Diplomacy

From: Christian Much, Die Pupille des Drachen - Vom Mehrwert diplomatischer Verhandlungen(The Pupil of the Dragon's Eye - The Added Value of Diplomatic Negotiations), in: Mehrwert Diplomatie, ed.: Otto Lampe, Otto Meißners Verlag Hamburg 2023, ISBN: 978-3-8280-3765-6.
 
Negotiations are a core diplomatic business. Great expectations have always been attached to solutions negotiated by diplomats. The hope of merely pulling one's head intact out of the snares of a violent and chaotic world has evolved into today's ambitious intention to make our earth more peaceful, just and survivable through multilateral negotiations.
           Where there is hope, there is also failure. The public verdict is then often astonishingly quick to conclude that diplomacy has failed once again. Negotiations were not tough enough, or too tough, the right will to negotiate was lacking, and so on.
           In the context of the war between Russia and Ukraine, there have been repeated calls for an end to violence, for negotiations to begin, for diplomacy to take precedence. The international community, it was said, must "create conditions that favor negotiations." What those conditions are and how they can be created remained an unanswered question. I conclude that the hope placed in diplomacy is apparently very great—and certainly greater than the knowledge about the preconditions for negotiations.
 
For the success of negotiations, personal integrity—that is, the diplomat's ability to build trust through reliability and truthfulness—has an importance that can hardly be overestimated. Diplomatic negotiations are, despite all common prejudices, not a competition to determine who the champion of deviousness is. The results of such negotiations would be short-lived. Nor are negotiations a million-dollar quiz in which the biggest brain gets the farthest. During my first years at the Foreign Office, as a former ethnology student, I gave lectures to attachés on intercultural communication. One of my core messages was that in other communication cultures, the messenger is at least as important as the message. Intellectually brilliant negotiators can fail if they act like omniscient but callous machines, rather than people endowed with empathy, modesty with regard to the limits of their knowledge, and a corresponding interest in the views of others.
 
Negotiations are far more successful than violence to take advantage of one of the greatest human resources: ingenuity—that is, the ability to piece together something better from scraps for the good of the people. Cannons cannot do that.