What goes on in an Embassy

Starting with the basics

From “The Diplomat” to “The Americans” (a must-watch in my view), there are plenty of portrayals of diplomats - or sometimes spies masquerading as diplomats. But even when the dramas are often based on true stories, there’s plenty of caricature too, much of which is as useful as a diet of gin and tonic, Ferrero Rocher and unpaid parking tickets as a guide to real diplomacy. I’d add that the theory of international relations is often equally as detached from the day-to-day reality as any of the dramas. In this piece, I want to set the baseline for where we’re going next, by describing some of the practical things that go on in Embassies (High Commissions, Permanent Missions etc etc). My apologies to the many readers for whom all this is already familiar, but a baseline is just that and we need to start somewhere.

When I describe what goes on in an Embassy, I will inevitably have in my mind a British Embassy of the kind I used to work in. But the basics are the same for everyone, whether you represent a country like Britain or a country like Belarus and whether you and your colleagues are (as the Foreign Office once put it) “ordinary people doing extraordinary things”, members of your country’s aristocracy or personal appointees of the President. What kind of people make good diplomats is something I’ll come back to in a future post, not because this is necessary the place to come if you’re thinking of being a diplomat, but because if we’re talking about diplomatic tools, we should also to talk about (surprisingly diverse) characteristics of people who can wield them.

Before we come to what diplomats do, we should start by asking where they do it. In short, either at home in their Foreign Ministry (or occasionally in the Prime Minister’s office, or another Government department) or abroad. I’m going mostly to be focusing on abroad. That’s not because the work diplomats do at home isn’t important - crafting policy, briefing Ministers, working with other civil servants to join up foreign and domestic policy, leading international negotiations and so on - but because we’re most likely to see the full range of diplomatic tools in use when the diplomat is working overseas.

“Abroad” comes in all different shapes and a diplomat’s life in Suva is rather different from that in Washington DC. Life in a “big” country that makes geopolitical waves won’t be like being somewhere your friends back home may struggle to find on the map. But “small” countries can be very important to some people some of the time - if, for example, they happen to neighbour your own. After all, we always care what our neighbours are doing. Just as most countries will send some of their best diplomats to Washington DC (and indeed to London), they’ll also send good people to keep an eye on the neighbours. Which makes neighbouring country Ambassadors always worth talking to, although you might have to factor in fraught relations between neighbours when you’re evaluating what they tell you. And, as we know, for all sorts of reasons - sometimes happy, sometimes less so - small countries can suddenly become very important indeed.

There’a another distinction we need to bring in here. Diplomacy abroad comes broadly in two forms: bilateral and multilateral. Bilaterally, a British diplomat lives in Paris and works with the French to promote British interests. In a British Mission to a multilateral organisation we’re part of - say the UN or NATO - British diplomats work alongside their French and other counterparts to promote British objectives in that organisation. Where we’re not a member - say the EU - the British diplomat will still be working to cooperate with and influence the decisions of the organisation in question, but from the outside. Multilateral diplomacy is in general a more obviously intellectual pursuit involving a lot of negotiation and drafting of resolutions or statements to reflect complex agreement between multiple parties. If it’s an organisation we’re not part of, it involves understanding the complexities created by others and identifying where the country’s interests are.

Vital and indeed demanding and fascinating though multilateral diplomacy is, I’m firmly of the view that a country’s success in this area depends fundamentally on its bilateral relationships. This isn’t an entirely uncontroversial view, though I recall that former Foreign Secretary William Hague articulated something like it when he decided to strengthen the UK’s diplomatic presence in a number of countries where it had long been neglected. However you think of the idea of the “international community”, it’s self-evident that our chance of working successfully with the French in an international organisation based somewhere on the other side of the world will be much improved if our bilateral relationship with France is in good order.

This is why the essential field on which diplomatic tools are deployed remains the bilateral. And we can finally get to what really goes on in bilateral Embassies. Because this is not a blog about the intricacies of diplomatic practice, I’m going to gloss over the fact that some Embassies are actually High Commissions and some Embassies are headed by a Chargé d’Affaires rather than an Ambassador.

Here we are simply interested in what Embassies do. All Embassies will work on the political relationship (good or bad) with their host country. All will have an interest, more or less intense, on the economy of the country (when I was Ambassador in Greece in the early 2010s, I’d say my interest in the economy was pretty intense). A lot of Embassies will have a defence section led by a serving officer called a Defence Attaché or Adviser. Every Embassy will have “consular” responsibility for the wellbeing of its nationals in the country, helping them (within the constraints of international law and the home Government’s preferences) if they are taken ill, injured - either alone or in a major accident - or the victim of a crime, or arrested. Many Embassies will have teams assisting their citizens doing business in the country, and perhaps even to help promote investment back home. Some may issue visas, though the “over the counter” element of this work is nowadays often contracted out to private processing companies. And, depending on the country, an Embassy may contain specialists dealing with issues as diverse as culture, agriculture, technological cooperation, international development assistance, police or other law enforcement and so on and so on… And I haven’t - of course - mentioned the intelligence services (the UK only admitted formally that we had one in 1994).

When we say that, say, a British Embassy has people “dealing” with political relations or trade or consular matters or whatever, we essentially mean that the mission is working to support British interests in the country they’re living in. So you might be seeking support for the British position in a UN negotiation (bilateral diplomacy supporting the multilateral effort), helping a British company understand how best to win business, or making sure that a citizen who has been arrested is being well treated and has access to a lawyer. More strategically, you might be on the lookout for issues on which your host country could be a useful ally in, say, trade negotiations.

In every case, in order to be able to achieve specific strategic or tactical objectives, the most important contribution an Embassy makes is to understand the country in the kind of depth you can’t manage from a distance, even with all the technology Governments now have access to. From the next blog, we’ll start to look at how we do that, and how the tools we use can be adapted for the world beyond the Embassy walls.