By: Charlemagne, June 5, 2009  

CARNE Ross, a former British diplomat who quit his gilded profession in despair at its lack of accountability, has published a thought-provoking essay, entitled: "It's time to scrap ambassadors and their embassies."

Mr Ross now runs a non-profit outfit called Independent Diplomat, which provides diplomatic advice and lobbies for foreign policy actors who cannot afford or do not have traditional diplomatic services to make their voices heard (clients including Kosovo and Somaliland).

His essay is worth reading in full, and in truth is less extreme that its attention-grabbing headline would suggest. But I still am left unconvinced by his insistence that we should welcome a world in which NGOs enjoy as much clout as diplomats.

To quote from his essay in Europe's World, one of the better Brussels policy journals:

In democratic terms, the actions and the views of diplomats are only tenuously connected to those people whom they allegedly represent. I found it ludicrous to pretend in negotiations that my views, which had in fact been invented by a small group of officials like myself, truly represented those of my whole country. This problem will of course be aggravated for the European foreign service (or European External Action Service, to give it its dreadful full name). As for accountability, one reason why governments are so little trusted is because its officials seem never to take responsibility for the failures they perpetrate in their country’s name – and in recent years there have been many. Diplomatic colleagues regarded it as naïve to believe that somehow they personally were morally responsible for actions they undertook on behalf of their government...
In short, the good old days of an ambassador are over. Diplomats are going to have to work harder to be relevant and respected in this new world. In an anarchic world, influence in shaping events is going to go to those with the most convincing arguments and the most power, and they are not necessarily going to be working in government.

Mr Ross talks of the "snobbish" assumption by diplomats that they represent the ordinary people of their countries. But it is not just snobbery, surely.

Diplomats may drive nice cars and work out of nice houses, but politicians are their bosses (even the most junior minister is taken seriously, at least in public, by the most senior ambassadors). And in Britain at least, those politicians have constituents, and a sense of what those constituents will stand.

I think this essay is in fact elitism in disguise. Mr Ross is talking about a brave new world in which NGOs - ie articulate middle class single issue campaigners, have more power, and governments less.
But governments are neither elitist nor not elitist, surely. For all their manifold faults, they are
the most coherent way yet found of representing the interests of national populations. By all means make sure NGOs have good access to senior policy-makers: they have a story to tell, often. But to argue that they are more democratic worries me: my experience with NGOs is that they get a free pass from the media and the public, because they seem nice and charitable, and are staffed by passionate young people who know how to argue. But as a result, their underlying beliefs are not often challenged as hard as they should be. Whereas most voters have a pretty good idea what they think of their national government at any given moment, and why (though I will concede that few voters pay much attention to their country's foreign policy, most of the time).

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