How diplomacy can make a world of a difference

I LIKED the Washington Post headline for its reflections on the 2000s: "The decade we didn't see coming." From hanging chads to the election of Obama; from a healthy budget surplus to a deficit measured in trillions; the flooding of New Orleans, the near collapse of the financial system, the inexorable rise of Google. Not to mention 9/11 and the two wars it sparked that remain unfinished as the decade turns. It has been quite a ride.

None of this was foreseen as we danced-in the new millennium across the globe and Y2K was beaten. As the Post put it: "History is always catching America off guard."

The same is true closer to home. Which is one of the motivations behind a new project from Chatham House on "the changing dynamics of global power and influence" over the next 20 years, against which background the UK – and Scotland – must calibrate its own "international ambitions and choices".

I attended one of the project working groups late last year. The discussion made clear to me that we may well be at a crux point for the conduct of international relations. It feels like a classic moment of disruption: the existing system is failing, the new system is emerging, and we are faced with a dilemma about which system to back for the longer term.

The existing order's waning power is obvious.

There have been calls to reform the United Nations, the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other bodies for decades. Those calls have become more urgent with the rise of new powers. But change is still horribly slow.

Too slow to keep up with pressing global dilemmas. The US National Intelligence Council call this incremental scenario "Borrowed Time". We will struggle to address the challenges that confront us and "leave an imperfect or flawed legacy to future generations".

At Brookings, Alex Evans and David Steven have written more specifically about the UN climate-change negotiations post-Copenhagen. They worry that the best we can expect from existing processes is "A Multilateral Zombie", "in which the process staggers on piteously, never making much progress, while never quite dying either, like the Doha round of world trade negotiations before it".

So business as usual holds little promise. But the alternative seems fanciful: the world finally gets its collective act together, real institutional reform occurs, new powers take their rightful place at the table and "A New Multipolarity" is born, to quote a British government scenario for 2020.

How plausible is that, given recent history and the requirement for so many existing powerful turkeys to vote for Christmas? Will it be wise for us to invest our precious foreign policy resources in such an unlikely goal, given the high risk that it will result instead in "slow motion failure"?

What most of these studies miss, and what sparked the most interesting exchanges in the Chatham House working group, is the phenomenon of emergence.

Generations of international strategists have drawn a clear distinction between order and chaos. But our new understanding of how order emerges in often surprising ways as a property of dynamic, complex systems offers another view.

Consider this. Ad-hockery is everywhere. Within the UN system the G20 has emerged as an unofficial ad-hoc leadership grouping. In the EU "variable geometry" amounts to the same thing. There is greater freedom for powers to form ad-hoc alliances: the Basic alliance at Copenhagen (Brazil, America, South Africa, India, China), the G2 of China and the USA, Sarkozy of all people attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in advance of Copenhagen, and so on.

On top of this there are numerous regional and sub-regional groupings. And international alliances based on little more than personal chemistry. Nothing is against the rules. As one participant at Chatham House put it: the landscape today is a "hopeless confusion".

And this might be our greatest hope. Ashby's law of requisite variety states that any system of management must be at least as diverse as the system it seeks to regulate. If the world is getting more complex, so should the international "order".

And what is required to turn this into a "hopeful confusion" are precisely the skills, talents, experience and capacity that are traditional UK foreign policy strengths. As one senior former diplomat put it, we know how to provide structure to a process, in a subtle way, to manage a complex negotiation through to a conclusion. We know how to deliver: to make sure a text is agreed, that ducks are in a row, that intentions are realised in boring bureaucratic follow through. And we know how to read complexity: we have been playing this global game for a lot longer than most and strategic thinking is in our DNA.

I believe we saw these strengths played out by Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and the rest of the UK delegation at Copenhagen – in exceedingly difficult circumstances.

These skills are recognised in the international arena. At our best we are known for being "artful and constructive" in international negotiations, while others can be single-minded, hard-headed, destructive, muddlers or meddlers.

It seems to me that this quality over the coming decade will be extraordinarily valuable. It requires a broader view of "national interest" that goes beyond national borders and beyond the term of a single government. And, as the Chatham House discussion acknowledged, it will need a political and policy class much better acquainted with a mindset more at home in a complex, emergent world. This will draw us closer to an eastern view of strategy: not as intervention, but as a superior ability to read the landscape. This is the goal of the true master: to win the battle without fighting.

These are big themes – but we are in another big decade. To be artful, constructive and at home in an emerging landscape are significant and worthy goals for all of us, at any scale, in any policy area. Scotland too should take note.

• Graham Leicester is director of the International Futures Forum.