Michael Cockerell’s documentary series on the great offices of state examined the history of the Foreign Office in its second programme shown last week. In it, the veteran journalist wistfully considered the faded glory of King Charles Street, the failures expressed in the grandeur of rooms like the Locarno suite which celebrate collapsed treaties and concluded it seemed to symbolise more a ‘palace of dreams’ than a powerhouse of the modern era.
The Foreign Office has always liked to see itself as a great organ of state – and even now attracts the brightest of the bright – with modern mandarins still concluding that few domestic civil servants make the switch to the diplomatic service. But the FCO’s place at the helm of Whitehall has been eroding ever since the collapse of Britain’s naval pre-eminence in the 19th century.
While the long, slow decline of empire contributes to the arcane prestige of the office, there have been a number of shifts in more recent years that have accelerated the ebb of power from the FCO.
While Palmerston surveyed the lanterns going out across Europe on the eve of the Great War, the quantity of top researchers and diplomats employed by the Foreign Office has been in steady decline over the last decade. Increasing resources, both at home and in-country have been diverted to the pursuit of other international projects – whether it be the creation of Department for International Development in 1997 by the new Labour government, or the pursuit of military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Britain may still have a place at the top table, but increasingly we must look to our European allies to project effective diplomatic force. We are only able to agree sanctions against Iran with the express approval of France and Germany, are hampered in our ability to pursue Turkish accession because of our EU neighbours, and would like to take a far tougher line on Russia than some of our colleagues such as Greece and Cyprus.
Of course no Foreign Secretary takes on the modern role thinking he or she can solve a crisis by sending in the gunboats. But it isn’t just the reduction in our hard power that has shifted the nature of diplomacy. Increasingly, government leaders are able to talk directly to each other, removing the need for the ambassadorial prism to facilitate conversations. And even further than that, publics in countries are communicating in a way that can undermine the propaganda of governments. So twitter users in the West were better able to help the Iranian opposition last year by creating host servers than diplomats constrained by a set of tools that are far more clunky and slow.
The Foreign Policy Centre think tank where I used to work, coined the term ‘public diplomacy’ for this new type of conversation – where the image of a country and the way in which it is both projected internationally and debated outside your borders can have a major impact on your reputation, your ability to trade and the security of your citizens. Engaging in public diplomacy is something the FCO takes an increasing interest in – demonstrated in ways from David Miliband uploading blogs to the funding of a new BBC Farsi service to broadcast into Iran.
The final way in which the primacy of the Foreign Office has been challenged is through the increasing power and focus of No 10, which has slowly expanded both its remit and the number of foreign policy advisers who sit with the prime minister. This is especially true in a second term government, when prime ministers tend to focus more on foreign affairs – think Blair’s intervention in Iraq and Thatcher’s in the Falklands.
From Charles Powell to Jonathan Powell, the power of the No 10 court to direct foreign policy, in an age when fellow leaders can be communicated not via letter or telegram but instantly, is slowly making the role of the diplomat more specialist and limited.
There will always be a place for the Foreign Office, given Britain’s standing in the world, and for its ability to negotiate and avoid unnecessary conflicts, but when the major decisions of war and peace are decided, it will be in the far smaller office just along the road in Whitehall.