Foreign Policy goes national

Today, foreign policy issues tend to dominate the newspapers in Europe, but more and more so also in the United States and elsewhere. Foreign policy actors have become public figures. Foreign policy is open to day-to-day public scrutiny and criticism. For the diplomat this means that she or he is also becoming more or less directly answerable to the public. The public expects explanations, journalists need to be given background interviews, Parliaments ask for information. Many foreign policy issues have fully entered into the domain of national and even regional and local politics. Foreign policy today has to do with many issues in our daily lives. What used to be ”low politics” (as against ”high politics”) has become normal work for the foreign policy agent: regulations for trade and investment, addressing environmental issues, regulating entry into the country and dealing with problems of migration, finding solutions to questions of road transit often endangering the living conditions of many people.

At the same time, for all these issues there are domestic ministries, experts in other government offices who increasingly are also establishing foreign contacts. They are directly interacting with their homologues in other countries and are regularly traveling to international conferences. This situation is bound to clash with the traditional ”gatekeeper” function of foreign ministries, which hinges on the (false) assumption that domestic and international affairs are conducted in two very different political arenas. In the age of globalization foreign ministries would be ill advised if they tried to maintain this claim as justification for their existence. If insisted upon too long, other ministries will simply bypass Foreign Affairs. It is not realistic to assume that in today’s world the Ministry for the Environment or the Ministries for Justice and for Home Affairs, just to take a few examples, will not have international contacts and that a modern diplomat can be an expert on detailed issues of environmental policy, or judicial and home affairs.

But the diplomat has to be able - on the international level - to assess the political consequences and possible trade-offs of a specific action or non-action in those areas of policy. This assessment can then lead to instruments of traditional diplomacy, e.g. if certain measures have to be explained or a demarche has to be delivered to the host country. Diplomats have to learn this new mode of cooperation with their colleagues from other ministries. Modern diplomats must learn to share their competence with other officials if they do not want to become redundant[14]. They have to take great care to make clear to their colleagues from line ministries what exactly the added benefit they can provide is.

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