WHAT IF THERE IS A REVOLUTION IN DIPLOMATIC AFFAIRS?

(Based on The Emergency of Noopolitik by David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla)

The next big revolution of the information age should occur in the realm of diplomacy. The United States has been undergoing a revolution in business affairs since the 1960s, and has also undertaken a revolution in military affairs since the late 1980s. Now the time is ripe for a counterpart revolution in diplomatic affairs (RDA).

There are good reasons why the business and military worlds are in the throes of information-driven revolutions and the diplomatic world is not. A key reason is that those worlds are driven by internal and external competition, in the first case between corporations, in the second between military services. In addition, the business and military worlds are eager for technological enhancements that extend their global reach, even if that means radically altering their traditional ways of organizing and strategizing.

None of this has been the case in the diplomatic world. The U.S. State Department, for example, has not been subjected to much organizational competition. It has shown little interest in technology, and lags in adopting it. Moreover, it has not suffered a defeat like Vietnam that would prompt a search for radical innovation. In short, it has had few impulses to cease being an elite preserve for classic diplomacy.

Diplomacy is in trouble almost everywhere, and its main institutions need reconstruction from the ground up. It is currently facing a crisis of relevance and effectiveness. A rising tide of violence, inequality, and unaddressed threats provides powerful testament not only to the socialization of globalization's costs and the privatization of its benefits, but to the abject failure of diplomacy to engage remedially.

However, the diplomatic world is now beginning to feel the heat of competition, especially from agile non-state actors that are being strengthened by the information revolution. These range from those with which foreign services want to cooperate, such as transnational nongovernmental organizations involved in disaster relief and humanitarian efforts, to those that spell conflict, such as transnational terrorist and criminal organizations. Another significant change for the diplomatic world is that technologists are on the verge of producing new tools that are as relevant for the diplomatic world as they have been for the business and military worlds.

While the heat of competition and the allure of new technology have so far motivated only a few diplomats to want an RDA, most are at least aware that the information revolution is roiling their world. Like leaders in the business and military worlds, diplomats remark increasingly, even plaintively, that advanced communications and other aspects of the information revolution are altering the nature of diplomatic time and space – they are quickening the pace of diplomacy and forcing open its once largely closed processes.

The Emergence of Noopolitik – A New Paradigm for Diplomacy.

The end of the Cold War has brought two major shifts that appeal to grand strategists. The first concerns political and military dynamics. The bipolar system has expired, and the world is returning to a loose, multipolar, balance-of-power system, with possibilities for U.S. dominance in key military areas. Since this shift is largely about interstate relations, it arouses the theorists and practitioners of realpolitik. The second shift is economic: the enormous growth of market systems woven together in global trade and investment webs. This shift began long before the Cold War ended and is now ascendant.

Meanwhile, a third, emerging shift is often noted: the intensification of the information revolution, with its implications that knowledge is power, that power is diffusing to non-state actors, and that global interconnectivity is generating a new fabric for world order. Information has always been important to statecraft. But it is moving from being a subsidiary to becoming an overarching concern; "information" matters more than ever. Many theorists and strategists do not seem to know quite what to do with this shift. Some view it as spelling a paradigm change.

Our view is that the structures and dynamics of world order are changing so deeply that a new paradigm is needed; indeed, it is already emerging, especially in nongovernmental circles consisting of civil-society actors. Our term for it is noopolitik. By noopolitik we mean an approach to statecraft, to be undertaken as much by non-state as by state actors, that emphasizes the role of informational soft power in expressing ideas, values, norms, and ethics through all manner of media. This makes it distinct from realpolitik, which stresses the hard, material dimensions of power and treats states as the determinants of world order.

Noopolitik makes sense because trends exist that make it increasingly viable: the growing web of global interconnection, the continued strengthening of global civil-society actors, the rise of soft power. These trends do not spell the obsolescence of realpolitik, but they are at odds with it. To a lesser degree, they are also at odds with the tenets of liberal internationalism.

Global Interconnection. The era of global interdependence began in the 1960s, and many trends its theorists emphasize continue to come true. Interdependence was spurred by the rise of transnational and multinational actors, especially multinational corporations and multilateral organizations. Now, a new generation of actors – such as news media, electronic communications services, and human rights organizations – are increasingly "going global," some to the point of claiming that they are "stateless" and denying that they are "national" or "multinational" in character.

Growing Strength of Global Civil Society. No doubt, states will remain paramount actors in the international system. The information revolution will lead to changes in the nature of the state, but not to its "withering away." At the same time, non-state actors will continue to grow in strength and influence. The next trend to expect is a gradual worldwide strengthening of transnational NGOs that represent civil society. As this occurs, there will be a rebalancing of relations among state, market, and civil-society actors around the world – in ways that favor noopolitik over realpolitik.

Noopolitik upholds the importance of nonstate actors and requires that they play strong roles. Why? NGOs often serve as sources of ethical impulses (which is rarely the case with market actors), as agents for disseminating ideas rapidly, and as nodes in networked apparatuses of "sensory organizations" that can assist with conflict anticipation, prevention, and resolution. Indeed, because of the information revolution, advanced societies are on the threshold of developing a vast sensory apparatus for watching what is happening around the world. This apparatus is not new, because it consists partly of established government intelligence agencies, corporate market-research departments, news media, and opinion-polling firms. What is new is the looming scope and scale of this sensory apparatus, as it increasingly includes networks of NGOs and individual activists who monitor and report on what they see in all sorts of issue areas, using open forums, specialized Internet mailing lists, and Web postings, as tools for rapid dissemination.

Against this background, the states that emerge strongest in information-age terms – even if by traditional measures they may appear to be smaller, less powerful states – are likely to be the states that learn to work conjointly with the new generation of non-state actors. Strength may thus emanate less from the "state" per se than from the "system" as a whole. And this may mean placing a premium on state-society coordination, including the toleration of "citizen diplomacy" and the creation of "deep coalitions" between state and civil-society actors.

Rise of Soft Power. The information revolution, as noted earlier, is altering the nature of power, in large part by making soft power more potent. This does not mean that hard power and realpolitik are obsolete, or even in abeyance. Hard power – men and missiles, guns and ships – still counts. But on the day-to-day level, "soft power" is the more interesting coin. Today there is a much bigger payoff in getting others to want what you want, and that has to do with the attraction of one's ideas, with agenda-setting, with ideology and institutions, and with holding out big prizes for cooperation, such as the vastness and sophistication of one's market.

Proponents of realpolitik would probably prefer to stick with treating information as an adjunct of the standard political, military, and economic elements of diplomacy and grand strategy; the very idea of intangible information as a basis for a distinct dimension of statecraft seems antithetical to realpolitik. Realpolitik allows for information strategy as a tool of propaganda, deception, and manipulation, but seems averse to accepting "knowledge projection" as amounting to a true tool of statecraft.

Both state and nonstate actors may be guided by noopolitik; but rather than being state-centric, its strength may well stem from enabling state and nonstate actors to work conjointly. The driving motivation of noopolitik cannot be national interests defined in statist terms. National interests will still play a role, but should be defined more in society-wide than state-centric terms and be fused with broader interests in enhancing the transnationally networked "fabric" in which the players are embedded. While realpolitik tends to empower states, noopolitik will likely empower networks of state and nonstate actors. Realpolitik pits one state against another, but noopolitik encourages states to cooperate in coalitions and other mutual frameworks.

Kissinger may be said to epitomize the zeitgeist and practice of realpolitik. Who may stand for the zeitgeist of noopolitik? One name that comes to mind is George Kennan. He has always been mindful of realpolitik; yet, his original notion of containment was not essentially military. Rather, it was centered on the idea of creating a community of interests, based on shared ideals, that would secure the free world while dissuading the Soviet Union from aggression, and eventually persuading it to change. This seems an early expression of noopolitik. Today, leaders like Nelson Mandela and George Soros, not to mention a host of less renowned individuals who have played leading roles in civil-society activist movements, reflect the emergence of noopolitik.

Some of the best exemplars of its emergence involve "social netwars" waged by civil-society activists. While all-out military wars, such as World Wars I and II, represent the conflictual heights and failures of realpolitik, nonmilitary netwars may prove the archetypal conflicts of noopolitik. The Nobel Prize-winning campaign to ban land mines; NGO-led opposition to the Multilateral Agreement on Investment; the Greenpeace-led campaign against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific; the swarming of transnational NGOs in defense of the Zapatista insurgents in Mexico; and information-age efforts by Burmese and Chinese dissidents, with support from U.S.-based NGOs, to press for human rights and political reforms in these countries all exemplify how transnational civil-society networks, in some cases with strong support from states, can practice noopolitik, with varying degrees of success, to change the policies of states that persist in emphasizing the traditional politics of power.

These cases substantiate that the practice of noopolitik is already emerging and that traditional ideas about "peace through strength" may give way to new ideas of "peace through knowledge." These cases also show that ideas themselves, particularly ones with deep ethical appeal, may be fused with new communications technologies and organizational designs to create a new model of power and diplomacy that governments will increasingly encounter and have to heed.

NOTES:

Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) was negotiated between members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development between 1995 and 1998. Its purpose was to develop multilateral rules that would ensure international invesment was governed in a more systematic, uniform, and fair way between states.

Zapatista originally referred to a member of the revolutionary guerrilla movement founded around 1910 by Emiliano Zapata, whose Liberation Army of the South fought during the Mexican Revolution for the redistribution of agricultural land. The modern Zapatista movement is seen by some in the anti-corporate globalization movement as a model for resistance and for local democratic organization.

Netwar is an information-age conflict that is defined by the use of network forms of organization, doctrine, and strategy, made possible by the information revolution.

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