David Miliband’s first speech as Foreign Secretary, given at Chatham House earlier today, is worth watching (transcript on the FCO website here). He’s proposing to simmer the UK’s ten current international priorities down to perhaps three, mooting radicalisation, climate change and the EU as his “starters for ten”.
Especially welcome was the emphasis on Foreign Office reform, policy coherence and the need for a new theory of influence for 21st century diplomacy (which, regular readers will know, David Steven and I both have a tendency to bang on about). In his conclusion, he noted that:
The Foreign Office is a unique global asset. But diplomacy has to be allied to other assets across government, in particular, aid, trade, investment and military intervention. How can we improve coordination across the FCO and other departments on particular countries and challenges?
[…and there’s the question of] how can we engage beyond Whitehall, with faith groups, NGOs, business and universities. The old diplomacy was defined by a world of limited information. It was a veritable secret garden of negotiations. And secret negotiation still matters.
But we live in a world where the views of a Pashtun farmer, and the conflict he faces between illegal opium production and legal farming, holds the fate of a critical country in the balance. So the new diplomacy is public as well as private, mass as well as elite, real-time as well as deliberative. And that needs to be reflected in the way we do our business.
But the real stroke of genius here was to ask Avaaz to co-host: an awesomely smart piece of positioning. Rather than waiting for Avaaz to dump a global petition on him during some crisis still to come, Miliband has actively set out to court their global network of supporters – and succeeded. Having been invited to co-host and canvass questions for Miliband from their global roster of members and supporters, Avaaz are now positively purring about David – titling their coverage of his speech, “David Miliband – a new diplomacy?”
