Each negotiation begins with the presentation of the starting positions, outlining the general approach to the issues that will be discussed, highlighting the matters that give cause for concern or anxiety.
The way in which the starting position is presented can be crucial for the success of negotiations. Not only because it can be the basis for the partner’s assessment of our intentions. In some negotiating cultures, our partner’s negotiating line may depend on how we start. This is often the case with Chinese and other East Asian diplomats. They usually expect us to lay down the cards first. Only when they see what is on the table will they lay down their own cards. So always think carefully about the opening gambit. About its substantive content, political message, and the very form of presentation.
Experienced negotiators advise: say clearly what you mean, be clear about your concerns that you want to dispel through negotiations, present expectations openly and honestly, do not bury your head in the sand, say directly what is on your heart. Reject issues you don’t want to talk about from the start.
This advice sounds convincing, but very often in my practice I met with representatives of states who beat around the bush and explained their negotiating goals in a twisted way. This is usually done by smaller states, fearing an unfavorable reaction from a more powerful negotiating partner. Directness, however, has one important advantage. It may turn out that the problem, which in our perception took gargantuan proportions, is only a trifle for the other party, a “bagatelle” that can be dealt with “while you wait”.
In business, there is a rule not to be afraid to reject the first offer of a partner. In international politics, the principle works only when the time factor does not significantly affect the negotiating power of the parties. Sometimes it is better to say “yes” to the first proposal and close the negotiating shop quickly, because it may turn out that each subsequent negotiating proposal will only be worse. The Russians reproached the Armenians that during the 44-day war with Azerbaijan in 2020, they rejected the more favorable terms of peace that Russia offered them, providing for, among others, keeping Shusha under the control of Karabakh and keeping two corridors (and not one) connecting Karabakh with Armenia. The Armenians had to agree to conditions that were ultimately much worse, when their armies were in danger of being completely destroyed.
But even if you reject the partner’s first or even several subsequent offers, do not say “no” directly to him, but only make it clear that despite the best intentions and appreciation of the other party’s efforts, you doubt that his proposal will solve the negotiation problem.
The old (and sexist) anecdote about the difference between a real diplomat and a real lady is that if a diplomat says “yes”, he means “maybe”, if he says “maybe”, he means “no”, and if he says “no”, that means he is not a real diplomat. There are negotiation cultures (especially Asian, e.g. Chinese or Iranian), where the word “no” has no right to be pronounced.
Loise Wyse, a famous American advertising and public relations specialist, once remarked: “The single and most dangerous word to be spoken in business is “no”. The second most dangerous word is “yes”. It is possible to avoid saying either.”
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One’s starting position is usually formulated, especially when it comes to expectations towards the other party, with a surplus. It is assumed that everything you want in an open message cannot be achieved. Sir Antony Arthur Acland, head of the diplomatic service and permanent undersecretary of state at the British Foreign Office in the years 1982-1986, described a reasonably good outcome of the negotiations as follows: “In any negotiations you have got to settle for 75 percent and you are lucky to get that. If you get 85 percent you are doing jolly well.” The initial position also does not specify the honestly assumed limit of concessions, i.e. the so-called red lines. These red lines are drawn at the beginning also with an excess.
The challenge is always how large the excess should be. International politics is not a bazaar. Not everything is done by haggling. There are things that are not subject to bargaining, especially when it comes to establishing the facts, defining opinions and political positions, not to mention the so-called imponderabilia (principles, values).
Can an exaggerated demand ruin the chances of an agreement? Negotiators from countries accused of the so-called bazaar mentality (where bargaining in everyday situations is an element of shopping and transaction etiquette), i.e. Orientals (from the Middle East to Southeast Asia) may, however, turn out to be very reluctant to bargain in interstate negotiations. On the other hand, representatives of the West, where the purchase price is by definition a rational price, not subject to negotiation, can behave very pragmatically in political negotiations. Is it because brought up in the spirit of liberal values, they believe that it is always possible and necessary to reach an agreement and that everything can be negotiated?
In diplomacy, starting positions usually do not discourage further attempts. It is assumed that image and internal political considerations are of great importance in determining the initial position.
Of course, the assumption that starting positions must be flexible is asymmetric. We always expect more flexibility from a partner than we would be ready to reciprocate. In its extreme form, this asymmetry in the history of diplomacy took the form of the so-called Gromyko doctrine. It read: “what is mine is mine, what is yours is negotiable”. In a softened form, it was described to me as follows: “At the outset you ask for something which has never been yours and should never be. If by the end of the negotiations you get 50 percent of what you asked for, you are a big winner.” It was undoubtedly revived in the Putin era. The demands that Putin made at the turn of 2021 and 2022 towards the West in the security sphere resemble vividly the Gromyko doctrine.
Excessive demands and inflexibility characterized the approach of the Palestinians (the Arab camp) in the Middle East negotiations for many years. As described by Sir Arthur quoted above: (Palestinians) “have always wanted to have 100 or 105 percent”. Which may not have been a problem in itself. The problem was their lack of flexibility. The Israeli politician Abba Eban coined a saying that made a great career among diplomats on a universal scale and that was inspired by the Arab negotiating style: “They never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
In any case, do not start negotiations with threats and pressure. They spoil the chances of an agreement more than an inflated starting position. Historians of diplomatic negotiations emphasize that an offer is usually more effective than a threat. So suggest instead of scare. Pressure and threats don’t always have to be verbal. They can be part of a dirty tactic that involves bribery, manipulation, or lying. If you are going to be exposed to threats and pressure, don’t succumb to it. Don’t show any signs that it’s working on you.
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One thing is beyond doubt for success in the initial phase of negotiations: the negotiator should have the elementary ability to clearly present his/her own arguments. People who have a problem with public speaking should rather avoid the negotiating work, especially in a multilateral forum. In my career, I met some very competent and nice young adepts of diplomacy, who were assigned by the human resources office to work on multilateral forums, and who had a real problem with speaking into a microphone in front of a wider audience. They were afraid to speak up, unable to respond to the voices of others. They had to tap everything off a piece of paper, and with terrible stage fright. There is a place for them in diplomacy, but not as negotiating frontmen.
Here again a personal digression – no one taught me to debate. At MGIMO (and at the University of Warsaw) such courses were not offered. A pity. Fortunately, I have a defiant and provocative nature, so I liked banter from a young age. In high school, my debating tendency reached dangerous proportions and pushed me into arguments with teachers that tormented not only them, but even my classmates. However, I regretted that when I started my studies, the lecturers at the University of Warsaw continued the tradition of keeping students at such a big distance that it precluded any polemics with them. In Moscow, however, I was relieved to find that, apart from the areas of ideological orthodoxy, it was possible to argue with the professorship, and I could disagree with my fellow aspirants when I was writing my doctorate. This ease of falling into polemics with the Russians got into my blood so much that when I joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and started acting on the CSCE and the Warsaw Pact forum, my behavior towards them fueled panic among my communist superiors. After all, it was not proper to argue with Soviet comrades so openly. Only that I did not look at them by force of habit as Soviet comrades.
I liked to argue so much at the beginning of my career that one of my older colleagues at negotiations in Vienna in 1989-1990 – a Dutchman, by the way, began to call me a little Jesuit, because, as he claimed, I was more annoying in a dispute than his teachers at the high school run by the order. But, as I found out for myself, aggressiveness is a privilege of immaturity and it can pass with time. I don’t want to argue anymore today. My wife can testify to that if need be.
But seriously: one thing is indisputable: if you do not have the ease of speaking and arguing with others, it is better to skip the negotiating adventure.
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Are lawyers’ talents and experience useful in negotiation work? I was not surprised when I saw at the UN forum that some countries (admittedly few, usually small and wealthy) employ lawyers from private law firms for negotiating tasks. I have also seen a tendency to speak in a court of justice style with some Latin American diplomats. They spoke beautifully, floridly, resonantly. They resorted to theatrical gestures, modulated voices, even suspended them for dramatic purposes, as if they were speaking not to their fellow diplomats but to some jury.
The lawyers, however, did not impress with their effectiveness. Because in diplomacy you can’t play on emotions, you can’t build beliefs based on impressions. And excessive advocacy can be counterproductive. Because it tires and raises suspicions of falsehood.
It is significant that at the beginning of the CSCE process, the Americans showed a tendency to make their main negotiators representatives of the legal professions: judges (Ambassador Goldberg), legal advisers (Ambassador Kampelman), lawyers, and also commercial agents (Ambassador Krehbiel). Ambassador Goldberg even resigned from the Supreme Court for the sake of a diplomatic career (President Johnson later explained that Goldberg was “bored” at the Supreme Court, which Goldberg passionately denied). The mentality of the judge must be clearly different from the mentality of the negotiator. Because the verdict is usually black and white and based on objective truth. In negotiations, anything on which a compromise can be built is true. Not surprisingly, Goldberg disgustedly rejected a compromise crafted by neutral mediators at the CSCE Review Meeting in Belgrade in 1978, which resulted in the meeting ending without the adoption of the document. Because the State Department was ready to work on the text of neutrals. But Goldberg had no intention of compromising the objective truth. Moreover, he did not listen to the Secretary of State at all, because he decided that since he was appointed by the President, he could listen only to the President. And so Belgrade ended in a fiasco, which, as it turned out, was only good for the CSCE process. It built its credibility for years.
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The presentation of the starting positions is followed by the clarification phase. For sometimes the speaker and the audience may mean completely different things under the same terms. My negotiating beginnings were related to military issues. It turned out then that a “regiment” is not always a regiment (e.g. in Great Britain this name was purely historical in relation to some units), that “armed forces” are not “military forces”. I spent hours listening to what “out-of-garrison activity” was, what a tank was and what an artillery piece was. The importance of the proposed parameters for observation and notification, etc., etc., was explained.
Even greater ambiguity may surround the intentions on which the position of the parties is based.
In non-military matters, there is also a lot of room for clarification. When Poland tabled a draft resolution on the rights of the child in the early 1960s at the UN, it contained only two sentences, implying that every child has the right to a nationality and a name and that he/she has the right to be cared for by the family, the state and society. It took four years to explain terms such as ‘child’, ‘family’, ‘surname’, ‘state’, ‘society’, and the rights of children in and out of wedlock. Although everyone agreed on the principle that children have rights. In 1978, Poland presented a draft of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was finally adopted in 1989. This is one of the great successes in the history of Polish diplomacy, which took almost thirty years of efforts.
The greater the mistrust between the parties to the negotiations, the greater the suspicion that there are traps and stratagems hidden behind seemingly innocent words and obvious phrases.
Clarifying positions is one of the most unpredictable phases of negotiations. No imagination can grasp the associations that initial positions can evoke in individual partners.
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After the explanations, it’s time to define differences in positions and convince people to our point of view.
During negotiation courses, one teaches eristics. It is useful. If only to recognize and properly assess the negotiation tricks used by partners.
The most common ploy is to distort the other side’s position in order to show its convergence with our own. We start the sentence: “If I understood correctly what you said…”, then we put words in the partner’s mouth that he did not say, but we want him to say. We force the partner to react and we examine how categorically he contradicts our interpretation of his words.
Another trick is to use your partner’s little eloquence (intentional or not) to guess his thoughts, i.e. suggest these thoughts to him: “I know that if my colleague wanted to speak on this issue, he would certainly support me, because …”
You can try to dominate your partners with talking, i.e. try to knock them down with the amount, richness and fluency of your spoken words. Certain partners may even develop inferiority syndrome because of this, which will help you in the debate. History knows many talkative negotiators and many unstoppable orators. One of them was Lloyd George, already mentioned on this blog. Even Clemenceau envied him and he was supposed to say with a sneer: “Si je pouvais pisser comme Lloyd George parle.” On the other hand, it is interesting that such an eminent public speaker as Winston Churchill at the negotiating table in Yalta or Tehran presented a spare and calm style.
In multilateral forums, it is quite common to refer to the audience, i.e. to the so-called silent majority, in order to build support for our position among the undecided: “Dear colleagues, you have just heard a proposal that must surely evoke negative feelings in you, because…”
Rarely but still, ad personam arguments appear in diplomatic negotiations. Perhaps not as personal as Schopenhauer once described them, but they can attack the partner’s sensitivity. It’s happened to me several times. Once (a long time ago) in the Council of Europe, when a decision was negotiated evaluating the implementation by Lithuania of the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, I raised the issue of the spelling of Polish surnames in official Lithuanian documents. During the discussion, a representative of Cyprus suddenly broke free and expressed surprise that it was so important to us. I had to answer him: “You say it makes no difference whether someone’s name is Jabłońska or Jablonskaite? Imagine, Dimitris, that it doesn’t matter to you whether your name is Papadouris or Papadoglu on your ID card.” It worked and the Cypriot colleague did not take the floor in the discussion.
A well-known ploy is the use of partners’ ignorance. Because before the given information is verified, the principle of the first effect will work. Although today, in the era of instant verifiability of any information thanks to Google and other search engines, this is a risky procedure. A few years ago, I sat at the negotiating table and enjoyed verifying the facts provided by the other side with the help of a smartphone. I hear: “As stated in the UN Security Council Resolution…”. I check on my smartphone. And immediately I react: “Sorry, but there is no such phrase in this resolution at all.”
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The presentation of our position is of course crucial. Because first impressions also count in diplomatic negotiations. It must be clear, understandable, transparent, logical and well-founded. Not only the substance matters, but also the choice of words. Exaggeration in language does not help, but a wooden, bureaucratic, gibberish language cannot have persuasive power either. You just have to get your partners interested.
Also the style of speech: voice intonation and gestures, can be important. If the partner only reads the text with difficulty, it means that he does not feel confident in the role of a negotiator, or he makes theses with which he does not fully agree. Sometimes, indeed, it may be intentional. I remember a representative of Slovakia a long time ago at the OSCE forum reading out an instruction with which he simply did not agree. He stuttered, paused, cleared his throat, and finally lost his voice and announced that his speech would be disseminated in written form.
Experts say that only 7 percent of what you perceive is determined by words. 38 percent – by voice, and as much as 55 percent by facial expression. But in the case of diplomatic negotiators, these proportions do not seem to be exact.
I almost always included negotiating instructions in a personal, improvised message, without reading from a piece of paper. Of course, these were always well-prepared improvisations. Partners, as a rule, listen more attentively to improvised speeches. If only because they are always waiting for something to slip out from the other side.
However, I remembered an anecdote read at the beginning of my studies and written down in the book “Diplomatic Notes and Anecdotes”. The cover author was a certain Diplomex. But years later, I also found out that it was Jerzy Michałowski, one of the most colorful diplomats of the times of the Polish People’s Republic, Adam Rapacki’s alter ego, who wrote them down under this pseudonym. Judging by the style, his wife Mira must have helped him in this, of which I am still waiting for a solid biography, because her biography is worth a sensational novel no worse than even “The Janissaries of the Kremlin” (and this is a high bar).
Well, Diplomex described how a delegate to the United Nations was asked if he “has never tried to speak improvisationally without a pre-written text.
“No,” he replied, “the experience of my colleagues has shown that impromptu speeches are not worth the paper they are written on.”
There are, of course, diplomats who (for various reasons, but most often for their own safety) strictly reproduce the instructions received. In general opinion, this should be feature of German diplomacy. The Germans are regarded as placing great importance on preparatory work, drawing up strict and comprehensive instructions. But in my work (on the forum of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg) I met a German ambassador, who interpreted the instructions very creatively. So much so that he acted against them. We checked with the Auswertiges Amt what instructions were sent to him on a matter important to us, and we compared with what he was saying. Cornered by me, he tried to dodge, but finally returned to the path of instructions. Therefore, it is always preferable to have a good, open dialogue between headquarters during negotiations and to check whether there are any distortions between the headquarters and the delegation.
In my experience, the most constrained by strict instructions in conversation were the Chinese. It seemed that they were constantly reciting only the “talking points” written for them at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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It should be remembered that negotiations are not resolved after the presentation of initial positions. You have to have arguments for later. You can’t shoot them at the first exchange of fire. And in the later stages, the arguments must be selected according to the sensitivity of the partners, the listener. You need good examples, good anecdotes, good quotes. Of course, you can focus on praising your own position (so-called one-sided argumentation), but it is better to take into account the arguments that came from the other side, refer to them and, when necessary, refute them effectively (so-called two-sided argumentation). It is necessary to determine in advance whether we will multiply demands during the discussion or tone down the initial position presented in excess during the discussion.
A common practice among diplomats is to attack the arguments of the opposing side with a question, and a rhetorical question in particular.
The master of rhetorical questions was Krishna Menon, an Indian politician and diplomat, the black legend of the UN. For many years, at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, he headed the Indian delegation at UN General Assembly sessions and was India’s Permanent Representative in New York. Due to his arrogance and aggressiveness, but combined with brilliance and oratorical talent, he became a universally disliked diplomat, and he annoyed Americans in particular. He was called Mephistopheles in a Savile Row suit, Genius of Evil, Indian Rasputin. He became famous for the longest speech in the history of the United Nations. On January 23-24, 1957, at a meeting of the Security Council dedicated to the Kashmir conflict, he spoke for 7 hours and 48 minutes (he collapsed in the process and needed medical attention, but he persevered). By the way, the second place in terms of the length of speeches is held by Fidel Castro, who on September 26, 1960, spoke for 269 minutes at the session of the UN General Assembly. Three days earlier, Khrushchev spoke into the microphone for 140 minutes, which also puts him in the leading group. Returning to Menon, however, when everyone was exhausted listening to his tirades, he finished off the audience with a final series of rhetorical questions: “Have we the right for the security of our territory? Have we the right to be free from threat? Have we the right to feel assured that the machinery of the Security Council and its resolutions are not going to be used as a smokescreen for the preparation of aggression against us? Have we the right (…) to live side by side with our neighbour, free from the threats of a holy war? Have we the right…”, and so on, and so on.
The clarifying phase is a phase where the ability to ask questions comes of special value. A well-posed question can sometimes be more persuasive than extensive evidence and argument. The question may expose the lack of logic in the position of the other party, it may ridicule its exorbitant demands. A good negotiator must know how to ask.
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A good trick is to use the so-called heuristic argumentation. We make an assumption, e.g. that the other party is right, than use hypotheses and guesses, without delving into the accuracy of the facts, to prove that implementation of the proposal will not lead to the assumed goal, or will even cause counterproductive effects, and even harm the interests of the other party, and more so than other bad proposals known so far. We begin this process, of course, with the reservation that it is only a mental exercise (“thinking out loud…”).
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The bane of negotiations, especially the so-called institutional ones, i.e. conducted in the forum of international organizations, is to refer to previously adopted formulations or positions when agreeing on new documents. Sometimes invoking the appropriate formula from the resolution of the UN General Assembly or the Committee of Ministers in the case of the Council of Europe even closes the discussion. Participants realize that the previously adopted formula will be the only way to reach an agreement anyway. And so what if the years fly by, the context of the statement changes, the quoted formula may not have much connection with the discussed issue, but once agreed formula may turn out to be an unbeatable argument.
In discussions, of course, you can always refer to the statements of well-known authorities, experts, wisemen, although it is always necessary to check whether their position is also unquestionable on the other side. The Soviets, in rightly past times, cited Marx, Engels and Lenin profusely in their internal foreign policy discussions, but spared it themselves and others when talking to their Western partners. And sometimes their Western partners quoted communist classics or paraphrased them. Ronald Reagan repeated to Gorbachev at every opportunity: “Doveryai, no proveryai!”.
Quotations and references work well when they come from the opposing party’s sources of authority and challenge their own position. And when they sting with irony.
It’s good to have such references ready when you sit down at the table.
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Adepts of diplomacy should undergo basic training in the art of oratory and eristic art. Consciously know when it is better to use narrowing arguments and when to use broadening ones. My first observations in the CSCE forum led me to the conclusion that the narrowing argumentation (from the general to the specific) was a typical line of the Warsaw Pact countries. There, the positions were built from the general (strategic) to the detail (specific parameters and details). In NATO, the broadening logic prevailed. There, the starting point was concrete, detail.
Repetition techniques must be learned. You have to learn how to build a line of argument from the simple to the complex, from the familiar to the new. You need to learn when to identify with the recipient (even if you may not fully agree with him), when to isolate the partner by referring to “mainstream” views.
And it all depends on who you talk to and what you talk about, and for what purpose.
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Of course, there are situations when the best solution in negotiations is silence. In October 2017, mediators from the Minsk Group arranged a meeting between the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan in Geneva. After the formal part, the leaders of both countries were to spend about an hour talking face to face. Aliyev reportedly suggested to Sargsyan that they just be silent for an hour. Because everything they had to say to each other, they had already said to each other so many times. And let the mediators think that their idea of a face-to-face conversation makes sense.
Silence usually evokes a sense of awkwardness. Someone who interrupts the silence may signal that he cares more about the conversation. Robert Holmes à Court, an Australian businessman and once the country’s first billionaire, said years ago: “It’s a well-known proposition that you know who’s going to win a negotiation; it’s he who pauses the longest.”
But no one will fool seasoned negotiators with such a trick. If we are silent, it should not be at the beginning of negotiations, but when solutions are proposed to us. Because the partner then has trouble reading our evaluation of his offer. Well, and you can and even should be silent when you don’t know what to say. It is always better to remain silent than to talk nonsense. Such silence will not offend anyone.
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It is also a method (“there is a method in this madness…”) using incomprehensible phrases and hard-to-read facial expressions. This specific negotiating style of Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz in the European Union budget negotiations at the end of 2005 was even immortalized in the pages of political literature. Jonathan Powell, who in 1997-2007 was the head of Tony Blair’s office and whom I met in diplomatic activities in Stockholm in 1986 and Vienna in 1987-1990, recalled that “… it was almost impossible to negotiate with their (i.e. our – my remark) silent prime minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz. He would speak entirely in riddles, very quietely and with a faint smile that conveyed a sense that he was being ironic. (…) It was either a very clever negotiating tactic so that we would keep offering him more and more money. Or he simply wasn’t there. We were never sure which, and we dubbed him the first postmodern prime minister.”
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Even more assaulting than silence is the method of leaving the room when you hear something you don’t want to hear. Clemenceau, when he wanted to show an extreme form of anger, reportedly used to run out of the room during the Versailles Conference. It is true that leaving the room during a speech by an unwelcome person (like by Lavrov at the 2022 session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva) is an extreme manifestation of diplomatic ostracism in conference diplomacy. This is very rarely done in negotiations. Because the absent may miss an important moment. The Soviet delegate’s boycott of the Security Council meetings in 1950 led to the adoption of a resolution that allowed the American intervention under the UN flag in the Korean War.
I witnessed a demonstrative exit from the room, which I cannot call anything other than rude, even after many years. President Yushchenko was invited to the NATO summit in February 2005 in Brussels. This is what the Americans suggested, and we as Poland wanted it very much. But Germany and France objected. They finally gave in. But when Yushchenko began to speak, Chirac and Schroeder were nowhere to be seen. I was sitting quite close and I could see that their departure from the room was planned and coordinated. I wouldn’t be surprised if they boasted about it to Putin.
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Diplomats are generally associated with speaking polite and ambiguous phrases. In formal and general debates, especially those that take place in front of the public, such as the sessions of the UN General Assembly, there is indeed a code of polite, but also artificial, stiff and boring speech. The most important task then is not to give anyone an excuse to feel offended. Even in the most basic way. Because there is nothing more important than the majesty of the state resulting from the principle of sovereignty.
The accusation that the diplomats’ statements are not clear is still justified. They usually speak vaguely, sometimes even (like the Chinese, for example) even in the Aesopian style. This often irritates experts, especially military ones, who are members of delegations, who are used to using the black and white language of facts and data. The ambiguity of expression has one fundamental advantage. It allows us to keep open the interpretation options of statements, and allows diplomats to withdraw in time from a course of action that may turn out to be dangerous. They do not allow themselves to be pinned down by their ambiguity and fall into situations that are difficult to extricate themselves from.
Based on my own experience, I can confidently say that even the formal part of negotiations is becoming more and more “de-formalised”. When I started my career, formal speeches, especially at the UN, were full of rigid formulas and treating other partners only as “esteemed (honourable) delegates” and the like. A formal debate among the Ministers’ Delegates at the Council of Europe looked a little less numb. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, despite the fact that it began its existence in times of deep political division, quickly adopted a more direct style of communication between the partners, although it was really revealed only after the transition to the so-called informal format, when the staff took off the plates with the names of the countries, and the negotiators addressed each other not as government delegates, but as private persons (Dear Mr. Switalski, and with time even Dear Piotr, even if we had not yet managed to switch to “first name basis”, because especially in English “You” is so ambiguous that “Dear Piotr” can also mean “Dear Mr. Piotr”). Years later, however, the OSCE has formalized itself again, and its debates are dull.
The most direct debates, for understandable reasons, took place within NATO and the European Union. There you could sometimes hear very painful confessions about your own government. I remember how, during the first PiS rule, at the EU co-ordination meeting in the CoE in Strasbourg, the ambassador of one of the important EU members expressed satisfaction in assessing the policy of the Polish government that Poland does not have, thank God, nuclear weapons.
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When Poland took over the presidency of the UN Security Council in March 1997, I published an article in “Rzeczpospolita” (February 27, 1997) in which I wanted to bring the functioning of this body to a wider audience. As a joke, I included a glossary of terms used in multilateral negotiations and their deciphered meaning. I gathered this glossary from various reference manuals and my own observations.
I will cite a few examples:
„I took note of your proposal” means „I essentially do not welcome your initiative”,
„I acknowledge the receipt of your note” means „I hate what you sent me”,
„I note” means „I do not agree with what has been said”,
„I note with satisfaction” means „I agree with what has been said but I do not intend doing anything”,
„I have no instructions” means „I am waiting for instructions”,
„I am waiting for instructions” means „I have instructions but I will not reveal them until I see where things are going”,
„I am instructed to say…” means „I don’t quite share the position I am going to present”
„Speaking in the spirit of compromise…” means „I will repeat what I said before but using different words”,
„If I understood correctly” means „I am going to distort what you have just said”,
„If I may put it another way” means „I wish to contradict myself”’,
„Your proposal will be transmitted to the capital for careful study” means „At first glance I do not like what you suggested but may be I will change my mind”,
„Our proposal is based on a delicate compromise which required a lot of effort by the interested delegations” means „Any amendments to the text are not welcome”,
„With all due respect to my esteemed colleague and friend” means „I am going to criticise heavily what my colleague proposed”,
„Reacting spontaneously to the proposal of the previous speaker” means „the previous speaker has warned me about it and asked to say something about it”,
„I must have not understood properly what my colleague said” means „I understood perfectly but I disagree with him and I want to give him a chance to change his mind”.
„If I understood properly my colleague…” means „I am going to put into his mouth something he did not say”.
One could multiply these phrases indefinitely. Since I compiled this glossary of multilateral diplomacy, however, the debates have become more direct even at the United Nations. The specific communication code is used less and less frequently. Maybe that’s better.
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Negotiators also communicate with each other in a non-verbal way. There is no special code for this. A raised thumb commonly means approval. But much less often than before, the sign of the combined thumb and index finger is used to signal that everything is ok, a sign used among divers, and in Italy meaning “perfetto”. Probably not, however, because there are supposedly communities where it is a signal implying different sexual preferences to the speaker. Head nodding from top to bottom by the listener means that he agrees with the content of our speech. Unless he’s Bulgarian. Then it could mean quite the opposite. Extended index and middle fingers can mean the joy of negotiating victory. But, if shown with the back of the hand, they can carry a rather insulting signal in the code of the French (we remember how President Sarkozy covered the two fingers innocently shown to him by President Kaczyński at the summit in Brussels in October 2008). Thanks to Tarantino, we know that Germans and English order three beers differently. Signaling the number two by sticking out your thumb and forefinger in Italy can be treated as an insult (suggesting your spouse’s infidelity). We also know that Russians and Poles count differently on their fingers. We straighten them one by one, while the Russians bend them. No middle finger has ever been shown at the negotiating table in my presence. But I will admit (voluntarily) that I once showed the gesture of satiety (gathering to vomit) used by the Italians. Because I knew that only an Italian would understand it, and it was not addressed to him, so the Italian diplomat just smiled and gave a thumbs up.
It reflects badly on the negotiator to exaggerate waving his hands while talking. He makes it clear that his words need additional support, that they do not evoke inner conviction in himself. So if you gesticulate, do it calmly, carefully. Maybe not as artificially and stereotypically as Stoltenberg, maybe not as caricatured as the touching hands by Merkel, but filling your messages with signs of openness and conciliation. Therefore, it is good to teach negotiators the art of gesticulation as well.
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The ability to listen is no less important than the ability to speak. The need to bring the position of the other party to our awareness by repeated repetitions can throw the partner off balance and spoil the atmosphere. It gives the impression that we do not listen to what the partner has to say, that we ignore him, disregard him. Unless we do so on purpose in accordance with the chosen tactics.
It is also important to be able to pick up the unspoken words. In diplomacy, it matters not only what is said, but also what is not said, what has been said before and what we expected to hear. And if the partner didn’t say something, and could have, why didn’t he? I wasn’t taught that kind of analysis in college. But immediately after starting work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I came across old diplomats who were masters of dissecting texts into prime factors, also in terms of omitted words and phrases. And they were masters of reading (and listening to) the messages hidden between the lines. Diplomacy used to be (and was certainly during the Cold War) the realm of communication between lines.
Next post June 19, 2023
