04 March 2006
The past is another country, they say, and it is hard to find your way back. What they don't tell you is that if you carry a diplomatic passport you can pretty well forget ever crossing that particular frontier again.
Making sense of life is hard enough. But making sense of a diplomatic life led in a dozen different places can be impossible. It doesn't matter if you are an ambassador in Washington or a third secretary in Ouagadougou such are the repeated curtailments and displacements of normal existence that it becomes hard to link postings, those disassociated segments of diplomatic life, into a single, coherent whole. Nor are postings taken one by one any easier to deal with. You may tell yourself that you are living in ?A?Beijing or Bratislava or Tehran but in a sense it does not really matter where you are on the diplomatic circuit everywhere is a temporary place peopled by similarly uprooted wanderers with a vision of the past and future as truncated as your own.
In fact, the country you have actually ended up in is a never-never land, cut off from all real countries by yet another state your own state of mind. It is the toughest of places, for from here there is no going home at all.
Is this the beginning of a spoiled whine? Surely the gypsy life of the foreign service officer cannot really be quite as disruptive as all that. Few would deny that discontinuity is part of the job. But don't the privileges and perks the garden parties and official cars and domestic servants, the private schools and children's gymkhanas more than make up for a little family inconvenience?
My own life growing up in embassies around the world did not convince me they do.
I come from a snowy northern capital. One day when I was small my parents, who until then seemed more or less reasonable people, informed my brother and sister and me that we were packing up and moving to Vietnam. A few weeks later the icicles and shovelled snowbanks of Ottawa were gone, replaced by humid tropical vegetation, revolving ceiling fans and a colonial Saigon villa. I went to a ?A?jardin d'enfants with French children, learned from the servants how to squat on my hams and spit great distances and took to copiously dousing everything I ate with nouc mam. It was a new but reasonable existence and I was ready enough to settle down to it for ever.
It didn't stay reasonable. From that point on existence began to be dished out in two and three year dollops and nothing ever remained the same.
Somewhere in me there must be a streak of American, for we had a stint in New York. Larger parts of me are African. By the age of 12, at the height of the apartheid era, I was being caned in public school manner at an all-white Cape Town boarding school that preferred to imagine itself still in the Dickensian age. By 17 I was cruising the troubled streets of Addis Ababa in a metallic green Ford Mustang with diplomatic plates even as Haile Selassie's doomed imperial regime teetered and fell.
Who could go back to a fusty and frozen northern city after growing up like that? Who, after that, could go back to any steady or conventional life at all?
On finally returning home I discovered it wasn't home at all. Ottawa never took I did not stay because impermanence and a sense of foreignness had themselves become permanent. It is not an unpleasing way of seeing the world there are lives and professions, journalism among them, that can accommodate even the most vagrant of habits. But when I encounter those with an unquestioning satisfaction in their own rootedness they seem fewer and fewer these days I wonder what it is I have missed.
More recently I have wondered if by now modern life has not radically transformed the diplomatic business. It should have. For it has altered everything else the workplace and relations in it, men's and women's professional expectations, the concepts of marriage and family.
In the age of ego-satisfaction and high private-sector salaries we question even our most basic values. Are today's bright young people willing to sacrifice personal ambition and lifestyle in the service of that nebulous concept, national interest overseas?
I was not up to speed. I was not even sure if diplomats still wore top hats and striped trousers to present their credentials, as my father did for all I knew chinos and deck shoes were now part of a more relaxed diplomatic ethic. I decided to bring myself up to date. Who better to ask, I thought, than a mandarin not long ago in charge of protocol at that repository of diplomatic tradition, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office?
No, no, Robin Gorham assured me from his home in south-west France, chinos and deck shoes have not yet made it into formal diplomatic circles. But just about every other innovation has. Gorham, who saw postings on four continents before retiring as chief of protocol in London, told me modern diplomacy would be barely recognizable to earlier generations.
"Technology alone has transformed the business," he said. "There used to be a lot more responsibility on post. Nowadays communications are instantaneous and important matters are referred to London. In the past you had to think for yourself, especially in non-OECD countries, where coups could, and did, take place overnight."
If London was au fait with world events even as they happened it made me wonder if there was any point at all in maintaining overseas missions. Had the actual work itself changed, I asked? The aims remain the same. What has changed, it appears, is the style of work.
"These days there is much more emphasis on management," Gorham replied. "It may not be more efficient but it is certainly more intense. Sometimes it is overwhelming. Planning, cost projection, administration it used to be instinctive; now it is systematized; much more formal. My superior in West Germany used to tell me to get out of the office and go to have coffee in the Bonn marketplace. It was very good advice. Today there is much less diplomacy on the ground and much more time spent before a desk. And you are expected to do far more with far fewer personnel."
And what about entertainment the formal dinners, the endless cocktail round, the pinching of the Italian ambassador's cook by the higher?A?-paying French? Had that kind of thing gone by the board too?
"Ah!" said Gorham, brightening up. "No, that's still there . . . and it's more important than ever. I used to think I was in the hotel and restaurant business but making contact with people is the life and soul of diplomacy. The rub these days is that costs are extremely carefully monitored."
No public organization, of course, is exempt from scrutiny of its ledgers. And there is no one more finicky about financial accountability nowadays than the Americans. So I rang Mireille Luc, the French wife of a recently retired American ambassador. Is counting the pennies as tedious as all that, I asked?
"Sometimes it is," she admitted. "I have often found myself in the kitchen at midnight, tired and still dressed in a formal evening gown, pawing through garbage trying to find a missing bottle. It gets even more stringent than that. Before official parties we marked bottle labels with pencils in order to know exactly how much we could claim back on our expenses. Every last thing has to be itemised and accounted for."
It sounded like a lot of work, I suggested. Was organizing dinners, acting as tour guide for official visitors and being a social secretary paid work? No, I learn, the practice is still "two for the price of one". If husbands receive post allowances, the long hours put in by diplomatic wives are still to their growing frustration an unspoken part of the job. Not only is the work unpaid; the burden of entertaining is sometimes so heavy that larger, more prestigious posts are out of the reach of US State Department career diplomats they involve so much expense they are taken on only by independently wealthy presidential appointees.
But surely, I insisted, there are social pleasures as well as duties.
Of course there are, Mme Luc agreed it all depends how curious, outgoing and adaptable you are. "When we arrived in Cairo from Paris it was a nightmare at first. There is no transition from one post to another; the things we took for granted just disappeared; there were no telephone books, no street maps or signs, no cheque books. Even the guest list we inherited from our predecessors was horrible; suddenly I was feeding strangers who were far more interested in a second shot at the buffet table than they were in me."
The former teacher was so lonely in Cairo that she took up teaching French again, even if, as a local recruite, her salary was lower than that of her internationally hired colleagues. She quit teaching when she made Egyptian friends painters, antiques dealers and art collectors and had a marvellous time.
She lost them when her husband was posted on to Doha, a Gulf capital so small and restricted that its circle of diplomatic wives was the only one open to her. "They became my sisters," she said. Then they, too, were gone. Can you stay married to a diplomat and remain happy at the same time? It is the question of spouses' employment that currently poses the greatest stumbling block in diplomatic family life. Most diplomats' wives are university trained and have careers of their own these days; many are loath to leave home for some distant spot where they are uncertain of pursuing their professions.
In developed countries reciprocal agreements are now usually in place in exchange for their surrender of diplomatic immunity spouses are permitted to work locally. In developing countries, however, the employment of non-nationals in a limited job market is a sensitive issue and often impossible. The result can be the sacrifice of a spouse's career, and sometime later on a marriage that ends in breakdown. Divorce rates in all foreign services are high, says Luc.
Matters can be that much more complex when the diplomat's spouse is a man. Alex Fieglar was a young lieutenant colonel in the Canadian air force when he was sent on a peace-keeping mission to central America. He was fully expecting to go on to a high-level military career but there he met a Canadian diplomat and instead became what he calls a "mail-order husband".
Today his wife is Canadian ambassador to Havana. When he arrived in Cuba, he told me, he found it difficult defining himself as "the husband of the ambassador". You begin to think of yourself, he remarked, as your wife's employer thinks of you - "the dependant". More irksome still was his exclusion, as a male, from the Havana diplomatic spouses' club - he finds it "amazing that diplomats who uphold and advocate in favour of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would allow discrimination on the basis of gender".
Apart from a crisis of identity, the decision to abandon a career in favour of a spouse's carries high financial costs, Fieglar points out. Discounting hardship and incentive allowances, his family's income has diminished by about half. Diplomatic spouses also usually lose the right to contribute to pension plans, he says, and are liable to pay social insurance premiums without being able to benefit from them.
Potential conflicts of interest made it impossible for Fieglar to become a military attache in Havana and the Canadian military has made it clear that he stands no chance of ever being promoted again.
But no one denies that the entry of women into diplomacy has brought positive changes, particularly for women themselves. Elizabeth Thornhill, US cultural affairs officer in Cairo, was one of the first women to enter American diplomacy as an unmarried mother and, with the help of a domestic staff, brought up her children single handed on post.
Now married, she and her husband form a diplomatic "tandem couple" one of the accommodations made by diplomatic personnel departments anxious to maintain high-quality recruitment. Both have worked in Egypt but it can actually be an advantage in this part of the globe, Thornhill holds, to be a woman. "A feminine viewpoint," she says, "brings with it a stronger empathy for others, a quality that makes the job of developing ties easier."
But in the end the ties that are the toughest of all to maintain are those between the children of diplomats and the people and places they have left behind. Boarding school is no longer the sole, often-distressing option it sometimes used to be, says Gareth Vaughn, director of the Washington International School in Washington, DC. About a quarter of the students there have parents working in diplomatic posts, the UN or the World Bank part or complete payment of children's tuition costs is today included in any good diplomatic employment package.
"The growth of an international education system, with worldwide standards and a universally recognized international baccalaureate," he told me, "means that children can now travel most of the globe with their parents with much less disruption. Growing up in a thriving 'intermediate culture', they sometimes have an advantage over their more isolated parents".
Children get over change. The real problems can come, Vaughn continued, when the moves end, when the stimulation of a vibrant multicultural experience is over and kids return home to a regular environment. Some take it in their stride and use their experience to build interesting lives and their own international careers. Others can fail to adapt, either educationally or socially, and end up never knowing quite where they belong.
Is it worth, for the sake of a diplomatic life, taking on what are obviously big risks with careers, marriages and children's futures? On the face of it the answer must be "no".
And yet the funny thing is that no one I spoke to would have had it any other way. Diplomatic life today may be more bureaucratic, more physically risky and less glamorous than it used to be. No matter from all countries almost everyone in the business maintains that the sacrifices and inconveniences are well worth a life of variety and personal challenge.
In Britain, the allure of foreign service seems as strong as anywhere. Foreign Office figures speak for future generations of diplomats in 2002 more than half its recruits were women and 14 per cent were of minority ethnic origin. Family friendly policies may have something to do with it. In the small UK mission in Bratislava, for example, the ambassador is Judith Macgregor. Forty kilometres down the road, her husband, John Macgregor, is the UK ambassador in Vienna. They usually manage to spend weekends together in one capital or another. There is no lack of back up when Mrs Macgregor is away. There are in fact two UK deputy heads of mission in Bratislava working four months on and four months off, both Caroline Davidson and her husband Tom Carter are able to pursue careers and raise their family at the same time.
Far from the sophistication of mittel-Europe, what about that northern capital and its frozen snowbanks? Would I really have preferred it to a life of constant wander and change? An unfortunate and continuing taste for nuoc mam aside, I wouldn't have it any other way myself.
By Nick Woodsworth
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