The New Diplomacy through a New Lenses

At the beginning of this course I filled the questionnaire about what I expect from this course and how I understand it so far. Before this course my understanding of diplomacy was quite limited and this is a shocking discovery. We all had written essays about MNCs and NGOs in the earlier modules but I have never realised that that was a part of the new diplomacy. My understanding of diplomacy was quite limited to thinking that diplomacy can only happen between heads of states or diplomats. My other discovery was that new diplomacy does not differ from the old one. The basics of good understanding of issue, tradition and history is also important. The development of modern communication did not cut off the old ways of diplomatic communications such as face to face or private meetings between state leaders or their counterparts. Understanding the rising importance of NGOs or public diplomacy have to mentioned as this is a quite radical change. No state leader could have thought of a group of individuals to challenge his or state opinion or decision-making in a modern civilised way about a century ago. Usually it would be a beginning of mass unrest or revolution. So my answer to the question regarding change of opinion about the role of new diplomacy has changed a lot since the start of the module. Looking back to the development of the knowledge I will have to take more actors into my understanding and observations of diplomacy than previously.
The one of the best explanations of evolution of public diplomacy I found in the words of Professor Brian Hocking (Loughborough University) - ‘From competition to collaboration’. He states that ‘The network model of public diplomacy rests on a fundamentally different picture of how diplomacy works in the twenty-first century. It recognises the importance of policy networks in managing increasingly complex policy environments through the promotion of communication, dialogue and trust. Globalisation – despite some views to the contrary – has not rendered national governments irrelevant, but it has highlighted their deficiencies in terms of knowledge, flexibility and speed in responding to global problems, and often the limits of their legitimacy in the eyes of those for whom they claim to act. The more diverse membership and non-hierarchical quality of public policy networks promote collaboration and learning, and speed up the acquisition and processing of knowledge.³ In contrast to the assumption (inherent in the hierarchical model) that government controls international policy, the emphasis here is on bringing together government agencies and non-governmental stakeholders. In short, public diplomacy becomes more than a component in the power inventory and suggests a different way of conceptualising the framing and implementation of international policy – and thus of conducting diplomacy in general’ (Foreign and Commonwealth Office ).


Foreign and Commonwealth Office http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/about-us/publications-and-documents/publications1/pd-publication/reconfiguring-pd