By Tom Fletcher

The first email between heads of government was sent on February 4, 1994, from the Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt to the US President Bill Clinton. Bildt congratulated Clinton on the lifting of the Vietnam embargo, and added that “Sweden is one of the leading countries in technology, and it is only appropriate that we should be among the first to use the Internet for political contacts and communications around the globe”. Clinton replied the following day, in hindsight perhaps with less panache than the moment required: “I appreciate your enthusiasm for the potential of emerging technologies. This demonstration of electronic communication is an important step toward building the global information highway.” The language was as clunky as the software, but e-diplomacy was under way.

Traditionally, the main means of communication between diplomats and capitals has been the telegram. In the British system these are always addressed to the foreign minister, and always in the name of the ambassador, although usually written by a political officer. Likewise, instructions from the Foreign Office to embassies always go out above the name of the Foreign Secretary, though it is exceedingly rare that he will actually see them, let alone write them, in advance.

In Paris in 2007, I recall seeing the trolleys of paper telegrams being rolled around the French foreign ministry on the Quai d’Orsay. They would arrive first with the director, and slowly work their way down the corridor. The desk officer, who more than anyone needed to see what was happening in the country he was working on, would normally receive his battered, coffee-stained, cigarette-singed version late at night, long after it had been overtaken by events.

This is one area that has evolved rapidly in the past ten years, at least in the UK Foreign Office. We switched to electronic telegrams in the 1990s, and now send e-grams, or diplomatic telegrams – diptels for short. These have the same content, but arrive instantly on the screens of those who need to see them. An average diptel will have a short three- or four-line summary, and seven or eight paragraphs of analysis or advice. Given that whatever is being reported will have been on rolling TV news in the minister’s office for several hours before the report arrives, the emphasis is increasingly on explaining and analysing the news rather than reporting it. As media cycles accelerate and concentration spans shorten, we cannot be far from a system of “diptweets”, quick and dirty analysis on breaking news, aimed to compete with what readers at the headquarters are getting from Twitter or news outlets.

Traditionally, diplomats have always tried to minimize and manage the amount of direct contact between leaders. We encased their exchanges in protocol, prepared lines and statements. I worked for one minister in Tony Blair’s government, Chris Mullin, who admirably made a point of not being connected by phone or pager, despite the strenuous efforts of his party’s whips and managers. As I used to tell him, this is a civil servant’s fantasy. But his technological detachment did not seem to stop the world from turning.

New ways of communicating are now breaking down the restrictions that officials put up. Leaders text, email and tweet each other direct. During negotiations, the text messages between them (and between their advisers) are often more important than the conversation at the table. It will become less necessary for them to meet as often, yet they will get to know each other better. Neither Bildt nor Clinton could have anticipated the speed at which the “global information highway” was being built around them. In terms of diplomacy, it is Twitter and Facebook that have built it. @jack (aka Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder) sent the first tweet at teatime on March 21, 2006. Within three years, a billion tweets had been sent. Eleven accounts are started every second, and 500 million are sent every day. Facebook has 1.55 billion users, and this figure has grown by a third a year. Most of these users are on mobile devices.

Diplomats are among them. Bildt was the first minister to make it compulsory for ambassadors to have social media accounts. Over 80 per cent of world leaders now have a Twitter handle. Barack Obama was the first leader to join Twitter, in March 2007, and is the most followed (though he still comes in well behind Lady Gaga). Pope Francis has over 20 million followers on his nine different @Pontifex accounts. Maybe those behind his account are aiming at quality not quantity – he gets retweeted much more than Obama: 11,116 times per tweet, as opposed to Obama’s 2,309.

More leaders are wresting control of their own social media accounts from their staff. They have recognized that if you’re not tweeting yourself, you’re not really on Twitter. In early 2014, John Kerry tweeted “It only took a year but @StateDept finally let me have my own @Twitter account”, and used the hashtag #JKTweetsAgain. Increasingly, such accounts – especially those of the US National Security Adviser Susan Rice and US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power – are replacing carefully scripted formal statements. “It won’t be a substitute for a meeting or a substitute for a phone call”, explains Douglas Frantz, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs: “American foreign policy is probably too nuanced to explain in 140 characters. It will be used to deliver quick messages and amplify existing messages.”

Diplomats need to pick arguments. Twitter and other social media tools allow them to do that in new ways. One of the pioneering digital diplomats, the former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, had online fights with the Russian ministry of foreign affairs over freedom of assembly and speech. He saw it as a way to avoid having his views censored or filtered through traditional Russian media. UN Security Council arguments between permanent representatives are now regularly played out in real time on Twitter. The brilliant French ambassador to the US, Gérard Araud, regularly takes on US presidential candidates and others in public. This would all have appeared unseemly just a few years ago. But in some ways it is simply a return to the lively political debate of the Roman forum.

The US are the market leaders in this “pivot to the people”. President Obama was a community organizer long before being elected, and saw the power of connecting digital communities to policy. States need to build networks and alliances with non-state actors. As a result of the State Department’s “21st Century Statecraft” initiative, US diplomats reach more than the number of subscribers to the top ten US newspapers put together.

Diplomats are putting these tools to increasingly creative use. In Iran, both the US and UK had virtual embassies – allowing them online engagement without the physical risks of locating diplomats. I remember how dangerous it felt to be organizing a joint town hall meeting between the UK and Chinese premiers in 2009, the first of its kind in China. There are now virtual town halls everywhere online.

Some of the most innovative digital diplomats are from smaller countries. Perhaps they find it easier to embrace a more fleet-footed, start-up approach. Estonia leads the diplomatic market on use of blockchain technology (a way of distributing digital data globally across thousands of computers), and online citizenship. Since its independence in 2008, Kosovo has been recognized by only half the world. So its deputy foreign minister, Petrit Selimi, persuaded Facebook to allow users to place their location in Kosovo, and not in neighbouring Serbia. The success of this effort means that Kosovo’s existence is more widely recognized online than offline. It is possible to imagine a similar process with other entities where some want to become sovereign states – Palestine, Catalonia, Scotland, Kurdistan.

Digital media are also increasingly important resources for those responding to humanitarian crises. The idea of consulting refugees on refugee issues sounds obvious, but only now are we able to try. Humanitarian agencies are aiming to get social media channels and devices to those hit by disasters, and use Google Earth to locate survivors. In Lebanon, we used smart cards to deliver cash to the neediest refugees, and sophisticated social media mapping tools to locate them.

Of course, all of this digital diplomacy brings risks. In September 2012, while under direct attack as the result of unrest caused by the rapid spread of a video critical of Islam, the US embassy in Cairo condemned the efforts of some to “hurt the religious feelings of Muslims”. The backlash in the US, where some felt that the tweet attacked the very principles of free speech that US institutions ought to be upholding, led to the White House disowning it. Separately, the US ambassador in Egypt had to apologize to his sensitive hosts when the embassy Twitter feed retweeted a clip from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that criticized the Egyptian government.

So digital diplomacy is not without its critics. The former British ambassador Oliver Miles wrote in 2010 (when William Hague was Foreign Secretary) that we need to “Stop the blogging ambassadors. The immediacy of social media does not lend itself to the measured nature of international diplomacy. . . . The issues with which ambassadors have to deal are better dealt with penseroso rather than allegro. Blogs by ambassadors were bound to end in tears. Let’s hope William Hague will blow the whistle”. “Il Penseroso” is Milton’s poem about sober contemplation, as opposed to the frenetic world of “L’Allegro”. Personally, I think Milton would have tweeted. The number of blog posts written annually by UK ambassadors since Miles wrote that has risen tenfold. If the whistle was blown, it was too piano to hear. Of course there will always be a need for considered diplomacy, but diplomats will also have to be part of the conversations that everyone in the real world is having.

Sir Leslie Fielding, another former UK ambassador, has also lambasted the “trivial chirpiness and dumbing down” of social media, saying that it “cuts no mustard when applied to the sheer complexity of many world issues. The global waters are often opaque, even muddy”. He is right, of course, about the fiendish complexities of foreign policy, and indeed the inane nature of much social media. But that is not an argument against trying to communicate in new ways, and to use the new tools to make the global waters a little less murky. The examples of diplomatic digital disasters – inadvertent insults to former opponents, misguided attempts at humour in serious situations, disgruntled hosts – will not seem so dramatic in a few years. There is no other way to pursue digital diplomacy effectively except through loosening the reins of control.

For a trade that relies on communication, diplomacy has obviously had to adapt to successive waves of dramatic technological disruption. The most important innovations to shape statecraft throughout history were language, writing, ships, rules, the printing press, trains, telephones, and now the internet. So the tools of diplomacy are constantly evolving. Diplomats now compete over who has the most Twitter followers rather than where they are placed at a diplomatic dinner. Talleyrand would have been out of his depth in a twentieth-century summit, just as John Kerry would be in a twenty-second-century summit. Diplomacy had surrounded itself by the late twen­tieth century with immense paraphernalia – titles, conferences, summits, rules and codes. But strip these away, and we can identify the diplomatic skills that made our ancestors more likely to survive the hostile 200,000 years of hunter-gathering, the eight millennia of the Agricultural Age and the two centuries of the Industrial Age. Maybe these can get us through the new uncertainties of the Digital Age.

The history of diplomacy suggests that diplomats have always been most effective when they have understood, channelled and represented real power. When emperors held power, diplomats were flunkies in their citadels. When monarchs held power, diplomats were courtiers in their palaces. When military leaders held power, diplomats hung around outside their tents. When states became the dominant power brokers, diplomats started ministries and tried to get as close as possible to their elected (or unelected) leaders. As democracy took hold in the West, diplomats reinvented themselves as its most ardent supporters, while trying to ensure that their trade stayed out of its sight. We need to consider what this means for diplomacy in an age when power is once again shifting and diffusing. If diplomats are not where the power is, they are simply slow journalists with smaller audiences.

The history of diplomacy also shows us that, at key points in our collective story, and normally following shocks such as war, shifts in power required diplomats and politicians to work together strenuously to recalibrate systems and establish new rules of coexistence. Modern diplomats are standing on the shoulders of the curious, canny and sometimes courageous individuals behind Westphalia, Vienna, the League of Nations and Bretton Woods. Two centuries after the Congress of Vienna, are we again at such a moment of flux and uncertainty, and do diplomats have the legitimacy and credibility to help manage the next global reset?

This is an edited extract from Naked Diplomacy: Power and statecraft in the digital age, published by William Collins on 2 June 2016. Click here to read the article on TLS. 

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Photo description: Angela Merkel looks at her smartphone while waiting for the Latvian Prime Minister in Berlin, April 2016

Photo credit: John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images