“International systems live precariously. Every “world order” expresses an aspiration to permanence; the very term has a ring of eternity to it. Yet the elements which comprise it are in constant flux: indeed, with each century, the duration of international systems has been shrinking”. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (1994)

 

 

During my time as Ambassador in Lebanon, I sometimes needed to escape the tempo of Beirut, the intensity of the Syria crisis, the security bubble, and the constant connectivity of social life and social media. My hideaway was the magnificent fort of Byblos, in one of the longest continually inhabited towns in the world. Legend has it that the Phoenician Princess Europa was abducted by Zeus (disguised as a bull) from here – giving our continent its name, the galaxy the Taurus star sign, and the euro note a rather inappropriate symbol (1) . And reminding us that we were hostage taking and people trafficking long before the people of the Middle East.

 

From Byblos, people have watched the fleets come and go for centuries. You can stand among the debris of nineteen civilisations. Each of those empires thought themselves invincible or permanent. Each believed that they had something different, special, unique.

 

The castle was consistently reduced to rubble, like the civilisations.

 

Byblos is no place for hubris. I stood there whenever I thought I had the world worked out. 

 

We know from history that the desire to gain and use power is hardwired into humanity. Empires, civilisations, families and individuals have risen up not just to run their own regions, but to conquer and rule those of others.

 

We also know from history that they fall, normally when they become overstretched, lazy or corroded from within, or when hungrier rivals emerge. A world where one country dominates cannot last long. Challengers always rise up to snap at the heels of the top dog of the age. Power ebbs and flows. Empires often collapse rapidly – look at the Mings in the 17th century, the Bourbons in the 18th century, or the British and Russian empires in 20th century. 

 

The tectonics of global power are still in flux. "Power is”, says former World Bank President Bob Zoellick, “easier to get, harder to use, and easier to lose." (2)  From Beirut to Bangalore and from Birmingham (UK) to Birmingham (US), we are feeling not only the tremors of changes in the geopolitical power balance. But also more fundamental power shifts, away from traditional authorities and hierarchies and towards greater empowerment of individuals.

 

Traditionally, power is measured by historians and diplomats in terms of territory, war and statecraft. This is usually a zero sum game: power is a pie to be sliced up. China’s rise, Europe’s decline. Power can be won or lost by good or bad decisions or political systems, by military might or weakness. It is raw power by Machiavelli, a never ending struggle in which great states and great men – almost always men - compete constantly with blood and treasure for influence, land and markets.

 

The big questions in international affairs since the birth of modern diplomacy in the 15th century have been about how states relate to each other. We send Ambassadors to Paris and Beijing, not to Google and Apple.

 

But now we are living through four major trends: the erosion of US hegemony and a shift to a period without a lead nation; the collapse of the 20th century world order; the increased influence of non state actors and new elites; and the technological empowerment of individuals.

  

Instead of a balance of power, we perhaps look set to be heading, faster than we realise, towards a period characterised by the absence of any hegemonic power. States, even the biggest and strongest, are discovering the limits of their influence. Syria has been a grim example of the limits of global reach, stomach and compassion. Assad has been a fortunate man – his brutality coincided with a period of global economic weakness, inwardness and war weariness, and a moment when Russia was looking for painless – for Russia at least – ways to bite at the heels of the US. A leaderless world might sound attractive in theory, but it will not be pretty in practise.

   

Meanwhile, the international architecture is weakening, corroded from outside and rotting from within. The post Second World War institutions such as the United Nations, World Trade Organisation, International Monetary Fund and World Bank, are seen by most of the world as increasingly unrepresentative, irrelevant and powerless. Aspirations by many Western policymakers the collective use of limited force to protect the most vulnerable - enshrined in what the UN called Responsibility to Protect (R2P) - have been buried by austerity and Iraq. Once again, the Syria people have been the main victims of this trend.

 

At previous points of such power transition, war or revolution reset the global structures. The 1815 to 1914 system, based on the concert of powers agreed in Vienna, was destroyed in the mud and blood of the First and Second World Wars. The post 1945 system then sought, with great idealism, to establish clearer rules to manage power, reduce the risk of military confrontation, and create space for economic cooperation.

 

That scaffolding looks pretty shaky now. The powers with most to gain from retaining the status quo are struggling to resource that aspiration. Those with most to gain from its destruction are not offering an alternative vision.

 

Meanwhile, post 1989 globalisation has meant that the major threats on the international agenda are now more cross border and transnational - terrorism, climate change, weapons of mass destruction, disease. Most of the 21st century's main wars have been fought on those issues rather than to secure territory or resources. Conflict is predominantly inside rather than between states.

 

So if states are on the wane, and the US is ceding ground, who is really in charge? Who are the new emperors?

 

I was struck, hosting Google senior executives in Lebanon in 2014, by their pulling power. Government Ministers who were hard to pin down for government counterparts dropped whatever they were doing to make time. I saw the same trend at the Hay Festival in 2013, where Google were able to gather many of us for an audience with Eric Schmidt. Google were able to hold court. As we rely more heavily on the internet for our social and professional lives, those who run it will become the new emperors.

 

This trend alarms many. Blaming the fact that "democracy and capitalism have both been hacked", Al Gore predicts "the transformation of the global economy and the emergence of Earth Inc".

 

But I’m not so sure. Google would not be the first company in history to be ambitious and creative, with megalomaniac tendencies. Companies like them are actually creating the freedom of choice and manoeuvre that limit the power of any single institution, including their own. We are unlikely ever to see again a company as powerful as the East India Company, which ruled much of Asia, funded a massive army and set the imperial agenda.

 

Power is shifting, from West to East, North to South, and from traditional actors to newer ones. But not as fast or predictably as many suggest. And we need to be as vigilant in establishing checks and balances on the new emperors as the old ones.

 

But more dramatic, and I would argue exciting, are the power shifts away from states to individuals. Power is diffusing.  It has been disrupted by individuals - the likes of Steve Jobs, just as it was in the past by the likes of Alexander the Great. And by innovations - by the integrated circuit as it was by the stirrup.

 

In an internal Microsoft memo in 1995, Bill Gates wrote that "the Internet is a tidal wave. It changes the rules. It is an incredible opportunity as well as incredible challenge". But it has proved to be much bigger than that. As Google’s Eric Schmidt now describes it, “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”

 

Already, the digital revolution has changed the world faster than any previous technology. Weapons such as spears and axes led to 200 million years of hunter gathering. Farming tools led to 8 million years of agriculture. The Industrial Revolution set off 150 years of rapid technological and social change. It is seventy years since mainframes arrived in academic and military institutions. Fifty years since the arrival of the microprocessor. Twenty years since personal computing started a mass migration of human effort and attention towards digital. Twenty years since Sergei Brin and Larry Page decided to name a search engine after the Googol, a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Twenty years since that Bill Gates memo.

 

Today, more than 3bn people are connected to the internet. The length of the average phone call has halved in the last decade, and the number of internet users has doubled. There are more mobile phones in Brazil than people. 36m British people use the internet every day, double the figure in 2006 (3) . The web is no longer for our downtime, but for all our time. These changes are astonishing. We have access not just to more information than we can process, but more than we can imagine (4) .

 

Respectable academic research from just ten years ago predicted that cars could never self drive. Fifty years ago, a committee organized by the US National Academy of Sciences concluded that “there is no immediate or predictable prospect of useful machine translation.” Now, Google Translate provides more translations in a day than all human translators do in a year. It is easy to scoff at the futurologists and soothsayers who have so often in history been wrong. But as Nobel Prize winning geneticist Richard Smalley says - "when a scientist says something is possible, they're probably underestimating how long it will take. If they say it is impossible, they're probably wrong."

 

And we're only just getting going. We have got used to the idea of that change as linear. The patterns show us – data, computer chip advancement, global temperatures, portable telephone size - that change is now speeding up at a staggering and bewildering rate. Sociologist Ian Morris has shown in just a century we will go through the equivalent in technological transformation of the shift from cave paintings to nuclear weapons. We will feel overwhelmed and unable to keep up.

 

These trends will rip apart established states, ideas and professions. This creates two major challenges for diplomacy: managing the fallout; while retaining the trust needed to do so from an increasingly empowered and sceptical public.

 

Technology has always changed the nature of the work we do. My ancestors were arrow makers who would have had to dust off their equivalent of CVs when gunpowder came along. The Industrial Revolution destroyed the job prospects for the weavers, and computers closed the coal mines. We are now much more likely to be employed for our brains than our brawn.

 

The impact of this next phase of innovation is going to destroy jobs more quickly than we can create them, with huge implications for politics. In January 2014, the Economist sounded the alarm for the global labour market. Automation and robotics are driving the outsourcing of jobs in all sectors of the economy to developing countries. You are as threatened as a lawyer or sports commentator as you are on a car assembly plant, camera film factory or security desk. 47% of today’s jobs in the US are at high risk (5) . When computers can perform more complicated tasks more cheaply and effectively than humans, the public sector should also be quaking.

 

We want this innovation to replace the work we don't want to do. But we don't want it to replace us altogether. We’ll need to find new ways to work. Since 2008, over 333,000 people in Britain alone have registered as self-employed (6) . There will be push factors, as competition for jobs increases. And pull factors - more people will be attracted to the idea that, like William Ernest Henley, "I am the master of my fate".

 

Innovation should create new and better jobs. Farmers become office workers, secretaries become computer programmers, diplomats become waiters. But less dramatic transformations of the labour market have ruptured politics and societies in the past. The costs are always felt faster than the benefits. Inequality will grow. "Technology’s impact will feel like a tornado, hitting the rich world first, but eventually sweeping through poorer countries too”, the Economist concluded. “No government is prepared for it."

 

Those are six powerful and terrifying words for anyone in politics, and everyone outside politics - no government is prepared for it

 

This technology tsunami is changing the relationship between governments and citizens. The new hyper-connectivity reduces trust in traditional political and media elites, and empowers citizen commentators. We’re using these devices to become creators and distributors. YouTube has more video content uploaded in a single month than the three main US channels broadcast in their first sixty years. More photos were taken in 2013 than in the rest of history. The digital generation beams out its triumphs and humiliations, not caring who is watching. As marketeers have long realised, people trust the voices of their peers more than they trust elites. Increased access to information gives citizens more power than ever before, and therefore governments less. MIT’s Moses Naim characterises it not just as a shift in power but “The End of Power”.

 

The generation now coming to positions of influence in much of the world is the first to have spent their entire career with the internet. They will be even better prepared to shine a light into dark corners and comfort zones. They will get to positions of influence faster than any generation before them, but lose those positions faster too.

 

This shift in power is a big deal. Our comfort zones are being disrupted. New ways of thinking and living are fundamentally changing what it means to be human. The transformation of how we meet our needs for security, dignity, and community will shatter the political equilibrium, and shift power away from governments towards citizens.

 

The printing press was the last innovation remotely comparable to the internet in its ability to diffuse and spread knowledge. Like the internet it reduced the entry barrier for access to information. As a result, it triggered the modern world.

 

States will still be around for some time. We haven’t yet come up with a better idea. But they are becoming weaker and less trusted. Ironically, at a time when the world faces a more dramatic combination of change and challenge than ever before, we are overwhelmed by that change. At a time when we have the tools to react globally, we are failing to use them.  We face massive global transition at a time when there is a lack of global leadership, a growing realisation that we are leaderless. No-one has a plan. We have not begun to adapt our institutions to the new realities.

 

If we are witnessing the birth of the first truly global, connected, civilisation, where are decisions to be taken to protect our basic human needs?  The world is becoming less like a traditional British banquet and more like a Lebanese mezze. Anarchic, unstructured, free.

 

But this does not make life simpler. In one of the closing scenes of Skyfall, British secret agent James Bond pounds through the Whitehall traffic to reach a committee room in which his boss, M, played by Judi Dench, is being grilled by parliamentarians. Unknown to her and the MPs, their lives are in severe danger. Pressed for greater transparency, M tells the committee that, "Our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map. They're not nations, they're individuals...Our world is not more transparent now, it's more opaque. It's in the shadows."

 

Our enemies no longer identify themselves with a helpful monologue or an underwater hideout. Of course, Bond gets there just in time to save M from the killer, and – indirectly – from the committee’s suggestion that the spies are obsolete Cold War relics, unfit for the modern age. Point made.

 

The history of diplomacy suggests that diplomats have always been most effective when they have understood, channelled and represented real power.

 

So when emperors held power, diplomats advised them in their citadels. When monarchs held power, diplomats were courtiers in their palaces. When military leaders held power, diplomats hovered outside their tents. When states became the dominant power brokers, diplomats started ministries. 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.

 

In an age when power is once again shifting and diffusing, diplomacy is again having to reconnect to new sources of power. Increasingly, central issues about the balance between security and liberty are settled in the space between governments and big tech companies. And big tech is providing the answers to many of the problems that governments have failed to address. So should countries now send ambassadors to Google, Microsoft and Apple? Are they the new emperors? 

 

In any case states will need to engage, work with, and sometimes compete with or clash with the technology giants. But they are still one actor among many. This article will look at the main areas of shared and diverging interests.

 

Actually, the tech giants are already changing the nature of diplomacy. Diplomacy is Darwinian. The most important innovations to shape statecraft throughout history were language, writing, ships, rules, the printing press, trains, telephones, and now the internet. Leaps forward in communication have often been uncomfortable for diplomats. On receiving his first telegram, in the 1860s, British Foreign Secretary Palmerston is reported to have spluttered “My God, this is the end of diplomacy."

 

Writing in 1961, against a backdrop of social change and the spectre of nuclear war, Harold Nicolson saw that the fundamentals on which the diplomacy and indeed the politics that he knew had been built were shaky. The rules of the game – an elite talking to fellow elites in Europe - were changing. “The old diplomacy was based on the creation of confidence, the acquisition of credit ... the old currency has been withdrawn ... we are now dealing in a new coinage.”

 

The coinage of diplomacy and politics is indeed now digital.

 

Human progress is not about IQ but how we collaborate and exchange ideas. Innovation thrives on the ability of smart people to create and compete together. The internet accelerates that process in as important a way as the printing press did. Every area of life and work will therefore be opened up to disruption and automation.

 

This presents three major issues for diplomacy as a profession. It is going to be disrupted at a time when it lacks resource, will and energy. What it represents – states, hierarchies, the status quo - is becoming weaker. And the challenges it needs to confront are becoming greater.

 

They most important terrain for debate between states and tech giants will be how to balance security and liberty.

 

Digital technology erodes trust in traditional sources of authority. Edward Snowden's revelations have accelerated a debate about surveillance and the internet. Security agencies argue that they have to mine an ocean of data to identify the new threats from legitimate intelligence targets. Faced with a context in which there is legitimate public interest in greater transparency, but also a continued and evolving security threat, it will be necessary to establish clearer international guidelines that govern 21st century espionage in democratic states.

 

But the modern reality is that the boundaries between his definitions of secrecy and privacy are now being rapidly eroded. We are not far away from a context in which we have to ask the people with whom we are having dinner whether they are filming us on their wearable technology. We'll be in an age when nothing we say, even in what we used to call private, is off the record. That’s a problem for diplomats – most of their work has tended to be off the record, protected by codes and laws, hidden from public sight.

 

The two biggest recent challenges to confidentiality in statecraft and espionage have come from Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Assange and his Wikileaks insurgents have tracked down and released masses of mainly US government confidential information. They do this without discrimination, believing that everything should be out there for examination. Meanwhile, whistle blowing US intelligence analyst Snowden lifted the lid on what he claimed were systematic efforts by Western governments to monitor the communications of other governments, and even their own populations.

 

I am evangelical about the need to shine a light into some of the darker corners of government, and to increase public awareness and oversight. But I don’t want to live in Wikiworld, as a diplomat or a citizen.

 

Has Assange made it harder to counter the threats we face?

 

Many involved in diplomacy naturally believe so, arguing that the greatest threats to national security now come from modern day Kim Philbys (7) , information anarchists motivated not by creed or crusade but by a desire to get back at the system. Fight the power. American science fiction writer Bruce Sterling judges this to be seismic - “Julian Assange hacked a superpower.”

 

The superpower agreed. In condemning Wikileaks, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pulled no punches. “It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems ... disclosures like these tear at the fabric of the proper function of responsible government.”

 

Wikileaks also creates dangerous implications for the ability of diplomats and governments to protect confidential information and exchanges. Former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband argues that "the best diplomats, outside of formal negotiations, make a difference by being a transmission belt for valuable insights, born of real knowledge and good contacts in their host country. It is judgements, preferably expressed in memorable prose, that you most want from people on the ground. WikiLeaks makes that task tougher. It is one thing for people in politics or business to be wary of writing anything down, but quite another if they fear to say anything to foreign diplomats. And if ambassadors fear to tell it straight and loud to head office then we are all poorer."

 

On the other hand, Wikileaks has given the public a greater insight into the workings of government. It has accelerated the process through which governments acknowledge the need for greater openness and transparency. It has embarrassed plenty of people, mainly American diplomats whose private views have been exposed and the interlocutors who thought that they were sharing theirs in safety. But it has not fundamentally hacked diplomacy and government.

 

In fact, Edward Snowden's revelations were more damaging than those of Wikileaks. Critics of Western governments claimed that the leaks of classified documents from the US National Security Agency revealed that American spies - and their British counterparts at Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) - now use the internet to sweep up vast amounts of data from the digital trail people leave every day.

 

Snowden has therefore displaced Assange as the poster boy of the transparency movement. Foreign Policy magazine even put him top of the list of 2013 global thinkers. Michael Hayden, a former NSA/CIA Director, suggests that "Snowden has compromised an entire generation of investments in US tactics, techniques, and procedures. He represents the single greatest haemorrhaging of legitimate American secrets in the history of the Republic." He didn’t mean it as a compliment.

 

Snowden's revelations should however accelerate a debate about surveillance and the internet. Security agencies argue that they have to mine an ocean of data to identify the new threats from legitimate intelligence targets. This means sifting through information from those who aren't targets, in the way that a Bond era spy looking for a SMERSH villain would cast his eyes over a crowd. As GCHQ's last Director Iain Lobban has put it, "we're looking for the needle, not at the hay". Robert Hannigan, his successor, argues (8) that US technology giants are becoming more reluctant – following Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing revelations – to cooperate with GCHQ, yet “privacy has never been an absolute right”, and US tech giants are “the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals.” He is right that ISIL and other organised terror groups are using digital media in a more savvy and intelligent way than their predecessors, including Al Qaida. Monitoring them is getting harder. But we have to be careful not to focus on the mechanism rather than the message. We did not ban the telephone when terrorists communicated by ‘phone.

 

Many observers, and probably many practitioners of diplomacy, wish that we remained in the Age of Bond, a time when the trade was more glamorous and when it was clearer who was the enemy - he either spoke with an Eastern European accent or had a striking quirk. Ideally both. We are no longer facing a comprehensible, if shifting, set of alliances that would have made sense to the crafters of the Congress of Vienna. Or indeed to Genghis Khan or Ug. Instead, diplomatic alliances are more fluid, issue based, and flexible. And so are diplomatic enemies. Those we pay to protect our security argue that they can no longer do so simply by spying on states. They need to spy on individuals.

 

Meanwhile, public and media expectations of oversight of policy making are increasing. Officials are more paranoid about leaks and inquires than ever before – a generation of policy makers are scarred by the various Iraq inquiries, which seem to have been a constant feature of the last decade. The carefully drafted minute that looks brilliant and witty in the Prime Minister’s red box will seem reckless to a parliamentary committee armed with hindsight and media outrage. There is quite rightly an intense interest in what advice goes to leaders, especially on issues relating to war and peace. Recent inquiries have shown that no-one comes out with much credit when their real time communications are put under an intense spotlight. In the past, a Private Secretary might put some additional personal advice in a post-it note on top of a submission if they wanted to avoid becoming part of the public record. That's increasingly likely now. Advice also becomes less candid, and more cautious.

 

Those of us representing countries that claim to stand for freedoms also need to use these new tools to promote those freedoms much more aggressively online. This is an area ripe for cooperation with the big tech companies. Even without the pressures of such technological change, there is a strong case to be made for greater openness and transparency. President Obama set it out (9)  in 2009 - "The more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves. That generates new ideas. It encourages creativity." The US, more than any other nation, has sought to use this new instrument to promote democratic values in other countries, whether through Presidential YouTube messages to the Iranian people or energetic defence of the rights of the free speech of bloggers facing greater restrictions. That must continue.

 

Any enlightened government should also be getting more people online. But the reality is that, of the five billion people who will become connected in the next decade, most will be in more repressive societies. Some states, such as Turkey, have already taken on Twitter directly. In Russia, pro Putin oligarchs such as Ivan Tavrin have forced more independent operators such as Pavel Durov out of control of large sections of the internet. Dissident sites are blocked in an increasing number of countries, as are even sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube.

 

This repression is increasingly sophisticated and well resourced. Censors have always been ingenious and well funded. But for everyone trying to build a wall around the internet, there are smart people building the internet around their wall. Governments should support the effort to end internet censorship in a decade.

 

Of course, this effort will be driven by activists and the internet companies themselves, who have most to gain. The idealistic technology pioneers who designed the internet saw it as a way to share information freely and without restraint. Tim Berners Lee famously declared after founding the worldwide web 25 years ago that "this is for everyone." He must surely be right. We will have to fight hard to defend a single internet that can benefit humanity as a whole, rather than one broken down by repressive states and censors.

 

The networked world has undermined traditional authority and hierarchy, destroying the claims of leaders and governments that they can control information. Everyone is now watching everyone, and the digital tools available to an increasing proportion of humanity will increasingly enable them to hold those watching them to account. These questions are bigger than the intelligence agencies involved. They are also bigger than the big tech companies.

 

Those behind the wall cannot dismiss or play down the views of those outside that wall. Hoarding information can be even more dangerous than sharing it. Government depends on the consent of the governed, and that demands trust. Security and rights must be two sides of the same coin.

 

Social media will transform the way that governments engage with citizens. But while the internet defies boundaries, most governments find it hard to escape the confines of national responses. Data is not sufficiently shared and regulation struggles to keep pace. Governments have not yet tackled the big questions on the balance between privacy and transparency, or found the right formula to nurture innovation. Set piece events are being replaced by more fluid, open interaction with the people whose interests diplomats are there to represent.

 

The next wave of diplomatic innovation will be driven by big data, another area ripe for closer cooperation between governments and technology giants. It will reshape how diplomats find and use information; how they deliver a service; and how they network and influence. More than 90% of data was created in the last two years. News and public opinion monitoring will take place on a dramatically different scale. Digital technology, and the masses of data it generates, should also make government better at discovering and delivering what people want from it. Foreign Ministries will need to understand the revolution in consumer power, and rising expectations.

 

Just as digital technology allows for faster innovation by bringing people together, it also allows them to spread protest. The uprisings of the Arab Spring fed off each other. Activists could for the first time watch the simultaneous successes and failures of their counterparts in other parts of the region. Individuals could now document what was happening around them in real time; share it more easily; and organise themselves more effectively. Anyone can now be a broadcaster or commentator. Political action is becoming a franchise rather than a controlled party operation. Global protest politics - from Wikileaks to Anonymous - is breaking down old power monopolies. Social media will continue to play a part in breaking down barriers everywhere where people are connected to the internet. Digital media alone did not create the Arab Spring. But it made it less predictable, and more widespread. It is no longer possible to imagine an uprising or revolution that does not deploy social media.

 

Digital technology will also allow those opposed to basic liberties a platform to suppress them, promote their atrocities, and recruit their footsoldiers. Shrewd authoritarian regimes will crack down on digital freedom, and turn it against activists. Social media campaigns will also be used to fuel extremism and polarise debate – the modern equivalent of the use of hate radio during the Rwanda genocide. ISIL sent 40,000 tweets in one day as they took Mosul in June 2014.

 

Technological change is unstoppable. The overall effect of the internet is positive. It is better ultimately to have too much information than too little. But it is not painless. Diplomats will be part of the debate on our digital rights, tackling the toughest issues around trust and transparency, and helping to find the balance between freedom of expression and the rights of others. Governments will continue to lose their monopoly on information and influence. Secrets will become harder to justify and harder to keep.

 

The answers to these questions on the balance between digital freedoms and oversight predate the digital era. We still need to understand where authority begins and ends; what issues fall under the rule of law; and how to balance the rights of individuals and communities.

 

The role of diplomats is being transformed faster than at any point in history. But diplomacy existed before states, and will exist after they have ceased to be the principal form of geographical power. We need diplomats more than ever because the implications of diplomatic failure are more catastrophic than ever. In the Digital Age the need is not for something to replace diplomacy, but for better diplomacy.

 

Footnotes:

 

(1) Ovid described the ‘seduction’ in Metamorphoses: “Fear filled her heart as, gazing back, she saw the fast receding sands. Her right hand grasped a horn, the other lent upon his back, her fluttering tunic floated in the breeze”.

 

(2) “The Currency of Power” (Foreign Policy Magazine, October 2012)

 

(3) UK Office for National Statistics, 2013

 

(4) See Daniel Levitin, ‘The Organised Mind’ (2013) 

 

(5) Carl Frey, ‘Future of Employment’ (Oxford Martin, 2013)

 

(6) UK Office of National Statistics

 

(7) For more on the heavy drinking, ferociously deceptive master traitor, I strongly recommend Ben Mackintyre’s riveting ‘A Spy Among Friends’, given to me by an impressed Lebanese warlord.

 

(8) FT, October 2014

 

(9) In Shanghai