Ideas and foreign policy

by | Jan 27, 2009


Two trends that should be welcomed and encouraged: (1) the rising amount of time that foreign ministry policy planning teams from different countries are spending with each other, which helps to build multilateral bandwidth and shared awareness; and (2) the fact that these conversations are also becoming increasingly transparent and accesssible to external stakeholders.

One interesting example of both of these trends in action is this transcript of a discussion between James Kariuki (former head of policy planning at the UK Foreign Office), David Gordon (his US counterpart) and Pierre Levy (their French opposite number) on the role of ideas in international relations, which was published last autumn in Les Carnets du CAP, the French policy planners’ quarterly publication. 

The whole piece is well worth a read, but especially interesting to my mind is James’s observation that

…in the West, the US has been particularly successful at forging links between the world of ideas and the world of policy making. This is partly about the soft power of the dominant nation. In my view, it is also a positive spin-off from the politicisation of public service. The significant turnover of staff with each change of administration means that the think-tanks are full of people with real and recent policy experience in the administration, and the administration fills up with those who have spent time outside thinking (in well resourced foundations). In Europe, certainly in Britain, the lines between officialdom and intellectual activity are more sharply drawn.

I think that analysis is exactly right (see also this post from last April).  So how to improve matters without ceding the principle of an apolitical civil service?  One option would be to open up all London-based FCO posts to external applicants, as David and I called for back in 2007.  Overall, that goal remains a long way off, but all due credit to James for practising what he preaches: when he was head of policy planning and needed to recruit three strategy project directors, he advertised every post. 

Author

  • Alex Evans is founder of Larger Us, which explores how we can use psychology to reduce political tribalism and polarisation, a senior fellow at New York University, and author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? (Penguin, 2017). He is a former Campaign Director of the 50 million member global citizen’s movement Avaaz, special adviser to two UK Cabinet Ministers, climate expert in the UN Secretary-General’s office, and was Research Director for the Business Commission on Sustainable Development. Alex lives with his wife and two children in Yorkshire.


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