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  • From: Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Why anarchism is better than conventional diplomacy | Carne Ross | Books | The Guardian
  • Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2017 07:15:00 -0400

Why anarchism is better than conventional diplomacy | Carne Ross | Books |
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/18/why-anarchism-is-better-than-conventional-diplomacy-carne-ross?CMP=fb_gu

Carne Ross: 'Diplomacy only works if it includes those affected – and it
often doesn't'

After watching the destructive and unjust workings of international
relations, former diplomat Carne Ross explains why direct democracy now
makes more sense to him
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/18/why-anarchism-is-better-than-conventional-diplomacy-carne-ross?CMP=fb_gu#img-1>
Carne Ross pictured at Marinaleda, Spain, a cooperative municipality.
Photograph: Storyville/ BBC Four
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/18/why-anarchism-is-better-than-conventional-diplomacy-carne-ross?CMP=fb_gu#img-1>Carne
Ross <https://www.theguardian.com/profile/carne-ross>
@carneross
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/18/why-anarchism-is-better-than-conventional-diplomacy-carne-ross?CMP=fb_gu#img-1>

<https://twitter.com/carneross>

Tuesday 18 July 2017 11.38 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 18 July 2017
13.29 EDT

I wrote Independent Diplomat shortly after resigning from the Foreign
Office. I had worked on Iraq and WMD for more than four years at the UN
security council, but resigned in 2004 after giving secret testimony to the
Butler review on the Iraq war. It was a difficult time for me. My future
was unclear; I had thought I would be a diplomat all my life.

Independent Diplomat is a short and precise little book and I wrote it
quickly, fired up by my anger at the lies and the war, and my frustration
with the system of diplomacy itself. I knew there was something very wrong
about the way that diplomacy was practised. I had seen and felt it. But
what was it, and how could I convey that to readers who might know nothing
about an unnecessarily obscure, but crucial, function?
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Diplomacy has remained largely the same as it was in very different eras,
but the problems have changed. There is a glaring deficit in diplomacy that
I realised only after my time in the UN security council, the world’s
supreme body to prevent and resolve conflict. Almost without exception,
when the council discusses a conflict – in Iraq, Kosovo or Western Sahara –
the people from those places are not present. At best, their views may be
relayed through the politicised and thus biased prism of the UN’s own
reports. As I was later to learn, reported views are usually very different
from the actual opinions of people “on the ground”. Their voice was
entirely absent.

This exclusion is unfair. It is also foolish to expect good, enduring
decisions about anything, let alone the complexities of war, to be made
when those most concerned are ignored. This came home to me when I was
posted to the UN mission in Kosovo, where the democratically elected
government was expressly excluded from the diplomatic process to decide the
future of … Kosovo. I saw directly how this stupidity helped fuel the
political frustration that blew up into deadly riots in March 2004
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/mar/18/balkans2>. It wasn’t the
only reason for the violence – there never is a single reason – but it was
a big one.
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Writing the book clarified my own way forward. I set up a non-profit
organisation to address that “diplomatic deficit”, also called Independent
Diplomat <https://independentdiplomat.org/>. Its first “client” was the
then-prime minister of Kosovo Bajram Kosumi, who I took to watch the UN
security council discuss his country. It was the first time he had been
allowed to do so. Today, Independent Diplomat, which is staffed with former
diplomats like me, regularly arranges meetings between security council
diplomats and parties affected by conflict, everywhere from Mali to
Myanmar. Dictators and repressive governments get to speak at the UN,
because they are the state. But we bring other leaders, those heading up
democratic opposition parties, women’s groups, leaders of guerrilla armies
– all of the dismissively-named “non-state parties” – to the UN, to tell
the diplomats what’s really going on. And, to their credit, the diplomats
listen.
Ex-diplomat Carne Ross: the case for anarchism
Read more

The discussion is intense. One opposition leader, his voice shaking, warned
the council diplomats that there would be genocide in his country. I have
only belatedly learned that those on the ground usually have the best idea
about how to solve conflict. Ultimately, such realisations led to a belief
in a very different kind of politics: anarchism.

Today, diplomacy’s public face has changed: diplomats must now scrutinise
Donald Trump’s tweets as much as they do wordy treaties. But the private
exchange between governments at places such as the UN or EU has hardly
improved since my book was written a decade ago. The reforms that the book
demands remain essential. But this alone will not be enough to solve the
world’s manifold problems, from political violence to climate change. For
that epic challenge, no one should rely on the creaking machinery of formal
diplomacy or the governments that run it. A wider mobilisation is necessary.
Extract

Ambassadors and diplomats tends to emphasise their intimate relations with
the local authorities, as a mark of how well they are doing their job. When
I was a diplomat, ambassadors took great care to relay to London detailed
accounts of every mutter and hint of their late-night conversation or round
of golf with the president or prime minister. Usually, these accounts would
be given a high classification and restricted circulation, in order to
underline the unusual access the diplomat has secured (even if the
information contained was banal). They were often spiced with little
personal details (the president’s favourite whisky; his fondness for the
British royal family, etc) in order to demonstrate the intimacy and
uniqueness of the exchange. The product of such behaviour is to reinforce
the sense that diplomacy offers a rarefied and unique level of
communication, where one élite talks to another, elevated from the
cacophonous hordes beneath.

More about the book

“This is a rare and honest book about real-life diplomacy, reported from
the coal-face. Ross diagnoses much that is wrong with the way diplomacy is
practised today, and offers some cogent – and urgent – solutions.” George
Soros
Buy the book

- Independent Diplomat: Despatches from an Unaccountable Elite
<https://bookshop.theguardian.com/independent-diplomat.html> by Carne
Ross is published by Hurst, £9.99.
- Accidental Anarchist <http://www.accidentalanarchist.net>, a
documentary about Carne Ross, airs on BBC4 on Sunday 23 July.




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