Diplomacy in the Digital Age
- By Brian Hocking and Jan Melissen
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E-mail China.org.cn, October 26, 2015
The disappearance of flight MH370. The disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in March 2014 resulted in intense scrutiny by the world media of the Malaysian Government's response. A lack of deft handling combined with confused and contradictory information undermined the credibility of the government. Each official statement was greeted with skepticism in the press and on social networking sites like Twitter and Sina Weibo, with the Chinese government even questioning the veracity of information from Malaysian officials.
The US-EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The negotiations between the EU and the US to create the world's largest free trade area ran into significant opposition over one of its key features, the Investor-state dispute settlement provision (ISDS). This would allow a business enterprise to take legal action against a foreign jurisdiction which it regarded as harming its commercial interests. Closed international tribunals would adjudicate on such disputes which opponents claim would conflict with governments' freedom to pursue policies in domestic domains such as healthcare, education and environmental protection. NGOs such as Public Citizen, a watchdog group, have tracked US multinationals use of ISDS clauses in other trade agreements and have developed a powerful alliance which through skilled use of digital and print media has been successful in generating public opposition to the agreement.
Each of these issues involves diplomacy in its most basic sense – namely the management of change in international relations by means of institutionalized communication. However, each of the three instances demonstrates just how difficult it is to manage communication in a highly fragmented information environment. Central to all these cases is:
The importance of public trust: these events highlight the problem that official actors – national governments and international organisations – confront in an environment where public trust is lacking. Confidence and reputation can be manipulated and destroyed through effective campaigns conducted by civil society groups using a range of media formats. The level of trust in the capacity and even truthfulness of the WHO, the Malaysian government, the EU and the US government were thrown into doubt, reducing their capacity to act.
The problem of appropriate response: none of the three cases demonstrated a high level of capacity to manage the situation. Given the complexity of the circumstances in the case of the Ebola situation and flight MH370, this is understandable to a degree. In the case of the Malaysian airliner, the failures in communication between Malaysian and Indonesian authorities enhanced public distrust. But even so, both governments demonstrated a clear failure to anticipate the global information campaigns and the multiplier effect of the social media. The case of TTIP is rather different – especially on the EU front. Here, it has been argued that the communications strategy was 'captured' by the Directorate-General (DG) Trade whose professional culture – rooted in client confidentiality and commercial sensitivities – was totally unsuited to dealing with a nimble and sophisticated opposition strategy.
The hybrid nature of the policy environment: each set of events demonstrated differing degrees of 'hybridity' in terms of the actors involved and the strategies that the various actors pursued – whether consciously or unconsciously. First, the case of MH370 was a sudden and tragic crisis situation demanding a response from several authorities and jurisdictions. The TTIP experience at the EU level seems to be an instance of a formal negotiating process where a key actor, the EU, failed to deploy an effective communications response through the most appropriate part of the EU policy machine. Second, each case involved a range of actors both governmental and non-governmental, the roles of which configured a distinctive pattern of communications. Third, whilst it is tempting to regard each situation as an example of the power of social media, the actual pattern of events was one of combined communications flows, including digital media, print media and TV.
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