Thomas Nowotny - Diplomacy and Global Governance: The Diplomatic Service in an Age of Worldwide Interdependence

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DIPLOMACY AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

DIPLOMACY AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

THE DIPLOMATIC SERVICE IN AN AGE OF WORLDWIDE INTERDEPENDENCE

THOMAS NOWOTNY

First published 2011 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2011 by Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2011003368

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nowotny, Thomas.

Diplomacy and global governance : the diplomatic service in an age of worldwide interdependence / Thomas Nowotny.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4128-1844-5

1. Diplomacy. 2. International relations. 3. International organization. I. Title.

JZ1305.N69 2011

327.2dc22

2011003368

ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-4958-6 (pbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-1844-5 (hbk)

Contents

I write this book as a tribute to all thoseand to those diplomats in particularwho have promoted and supported politics that have carried the world forward over the last 70 years into an era of unprecedented wealth, welfare, and relative peace.

Their work is still incomplete. By now, it even seems threatened by backsliding into a past dominated by sterile and disruptive power plays, by mutual distrust and hostility, and by a failure to tackle those tasks that can be accomplished by common action only.

I write this book in the hope that we will summon the resolve to stem such a reverse into a tragic past and that we will be able to shape the tools of governance indispensable in a very interdependent, and thus fragile and risk-prone world.

I owe thanks to goddess Fortuna, for the luck of having lived in places and at times that have encouraged a positive outlook on human prospects. And I owe thanks to the good fortune of having been involved in, or close to, political efforts to improve on the dismal record of human history in the first half of the 20th century.

I wish to salute all my colleagues in the diplomatic service who have not fallen into the trap of careerism, posturing, and complacency, and who are tenacious in advancing global cooperation.

Above all, I wish to thank my wifea prominent diplomat, and warmhearted and generous as a spouse and companion. I don't recount how often she went over my notes and the ever-changing manuscript of this book. Her help was essential.

I am aware that the book does not easily fit one of the usual categories. It is not simply a handbook for practitioners. It is not just one of the overly numerous memoirs by ex-diplomats. And it is not one of the many academic writings on a changing world order. So I am grateful to the publisher for taking the risk of publishing something for a still uncertain market. I hope that readers will find it worthwhile to follow me in roaming over these three distinct areas.

It is necessary, I believe, to tie together these three accounts. Practice and theory are intertwined. Even when not aware of it, hands-on practitioners are nonetheless guided by some ideas on how things work in general. They are guided by some theories on international relations. But on its turn, theory that looses sight of actual practice will become useless at best and counterproductive and dangerous at worst. When pursuing political goals one thus has to deal both with practice and with theory at the same time. This is what the book aims at.

1
Introduction

When was the last time you read a book on utopiaa book about a possible, bright future for mankind? You are not likely to find one in bookstores. Utopias are not in fashion. Yet books that predict a bleak future are in ample supply. As are films about the last ones from the human species roaming the garbage dump earth would have become.

Social scientists are fully in this trend. They promote it with dire predictions:

• - A population bomb would be about to explode, making for standing room only on the earth's surface and dragging us all down into misery.
• - We would soon, very soon run out of essential raw materials and thus soon witness a collapse of the world economy.
• - Anarchy would spread over the globe as gaps in wealth continue to widen and poorer states descend into chaos.
• - A sizeable part of humankind would perish after global warming, having overshot a tipping point, accelerates in an unbridled fashion.

The predominance of such stark scenarios should surprise in light of recent history. It does not support such pessimism. On the contrary, developments over the last 70 years make it difficult not to believe in human progress. People lead longer lives. Fewer children die at a young age and fewer of their mothers at childbirth. A bigger share of the world's population can read and write. Famines touch an ever-smaller percentage of humanity. And, last not least, we have obviously progressed in the political organization of human societies. The number of democratic states has grown. Wars between these have become rare. Where wars between states still occur, they seem to be symptoms of the past and not a pointer to the future.

Why should such positive trends not continue into the future? Why must optimists who believe in the continuation of such progress bear the stigma of being perceived as nave and uninformed?

Indeed, there are weighty arguments against such optimism and against the notion that the future would resemble the past. The massive growth in the global population and the even more massive growth in overall wealth needed and created a dense interdependence between humans, societies, cultures, and states. This interdependence makes for great complexity, and complex systems are fragile. Also, with the growth of the global economy and of the earth's population, limits have become visible that would inhibit a simple continuation of past practices. That is something new. Never before has humankind been faced, for example, with the fact that its economic activities will raise dramatically the temperature of the globe.

It would therefore be unwise to simply ignore the pessimists and, in looking back on past progress, assume its continuation as inevitable. Such further progress is not preordained. It is contingent on political support and direction. Progress would stagnate or become reversed if politics would fail in that task; if humans would lack will and capacity to organize politically in order to influence the course of events.

Truethe challenges for such remedial, corrective political action are now greater than they have been in the past. But even when minor in comparison with present ones, such challenges had existed in the past too. We have not been carried forward in these last 70 years by some powerful, broad current of an abstract progress that would have worked in absence of human intervention. Global/international politics had shaped the last 70 years of our history and made them the success they were.

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