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Power for Peace
Track One diplomacy is about men in suits posing before squads of photographers before they disappear behind closed doors for discrete talks. It is also about encoded telexes and email-messages sent back and forth between embassies and government headquarters, evoking a world ruled by formal gentlemen-like codes, imperturbably exposed at press conferences and cocktail parties © By Jos Havermans
Track One diplomacy is the realm of traditional international politics as practised by foreign offices, ambassadors, special envoys and other officials representing governments. More than any other track, traditional diplomacy can play a decisive role in matters of war and peace.
The culture of Track One diplomacy, the traditional form of international politics, is clearly alien to the world of most Non Governmental Organisations and adherents of alternative political ways. However, proponents of unconventional diplomacy do not consider Track One to be inimical to less conventional approaches. All tracks that can lead to peace should be valued, they say, and the world of traditional diplomacy is no exception.
This point of view fits well with the non governmental peace builders’ penchant for harmony and togetherness. It is also born out of pragmatic reasoning. Non-official actors in international politics are as aware as anyone else that the world of Track One diplomacy can exert enormous influence because, generally speaking, it has armies, guns and money at its disposal. Track One, in this sense, is synonymous with power.
Track One diplomacy is indeed suspiciously closely connected to warfare, because, as history books tell us, the same politicians who carry out delicate diplomatic manoeuvres can decide to use force should they prefer to pursue their political goals by other means. But its weight and resources can, of course, also make a difference if used on the side of promoting peace and reconciliation. It is exactly its ability to mobilize vast material resources that constitutes the major potential of Track One diplomacy over other tracks when it comes to going the difficult but rewarding path of conflict prevention, peace building and reconciliation. If politicians of conflicting camps are sincere in their determination to make peace, there will be peace.
The surplus value of Track One over Track Two diplomacy, therefore, is its ability to coerce on the parties in a conflict by directly or indirectly threatening to mobilize its military and financial-economic means. Track One can build up enormous pressure on conflicting parties to pursue a process of negotiation. A prerequisite for this scenario is that Track One actors are willing to intervene as a third party in a foreign conflict in the first place. There are signs that the world of Track One is increasingly receptive to unconventional approaches and collaboration with NGOs, as will be discussed later.
Another advantage of Track One over other tracks is that its actors have direct access to the most important players in a conflict when it comes to forging political agreements. A telling example of what Track One actors can contribute to reconciliation and peace building is the initiative of the Norwegian diplomat Johan Jorgen Holst. Holst discretely contacted Israeli and Palestinian diplomats and hosted secret negotiations in Oslo leading to a breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the signing of the Oslo agreements in 1996.
The impact of Track One diplomacy can be enhanced enormously when its efforts coincide with complementary initiatives taken by Track Two or other non-official tracks of diplomacy. The signing of the ban on landmines in 1998, for instance, is the result of a successful campaign by international NGOs, but the involvement of Track One was obviously indispensable to anchor the agreement and supervise its implementation.
A major difference between Track One and Track Two diplomacy is that the former, although more powerful and affluent, is in many ways more restricted in the scope of its actions than the latter. This is because a conciliatory move by an official governmental actor is intrinsically connected to other national interests. For instance, if a mediatory intervention in a foreign conflict is interpreted as being partisan by one of the relevant parties in a conflict, this could lead to economic boycotts or lack of support in international fora for the intervening country concerned. NGOs could also suffer a backlash as a result of intervening in a conflict, but generally speaking they can damage nothing but themselves on the mediating side. An official diplomat or institution, on the other hand, represents an entire nation and its interests and is putting these interests at stake in any intervention.
In democracies, Track One Diplomacy’s scope of action may be further limited due considerations of accountability and restrictive regulations of the legislature. Actors in other tracks usually have more freedom to act swiftly and try new approaches.
Track One diplomacy does have its weaknesses. The world of diplomats is said to have insufficient awareness of relevant expertise about international relations, peace and conflict resolution that resides outside the diplomatic community. Another peculiar characteristic of Track One is that commitment to a process of negotiation is often seen as a sign of weakness by political leaders. One of the most striking flaws of the official diplomatic world, however, is its lack of professional negotiation skills. In many countries, most formal negotiators are known to be still operating without training other than their own experience and intuition. As negotiations are becoming increasingly complex, in an increasingly interdependent and multipolar world, professional negotiation training would be a sensible attribute for all diplomats, McDonald and other advocates of multi-track diplomacy say.
In spite of its weaknesses, Track One actors have become more receptive to peace building, conflict prevention, early warning and similar concepts. In a remarkable move for actors who tend to base their behaviour on the traditional considerations of power politics, an increasing number of national governments has become susceptible to the ideas of conflict prevention and peace building. Belief in the feasibility of alternative approaches is also gaining ground among international organisations and local governments, two other categories that are classified in the Track One category.
In this respect Canada is at the forefront among national governments. Ottawa declared in 1996 that it wanted to set an example to the leadership of the international community by increasing its investment in peace building. It announced a comprehensive peace building strategy, consisting of support to non governmental peace organisations and plans to prepare government agencies, including the armed forces, for tasks in the field of peace building, conflict management, mediation and the like. In September 1997 the Canadian Peace building Program was set up within the Department of Foreign Affairs, giving the new approach a solid place in Canada’s Track One diplomacy.
Great Britain’s Conservative government decided in 1996 to embrace alternatives to traditional diplomacy, including conflict prevention. London sent its entire foreign aid staff to conflict awareness courses and allocated 1 million pounds to pilot projects in conflict resolution. The present Labour government is continuing on this road.
The left-leaning social democrat administration in Germany, which took office in 1998, has also expressed its commitment to conflict prevention and peace building. Other countries that have already begun to invest significantly in peace building include The Netherlands, Sweden and Norway.
National governments’ commitment to peace building is often implemented indirectly, through support to organisations specializing in Track Two approaches. This form of collaboration and coordination between official foreign affairs and non governmental actors is warmly welcomed by most ‘alternative’ negotiators and peace builders. Complementarity comes into play here. Mutual additionality of Track One and Track Two diplomacy is considered to be of crucial importance to create synergy between the two.
In some cases of Track One contributions to peace making, governments can build on domestic conciliatory traditions. For instance, the initiatives taken by the government of Mali to defuse the deep rooted tension between nomads and sedentary groups in the 1990s -a case which is discussed later in this volume- is in many ways an example of such an approach. On March 27, 1996, President Konaré, Ghanaian President Jerry Rawlings, and leaders of the Mali rebel movements and a large delegation of international observers gathered in Timbuktu for the highly symbolic destruction of all the surrendered armaments in what was called a ‘Flame of Peace’, to celebrate a peace process initiated by Konaré and hailed as ‘visionary’. Here, the Mali government succeeded in motivating local leaders and communities to get a national peace process going.
The growing consensus on the feasibility of peace building and conflict prevention is also visible in multinational organisations. The United Nations, for whom peacemaking is its major mandate, has spent most of the 1990s redefining its mission to include coping with internal conflicts. The Agenda for Peace, published in 1992, was the starting point for this adjustment and notwithstanding its numerous failures to stem violence, the UN is still working to improve its peacemaking abilities. Its early warning capacity, a prerequisite for any timely action to control an upcoming conflict, is said to have definitively improved. In theory, the UN has huge peace building capacities because it has the potential to bundle the resources and expertise of powerful member states. In practice, the organisation’s abilities are, sometimes fatally, limited by disagreement or the member states’ lack of political will of member states, especially the permanent members of the Security Council.
In Africa, the consensus about conflict management since the early 1990s was captured in the institutional framework of the OAU’s Mechanism on Conflict Prevention Management Resolution. This Mechanism is mandated to develop an approach to peace building for both internal and intrastate crises. So far, however, the OAU’s new Mechanism has played a limited role. The OAU was still overtaken by violent events in the 1990s, a failure that can be attributed to its limited resources and staffing. But the OAU did send special envoys to several hotbeds to make attempts at mediation. In Congo-Brazzaville, this helped bring about an accord that temporarily stopped the use of violence in that country. In Burundi the UN representative forged a political agreement in 1994, which at that time defused tensions in the country. The OAU also deployed a monitory mission in Burundi, but this intervention is widely regarded as being of limited effect.
The Organisation of American States (OAS) has shown a much more modest commitment to the field of peace building and conflict management. It declared a form of interest in the field however with the establishment of the so-called ‘Santiago Mechanism’, an agreement on taking swift collective action in case of coup-attempts in any of of the member countries.
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has developed one of the most effective structures of conflict management. A large portion of its early warning, early action and mediation capacity has been put in the hands of one individual, the High Commissioner on National Minorities. This official, whose function is to detect of ethnic tension in Eastern Europe, has been allowed a large amount of personal initiative. The silent but persistent interventions of the first OSCE High Commissioner, Max van der Stoel, a soft spoken Dutch diplomat, are highlighted in this section of this volume. He scored several successes in defusing upcoming ethnic conflict in countries such as Estonia and Rumania.
The personal peace-making qualities of Van der Stoel are matched outside Europe by former US president Jimmy Carter. Formally working as a non-official mediator, Carter’s intervention on government level could be dubbed One-and-a-half Track Diplomacy. He managed to get peace processes going on a governmental level on several occasions. The Carter Center’s intervention in Korea, described later in this book, taught the former president once again that Track One’s confrontational tendency in dealing with political crises is often counter productive. Carter observed that the tendency towards imposing sanctions in international crises cuts off openings to communication. ‘Nations rarely achieve their goals this way,’ he commented flatly. Meanwhile, Carter’s ability to change politicians’ attitude also illustrates that Track One diplomacy is susceptible to arguments from outside of its own realm.
Openness to innovation and unconventional approaches are also breaking ground in the most modest section of Track One diplomacy: local government. New forms of international cooperation between local governments are emerging. These activities, especially those sustained by long-term ties between cities in different parts of the world, can also contribute to enhancing peace and reconciliation. While the flaws of local governments’ actions are being taken into consideration (amateurs in the international realm could do a lot of damage), the potential of local authorities in the quest for peace increasingly gain recognition. The peace process in Tuzla furnishes some compelling examples of what local governments can accomplish. Personal commitment and colleague-to-colleague contacts are key factors in the success of peace building and municipal international cooperation has extensive experience with this strategy.
Some of the cases that are presented below may not fit in the Track One category in every detail. Given that, reality can never be completely made to conform with a schematic straitjacket, the editors took the freedom to take a pragmatic approach. Jimmy Carter is not a government official, but his reconciliatory efforts are exclusively aimed at the highest governmental circles and his stature as a mediator is to a large part derived from his personal experience as president of the United States, the world’s top Track One position. The Mali peace process has been an undiluted governmental initiative, despite the fact that its implementation unfolded partly through actions by local communities. The Tuzla peace initiative also shows the sign of a mixture of actors but is nevertheless interpreted as having its centre of gravity in local governmental circles. The OSCE and UNESCO reconciliation activities are Track One in its purest form.
Conflict Prevention & Post-Conflict Reconstruction - Perspectives and Prospects. The World Bank, Post-Conflict Unit, Social Development Department, August 1998
Guidelines for Newcomers to Track Two Diplomacy, John W. McDonald. Occasional Paper no. 2, Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy, Washington, D.C., November 1993
Inter-governmental Organizations and Preventing Conflicts - Political Practice Since the End of the Cold War, Klaas van Walraven. In: K. van Walraven (ed.), Early Warning and Conflict Prevention: Limitations and Possibilities, Kluwer Law International, The Netherlands, 1998.
Preventing Deadly Conflict - Final report of the Carnegy Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. Carnegy Corporation of New York, 1997
The General Principles of Multi-Track Diplomacy, Kumar Rupesinghe. ACCORD, South Africa, 1997
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