From cats and dogs to partners.

The aspect that I find the most important in what we call New Diplomacy is the emergence of the new actors. This includes NGOs and MNCs. But because the MNCs have been working alongside governments since the rise of liberalism in terms of economics, I would say that the most important aspect of the New Diplomacy is actually the rise of NGOs and their ability to have managed to reach the status of government partners. The reason for this I think it is simple: before the rise and victory of liberalism, which certainly has a role to play in the gap widening between poor and rich countries through exploitation, there was no such thing as globalization as we know it since the 1990’s – even if some scholars say that globalization is a long process that started at the time when European empires were enlarging through their thirst for discovery of the New World and get wealth from it. Indeed, before the 1990’s, the means of communication were not that wide as they are today, and as I said before, the gap wealth between rich and poor countries was not as evident as today – or at least people were not that aware of it; this obviously in disputable. But the point is that before the 19^th century, the connection between people of different regions of the world was not as easy as it is since the 1970’s, 1990’s, and even as it is today, twenty, thirty, forty years later. As a result people nowadays are more aware of the disparities and injustice and that liberalisation victory brought new ideas such as human rights and legal justice. Therefore, people that had the capacity and the possibility to do something, started to create organisations to help those who they thought, right or wrong, needed their help. This is how, in my opinion, how the NGOs first really appeared. The reason for them to exist is to help and protect the people from the law, the society they live in, empower those people, and make their lives better, in comparison to governments who put those people in that situation and still let that happen. In other words, most of what people think is that governments are bad – due to corruption, dirty financial arrangements, crimes, and self-interested decisions, while the NGO’s are seen as altruists, way of improving people’s lives and the only ones helping them. Thus, they are in a sort of competing relation: NGOs are demanding and requesting important and significant changes from the government regarding the specific matter which that NGO will feel concern about. And the more NGOs they were, more powerful they got. It is even truer that nowadays governments let NGOs, the ‘other team’, be part of the negotiation process. This is when the characteristic of ‘openness’ in the New Diplomacy comes up. This aspect is also really important, but it is undermined by two things. Firstly, by the fact that as I tried to explain, the openness of the negotiations and conferences came from a need or perhaps an obligation from governments in order to ‘calm’ the NGOs. Actually, I think if a government always acts according to it self-interest, in letting this new and competitor actor enter their round table, that means that there was a reason for that. And for me the motivation for doing such thing is manipulation. Indeed, as the saying goes ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’. Secondly, the opening aspect of the negotiations is a less significant aspect in New Diplomacy, because other actors are kept apart from private and enclosed states negotiation. This challenges the idea of the New Diplomacy being ‘open’ but it does not change the fact that NGOs are still present, take action and influence governments decisions and bring new points to the international agenda.

The main example for this could be the Copenhagen Summit on environmental issues in December 2009.environmental topic was addressed by head of states because it was brought in the agenda by many NGOs that are very much environmentally active (e.g.Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth) or by NGOs which first concern was not the environment but nonetheless, the deterioration of it makes their work less effective and environmental issues have become stronger and certainly paramount for those NGOs as well, because everything is linked to the environment. And most importantly because the first victims of the climate change are the people who are actually protected and represented by those NGOs before governments (e.g. Oxfam, Survival). Thus this is the ‘bringing NGOs concerns to the international agenda’ step. This, in my opinion, is a very positive achievement, and certainly a great change.

Nonetheless, why the Copenhagen Summit did failed and states did not come to any agreement, despite the fact that they were all driven by their self-interest and that they did not want to make any compromise while meeting altogether, I think it might be the fact that there were secret meetings held by the developed countries, letting on a side the poorer countries, those who are demanded to do all the efforts but also suffer the most.

Finally, the most important aspect of the New Diplomacy is the emergence of new actors in the international system and little by little in the negotiation process, especially the NGOs, which, even if they are not always present physically in the discussion, do play their part by taking action and changing, bringing new topics in the international agenda, making governments and NGOs sort of partners.