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Science and Diplomacy
Science and Diplomacy
On one occasion one of Lord Salisbury's experiments nearly cost him his life. So perhaps he - or at least those around him - would have agreed that science and diplomacy are not the most natural of bedfellows. Indeed, the essence of scientific progress is not just transformational but disruptive - the focus is on great inventions and scientific breakthroughs. The essence of diplomacy, however, is to maintain order. And while science is in the business of establishing the truth it has long been perceived that diplomats are there to obscure it. Henry Wotton, the 17th century diplomat famously claimed that an Ambassador is "an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country".
I am not going to lecture you about science. After all I got a D in A Level Physics and a C in O Level Chemistry. But a bright spark in the Foreign Office has drawn my attention to something that I think is interesting. The scientific revolution I learnt about at school was about the replacement of Newtonian mechanics with Quantum mechanics.
I wouldn't want to hang everything on it - and perhaps it's a bit of stretch - but if you think about it the world of international relations is undergoing a change that is not dissimilar. International relations is experiencing its own "Quantum" shift:
First, international relations has long been premised on the idea of a 'balance of power'. The international system tended towards equilibrium and self-correction, as states sought to balance each other's economic or military strength; an echo of the world of Newtonian Mechanics. But today, a defining feature of our world is the tendency towards uncertainty, mirroring the world of Quantum Mechanics. Think of the damaging positive feedback loops that are driving runaway climate change and that built up unsustainable financial imbalances between emerging and existing powers. Think of the emergence of asymmetric tactics of terrorist organisations, leading not to a stable balance of opposing force, but chronic instability.
Second, the actors involved in international relations today are no longer just nation-states: global NGOs, multi-national businesses, media and social networking sites, formal and informal international institutions all constrain and shape the preferences and actions of states. In some senses, this is akin to the shift from Newtonian mechanics, predicated on globes in orbit around each other, to the world of quantum mechanics that sees a more subtle and complex interplay of different forces.
A third defining feature of modern international relations is interdependence. Again this resembles this shift from Newtonian science modelled on discrete independent systems, to Quantum mechanics that accepts that everything is inter-connected. Foreign policy is no longer a game of risk or chess in two dimensions; it is more multi-dimensional. As a result, the world is more unpredictable and more uncertain. Every action does not have an equal and opposite reaction; sometimes it is the small interventions that catalyse major change. So in Pakistan, where I was this weekend, it was not the billions of dollars in US funding of the military that triggered the Pakistani military to take on home-grown terrorists; it was the product of public outrage at the images of a 17 year old girl being flogged by Taliban militants in Swat Valley. Foreign policy today is about managing interdependence and uncertainty, and finding the game-changing interventions that break the deadlock.
The old world of foreign policy - relations between states, sometimes strained, sometimes cooperative - remains. In Europe, I am pleased to say it has become bound up in the largest experiment in shared sovereignty that has ever been tried, in the European Union. But in the new world - ungoverned spaces, the diplomatic equivalent of black holes, and non state actors, the quarks of diplomacy - are the biggest challenge and in some ways the biggest change makers. And in this new world, more than any other that has gone before, I believe that_science has a vital role to play in international relations and diplomacy - and equally, that diplomacy can assist scientific progress.
© National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, 2011
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