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Carne Ross: An independent diplomat
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After 15 years in the British diplomatic corps, Carne Ross became a "freelance diplomat," running a bold nonprofit that gives small, developing and yet-unrecognized nations a voice in international relations. At the BIF-5 conference, he calls for a new kind of diplomacy that gives voice to small countries, that works with changing boundaries and that welcomes innovation.
Carne Ross - Diplomat
Carne Ross is the founder of Independent Diplomat, a nonprofit that offers freelance diplomatic representation to small, developing and yet-unrecognized nations in the complex world of international negotiations. Full bio
Carne Ross is the founder of Independent Diplomat, a nonprofit that offers freelance diplomatic representation to small, developing and yet-unrecognized nations in the complex world of international negotiations. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
00:16
My story is a little bit about war.
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It's about disillusionment.
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It's about death.
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And it's about rediscovering
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idealism
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in all of that wreckage.
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And perhaps also, there's a lesson
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about how to deal with
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our screwed-up, fragmenting
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and dangerous world of the 21st century.
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I don't believe in straightforward narratives.
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I don't believe in a life or history
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written as decision "A" led to consequence "B"
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led to consequence "C" --
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these neat narratives that we're presented with,
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and that perhaps we encourage in each other.
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I believe in randomness,
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and one of the reasons I believe that
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is because me becoming a diplomat was random.
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I'm colorblind.
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I was born unable to see most colors.
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This is why I wear gray and black most of the time,
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and I have to take my wife with me
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to chose clothes.
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And I'd always wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was a boy.
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I loved watching planes barrel over
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our holiday home in the countryside.
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And it was my boyhood dream to be a fighter pilot.
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And I did the tests in the Royal Air Force to become a pilot,
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and sure enough, I failed.
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I couldn't see all the blinking different lights,
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and I can't distinguish color.
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01:34
So I had to choose another career,
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and this was in fact relatively easy for me,
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because I had an abiding passion all the way through my childhood,
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which was international relations.
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As a child,
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I read the newspaper thoroughly.
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I was fascinated by the Cold War,
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by the INF negotiations
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over intermediate-range nuclear missiles,
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the proxy war between the Soviet Union and the U.S.
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in Angola or Afghanistan.
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These things really interested me.
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And so I decided quite at an early age
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I wanted to be a diplomat.
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And I, one day, I announced this to my parents --
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and my father denies this story to this day --
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I said, "Daddy, I want to be a diplomat."
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And he turned to me, and he said,
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"Carne, you have to be very clever to be a diplomat."
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(Laughter)
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And my ambition was sealed.
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In 1989,
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I entered the British Foreign Service.
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That year, 5,000 people applied to become a diplomat,
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and 20 of us succeeded.
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And as those numbers suggest,
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I was inducted into an elite
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and fascinating and exhilarating world.
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Being a diplomat, then and now,
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is an incredible job, and I loved every minute of it --
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I enjoyed the status of it.
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I bought myself a nice suit and wore leather-soled shoes
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and reveled in
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this amazing access I had to world events.
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I traveled to the Gaza Strip.
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I headed the Middle East Peace Process section
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in the British Foreign Ministry.
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I became a speechwriter
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for the British Foreign Secretary.
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I met Yasser Arafat.
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I negotiated
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with Saddam's diplomats at the U.N.
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Later, I traveled to Kabul
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and served in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban.
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And I would travel
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in a C-130 transport
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and go and visit warlords
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in mountain hideaways
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and negotiate with them
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about how we were going to eradicate Al Qaeda from Afghanistan,
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surrounded by my Special Forces escort,
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who, themselves, had to have an escort of a platoon of Royal Marines,
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because it was so dangerous.
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And that was exciting -- that was fun.
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It was really interesting.
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And it's a great cadre of people,
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incredibly close-knit community of people.
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And the pinnacle of my career, as it turned out,
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was when I was posted to New York.
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I'd already served in Germany, Norway,
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various other places,
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but I was posted to New York
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to serve on the U.N. Security Council for the British delegation.
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And my responsibility was the Middle East,
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which was my specialty.
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And there, I dealt with things
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like the Middle East peace process,
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the Lockerbie issue --
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we can talk about that later, if you wish --
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but above all, my responsibility was Iraq
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and its weapons of mass destruction
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and the sanctions we placed on Iraq
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to oblige it to disarm itself of these weapons.
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I was the chief British negotiator
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on the subject,
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and I was steeped in the issue.
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And anyway,
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my tour -- it was kind of a very exciting time.
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I mean it was very dramatic diplomacy.
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We went through several wars
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during my time in New York.
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I negotiated for my country
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the resolution in the Security Council
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of the 12th of September 2001
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condemning the attacks of the day before,
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which were, of course, deeply present to us
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actually living in New York at the time.
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So it was kind of the best of time, worst of times
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kind of experience.
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I lived the high-life.
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05:13
Although I worked very long hours,
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I lived in a penthouse in Union Square.
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I was a single British diplomat in New York City;
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you can imagine what that might have meant.
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(Laughter)
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I had a good time.
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But in 2002,
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when my tour came to an end,
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I decided I wasn't going to go back
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to the job that was waiting for me in London.
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I decided to take a sabbatical,
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in fact, at the New School, Bruce.
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In some inchoate, inarticulate way
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I realized that there was something wrong
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with my work, with me.
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I was exhausted,
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and I was also disillusioned
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in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on.
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And I decided to take some time out from work.
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The Foreign Office was very generous.
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You could take these special unpaid leave, as they called them,
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and yet remain part of the diplomatic service, but not actually do any work.
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It was nice.
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And eventually, I decided
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to take a secondment to join the U.N. in Kosovo,
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which was then under U.N. administration.
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And two things happened in Kosovo,
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which kind of, again,
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shows the randomness of life,
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because these things turned out to be
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two of the pivots of my life
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and helped to deliver me to the next stage.
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But they were random things.
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One was that, in the summer of 2004,
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the British government, somewhat reluctantly,
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decided to have an official inquiry
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into the use of intelligence on WMD
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in the run up to the Iraq War,
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a very limited subject.
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And I testified to that inquiry in secret.
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I had been steeped in the intelligence on Iraq
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and its WMD,
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and my testimony to the inquiry said three things:
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that the government exaggerated the intelligence,
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which was very clear in all the years I'd read it.
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And indeed, our own internal assessment was very clear
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that Iraq's WMD
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did not pose a threat to its neighbors, let alone to us.
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Secondly, the government had ignored all available alternatives to war,
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which in some ways
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was a more discreditable thing still.
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The third reason, I won't go into.
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But anyway, I gave that testimony,
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and that presented me with a crisis.
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What was I going to do?
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This testimony was deeply critical of my colleagues,
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of my ministers, who had, in my view
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had perpetrated a war on a falsehood.
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And so I was in crisis.
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And this wasn't a pretty thing.
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I moaned about it, I hesitated,
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I went on and on and on to my long-suffering wife,
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and eventually I decided to resign from the British Foreign Service.
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I felt -- there's a scene in the Al Pacino movie "The Insider," which you may know,
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where he goes back to CBS
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after they've let him down over the tobacco guy,
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and he goes, "You know, I just can't do this anymore. Something's broken."
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And it was like that for me. I love that movie.
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I felt just something's broken.
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I can't actually sit with my foreign minister
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or my prime minister again with a smile on my face
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and do what I used to do gladly for them.
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So took a running leap
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and jumped over the edge of a cliff.
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And it was a very, very uncomfortable, unpleasant feeling.
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And I started to fall.
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And today, that fall hasn't stopped;
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I'm still falling.
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But, in a way, I've got used to the sensation of it.
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And in a way, I kind of like
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the sensation of it a lot better
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than I like actually standing on top of the cliff,
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wondering what to do.
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A second thing happened in Kosovo,
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which kind of -- I need a quick gulp of water, forgive me.
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A second thing happened in Kosovo,
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which kind of delivered the answer,
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which I couldn't really answer,
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which is, "What do I do with my life?"
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I love diplomacy --
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I have no career --
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I expected my entire life to be a diplomat, to be serving my country.
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I wanted to be an ambassador,
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and my mentors, my heroes,
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people who got to the top of my profession,
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and here I was throwing it all away.
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A lot of my friends were still in it.
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My pension was in it.
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And I gave it up.
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And what was I going to do?
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And that year, in Kosovo,
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this terrible, terrible thing happened, which I saw.
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In March 2004, there were terrible riots
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all over the province -- as it then was -- of Kosovo.
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18 people were killed.
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It was anarchy.
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And it's a very horrible thing to see anarchy,
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to know that the police and the military --
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there were lots of military troops there --
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actually can't stop that rampaging mob
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who's coming down the street.
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And the only way that rampaging mob coming down the street will stop
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is when they decide to stop
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and when they've had enough burning and killing.
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And that is not a very nice feeling to see, and I saw it.
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And I went through it. I went through those mobs.
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And with my Albanian friends, we tried to stop it, but we failed.
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And that riot taught me something,
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which isn't immediately obvious and it's kind of a complicated story.
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But one of the reasons that riot took place --
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those riots, which went on for several days, took place --
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was because the Kosovo people
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were disenfranchised from their own future.
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There were diplomatic negotiations about the future of Kosovo
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going on then,
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and the Kosovo government, let alone the Kosovo people,
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were not actually
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participating in those talks.
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There was this whole fancy diplomatic system,
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this negotiation process about the future of Kosovo,
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and the Kosovars weren't part of it.
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And funnily enough, they were frustrated about that.
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Those riots were part of the manifestation of that frustration.
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It wasn't the only reason,
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and life is not simple, one reason narratives.
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It was a complicated thing,
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and I'm not pretending it was more simple than it was.
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But that was one of the reasons.
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And that kind of gave me the inspiration --
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or rather to be precise,
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it gave my wife the inspiration.
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She said, "Why don't you advise the Kosovars?
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Why don't you advise their government on their diplomacy?"
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And the Kosovars were not allowed a diplomatic service.
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They were not allowed diplomats.
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They were not allowed a foreign office
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to help them deal with this immensely complicated process,
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which became known as the Final Status Process of Kosovo.
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And so that was the idea.
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That was the origin of the thing that became Independent Diplomat,
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the world's first diplomatic advisory group
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and a non-profit to boot.
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And it began when I flew back from London
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after my time at the U.N. in Kosovo.
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I flew back and had dinner with the Kosovo prime minister and said to him,
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"Look, I'm proposing that I come and advise you on the diplomacy.
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I know this stuff. It's what I do. Why don't I come and help you?"
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And he raised his glass of raki to me and said,
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"Yes, Carne. Come."
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And I came to Kosovo
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and advised the Kosovo government.
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Independent Diplomat ended up advising three successive Kosovo prime ministers
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and the multi-party negotiation team of Kosovo.
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And Kosovo became independent.
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Independent Diplomat is now established
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in five diplomatic centers around the world,
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and we're advising seven or eight
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different countries, or political groups,
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depending on how you wish to define them --
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and I'm not big on definitions.
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We're advising the Northern Cypriots on how to reunify their island.
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We're advising the Burmese opposition,
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the government of Southern Sudan,
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which -- you heard it here first --
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is going to be a new country within the next few years.
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We're advising the Polisario Front of the Western Sahara,
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who are fighting to get their country back
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from Moroccan occupation
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after 34 years of dispossession.
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We're advising various island states in the climate change negotiations,
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which is suppose to culminate
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in Copenhagen.
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There's a bit of randomness here too
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because, when I was beginning Independent Diplomat,
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I went to a party in the House of Lords,
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which is a ridiculous place,
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but I was holding my drink like this, and I bumped into
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this guy who was standing behind me.
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And we started talking, and he said --
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I told him what I was doing,
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and I told him rather grandly
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I was going to establish Independent Diplomat in New York.
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At that time there was just me --
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and me and my wife were moving back to New York.
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And he said, "Why don't you see my colleagues in New York?"
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And it turned out
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he worked for an innovation company called ?What If!,
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which some of you have probably heard of.
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And one thing led to another,
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and I ended up having a desk
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in ?What If! in New York,
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when I started Independent Diplomat.
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And watching ?What If!
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develop new flavors of chewing gum for Wrigley
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or new flavors for Coke
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actually helped me innovate
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new strategies for the Kosovars
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and for the Saharawis of the Western Sahara.
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And I began to realize that there are different ways of doing diplomacy --
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that diplomacy, like business,
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is a business of solving problems,
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and yet the word innovation doesn't exist in diplomacy;
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it's all zero sum games and realpolitik
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and ancient institutions that have been there for generations
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and do things the same way they've always done things.
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And Independent Diplomat, today,
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tries to incorporate some of the things I learned at ?What If!.
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We all sit in one office and shout at each other across the office.
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We all work on little laptops and try to move desks to change the way we think.
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And we use naive experts
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who may know nothing about the countries we're dealing with,
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but may know something about something else
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to try to inject new thinking
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into the problems
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that we try to address for our clients.
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It's not easy, because our clients, by definition,
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are having a difficult time, diplomatically.
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There are, I don't know,
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some lessons from all of this,
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personal and political --
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and in a way, they're the same thing.
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The personal one
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is falling off a cliff
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is actually a good thing, and I recommend it.
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And it's a good thing to do at least once in your life
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just to tear everything up and jump.
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The second thing is a bigger lesson about the world today.
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Independent Diplomat is part of a trend
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which is emerging and evident across the world,
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which is that the world is fragmenting.
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States mean less than they used to,
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and the power of the state is declining.
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That means the power of others things is rising.
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Those other things are called non-state actors.
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They may be corporations,
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they may be mafiosi, they may be nice NGOs,
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they may anything,
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any number of things.
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We are living in a more complicated and fragmented world.
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If governments are less able
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to affect the problems
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that affect us in the world,
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then that means, who is left to deal with them,
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who has to take greater responsibility to deal with them?
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Us.
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If they can't do it, who's left to deal with it?
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We have no choice but to embrace that reality.
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What this means is
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it's no longer good enough
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to say that international relations, or global affairs,
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or chaos in Somalia,
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or what's going on in Burma is none of your business,
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15:55
and that you can leave it to governments to get on with.
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I can connect any one of you
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by six degrees of separation
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to the Al-Shabaab militia in Somalia.
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Ask me how later, particularly if you eat fish, interestingly enough,
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but that connection is there.
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We are all intimately connected.
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And this isn't just Tom Friedman,
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it's actually provable in case after case after case.
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What that means is, instead of asking your politicians to do things,
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you have to look to yourself to do things.
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And Independent Diplomat is a kind of example of this
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in a sort of loose way.
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There aren't neat examples, but one example is this:
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the way the world is changing
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is embodied in what's going on at the place I used to work --
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the U.N. Security Council.
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The U.N. was established in 1945.
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Its charter is basically designed
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to stop conflicts between states --
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interstate conflict.
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Today, 80 percent of the agenda
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of the U.N. Security Council
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is about conflicts within states,
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involving non-state parties --
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guerillas, separatists,
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terrorists, if you want to call them that,
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people who are not normal governments, who are not normal states.
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That is the state of the world today.
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When I realized this,
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and when I look back on my time at the Security Council
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and what happened with the Kosovars,
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and I realize that often
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the people who were most directly affected
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by what we were doing in the Security Council
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weren't actually there, weren't actually invited
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to give their views to the Security Council,
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I thought, this is wrong.
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Something's got to be done about this.
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So I started off in a traditional mode.
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Me and my colleagues at Independent Diplomat
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went around the U.N. Security Council.
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We went around 70 U.N. member states --
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the Kazaks, the Ethiopians, the Israelis --
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you name them, we went to see them --
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the secretary general, all of them,
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and said, "This is all wrong.
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This is terrible that you don't consult these people who are actually affected.
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You've got to institutionalize a system
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where you actually invite the Kosovars
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to come and tell you what they think.
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This will allow you to tell me -- you can tell them what you think.
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It'll be great. You can have an exchange.
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17:54
You can actually incorporate these people's views into your decisions,
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which means your decisions will be more effective and durable."
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Super-logical, you would think.
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I mean, incredibly logical. So obvious, anybody could get it.
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And of course, everybody got it. Everybody went, "Yes, of course, you're absolutely right.
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Come back to us
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in maybe six months."
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18:13
And of course, nothing happened -- nobody did anything.
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The Security Council does its business
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in exactly the same way today
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that it did X number of years ago,
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when I was there 10 years ago.
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So we looked at that observation
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of basically failure
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and thought, what can we do about it.
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And I thought, I'm buggered
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if I'm going to spend the rest of my life
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lobbying for these crummy governments
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to do what needs to be done.
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So what we're going to do
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is we're actually going to set up these meetings ourselves.
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So now, Independent Diplomat
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is in the process of setting up meetings
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between the U.N. Security Council
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and the parties to the disputes
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that are on the agenda of the Security Council.
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So we will be bringing
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Darfuri rebel groups,
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the Northern Cypriots and the Southern Cypriots,
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rebels from Aceh,
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and awful long laundry list
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of chaotic conflicts around the world.
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And we will be trying to bring the parties to New York
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to sit down in a quiet room
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in a private setting with no press
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and actually explain what they want
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to the members of the U. N. Security Council,
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and for the members of the U.N. Security Council
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to explain to them what they want.
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So there's actually a conversation,
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which has never before happened.
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And of course, describing all this,
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any of you who know politics will think this is incredibly difficult,
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and I entirely agree with you.
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The chances of failure are very high,
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but it certainly won't happen
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if we don't try to make it happen.
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And my politics has changed fundamentally
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from when I was a diplomat to what I am today,
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and I think that outputs is what matters, not process,
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not technology, frankly, so much either.
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Preach technology
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to all the Twittering members of all the Iranian demonstrations
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who are now in political prison in Tehran,
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where Ahmadinejad remains in power.
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Technology has not delivered political change in Iran.
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You've got to look at the outputs, and you got to say to yourself,
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"What can I do to produce that particular output?"
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That is the politics of the 21st century,
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and in a way, Independent Diplomat
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embodies that fragmentation, that change,
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that is happening to all of us.
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That's my story. Thanks.
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Carne Ross - DiplomatCarne Ross is the founder of Independent Diplomat, a nonprofit that offers freelance diplomatic representation to small, developing and yet-unrecognized nations in the complex world of international negotiations.
Why you should listen
Carne Ross was a member of the British diplomat corps for a decade and a half -- until a crisis of faith in the system drove him to go freelance. With his nonprofit, Independent Diplomat, he and a team advise small and developing nations without a diplomatic corps, as well as unrecognized nations that would otherwise lack a voice in negotiations on their own futures. His group helped advise the Kosovars in their quest for recognition as a nation, and with Croatia on its application to join the EU. They're now working with Southern Sudan as it approaches a vote to separate (a vote that, on Sept. 8, 2010, US Secretary of State Clinton called "inevitable").
As Ross said to Time magazine, when it profiled him in a 2008 story called "Innovators/Peacemakers": "Our work is based on the belief that everybody has a right to some say in the resolution of their issues." He's the author of the 2007 book Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite.
Carne Ross | Speaker | TED.com