Former British diplomat Carne Ross tells his story from “the other side”, a story about what it was actually like to be a diplomat on the front lines inside the U.N. Security Council prior to his resignation from the British Foreign Service. In his book, “Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite”, Carne Ross shares various episodes of his life as a diplomat in the Security Council and as a speech writer for the British Foreign Secretary. Not only does Mr. Ross talk about what it is like to be a diplomat, he talks, above all, about what is wrong with being a diplomat.
Mr. Ross’ experience has been quite extensive, more than 15 years, and four and a half of those years were spent in the UK delegation on the U.N. Security Council where he was the UK delegation’s Middle East expert. Mr. Ross worked on many issues which he called quite acute and important today including terrorism, the Israel-Palestine issue, the global environment, Afghanistan and Iraq which is why, he says, he is not a diplomat today. Mr. Ross resigned from the British Foreign Service in 2004 after giving evidence to the official inquiry into the abuse of intelligence of weapons of mass destruction. He also gave evidence to the so-called “Butler Inquiry”.
The book tells the story of how “we” negotiated sanctions on Iraq for many years between the years of 1998 to 2002, Mr. Ross said. It shows how those negotiations were going so badly that Ross had the idea of playing music during the negotiations to try to improve the tone of those negotiations and reach agreement between the differing states of the Security Council.
On Iraq, Mr. Ross stated “The one group who were always absent from those discussions were the Iraqi people themselves” and one of the insights that came to him after leaving the foreign service, in a period of reflection after he quit, he said, was that all too often decisions in diplomatic forums like the U.N. Security Council are taken with far too little reference to the people themselves. The very people that most needed to be there, i.e. the people they were talking about, were more often than not the very people who were absent. “This was not just true of Iraq. It was also true of the Western Sahara. It was also true of Kosovo”, Mr. Ross stated.
During his briefing at the United Nations Correspondents Association, Mr. Ross asked journalists, “Does this strike any of us as being a little bit unusual and a little bit odd?” Curiously it didn’t strike him, at the time, as odd. “It is pretty obvious that it is not the right way to do business”, he said. If you want places like to the U.N. Security Council to make good decisions about the world, about the places they’re discussing, then surely the U.N. Security Council should find room to listen to the very people that they’re talking about. Mr. Ross stated this is one of the things the book talks about at length but, strikingly, nobody seems to be talking about it at all.
Mr. Ross tells the story of British Foreign Policy on the Western Sahara issue and the instance in which he used the phrase, "No dog in this fight". “Diplomats like me wrote telegrams that said things like we have no dog in this fight. One may think this was the right conclusion about British policy on the Western Sahara, but the conclusion I drew about it was that I wrote this telegraph without reference to the people I was representing, and mainly the British people. When foreign policy is made, it’s often made in a completely invented and arbitrary way, based on an invented calculus on what diplomats think is important. This calculus is arbitrary in the extreme and often just resides in the heads of people like me and in our prejudices. Never in my experience as a diplomat did we ever consult the British people on what our policies should be - whether it was sanctions on Iraq, Palestine or particularly issues like the Western Sahara and I felt this was wrong”, he confessed. Mr. Ross told reporters that we need greater accountability in our diplomats and that all too often diplomacy is a closed box.
“Even the most democratic governments are making foreign policy with very little democratic accountability. Even states like Britain do not have public debates about foreign policies. We can generate a British policy on Western Sahara which has zero public support or authority behind it because it’s never discussed. It is simply invented by people like me in an entirely arbitrary fashion, based on an invented calculus of interest. So the U.N. is not where people shall speak unto people, this is where government shall speak unto government and that is a profoundly problematic way of dealing with our problems. We need greater democracy in institutions like this; greater openness of the Security Council, consultation of the people the Security Council is talking about and ultimately, a democratization of the whole institution. My answer for greater legitimacy for the U.N. which is frankly an institution in trouble in terms of its legitimacy today, is to think about democratic changes in the U.N., to think about an elected chamber to sit alongside the General Assembly of States, to actually provide some kind of democratic voice alongside the voice of government”, Ross told reporters.
“The Independent Diplomat” is also about the genesis and the foundation of Independent Diplomat, the world’s first non-profit advisory group, as an organization. This organization was set up to meet the need of what Mr. Ross calls the “diplomatic deficit”, the gap the diplomatically powerful, such as the P5 countries who have vast resources in terms of diplomacy i.e. lawyers, skilled diplomats, money, large numbers of people who cover the proliferating bodies of international diplomacy, and the gap between them and everybody else who have all too often had very few resources and who are not being heard in the places where decisions are being made about their future. At the WTO and at the EU, there are a great many actors, he said, small countries and political groups that do not have the skills to make there voices heard in the process. “Independent Diplomat” is designed to meet that deficit by providing advice and practical assistance to “countries” like Kosovo, here at the U.N., and Somaliland. Mr. Ross’s organization, “Independent Diplomat”, already has clients around the world and the organization hopes to expand (deliberately slowly) to a global network of skilled diplomatic advisors and former diplomats, international lawyers and others who can provide the expertise to help marginalized governments and groups be heard in the closed forums of diplomacy.
Elisa Burchett
U.N. OBSERVER & International Report
Please also see:
Independent Diplomat http://www.independentdiplomat.org
Mr. Ross’ experience has been quite extensive, more than 15 years, and four and a half of those years were spent in the UK delegation on the U.N. Security Council where he was the UK delegation’s Middle East expert. Mr. Ross worked on many issues which he called quite acute and important today including terrorism, the Israel-Palestine issue, the global environment, Afghanistan and Iraq which is why, he says, he is not a diplomat today. Mr. Ross resigned from the British Foreign Service in 2004 after giving evidence to the official inquiry into the abuse of intelligence of weapons of mass destruction. He also gave evidence to the so-called “Butler Inquiry”.
The book tells the story of how “we” negotiated sanctions on Iraq for many years between the years of 1998 to 2002, Mr. Ross said. It shows how those negotiations were going so badly that Ross had the idea of playing music during the negotiations to try to improve the tone of those negotiations and reach agreement between the differing states of the Security Council.
On Iraq, Mr. Ross stated “The one group who were always absent from those discussions were the Iraqi people themselves” and one of the insights that came to him after leaving the foreign service, in a period of reflection after he quit, he said, was that all too often decisions in diplomatic forums like the U.N. Security Council are taken with far too little reference to the people themselves. The very people that most needed to be there, i.e. the people they were talking about, were more often than not the very people who were absent. “This was not just true of Iraq. It was also true of the Western Sahara. It was also true of Kosovo”, Mr. Ross stated.
During his briefing at the United Nations Correspondents Association, Mr. Ross asked journalists, “Does this strike any of us as being a little bit unusual and a little bit odd?” Curiously it didn’t strike him, at the time, as odd. “It is pretty obvious that it is not the right way to do business”, he said. If you want places like to the U.N. Security Council to make good decisions about the world, about the places they’re discussing, then surely the U.N. Security Council should find room to listen to the very people that they’re talking about. Mr. Ross stated this is one of the things the book talks about at length but, strikingly, nobody seems to be talking about it at all.
Mr. Ross tells the story of British Foreign Policy on the Western Sahara issue and the instance in which he used the phrase, "No dog in this fight". “Diplomats like me wrote telegrams that said things like we have no dog in this fight. One may think this was the right conclusion about British policy on the Western Sahara, but the conclusion I drew about it was that I wrote this telegraph without reference to the people I was representing, and mainly the British people. When foreign policy is made, it’s often made in a completely invented and arbitrary way, based on an invented calculus on what diplomats think is important. This calculus is arbitrary in the extreme and often just resides in the heads of people like me and in our prejudices. Never in my experience as a diplomat did we ever consult the British people on what our policies should be - whether it was sanctions on Iraq, Palestine or particularly issues like the Western Sahara and I felt this was wrong”, he confessed. Mr. Ross told reporters that we need greater accountability in our diplomats and that all too often diplomacy is a closed box.
“Even the most democratic governments are making foreign policy with very little democratic accountability. Even states like Britain do not have public debates about foreign policies. We can generate a British policy on Western Sahara which has zero public support or authority behind it because it’s never discussed. It is simply invented by people like me in an entirely arbitrary fashion, based on an invented calculus of interest. So the U.N. is not where people shall speak unto people, this is where government shall speak unto government and that is a profoundly problematic way of dealing with our problems. We need greater democracy in institutions like this; greater openness of the Security Council, consultation of the people the Security Council is talking about and ultimately, a democratization of the whole institution. My answer for greater legitimacy for the U.N. which is frankly an institution in trouble in terms of its legitimacy today, is to think about democratic changes in the U.N., to think about an elected chamber to sit alongside the General Assembly of States, to actually provide some kind of democratic voice alongside the voice of government”, Ross told reporters.
“The Independent Diplomat” is also about the genesis and the foundation of Independent Diplomat, the world’s first non-profit advisory group, as an organization. This organization was set up to meet the need of what Mr. Ross calls the “diplomatic deficit”, the gap the diplomatically powerful, such as the P5 countries who have vast resources in terms of diplomacy i.e. lawyers, skilled diplomats, money, large numbers of people who cover the proliferating bodies of international diplomacy, and the gap between them and everybody else who have all too often had very few resources and who are not being heard in the places where decisions are being made about their future. At the WTO and at the EU, there are a great many actors, he said, small countries and political groups that do not have the skills to make there voices heard in the process. “Independent Diplomat” is designed to meet that deficit by providing advice and practical assistance to “countries” like Kosovo, here at the U.N., and Somaliland. Mr. Ross’s organization, “Independent Diplomat”, already has clients around the world and the organization hopes to expand (deliberately slowly) to a global network of skilled diplomatic advisors and former diplomats, international lawyers and others who can provide the expertise to help marginalized governments and groups be heard in the closed forums of diplomacy.
Elisa Burchett
U.N. OBSERVER & International Report
Please also see:
Independent Diplomat http://www.independentdiplomat.org