Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter’s talk in Parliament in London this week offered useful insights into how the Obama administration and foreign policy analysts around it are thinking about shaping international order. As Director of Policy Planning in that administration from 2009-11 she spoke from experience about the mechanisms being used to implement international change. While she touched on Syria, drone strikes and other newsworthy issues, her wide-ranging discussion was more important for the glimpses it gave of the theoretical assumptions underlying how US policymakers understand change. There is a tremendously ambitious agenda at work. We must scrutinise the theory driving that agenda if we’re to understand US foreign policy.
Slaughter began by saying that structures are being put in place whose effects won’t be visible for some years. The structures the US is building are informed by the assumption that the biggest development in international relations is not the rise of the BRICs but the rise of society – “the people” – both within individual countries and across countries. The US must build structures that harness societies as agents in the international system. Slaughter returned to Putnam’s (1988) two-level game, the proposition that it is in the interaction of international and domestic politics that governments can play constituencies off against one another to find solutions to diplomatic and policy dilemmas. Slaughter took up this framework: the US administration must see a country as comprised of both its government and its society, work with both, and enable US society to engage other countries’ governments and societies. The latter involves the US acting not as “do-er” but as “convenor”, using social media and organising face-to-face platforms for citizens, civil society groups and companies to form intra- and international networks.
Critically, these two levels are flat. This took me by surprise. At the society level, citizens, civil society groups and companies are connected horizontally. No particular group or individual is afforded a priori centrality. Why is this a surprise? Public diplomacy experts have spent the last few years trying to target ‘influencers’ in societies. Influencers are political, religious or cultural figures who are listened to by others. This idea is informed by network analysis, marketing, and the idea that State Department messages are more credible in different parts of the world when mediated and delivered by a local influential figure than by Hillary Clinton on TV. Slaughter was not convinced by reliance on influencers, empirically or normatively. She argued that all the millions marketers have spent still hasn’t generated any clear knowledge about how influencers can be identified and utilised. Not only that, but it is surely preferable to try to engage whole societies and treat all individuals equally. That would flourish a greater democratic ethos than appealing to amenable clerics, companies, journalists and intellectuals in the hope they might spread the word downwards.
The long term goal of this foreign policy agenda is to create overseas publics who are receptive to the US in a low-level way, such that in a decade or two when the US might need to rely on these publics, it will at least be listened to. Slaughter quoted former Secretary of State George P. Shultz (1997). He suggested diplomacy is like gardening: “You get the weeds out when they are small. You also build confidence and understanding. Then, when a crisis arises, you have a solid base from which to work”. Slaughter praised the US Ambassador to New Zealand, David Huebner, who spends 20 percent of his working week on Twitter and his blog. Huebner writes about rugby and other issues of local interest rather than about US foreign policy. As a result, Slaughter said, he has a higher readership than New Zealand’s largest newspaper. The significance of this isn’t so much in quantitative metrics such as reach, but that he has built an audience by constructing a different quality of engagement. He is forming Schultz’s solid base.
An incremental, everyday-focused approach to engaging foreign publics might not strike up much publicity, but some US policy practitioners have been trying it for a few years now. In War and Media (Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010) we discussed how since 2005 Capt. Frank Pascual and Capt. Eric Clark of the Media Engagement Team of CENTCOM, Dubai (the US Central Command base for the Middle East) had tried to engage Arabic-speaking audiences by becoming a regular presence on TV in the region, ’24 hours a day’:
Unlike the ‘monks’ in their embassies, Pascal and Clark felt they were beginning to generate trust, initially with journalists but eventually with audiences. They acknowledged this was a slow process. Their temporal horizons for success appeared long term:
This statecraft-as-gardening approach faces problems, Slaughter acknowledged. First, convening platforms for societies to communicate to each other and to foreign governments depends on a liberal faith that if you give people opportunities they will do more good than harm, and a quasi-Habermasian public sphere where everyone can and should have equal say. Slaughter conceded that the very technologies that allow publics to come together are the same technologies that allow states (and some non-state actors with particularistic agendas) to monitor and manipulate public debate, censor, and arrest dissenters. This was part of a “back and forth” struggle, Slaughter said, between people challenging their government using communications technologies that government can also use to restrict freedom – a struggle that long predates the Internet. So, there will be risks with this technology-led strategy and the open, free “townhall” model won’t emerge overnight.
Indeed, this approach assumes information is neutral and communication is a fundamental right. It is an approach that can easily slip into presenting a particular vision as natural and apolitical. Slaughter’s is a world where information should flow freely; it only gets political when people restrict it. If the US embassy in China tweets alternative air quality information to the Chinese government’s (LeVrine, 2010), “we were just tweeting information”, Slaughter said. No: information is being used to challenge Chinese state authority and make its expertise seem provisional and weak.
The second problem is that other major powers are trying to shape the international system at the same time. They may not share Slaughter’s theoretical premise that the fundamental relationships in international politics now involve the mutual interpenetration of numerous governments and societies. The EU and the BRICs have alternative ways of looking at the world, different levels of analysis, and their understandings of the individual, society and state can diverge fundamentally. It will take a lot of patience between foreign policymakers among these powers to identify conceptual and practical overlaps if the US approach is to be finessed with others.
Rival powers might also ask whether Slaughter’s approach is simply a new form of instrumentalism. Creating platforms for citizens and civil society groups to work together may seem attractive, but this is a means to the ends of US security. As Schultz said, the aim is to have a solid base of support overseas when crisis hits. And given that global pandemics, food and water shortages, terrorism and other security challenges depend on the responses of societies, “empowering” societies to address these issues may be a route to preventing crises and securing stability in the first place. Consequently, the classic tension in US foreign policy between pragmatism and idealism, documented again in Global Policy this week (Lilli, 2012), remains there to see.
It was generous of Slaughter to articulate so many of the assumptions and concepts underpinning US foreign policy and to provide detail on how those are being translated into policies and structures. US policymakers are aware of the problems identified here and it will be a long, patient process on their part to ensure those problems do not fatally undermine US efforts to empower citizens and cultivate support for the US around the world. Students of international affairs can expect to watch this renewed two-level game play out well beyond the current administration.
Cross-posted from the LSE journal Global Policy: https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/
References:
Hoskins, A. and O’Loughlin, B. (2010) War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War, Cambridge: Polity.
LeVrine, S. (2011) ‘China’s microblog furor over bad air days’, Foreign Policy, 10 November. Available at: https://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/11/10/chinas_microblog_furor_over_bad_air_days
Lilli, E. (2012) ‘Review: Bending History: Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy by Martin S. Indyk et al’, Global Policy, 30 May. Available at: https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/30/05/2012/review-bending-history-barack-obama%E2%80%99s-foreign-policy-martin-s-indyk-et-al
Putnam, R.D. (1988) ‘Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games’, International Organization, 42 (3), 427-460.
Schultz, G.P. (1997) ‘Diplomacy in the Information Age’. Paper presented at the Conference on Virtual Diplomacy, U.S. Institute of Peace, Washington, D.C., April 1.
If you really think cryto Marxists like Obama, his minions and the Democrat’s Nomenklatura have any concern in the least for the interests of America in their new “order” you are most deeply mistaken. Their agenda is to weaken America, not strengthen her. The notion is to work against her interest and in the interests of International Socialism and “Globalism” reduce her to the status of just another province in their ‘new world order”.
They are a mixture of tranzis, internal socialists, Maoists, Leninist, Stalinists, “quasi-Peronists”, nihilists and outright gangsters. One cannot imagine a more traitorous and subversive bunch of vipers. Their goal is this bizaare mixture of Socialism and Corporsatism we call “Globalism”. I t is a hideous and vile project and one that si and will be a disaster for the USA. America as she has been traditionally is a great obstacle to that project–she must be diminish, humiliated and removed as an obstacle. All this socialist cant about the “BRICS” and “the people” are just masked for this. The Left wants America destroyed; they have been pushing this declinist nonsense for generations now.
(And seriously now, “the people”? These are the sophomoric thoughts of “community organizers’ (read “communist agitators”). Their abstraction of “the people” does not actually exist outside their addled, Marxist imaginations. The whole program could be pull almost word for word out of the propaganda on the COMINTERN circa 1928. You should be guffawing at this–when you are not weeping–and not “analyzing” it as though it was some “new” and serious program of thought and attendant action.)
Moreover, actual and real “international orders” are not “set” by diplomacy, academics, deluded or otherwise, political cliques or, most partcularly, the Nomenklatura of the Democrat Party. They are shaped–and not “set”–by the reality of the brute facts on the ground. These are the hard and brutal facts of economic, technological and military power, and national interests with respect to these. “Policy”, such that it exists at all, is merely a reaction to these. “International Orders” are not most certainly shaped by “outreach” on Arabian TV. How absurd. “Wow” indeed. Seriously, one cannot make this stuff up.
It goes to show just how parochial, silly, self-deluded and self-important the Democrats truly are. They are treating the world like they treat the american public: contemptuously and superficially. What utter narcissism this whole nonsense betrays.This is not an election campaign in a Blue city run by one of their political machines. It is the World. It is hoping too much that the upcoming elections will disabuse the Democrat of their delusions and stratagems, and all their pernicious shenanigans, it is after all all that they have, but perhaps the Electorate itself may finally be disenthralled from this vileness.
Beyond that, in this nation it is not up to some self-appointed elite to “set up some international structure” on their own (read: to destroy the existing order). Whoever asked them to do this?
One gasps to hear this: “Slaughter began by saying that structures are being put in place whose effects won’t be visible for some years. “. So bitterly true.
Slaughter, Obama, Pascal and their ilk represent everything that is wrong with the pseudo-elites that make up the Institutional Left. They must be finally and utterly removed from power if the nation is to survive.
These goals they set are not new and the always end in disaster. They are behind most of the hideousness of the savage 20th Century. I can guarantee you that when they have reduced America’s power, corrupted her political and moral culture, and thus toppled the exist “order”, the chaos that will ensue will most certainly not have “the people” in the vanguard. “The people” will be crush under the brutal heels of local tyrants. These tyrant are made from the same stuff as our Democrats.
Seriously?
Interesting stuff. Lots of angles and potential critiques to raise, but one thing that personally puzzles me is whether the very proliferation of social media outlets and growing amounts of information online will eventually render them trivial or simply work to obfuscate audiences. I use Twitter and Facebook, but at some point I tire of the information overload and have to shut them down. For this reason I believe that “influencers” will have to continue to act as focal information transmitters and trust-brokers… there simply is too much tweeting occurring out there, and well, as my dad says, “you can’t believe everything people say,” and “beware of strangers.”
Audiences’ ability to mobilize “in real life” as a product of social media, and whether mobilization lasts enough to matter, is another crucial question.
Finally, I can see the pessimists saying that all is well with this type of tactic, but that in the end it is the powerful (read: the guys with guns and money,) both domestically and internationally, that will carry the day. We know this isn’t always the case, but it remains a sobering though.
Cheers.
The anonymous forum provided by our blog comment section allows someone like Hattip to make wild assertions without evidence or logic, though s/he certainly understands how to employ ad hominem attacks. Interestingly, that’s almost exactly the same sort of argument style employed in many of the 1928 Comintern documents.
I’m trying to imagine why Hattip thinks the Obama administration has weakened America. The US now spends more on defense as a portion of GDP than it did under Bush 2008. Rapidly escalating annual deficits from 2001-2009 have leveled off. America’s image in the world has climbed back to respectable levels. A costly and largely pointless war in Iraq is over. A financial system (plus auto manufacturing sector, etc.) teetering on collapse has been saved…
Great post Ben. I wonder if the strategy is predicated on difficult to support assumptions in addition to those you highlight. One is the extent of information penetration, particularly in the places the US really needs to cultivate like China and Russia. Your point about information not being politically neutral is spot on.
Cool stuff.
1) On diplomatic structures. These (at least, it seems that way for the US) almost always have some level of flexibility. It’s perhaps more interesting to think less about new structures and more about new conceptualizations of what diplomatic work actually involves (and who it involves; the NZ and Pascal/Clark examples are good ones!). In that practical perspective, I think we can envision a wide array of possibilities to create and engage these publics.
2) On the ‘levels are flat’ point and the surprise it generated. Yes agreed it is surprising. But certainly explainable given the association she makes to equality of people. In practice, aren’t there doubts that diplomats also think of publics as ‘flat’?
2.1) Maybe the ‘influencers’ (if we restrict this notion to actual entities) are not the focus. But even in a flat system, diplomats have to decide what they are going to do. Seems to be that particular notions still resonate and are legitimate (the NZ example of talking about rugby; what’s a locally interesting issue?). These notions are linked to particular audiences, identities, etc. Not sure the system is usefully described as ‘flat’ given that particular language (and thus particular groups who are involved with this language) are selected anayway. Again I get why she may have characterized it in this way.
3) Reducing a set of literature interested in how legitimacy is produced to ‘marketing’ is selling it awfully short. This is definitely an active research area that should not simply be boiled down to ‘marketing’.
4) On information being neutral. Agree on the general point. To me, though, far more interesting that Slaughter gets up there and says “we were just tweeting information,” as if that were a perfectly legitimate statement to make. Suggests that new diplomatic practice emerging (and possibly emulate-able). Analogous historical instance of “just tweeting information”? Hmm… interesting to think about.
5) To the second problem identified (multiplicity of entities also shaping the system). Agreed–and there are historical analogies for this as well. Different diplomatic vocabularies and practices colliding and then being mediated. Briand’s overture in the NYT in 1927 for renouncing war was essentially ignored by the State Department… until Claudel delivers the note properly in Washington.