The SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich is not the only one who likes to advocate giving preference to diplomacy over the use of military force in the Ukraine war. Governments that are most vocal in this regard are often militarily weak and often ill-equipped to defend their own territory.
The other extreme can be seen in countries with superior military capabilities. If you’re holding a pencil, you’ll look around for a piece of paper you can write on. But if you’ve got a hammer, you’ll rather be looking for nails to drive into the board.
And as we busily figure out how to get Moscow to use the pen instead of the hammer, the world around us seems to be getting rougher by the day. We are confronted with the disintegration of a rules-based international order and with growing risks of great power and other conflicts.
There is war in the middle of Europe!
Against this background, the question of the optimal use of diplomatic instruments is of great current importance.
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Here are some very simple suggestions from the diplomatic toolbox for practice:
First: Wherever the instrument of diplomacy is available to us, we should please use it actively! Unfortunately, German chancellors have long tended not to involve their own ambassadors (anymore) when they hold talks with other heads of government.
Kicking out your ambassador and denying him or her the ability to provide expert advice is not a good idea. In most cases, the ambassador is better able than the visiting staff to read between the lines of what is said, what is written and what is not said; Above all, the exclusion of such encounters undermines the efforts of the German embassies to gain the professional respect of the local leadership.
Anka Feldhausen is the German ambassador in Kyiv.
(Photo: IMAGO/Ukrinform)
Secondly: If we want to strengthen the European Union and its credibility as a foreign policy actor, it should go without saying that the EU heads of government and foreign ministers invite the respective EU ambassadors to their visits and meetings, thereby emphasizing their determination, not to conduct only national, but EU foreign policy.
Clever use of the diplomatic toolbox means, wherever possible, not only being accompanied and advised by your own ambassador, but also by the highest-ranking EU representative.
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Third: Another example of the intelligent use of the diplomatic toolbox concerns the conduct of crisis negotiations. Heads of government and their ministers should resist the temptation to conduct crisis negotiations themselves, let alone draft documents, even if they consider themselves smarter and more experienced than their entire diplomatic staff. Two examples from the past two decades may illustrate this point:
In the spring of 2008, NATO failed to reach agreement in Brussels on the draft communiqué for the NATO summit in April 2008 in Bucharest. Ultimately, the heads of state and government at the Bucharest summit had to negotiate a compromise text themselves under enormous time pressure. Unfortunately, this text – about NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia – only made things worse in the end.
The leaders mistakenly thought their text would be easier for Russia to accept because it did not set a date for future NATO membership. From a Russian point of view, the communiqué said that Ukraine and Georgia would become members of NATO – which was and is completely unacceptable to Moscow. Some suspect that this rotten compromise in the NATO communiqué contributed to the military confrontation between Russia and Georgia in August 2008.
A recent example that may illustrate this point is the so-called Minsk agreement of 2014-2015, negotiated by the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine. It turned out to be impractical.
The problem here is this: if a text negotiated at diplomatic level turns out to be unsatisfactory, there is always the possibility of escalating the issue to foreign ministers or even to the level of heads of state or government. But when a text has been negotiated personally by the heads of state and government, this option of escalation or revision no longer exists. Then you can’t get off it!
After the Minsk Agreement was negotiated, the negotiated points were not implemented.
(Photo: dpa)
Fourth: Today, our crisis diplomacy is mainly carried out with the megaphone. Every telephone call is announced, every conversation is explained to the media. Silent diplomacy can be much more effective – Egon Bahr and Henry Kissinger have successfully demonstrated this!
However, the most important prerequisite for the successful use of the diplomatic toolbox is trust – the currency of diplomacy. With trust anything is possible. Take, for example, the peaceful unification of the two German states, which would never have been possible without the trust placed in the federal government.
After all, nothing works in international crisis negotiations without trust. Even the most experienced politicians cannot reach sustainable agreements or negotiate successful peace solutions unless they trust each other. In other words: trust is the currency of diplomacy and thus the most important instrument in the diplomatic toolbox.
>>Read also: The G20 Summit in Bali – an Opportunity for European Crisis Diplomacy?
Unlike military confrontation, wise diplomacy should never be defined as a mere zero-sum game in which one’s victory means the other’s defeat. Rather, diplomacy is often about gaining a sustained advantage without making the opponent feel completely humiliated: a classic definition of win-win.
Young diplomats are often told that in the course of a diplomatic career you always meet twice and that you should do your best to avoid that the negotiating partner harbors lust for revenge if you meet again.
Like his predecessors, the chancellor no longer involved his ambassadors enough, says Wolfgang Ischinger.
(Photo: AP)
Such advice may sound banal. However, in a world of instant communication and social media disinformation, shrewd diplomacy is proving to be a tough business. This also includes the often underestimated ability to listen and understand not only what is explicitly said or written, but also what is not said at all or only between the lines.
In the military sense, diplomacy is the art of winning without incurring losses. In the current situation in Ukraine, diplomacy can of course only point the way from war to a ceasefire or even to peace when both sides, especially in Moscow, have come to realize that military means have been exhausted. Unfortunately, we are still a long way from that today. It will be a while before diplomacy gets a serious chance here.
More: Follow the current events in our live blog on the Ukraine war