Jonathan Clarke Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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It sounds like the choice of the diplomatic service, the foreign service of Great Britain, was natural for you, having been in all these places and actually been raised in Hong Kong.
Yes, it was. It was something I was interested in from an early stage, and something which I thought I would try out for throughout my career at Oxford, having seen the international stage from early life. I did want to play a part in it as a career.
What do you think are the skills and the temperament required to be a diplomat?
There's an old joke about diplomacy. The art of diplomacy is telling somebody to go to hell and making him look forward to the journey. There are two aspects there. The first aspect is that you're there to defend the interests of your country. You're there to represent the person who's sending you abroad, to advance, in my case, British interests, to make sure that they flourish as best as possible. That in a sense is the hard part, that's the cutting edge of it.
The second part which you might call the soft aspect is the ability to persuade, is the ability to take your interests and make them the interests of the party to whom you're talking, to make them see, "Ah yes, well, the British want to go in that direction. Well, that sounds like a good idea." To persuade them, in other words, whether it is or not against their interests. So, on one hand, you're standing up for your own country, standing up for what their needs are, and secondly, you're trying to listen, you're trying to work with the people to whom you're accredited.
A sense of the history and culture of both where you're coming from and where you're going as a diplomat must be terribly important.
Absolutely, yes. There's not a lot of point in disdaining the culture of the place that you're sent to. If you don't know anything about Nigerian culture, you're going to be unhappy in Nigeria. If you don't know the local language, if you're out of sympathy with where they're coming from; in other words, you're probably not going to be a particularly successful diplomat.
One thing you have to be a little bit careful of is being so-called "captured" by the local culture. This does happen sometimes, you almost end up where you're seen by the capital as being turned by the host government, and you're suddenly becoming an advocate of the host government's interests back to London or back to Washington. And that's something -- "clientitis," it's called -- that you have to be a little bit careful of. But an absolute understanding and familiarity with the local culture is a complete requirement.
This dilemma of your home port, so to speak, your home base, the country that you're representing, having ideas about what should be done which are inconsistent with the realities on the ground, must recur again and again, I assume.
Absolutely. I mean, the experience in my career was that in Zimbabwe I was part of the British team that was at the Lancaster House Conference which brought then-Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, independence.
These are the negotiations led by Lord Carrington? [link]
Exactly, yes.
Who was a guest on our program twenty years ago.
A very fine man, indeed. I think that was a tremendous triumph of diplomacy and very much illustrates the point that I was making before, that Lord Carrington had a very clear idea of the destination that we wanted to arrive at, and he had tremendous patience and negotiating skills to persuade what was really a very difficult audience in Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Nkomo, Ian Smith, Muzarewa, to accept our ideas. By the way, there was also a little crossfire from President Carter at the time, who didn't fully line up behind some of the British ideas.
But to come back to Zimbabwe, I was in the British embassy, we call it the High Commission, in Zimbabwe. We faced precisely that dilemma: to try and transmit to the new government of Zimbabwe our ideas about where they should go was a very finely balanced thing indeed, because the new government naturally enough wanted to show its independence from Britain. In a sense, it felt it had been fighting against Britain throughout the civil war, and Mr. Mugabe himself is a difficult character to deal with. He was difficult even then in 1980. And to portray the advice that you were giving as disinterested, genuine advice, rather than neocolonial lecturing, was something which I'm afraid we didn't always get right, and perhaps there were faults on both sides. But anyway, the communications broke down fairly rapidly on exactly that point.
You mean after Zimbabwe had its independence?
Precisely, yes. The British government at that stage had a variety of interests, but what we really wanted was to make sure that the transition was a smooth and stable one and that the new government of Zimbabwe was able to take advantage of what we saw were the tremendous resources available to it, both natural resources and human resources, all of which required a moderate type of social market democracy. Mr. Mugabe himself came from a rather different background of where his education -- he is a very highly educated person, has three advanced degrees -- but his education was much more in line with Marxist economic systems. Therefore we were trying, if at all possible, to steer him away from that approach which had been tried, as we saw it, disastrously elsewhere in Africa -- in Tanzania, in Ghana -- and we were trying to say, "Well, now it's 1980, those systems have been tried. Let's try something different." But of course, he would say, "We're in charge now." So, that was the sort of dilemma that we faced and it wasn't an easy trick to pull off.
And the outcome today is not a positive one. But what you're suggesting is that it's difficult to see places like Zimbabwe as fitting some grand formula. I guess Zimbabwe has been listed as one of the outposts of tyranny, and things are very bad there. But it sounds like one has to take into account the peculiarities of its history and of its leadership to understand the disaster that it has become.
That's right. I'm afraid Zimbabwe is -- I don't think anybody would find it easy to say a good word about what has happened today. It really is a terrible tragedy because Zimbabwe was a country highly endowed particularly with human resources. When the Gold Coast became independent in 1960, the first of the British colonies in Africa to gain independence, there was, believe it or not, one African graduate, just one. In Zimbabwe there were many thousands, people educated in the United States, educated in Britain, France, Germany, many of whom flooded back to Zimbabwe hoping to contribute to what they saw as successful evolution, and I'm afraid that their inputs were shunned. It does indicate the point that you were making, that leadership, the personality of the leader, is very, very important indeed, and the British were, I'm afraid, not successful in keeping Mr. Mugabe on the path of moderation.
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See the Lord Carrington interview (1984)