Том Флетчер – The Naked Diplomat: Understanding Power and Politics in the Digital Age (страница 15)

The job was still not of course without its dangers. British diplomat Alexander Burnes, a Hindi- and Persian-speaking Scot with a roving eye, was hacked to death by a mob of jealous husbands in Afghanistan in 1841. His colleague Charles Stoddart was imprisoned and executed for spying in Bukhara in 1842, following a failed mission to persuade the emir to free Russian slaves. Bertie Mitford, the grandfather of the famous sisters, was made to watch ritual disembowelment on arrival in Japan as ambassador in 1868 (perhaps it was this that prompted his granddaughter Nancy to ascribe to a character in one of her novels the opinion that ‘abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends’,6 a view shared by her father David – and some modern politicians). The entire diplomatic corps was placed under siege during the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. Diplomatic papers record seventeen deaths among the English ‘King’s Messengers’, who transported the diplomatic bag, in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century.

The expectation of diplomatic hospitality also created its own challenges – 14,000 Persian merchants took up uninvited residence at the British legation in Tehran in 1906 as part of their effort to secure constitutional reform. Earlier, 300 of the shah’s wives and eunuchs had made a similar request for sanctuary. Sir Mortimer Durand, the British representative, was, he reported to London, ‘somewhat staggered’.

New rules gave a sense of greater purpose and historical context to diplomats, who could now make war as well as peace at the stroke of a pen. The Prussian chancellor Bismarck famously edited out the diplomatic niceties from a telegram from his emperor Wilhelm I to Napoleon III, thereby leaving its recipient furious, and triggering the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Future diplomats who could spend days negotiating the positioning of a comma in the Maastricht Treaty would have cooed with admiration at Bismarck’s later drafting success, following days of negotiation, in establishing his master as ‘German emperor’ rather than Wilhelm’s preferred ‘emperor of Germany’.

Diplomats and their masters also began to have to take much greater account of public opinion. Advisers started to offer judgements to their leaders as to which of their mistakes the public could accept, and which were unforgivable. These were not always well received by capitals. In 1919, Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon responded furiously to one such missive from his ambassador to Paris, saying, ‘I have always known you to be a cad, I now know you to be a liar.’7 It has never been easy for envoys to speak truth unto power.

By the end of the nineteenth century, there was a new and increasingly influential player on the block. America began investing heavily in innovative naval technology. Steam-powered battleships with powerful armaments bought real-world diplomatic clout. They could also drag the new nation into war. When its battleship the USS Maine exploded for undetermined reasons in the harbour of Havana, the American press stoked war fever and blamed Spain. This gave a pretext for America to replace Spain as the dominant power in its own backyard, in countries such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam. America had arrived as a global power to rival the European states that had entrenched their positions at the Congress of Vienna.

Yet America’s ambitions remained opaque. As president, Thomas Jefferson wanted it both ways, to ‘enjoy the fruits of power without falling victim to the normal consequences of its exercise’.8 Or as John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State in 1821, put it, America ‘goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.’9 This dilemma at the heart of American foreign policy continues to this day.

The diplomatic system in 1815 – constructed with such care and swagger – looked robust enough on the eve of the First World War. Surveying regional tensions, diplomats assessed that there would need to be some accommodations to acknowledge shifts in power, but did not anticipate that conflict would shatter the genteel assumptions that underpinned their interactions. European diplomacy had got fat, entitled, and complacent.

So the British ambassador in Berlin continued his yachting expedition with the German kaiser even after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, triggering the Great War. The ambassador visited key ministers after the outbreak of conflict, and dined as usual that evening at his Residence in Berlin. When his meal was briefly disrupted by pesky protesters, his staff judged that the German emperor’s apology for the inconvenience was tardy. Having not arrived until ten the next morning, it ‘served to show what we had thought, that the emperor was not a gentleman’.10

After diplomacy’s finest century it was one thing to declare war, but quite another to misjudge diplomatic etiquette.

* Within the FCO, the honour of CMG is known as ‘Call Me God’, and KCMG is ‘Kindly Call Me God’. GCMG is of course ‘God Calls Me God’.

† Pauline’s breast cup, in which she offered drinks to suitors, is still on display in the ambassador’s Residence, thus prompting many an awkward silence at drinks receptions.

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