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Inside the Foreign Office
Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso
- GenresNonfiction
338 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 12, 2019
Fascinating as a kind of dual-view historical document.
Written in 1992, after the fall of the Cold War and the first Gulf War but before 9/11, this book looks back on the Foreign Office for about thirty years from the 60's through to the 90's.
This was written around the highpoint of 90's liberalism so its a fascinating look into the world-view of that time.
It feels a much fluffier world, which certainly it must not have seemed to be then but in comparison this book has a vague sense of the inevitability of bureaucratic western liberalism essentially taking over everything.
The most interesting and resonant parts are the fragmentary personality portraits and microdramas which take the parade of Foreign Secretaries, who do seem to be near visually identical, and transforms them into a kallaidoscope of unique personalities.
The presence of humanis in history is well-noted. In 1987 a major diplocmatic incident with Iran begins when the Iranian Vice-Consul steals a purse and a few pairs of socks from a shop (total value £7.75) and runs away from the police. This escalates to the point where the number two at the british Embassy in Iran is driven off the road with his wife in the car and abducted.
One who, oddly, sticks out, is Douglas Hurd. An amazingly boring man, at least domestically, but who's deep, or at least coherent long-term relationship with, and ability to tolerate, Thatcher, makes him a major figure. His boringness here valourised as a vital quality, considering the amount of times that it is absolutely necessary that the Foreign Secretary says something and also vital that he says nothing.
The Foreign Office seems to be a rather strange place, an intensely elitist institution which sometimes nearly lives up to its elite reputation, and one that, in a sense, seems to have its own view of the world, and its own slow policy goals, specifically, the slow union of nations through mutual membership in treaties, supra-national organisations and combinations.
The tug of war between Prime Ministers and the FO seems to be eternal. The FO is convinced that it is the only organisation which really understands what is going on, and it does seem to be highly intelligent, it also at times seems not to understand at all how the machinery of the world works.
Its an amazingly soft institution (on discovering that the Russian Embassy had not dozens, but hundreds of spies in the UK, the FO were very worried about expelling them because it would make Britain look bad and provoke an extreme response from the Russians) which seems to believe that nation states exist mainly to provide places for Diplomats to fly back and forth between and that democracies exist primarily to hire someone to sign the treaties which the FO arranges. The world view reminds me a lot of a book I reviewed on here a while ago, Stephen Sedlys (may have got the name wrong) Ashes and Sparks, about his life as a lawyer and judge. Like Sedly the FO is highly intelligent, somewhat liberal, intensely bureaucratic, legalistic and totally convinced of a sense of mission which it is only half-aware that it has.
"It is this internal scale of priorities, which is never disclosed even under questioning in the House of Sommons, that keeps the vast majority of those who wish to influence policy at a distance. Bowing to outside pressure is anathema for the elite who have been trained to beleive that they are the natural interpreters of the best options in any situation. Thus the atmosphere of a secret society run by the mandarins is preserved against those who are presumptuous enough to think that sometimes people outside the Foreign Office are more aware of what will best serve the interests of Britain abroad."
Foreign Secretaries seem to be in a position where they cannot really win, but they can fuck up. Huge amounts of what they deal with are effectively decided before they arrive by the contrasting interests of nations and the personalities of leaders, the FO's most powerful contribution is sometimes just spotting stuff before it happens, thier greatest failures are not spotting stuff, especially wars and its high strategic win-state is a well-run meeting with a bit of paper at the end.
It seems impossible to really know, at the Foreign Office, if you have ever won or entirely succeeded. Successive Secretaries and their bureacracy are deepy invested in integration with the EU and regard it as an inevitability, they play significant roles in the decolonisation of Zimbabwe and Hong-Kong, both situations where the British Government and/or white settlers didn't really have a leg to stand on, but where the decolonisation may have actually fucked the population more than could have beed expected.
Were those victories? Or just well-managed instabilities? Maybe just avoiding chaos was the victory?
Reading this in 2019, reading about our negotiations with China, the FO's deep desire to bin the Falklands, handing Zimbabwe over to Mugabe, rather than the racist Ian Smith, about the blind obsession with the EU, its a strong reminder that history is long and we really don't know what is going to happen, or what things will mean in the future.
There are many strange shadows of the future in this book;
Douglas Hurd in 1986 - "If freedom of information simply means freedom for pressure groups to extract from the system only those pieces of information which buttress their own cause, then conceivable the result might be greater confusion."
Written in 1992, after the fall of the Cold War and the first Gulf War but before 9/11, this book looks back on the Foreign Office for about thirty years from the 60's through to the 90's.
This was written around the highpoint of 90's liberalism so its a fascinating look into the world-view of that time.
It feels a much fluffier world, which certainly it must not have seemed to be then but in comparison this book has a vague sense of the inevitability of bureaucratic western liberalism essentially taking over everything.
The most interesting and resonant parts are the fragmentary personality portraits and microdramas which take the parade of Foreign Secretaries, who do seem to be near visually identical, and transforms them into a kallaidoscope of unique personalities.
The presence of humanis in history is well-noted. In 1987 a major diplocmatic incident with Iran begins when the Iranian Vice-Consul steals a purse and a few pairs of socks from a shop (total value £7.75) and runs away from the police. This escalates to the point where the number two at the british Embassy in Iran is driven off the road with his wife in the car and abducted.
One who, oddly, sticks out, is Douglas Hurd. An amazingly boring man, at least domestically, but who's deep, or at least coherent long-term relationship with, and ability to tolerate, Thatcher, makes him a major figure. His boringness here valourised as a vital quality, considering the amount of times that it is absolutely necessary that the Foreign Secretary says something and also vital that he says nothing.
The Foreign Office seems to be a rather strange place, an intensely elitist institution which sometimes nearly lives up to its elite reputation, and one that, in a sense, seems to have its own view of the world, and its own slow policy goals, specifically, the slow union of nations through mutual membership in treaties, supra-national organisations and combinations.
The tug of war between Prime Ministers and the FO seems to be eternal. The FO is convinced that it is the only organisation which really understands what is going on, and it does seem to be highly intelligent, it also at times seems not to understand at all how the machinery of the world works.
Its an amazingly soft institution (on discovering that the Russian Embassy had not dozens, but hundreds of spies in the UK, the FO were very worried about expelling them because it would make Britain look bad and provoke an extreme response from the Russians) which seems to believe that nation states exist mainly to provide places for Diplomats to fly back and forth between and that democracies exist primarily to hire someone to sign the treaties which the FO arranges. The world view reminds me a lot of a book I reviewed on here a while ago, Stephen Sedlys (may have got the name wrong) Ashes and Sparks, about his life as a lawyer and judge. Like Sedly the FO is highly intelligent, somewhat liberal, intensely bureaucratic, legalistic and totally convinced of a sense of mission which it is only half-aware that it has.
"It is this internal scale of priorities, which is never disclosed even under questioning in the House of Sommons, that keeps the vast majority of those who wish to influence policy at a distance. Bowing to outside pressure is anathema for the elite who have been trained to beleive that they are the natural interpreters of the best options in any situation. Thus the atmosphere of a secret society run by the mandarins is preserved against those who are presumptuous enough to think that sometimes people outside the Foreign Office are more aware of what will best serve the interests of Britain abroad."
Foreign Secretaries seem to be in a position where they cannot really win, but they can fuck up. Huge amounts of what they deal with are effectively decided before they arrive by the contrasting interests of nations and the personalities of leaders, the FO's most powerful contribution is sometimes just spotting stuff before it happens, thier greatest failures are not spotting stuff, especially wars and its high strategic win-state is a well-run meeting with a bit of paper at the end.
It seems impossible to really know, at the Foreign Office, if you have ever won or entirely succeeded. Successive Secretaries and their bureacracy are deepy invested in integration with the EU and regard it as an inevitability, they play significant roles in the decolonisation of Zimbabwe and Hong-Kong, both situations where the British Government and/or white settlers didn't really have a leg to stand on, but where the decolonisation may have actually fucked the population more than could have beed expected.
Were those victories? Or just well-managed instabilities? Maybe just avoiding chaos was the victory?
Reading this in 2019, reading about our negotiations with China, the FO's deep desire to bin the Falklands, handing Zimbabwe over to Mugabe, rather than the racist Ian Smith, about the blind obsession with the EU, its a strong reminder that history is long and we really don't know what is going to happen, or what things will mean in the future.
There are many strange shadows of the future in this book;
Douglas Hurd in 1986 - "If freedom of information simply means freedom for pressure groups to extract from the system only those pieces of information which buttress their own cause, then conceivable the result might be greater confusion."
July 6, 2024
Rather bland and whilst informative, mostly full of facts and figures. Given the book was written in the 90s, the book is obviously outdated now but I was hoping for something that really ground down into the workings of the Foreign Office; the things that will transcend time. But it really doesn’t tell someone in 2024 much given most of it is clearly from an era long gone. It’s written decently at least, but too many paragraphs are just recitations of statistics.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews