This column was in Brazil last week, including a stop in its carefully curated capital, Brasilia, whose architect, Oscar Niemeyer, had lent his hands and mind to the design of the United Nations Headquarters in New York, a city which, three years ago, was home to the first “International Day of Diplomats”, proposed by an Indian diplomat stationed there, Abhay K, chosen aptly to coincide with United Nations Day on October 24 to celebrate, in his phrase, the women and men “at the heart of bringing and keeping the world together.”
That world, as seen from Egypt in 1360 BC, extended to its representatives in Canaan and Amurru, and immediately adjacent kingdoms and the “Amarna letters” they exchanged , in history’s earliest recorded diplomatic correspondence. Letters with vivid imagery ("...when an ant is pinched, does it not fight back and bite the hand of the man that struck it?”) suggesting the possibilities of conversation and negotiation over war and force, the beginnings of the art of diplomacy, if “art” is the word one should use, noting what Ambassador Kishan Rana of the DiploFoundation suggests when he writes “unlike chartered accountancy or the practice of law, diplomacy is not recognized as a profession, despite the fact that diplomats need specialized and increasingly deep skill sets.” That said, universities , including many UNAI members, have suggested a congruence between studies in diplomacy and those in “international relations”, a discipline itself just over a century old since it emerged in a post-Versailles League of Nations world in 1919 at Aberystwyth University in Wales.
But while “diplomacy” may not be a discipline in itself, it lends itself to exercise in completely distinct environments, bringing in practitioners who may not be career diplomats and, equally, demanding of those who have chosen it as a profession its continuous iteration in fresh and unexpected forms. At the triennial conference of the International Association of University Presidents in 2005, hosted by the genial and ever smiling President of UNAI member Siam University Pornchai Mongkhonvanit, President J.Michael Adams of Fairleigh Dickinson University in the United States spoke of the possibilities of “academic diplomacy”, just a few years before President Obama named the Dean of the Fletcher School as the United States Special Representative for North Korea Policy and two years after the American Association of State Colleges and Universities sent its first presidential mission abroad - to Cuba. Siam University has itself launched a Master’s Programme in “peace studies and diplomacy” aimed to a “new global society with a new paradigm of attaining, promoting and maintaining peace and social well-being through diplomacy”, its annual observance of the International Day of Peace, orchestrated by the gentle and cheer bringing Yhing Sawheny, unites Bangkok’s diplomatic corps with students and faculty at the university.
That it was in Bangkok that Michael floated the idea has its own resonance, twenty two years earlier the city had witnessed another form of diplomacy, difficult to capture in single adjective, chess player like in its courage and daring, childlike in its hope and faith. As Ambassador Alexander Karchava writes in an article on the 120th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Russia and Thailand commemorated a few weeks ago (a remarkable milestone in its own right, and in the ten Buddhist cycles the figure of 120 represents), he was first assigned to his country’s embassy in Bangkok in 1973 when an armed group seized the Israeli embassy there but “the Thai authorities managed to end the siege without loss of life. I remember clearly when deputy prime minister Air Chief Marshal Thavi Chulasab arrived at the besieged embassy and offered himself in exchange for the Israeli diplomats. The eventual success of his diplomatic mission was down to determination, earnestness and the readiness to risk “soft” power rather than solving the crisis with weaponry.”
I thought of that unique exercise in diplomacy when I heard last year of the passing of Virachai Plasai, who had served with distinction as Thailand’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations. While he will be remembered as a keen and purposeful chair of the “G77”, he will be even more so as the convener, with his staff , of a rock band “Thaiphoon” in which he was the lead guitarist, and at times beater of drums (and at whose one memory worthy performance US Ambassador Samantha Power rendered an impromptu Eye of the Tiger), a celebration of what many described as a unique and utterly welcome "music diplomacy.” (Come to think of it, the pivotal lines in Eye have a resonance for diplomats everywhere – “Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past, you must fight just to keep them alive.)
If career diplomats can invoke art to their cause , so too can artists bring their creativity to the connection which is diplomacy’s invariable premise; the lovely illustration accompanying this comes from “Paintbrush Diplomacy” “exploring and exchanging ideas and experiences locally and globally” much as the twenty first century United Nations tries to do, including through the art its postage stamps invariably inspire. Launched, like the United Nations and the International Day of Diplomats , on October 24, its seventieth anniversary coming up next year, the UN Postal Administration, headed by Thanawat Amnajanan from Thailand, issues stamps with “universal themes that I think everybody can appreciate,” as philatelist Greg Galletti says, a phrase so summative of multilateral diplomacy itself.
And, indeed, “person to person” diplomacy whose range of “universal” possibilities open to a career diplomat were captured vividly by India’s ambassador in Bangkok, Anil Wadhwa, in 2012 where in a space of a few weeks Thai audiences joined the centenary celebrations of Indian Cinema in October, a screening of mega audience Indian films at the Bangkok Film Festival, an India-ASEAN Car Rally racing across nine countries of the Association of Southeast Asian nations , an Indian Food Festival in the Thai capital in November, a literary event at UNAI member Chulalongkorn University celebrating three acclaimed Indian writers and culminating in an event in December pairing businessmen from Thailand with those from northeast India. This in a year which began with the visit of Thailand’s Prime Minster, Yingluck Shinawatra, to India’s Republic Day celebrations, shaping and extending the seclusion of summit diplomacy to the energetically popular within a twelve-month span.
Thinking of career diplomats brings to mind a legendary ambassador who scoured the halls of the United Nations looking for meetings in progress so that he could join and “intervene” on virtually any subject that was being discussed , blessed as he was by Wikipedian wisdom as much as a Britannican brawn. There was the day when a committee was negotiating a resolution to declare an “International Year of Sustainable Gastronomy” and the electronic placard outside the room missed the all-important letter “G” in the last word. Sure enough, he made his customary grand entrance, asked for the floor to speak and in masterful breadth of style and space invoked Copernicus, Galileo and Carl Sagan in passionate plea to make astronomy sustainable.
Mistakes, happy and less so, are the legend of diplomacy, adding their own layer to its profession and calling. When I revisited Bangkok a couple of years after the Triennial, I called Pornchai to ask if he might be free to meet; he immediately and gracefully suggested dinner the day I arrived. I reached the restaurant that evening to find a galaxy (truly sustainable astronomy again) of university presidents and professors to welcome me. Pornchai looked taken aback for a splinter of a second and then introduced me to everyone, some of whose puzzlement lasted marginally longer. I was fortunate to have a gregarious neighbour at the dinner table, who explained to me that Pornchai had mistaken my name when I called for that of Ramos-Horta and had summoned the stars to meet the Timor Leste statesman and Nobel Laureate, who had also been at the Triennial.
In his poem on Bangkok, Abhay K captures a vivid image of machines talking down to humans, and the ensuing thought, by implication, that it falls upon humans to look up to each other , as diplomacy premises us to do. Oscar Niemeyer spoke of having created his architecture “with courage and idealism, but also with an awareness of the fact that what is important is life, friends and attempting to make this unjust world a better place in which to live, " an importance inherent in the International Day which Abhay launched, importance whose wisdom I reflected upon, that dinner evening with Pornchai, sustained by gastronomy at its most splendid and sustainable, and the life and laughter around me of strangers who proved to be friends I had not met before.
Ramu Damodaran
Chief, United Nations Academic Impact