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‘Building the Global Network?’
The Reform of the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office under
New Labour
Ian Hall
From 1997 onwards the FCO was reshaped by New Labour. The removal of responsibility for
overseas aid to a new Department of International Development (DFID) was perhaps the most
dramatic change. Successive cuts to the FCO budget and the progressive centralization of foreign-
policy decision-making in Number 10 also had their effects, as did a series of government-directed
reforms to recruitment practices. In an effort to make it more accountable to the public, the FCO was
also bound by Public Service Agreements specifying targets for service delivery, publish Strategy
Reports and mission statements, and Annual Departmental Reports setting benchmarks for per-
formance. Together these reforms were designed to transform the FCO‘s culture, replacing inherited
traditions of thought and practice with new ones believed better suited to contemporary world
politics. This paper examines these inherited and new traditions, as well as the dilemmas they
addressed.
Keywords: Foreign and Commonwealth Office; New Labour; foreign policy;
interpretivism
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) is often perceived to have been the
biggest departmental loser of the New Labour era (Williams 2004; Steven 2007;
Korski 2009; Evans and Steven 2010; Hennessy 2010; LSE IDEAS 2010; Whitman
2010; Korski 2011; Marshall et al. 2011). Its budget was carefully controlled, its
responsibilities limited, and its influence over foreign policy-making curtailed.1For
some, the fact that this apparent decline in FCO fortunes occurred during a period
of extraordinary activism in British foreign policy only served to underscore the
extent to which the department was marginalised by New Labour under Blair
and Brown.2With foreign policy-making increasingly done in Downing Street and
overseas aid in the Department for International Development (DFID), disillusioned
diplomats lamented that the FCO would soon be little more than a ‘Ministry
of Consular Affairs, rescuing distressed travellers and tourists’ (quoted in Meyer
2009, 14).
From the outset, it is clear that New Labour did not consider the FCO—to borrow a
phrase—‘fit for purpose’. Leading government figures and sympathetic think-tanks
complained of its old-fashioned culture, its seeming elitism and its apparent inability
to change (Theakston 2000, 199; Briggs 2009). Other powerful players—not least
Gordon Brown—treated the FCO with suspicion and fought turf wars with Foreign
Secretaries.3Under New Labour, the FCO was required to undergo extensive reform,
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doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856X.2012.00533.x BJPIR: 2012
© 2012 The Author. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2012
Political Studies Association
especially in the areas of recruitment and management culture, but without
any clear indication that it would ever again become the dominant institution in
making and implementation of British foreign policy. In this, of course, the FCO was
not alone. New Labour’s reforms to the FCO tell in microcosm the broader story that
can be told about its efforts to ‘modernise’ the civil service. The story of the reforms
is one of reviews, performance targets, business plans and strategic priorities
intended to improve ‘delivery’, ‘relevance’ and ‘accountability’ (Bovaird and Russell
2007; Fawcett and Rhodes 2007; Rhodes 2010). But it would be wrong to conclude,
as some former diplomats have implied we should (e.g. Meyer 2009; Crawford
2010), that the reform of the FCO was just a New Labour project—a ‘Cultural
Revolution’ designed to remake diplomats in a Blairite image (Roberts 2009).
The story of the FCO reforms, this article argues, is far more complicated. Taking an
interpretive approach, what follows looks again at the various narratives advanced
by politicians, diplomats and outsiders to justify and to resist reform. These narra-
tives are located in speeches, policy documents, departmental reports, consultants’
reviews and the reminiscences of the various protagonists. Each draws upon inher-
ited traditions and novel rationalities, which this article tries to disentangle.
Three points stand out from this analysis. First, the reforms under New Labour were
not just driven by New Labour. Rather, the process was influenced by at least five
distinct sets of beliefs about how the reforms ought to proceed—three held within
the Labour movement (Old and New) and two within the FCO itself. The thinking
behind the reforms or indeed the resistance to the reforms, in other words, was
not as coherent or dirigiste as it sometimes portrayed. Second, the process was
informed by at least two different sets of ‘rationalities’, one drawn from contem-
porary management theories and one from social scientific theories about the
relationship between ‘identity’ and social behaviour. These latter ideas drove some
of the key reforms, namely the attempts to make the FCO more socially diverse in
an effort not just to make it more representative, but also to make it generate better
policy. Finally, the reforms indicate a belief on the part of the reformers that
transforming the FCO from what they perceived as a hierarchical and hidebound
institution into a flexible network-oriented agent would itself help to transform
the conduct of international relations as a whole, not just the conduct of British
foreign policy. In short, the reforms were a response to ‘globalisation’—or at least to
globalisation theories.
This paper is divided into three parts. The first outlines the reforms that were
undertaken between 1997 and 2010. The second analyses the origins and the
impact of the attempts to change the culture of the FCO, as well as the implications
of the underlying philosophy for foreign policy making. The third and concluding
section turns to the effort to transform the FCO into the ‘builder’ of a ‘global
network’—the attempt to make it an agent of change in global governance (FCO
2008, 20).
Reform
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office was once defined by its very particular
traditions of practice. It was widely considered to have, as a 1994 White Paper on
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the Civil Service put it, its ‘own particular needs and structure’ (Cabinet Office
1994). Under New Labour, however, this view was set aside, as sweeping changes
were implemented inside and outside the FCO.
The first change—the removal of responsibility for overseas aid from the FCO to
a new ministry, the Department for International Development (DFID)—had been
widely trailed well before the election (Clwyd 1992). It did not come as a surprise
when it was announced on 3 May 1997 and it was not unprecedented; indeed, the
Labour Party had done the same on taking office in 1964, when Harold Wilson
first created the Ministry of Overseas Development, and again in 1974 (Burnell
1991, 2–5). What was different was the depth of commitment, especially from
Gordon Brown, who channelled very considerable funds towards DFID as both
Chancellor and Prime Minister (Honeyman 2009, 91–94). DFID quickly grew to be
significantly larger than the FCO, with a resource budget in 2009–10 more than two
and a half times bigger, at about £5.5bn compared to the FCO’s £2bn (HM Treasury
2009, 241).
Other early changes were less tangible but no less significant. On 12 May, the
new Foreign Secretary Robin Cook launched his ‘mission statement’ for the FCO,
adding the ‘ethical dimension’, and attempting to generate a ‘long term strategy’
for British foreign policy and the FCO itself (Cook 1997). At the same time, Blair
acted to bolster Cabinet Office expertise in foreign affairs, especially on Europe, and
to reduce the FCO’s influence on policy advice, appointing new special advisors
and utilising Peter Mandleson in a roving European role (James 2009; James and
Opperman 2009, 293).
Last but not least, in the first few days of government New Labour moved to
address FCO recruitment. This reflected both ‘old’ and ‘new’ Labour concerns, some
ideological and some more functional. Old Labour had long perceived the FCO as
a bastion of privilege, of public school and Oxbridge ‘toffs’ (Hennessy 2001, 400).
New Labour shared some of these prejudices, but was driven too by the more
positive conviction that government ought to reflect the demographics of ‘modern’
Britain. To those ends, Cook created the post of ‘gender diversity officer’ within the
FCO—the first in any government department (Dickie 2004, 25)—and began a
round of recruitment fairs to promote FCO careers to students from so-called
‘unconventional’ backgrounds (Theakston 2000, 119). In appointing Keith Vaz and
Baroness Scotland to the ministry, Tony Blair also signalled an intention to scruti-
nise just how representative the FCO was and could be. Both ministers were meant
to be ‘role models’ for aspiring female and ethnic minority staff as well as effective
political operators (Foreign Affairs Select Committee 2000).
The immediate consequences of this new recruitment strategy were, in the short
term at least, somewhat mixed. In 1998, 52 per cent of FCO (Diplomatic Service)
Fast Stream entrants were female, compared to only 36 per cent a year earlier, and
9 per cent from ethnic minorities rather than none at all (Theakston 2000, 119).
The number of Oxbridge entrants, however, actually increased from 48 per cent to
64 per cent and the proportion educated at state rather than independent schools
remained very low (Theakston 2000, 119). More up-to-date figures are—perhaps
understandably—hard to find. Cabinet Office numbers for the whole of the Civil
Service Fast Stream suggest some lasting—though not dramatic—changes in the
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mix of candidates for high-level positions. In 2009, 43.5 per cent of all applicants for
the Fast Stream were female and 42.8 per cent of those that were successful were
female. The same year, 18.3 per cent of applicants were from ethnic minorities and
10.7 per cent of ethnic minority candidates were successful. Where there was a
significant shift was in the number of Oxbridge graduates getting Fast Stream posts,
with only 26.2 per cent of successful candidates having degrees from those univer-
sities (Cabinet Office 2009).
These changes will take some time to be felt. At the end of the New Labour era the
top ranks of the FCO were still predominantly white, male and Oxbridge-educated.
The FCO Departmental Report for 2008–09 notes that among the 371 staff in the
Senior Management Structure there were 79 women (21.3 per cent of the total)
and 13 individuals from ethnic minorities (3.5 per cent). At the next level down
in the D band, 33.6 per cent of the 1120 staff was female and just 3 per cent from
ethnic minorities. Overall, out of just under 6000 FCO staff, 41.3 per cent were
female and 8.8 per cent are from an ethnic minority (FCO 2008–09, 24). In the past
decade, in other words, there has been change, but not as dramatic a shift as some
might have envisaged in 1997.4To try to give these reforms new impetus, the FCO
published Diversity reports in 2007 and 2008, and put in place a new Diversity and
Inclusion Strategy for 2008–13 (FCO 2009a).
Arguably more consequential were the reforms made to the ways in which the FCO
was managed. Within the FCO, pressure had been building since the early 1990s
for a new organizational culture, especially with regard to career development and
human resource management. In 1997 those behind this movement—the mainly
Fast Stream ‘Young Turks’ in their thirties—saw an opportunity to push their
agenda forward, while Robin Cook seems to have seen in this group a chance to
advance his own objectives with allies within the organization (Dickie 2004, 11).
Together with the then-Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir John Kerr, Cook allowed
the ‘Young Turks’ to draw up a manifesto for reform. Their ‘Foresight’ report was
published internally in 2000, but on Cook’s orders was never released to the public
(Dickie 2004, 15).
‘Foresight’ apparently acknowledged what all recent reports on the FCO have
observed, namely that its staff were highly educated, loyal and motivated, and that
they excel at engaging foreign audiences, having excellent language skills and
knowledge of local cultures. But it noted too that its staff did not have great trust
in management and that they excelled all too frequently despite the organization
rather than because of it (Steven 2007, 5). In particular, ‘Foresight’ argued that the
FCO was poor at strategic thinking and planning, adaptation to change, utilizing
information technology, and at managing the careers of staff. It was also critical of
ministers, whom the ‘Young Turks’ thought were too aloof, vague in the setting of
priorities and the direction of policy, and prone to take FCO staff and their work for
granted (Dickie 2004, 14–19).
With impetus from ‘Foresight’ and backing from Cook and then, after 2001, from
his successor Jack Straw, the FCO underwent a series of changes during the course
of New Labour’s second term in office. The information technology (IT) systems
were improved and efforts made to modernize its culture, with the opening of a
gym, the advent of ‘dress-down’ Fridays, a push for less formality in interactions
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between junior and senior staff, and a new childcare facility (Dickie 2004, 20). More
importantly, the FCO embarked upon a major strategic planning exercise, leading to
its first White Paper, UK International Priorities: A Strategy for the FCO, in December
2003 (FCO 2003). This document marked a departure from previous FCO behav-
iour in setting and publically announcing targets—called ‘International Strategic
Priorities’ or ISPs—for British foreign policy and setting out criteria that might be
used to determine if they had been met (Lane 2007).
This use of ‘benchmarks’ and ‘targets’ was a particular feature of New Labour
governance and one imported from the private sector. They were intended to
resolve the principal-agent problems supposedly inherent in government bureauc-
racy and were applied self-consciously to try to improve accountability and deliv-
ery. For Blair, at least, they were the best weapons with which to fight the ‘forces
of conservatism’ (Blair 2010, 261–267). In the FCO, however, they were a novelty,
and ran contrary to the way in which many diplomats perceived their work (Meyer
2009).
The ISPs set for the FCO in 2003 built upon Public Sector Agreement (PSA) targets
set in 2002 as part of the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR).
The CSR had previously set twelve targets for the FCO:
(1) Reducing the risk to the UK of international terrorism, proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and international crime;
(2) Reducing tension in South Asia, the Middle East and Balkans;
(3) Strengthening European security;
(4) Improving UK conflict prevention and management;
(5) Improving business performance of Trade Partners UK and maintaining
foreign direct investment (FDI) levels;
(6) Reducing global barriers to trade;
(7) Making globalisation work for sustainable development worldwide;
(8) Modernizing, reforming and enlarging the European Union (EU);
(9) Improving UK influence overseas;
(10) Providing high quality consular services;
(11) Securing the good governance of British Overseas Territories;
(12) Delivering value for money (FCO 2002).
In the White Paper, these PSA targets were rendered into eight ISPs:
(1) Making world safer from terrorism and WMD;
(2) Protecting UK from international crime;
(3) Pursuing an international system based on the rule of law;
(4) Building an effective EU;
(5) Promoting UK economic interests;
(6) Working for sustainable development;
(7) Ensuring the security of UK and global energy supplies;
(8) Ensuring the security and good governance of UK Overseas Territories (FCO
2003, 30).
While the White Paper was long on aspiration, setting out multiple specific aims
that would guide the FCO towards the achievement of their broad targets, it was
shorter on detail about how it would be translated into action.
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The White Paper nonetheless identified three areas for change. The first concerned
what might be described as the FCO’s network infrastructure—its posts overseas
and the connections between them. The White Paper hinted that these were
under pressure, but argued that they were critical for ‘advice, influence, advocacy
and public service’ (FCO 2003, 54). In response, it noted, the FCO was exploring
‘possibilities’ of restructuring overseas posts, utilising DFID and other EU states’
resources, and improving IT capabilities (FCO 2003, 55). The second set of changes
concerned resource allocation, in particular shifting staff and assets back to London
from overseas and deploying them to where they are needed, when they are needed,
on a more responsive basis (FCO 2003, 58). Lastly, the FCO argued that its diversity
agenda was critical to meet the ‘varied’ demands on its services (FCO 2003, 59).
Taken together, the White Paper was very much an interim statement on reform,
reticent about commitments and—between the lines—cautious about the prospects
of funding for change. It also reflected the widely belief among diplomats that setting
targets and priorities that were too restrictive might hamper the FCO’s ability to
respond effectively to ‘events’ (Lane 2007, 185).
The 2006 White Paper did not deviate substantively from the lead given three years
previously. It enumerated nine rather than eight ISPs, adding ‘Managing migration
and combating illegal immigration’ to the earlier list (FCO 2006a, 28). It placed the
same emphasis on the ‘global network’ of overseas posts, developing IT capabilities
and on promoting diversity, but departed from the earlier White Paper in placing
greater weight on the FCO’s role in British public diplomacy (FCO 2006a, 46–47).
This new concentration reflected the greater salience of public diplomacy as an
instrument of foreign policy developed especially under Jack Straw in response to
Lord Carter of Coles’ review of British efforts in the area (Carter of Coles 2005). The
new White Paper was also far clearer on what it termed the ‘specific aims’ of the
FCO, which were gathered in an eight-page annex (FCO 2006a, 52–59). In general,
however, these aims were again more aspirational than anything else, and betrayed
little about precisely how the FCO would organize its resources to achieve them.
Partly in response to this latent ambiguity, David Miliband undertook yet another
review of the FCO’s strategic priorities on taking over from Margaret Beckett in June
2007, this time alongside a broader Capability Review. The 2008 mission statement
that resulted from these studies recommended a focus on delivering three services—
promoting the British economy, protecting British citizens overseas and managing
migration—and on four policy priorities—weapons counter-proliferation, conflict
prevention and resolution, an environmentally sustainable global economy, and
robust international institutions (FCO 2008). Together, these policy priorities formed
what Miliband called a ‘strategic framework’ that was more ‘appropriate’ for the kind
of work the FCO does (FCO 2008, 15–16).
These successive strategic planning exercises also led to considerable changes in
the internal structures of the FCO. Traditionally, the FCO was organised mainly
into regional departments with a few separate functional departments dealing with
specific issues such as arms control (Hennessy 2001, 398). The reform process led
to an increase in the number of functional departments as the FCO tried to reorient
itself from an organisation principally concerned with building knowledge about
foreign societies to one concerned too about issue-specific areas.
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As a consequence, the FCO underwent a significant restructuring in 2003 under
Jack Straw. The five Deputy Under-Secretaries (DUS), serving the Permanent
Under-Secretary (PUS) were transformed into Directors-General in command of
six broad areas: economic, Europe, defence and intelligence, legal advice, and
political. The Chief Clerk, in control of corporate affairs, was also made into a
Director-General. Together the Directors-General manage a series of Directorates,
which grew in number under New Labour from 13 when the party took office to 16
when it left.5In 2006 the corporate affairs directorate was made a free-standing
government executive agency, FCO Services. At the same time, there was also an
expansion in the number of missions. Dickie reports that twenty-seven new posts
were opened between 1997 and 2001 (2004, 41) and this expansion continued
through the 2000s. In 2001, the FCO had 224 posts overseas; by 2008, it had 260,
with the main areas of expansion being the Middle East and Asia (FCO 2002, 7;
FCO 2008, 26).
This widening of the FCO’s network was meant also to be accompanied by an
improvement in human resource management and an intensification of engage-
ment with external stakeholders. The first is (and arguably remains) a serious
problem. The surveys done for the 2000 ‘Foresight’ report observed that FCO staff
were generally dissatisfied with the ways in which their careers were managed,
their promotions assessed and their work praised. These results were replicated
in both the FCO Employee Engagement Surveys of 2006 and 2009, which found
that although staff thought they were contributed to something worthwhile, their
efforts were not always recognised or rewarded. Importantly, both surveys sug-
gested that there had been little improvement in these indicators since the ‘Fore-
sight’ report, despite the reforms that had been made in the interim (FCO 2006b,
9; FCO 2009b). In 2009, indeed, those surveyed also reported dissatisfaction
with the process of change itself and the way that it was being managed, with only
41 per cent saying that when change occurred, it was for the better. These poor
results reflected the findings of the Collinson Grant consultants, who were heavily
critical of FCO management procedures—which they characterised as intrusive and
over-bearing6—as well as accountability, job security and professional development
(Collinson Grant 2005).
To try to address these problems, the FCO had already made a series of reforms
to the ways in which it managed its staff under both the Thatcher and Major
Conservative governments from late 1980s onwards (Dudley Edwards 1994, 94). To
address the concerns that career progression was dependent upon one’s personal
relations with senior ranks and that appointments to postings were not open to
scrutiny, staff appraisal processes were introduced with specified performance
targets (Bailes 2005, 194). These changes took time—the first occurred after a
damning report on the FCO’s human resource management in 1990—but the basic
framework was in place by 2000. A system in which diplomatic staff might have
little or no say in where or when they were posted was replaced by a more open
competitive bidding process (Dickie 2004, 64). Moreover, all senior postings were
assessed and graded according to the challenges they posed under the Job Evalu-
ation Senior Posts (JESP) system, with diplomats then matched to that grade
according to their perceived abilities (Dickie 2004, 64–65).
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At the same time, the FCO began to engage more fully and substantively with the
outside world, including so-called ‘external stakeholders’ in foreign policy making
and implementation. New Labour gave new impetus to the push to appoint out-
siders to senior posts in the FCO, a process begun in 1991, when the government
required that all such positions be open to competition. Under Cook, Dianna
Melrose, formerly of Oxfam, became deputy head of the Planning Department in
1999, Sheena Matthews, a consultant, was brought in to run the Change Manage-
ment Unit, and John Williams, a former journalist, to head the News Department
(Dickie 2004, 34). Under the New Labour governments more generally, there were
also a series of political appointments either to embassies or to be special envoys for
various issues. Some of these were serving civil servants or military officers, and
some former politicians, such as Jack McConnell, MP, appointed as Prime Minister’s
Special Representative for Peace Building in 2008, or businesspeople like Lord Levy,
Blair’s envoy to the Middle East. These appointments were not without their critics,
not least in parliament, where the Foreign Affairs Select Committee expressed
disquiet with the process of selection and lines of accountability (Foreign Affairs
Select Committee 2009, 55–57).
By contrast, FCO engagement with external stakeholders was more systematic,
reflecting both the changing context of foreign policy making and New Labour
commitments to involve business, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), think
tanks and others in foreign policy debate. On coming to office, the new government
moved first to create alternative sources of ideas, setting up the Foreign Policy
Centre (FPC) in 1998 to rival Chatham House, the International Institute for
Strategic Studies, and other bodies perceived to be more traditional in their outlook.
Under its Director Mark Leonard, the FPC did operate as quite an effective advocate
in some areas, especially for improved public diplomacy, though in others, such as
Europe, their record of success was more mixed.7
Under Jack Straw, in particular, there was also a concerted effort to draw business
and NGOs into the policy process (Lee 2004; Lownsbrough 2009). In 2002, the FCO
commissioned the consultants Stanton Marris to evaluate its relationships with all
‘external stakeholders’, including other government departments. The results were
both good and bad. The FCO was criticised by other parts of government for not
being sufficiently responsive, being insensitive to domestic political agendas, and
for lacking expertise on both economics and Europe (Stanton Marris 2002, 10). On
the other hand, businesses reported that the FCO had much improved in the past
decade and that overseas posts were very helpful (Stanton Marris 2002, 18 and 24).
In general, however, the report noted that relationships tended to be too ad hoc
and that networks were too personal, especially with NGOs. These findings fed into
initiatives under Straw, Beckett and Miliband to promoting more ‘joined up’ gov-
ernment within Whitehall and to further improve relations with actors outside it,
beginning with Straw’s 2003 White Paper (FCO 2003). By 2007, Miliband’s FCO
had come to call this process ‘building the global network’ (FCO 2008).
In sum, New Labour presided over four distinct sets of internal reforms to the
FCO: first, changes to recruitment practices; second, developing the FCO’s strategic
planning and implementation capabilities, including the introduction of measures of
performance accountability; third, changes to human resource management; and
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fourth, building networks with external stakeholders. Together they were presented
as ‘modernisation’ (a favourite New Labour term that often covered a number of
different things) or as means of improving policy advice and service delivery. In
reality, however, these reforms reflected a number of different influences, from the
FCO’s traditional whiggism to newer theories of politics and governance.
Tradition and Innovation
The FCO has long been reputed to have its own particular culture and traditions of
doing business. British diplomacy is renowned (or notorious, depending on one’s
point of view) for being whiggish8and reactive, albeit highly attuned to changes in
circumstances overseas and steeped in ‘local knowledge’ of foreign societies (Green
2000, 4). The FCO has historically placed much emphasis on practical knowledge
over theory in the belief that diplomacy is learned by experience and the slow
development of expertise, especially in languages (Meyer 2009, 9). Indeed, the FCO
is sometimes portrayed as one of the last bastions of Westminster whiggism. Zara
Steiner has recently observed:
Informed critics of the service still complain that though recruitment
procedures have improved, the Foreign Office ethos has scarcely changed.
Once entering the Foreign Service, a process of acculturation takes place.
There is a FCO style which entrants, whatever their backgrounds, appear
to acquire. Pride in Britain’s political institutions and past performance
often translates into that assumption of superiority that so annoys some
domestic civil servants and many foreigners. ... The mission heads of today
(apart from the women) are not vastly different from those of a previous
generation. The very existence of an interchangeable, hierarchical and
closed service promotes a kind of ‘group-think’ (Steiner 2005, 23).
This whiggism, in other words, imparts an esprit d’corps and a particular set of
professional norms.
Central to this whiggism are two core principles—one shared by whiggish elements
of other parts of the Civil Service, and one distinct to the FCO. The first concerns the
power and virtue of institutions and administrative process honed, as it were, by
the passage of time and long experience. This is perhaps best illustrated by the
means by which FCO policy advice is traditionally delivered, by memoranda drafted
internally and then submitted by junior staff to their seniors for modification and
approval before finally being put before a minister. These memoranda were rarely
written after any consultation with ‘external stakeholders’ and emphasis was
placed not just upon consensus, but also on a ‘house-style’ of drafting. Here, three
beliefs are reinforced: first, that the FCO is (or ought to be) the sole repository of
policy expertise; second, that the best policy is the product of consensus not conflict;
and third, that the process of drafting itself shapes (and ought to shape) good policy.
The other core principle concerns expertise—or rather the particular kind of exper-
tise valued by FCO whigs (Korski 2009). Like whigs elsewhere in the Civil Service,
FCO whigs prefer clever generalists to specialists, but they also place great emphasis
on linguistic skills, arguing (reasonably) that these are the key to acquiring expertise
about foreign societies. Nowhere is this clearer than in the allowances given to
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diplomats (and their spouses) who have mastered foreign tongues, with higher
salary supplements going to those who speak the harder languages (Dickie 2004,
60).
Together, administrative ritual and pride in their linguistic abilities gives the FCO
‘great confidence in the superior wisdom of its thinking’, according to Hennessy
(2001, 405), but they have also arguably helped to undermine its influence in
government. They have made it difficult for the FCO to establish good relationships
with others in government, who sometimes perceive them as aloof and ‘elitist’. The
FCO are sometime seen too as having better relations with foreigners than with
Whitehall (Stanton Marris 2002, 29). The other complaint is that the FCO has failed
to transform itself from a lynchpin of empire into a more flexible post-colonial
institution—a gripe that has been heard since the 1960s, if not earlier, and contin-
ues to be heard today (see, for example, Shonfield 1970; Stanton Marris 2002, 16).
With their emphasis on practical knowledge, expertise and gradualism, the whig-
gish elements of the FCO could not but come into conflict with New Labour’s
agenda for ‘Modernising Government’ (Cabinet Office 1999). That agenda drew
on abstract concepts drawn from both the new public management (NPM) and
network theories (Fawcett and Rhodes 2007, 87). It promised ‘joined-up’ govern-
ment, targets, incentives and delivery, observing that organisations sometimes put
their own sectional interests above those of those they serve, and also tend toward
inertia and risk-averse behaviours (Cabinet Office 1999). It aimed at goal-oriented,
inclusive and strategic policy-making, implementation and service-provision.
Only parts of this agenda were new and only parts of it were New Labour.9Earlier
Conservative reforms to government had also derived key ideas from new public
management and marketisation theories that argue that target setting and incen-
tivisation is critical to getting the best performance from bureaucracies and holding
them accountable for their results. These theories are informed, on the one hand,
by social scientific ideas about how people behave (Bevir 2010) and, on the other,
by consequentialist reasoning about politics and ethics. As Blair’s memoirs make so
clear, New Labour stood, if it stood for anything, for ‘delivery’—for ‘improving
outcomes’ almost regardless of the means used (Blair 2010).
The distinctly New Labour part of the reforms concerned ‘joining-up’. It rested on the
thesis that one of the principal reasons why bureaucracies had failed to deliver the
kinds of the results that the electorate demanded was because they were organised
into ‘silos’, with little intra- and inter-departmental coordination. This meant that
they found it difficult to deal with a number of major problems whose causes and
consequences fell within the purview of two or more different Whitehall depart-
ments. The New Labour response to this challenge was ‘joined-up governance’
(Bevir 2010, 199–226; Rhodes 2010). This entailing extending existing networks
between departments and with other actors—notably with non-governmental
organisations and epistemic communities in any given area—or building new
networks, providing the means to coordinate the policy responses of various depart-
ments and agencies to problems.
This kind of thinking—and indeed this kind of language—riled the whigs. For
Christopher Meyer, ‘[m]odernisation and managerialism’, as he called it, simply got
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BJPIR, 2012
in the way of getting ‘on with the job for which there was only one authentic
objective: advancing the national interest, using our judgement, common sense
and professional skills to work out how to get from A to B’ (Meyer 2009, 16). His
complaint that ‘under New Labour, as deference to the world of business and
consultancy reached its climax ... [t]he culture of targets ... acquired the madness
and mendacity of Soviet statistics’ (2009, 16) may be taken as representative of
whig opinion. But it was not representative of FCO opinion as a whole. Not all of
the FCO was opposed in principle to such ideas—some of the ‘Young Turks’ within
the ‘Foresight’ group were in fact steeped in them, having studied for MBAs and the
like during sabbaticals or spare time (Dickie 2004, 9). The clash of traditions was not
just a clash between those inside and those outside the institutions, but was also
one fought by representatives of differing sets of beliefs within the FCO.
The Young Turks’ ‘Foresight’ report is notable indeed for its rather un-whiggish
insistence on openness and accountability, especially when it came to human
resource management, but also in policy-making. It challenged some central norms
of the ‘whig’ tradition, especially its insistence that authority, hierarchy, trust and
confidentiality are essential to the proper functioning of bureaucracies. Instead, the
Young Turks’ favoured procedural fairness, arguing that this was both a good in
itself—in something akin to the Rawlsian sense that justice is fairness—and that it
produces better outcomes for those working in institutions and for those they serve
(Dickie 2004, 7–22). The roots of this thinking were political, cultural and to a large
extent generational—they expressed a frustration with an older generation who
prized expertise over openness, while reserving the right to judge their subordinates
by criteria that were less than clear.10
The young and the old clashed too over the diversity agenda. For some whigs, like
Sir Andrew Green, ‘diversity’ is simply ‘irrelevant to diplomacy’ (2000, 4). For some
‘Young Turks’, and especially for powerful elements of the Labour movement, it
was a key issue (Dickie 2004, 16). The ideas informing the diversity agenda were a
blend of old and new. Some of its impetus came from long-standing socialist and
internationalist convictions that diplomacy conducted by a privately-schooled,
Oxbridge-educated and socially-unrepresentative elite is incapable not just of prop-
erly implementing a Labour foreign policy, but is unable to pursue any policy that
would not be in their class interests (Theakston 2000, 112). But some of it also came
from newer ideas. The contemporary variant of the argument for diversity is one
grounded not in class, but in ‘identity’, which maintains that the same privately-
schooled, Oxbridge-educated and socially-unrepresentative elite cannot formulate
or pursue an adequate foreign policy that reflects the values of many other Britons
not because of their interests, but because of their gender, race, educational expe-
rience and cultural baggage.
For the reformers, the best foreign policy for Britain can only emerge from an FCO
that reflects the gender balance, ethnic composition and socio-economic make-up
of Britain. This is best expressed by the FCO’s present ‘vision’ statement on diver-
sity, which states:
Why is diversity so important to the FCO?
The nature of our work is changing. Globalisation is changing the world
in which we live. Our work does not exclusively rely on government to
‘BUILDING THE GLOBAL NETWORK?’ 11
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BJPIR, 2012
government communication but on our ability to engage with others. This
means using different skills and techniques which focus on influencing the opinion
of the public and the organsisations [sic] we work with.
We operate in a global environment
We have over 260 British embassies/consulates in more than 190 coun-
tries and over 10,000 local staff. It’s important for us to reach out to people from
different cultures who hold different views. It’s also core to the success of our
UK and locally-engaged staff working together for UK interests.
Diversity and equality in our work
Embracing diversity will help us carry out our key Policy Goals, such as
championing human rights and equality; and helping to resolve conflicts
between groups with different views.
[...]
Productivity and job satisfaction
Diverse teams and flexible working styles lead to more innovation—something
which is needed in an increasingly complex world where we need to think
more creatively [italics added] (FCO 2010).
On this view, the pursuit of diversity is not simply a moral good, affirming a belief
in egalitarian principles, but also essential to producing the best foreign policy.11
The reforms that the FCO underwent during New Labour’s three terms in office
were shaped, therefore, by a number of different traditions of thought. What is
marked about the FCO reform-process, in contrast to those in other departments,
is that the various modes of reform occurred almost simultaneously, rather than
in a progression. The diversity agenda, openness, new public management, and
joined-up governance were all unleashed on the FCO more-or-less at the same time
and within a very short space of time. Whiggism informed what might be called the
‘resistance’—those like Sir Ivor Roberts or Sir Christopher Meyer who disliked
the various types of reform that were imposed. The ‘diversity agenda’ dominated
the first term, when the FCO was led by its most clearly socialist Foreign Secretary,
Robin Cook, and returned to the fore once more in 2007-08, under Beckett and
then Miliband. But it was the procedural fairness and new governance agendas
which arguably had the greatest impact, leading to a complete re-structuring of
human resource management and the introduction of a completely new model of
assessing performance and accountability.
Conclusion: Building the Global Network?
New Labour’s reforms had aimed to make the FCO more representative of ‘modern
Britain’ and the community it served, more responsive to the needs of its ‘stake-
holders’, from ordinary citizens to UK-based multi-nationals, including other gov-
ernment departments, and a more influential agent of change in international
relations. The thinking that underlay the reforms designed to secure this last
objective was different from the others. It stemmed partly from theories of inter-
national relations, rather than political science and economics, specifically from
theories of globalisation and global governance.
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BJPIR, 2012
The concept of globalisation and the argument that this phenomenon had pro-
foundly and irrevocably changed international relations was central to New Labour
thinking on foreign policy (Fairclough 2000; Vickers 2000; Watson and Hay 2003;
Cerny and Evans 2004). It featured very prominently, for example, in Blair’s
reasoning for taking Britain to war in Kosovo in 1999 and again in Iraq in 2003, as
well as in a range of lesser foreign policy decisions by both the Blair and Brown
governments.12 In Blair’s Chicago speech, in the midst of the Kosovo campaign,
Blair provided one of his most pithy summaries of his understanding of its nature
and implications:
Twenty years ago we would not have been fighting in Kosovo. We would
have turned our backs on it. The fact that we are engaged is the result of
a wide range of changes—the end of the Cold War; changing technology;
the spread of democracy. But it is bigger than that.
I believe the world has changed in a more fundamental way. Globalisation
has transformed our economies and our working practices. But globali-
sation is not just economic. It is also a political and security phenomenon.
We live in a world where isolationism has ceased to have a reason to exist.
[...] We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not (Blair 1999).
These convictions drove not only Blair’s decision-making over Kosovo and Iraq;
they informed too his government’s insistence on the reform of the institutions of
global governance (Blair 2010, 660).
Blair does not seem to have derived his understanding of globalisation from any
one particular source. This is not, of course, especially surprising: the concept was
simply ubiquitous in the mid- to late-1990s when Blair’s foreign policy thinking
was evolving (Giddens 1998, 28). What it meant for Blair was straightforward, as he
explains in his memoirs:
My theory of the world today is that globalisation, enabled by technology
and scientific advance, is creating an interdependent global community,
in which, like it or not, people have to live and work together, and share
the world’s challenges and opportunities. The drivers behind this are not
governments, but people, and it is an unstoppable force. Its consequences,
however, are a matter of choice (Blair 2010, 689).
Under New Labour, the primary agent charged with addressing these challenges
and opportunities, apart from the PM, was not of course the FCO. It was DFID,
which showed itself far more able to present itself as having the necessary skills to
deal with the problems arising from the new ‘mutual dependence of nations’
(Meyer 2009, 261). The FCO’s role was conceived differently: it was to facilitate the
actions of others rather than to deliver substantive goods itself. This is the essence
of the ‘global network’ idea and it fits neatly into new beliefs and theories about
‘global governance’ (Bevir and Hall 2010).
Under New Labour, the FCO was re-cast as what might best be called a ‘network
manager’ (Bevir 2010, 183–184). Its function was less to deliver services than to
facilitate their delivery by others—apart, of course, from the consular side of its
work. Our ‘network’, the Better World, Better Britain report declares, ‘now acts as
‘BUILDING THE GLOBAL NETWORK?’ 13
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BJPIR, 2012
platform for the whole of Government’ (FCO 2008, 26). It connects businesses to
foreign customers or suppliers; provides information to support immigration policy;
supports counter-terrorism partnerships and training missions conducted by police,
military and other agencies; and acts a funding body for externally-run conflict
prevention programmes, public diplomacy outlets, and foreign NGOs. In contrast to
the FCO of old, it does not emphasise the expertise so prized by the whigs which
underpinned its claim to be the sole or main source of foreign policy-making and
the principal actor in Britain’s diplomatic relations with other states.
The new FCO is thus designed for the world of de-centralised global governance
rather than conventional international relations (Chandler 2007). But the viability
of this new model depends to a significant degree on whether the world has indeed
changed in the way that the globalisation theorists think. The whigs warn that the
hollowed-out FCO is not merely losing basic diplomatic skills honed over genera-
tions, but that it is making itself incapable of dealing with a world that may relapse
into older modes of international relations. Moreover, the whigs worry that the
FCO’s growing involvement in extra-diplomatic activities, such as funding and
supporting human rights and pro-democracy NGOs in Russia, Central Asia and the
Middle East, undermine its capacity to do its core jobs.
The FCO emerged from the New Labour era smaller, poorer, and marginalised, at
least from high-level decision-making on major foreign policy issues. Despite a
rapid succession of major reforms, it remains unclear whether the FCO is better
designed to meet its challenges than it was before. To the whigs, convinced that the
FCO ought to be the sole or main authoritative institution in British foreign policy
making, the FCO is clearly not on the right road. In thirteen years of New Labour
rule, the PM’s office has clearly emerged as the dominant player, with DFID, the
Ministry of Defence and the intelligence community jockeying for second place.
When measured against New Labour performance objectives, the picture is not
much better. In 2008, the FCO was judged to have met only one of its nine Public
Sector Agreement targets set in 2005–06, to have ‘partly met’ another seven, and to
have failed to meet the last (FCO 2008, 171–173). Its remains unclear, in other
words, as to whether after thirteen years of almost perpetual change, the FCO is any
more fit for purpose now than it was at the outset.
About the Author
Ian Hall, Department of International Relations, Australian National University, Hedley Bull
Centre, Canberra, ACT 0200 Australia, email: ian.hall@anu.edu.au
Notes
I am grateful to the other participants in this special issue for their comments and criticism, and to Griffith
University for the financial support that permitted me to travel to Berkeley for the workshop.
1. In 1998–99, the FCO budget was £1.037bn at current prices (HM Treasury 1998) and in 2007–08 it
was £1.581bn at current prices (HM Treasury 2007), which translates into a slight increase in budget
if adjusted for inflation. It has suffered in recent years, however, from the weak pound, which has
reduced the FCO’s purchasing power abroad (Alexander 2010).
2. One indication of the extent of its marginalization may be found in the index to Tony Blair’s memoirs
(Blair 2010), where the Foreign Office is mentioned only twice, once in an early discussion of the
14 IAN HALL
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BJPIR, 2012
decision to create DFID (p. 24) and once in passing, during a discussion of Mo Mowlam’s ambition to
be Foreign Secretary (pp. 269–279). Anthony Seldon’s (2004) Blair goes one step further and does not
mention the FCO at all.
3. On Brown’s difficult relationship with Robin Cook, see Naughtie 2002, 113–115 and Blair 2010, 93.
4. Indeed, one could argue that the really significant changes in FCO recruitment patterns occurred
under John Major. In 1990, 67 per cent of FCO Fast Streamers were Oxbridge educated and only
26 per cent were women (Dudley Edwards 1994, 91), compared to the 48 per cent and 36 per cent
reported for 1997 by Theakston (2000, 119).
5. It should be noted that there are more Directors than Directorates—in 2011 there were 25 Directors.
See http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/about-us/who-we-are.
6. One statistic in the Collinson Grant report is telling: the ratio of human resource management staff
to other staff in the FCO was 1:40, compared to a ‘world-class’ benchmark of 1:100 (2005, 17).
7. Leonard himself published a number of studies of public diplomacy, including Leonard and Alakason
2000, which fed into a broader push for improved British practices in the area, culminating in Lord
Carter of Coles’ review in 2005.
8. Whig and whiggism is used here in the sense that Bevir and Rhodes (2003, 46–47; 52–54) describe
it, as a tradition that emphasises the role of ideas and institutions in the study of politics and places
great value on the Westminster tradition of government. It also emphasises ‘gradualism’, slow
evolution, and the need for expertise to address political problems, and the belief that the Civil Service
is the best repository of expertise if it is impartial, meritocratic and independent. On whiggism and
international relations, see Hall 2006 and Hall 2012.
9. On the continuities between Conservative and New Labour thinking on public sector reform, see
Newman 2001, 55–82.
10. For a sense of this frustration, see Frazer 2009, Murray 2007 and Riordan 2003.
11. This belief is also core to theories and practices of ‘gender mainstreaming’ in government (see Squires
and Wickham-Jones 2004).
12. Interestingly, however, the word globalisation did not feature in Cook’s 1997 mission statement for
the FCO. Instead, he described an ‘age of internationalism’ (Cook 1997).
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