/he wanted

The Head of ITO plus you and one other top ITO colleague are in a late-night meeting with 20 other delegations arguing over a important UN budget deal worth millions. Several hours more work will be needed. Your delegation shares a pocket calculator to help with the complicated options.

Suddenly the pocket calculator runs out of battery. The junior staff on the delegation were all sent home long ago. An all-night supermarket five minutes away sells new batteries. Do you:

a)         volunteer to run down to the supermarket to buy a new battery

b)                   if the Head of ITO asks you to go and buy a new battery, insist that it is not your job as a senior diplomat to go shopping, and say that the delegation will have to manage by doing paper calculations

c)                   ask around quietly to see if another delegation will lend you a calculator

d)                   not mention the fact that the battery has died and do your best to use paper

e)                   ask the Head of ITO to decide what to do, agreeing to accept any instruction even if you feel it is immensely undignified or even improper

f)                     telephone the hotel to wake up a junior ITO colleague and order a new battery be brought to you asap (probably 45 minutes or more)

The Commentator has published a piece of mine - Torture versus terror - a tale of two resignations - which is intended to bring out in 100% unambiguous terms what practical and ethical/policy dilemmas a blanket extension of the idea of 'complicity in torture' might produce.

It takes a dramatic imaginary scene some years in the future to explain why and precisely how some anguished operational choices might need to be made, and how different honourable people might come to completely different conclusions: 

I believe that in the extreme circumstances I faced, I acted – as I was elected to do - in the national interest, by accepting that information and acting on it. Torture is despicable. We work tirelessly at the United Nations and elsewhere to stamp it out.

But I believe that it cannot be right to avoid any action to thwart murderers and so save innocent lives. The relatives and friends of all the victims of the bombings today in London and Edinburgh will be tortured by their grief from this disaster every day for the rest of their lives.

This situation creates appalling policy and ethical dilemmas for us all. Indeed, I myself might be open to prosecution for what I did. If this happens I will plead not guilty but enter no defence and leave it to the jury to decide.

I do not wish to continue to serve as Prime Minister without a clear mandate from voters as to how I should respond in such circumstances.

I hereby resign my seat in Parliament with immediate effect. A by-election will be called in the shortest possible time. I will stand for re-election but not campaign for it. My statement here tonight represents my only policy position and my only public statement in that campaign...

In fact the dilemmas are there already for practical purposes. British police officers have been busy grilling MI6 officers on what if anything they knew or suspected about the treatment in other countries of AQ and other terror suspects.

These issues take us right to the very outskirts of Policy and how it's made. And if you want one of the most remarkable and profound set of answers ever articulated on some of these problems as they come up in a democracy out there on the Limits of Diplomacy, swing by the transcripts of the UK's Iraq Inquiry and have a read of this testimony by an MI6 officer.

Plenty of heavy black redactions for reasons of the highest secrecy, but what's left is gripping and subtle enough. And, in parts, downright magnificent:

Here is Craig Murray rumbling on about the fact that News International recently held a reception in the FCO:

Last week the Murdoch phone hacking empire hired the palatial rooms of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for their summer party. There Rebekah Brooks and Murdoch junior sumptuously entertained their bought politicians from all the major parties, who turned up in droves, tongues dragging on the bespoke axminster, from Cameron down.

But what's this?

A couple of years ago when Charles Crawford and I were considering holding a public debate on foreign policy and the practice of diplomacy, I asked whether it would be possible to rent a state room in the FCO. I was told I was not an appropriate person to rent a room there.

Let's see what they say now under Conservative/LibDem management...

Remember the Bonn Powers for Bosnia and Herzegovina - the supposed authority bestowed on the High Representative by the 'international community' to allow him/her to remove recalcitrant Bosnians from office or otherwise 'move forward' the 'peace process'?

The impressive thing was that as far as I could see the Bonn Powers had no real legal basis at all. They amounted to an international political power-play bluff which successive High Representatives wrapped up in legal language to make the whole thing look imposing and inevitable.

And they worked, for many years. Senior BH politicians and officials were indeed sacked. Yet the perverse if unsurprising result of sacking people whose elections we had proclaimed to be free and fair was only a diminished sense of local responsibility for real-life outcomes, rather than enhanced effort. Inat?

Thus familiarity bred contempt. Sooner or later a direct legal challenge to these 'powers' was going to be mounted somewhere.

The whole idea of these 'powers' (not granted under the Dayton Peace Treaty) was at best ambiguous. The more they were used, the more likely they were to become counter-productive: they amounted to an arbitrary use of power with no serious legal checks and balances.

Matthew Parish is a lawyer who knows the BH situation from first hand. Here is a trenchant essay decribing how the current HiRep Valentin Inzko is quietly demolishing all the powers, many of which were abused in a grotesque way:

Mass dismissals became common shows of force. High Representative Wolfgang Petritsch dismissed 12 people (and imposed 24 laws and amended the constitutions of both Entities) in his last two days in office. Ashdown dismissed some 58 officials on one day in June 2004.

The so-called “Bonn powers”, named after the international conference that created them, became used with increasing frequency and capriciousness.

Some of the most repellent exercises of this unrestrained authority took place quite late. In July 2007 High Representative Miroslav Lajcak accused a hitherto obscure official Dragomir Andan, then Deputy Head of Police Education in Republika Srpska, of supporting Radovan Karadzic, fired him from office, confiscated his identity documents (and those of 90 other people) and ordered the police to investigate him.

In September of the same year his Deputy, Raffi Gregorian, fined a Brcko District parliamentarian two months’ salary for making an obscene gesture on television.

Bosnia’s Constitutional Court, despairing of the gross failures of due process and right to a fair trial inherent in OHR’s methods, declared that the Bosnian courts should review OHR’s decisions. OHR annulled its judgment and threatened any judge with the same sanctions should (s)he seek to implement the Constitutional Court’s ruling.

What was intended to be a deft tool for removing crude senior trouble-makers after all else had failed became a clumsy and quite illegitimate bludgeon.

The issue now becomes stark(er): can Bosnia and Herzegovina survive in its current form if this threat, clumsy as it was, is removed, allowing Bosnia's Serbs and Croats to express their objections to the Dayton peace deal all the more assertively?

It's easy to be pessimistic:

In lifting OHR’s remaining bans, Inzko has quietly conceded that OHR no longer has the moral authority to dismiss people from public office or to punish them by international decree. An educated and civilised advocate of European values, he considers the use of these powers out of place in a modern democracy.

In taking this decent stance he deserves to be praised in the highest degree, because his embrace of principle is likely to subject him to significant attacks. Abdication of the Bonn powers confirms there is now no domestic tool to prevent Bosnia’s Serbs and Croats from pursuing their secessionist goals.

Bosnia and Herzegovina may collapse over the coming months, and the international community will shortly find it convenient to blame Inzko. We will hear expressions of despair about his weak leadership and lack of resolve in letting Dodik push the country to the brink of failure.

The period of proconsulship is now over, and the international community will need a scapegoat for the fact that its labours over the last 15 years have proven to be for naught. The Americans in particular will inveigh over European weakness, refusing to countenance that their heavy-handed model of state-building, pioneered by Richard Holbrooke in reconstructing Bosnia and Kosovo, has proven unsuccessful.

Instead we are getting a turbo-boosted EU 'Embassy', armed with lots of long-term carrots and no sticks. Soft power!

This soft power strategy carries its own dangers. It risks underestimating the depth of inter-ethnic animosity, which may impede meaningful political cooperation whatever the external incentives. It also assumes a maturity to Bosnian democracy – in which the electorate can be expected to vote for the outcome most economically beneficial to them – which so far has proven absent.

The most desirable solution for the future of Bosnia may be as a radically decentralised state which maintains formal unitary sovereignty only in name. The Scottish, Swiss and Northern Irish models all may provide insights in this regard. But such an approach would entail dismantling many of the institutions of central government that OHR previously created.

If the EU tries to resist this course, then it may perpetuate political crisis in much the same way as OHR has done and its soft power will prove uninfluential.

We are on the brink of a profound change in the international community’s attitudes towards Bosnia. Bosniaks will not like it, because they perceive the authority of OHR to have been exercised mostly in their interests. Croats and Serbs will welcome it because they will be able to advance their agendas ...

International officials cannot credibly exhort domestic politicians to observe the bedrock standards of European governance set out in the European Convention on Human Rights, if they do not see fit to submit to those standards themselves.

That last point must be right.

More generally, the BH model gives all sorts of insights into what works and what does not in internationally-sponsored 'nation-building'. In particular, it points to what I call front-loading for success, taking radical action in the early days of any intervention to remove senior extremists from positions of influence so ass to empower (and be seen to empower) more moderate and constructive local forces. The absurdly extended hunts for Karadzic/Mladic show how idiotic and off-balance things get if this is not done.  

But will anyone bother to learn those lessons and apply them next time round? Of course not.

As always, these things boil down to some simple propositions. In this case, how to make work a new European state when something like half the population would, on the whole, rather not be in it?

You all know where these came from:

• Art never expresses anything but itself
• All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals
• Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life
• Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art

Remember this vivid argument last year? Thus:

The slide asks some questions:

EU in 50,000,000 years' time?   No

EU in 5,000,000 years' time?     No

EU in 50,000 years' time?         No

EU in 5000 years' time?            No

EU in 500 years' time?              No

EU in 50 years' time?                Maybe

EU in five years' time?               Probably

This is a striking idea. It reminds us that over time things just come and go.

I enjoy giving presentations featuring maps of Europe and national borders over the past 800 years, one century at a time. These maps show countries, peoples and powers waxing and waning. Now that the Polish, Holy Roman, Russian, Austrian and Turkish empires have disappeared, in some areas of Europe the map looks quite like what we had many centuries ago.

Why should not this pattern continue? In particular, is not the European Union as presently constituted Too Big to Fail - and thereby doomed to Fail in the not too distant future?

In other words, it is likely that within the lifetimes of the sassy young Poles who comprised much of the audience in Krakow last week the European Union will change into something completely different. Not necessarily worse, not necessarily better. Just different.

This change could come slowly. Or abruptly. The state of the EU's finances because of ill-discipline within the Eurozone means that important parts of the EU financial sector across different countries are vulnerable to sudden crashes in global market confidence which, as we have seen, can come out of a clear blue sky.

All of which is simply to say that any talk of opening the Pandora's Box of Treaty Change brings forward to the day when the current arrangements start to dissolve.

The political and operational problem in trying to bring about any organised change is that there is now huge weight of people, money and prestige invested in the current ungainly structures: European Parliament, European Commission and countless funding arrangements for all sorts of activities. So trying to take a proper radical look at what is happening now - and identifying something simpler but better - will be next to impossible.

This is dangerous, since it implies that only a really stupendous crisis will force national governments to confront reality and take the genuinely difficult decisions needed to change course.

In such a situation there is no reason to think that national governments will have too much time for an elusive Europe-wide common interest. Instead it will be sauve qui peut.

Art indeed.

Yet look at this amazing piece from the Guardian's Martin Kettle today, showing how Life is fast catching up:

... just the other day, I heard Sir Stephen Wall say something so similar. Here's what Wall said, at a seminar run by the Policy Network thinktank in London: "We have seen the high point of the European Union. With a bit of luck it will last our lifetime [Wall is 64]. But it's on the way out. After all, very few institutions last forever."

Ferguson is a Eurosceptic. His dismissive view of the EU is not a surprise. But Wall's view that the EU is on the way out marks the death of the old faith. For Wall was the most influential British pro-European diplomat of his time: our man in the negotiations of most of the EU treaties of the modern era; Tony Blair's longtime European policy adviser; and the author of a book on the EU that begins with the words: "I am convinced that wholehearted participation in the EU is strongly in Britain's national interest."

First the Berlin Wall. Now Stephen Wall. European collapses don't come more dramatic.

Yet the remarkable thing about Wall's pessimism is that it no longer seems so remarkable. As EU leaders gathered in Brussels on Thursday to grapple with the Greek crisis, the airwaves were awash with existential debates not just about Greece or the eurozone but about the very future of the EU itself.

Though most EU-watchers still talk of muddling through as the most likely policy response to Greek bankruptcy, it is a muddling without momentum, direction or real agreement, let alone enthusiasm.

NB the famous 'muddling through' idea. One of my very first posts here was all about what the Muddling Through Somehow (MTS) idea means in itself, as it were. MTS makes sense only if there are categories of events which do NOT amount to muddling through - non-MTS events:

The Muddle Through Somehow (MTS) metaphor conveyed a number of interesting assumptions:

 

"… general notions of pragmatism; a certain degree of homely confusion; perhaps an absence of precise planning and control (“muddle”) but at least a broad sense of direction (“through”); … an absence of drastic, shocking, violent or cataclysmic change”.

 

But, I asserted, MTS as a very concept made sense only if it did not cover everything. World War Two had not exactly been a MTS event. In each case there had to be agreed non-MTS events (for Yugoslavia eg civil war or Soviet military intervention to prop up communist rule) whose likelihood also had to be assessed hard-headedly.

 

I tried to weigh all this up, and concluded that there was a serious chance of drastic non-MTS internal tensions escalating across Yugoslavia in the years to come as the various republican leaderships diverted attention from the country’s grim economic problems and played the card of mass nationalism. Kosovo was a particularly likely flashpoint. “One has an eerie feeling of being perched on a sandcastle with the waters of economic logic slowly but surely eroding the base.”

 

These exchanges read rather well now from my point of view – after many tens of thousands of violent deaths, plus billions of international taxpayers’ dollars thrown not very successfully at the problem. Oh, and look: here comes Kosovo again.

 

Yet it took a while for all that to unfold. Yugoslavia did Muddle Through Somehow. Until it didn't. Hence the core diplomatic policy conundrum: over what timescale is success measured?

Could we just be seeing an extraordinary opportunity for redefining the whole European project: summarily demolishing a lot of the institutional hulks now cluttering the landscape and creating instead a simpler and, yes, less 'ambitious' framework for peaceful cooperation built on much more solid and legitimate foundations?

And if so, does someone in Whitehall have a plan?

Here's a lively little number over at The Commentator, if I say so myself:

There is now little joy in this fast unfolding fiasco for any political tendency or EU member state. Everyone has got what they wanted. Yet it is not working out so well, just as in the best Five Children and It story:

"We want," said Robert slowly, "to be rich beyond the dreams of something or other."

"Avarice," said Jane.

"So it is," said the Fairy unexpectedly. "But it won't do you much good, that's one comfort," it muttered to itself…

"[T]he sight was too dazzling for their eyes to be able to bear it. It was something like trying to look at the sun at high noon on Midsummer Day. For the whole of the sand-pit was full, right up to the very top, with new shining gold pieces …and on the sides and edges of these countless coins the midday sun shone and sparkled, and glowed and gleamed till the quarry looked like the mouth of a smelting furnace, or one of the fairy halls that you see sometimes in the sky at sunset."

Millions of Greeks have not paid their taxes, yet their benefits and state services have trundled on. Greek demonstrators babble that the cuts and taxes needed for Greece to start to pay its honest way are “unfair”.

The Euro-elite in Brussels have wanted and achieved closer economic and political integration at the expense of national governments. Many EU countries have wanted and been given lots of new infrastructure funded by foreigners. People across Europe wanted and have bought new houses and fancy cars. European bankers lent money for this profligacy and have given themselves vast bonuses, confident (they thought) that they would never be called to account if it all went wrong, as they were “too big to fail”.

Leftists clamour for the state to do more. They have a point. In a crisis maybe the first priority is to set more/better rules? Rightists clamour for the state to do less. They too have a point. Has not too much official regulation insulated the financial world from common sense and professional responsibility?

Europhiliacs clamour for “more Europe”. They have a point. The current rules have failed to keep member states in line.

Eurosceptics have the grim satisfaction of saying “I told you so” and clamour for “less Europe”. They have a point. Systems which are too complex lose legitimacy and are doomed to fail.

* * * * *

As in the Psammead’s sand-pit, so in modern Europe. We sit perched on the reality of mountains of borrowed money. Yet we are now confronted with the consequences of that reality, namely that we are fast getting weaker and poorer. The policy train we designed and built chugs into the black Tunnel of Doom. But it’s no-one’s fault!

In this vivid situation, who “deserves” what? And why?

Update  Link not working previously - now fixed. Apologies.

When I rummage around in this blog I find all sorts of good stuff I have forgotten I ever wrote.

This is one such: a good practical example of a policy and personal dilemma for any civil servant to which there is no immediately good answer, the more so these days when discipline has collapsed and almost anything can be leaked so easily.

Any thoughts, especially from readers still on the inside peering out? How would they handle this situation?

Come on, don't be shy. You can email me thoughts if you'd rather not post a comment and wish to stay anonymous.

Here's my latest article in DIPLOMAT magazine, mulling over the subject of diplomatic loyalty:

... the Libya case has given rise to a spectacular number of high profile diplomatic changes of side, with one Libyan ambassador after another announcing support for the opposition forces struggling to bring down the Gaddafi regime.

Whereas host governments might or might not commend the high principle shown by such a defection, unwelcome problems quickly arise if some diplomats in an embassy switch sides but others don’t. Who is running the local Libyan embassy for the purpose of carrying on routine diplomatic business? Who gets invited to which functions? Does a Libyan diplomat who has announced a switch of loyalty still get diplomatic immunity? What about the official embassy car?

What if the uprising fails and Gaddafi wins – must we throw these people out of the Libyan Embassy? Who needs all these complications anyway?

How these questions and many others are answered will depend upon local circumstances and, perhaps, the personalities concerned. The worst outcome from a host government’s point of view is the outcome we have ended up with, the Libya crisis in particular, violently dragging on with no obvious end in sight. The Gaddafi elite are clinging on to power despite NATO forces blowing up significant quantities of military equipment.

Could a worst-case scenario unfold, namely a de facto or even de jure partition of Libya, with unfathomable complications for Libya’s diplomatic representation at the UN and around the world? In short, the Libya drama exemplifies the greatest challenge to any diplomat’s loyalty to his/her country: what to do if the country slumps into civil war or even disappears altogether?

This problem was faced in acute form by Soviet diplomats when the USSR disintegrated in 1991. They had represented one massive state – what to do when the 15 former Soviet republics had each become a new country? For most diplomats born and raised in Russia, the choice was simple: stick with the new Russian Foreign Ministry.

But those diplomats born and raised elsewhere in the Soviet Union had a painful choice. Better to stay on in powerful Moscow as a Russian diplomat, or return to one’s home republic and hope for a role in the nascent and disorganised Foreign Ministry there? If the latter, would they be trusted by the new leadership?

Many chose to stick with the Russian Foreign Ministry. Thus in 1995 when Russia and Ukraine were haggling over the fate of the Black Sea Fleet, the negotiating team representing Russia included plenty of ethnic Ukrainian expert diplomats.

It ends on another interesting question:

Could we see a tumultuous test of British diplomatic loyalties in the coming years if Scotland holds a referendum and opts for independence? Recent SNP gains show the country may well be heading in this direction.

Will the FCO’s sizeable tartan army of Scottish diplomats vote to stay in London representing a reduced UK or will they go north en masse to help Scotland set up its new diplomatic service?

In either case, who will trust them?

When Radovan Karadzic was finally arrested in mid-2008 I echoed here a telegram I sent to London from Belgrade in 2001 following the sudden transfer to ICTY of Slobodan Milosevic provocatively titled: "Is Milosevic Innocent?"

My piece "Is Karadzic Innocent?" made the point that it would be easier for ICTY to make a convincing if not irrefutable case against Karadzic than to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Milosevic himself had been guilty of specific war crimes and crimes against humanity in different parts of Bosnia. Karadzic had been at the centre of the Republika Srpska political leadership from the start of the BH conflict and therefore had been that much more closely linked to general and specific atrocities.

What about Ratko Mladic?

Various broad arguments will be mustered in Mladic's defence, if he lives long enough to be put on trial. That he was a loyal Yugoslav Army officer fighting to stop different regional extremists splitting up his country. That he disagreed with Karadzic on many issues and did well to pull together the disparate Bosnian Serb forces into something like a disciplined modern fighting force. That across Bosnia the Serbs were under attack from Croats and Muslims/Bosniacs alike (re-runs of countless WW2 Nazi-induced local atrocities against Serbs) and were compelled to attack to defend themselves.

On Srebrenica, his team above all will point to the fact that against all the rules of war the Muslims/Bosniacs took cynical advantage of the UN protected status of the enclave to sneak out and kill many local Serbs, retreating to the enclave to skulk behind the UN flag, all with the UN forces failing to act.

But these points and more (whatever you think of them) pale into insignificance when compared with the startling fact that in 1995 the Bosnian Serb forces over-ran the enclave to the UN's utter humiliation and captured in different places large numbers of Muslims/Bosniacs. In a range of atrocities men (and some boys) were separated from the women and children and massacred.

The numbers of men killed and buried in mass graves are hotly disputed. Some apologists for the Serb cause argue that 'only' a couple of thousand people were killed and not the 8000 or so cited by the Muslim/Bosniac side, and that in any case a goodly proportion of the people found in mass graves had died in open conflict.

But the Bosnian Serb leadership has accepted that several thousand people were wrongly killed. When I was British Ambassador in Belgrade even President Kostunica's office - who otherwise did nothing to hide their sympathies with the Republika Srpska cause and indeed Radovan Karadzic's plight - gloomily accepted that Mladic had made "a very serious mistake" at Srebrenica. Well, yes, that was one way of putting it.

So if Mladic is fit to stand trial at ICTY he will face overwhelming evidence that Bosnian Serb (and maybe units from Serbia as well) under his direct command committed a whole range of war crimes on a scale and intensity far beyond anything else seen in the Bosnia conflict. We'll never know what made someone from a disciplined military background plunge into these black depths, although the suicide of his daughter in 1994 must have played a part.

After all the years of radical Serb bravado about Mladic and the sure thing that he would never be taken alive, there he was today shuffling off to prison, a decrepit old man who (say Belgrade media) had had two pistols with him but surrendered meekly when he was finally tracked down.

I never met Mladic, who had been indicted by ICTY by the time I got to Sarajevo in 1996, but NATO forces did have direct contact with him in the early months after Dayton (1995) to make sure that the huge NATO presence moving in to Bosnia did so peacefully. One senior British officer told me how earlier in the conflict as a soldier under UN command he had had various direct dealings with Mladic in the Srebrenica area and watched Mladic painstakingly squeezing out his ugly boils during their meetings.

Balkan Insight are doing a great job for all your Mladic needs. See eg this one, with lots of interesting detail including on the way Karadzic and Mladic often disagreed.

* * * * *

Serbia's President Tadic seems to be sticking to his decision not to travel to Warsaw tomorrow for a major meeting of central and eastern European leaders with President Obama, saying that he can not accept the presence there of the President of Kosovo.

Mistake? Yes.

By arresting Mladic Serbia has just made a huge step towards drawing a political line under the policy and attitudes of the Milosevic era. Tadic could expect a rousing reception, although of course that very fact will be encouraging him to stay at home to try to show Serb public opinion that he remains his own boss.

Better in my view to take the chance - and privately and publicly to urge European leaders and Obama to think hard about the fact that as things stand the majority of countries in the world representing the majority of people in the world are still more or less comfortable with Belgrade's side of the Kosovo argument.

Here is the text of President Obama's speech in Westminster Hall. Well received more for powerful delivery and 'feel-good factor' than substance.

Before he left Washington the President gave an important speech on the upheavals across the Arab region and what it all meant for the Middle East. Text here.

This latter speech was widely seen by Israel and by Israel's supporters in the USA as bearing down hard(er) on Israel, insofar as Obama called for a solution to the Israel/Palestine question "based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states".

The subsequent speech to Congress in Washington by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has received comparatively little coverage in Europe. But it was a powerful performance which won sustained applause from Republicans and Democrats alike. Full text here. This opening sets the tone:

Israel has no better friend than America. And America has no better friend than Israel. We stand together to defend democracy. We stand together to advance peace. We stand together to fight terrorism. Congratulations America, Congratulations, Mr. President. You got bin Laden. Good riddance!

My friends, you don’t need to do nation building in Israel. We’re already built.

You don’t need to export democracy to Israel. We’ve already got it.

You don’t need to send American troops to defend Israel. We defend ourselves. You’ve been very generous in giving us tools to do the job of defending Israel on our own.

Thank you all, and thank you President Obama, for your steadfast commitment to Israel’s security. I know economic times are tough. I deeply appreciate this...

The overall result of the Netanyahu visit to Washington is vividly described by Walter Russell Mead in one of the most ruthless demolition jobs of a US President and his policy you're likely to see in a good while. Whatever you think of the grim and complicated Middle East and Arab/Israeli/Palestinian nexus of problems, have a look at this writer warming to his task:

I had never thought there were many similarities between the pleasure-loving Charles II of England and the more upright Barack Obama until this week.  Listening to his speeches on the Middle East at the State Department, US-Israel relations at the AIPAC annual meeting and most recently his address to the British Parliament the comparison becomes irresistible.

“Here lies our sovereign king,” wrote the Earl of Rochester about King Charles:

Whose word no man relies on.
Who never said a foolish thing
Or ever did a wise one.

This seems to capture President Obama’s Middle East problems in a nutshell...

His record of grotesque, humiliating and total diplomatic failure in his dealings with Prime Minister Netanyahu has few parallels in American history.  Three times he has gone up against Netanyahu; three times he has ingloriously failed. 

This last defeat — Netanyahu’s deadly, devastating speech to Congress in which he eviscerated President Obama’s foreign policy to prolonged and repeated standing ovations by members of both parties — may have been the single most stunning and effective public rebuke to an American President a foreign leader has ever delivered.

Netanyahu beat Obama like a red-headed stepchild; he played him like a fiddle; he pounded him like a big brass drum.  The Prime Minister of Israel danced rings around his arrogant, professorial opponent.  It was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters go up against the junior squad from Miss Porter’s School; like watching Harvard play Texas A&M, like watching Bambi meet Godzilla — or Bill Clinton run against Bob Dole...

Is Obama's problem that he is too academically smart and unable to work out to deal with the emotional resonance which Israel has in the USA? W R Mead thinks so:

As the stunning and overwhelming response to Prime Minister Netanyahu in Congress showed, Israel matters in American politics like almost no other country on earth.  Well beyond the American Jewish and the Protestant fundamentalist communities, the people and the story of Israel stir some of the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the American soul.  The idea of Jewish and Israeli exceptionalism is profoundly tied to the idea of American exceptionalism.  The belief that God favors and protects Israel is connected to the idea that God favors and protects America.

... Substantial numbers of voters believe that politicians who don’t ‘get’ Israel also don’t ‘get’ America and don’t ‘get’ God.  Obama’s political isolation on this issue, and the haste with which liberal Democrats like Nancy Pelosi left the embattled President to take the heat alone, testify to the pervasive sense in American politics that Israel is an American value.  Said the Minority Leader to the Prime Minister: “I think it’s clear that both sides of the Capitol believe you advance the cause of peace.”

President Obama probably understands this intellectually; he understands many things intellectually.  But what he can’t seem to do is to incorporate that knowledge into a politically sustainable line of policy. 

The deep American sense of connection to and, yes, love of Israel limits the flexibility of any administration.  Again, the President seems to know that with his head.  But he clearly had no idea what he was up against when Bibi Netanyahu came to town...

Read the whole thing. And note the pessimistic conclusion.

Still, this has been one of the best weeks for top-end public speaking (and the art of making an impact through a speech) in living memory. Lots for us speechwriters to study for a long time to come.

A powerful article by Yale law professor Jeb Rubenfeld spelling out for the purely foolish the legal issues (such as they are) surrounding the death of Osama Bin Laden.

See especially this:

The opportunity to surrender is a cherished, civilized and valuable part of warfare. But accepting an enemy's white flag in the heat of battle is a life-endangering proposition: The flag could be a ruse; a bomb could be hidden; the captors could end up dead.

We give enemy soldiers the benefit of this dangerous doubt for two reasons. First, because soldiers who have fought honorably, complying with the laws of war, have earned it. And second, because we want the enemy to treat our soldiers the same way.

Neither reason applies, however, to enemies who flagrantly violate the laws of war, targeting civilians for death, hiding bombs behind burkas, using children as shields or — yes — faking a Red Cross, upraised hands or other symbolic white flags to perpetrate lethal attacks...

... Even if we imagine Bin Laden actually waving a little white sock on a stick in Abbottabad, there would have been no reason for our soldiers to credit these statements. No soldier had a duty to take the slightest risk to his own life because Osama bin Laden promised to be good from now on.

As far back as Grotius in the 17th century, the great international law jurists have declared that enemy leaders may be targeted in wartime. But if Bin Laden's compound could simply have been attacked from the air, human rights lawyers should be praising, not condemning, the U.S. for sending in boots rather than bombs, which saved enemy and noncombatant lives at considerable risk to American soldiers.

It is pure foolishness to suggest that by going in on the ground, the U.S. turned its soldiers into policemen required to give Bin Laden "due process," place him "under arrest" and read him his Miranda rights.

Pure foolishness. And therefore all the more prevalent these days.

Does Dominique Strauss-Kahn enjoy diplomatic immunity by virtue of his role as the top official at the IMF, so that any American domestic attempt to prosecute him for assaulting a hotel employee gets struck out before it starts?

Good question. I don't know the answer.

Missions of international organisations enjoy many diplomatic privileges in their host country of the sort enjoyed by national diplomats, but not necessarily all. So hard work will be needed foraging through the IMF's statutes and legal precedents in the USA to try to work out if he can loftily continue about his business without facing prosecution.

Here (in French, but y'all have Google Translator) is Le Monde poring over the issue. Noteworthy that the French Embassy's consular officials in the USA and the the French Foreign Ministry are hot on the case - isn't DSK supposed to be working for all of us, not merely France?

Basic conclusion: if (God forbid) he ever makes it to the summit of the IMF, Gordon Brown is unlikely to get into this sort of difficulty. He's Scottish and socialist after all, and so has unbounded self-control.

You may not have noticed, but in the last few days/weeks/months/years (depending on how you look at it) Bosnia and Herzegovina has been teetering on the Brink of Disaster.

Why?

Oh, for all the familiar reasons. Key posts in the central government unfilled, general political deadlock stretching in all directions, and above all a challenge to the High Representative and his authority through a threatened referendum in Republika Srpska.

You might think that if part of the whole point of the dayton Peace Accords was to inflict democracy upon Bosnia, it makes little sense to complain about one or other Entity holding a referendum to consult voters. Didn't the UK just have one?

Yet in this case things are different, because RS leader Dodik is using the referendum on the issue of the High Representative's legal powers to undermine the High Representative, which ipso facto is an attack on Dayton!

What's happened?

The EU has raced to the rescue, the BH High Representative being trumped by an Even Higher EU High Representative, namely Catherine Ashton:

Dodik told a joint news conference that he had chosen to drop the referendum after receiving assurances from Ashton that Serbian concerns about Bosnia's judicial system would be addressed:

"During talks with Baroness Ashton and other European officials in recent days, we received the highest guarantees that the European Union is ready to tackle the issues surrounding Bosnia and Herzegovina's judiciary," Dodik said...

Ashton, whose surprise visit underscored the international community's alarm, welcomed the decision to drop the divisive poll.

The European Union, she pledged, will start reviewing the role of Bosnia's judicial institutions. She also echoed Dodik in saying that "the best way forward is constructive dialogue" on the issue.

Phew.

The first BH HiRep Carl Bildt has been quick to congratulate Baroness Ashton:

carlbildt Carl Bildt

Good reason to congratulate Cathy Ashton on her achievement in Bosnia. It was EU crisis prevention when it is at its best.

11 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

EU crisis prevention at its best?

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee today published a searching report on the Role of the FCO in UK Government.

Here it is.

And here is my own trenchant evidence, submitted in writing. I am not, it seems, grand enough these days to merit giving oral evidence. Sob.

But read it anyway. I decided not to bang on about grand foreign policy themes and Whitehall structure as that is what most other witnesses would do to good effect. Instead I focused on the neglected issue of Diplomatic Technique itself. And in the process walloped the ruination of New Labour politically correct managementism with real brio, if I say so myself:

12.  Some of today's excessive process was invented in the previous Thatcher/Major Conservative era, with the ostensibly laudable idea of making government policy processes more "businesslike". But there was (and is) no consensus on what "business" foreign policy actually is. In fact it is a complex mix:

(a)  part consultancy (top-level advice on what is happening and how to respond);

(b)  part agriculture—planting seeds of goodwill and influence, knowing that some will grow into strong plants in years to come but others will not;

(c)  part insurance—developing relations with senior foreign people patiently and deftly when there are no problems in sight, so that when problems occur there is a chance of having essential allies;

(d)  part fire-fighting (making an impact in difficult/dangerous situations far from home); and

(e)  part service provider (consular/visa work).

13.  This is a unique "business" indeed. Because much solid background diplomatic work needed to get results is in the insurance sector and shows no "measurable" outcome, it tends to be devalued in Treasury calculations15.  The last decade or so has seen a startling loss of quality within the FCO, a phenomenon noted by many foreign diplomats. It shows itself most dramatically in what ought to be the centrepiece of FCO work—communication. The FCO no longer communicates well with itself, or with its own knowledge...

16.  The standard of FCO written work—formerly among the most effective prose work ever achieved in the civilised world—has dropped. Even work for Ministers often is not being done properly: submissions are being sent back for reworking as they are so badly written. (Note: I submitted an FOI request about this and was told that there was no information on the subject.)

17.  A number of factors have combined to create and accelerate this decline:

(a)  An idea from a few years ago that work needed to be only "fit for purpose", to save time/resources "wasted" in proof-reading and redrafting. (The point lost here was that creating high-quality work did involve commitment, but such good work had many positive demonstration and operational effects, no less real because they were impossible to "measure".) This change encouraged less good presentation and so less good thought/analysis.

(b)  That in turn has led to a subliminal sense that correcting another officer's work is not appropriate or somehow stuffily "judgemental". This has come together with the rise of email culture to wreck on-the-job training. Years ago junior officers would be firmly taught by their superiors the fine art of accurate drafting. That has largely vanished.

(c)  No serious sanctions are imposed on people unable to write well, or unable to supervise good writing in their team.

(d)  The wider inability of the UK education system to produce people able to write accurate English is visible in the work of even the top graduates entering the FCO.

18.  The FCO is glumly aware of this and is considering how best to deal with "poor performance". One idea is to move away from "competences" to "skills" in measuring performance. Drafting exams could be set as a condition for getting promoted, perhaps in partnership with an outside academic body, and drafting standards might be raised for FCO entry.

19.  That could make a positive difference over (say) 10 years. But in the short run more drastic action is needed, most immediately in the form of severe sanctions on senior officials presiding over poor quality work.

The Parliamentary website Advanced Search function is v efficient in its links these days so you can pounce on any parts that catch your interest, such as different references in the report and accompanying statements to my own views, of which there are quite a few as I appear to have given different people some food for thought.

For example, here are a couple of extracts from Sir Jeremy Greenstock's oral evidence, Sir Jeremy being our former Ambassador at the UN and a very serious and experienced diplomatist - to have won his endorsement is good news: 

Colleagues of my age and I played along with the quantification of those objectives, which I thought was irrelevant to the role of diplomacy - how many speeches you made a year, how many contacts you made with other Governments and all the rest of it - because, and this is a point that Charles Crawford made very clearly, the most important skill of a diplomat is his or her judgment.

You can’t quantify the quality of judgment that you get, and the quality of experience that has been learned, in an individual diplomat. So I felt that we spent more time than was justified from the results, or from the utility, on the objectives exercise...

My second preliminary suggestion is that I do not think that Westminster and Whitehall should be thinking too radically about structural change to the Foreign Office. That will not solve any problems. I have seen a number of witness statements so far to you from Daniel Korski and others who have suggested that we might rearrange the furniture in some quite radical ways. That would be a mistake because we need to focus on not where the furniture is placed, but the quality of the furniture itself and particularly the human components of it.

You will therefore find me much more in the camp of Charles Crawford and concentrating on what the skills of the Foreign Office need to be, how they should be developed, how they should serve Ministers and how they should be co-ordinated with the rest of Whitehall. It would be a grave mistake at this juncture to get into radical change of the structure. That is where I am coming from.

Plus I sneaked into the FAC report myself in a few places. Here the Report looks at how far it makes sense to 'measure' or quantify the outputs of diplomacy:

Our predecessors were also concerned that, at least as regards foreign policy as opposed to other areas of the FCO's work, measuring the FCO's performance was inherently difficult; and departmental performance might in any case be less closely related to actual outcomes than in the case of many other departments, because by definition other states are also involved.

94.  Witnesses to our current inquiry shared these concerns strongly. David Miliband, Jack Straw and Lord Hennessy all discussed the difficulty of measuring what the FCO does;[186] and Charles Crawford told us that performance measurement in foreign policy "assumes a 'cause and effect' clarity in policy outcome which [...] is simply impossible overseas". Mr Crawford characterised much diplomatic work as "insurance", which by definition does not become evident unless and until it is needed

I scored nicely here:

Corporate skills: doing foreign policy

178.  A number of witnesses, most notably former Ambassador Charles Crawford, argued that the FCO needed to improve its skills in what he called "basic diplomatic technique". To use Sir Peter Marshall's distinction, Mr Crawford's critique encompassed both the FCO's "advisory" role (which he called its "consultancy" function) and its executive role, where Mr Crawford said that the department had "no clear methodology of how to make a difference overseas".[346] Mr Crawford saw as especially worrisome what he perceived as the downgrading of FCO standards in drafting and judgement, and urged that far greater attention in the training of FCO diplomats be given to "core technique", especially personal communication. Mr Crawford contended that "without looking hard at first principles of diplomatic technique the FCO is not going to do the job which No. 10 and Whitehall need doing: understanding and influencing foreigners".[347]

And here:

Information and institutional memory

188.  Charles Crawford drew our attention to what he regarded as a further "little-understood cause of quality decline in the FCO", in the shape of the shift from hard copy to email and other electronic forms of communication and data storage. In Mr Crawford's view, this meant that there was no longer 'a file' containing a complete documentary record of the development of Government policy on a country or issue, which could be handed to a member of staff newly arriving at a desk or overseas post. Instead, there is information which is available only electronically and not easily searchable. As a result, in Mr Crawford's view, the FCO's "collective memory and collective knowledge has plummeted", and staff can only react in an improvised and thus "banal" way to events as they happen. He recommended that "urgent changes in FCO data management are needed [...] to devise new ways to make saving and searching information a proper professional discipline".[357]

And this point on how too little discretion has been devolved to posts overseas:

198.  Charles Crawford and Caterina Tully, among other witnesses, recommended that the FCO's overseas posts should be given greater autonomy, in particular over the spending of their small amounts of programme funds. Several witnesses said that the disbursement of such funds by posts was currently overly bureaucratic, given the often small amounts of money involved. Mr Crawford contended that "a simple devolution of funds to all Embassies/Missions [...] would transform the impact of British diplomacy".[379] On 1 February 2011, the Foreign Secretary announced that the FCO was to "give British Ambassadors greater responsibility for deciding how best to spend their local budgets to support UK foreign policy objectives and strengthen bilateral relationships".[380]

This Report is unusually interesting as such things go, mainly because the sense of horrible despair at the end of the Labour government was such that many senior diplomats queued up to offer their thoughts on how to use diplomacy far more effectively in the UK interest.

The Report's Conclusions and Recommendations are nonetheless rather bland, although the emphasis on re-establishing strong analysis and judgement - in a word, Technique, is important and welcome:

13.  We support the Foreign Secretary's wish to see the FCO "at the centre of Government", but we conclude that this will be neither possible nor desirable unless the department is able to provide the Government with deep foreign policy expertise and judgement to underpin and implement its decision-making. We further conclude that the provision of foreign policy information, analysis, judgement and execution constitutes the FCO's core role for the Government. We recommend that a statement along these lines be the overarching statement of the FCO's role for the Government...

So, let's see. how far William Hague manages to sort out Labour's mess. I have talked to him about these matters on several occasions - his instincts are all in the right place, which is a good start.

I'm meeting a senior FCO person next week to chat about these issues and take stock of how the machine plans to respond to the FAC's challenge. I'll let you know.

For now, enjoy Sir J Greenstock in fine form, describing the important role of Incompetence in diplomacy:

In terms of diplomacy - as in observing, analysing, reporting, negotiating and communicating with other Governments - I am still to be convinced that there is a Government less incompetent than the British one in these fields.

Q165 Mike Gapes: Less incompetent?

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Less incompetent. I formed the view over my career that all Governments are incompetent in one way or another. Where you have a civil service or a diplomatic service that minimises the mistakes; that can handle complex issues; and that can deal with a number of balls in the air at any one time, you have a comparative advantage against what is out there on the field of competition.

Of course, some of the competition are allies and partners, but you would be surprised - I will name no names - how incompetent very close and admirable allies could be on particular cases. The British would come in, mop up, do the drafting, do the communication with other Governments and try to make the most of the situation. I think we’re very good at that...

Indeed we are

Baffled by the sluggish rate of NATO bombing of Gaddafi's forces in Libya, and the fact that this business is dragging on so inconclusively?

Read this fine piece by Stephen Saideman at McGill University on the underlying negotiation going on. Really, I could not have it better myself.

Thus:

Indeed. Diplomatic negotiation is all about lots of things simultaneously:

• exertable power
• credibility - are your threats believable for the other side?
• willingness to inflict pain - and to sustain the pain for as long as it takes
• willingness to tolerate pain - and to tolerate it for as long as it takes
• who loses/wins what
• what's really at stake
• who cares the most

Here Gaddafi cares a lot about Gaddafi and his rule. Because he cares, his ability to absorb pain (which falls mainly on other Libyans) appears to exceed (for now) NATO's willingness to inflict it. Plus whereas NATO's power is very powerful but operating from on high, his is disaggregated and operating from on low (sniper-rifles, ad hoc attacks on rebel forces or their water supplies).  

See also this earlier posting about other diplomatic negotiations: