FOREIGN FOCUS

Shock report

CRABRO

The recipe for royal commissions and review committees is almost infallible. You take an eminent jlidge, or an eminent businessman; add a well-known television don or economist, a trade union life peer, a retied civil servant, the headmistress of a trendy comprehensive irc•m the suburbs, and a worthy from the dead centre of politics. Shake them together and you can be confident that the end-product will be a bland, syrupy distillation of the conven- tional wisdom: a consensus cocktail.

The Duncan committee on the overseas diplomatic service conformed fairly well to type. It was admittedly smaller than aver- ae.e : still, the chairman of Rio Tinto-Zinc, the former British Ambassador to Moscow and Bonn, and the chairman of the Royal College of Social Studies add up to a petty coNy coterie. A ad he ..c is their summary of 'major objectives' for the British foreign service in the 1970s: 'the improvement of the balance of payments, the maintenance of the North Atlantic Alliance and the pro- motion of integration of western Europe ... the reduction of East-West tension, when- ever circumstances in the Soviet bloc permit this without weakening the Atlantic Alli- ance; the sustaining of Commonwealth links . . . the improvement of economic conditions in the less developed countries; and the strengthening of international organisations' . . . Not much to alarm the timid soul in this.

Yet that personification of the conven- tional wisdom at its most wooden who is the present Foreign Secretary gave a wel- come to the committee's report which stopped a very long way short of en- thusiasm. Some of its conclusions were 'novel', and 'Anguilla' Stewart felt the need `to go further into their probable conse- quences'. What had they been up to?

Part of the answer is to be found right at the beginning of the report, immediately after the benign statement of objectives quoted above. 'We felt very keenly,' says the committee, 'that it was not possible ... to proffer useful advice if there were ambi- guities at the very centre of our policy decisions. We conclude that ambiguity of intention .. . cannot be had on the cheap'. Now that is emphatically not the sort of language that any self-respecting Foreign Secretary would expect to hear from a properly constituted review committee.

There is worse to come. Sir Val Duncan and his colleagues state bleakly that 'Britain is nowadays a major power of the second order', and proceed to draw the logical in- ferences from this assertion. The world is sliced up into an 'area of concentration', consisting of Western Europe and North America, where diplomatic representation should be maintained at at least the present level, and an 'outer area' where, apart from a few posts such as Tokyo and Canberra, British missions should be scaled down to a minimum of three-man commercial offices and the traditional 'political' role of the Foreign Service should be abandoned.

This is indeed radical stuff. Notwithstand- ing the lip-service paid to the Common- wealth in the statement of objectives, the committee plainly regards it as an irrele- vance, and an expensive irrelevance at that. Advocates of floating exchange rates will view the committee's preoccupation, both positive and negative, with the balance of payments as wrong-headed. But whatever the motives, what matters surely is that for

once we have a review body which has decided to come to terms with the world as it is, and not as those imbued with the nostaigie de l'Entpire would wish it to be.

Some of the detailed recommendations are open to question. The committee was not concerned with methods of recruitment into the Foreign Service; nevertheless it feels it desirable—presumably in deference to the position of Mr Shonfield—to suggest that 'a certain familiarity with the basic concepts of the social sciences' should be elevated to rank with 'a working l'nowledge of at least one and preferably more European languages' as one of the two basic skills of the profession. Oh, dear! Some years ago the Foreign Office felt im- pelled by modish criticism to start recruit- ing scientists for the Diplomatic Service. It soon discovered it did not know what to do with them, and the idea was quietly dropped. Let us hope it does not now have to go through a repeat performance with social scientists.

If Mr Shonfield was responsible for that aberration, one wonders how Sir Val Dun- can, a businessman with special experience of invisible exports, came to set his signature to the forecast that 'it will be one of the functions of overseas commercial staff to take an active interest in identifying attrac- tive investment opportunities which may be of interest to British business'. Imagine the scene in the Rio Tinto boardroom when the Foreign Office notifies the directors that Clutworthy-Brown in Jakarta has met a Chinese gentleman with a most interesting diamond mine in New Guinea, who is just waiting for some kind British investor to come along and help him get it going.

This leads directly to the most important reservation which may be felt about the whole report. The Duncan committee wants to heighten the priority which has already been given to commercial work in British embassies overseas. It rightly draws atten- tion to the first criticism which is made by businessmen about the services now offered by commercial officers—that they do not stay long enough really to get to know their territories—and makes some sensible sug- gestions for putting this right. But when it comes to deal with another major point of criticism—'the need for increased com- mercial background and business experience in posts'--it gets cold feet.

There are certainly important aspects of commercial work for which diplomats are well equipped: government-to-government negotiation, dealings with the state trading corporations in the countries of Eastern Europe where these bodies still (theoretically at least) control the purse-strings, and the maintenance of statistical information. But the committee wants to see a shift of emphasis from 'responsive' to 'initiative' work: and yet it tries to convince us that the existing staff can be adequately prepared to perform this 'initiative work' through three to six months exchanges of personnel with industry, and through the permanent recruitment of late entrants from industry. It refers to the Swedish system of second- ment between industry and diplomacy for periods of years only to dismiss it, without any reasons given.

Now presumably young men entering the diplomatic service do not feel themselves to

have a commercial bent, or they would have gone into industry in the first place. How can they be expected, after years of indoc- trination into civil service ways, to turn themselves into salesmen—for that is what `initiative work' must really involve? One would like to hope that the committee's easy rejection of new techniques pioneered by Sweden, Japan, Germany and other countries will be re-examined. But that, judging from his replies last week, is the last thing to expect from Mr Stewart.

Moreover one wonders whether the com- mittee has really thought through the con- sequences of stripping the 'non-selective' posts in the 'outer area' down to the level of trading posts. In virtually every under-

developed country the politicians have a keen interest in any import contract of any size. Knowledge of who arc the right poli- ticians for visiting British businessmen to see (and perhaps to 'encourage' with a douceur or two) can be even more im-

portant than knowledge of local market conditions. Nor should the commercial value of the Ambassadorial Rolls and the Queen's birthday garden party be under- estimated —least of all in the countries from which the committee would apparently wish to see them disappear.

On the other hand not all the responsi- bility for our lamentable diplomatic record in recent years can be fairly attributed to the desire of the politicians to enjoy 'ambi- guity of intention on the cheap'. Some, but not all. The Foreign Service's own obsession with Anglo-American relations has con- stantly vitiated the fulfilment of the European purpose which it has ostensibly espoused. It is all very well to express the hope, as the Duncan committee does, that

we shall be ready with men of high quality to enter and exert British influence upon the Brussels Commission as soon as we arc able to take our place in the European Community: until British diplomats have recovered some degree of social converse with their French colleagues the opportunity is unlikely to arise.

So the acceptance of the Duncan com- mittee's recommendations—a fairly unlikely event in itself—would not necessarily cure the present incoherence of our diplomacy. But it would at least demonstrate a willing- ness to come to terms with the world around us. That is the measure of the com- mittee's impressive achievement.