However much they are masters in their own backyard, all politicians eventually have to accept they need to deal with their opposite numbers in countries large and small. How they do it can often mean the difference between war and peace. Testing one’s own demands against those of others is fraught with potential for dispute. Diplomacy has been described as the art of putting your foot down without stepping on anyone’s toes. Here we survey the recent international scene.
THE UNIQUE WORLD OF DIPLOMACY
Officials in the Italian Foreign Ministry staged a novel industrial demonstration in 1981 when a national strike of civil servants took place during a pay dispute. They undertook a “strike in reverse” and carried on working after the end of normal working hours. They refused to take meal breaks and continued their duties until 2 a.m. Union representatives said they had decided against a traditional walk-out because “professional habits” would lead most of the ministry staff to turn up anyway. But they did not want to undermine their colleagues’ strike elsewhere in the service.
THE MAYOR OF ROME headed a delegation to Tunis in 1985 to sign a treaty formally restoring peace with the city of Carthage, which the ancient Romans had destroyed in 146 BC.
THE DUTCH AMBASSADOR IN Britain paid a long-overdue visit to the Scilly Isles off Cornwall in 1986 to sign a peace treaty between the Netherlands and the islands that brought to an end a state of war that had formally existed for 335 years. When Britain had settled its scores with the Dutch after war in 1651, no one had noticed that the Scillies had been left out. It was only in October 1985 that the chair of the isles’ council discovered the oversight.
FRANCE AND SPAIN REACHED an agreement in 1986 to exchange about an acre of territory each on their joint border because a statue of Luis Companys, the last Republican president of Spain before the Franco revolt, had been built by mistake on French soil.
IN 1992, AFTER 18 years of legal wrangling, diplomats for India and Bangladesh agreed a 999-year lease on the Tin Bigha corridor, which links mainland Bangladesh with two enclaves in India, Dahagram and Angarpota. The size of the territory involved was the equivalent of a football field.
NEW MOORE ISLAND, A sandbar in the Bay of Bengal, was also the subject of protracted dispute between India and Bangladesh. For nearly 40 years, the two countries failed to settle ownership of the uninhabited island of 100,000 square feet—slightly smaller than London’s Trafalgar Square—after it had emerged from the sea in the wake of the 1970 cyclone that devastated the region. The problem solved itself in March 2010 when an oceanographer at Jadavpur University in Calcutta announced that global warming and rising sea levels had caused the entire landmass to disappear back under the sea.
A GERMAN WATCHDOG OF government waste revealed in 1992 that the authorities did not even know where Germany’s borders were. It discovered that 100,000 marks ($68,200) had been spent on a small bridge across the river Blies in the Saarland to access land officials believed was German. It later turned out that the land was actually part of France.
THE HEAD OF THAILAND’S Office of the Prime Minister, Somsak Thepsuthin, announced in December 2001 plans for a 27-hole golf course at the juncture of his country with Laos and Cambodia, with nine holes in each country, the first in the world to straddle three countries. Despite the possible downside of the area being littered with Khmer Rouge land mines from the wars of the 1970s, he was confident that golfers would fly in from around the world “for the challenge.” To our knowledge, a decade later the course is still on the drawing board.
DISPUTED LOYALTIES
In 1982 the mayor of Key West and his council, frustrated by travel restrictions caused by U.S. Border Patrol roadblocks set up to stem the flow of illegal Cuban refugees that had severely damaged the tourist trade, declared secession from the United States and the establishment of the Conch Republic. Declaring, “We were once the richest town south of Savannah; now we’re just the highest taxed,” Dennis Wardlow formally announced separation on April 23 in an elaborate ceremony in front of the roadblock at the entrance to the island chain, during which he was proclaimed prime minister and promptly declared war against America by ceremonially breaking a stale Cuban loaf over the head of an actor dressed in naval uniform. He rescinded the state of war after one minute and formally applied for $1 billion in aid from the United States.
The “republic” continues to this day, holding a celebratory week of events each year in April around “independence day” on April 23. The international airport at Key West is emblazoned with a banner welcoming arrivals to the Conch Republic, and sales of souvenir passports, ID cards, and car bumper stickers have become a staple ingredient of the once ailing tourist trade.
A GROUP REPRESENTING RESIDENTS of the District of Columbia, the federal territory that is home to the U.S. capital, Washington, marked American Independence Day in 2002 by seeking reaccession to the United Kingdom in protest of the lack of representation in the U.S. Congress, which sits on their doorstep. Despite years of lobbying, the other states, who need to approve the required constitutional amendment, have never summoned enough support to the cause. In 2000, the city authorities—elected local government has only existed since 1975—formally adopted as its official motto for car license plates the slogan “Taxation without representation.” The protest group DC Vote presented a request to the British Embassy for the queen to reassume sovereignty over the city. Paul Strauss, the movement’s leader, said, “We want Her Majesty to intercede on our behalf.” There were no immediate signs that the British government was inclined to oblige.
TESTING RELATIONS
Muslim Pakistan refused permission for a delegation from the European Community to visit in 1982 because the team was headed by a man named Israel.
SOON AFTER TAKING OFFICE, U.S. president Barack Obama visited one of his arch opponents in the Americas in April 2009, Venezuela’s firebrand leader Hugo Chavez. Obama graciously spoke at a news conference of the gift that Chavez had given him: “Well, I think it was a nice gesture to give me a book. I’m a reader.” He had received Chavez’s polemical study, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.
IN NOVEMBER 2003, NEW Zealand prime minister Helen Clark was required by an airport guard to be frisked as a security risk as she went through metal detectors when changing planes in Sydney, Australia. Reports of the incident outraged New Zealand opinion, which regarded it as an insult by their traditional arch rivals. The guard was said not to have recognized the prime minister, despite her traveling with a sizeable official entourage.
GERMAN DEFENSE MINISTER VOLKER Rühe ruffled feathers during a period of controversy in the summer of 1992 as the country faced growing demands from its European allies to contribute troops to the NATO peace-keeping effort in the civil wars in the Balkans involving Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. “I am not willing to risk the lives of German soldiers for countries whose names we cannot even spell properly.”
NEGOTIATING AN AGREEMENT IN 1986 on sharing state-of-the-art military and industrial technology, the United States was acutely concerned about the ability of West Germany to keep such secrets safe from being leaked to the Communist East. How do we know? Details of the negotiation and the secret treaty were leaked to the West German newspaper.
THE FORMAL WELCOMING CEREMONY for the new West German ambassador to Honduras in 1989 was marred by a small but important oversight. The Honduran national military band had been unable to get the music for the German national anthem. They played the British one instead.
PROTOCOL SLIPUPS ARE LESS uncommon than might be thought. In November 2009, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez entertained his equally erratic counterpart from Iran when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited. Unfortunately, he was welcomed by the playing of Iran’s old imperial national anthem of the previous, overthrown, Shah’s regime.
In October 1992, the U.S. Marine Corps caused a diplomatic storm with its northern neighbor by flying the distinctive Canadian maple leaf flag upside down during the national anthems ceremony at the opening game of the baseball World Series between Atlanta and Toronto. As images of the debacle at one of the biggest sporting events in North America were beamed across the continent, President Bush had to be roped in to issue a formal apology to his Canadian counterpart.
The White House did not help President Bush’s visit to Southeast Asia in November 2006 by displaying on the president’s official website the flags of the countries he was visiting. Included on the itinerary was Bush’s first visit to Vietnam, always a sensitive affair for any American leader. The flag shown by the White House was the yellow and red emblem of the former U.S.-backed South Vietnam, a country that had been extinguished more than 30 years earlier by America’s withdrawal.
When Bush visited Bulgaria in June 2007, every other American flag flying on poles spread along the ceremonial route down the main boulevard in the capital Sofia was the wrong way round—flying the starred blue quadrant on the right-hand side.
Australian officials caused a diplomatic incident with Spain in November 2003 at the opening ceremony in Melbourne of the two countries’ match in the final of tennis’ prestigious Davis Cup. Instead of playing the modern Spanish anthem, the tune that blared out across the stadium was the Communist Republican anthem used briefly in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War. A version of the anthem includes a verse in which the Spanish Queen is beheaded and a man wipes his bottom on King Alfonso XIII, the grandfather of the present Spanish king, Juan Carlos. Unfortunately, the Spanish sports minister was present. He stormed out and the match only carried on after Australian diplomats had concocted a groveling apology for the slight.
It was not the first time Australia had slipped up. At a football World Cup qualifier match, also in Melbourne, with Israel in October 1985, the Australian hosts played, of all tunes, the West German national anthem for the Israelis.
OFFICIAL VISITS
Yoshiro Mori, who unexpectedly became Japanese prime minister in April 2000 after his predecessor suffered an incapacitating stroke, had a term of office that was both short—he lasted just a year and three weeks—and gaffe laden. A poor speaker of English, his advisors gave him emergency lessons before he departed on a crucial visit in May to see President Clinton in Washington. According to accounts that have become legendary in diplomatic circles, he was taught that when shaking hands with Clinton he was to say, “How are you?” Clinton would say, “I am fine, and you?” and Mori was advised, “Now you should say, ‘Me too.’ After that, the translators will do all the work for you.”
On the big day, when greeting Clinton, Mori mistakenly asked, “Who are you?” Clinton, only slightly taken aback, responded jocularly, “Well, I am Hillary’s husband, ha ha…” Mori replied confidently, “Me too, ha ha ha…”
UK RELATIONS WITH THE Gulf state of Qatar came within minutes of being derailed in the autumn of 1999 when British Department of Trade officials discovered an awkward inclusion in the dozen copies of a gift book that ministers were about to hand over to their Arab guests. Opting for a chic photography collection, Britain: The Book of the Millennium, they had neglected to notice one shot showing a model posing naked for art students. Civil servants were reported to have “felt-tipped away like mad” to cover up the picture in all 12 copies. Told of the episode, the author of the book acknowledged their problem: “There are no two ways about it—she’s completely nude,” adding, “I only hope they did it tastefully.”
BRITAIN WAS ON THE receiving end of less than I meticulous planning in March 2009 when Prime Minister Gordon Brown made his inaugural visit to the White House to meet newly elected president, Barack Obama. Aiming to shore up the “special relationship,” Brown went armed with a gift of a first edition of the multi-volume biography of Winston Churchill. Obama reciprocated with a DVD box set of 25 famous Hollywood movies. When the British party returned home and tried to play them, they discovered they were Region 1 format, playable only in North America.
IT WASN’T THE ADMINISTRATION’S only blunder in its early days. Just three days after Brown’s visit, Hillary Clinton, the new secretary of state, met her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Geneva. She gave him a joke gift of a small box the size of a television remote control with a single button on it. It was labeled, in Russian, a “reset” button, and was meant to be symbolic of President Obama’s hope to recast U.S.–Russian relations after a stormy period under the previous Bush regime. Unfortunately, linguistic expertise seemed to have been in short supply, as a confused Lavrov quickly pointed out that the Americans had misspelled “reset.” The word on the box translated as “overload.” At least smiling, Lavrov told Clinton, who had spotted his quizzical expression when unwrapping the gift, “You got it wrong.”
HILLARY CLINTON’S MONTH DID not get any better. On a visit to Mexico in late March, she visited the Basilica of Our Lady in Guadalupe, the second most visited Catholic shrine in the world and home to Latin America’s equivalent of the Turin Shroud—a sixteenth-century cloak with an image of the Virgin Mary. The image is said to have miraculously appeared, and the phenomenon is unexplained to this day. Its local fame had clearly not extended to Clinton. Her first question to her host was, “Who painted it?” Rector Diego Monroy swiftly responded, “God!”
VISITING ISRAEL’S SACRED HOLOCAUST Museum in October 2000, German chancellor Gerhard Schroder performed a ceremony alongside the Israeli prime minister that should have involved him turning up the Eternal Flame memorializing those killed in the extermination camps. Instead, he turned the switch the wrong way and extinguished the flame. Horrified officials were initially unable to reignite the flame, which had been burning since 1961. It was eventually relit with a cigarette lighter.
BRAZILIAN PRESIDENT LUIS INACIO Lula da Silva made few friends on his visit to Namibia in November 2003 when he tried to compliment his hosts on his departure from the capital, Windhoek, saying it was so clean, it did not seem like Africa. “I’m surprised because…it doesn’t seem like you’re in an African country. Few cities of the world are so clean and beautiful as Windhoek.” So far as we know, he has not been asked back.
THE BODYGUARDS OF AMERICAN secretary of defense William Perry were given a nasty surprise in January 1995 when he visited Pakistani tribesmen in the lawless hills near the Khyber Pass. As part of the reception ceremony, gun-toting elders danced in welcome, firing their automatic weapons in time to the music.
ALBANIA’S PUBLIC ORDER MINISTER had his official limousine confiscated by Greek customs when he arrived at the Christalopigi border crossing in December 1999 en route to an engagement in Athens. Spartak Poci’s luxury Mercedes was subjected to a routine check that revealed the car to have been stolen in Italy. Embarrassed Greek officials said they had no option but to seize the vehicle, as Interpol had put out an order for its impounding. Stranded until his host sent up a Greek government car, Poci continued his journey to the Greek capital…to sign an agreement combating cross-border crime. He returned home by air.
AN OFFICIAL VISIT TO Washington in February 1996 by pomp-conscious French president Jacques Chirac—the first by a French leader for 12 years—nearly derailed when congressional leaders intimated to Gallic planners that they were unenthusiastic about granting him a joint session of Congress, the privilege usually accorded to America’s closest allies. At the time, France was very unpopular in the United States on account of its controversial nuclear testing program in the Pacific. Chirac’s threat to cancel the whole visit resulted in an elaborate subterfuge. According to diplomatic sources, while television cameras—and Chirac—witnessed a full chamber to listen to his speech, only 50 of the 535 seats were actually filled with congressional representatives. The rest were ushers and pages dragooned in to spare the president the humiliation of having no audience.
THE U.S. SECRET SERVICE mistakenly bombarded an Auckland chicken processing plant with top secret security details of President Clinton’s arrival plans for the September 1999 Asia-Pacific Summit. Despite reporting the errant faxes, the head of the plant told local press that the messages kept arriving for several weeks. One detailed the installation of the White House secure communications equipment at Auckland airport ahead of the arrival of Air Force One, the president’s plane. Another had the names of military officers involved in the advance party, replete with code names and security badge numbers. U.S. officials were reported to be “looking into the situation.”
ANGER MANAGEMENT
For over three years, after a fit of pique about France’s opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq, Walter Jones and Bob Ney, Republican members of the House of Representatives, persuaded the House cafeteria to rename French fries “Freedom Fries” and French toast “Freedom Toast” to express “our strong displeasure at our so-called ally, France.” The practice was lifted in August 2006 as relations warmed. There was a touch of irony about the announcement: Jones had now become an outspoken critic of the war, leading him to express regret at starting the name-change campaign.
A LONG-AWAITED PEACE GATHERING between two tribes in the remote New Guinea highlands convened in 1990 with the intention of having a joint feast. Members of the Puman and Mandak tribes sacrificed a pig and proceeded to cook it. An argument broke out about the best way to prepare it, resulting in a five-day battle involving 2,000 spear-wielding warriors. Five died and dozens were wounded. A subsequent peace gathering agreed to have the event catered.
FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE end of the Bush administration in January 2009, the United States announced the imposition of increases to customs duties on a wide range of goods from the European Union. Commentators pointed to the possibility that Bush was still smarting from the lack of co-operation from France in the Iraq War, and the new tariffs contained a parting shot. While the duties on almost all the items were 100 percent, standing out was a 300 percent tariff on France’s iconic product, Roquefort cheese. When quizzed, no one in the administration was willing to explain the reason for the decision.
Credence was lent to the move having had political motivation when the new Obama administration diplomatically negotiated a dropping of the tax four months later.
THE NADIR OF THE SUMMIT
The United Nations’ flagship conference on international development in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2002 was marred by technical difficulties over sound and translation equipment because the UN had not checked that its contractors knew the right place to go. The German firm flew its technicians to Monterey, California, 1,500 miles away. It was halfway through the weeklong conference before they reached the correct destination.
ATTENDING THE 1989 CONFERENCE of the heads of state of the economic community of West Africa in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Gambian president Dawda Jawara arrived in what the official British observer termed “an ostentatiously modest” propeller-driven aircraft. It was believed locally that this was designed to present an implicit contrast to the luxurious presidential jet enjoyed by the conference host, Blaise Campaoré. The slight managed to achieve more than intended. The propellers, which were still turning as the plane halted, sucked up the red carpet, chopping it to pieces and showering President Campaoré and other dignitaries with red fluff. It was then discovered, in the words of the British envoy’s report, that the airport “proved not to possess steps of the right height to allow the Gambian president to descend gracefully to earth.”
A BIZARRE DIPLOMATIC BALLET took place in the preparatory negotiations for the 1975 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, a major milestone in managing Cold War relations between East and West. On the tricky question of who should fund the event, countries disagreed on whether the costs should be borne by the United Nations or by contributions by individual states. Tiny Luxembourg had not been able to afford to send a delegation to the talks and asked the Netherlands to represent its views. At the appropriate moment in the debate, the Dutch representative moved a few places across the conference hall to occupy the vacant Luxembourg seat and deliver a passionately argued statement demanding that the United Nations pick up the bill. Finishing the speech, he then moved back to his own seat and forcefully attacked the Luxembourg position, urging that all members should provide their own contributions.
FROM THE HISTORY BOOKS
In 1040, Pope Benedict IX initiated a vain attempt to make war illegal by proclaiming the “Truce of God,” probably the first example of international attempts to outlaw war. It decreed that fighting was unlawful for anyone between vespers on Wednesday evening and sunrise on Monday.
THE SO-CALLED WAR OF 1812 between Britain and the fledgling United States is probably history’s most extreme example of war by accident. It both began and ended through error. The conflict originated in American objections to British trade blockades that were thought to be trying to squeeze the life out of the new republic. The States eventually declared war on June 18, 1812. Unknown to them, over in England, a new government under Lord Liverpool had taken office 10 days earlier. Liverpool was in favor of a more conciliatory approach to America. He had had one of the key reasons for the war removed by withdrawing controversial orders allowing the conscription of American nationals into the British Navy. These orders had been rescinded just the day before the American declaration of war. The Americans could not have been aware of this, as there was no way for the news to reach Congress before it voted for war. Three more weeks, and news of the British climbdown would have been known. The war would last two and a half years and cost nearly 4,000 lives.
Its end was similarly shrouded in disastrous blunder. The culminating engagement, the Battle of New Orleans in early January 1815, took place two weeks after the official peace treaty ending the war had been signed on Christmas Eve 1814. News was still on its way from Europe and too late to prevent the final encounter. Nearly a thousand men lost their lives in the most unnecessary battle in history.
THERE ARE UNLIKELY TO be many competitors better suited for the title of Britain’s most embarrassing diplomat of all time than Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, who was appointed by his cousin Queen Anne in 1701 as governor-general of the New York colony. In an era steeped in the formalisms of courtly rectitude, he adopted the bizarre practice of donning women’s clothes for public appearances. He turned up for his inaugural opening of the New York Assembly in 1702 dressed in a blue silk gown, a stylish diamond-studded headdress, and satin shoes. When challenged on the proprieties of his choice of clothes, he replied, “In this place and particularly in this occasion I represent a woman and ought in all respects to represent her as faithfully as I can.” Described by contemporaries as a “large, fleshy man” with a distinctly masculine face, he preferred promenading around his domain in hooped skirts, flashing a womanly fan to waft away the city odors. Amazingly, despite the outrage his transvestism caused, he was not recalled until 1708.
RATHER MORE DIPLOMACY WAS shown by New York’s city elders in June 1775 in the early months of the War of Independence when they faced the prospect of having to welcome both the newly appointed commander in chief of the rebel Continental Army, George Washington, and the return from England of the British governor of New York colony, William Tryon. They both arrived in the city on June 25. With only one main street—Broadway—available as a route for the ceremonial marching of the troops, the civic leaders laid on a welcoming reception for Washington and his force at the northern end of the thoroughfare, and for Tryon at the southern, downtown, end, ensuring that neither side managed to meet each other.
LABOR FOREIGN SECRETARY ERNEST Bevin, a trade union official to the core, had a typically working-class approach to the pomposities of diplomacy. Surprisingly appointed by Attlee in 1945 at a critical time of postwar reconstruction, his lack of finesse was sometimes an asset for the Foreign Office. Warned that he had to receive a puffed-up Guatemala ambassador who was arriving at the Foreign Office to stake a claim on the British Central American possession of Belize, Bevin warmly embraced the emissary when he was shown in with the greeting: “Guatemalia—that’s where you’re from, isn’t it, Guatemalia…funny thing, we were just talking about it this morning, couldn’t find it on the map. What a bit of luck you’re here, now you can tell us where it is.”
NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN CHANCELLOR BISMARCK had an equally effective but more standard diplomatic device for retaining control. The story is told of the British ambassador who asked him during an audience how he handled “insistent visitors who take up so much of your time.” Bismarck replied that “I have an infallible method. My servant appears and informs me that my wife has something urgent to tell me.” At that point, there was a knock at the door and a servant entered bearing a message from his wife.
IN MARCH 1966, DURING the Cold War, the United States banned the importation of wigs that contained hair from people living in Communist countries.
JOHN HUMES, AMERICAN AMBASSADOR to Austria during the same era of confrontation, finding himself facing a similar quandary, applied a more freethinking approach. He had received a gift of a box of Cuban cigars at a time when dealing in any produce of the Communist regime would be a breach of U.S. sanctions policy. He therefore told his chief of staff to dispose of them with the following instructions: “Burn them…one by one…slowly.”