1 December, 2020
Recent official revelations about the ‘special arrangements’ governing the diplomatic status of the US intelligence hub at the Croughton airbase in the English Midlands, which were provoked by the Sacoolas affair, raise important questions. Read more.
5 November 2020
The American scholar-diplomat, Laurence E. Pope, died on 31 October 2020. Read more.
12 September 2020
The moral and political decay of Boris Johnson’s government has now marked a new low. It has been forced to admit publicly that it is willing to break an important international agreement signed and ratified less than a year earlier. The price of this is already significant and, unless it is stopped, will become much heavier. Read more.
4 September 2020
‘The danger is now clear: Trump is destroying democracy in broad daylight.’ Such is the heading of Jonathan Freedland’s column in The Guardian today. Few writers could have summed up this frightening threat with more eloquence and authority. I urge all visitors to this site to read this article.
At very low cost, the US election campaign can be followed in detail via the digital edition of The New York Times. Students, I believe, can get an even lower rate than the one I am paying. Visit this page.
2 September 2020
First it was the Foreign Office (FO), then it evolved into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), and today it becomes – as foreshadowed by Boris Johnson on 16 June – Britain’s ‘super-department for international affairs’, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). Was this a good idea? Read more.
29 July 2020
Over the last three and a half years the Trump White House has steadily inflicted serious damage on the US Department of State. Read more.
21 July 2020
After nine months since it was cleared for publication by the British Intelligence Community (IC) but then withheld by Boris Johnson’s government, the Russia Report has finally been released. Read more.
7 July 2020
On 2 July 2020 I received an email from Razvan Constantinescu, the energetic Romanian Honorary-Consul General for the south-west of England based in Bristol and president of the Bristol Consular Corps. This told me how the Covid 19 pandemic first revolutionised the nature of his work load, and then reduced it to a ‘walk in the park’. Read more.
14 June 2020
I am a keen gardener, and during the lockdown I had the great good fortune to be allowed by our neighbour to take over the care of her very large, tree-lined, and blissfully quiet garden. The weather was also unusually good, so I spent on average 6 hours a day working in it through late March, April and May. I could have wished for nothing more. Read more.
12 June 2020
The future relationship negotiations between Britain and the EU, which commenced on 3 March 2020, teach many lessons in the art of negotiation. Among these are the obvious value of certain kinds of deadline and the less obvious value of publicly announcing ‘red lines’ before talks start. For present purposes I shall concentrate on what they reveal about video-conferencing and whether it has all been for show. Read more.
15 May, 2020
An influential article of 2014 noted that health attachés were appointed shortly after the Second World War and were thereafter assigned by ‘a growing number of countries … to work in embassies in countries of strategic importance.’ Is this true? If not, why not? And does it matter anyway? Read more.
14 March 2020
As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has been announced that the second round of face-to-face talks on the UK’s new relationship with the EU, due to take place in London next week with the arrival of an EU delegation of over 100 trade experts, has been cancelled. Video-conferencing has been officially suggested as a possible alternative. Read more.
1 February 2020
Last night, 31 January, the UK’s last night as a member of the European Union, I ignored the evening news channels for the first time for many years. Read more.
27 January 2020
The US Department of State has announced its conclusion, without even a whiff of supporting argument, that requiring Anne Sacoolas to return to the UK to face a criminal charge would set a precedent that would weaken diplomatic law. This is the opposite of the truth. Read more.
17 January 2020
Recent publicity about the hostile reaction in South Korea to Harry Harris, appointed as US ambassador at Seoul by Donald Trump in June 2018, serves to underline an important point: Read more.
8 January 2020
Probably not; or, if it does, only with further passages blacked out. Read more.
Eugenio Cusumano, Christopher Kinsey, eds. Diplomatic Security: A Comparative Analysis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. 280 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5036-0898-6.
“Diplomatic security” is the term now usually preferred to “diplomatic protection” for the steps taken by states to safeguard the fabric of their diplomatic and consular missions, the lives of their diplomatic and consular officers, and the integrity of their communications; it has the advantage of avoiding confusion with the controversial legal doctrine of diplomatic protection.[1] The book under review here, Diplomatic Security: A Comparative Analysis, edited by Eugenio Cusumano and Christopher Kinsey, contains the views of scholars from China, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Israel, Turkey, and the United States on three issues: first, the policy of their state on diplomatic security, including its home-based administration; second, the ways the policy was shaped by national attitudes and circumstances; and third, the effectiveness of that policy. A final essay looks at the whole subject from a “critical” perspective, while a conclusion is provided by Cusumano.
There is much valuable detail in this volume, and several of the essays—especially those written by persons who had previously worked in diplomatic security—are unquestionably authoritative. I was interested to learn, for example, that China still relies to an unusual extent on the receiving state for diplomatic security, although it is expected before long to adopt the “‘best practices’ of other great powers” (p. 51); that, in part to avoid the need for parliamentary approval, German soldiers sent at short notice to protect any seriously threatened foreign mission of the Federal Republic do not carry arms, wear civilian clothing, and have diplomatic status; that the Russian Embassy in Damascus relies on the Syrian Army for protection; that Israel claims to be unique in embracing responsibility for diplomatic security in one “overarching” counterterrorist organization designed to protect, via both intelligence gathering and operational engagement, Israelis at home as well as abroad; and that incompetence consequent upon nepotism in the Turkish foreign service has compromised the security of Ankara’s communications, to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s cost. But valuable detail is one thing; the comparative analysis promised in the sub-title to the book is another.
Cusumano and Kinsey outline their method in their introduction. It is to employ case studies of the diplomatic security policies of nine states that are so “structured” by the same questions as to enable “an empirically rich comparative analysis” (p. 6). I take it that by this they mean the production of generalizations about the subject that are at the least suggestive hypotheses to be tested by further research in what they rightly say is an under-explored field. There are, unfortunately, a number of serious weaknesses in their approach.
First, a volume consisting of case studies, which only in occasional asides if at all comment on the practice of other states, clearly does not in itself amount to a “comparative analysis,” which is why it is rather baffling that Cusumano commences his conclusion by remarking that his task is to “complete the comprehensive comparative analysis of diplomatic security in this book” (p. 223, emphasis added). In fact, such comparative analysis of diplomatic security only begins with the conclusion, although this is a long one (twenty-four pages, including endnotes), and I shall make some observations about the content of this later.
The second problem with this approach is that the selection of the cases—the UN Security Council Permanent Five plus four other major powers—is idiosyncratic. No explanation for this selection is provided, other than that these states all have missions in dangerous places, have been “increasingly confronted by the threat of terrorism,” and have treated diplomatic security as an “urgent issue” (p. 6). (The last claim is in any case questionable on the evidence of the Turkish chapter.) Many other states meet the same conditions for selection, among them some smaller states that have suffered serious attacks on their diplomatic or consular missions in recent years, not least in the Middle East and North Africa: for example, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, and Morocco. It would surely have been instructive to include some smaller states at the expense of some of the larger ones, or alternatively some from other regions, such as South Asia, central and southern Africa, and South America.
The third and most serious problem is the country focus itself, even were it to have had a more representative sample. A serious comparative analysis of this subject would have been problem-focused. It would have begun with chapters on the changing threat and the administrative response and then proceeded with individual chapters on the changes to buildings and compounds, location, types of guard, and communications—with the effectiveness or otherwise of each considered in turn. This would have brought much sharper focus to the key questions raised by the subject, encouraged the net to be cast much wider for comparative evidence, and made an infinitely more valuable contribution to public policy. It would also have produced a more elegant book, for out would have gone the irrelevant descriptions of the great geographical spread of the selected states’ diplomatic representation and above all the over-long accounts of the deadly attacks suffered by their foreign missions, both of which are a prominent feature of most chapters in this volume.
Since, for good reasons, great secrecy veils much of how states go about providing security for their diplomacy, the editors freely acknowledge that their authors faced great difficulties in obtaining evidence for their studies and had to rely on “existing unclassified information” (p. 6). And this lament is echoed by more than one of the authors themselves. With the honorable exception of Thomas Stocking’s chapter, “Risk Management in US Diplomatic Security,” the consequence is that there is relatively little in this book on the methods actually employed in the provision of diplomatic security, and therefore on their effectiveness as opposed to related subjects, such as the bureaucracies and units that handle it and the national cultures of which they are an expression, useful though these treatments are.
Weakened both by the limitations of its methodology and the obstacles in the way of obtaining primary source evidence on the most important point, it is hardly surprising that this book drives to unexceptionable conclusions. In his winding up, which is nevertheless full as far as it goes, Cusumano says that the case studies demonstrate an “increasingly widespread awareness of the importance of effective diplomatic security arrangements” and a corresponding increase in its bureaucratic focus in foreign ministries, and that this is a function of the presence of so many embassies and consular posts in “developing states fraught with social unrest,” the “growth of international terrorism,” and the recent appearance of “expeditionary diplomacy,” although the last is by no means as new as he supposes (pp. 224-25, 225, 226).[2] And yet, he rightly notes, there remains a marked reluctance on the part of diplomatic officers to allow themselves to be protected too much, partly because of the poor impression this creates and partly because it impedes their freedom of movement. There are also “clear differences” between states in the “type of actors … tasked with providing diplomatic security,” although private security contractors—who are more readily controlled by foreign ministries and have a lower profile than military units—are becoming popular (p. 228). But this is not evidence that diplomatic security policy is “converging in an isomorphic process,” the view expressed in the China chapter (see above) notwithstanding (p. 229). Aside from the enduring influence of different national traditions and different propensities to accept risk, using soldiers or policemen as guards usually means that some of the costs of diplomatic security are borne by defense and interior ministries, which is a point well taken. Another is Cusumano’s conclusion—in a particularly strong, skeptical analysis of risk management methodology—that the increased attention given to diplomatic security and widespread disposition to close diplomatic posts in dangerous places only as a last resort are a vindication of the continuing value attached to “traditional, face-to-face diplomatic relations,” although he overlooks the important point that another reason for this is that such posts routinely give cover to large numbers of intelligence officers (p. 236).[3]
I am less impressed by the somewhat strained argument in the conclusion that the investigation of diplomatic security policies is a “source of insight into the architecture of the international system,” revealing in particular that in recent decades its vastly important norm of diplomatic inviolability “has been increasingly violated” (pp. 238, 240). For this is like saying that the rules of football have been increasingly violated by crowd invasions of the pitch. Diplomatic inviolability is a norm between states, and—with the odd exception—it is not states that have been attacking embassies.
What policy recommendations are offered by this book? In the final essay, “Securing Diplomacy in the War on Terrorism: A Critical Perspective,” which sits uncomfortably into the plan of this volume, Clara Eroukhmanoff appears to say little more than that diplomats would be much safer if they were to withdraw from all association with the military. So any diplomat interested only in “short-term solutions,” such as one drafted as political adviser to an armed forces commander, can safely ignore this chapter (p. 215). As for Cusumano, in addition to advising the obvious need to strike a balance between the demands of diplomacy and the demands of security, he has only one suggestion: that the corporate body of diplomats of all states in receiving state capitals should be exploited. So as to avoid the risk of a poorly protected mission being an attractive terrorist target, the members of the diplomatic corps should compare notes on the local security situation and promote a uniform response relative to the physical security of all diplomatic premises in the capital, which he rightly regards as “much more feasible” than a similar plan in regard to their diplomatic communications (p. 243). This is a useful idea that might fly in some situations and probably already does, at least among politically aligned groups within the diplomatic corps. (The term “diplomatic corps” is used in its correct, multinational sense in this last passage of the book but is widely used incorrectly elsewhere as a synonym for the essentially national “diplomatic service,” thereby blurring an important distinction.)
In sum, this book contains much of interest, features some passages of penetrating analysis, and flags up a subject well worthy of scholarly interest but is weakened unnecessarily by poor methodology and unavoidably by the difficulty of penetrating primary sources on such a sensitive subject.
Notes
[1]. See G. R. Berridge and Lorna Lloyd, The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Diplomacy, 3rd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 112-13.
[2]. See my “Expeditionary Diplomacy,” DiploFoundation, January 13, 2013, https://gbadmin.diplomacy.edu/expeditionary-diplomacy/.
[3]. See my Diplomacy and Secret Service: A Short Introduction (DiploFoundation: 2019), chap. 3, available on the ISSUU platform, https://issuu.com/diplo/docs/diplomacy_and_secret_service.
Citation: G. R. Berridge. Review of Cusumano, Eugenio; Kinsey, Christopher, eds., Diplomatic Security: A Comparative Analysis. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. November, 2019. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54330
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
First published on H-Diplo at URL in ‘Citation’ above in November 2019. Reproduced here by permission, for which I must express my thanks to Seth Offenbach of the City University of New York.
7 December 2019
It was just a matter of time before a senior British diplomat got so sick of representing the UK government of Boris Johnson that she resigned. Read more.
Barder, Brian, Brian Barder’s Diplomatic Diary, ed. Louise Barder (privately published: London, 2019), pp. 307. Paperback ISBN 978-1-944066-29-1; hardback ISBN 978-1-944066-25-3. Available from Amazon, as well as other booksellers.
Sir Brian Barder, the senior British diplomat and author of the always sage and sometimes gripping What Diplomats Do, died in 2017 but, courtesy of the professional editorial hand of his daughter Louise, has left us another treat. This is what he called a diary and which for the most part has the form of a diary (dated daily entries), although originally it was a series of letters sent to friends from foreign parts. Compared to diplomatic memoirs, diplomatic diaries are a rarity. And since this one is the product of an acute observer who loved the English language and used it in a vigorous and creative style, the appearance of this volume is doubly welcome.
The diary does not cover Barder’s early career, which started in the Colonial Office in 1957, but begins when he arrived in Moscow in February 1971. In that important embassy he was first secretary political, number two to the head of chancery and also press attaché; in September, when his immediate boss went on leave, he became acting head of chancery and right-hand man of the ambassador just as the crisis began in Anglo-Soviet relations provoked by the expulsion of 105 Soviet intelligence officers from London (at almost 100 pages, the Moscow diary is the longest in the book). The next chapters deal with Australia in the mid-1970s, where he was counsellor head of chancery and a little over two years after his arrival faced the political crisis prompted by the sudden sacking of prime minister Gough Whitlam by the governor-general, who looked ‘as always like Mr Micawber, portly in morning coat and top hat, his thick snowy hair flowing out of it and setting off his florid petulant baby face, plum-coloured with tan or anger or both.’ There follow chapters covering an eleven month sabbatical in 1977-8 with the Canadian National Defence College while awaiting the outcome of a radical report on the Diplomatic Service; and finally all of his head of mission appointments bar the last one. These were in Ethiopia, where in the mid-1980s Barder substantially overlapped with an appalling famine that attracted world-wide attention; Poland, in the last years of its Communist regime; and Nigeria, stagnating under yet another military junta at the end of the 1980s. Were it not for the relative stability prevailing at the last two postings, Barder might have been thought of as a diplomatic storm crow.
As a diary not remotely composed with a view to providing a record for historians, this volume has obvious weaknesses from the scholar’s point of view. Diplomatic historians will lament that it contains little on the policy questions that Barder was involved in with his local interlocutors or advice given to London; area specialists on South Africa during the later apartheid years will regret that he kept no diary at all during his London postings, for he was head of Southern Africa Department in the FCO from 1978 until 1982 when the future of Namibia was in the balance; and harried scholars generally might be annoyed that the volume has no index. But for historians of diplomatic method, lovers of travel writing, students who wish for a companion volume to bring more colour and humour to the author’s What Diplomats Do, and finally for the many followers of the author’s well known blog who would like to know more about the man behind it, this book is a must. (The blog has been archived by the British Library because of its ‘high quality’.)
Barder did a vast amount of travelling while at his various posts, some for holiday with his wife Jane and their children but most on duty. And his descriptions of the landscapes and townscapes he saw are vivid and discerning; for example, Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg) was ‘like a vast disintegrating museum: the great facades are crumbling as fast as the palace next door is restored, nothing is used for the purposes originally intended, the life-style of the society which camps out in all this baroque splendour is all at odds with its spirit, and the only new buildings are a desecration.’ The difficulties and occasional perils of travelling and finding accommodation, especially in the Soviet Union and Africa, also find much space in the diary and are often the targets of his dry wit. Typically self-deprecating, he refers at one point to the time when ‘diplomats were travellers rather than tourists’ but there are passages in this book which show that Barder did not always travel with the comfort and carefree attitude of the tourist. Even his Moscow flat was no paradise: ‘The cockroaches are drawn up in orderly ranks to receive us,’ he noted of his return to it on 10 May 1972.
What comes out with particular force from the diary is just what a huge, unvaried and often unappetising chore can be the representative work of a conscientious ambassador like Brian Barder. This is because – aside from information gathering and reporting and, in exceptional circumstances such as those in the Ethiopian famine, supporting a major aid mission – this is what the duty of travelling is all about. By April 1990, while in Nigeria, he was beginning to describe his official visits and courtesy calls as ‘identikit’ tours. ‘Much of the time,’ he records on 26 August 1989, ‘we were escorted by police cars with flashing lights and howling sirens, government protocol cars with protocol officials leaning out of the windows trying to bash passers-by with truncheons …’. Courtesy calls to traditional rulers also had a habit of ending on the same note, he wrote from Lagos in April 1990: ‘Your Excellency, it is a great honour and pleasure … my people are suffering from … because of our historic connexions we look to Britain … just a modest residential school complete with staff [would be very welcome]… before We wish Your Excellency Godspeed, hope We may seek your immediate intervention to settle a small problem over Our niece’s visa … .’ With the completion of one more tour inside Nigeria, he added to this entry, ‘we shall have visited and done our official calls in all 21 of the State capitals and the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja’ – a sigh is almost audible. As generous as ever, however, he acknowledges an upside to his representational duties, not least in Nigeria: there were ‘also plenty of friendly and often impressive people to meet.’
While I have said that there is little in the diary for diplomatic historians, those with an interest in Anglo-Soviet relations will get from it the flavour of the atmosphere in the Moscow embassy in September and October 1971 when the sensational news was received about the 105 Soviet intelligence officers to be expelled from the UK. As acting head of chancery, Barder accompanied the ambassador, Sir John Killick – only just arrived in Moscow – to the Soviet Foreign Ministry during these weeks and also had to field a British press corps clamouring for information. He was relieved that he was not among those expelled from Moscow in retaliation, for it would have been ‘pretty disastrous financially, disruptive for the children, and generally unsettling’; besides, it would have been disagreeable to be treated ‘like a thing’ in a tit-for-tat exchange. There is far more detail on this affair here than in the transcript of Barder’s interview for the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme (BDOHP), instructive though this is on other stages in his career.
The diary is also illuminating on the pleasures as well as the trials an ambassador might find in accommodating streams of visitors from home, and on the trials devoid of pleasures in dealing with business and press moguls gate-crashing such tragedies as the Ethiopian famine.
This brings me finally to note a reflection made by the author in his Ethiopian diary of 19 April 1983 after he had described, almost with envy, the affection and respect reported to have been earned by a relief worker he had just encountered. ‘Not for the first time in one’s dealings with relief workers,’ he wrote, ‘diplomacy is made to seem a superficial, shallow, almost shameful occupation. Definitely not one of the caring professions, anyway.’ This is a clear echo of the outlook that ripened when he joined the Colonial Office in the Home Civil Service in 1957. Unique among Whitehall departments, this prided itself on putting the interests of colonial peoples before narrow British national interests. As Barder, a life-long socialist and for the greater part of his career a member of the Labour Party, explains in his BDOHP interview, it was only with reluctance that he switched to the Diplomatic Service in 1965 after the Colonial Office had been made obsolete by decolonization. He did not believe that diplomacy was truly a shameful occupation and his own career, much of which is illuminated by this diary, is eloquent testimony of the opposite. But the fact that he could muse on the idea shows just what a fundamentally decent and thoughtful man he was, as well as an outstanding diplomat. I strongly recommend this book.
2 November 2019
A report on Russian meddling in British democracy by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee is being suppressed by the Johnson government. Read more.
