Web 2.0

There was a good interview in the Financial Times on Monday with the UK’s new Foreign Minister, David Miliband. Even better, you can read a full transcript of the interview over at FT.com.

Miliband was the UK’s first blogging minister, initially at the Office for the Deputy Prime Minister and then as Environment Secretary before being promoted to Foreign Minister under Gordon Brown.

Miliband’s blog followed him from the ODPM to his new department when he was Environment Secretary and it seems that following his re-shuffle the Miliblog will re-appear over at the Foreign Office.

His last blog post, titled Moving On, reads:

“The new mechanisms for political engagement and dialogue represented by this blog are needed more than ever. … Thank you for reading, commenting and arguing over the last 15 months. It may take some time for new service to be resumed, but please watch this space.”

But can Miliband really continue his drive to open up political engagement at the Foreign Office?

Before starting a corporate blog, organisations and businesses need to address the issue of whether they are prepared to be open, honest and transparent about themselves. If they aren’t, then there’s no point blogging as the reluctance to open up will get in the way of building a genuine dialogue based on trust and could seriously damage their reputation.

Apply this to government and twist the question to: is the Foreign Office under David Miliband prepared to be open, honest and transparent about it’s work?

Certainly a much more problematic proposition.

Part of me understands the need for things like secrecy and back-channel diplomacy in foreign affairs and policy-making. But former diplomat Carne Ross presents a compelling argument for all that is wrong with the ‘closed network’ of the diplomatic service.

In the article, Secrets, Lies and Diplomats, published earlier this year in the New Statesman Ross argues that being part of the foreign office was to be part of a closed, inward looking network.

This lifestyle and organisational culture:

“is constantly reinforced throughout one’s career. Telegrams are transmitted only when highly encrypted. All computers are hardened against electronic eavesdropping. … So many and so ubiquitous are these limitations, that it is soon clear that the only people with whom one can discuss candidly what “we” are doing are one’s colleagues – other members of the club of “we”. One should only talk to people with a “need to know”. This excludes almost everyone, including those in whose name “we” are acting.”

Obviously a lot of this ‘culture’ is vital to maintain the UK’s strategic international primacy, but this kind of atmosphere portrays a distinctly top down organisation with clear hierarchies and demarcated levels, not just of operation but of knowledge.

Put like this, the FO and its diplomatic service represents everything that is being undermined by the rapid growth of the internet – specifically, a fairly paradigm shift from traditional, centrally controlled authority to a more horizontally dispersed, fragmented power.

This has implications for the future of global democracy and international relations. Just as consumers are becoming more engaged by commercial brands, so too will they expect to play an active role in the way their elected government behaves on the international stage.

Ross tells us:

“Even when our [the FO’s] motives were transparently different, we were encouraged, subtly and through imitation, to claim that we were offering others versions of ourselves: our democracy, our laws, our “values”.”

Organisations that feel comfortable appearing to do one thing but say another will quickly be unmasked in a world where the public has fast, easy, access to millions of public (and confidential) news and information sources from around the world.

Miliband is a smart politician who understands the need for governments to start shifting towards a more open and transparent way of working. However, the Foreign Office deals in ‘diplomacy’ – a process which more often than not involves saying one thing and doing another.

I could be being overly-cynical, but unless there is a major shift in international statecraft, Miliband may struggle to blog openly and transparently about the work of the Foreign Office.