The word diplomat entered my vocabulary when I was about four years old, when my father got his first diplomatic passport in the late 1980s for a visit to the erstwhile USSR as part of a Finance Ministry delegation from India. Journalism brought me in close contact with various diplomats, ambassadors and officials of the Ministry of External Affairs but it has been mainly through education and business development that I have got a better insight into various types of international relations and the functions of diplomacy. A diplomat’s job requires patience, courage, tenacity, persistence, resilience, creativity, integrity and good humour that will make the other side listen to you even if they don’t agree with you.
As someone who has worked on people-to-people
peacebuilding through education in Afghanistan until the Taliban takeover in 2021,
I believe diplomacy is not limited to only statesmen and women and political
leaders. Any relations between people, states and cities with an aim to bring
peace, harmony and stability could be called diplomacy. They could be in the
form of political talks and meetings, communications, business, sports, arts,
entertainment, science, medicine or education.
Take the case of India and Pakistan. With almost 75
years of animosity between them since the two states were created from British
India, there have been huge failures in diplomacy with the boycott of talks, intermittent
suspension of sports, cultural and economic ties, massive defence expenditures,
armed conflicts, terrorism and full-blown wars. And yet, when diplomats meet,
in spaces other than offices and conference halls, there is a common sense of
bonhomie and mutual respect, a celebration of common culture, arts, food, films,
and music, and a 5000-year-old heritage that brings them together. When a massive earthquake hit the
disputed state of Kashmir in 2005, both the high commissioners of India and
Pakistan were constantly in touch with each other to mobilize aid, rescue teams
and relief materials in the state. When
summit diplomacy fails, back-channels remain open, more so today, through
social media, where people-to-people contact between the two sides is easy. And
what we see is that the students, youth leaders, doctors, teachers and NGOs
lead the way in creating a dialogue between the two countries, even when the
high commissioners stop talking to each other.
Communication
is the bedrock of diplomacy. If you’re talking, you might arrive at an
agreement, bargain or compromise that everyone can live with. Successful
diplomacy is about getting a ‘yes’ without giving too much away. It requires
continuous engagement and immeasurable patience and may result in a peace
treaty in some cases, or, in the case of the Iraq war, an agreement towards no
substantial political action questioning its legality. Diplomacy is an
iterative process and for it to succeed, you have to be realistic. The ability
to bring people to the table and keep them at the table is the mark of a good
diplomat. And if you get the timing right, you may be successful in formulating
an agreement. Diplomacy is not about attending one conference and coming up
with a treaty, but small incremental gains over time through different channels
of diplomacy – politics, sports, education, medicine, entertainment and
business – to build trust, harmony and cooperation between nations.
While we focus a lot on the public performance of formal
diplomacy with two ambassadors talking to the media after a round of negotiations,
I believe diplomacy is getting more democratised and informal with
globalisation and the enmeshing of the computer networks. Increasingly, companies are seen as advancing
their countries’ policies and ideologies through treaties or even
non-cooperation. For example, United Airlines, the American airline company, withdrew
its codeshare services operated in conjunction with Aeroflot, the Russian
national airline, in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
In Diplomacy,
Democracy and Society, Harry Rudin writes, “Enabling man to recover his sense
of fundamental security in our world is the basic problem of our time… To bind
one’s security to what must change will be fatal to all hope… The whole of the
present cannot be carried unchanged into the future. This is history’s most
obvious lesson and the hardest one to learn.” The coming years will be exciting
for global diplomacy, as a new world order is being created through Chinese
economic imperialism, Russian aggression and the tensions arising from severe
humanitarian crises in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia because
of the US invasions of Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan.
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