The traditional way of conducting diplomacy involved the arcane exchange of official communiqués and diplomatic cables among governments. The ideological competition between Western democracy and Soviet communism throughout the second half of the 20th century spurred the rise of public diplomacy that delivered political propaganda via multiple instruments such as radio broadcasts or exchange programs. In this regard, the United States has been on the forefront of developing a wide range of tools aimed at advocating liberal democracy and capitalism abroad. With the end of the cold war came the advent of new communication technologies that could reach individuals without national governments or traditional news media serving as facilitators (or blockers). This development gave rise to a third major transformation of how diplomacy would be conducted. At the beginning of the 21st century, diplomacy went digital as the use of new social media fundamentally altered the historically grown (mostly one-way) relationships between diplomacy and its recipients, and significantly broadened the scope of actors using direct communication to advance their objectives.
Whereas public diplomacy could be seen as a reaction to the geopolitical split between East and West, digital diplomacy should be understand as a reaction to the network world in which, as Anne-Marie Slaughter has argued, the measure of power is connectedness. According to this logic, the number of established ties corresponds directly with political leverage. Faced with the chance to advance their objectives through the use of new social media, many internationally operating entities ranging from corporations to international organizations (and even the Taliban in Afghanistan) seized this new opportunity to increase their influence.
As an organization socialized by the secretiveness of the Cold War, NATO also took the initiative and began to reach out to its member state’s societies in communicating its actions through various channels in order to garner support. This embrace of digital diplomacy – more advanced than some approaches to diplomacy of the organization’s founding members – was announced by then Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy Dr. Stefanie Babst in a speech in January 2009. Acknowledging the ultimate precondition for being successful in the network world, NATO dedicated itself to comprehensively “engage, listen, discuss, persuade and ultimately influence others.”
Whereas NATO’s well-equipped Public Diplomacy Division was soon able to technically master the various communication channels provided on the internet, it would at the same time contribute to an overload of information that steadily diminishes the attention span of the recipients of its media operations. In fact, the desired two-way communication that makes social media so attractive reveals itself as an abstract possibility in case its senders and recipients fail to actually engage with each other. In an effort to track down an interested audience, NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division invited bloggers from the United Kingdom (among others from the Royal United Services Institute and The Guardian) as well as from Germany (among others five members of atlantic-community.org) to Brussels in February 2011. Almost unthinkable during the Cold War and precedented only by a similar trip organized by the Atlantic Council of the UK in 2009, this meeting was supposed to fathom “what particular role bloggers could play to enhance two-way communication of key security and defence aspects.”
The meeting turned out to be a mixture of a workshop about post-Lisbon developments, a presentation of NATO’s strategic communication, and a discussion on how it could become more transparent in order to provide bloggers and other parts of the foreign policy community with information that could be used online. In the course of the daylong exchange with senior NATO staff and British and German diplomats, it became apparent that a generational gap is not only running through the recipients but also through the senders of digital diplomacy. Strikingly, the tech-savvy staff from the office of the Secretary General and the Public Diplomacy Division stood in sharp contrast to the members of the national delegations. Moreover, it revealed that an organization still dependent on secrecy and characterized by hierarchy must arduously adapt to the realities of the network world with its free and unfiltered flow of information – similar to the sometimes painful learning curve currently experienced by many governments and the traditional news media.
It seems to be doubtful whether an organization tasked with providing collective security for its member states should be in charge of courting public opinion over highly complex global operations. Especially where the audience is not very prone to listen since it cannot hold NATO to account. Because its missions are ordered, funded, and staffed by national governments, it is their responsibility in the first instance to explain NATO’s adopted policies. While it is understandable that every organization’s foremost goal is to sustain its continued existence, the efforts spent on new social media mark a striking mismatch between input and outcome exemplified by the less than 1600 subscriptions to its sophisticated YouTube channel. Thus, NATO should reevaluate how its particular interests (if congruent with those of all of its member states) could be advanced. By thoroughly examining the prospects and pitfalls associated to the use of new social media as well as by further evaluating feedback and input from selected audiences, NATO could take a significant step in that direction.
Sascha Lohmann is a student of political science at Free University Berlin.
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