[MUSIC] Hello, I'm here with Dr. Mark Laffey, SOAS University of London Politics and International Studies Department. Mark, what do you conceive diplomacy to be? >> Well, it used to be that diplomacy was lying for your country and then the new diplomacy was lying with laptops. But I've always thought that diplomacy is really about maintaining cordiality in the midst of profound disagreement. >> Building on that, what does successful diplomacy look like to you? How do we know when diplomacy's been successful? What are its measures of success? >> Well, I suppose we could start with the opposite. How do we know when it's failed? So the United States stopped talking to Cuba sometime in the 1960s, and only recently started talking to them again after this part of half a century. So I think diplomacy has failed when you no longer have communications, when you no longer have contact, when you no longer have any kind of ongoing dealings with people that you care about whose actions you're actually profoundly interested in. So I think that's sort of the limit case. Diplomacy is often understood as being about success, as about getting to yes, those sorts of things. And that's true but I don't think diplomacy is the same thing as negotiation. Diplomacy's about maintaining communications and contact in the midst of on-going disagreements. >> So would you just pick up on your distinction there between diplomacy and negotiation. Perhaps you could just expand on that a little. >> Well, negotiations about convincing other people that they're interests are in fact your interests. And of course, that's a large part of what diplomacy consist of. But if you think about what the day to day nature of diplomacy is, I think in the 20th century one of the things that we've seen is a mess of institutionalization of world politics in a way which I don't think is often picked up on when people think about diplomacy. So what do people spend most of their time talking about? They spend most of their time talking about trade, economic kinds of matters. And you see this institutionally as well. So when I first started working for the New Zealand government, I was in the Department of Trade and Industry. Very shortly after I left, my section, which was devoted to trade relations, was gobbled up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. So it became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or MFAT for short. And I think that's symptomatic of a transformation that you've seen in diplomacy over the course of the 20th century. So diplomacy is increasingly about trade, economic relations and so forth. In that context, yes of course, they're negotiations. They're efforts to get to certain kinds of positions. But those negotiations, those discussions are ongoing. They're constant. And you add in modern communications which makes it much, much easier to do that. I can recall when the New Zealand trade mission had to send all of our cables to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs because they controlled the cable machine, and the cable machine sent the cables to our negotiating team in Geneva. Naturally because they had control of it, they had the last word on what could be said. If you fast forward to today those kinds of communication systems. And so there's a constant interaction of back and forth which you didn't have before and I think diplomacy is now about that. It's about the changed context. Those changed kinds of issues. And yes, of course, you do see spectacular moments where there's a crisis as in Ukraine for example, where people are shouting back and forth and it's all very serious and dangerous and those sorts of things. And that's part of diplomacy, too. But I think the will of it. The actual substance of it others, other often unseen, unheard interactions, which take place more discontinuously. >> We pick up on some of the, perhaps, alternative ways you're looking at failure. So you said that failure is an absence of dialogue in the US/Cuban involvement. Are there are other ways that we can sort of conceive of diplomacy when we know it's failed? >> My favorite diplomat is Sergey Lavrov. He's the foreign minister of Russia. And I like him, partly I just like the fact that he's funny. He'll make jokes. He was responding to someone who had complained about the return of Russia on the world stage as a great power. And he said, well, in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union fell apart, there were all these people in the West who were concerned. We need a strong, sort of unified Russia. And he said, well, here we are. People don't seem to understand that diplomacy is also about respect and regard for people that you disagree with. And so, he's also said that the West had gone from being the world's greatest problem solver to being the world's greatest liability. He was asked about this, this is what you really believe? He said, well I was reading this because it was a text from a Singapore colleague, and I wanted him to know that I was still reading what he was saying and what he was writing. So on the one hand, he managed to say, yes, the United States and the West have become this huge problem for the world, without actually committing himself to doing it. And I think that kind of subtlety is, well, sort of characteristic of a caricatured notion of diplomacy. Sort of saying one thing while saying something else. But what he was really saying was that there's a lack of mutual respect on the part of the West for what he referred to as other civilizations in the world. And he said, without that sort of basic level of respect and regard diplomacy necessarily breaks down. It's not helpful if the West is constantly telling the Chinese or the Russians or someone else effectively that they're stupid. That they don't really understand the realities of world politics, that world politics really is what the United States and its allies say it is. That's not a basis for any kind of diplomacy it seems to me. >> Great, thank you. Let me pick up on one dimension to diplomacy. One of the important characteristics, and that being trust. How important is trust to your understanding of diplomacy? >> I think it's profoundly important. I think it's precisely to foster trust, that you need to have ongoing interactions and communications, and so forth. So I can recall, again as a very, very junior frog working for New Zealand government going off to a meeting of trade ministers at a holiday resort in New Zealand, which of course is a tradesman's preferred hang out. And there was a big fuss because there were two buildings where people were going to be accommodated. There was a big fuss about who was going to be in the big building with the big negotiation teams from the United States and the European Union and Japan. And who was going to be in the other one, just slightly down the road. And I don't think that's just because people think that the US trade representatives are party animals or good fun to hang out with. It's because you want to be in the room, you want to be having those sort of on-going connections, associations. The sort of interpersonal relationship with whoever happens to be the lead on those teams at the time. Because those kinds of personal relations might seem quite trivial. None the least, over time build up to relations of trust so you have time with this person, they say things to you. Subsequently you find out whether they've been misleading you or being straight with you or not. If you don't have those kinds of relations, it's variable to go from that to something much more substantial when you find yourself in a negotiating situation. So I think trust is profoundly important. >> So thinking about your research and your experience, where do you see diplomacy at work? Is it well beyond perhaps the state to state interface? >> Well I think diplomacy has become sort of decentered I suppose and now moves around quite a lot. So I think if you only focus on state to state, you see one aspect of all of this. But you need to sort of pull back from and start to think about all the things that are going on around those rooms we have state representatives present. So you have to take that narrow focus. You can't really understand it unless you understand where the negotiating positions come from. So I've discussed this with a colleague who I suppose you describe as a negative entrepreneur. He's one of those people who sort of crosses the divide between policy on one hand and academia on the other. And he's described to me being in a room with a bunch of state representatives. And at least three of them were saying things that he himself had actually written because of his sort of behind the scenes role, in helping those states figure out what they thought about the particular issue, his area of expertise. I think if you take that example you can start to generalize it. So when I was in Minneapolis, this was during the negotiations that led up to the North American Free Trade Agreement. And you had corporate lawyers including on their CVs or things that they have done drafting sections of what became the North American Free Trade Agreement. And that's perfectly fine, right. I'm not criticizing them for doing that, but I'm simply saying if you live in world where the negotiating positions, indeed ultimately the draft documents, that governments are presenting to each other in negotiations of whatever kind, have been produced by people who are in fact not part of government. In fact don't really have any kind of public role whatsoever, then you can't really understand diplomacy if you all you look at are states and what they say and do. >> And looking typically the experience in the work that you've undertaken. All there sort of certain individuals that you'd like to name and identify with as being good diplomats, as being diplomats of particular quality. >> Well, I namechecked the current Russian- >> Yeah. >> Foreign minister. So I suppose if I'm going to have a diplomatic hero, he would probably be my choice. That's not simply because I think a lot of the positions that Russia has taken, in relation to Ukraine, let's say, have been. In contrast to the other side it's really straightforward, and have a bit of grasp of the facts and the history than one tends to get from wisdom representatives. But I think it's maybe just grace under pressure. Russia's been in a rather poor position if you look at the way in which they've been discussed in western media. And the kinds of statements that were being made by representatives of the European Union or the United States or Britain or Australia for that matter, in relation to what the Russians have and haven't been doing in relation to Ukraine. And I think he has consistently in a variety of forums, in the face of often quite difficult questioning retained not just so the calm exterior appearance that one associates with diplomats and so forth generally. But has consistently responded to, often, almost hysterical attacks calmly with the command of the figures and the history, and the actual facts on the ground, which I think puts many of his to shame. So he would probably be my hero. >> Just one final point that you've talked in your remarks about about the importance of perception to the way that diplomacy. I'm wondering how you see that play into this sort of current debates on public diplomacy. Importance of the audience to diplomacy. >> Well, I think one of the things that has happened again over the course of the last century, let's say, with the rise of mass publics and the rise of modern communications, technologies, is that it's become much more central, I think, to how states position themselves in the world. They speak not only to foreign governments and their representatives, but also to the broader publics. And so, I think public diplomacy is actually quite important. At the same time, it's often difficult to separate it out from propaganda. And I also think public diplomacy is one of those areas where states are most vulnerable to be misled by their own misunderstandings of who they are and what they represent. So after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States set out to produce quite a large and elaborate public diplomacy program aimed at the Middle East. Because their understanding of why they hate us which is in itself a deeply problematic way of thinking about what had led to that [INAUDIBLE] tax. Their understanding of why they hate us was that they don't know us, they don't actually understand us. And so we can communicate with people in the Middle East what it's like to be a muslim in the United States or how US society works, and they'll know us better and there won't be such a problem. Now, they brought in people from Madison Avenue, so experienced advertising executives to try and run the program. They put lots of money into it. They made TV shows about life in America. And the problem with that was that the Pew Foundation had often did some survey research in the Middle East. And they asked people in the Middle East, why do you have a problem with the United States? And turned out the people in the Middle East know quite a lot about the United States, which would have been surprising if they didn't given sort of the role of US media in the world. They were concerned about US foreign policy, so it was more about what they did rather than who they were. So I think public diplomacy is important but I think one has to start by looking realistically at one's conduct in the world, and asking straightforward questions about why they hate us, before you try to explain to them why they shouldn't. [MUSIC]
