Net Diplomacy: Publications: Virtual Diplomacy Initiative: U.S. Institute of Peace

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Released Online
9 October 2002

CONTENTS

PART ONE

Introduction

• Beyond Foreign Ministries

• Beyond Old Borders

• 2015 and Beyond

The End of Diplomacy

Creating Change Insurgents at State

• Endnotes

Net Diplomacy I
Beyond Foreign Ministries

PART THREE

The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. government, the Department of Defense, or any of its agencies.

Diffusion of Diplomacy

Diplomacy's theater of operation, its tools, and practitioners have changed fundamentally to meet the demands of flatter, more responsive, more information-equipped and demanding global publics, who include everyone from mom and pop in Mule Shoe, Texas, to Jiang Zemin, in Beijing.

--Sheryl J. Brown and Margarita S. Studemeister

Sheryl J. Brown is chief information officer, director of the Information and Communications Technology Program, and codirector, Virtual Diplomacy Initiative, United States Institute of Peace.

Margarita S. Studemeister directs the Jeannette Rankin Library Program, codirects the Virtual Diplomacy special initiative, and assists in coordinating and implementing Latin America activities at the Institute.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Institute of Peace, which does not advocate specific policies.

In "Reinventing Diplomacy; A Virtual Necessity,"¹ Gordon Smith posits that traditional diplomacy consists of 1) the art of advancing national interests 2) by the practice of persuasion. Today, however--and for the foreseeable future--the means of international persuasion have expanded and will continue to expand to include anyone anywhere connected or plugged into the infosphere, which amounts to any and all of global communications media. Accompanying the accelerated diffusion of information and communications technologies globally, we are witnessing a parallel diffusion of the practice of diplomacy among nonstate actors² who have access to these technologies and a desire to reach and create global constituencies about specific issues that are based on perceived common values.

The current international landscape not only encourages but in some respects compels this expansion of diplomatic responsibility and practice from state to non-state actors. Just as the technological wave surprised most of us in the profundity and the speed of its transformations, the effects of globalization, hardwired by these technologies into an information-based power structure, have stunned the institutions that guarded the former global construct, particularly the nation-states, and especially with regard to issues about accountability and territorial sovereignty.

The Internet more than any other technology has given non-state actors an effective means to voice their concerns about their environs to a wide audience transcending local, regional, and national boundaries, independently of traditional media, publishing, and dissemination outlets. Political movements, parties, and groups engage in their respective causes countless individuals spread across the globe. Citizens' influence as well as are influenced by ideas accessible via the Internet.

It is that change that the United States Institute of Peace's Virtual Diplomacy Initiative has examined since its inception in 1995. One of its main foci has been how governments can or should use information and communication technologies (ICTs) to respond to and manage international conflict and how these technologies have forced new competitors and new practices on official state-to-state diplomacy. The most striking change in diplomacy's theater of operation, the international landscape, is, as Jessica Mathews presciently pointed out in 1997,³ the rise of nonstate actors in the public realm. It is they who access, penetrate, and influence every level of officialdom and at the same time mobilize populations on a host of issues using every variety of communications technology from the radio to the Internet. Of course this shift has happened in concert with the widespread adoption of liberal capitalism and democratic governance by most of the international community.⁴ (In this article, international community consists of nation-states, international and nongovernmental organizations, as well as "plugged-in and vocal" global publics.) Finally, it is the ethos of Net-community action-- transparency and accountability--that has enforced a kind of political parity among the members of the wired international community, or the emerging network society.⁵

Few thinkers have understood and written about the dialectic that informs the political transition from territory-based power to information-based power, from sovereign borders to international publics and global constituencies, so well as Jean-Marie Guéhenno in The End of the Nation-State.⁶ Everything changed for the nation-state and the notion of citizenship, says Guéhenno, when human activity liberated itself from territorial, or geopolitical, space and entered cyberspace. Citizens not only have the opportunity (access to the network) but the right (under the conditions of an international acceptance of democratic and free market conventions) to act as "netizens" irrespective of the policies and positions of their governments. The argument runs thus: because networks are divested of territory, mastery transfers from territory to network. Human competence becomes the most valued commodity. Competition for human competence occurs on a global level. Once technology standardizes men, they are then interchangeable qua the network. Capital (men, network, money) is not only mobile but in short supply, therefore in demand globally. Spatial solidarity of territorial communities, provided by being a member of a particular nation-state is replaced by the benefits derived from being a part of a temporary interest group.

Territorial sovereignty is no longer sacrosanct, writes Guéhenno: "We have lived in the two-dimensional world of territorial power, and we are entering what one could call the three-dimensional world of network power." The integrity, power, and security of the nation-state are challenged by multinationals from above and by ever-shifting coalitions of networked interest groups from below. On the one hand, responding to economic opportunities, multinationals locate themselves in tax-friendly environments regardless of "national interest." On the other hand, individuals live conveniently or by force of economics or politics as expatriates and diaspora all over the world. Both exert political pressure not only on their native countries but also on other nation-states as well to conform to the norms of the network society.

In "States, Sovereignty, and Diplomacy in the Information Age,"⁷ James Roseneau points out that "we are undergoing a decentralized fusion of global and local interests." He calls this dynamic fragmegration, "a concept that juxtaposes the processes of fragmentation and integration occurring within and among organizations, communities, countries, and transnational systems such that it is virtually impossible not to treat them as interactive and causally linked." The dispersion of authority away from states and the growing role of nongovernmental organizations, social movements, and other transnational networks as primary international actors characterize fragmegration. Roseneau notes, however, "we still do not have ways of comprehending the diminished role of states without at the same time privileging them as superior to all the other actors in the global arena." This inability to recognize the changed geopolitical landscape has meant that nation-states persist in operating as though organized violence and peace are their exclusive venue and the focus of their foreign ministries. Meanwhile, nongovernmental organizations and individuals have been going about their business identifying and responding to this last decade's inundation of intractable, identity and value-focused intrastate conflicts. As often as not they too have also been responsible for building conditions for peace in this new landscape.

In short, the club of nation-states no longer enjoys exclusive power to legitimize or delegitimize new regimes, recognize new states, and negotiate and execute treaties and international law. The new contenders for international power are information mobilizers that collect and assemble around issues. These are most notably represented by the already internationally powerful multinational corporations and loose communities and coalitions of nongovernmental and international organizations, student bodies, expatriates, and diaspora. Although these groups do not have the official power to recognize or withhold recognition from states, with leverage, bolstered--because extended and accelerated--by an able use of ICTs, they often influence the states that do.

Nonstate actors leverage their power much the same way the network functions. Power in the network society is diffused, demonstrated in one's multiple live connections; we are in communication in order to influence. No longer consisting in merely possessing knowledge, effective power functions by linking bodies of knowledge. Aspects of information have therefore changed with this shift from possession to linkage as its primary value. Information's value is entirely in exchange. Information hoarding stimulates suspicion among information users and ends in a kind of cyber-shunning. Hoarding, stove-piping, or other kinds of proprietary hold on information are anathema to the network ethos. One aspect still obtains, however: Information can and will be spun for particular interests.

Joseph Nye and William Owens have dealt with these phenomena in the groundbreaking article on the meaning and use of "soft power."⁸ Briefly described, because of the transparent nature of the wired world, the more people someone can persuade about the credibility of his pitch--especially against someone else's--the more powerful he is. The government of Sudan won a soft power coup against the United States after the U.S. bombing of the pharmaceutical factory, as did Jodie Williams when she won the Nobel Peace Prize despite U.S. opposition to the land mine ban campaign. Colombia's largest guerrilla group disseminates news, statements, and documents of its views and positions via a Web server. The Colombian government unsuccessfully attempted to apply diplomatic pressure to have it closed down. All parties to the conflict have discovered that soft power is part of a comprehensive strategy to deal with opponents.

The shift from hard power (military, sanctions, and basically hardball politics) to soft power strategies comes as a result of the transparency foisted on global actors, states, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals by the hardwired globalization and its 24/7 real-time media coverage. Transparency necessarily governs not only official relationships but also relationships between public and private sectors and among individuals. Because each state's public has expanded far beyond its traditional borders and collective values, access to it via its own citizens' information network has forced every national government to become or at least appear transparent, and thus accountable, to global publics.

While the optics of official transparency are required, at the same time states have realized that the playing field has been so leveled that they must plead their case before global publics, the likes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jung Il, the same as any other viewing constituency. Thus the potency of regimes seems to stand or fall according to polls derived from the "mediazation" of a wired world.

Asymmetrical relationships between state and nonstate actors characterize network diplomacy. Single states find it difficult, not to say impossible, to respond effectively to such supra-individuals as Bill Gates, George Soros, Jimmy Carter or Osama bin Laden. The significance of possessing access to global constituencies is most noticeable in these relationships.⁹ Recall the overnight notoriety of the first new rebel group in the post-Cold War era made possible by the strategic use of the Internet. The Zapatista rebels initiated an insurrection in the southern state of Chiapas in Mexico at the beginning of 1994 and have continued to use the Web to inform and gain sympathizers to their cause against the North American Free Trade Agreement and in support of indigenous rights in Chiapas. The Mexican PRI party's fall from its seventy-year reign can be attributed in part to the visibility of its mishandling of Chiapas.

Political accountability no longer seems to reside in a fixed relationship between citizen and nation-state; rather it is a service-based relationship of convenience. In other words, political responsiveness is less a matter of elected representation within an identifiable regime than of the capability to mobilize various networks of power according to constantly shifting interests. Consequently, pluralism, rather than democracy, is the political ethos of governance in the network society. Multiple perspectives, rather than a single majority point of view, characterize the architecture of the network.

Network pluralism and the changing nature of the diplomacy it requires are evidenced by the ever-shifting coalitions of group-based interests, which demand recognition online and in real-time physical relationships, regardless of the asymmetry of the relationship. Jean-Francois Rischard, vice president for Europe of the World Bank, pointed out at the 2001 Davos meeting that despite the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, virtually no action has been taken to counter global warming. "If treaties were enough, the environment would already be saved," he says. "So what's the answer?"

According to David Ignatius:

Rischard ventures an intriguing proposal. The only models that have a chance in the 21st century will be ones that share the network effects of the new economy. They'll be coalitions of interested nations, private companies and nongovernmental organizations. They'll use online polling to speed their work along. And they'll focus on setting standards or norms--much like the informal bodies that built the Internet without treaties or legislated rules and regulations. Rischard calls them "Global Issues Networks." And he hopes that, over time, they'll issue ratings that measure how well countries and private businesses are doing in meeting specified norms on the environment and other issues that affect the welfare of the planet. The process will be quick and non-bureaucratic. The premise will be that if you don't meet the agreed-upon norms, you will be exposed as a rogue player in the global economy.¹⁰

Guéhenno portrays this phenomenon as the principal dynamic of a new "imperialism," which he likens to Rome's loose global empire. Instead of an authentic political space, collective solidarities form and dissolve based on dominant perceptions and resulting interests--like multiple organisms, protean-like they morph according to conditions and needs. "It is a field of forces, of imbalances, in which the will to increase the number of one's connections is counterbalanced by the fear of losing control of the networks that have already been set up. . .a gigantic stock exchange of information that never closes," writes Guéhenno. "The more information there is, the more imbalances there are: as in a great meteorological system, a wind that creates a depression here, causes high pressure elsewhere."

Power is evanescent, associated with recognizing and pursuing a common objective, then reassembling with another collective or group in order to actualize a new objective. Rosenau describes these coalescing phenomena as "spheres of authority" (SOAs). He argues that SOAs have begun to supersede nation-states in terms of mobilizing and wielding effectual power. To be sure, one of the most effective recent SOAs was demonstrated by the virtual mobilization of citizens on behalf of the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines. From Putney, Vermont, Jody Williams used her e-mail account (banmines@sover.net) to coordinate the more than 700 organizations in over 60 countries that supported the campaign.

Loose coalitions, in particular, represent the international public at its most mobilized and articulate and thus operate most effectively in the network society. These characteristics in particular--the lack of group or community homogeneity and hierarchy--confound states and foreign ministries. States find themselves scrambling to assume authoritative positions in this fluid international landscape. Tiffany Danitz and Warren P. Strobel conducted an early study of this phenomenon in "Networking Dissent: Cyber Activists Use the Internet to Promote Democracy in Burma."¹¹ In January 1997, PepsiCo announced to the world that it was leaving Burma, called Myanmar by the SLORC regime in power despite free and fair elections in 1990 that should have replaced it. PepsiCo's announcement crystallized the geopolitical complications inherent in an international network society.

Using all of the electronic tools available to them, a coalition of Burmese diaspora and non-Burmese activists from across the globe succeeded in applying strategic public pressure--soft power--to a few Boston universities, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and finally the U.S. president to force a multinational corporation, PepsiCo, to leave Burma and to reverse a U.S. foreign policy position, which had turned a blind eye to U.S. investment in Burma. In brief, the global campaign strategically targeted Boston university campuses where PepsiCo was attempting to negotiate a contract to replace Coca-Cola in their dining services. The well-organized Boston student network next lobbied then-Governor William Weld to sign into law a bill banning corporations that do business in Burma from getting new contracts with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Forced to choose between lucrative local government contracts and unstable business opportunities in Burma, Pepsi, Disney, Eddie Bauer, Liz Claiborne, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple, among others, withdrew from Burma.

Subsequently, a host of U.S. cities adopted this "selective purchasing" legislation, which ultimately put the U.S. foreign policy under the klieg lights of domestic public opinion. Clearly the question of whether a state should be making foreign policy, especially in opposition to national foreign policy, is a constitutional question. Even so, because of the democratic nature of the government entities involved, not to mention state and national politics, strategically organized and networked popular pressure exerted a mighty force for change. National policy toward Burma changed to reflect policy as dictated by Massachusetts, New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, to name a few of the jurisdictions that had adopted selective purchasing legislation.

Network power is not monolithic, as Guéhenno has intimated by calling network governance a loose imperialism--to which we would add--of "nodes." Some of these nodes represent organizations, individuals, or portals. Mainly they are like the junctures at the cross threads in a spider's web, which simultaneously represents the system's complexity and its strength. Just as the Internet was developed to be a "workaround" if a section of it were damaged, this loose imperialism of nodes in the network society works the same way. Listen to Belgrade's editor and chief of Radio B92 and chairman of the Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM), Veran Matic, unsung hero of the collapse of the Milosevic regime in Serbia, describe how his organization's early adoption of the Internet during the 1996 opposition movement began the long, inevitable march to Milosevic's fall:

We started to develop our Internet program because we were afraid that the regime might also try to control that area of communication. Thus, we became the first Internet provider in Yugoslavia which understood the Internet as a new medium, and which used the Internet as an alternative means of disseminating information throughout Yugoslavia, as well as to the outside world. However, in a society as closed as ours, the impact of the Internet was not truly visible until after the radio was banned at the height of the 1996-1997 mass civic protest. It was then that we started to broadcast our program via the Internet using Real Audio. In addition to reaching citizens outside of Belgrade for the first time, B92, via the transmitters of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, the BBC, etc., was able to broadcast to the world. The radio's swift move to harness its knowledge of the Internet to the immediate need to break the government-imposed silence thus made the ban pointless.

During B92's two-day ban and the new Internet broadcast, the students began to use the Internet intensively to distribute information about the student protest, its activities and its aims. In this way, the student movement too was able to attract the attention of the world public, who in turn began to help the students by redistributing their information, sending help and money.¹²

The rest is history.

Matic had played a key role in formulating, keeping alive, and ultimately spreading a perspective of dissent against Milosevic's brand of Serbian nationalism. With a vision for what was possible, in the intervening four years, Matic purposively networked his country into the international community through all forms of media, radio, television, and Internet. His extensive network spanned the globe, connecting policymakers, opinion makers, journalists, and civil society organizations to Serbia, giving them a window to the grassroots work that Serbs were building in behalf of a future democratic Serbia.

It was Matic's grasp of how to use these new technologies to expose a population to the possibilities of its own power that won the day. The students who finally turned the corner and opened Serbia to a democratic future managed to do so by following his lead. Like him, they identified no central commanding figure and they purposely decentralized their organization. If one group was incarcerated, the others filled in the void and kept the pressure on. To be sure, the students used all forms of media to remain in contact and to organize events; but it was the Internet's decentralized structure and community ethos that provided the backbone for the October Revolution. True to form, neither Matic nor the dissident student movement, OTPOR, took front stage during or after their success. They are links in the web that operated with, among, and despite other organizations, nations, and even the greatest military alliance ever to exist.

Of course, it is still too early to assert what is happening in international governance and to identify the political practices these changes will require. Even so, it is safe to say that diplomacy's theater of operation, its tools, and its practitioners have changed fundamentally to meet the demands of flatter, more responsive, more information-equipped and demanding global publics, who include everyone from mom and pop in Mule Shoe, Texas, to Jiang Zemin in Beijing. Diplomacy in this environment is shared by all who speak and act on a global level to arbitrate, negotiate, mediate, or in any way represent the multiple perspectives that make up these publics. Have we come to the point where we have to reassess the meaning of diplomacy? Certainly. Just as we must now reassess the relationship between national, international and global interests. And as the Burma case so graphically demonstrates, local policies have come to demand equal status with national and international policies. Who was responsible for the change in U.S. policy toward Burma--the diaspora and students behind Burmanet, Massachusetts Governor Weld, or the several powerful urban centers that adopted "selective purchasing"? Who in the case of Chiapas--Comandante Marcos or the Internet services provider in California that put the Zapatisa claims on the Internet? Who for the fall of Milosevic, NATO, Matic or OTPOR? All were responsible, but not least the global public opinion they mobilized to force political change.

Will the diffusion and expansion of diplomacy to nonstate actors continue? Is the Internet here to stay? Without a doubt.

Released: July 23, 2001
iMP Magazine: http://www. cisp. org/imp/july_2001/07_01brown.htm
(c) 2001. Sheryl J. Brown and Margarita S. Studemeister. All rights reserved.

Endnotes

1. Gordon S. Smith, "Reinventing Diplomacy: A Virtual Necessity," U.S. Institute of Peace, Virtual Diplomacy Series, no. 6 (February 2000). The report was presented at the International Studies Association as part of a two-part-panel series entitled "Virtual Diplomacy: A Revolution in Diplomatic Affairs, Theory and Case Studies," Washington, D.C., February 1999.

2. Here nonstate actors include anyone or any organization that is not a nation-state, but assumes implicit or explicit parity with nation-states.

3. Jessica Mathews, "Power Shift," Foreign Affairs, 76 (1) (January/February 1997): 50-60.

4. David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, "What If There is a Revolution in Diplomatic Affairs?" U.S. Institute of Peace, Virtual Diplomacy Series, no. 4 (February 2000). The report was presented at the International Studies Association as part of a two-part-panel series entitled "Virtual Diplomacy: A Revolution in Diplomatic Affairs, Theory and Case Studies," Washington, D.C., February 1999.

5. Manuel Castells, "Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society," British Journal of Sociology, 51 (1) (January/March 2000): 5-24.

6. Jean-Marie Guéhenno, The End of the Nation-State, trans. Victoria Elliott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

7. James N. Rosenau, "States, Sovereignty, and Diplomacy in the Information Age," U.S. Institute of Peace, Virtual Diplomacy Series, no. 5, (February 2000). The report was presented at the International Studies Association as part of a two-part-panel series entitled "Virtual Diplomacy: A Revolution in Diplomatic Affairs, Theory and Case Studies," Washington, D.C., February 1999.

8. Joseph Nye and William Owens, "America's Information Edge," Foreign Affairs, 75 (2) (March/April 1996): 20-36.

9. Thomas Friedman, "A Memo From Osama," The New York Times, June 26, 2001, p. A19.

10. David Ignatius, "Think Globally, Build Networks," Washington Post, January 28, 2001, p. B7.

11. Tiffany Danitz and Warren P. Strobel, "Networking Dissent: Cyber Activists Use the Internet to Promote Democracy in Burma," U.S. Institute of Peace, Virtual Diplomacy Series, no. 3 (February 2000). The report is a product of a 1996 U.S. Institute of Peace grant award. The authors presented it at two subsequent Institute-organized events: "Virtual Diplomacy: The Global Communications Revolution and International Conflict Management," Washington, D.C., April 1997; and the International Studies Association as part of a two-part-panel series entitled "Virtual Diplomacy: A Revolution in Diplomatic Affairs, Theory and Case Studies," Washington, D.C., February 1999.

12. Veran Matic, "Between an Electronic Gulag and the Global Village," presentation at "The Information Revolution and its Impact on the Foundations of National Power" conference, September 23-25, 1997. Available online at http://www2.opennet.org/b92/radio/info/people/veran_matic/vmatic-tx2.html.

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Postmodern Diplomacy and the New Media

What occurred was an informal, Darwinian sorting out, in which power tended to devolve to those agencies and offices that mastered, first their subject area, and second, the networked environment of Web sites, e-mail publishing, wireless applications and online information resources--whether located in Washington or Singapore.

--Howard Cincotta

Howard Cincotta retired last year as head of electronic media in the State Department's Office of International Information Programs, where he directed an information technology project called "Liquid State."

From the perspective of 2015, it now seems clear the Cold War constituted the last golden era of so-called traditional or "modern" diplomacy--a time when the representatives of nation-states were the principal actors on the international stage. At the close of the twentieth century, however, that era ended in a moment that more closely resembled the quick-cut of an MTV music video than the slow fade of historical time.

New Internet-based technologies certainly contributed to this revolution in diplomacy, but they were hardly the only factor in what amounted to a fundamental, or quantum, shift in the meaning and conduct of international relations. On the other hand, it would be highly misleading to suggest that rapid political change alone undermined traditional state-to-state diplomatic practice. Diplomacy was invented, after all, to manage conflict and change, or at least to ameliorate their effects.

The best analogy for the impact of information technologies on modern diplomacy is not the winds of change, but the shifting of tectonic plates.

Electronic Diplomacy Circa 2015

Unless you are writing science fiction, there is usually no greater mistake than to make straight-line projections from your baseline outward. Nevertheless, we can assume that, over the next decade or so, information technology will continue to expand and proliferate, creating a networked, broadband world that, whatever its conflicts and tensions, is even more interconnected than today.

In many respects, the world of international affairs in 2015 looks quite similar to today: Foreign ministries issue policy statements; high officials travel to international conferences; and tensions among local identity, nationhood, and globalization remain. But on closer examination, it becomes apparent that electronic media have transformed diplomatic practice in fundamental ways.

The first surprising fact is a change that didn't happen: the long-predicted demise of the overseas embassy. Ever since the invention of air travel and the radio teletype, the question has been raised about why we need ambassadors at all. But the new media turned the tables, since Internet-based systems tend to level the playing field. Washington discovered that overseas embassies could often deliver authoritative foreign policy information faster and more flexibly than it could. At the same time, the embassies realized that Washington no longer depended on them as the exclusive gatekeepers for communicating directly with foreign audiences.

In the decentralized, networked world of 2015, foreign missions tend to be dispersed, mobile, even virtual--and no longer dominated by their political sections. Instead of traditional reporting by cables, diplomats--equipped with digital assistants that could tap huge online information resources--use streaming video, electronic forums, and advanced, encrypted e-mail applications to communicate. The foreign policy agenda of 2015 continues to expand "horizontally," encompassing new arenas of technology, health, environment, population movements, and economic relations that require deployment of shifting groups of specialists recruited from government and the private sector.

Diplomats no longer perceive themselves exclusively as representatives of one government to another (although the black diplomatic passport remains a jealously guarded status symbol). Instead, they negotiate as frequently with international organizations, local governments, and other so-called nonstate actors as they do with the diplomats of other nations.

From one perspective, foreign policy had been stuffed with so many issues and topics by 2015 that it simply burst and disappeared as a useful category. The continuing impact of globalization, the growth of regional power centers in China, India, and Brazil, and the rise in influence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) mean that most distinctions between foreign and domestic affairs have become irrelevant.

Quadripartite Revolution

In some ways, the more interesting question is not the shape of the world in 2015, but how it evolved that way. From the vantage point of 2015, we can now see that the collapse of traditional, state-to-state diplomacy as the basic model for the conduct of global affairs was the result of four overlapping, reinforcing, yet distinct quantum shifts, or discontinuities, in the conduct of "foreign affairs" (a term that, by 2015, was used only in an ironic context).

The first revolution to rattle the diplomatic edifices was the one most familiar to textbook readers: the end of the Cold War. When celebrating Germans swarmed over the graffiti-covered Berlin Wall in November 1989, huge swatches of the Western world's enormously expensive political-military infrastructure were instantly rendered superfluous--and ultimately a severe restraint in conceiving and investing in newer, more dispersed, and more flexible structures for international engagement.

Secretary of State Colin Powell captured this moment wonderfully in a story he told department employees shortly after his confirmation in 2001. He recalled sitting at a 1988 U.S.-Soviet conference as national security adviser when Mikhail Gorbachev turned to him and said, "Ah hah, General, I'm very sorry. You'll have to find a new enemy."

"And I thought to myself, I don't want to, " Powell recalled. "I like this enemy very, very much. We've got 6 percent of the gross national product. I've got three million people working for me. Everything's nice, we understand it, you've got your place, I've got my place.... Just because you're having a bad year, I don't want to change."

But of course he--and the world--did change, and within a few years the West found itself no longer fending off Soviet strategic strength and ideological challenge, but trying to manage Russian weaknesses and political decline.

The second seismic shift was the proliferation of NGOs and other nonstate actors. These amorphous terms defined a less dramatic and evolutionary shift, but one whose impact was nothing short of revolutionary as the frozen world of the Cold War melted into what observers of the time unimaginatively called the "post-Cold War era."

Estimates are that more than 15,000 NGOs were crowding onto the international stage at the turn of the century, especially in areas such as humanitarian relief. For issues such as land mines and HIV/AIDS, these activist NGOs often set the agenda for defining priority foreign policy issues and compelling concerted international action. Street barricades and tear gas became as standard at any global gathering of economic or political leaders as the obligatory photo ops. Further, the global reach of multinational corporations--from Microsoft to Disney, Siemens to Royal Dutch Shell--ended any remaining illusions that nations held even a semi-exclusive monopoly over the conduct of foreign affairs.

The third diplomatic revolution was the expansion and redefinition of the foreign policy agenda.

Cold War political leaders would have found few familiar landmarks among the urgent, transnational issues that dominated the foreign policy agenda by the turn of the century. The Middle East, NATO, and China might have had a familiar ring. But what would they make of climate change, HIV/AIDS, genetically modified organisms, trafficking in people, multinational crime syndicates, intellectual property rights in pharmaceuticals and software, the death penalty as a component in anti-Americanism, and the tidal movement of refugees and displaced persons across the globe?

And finally, the fourth revolution: information technology. Among historians in 2015, one of the hottest debates is whether the appropriate demarcation line between the "modern" and "postmodern" eras is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the advent of a 1994 software application called Mosaic, which morphed into the Netscape browser that transformed the World Wide Web.

Culture Clash

In looking at the impact of information technology and the new media, the early story of the Internet and the State Department is typical. As an institution whose core mission involved the collection and analysis of information, the department never lacked for individuals who recognized the value of the Internet. Both the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA, which merged with the department in 1999) created early Web sites, and e-mail, that most ubiquitous of Internet applications, became commonplace.

But in other respects, the new media and information technology ran into high walls of institutional resistance. After all, the entire communications structure of the State Department--hierarchical, closed, and classified--was antithetical to the open, flexible, high-speed ethos of the Internet. At a time when Web sites drew media attention and e-mail demonstrated that it was the genuine "killer app," the State Department remained locked into the paradigm of reporting by official cable over closed networks that dated back to the invention of the telegraph.

Faced with the challenge of investing in new digital networks and computer infrastructure, the department found itself with three different telecommunication systems, each demanding a heavy investment in resources: an entirely separate classified network; an open, unclassified system inherited from the consolidation of USIA; and an intranet that carried information termed "sensitive but unclassified."

Instead of being empowered by information technology, too many Foreign Service officers found themselves still trapped in a cycle of drafting and reading telegrams formatted in all caps that required multiple clearances to send and classified computers to read. Digital technology too often simply became a faster way to conduct business the old-fashioned way. Instead of replacing or integrating these closed classified systems, e-mail and Web applications became add-ons, and it was not uncommon for many Foreign Service officers to have two, or even three computer terminals on their desk. With the pernicious threats posed by viruses, hacks and denial-of-service attacks, the dilemmas posted by open versus closed networked systems only intensified.

In this environment, many senior Foreign Service officers tended to resemble the figures described in a memoir by the late Washington Post editor Meg Greenfield, "Like late medieval knights encumbered with heavy armor that limits their capacity for maneuver ... modern-day leaders are often pinned down by the trappings of office."

Diplomatic Survivor

In the first years of the new century, the impact of the Internet on diplomacy was dramatized in a series of challenges modeled on the "Survivor" TV shows. Take two Foreign Service officers of equal ability and experience and lock them in separate rooms for, say, three hours.

Equip officer A with a computer and access to every classified network and database that the State Department and the entire foreign affairs community can provide. Throw in a telephone and cable television.

Give officer B a computer and unrestricted Internet access.

Nothing more.

Both have a standard suite of office applications on their desktop.

Now give both officers the classic kinds of tasks that any mid-level Foreign Service professional might be called upon to perform. For example:

Provide talking points for a briefing on U.S.-China relations.
Compare U.S., European, and Asian emissions of greenhouse gases in the past decade, per capita and total.
Find examples of U.S. public health programs that can serve as models for combating AIDS overseas.
Explain the UN "Oil for Food" program for Iraq and how it differs from U.S. proposals for "smart sanctions."
Draft questions and answers explaining how the World Trade Organization deals with disputes.
Provide an analysis and psychological profile of the self-described "anarchist" groups organized around opposition to "globalization."

Who wins such a contest?

Answer: officer B, the Internet-equipped officer. Every time.

At first glance, the reason is obvious: the Internet simply provides access to an unparalleled wealth of information; open systems, in this sense, will always trump closed system. (This mass of data can also prove impenetrable, and our hypothetical officer must certainly be adept at navigating these resources.)

But the less obvious reason is that the subjects of twenty-first-century diplomacy had shifted from bilateral political negotiations to global or transnational issues, expertise about which is no longer restricted to closed or classified files. The aide-memoire has been replaced by the press release--or too frequently, the unplanned response to the shouted question at a hastily organized press conference.

Getting Horizontal

Despite resistance from the State Department's vertical clearance-and-cable culture, elements of the foreign affairs community did embrace the new information technology to work in innovative ways. Not surprisingly, many of these initiatives took place in the department's so-called "functional bureaus" that were trying to manage the broader, "horizontal" foreign policy agendas of global trade, arms proliferation, environment, health, trade, narcotics, public diplomacy and educational and cultural exchanges.

The Bureau of Consular Affairs, for example, embraced e-business models to manage visa requests and passport applications. Environmental, health and drug trafficking issues, among others, demanded flexible, open channels--from digital videoconferencing to online forums--to communicate, and to negotiate agreements with the vast world of nonstate actors.

Nowhere was the impact of Internet-based technology greater than in public diplomacy and public affairs--arenas that in traditional diplomatic practice were regarded as peripheral. In among the large number of agencies--the Commerce Department to the Environmental Protection Agency--with substantial foreign policy interests. What occurred was an informal, Darwinian sorting out, in which power tended to devolve to those agencies and offices that mastered, first, their subject area, and second, the networked environment of Web sites, e-mail publishing, wireless applications, and online information resources--whether located in Washington or Singapore.

2015: A Diplomatic Odyssey

Despite the pervasive impact of the new media, any expectation that it would replace confidential negotiations and personal exchanges--what Edward R. Murrow called "the last three feet"--missed the point. Neither a Middle East settlement nor a trade deal on computer software would be resolved in a public press conference or an electronic chat room. But on the other hand, neither agreement could be sustained for a nanosecond without the engagement, understanding, and support of a transformed world networked and empowered by information technology.

Managing this transition from modern to postmodern diplomacy became one of the chief challenges for the United States and the international community at the turn of the century. From the perspective of 2015, we know the denouement of that remarkable, and surprising story. But in the year 2001, the issue remained very much in doubt.

Released: July 23, 2001

iMP Magazine: http://www. cisp. org/imp/july_2001/07_01cincotta.htm

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About the Report

This report is the first of three in a special series published by the United States Institute of Peace's Virtual Diplomacy Series. The three issues, entitled "Net Diplomacy: Toward the Year 2015," were originally published July 23, 2001, by the online magazine iMP: The Magazine on Information Impacts: http://www.cisp.org/imp/, a publication of the Center for Information Strategy and Policy (CISP) and of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Guest editor Barry Fulton invited authors to speculate on the state of diplomacy in 2015. What turned out to be the final edition of iMP for the foreseeable future became an opportunity for the Virtual Diplomacy Series to print and circulate its contents to its audiences. We are grateful to Amy Friedlander, editor of iMP, who edited the original online series, to all of the authors, and especially to Barry Fulton who agreed to reassume the duties of guest editor for the Virtual Diplomacy Series production.

About the Editor

Barry Fulton is an adjunct professor at George Washington University and an associate of Global Business Access. He retired from the Foreign Service as a minister-counselor after a thirty-year career with the United States Information Agency. He joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 1997 and directed the CSIS study "Reinventing Diplomacy in the Information Age." Lt. Col. Donna G. Boltz is a career officer in the U.S. Army. Currently, she is chief of Regional Contingency Operations, Department of Defense, Office of Stability Operations.

The views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Institute of Peace, which does not advocate specific policies.

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