Negotiations do not take place in isolation. They are influenced by events in the wider world. But the longer the negotiations last, the more the behaviour of negotiators can be influenced by the ivory tower syndrome. You have to be able to overcome it, adapt your negotiation strategy and tactics to the evolution of external factors.
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The position in international negotiations is increasingly built by appealing to public opinion. With all the secrecy of the negotiations, it is important to convince the public opinion to support your position, and to gain public approval for the outcome of the negotiations. This also applies, and perhaps above all, to situations when negotiations are heading towards decisions that may prove difficult to be accepted by the public opinion. President Serzh Sargisyan was completely unable to shape public opinion when in 2016 he went to accept the Lavrov Plan, which meant serious concessions to Azerbaijan. He kept everything a secret from the public, creating space for rumours and speculation. As a result, it brought about an atmosphere that indirectly led to an attempt to protest by force (terrorist attack on the police barracks in July 2016). He had to ask the Russians to postpone the deal until the situation calmed down and the elections were held but in the meantime was removed from power. Nikol Pashinyan, when he began negotiating a peace treaty with Azerbaijan after the 2020 war, did not hide from the public the need for difficult concessions. But he was aware that the development of events was putting him up against the wall. He had nothing to lose.
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When I started my diplomatic adventure, the authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland did not have to seek the favor of public opinion. However, they wanted to show our diplomatic activities on international forums, including the CSCE, as achievements of the authorities and a proof of the independence of foreign policy. Reports from the proceedings of the Stockholm conference, the CSCE review meeting in Vienna, CFE negotiations, and in particular Polish speeches and proposals found their way to the prominent pages, even of regional newspapers, without any effort on the part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
But we also had to ensure that our position was well understood by the party and government elite. The source of information about the world and international politics for the power elite of the People’s Republic of Poland were the so-called PAP (Polish Press Agency) special bulletins. There, international reality was described as it was, without embellishing it for the current needs of propaganda. And the elite should have understood and supported our negotiating line, especially when it came to making concessions.
I must admit that I spent a lot of time, especially in Vienna in the late 1980s in connection with the CFE negotiations, preparing messages for PAP correspondents who were working on texts for the bulletin. If the correspondent was competent (such as Andrzej Rayzacher), a simple conversation or a loose briefing was enough. However, if the correspondent showed resistance to absorbing the content, the only way was to write ready-made texts for him. I had to do this several times to avoid the distortion of the complex aspects of the negotiations. Of course, I didn’t earn any verse for this reason, nor did I gain recognition, because the texts were published under a different name.
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With time, I became an ardent advocate of directing the activity of diplomats to the tracks of public diplomacy. This should also apply to explaining diplomatic negotiation processes, not only to the public opinion of one’s own country. It requires even more effort to explain this to the public opinion of the other negotiating party.
When in 2015 I took over as the European Union’s ambassador to Armenia, I was horrified to find that, for large circles of Armenian society, the failure of negotiations on an association agreement with Armenia in 2013 was the fault of the European Union alone. Such a perfidious propaganda strategy was adopted by the then Armenian government and articulated by the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, who zealously implemented Russian directives. I devoted a lot of time to bring the true version of events to the awareness of the Armenians and make them realize that it was the Armenian authorities, under the dictation of Russia, who withdrew from the negotiations. When we negotiated a new partnership agreement with Armenia, our message was dominant. And when in May 2016 I publicly expressed concern about the lack of progress in the negotiations, the authorities took the remark to heart, as public opinion sided with me, and quickly issued instructions to speed up the talks.
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My public persuasion skills were put to the first serious test during the negotiations on the Convention on the Prohibition of Anti-Personnel Mines in Oslo in September 1997. The negotiations attracted the attention of the world’s NGOs as well as the press. NGOs were present in Oslo and tried to influence the course of the negotiations by putting pressure on delegations of countries that showed an “unconstructive” approach to the Convention. They invited the heads of particular “difficult” delegations to public discussions. Not everyone accepted the invitations. We were also marked by the “kind ones” as “resistant”. I accepted the invitation. And I convinced the activists of non-governmental organizations that our postulates are guided solely by the desire to make the convention as universal and effective as possible. I convinced them that our philosophy would bring closer to the convention the states that have in their arsenal and use these mines, and not only those that, as a result of conflicts, including internal ones, suffer from the numerous victims of mines deployed years ago on their territory (Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan and others). That we want our neighbours – Russia, Belarus, Ukraine – to join the convention, and that great powers, such as the USA or China, join the convention. Therefore, we are so much for the idea of a ban that we have to be against some provisions of the Canadian-Austrian draft negotiated in Oslo. Judging by the press and other accounts of our discussion, I managed to remove the odium of the “resistant” state from our delegation.
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The negotiator must be prepared that his work will be hindered by “leaks” to the press, the source of which will be officials of his own ministry who are reluctant to him. When, on behalf of Poland, I negotiated in NATO in 1998 the position of the Alliance on the so-called adaptation of the CFE treaty (I wrote about it on my blog in 2022), I quickly learned in contacts with the Polish press that one of the then directors at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who quite often succumbed to delusions about the course of these negotiations, prompted one of the editors of a very widely read newspaper not only the content of my notes, but also informed him about my consultation plans. Needless to say, it didn’t make my mission any easier. But all the more it mobilized me to go for sincere contacts with the press.
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It is true that diplomats, especially old-school diplomats, have a resistance to public diplomacy in a foreign country. Because these activities are not related to the traditional understanding of the profession. The authorities of the host country often do not like the public involvement of foreign diplomats. So the stress is double, and the success is elusive.
This resistance contributed to the creation of stereotypes that hurt professional diplomats. Ambassador Perina, an American diplomat, quoted earlier, and more than once in today’s entry, admitted that in the US political circles in the administration blamed their own diplomats for US image problems in the world. “The argument was that the culture of the Foreign Service did not value public diplomacy, and that ambassadors spent too little time on it.”
But just look at the public recognition of the US ambassador to Poland Mark Brzezinski (or his predecessor Georgette Mosbacher and earlier ambassadors). I wish Europe that at least one of the ambassadors of the European Union countries in Warsaw (and not only in Warsaw) would have comparable recognition.
Today, foreign ministers and diplomats are widely expected to be active in the field of public diplomacy. Although there are still, even now in Poland, ministers of foreign affairs who so effectively avoid contact with the public that their society, even after years in office, cannot remember their names (and achievements). But maybe that’s a good thing, because they can’t offer anything to society apart from tromtadrama, banality and lies.
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Kissinger was, on the one hand, the first secretary of state a genuine celebrity who could twist journalists around his finger and manipulate public opinion. He was active. Annually, he delivered over a dozen keynote speeches to American local audiences. But at the same time, he was criticized by the American diplomatic corps for the way he conducted public diplomacy.
The famous American strategist Helmut Sonnefeldt had the greatest personal grudge against him. He entered diplomatic history textbooks as the author of the Sonnefeldt Doctrine, against his intentions, of course. In 1975, he met in London with American diplomats in Western European countries. And he said there that perhaps more organic ties would emerge in relations between the socialist countries and the USSR. Warren Zimmerman, who, as an officer of the London embassy, prepared a circular cable with a summary of Sonnefeldt’s briefing, formulated this thesis in a way that later gave rise to the interpretation that Americans believe that the violation of organic ties within the communist camp can lead to World War III. It was leaked to the press (Sonnefeldt suspected the Pentagon) and in April 1976 Novak and Evans published an article in the Washington Post that outraged public opinion. However, when Sonnenfeldt wanted to go to the press and correct the insinuations, Kissinger forbade him. And the Sonnefeldt Doctrine became world famous.
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Negotiators have learned about the importance of public support many times in modern history. How many times have negotiated agreements had to be put aside because they did not pass the public support test. The opposition of the French and Dutch societies in the 2005 referenda made the Constitutional Treaty of the European Union dead. And yet it was a Frenchman, former president – Valery Giscard d’Estaing who presided over the work of the Convention, which drafted the Treaty.
And how many times have diplomats negotiated excellent documents that did not find political support in the ruling elites. The Americans played a leading role in developing the concept of the League of Nations, indeed, they were the original authors of the idea, and due to the opposition of the Senate, they did not join it. The Americans also played an initiative role in the negotiations on the Convention on the Laws of the Sea, adopted in 1982, and have not yet ratified it.
The French submitted the Pleven Plan in 1950 to build a European defense community. And when, after intensive work at the turn of 1951 and 1952, an agreement of six countries was negotiated, it was the French National Assembly that buried the project in 1954, refusing to ratify it. There is no European army to this day. Maybe if the Pleven Plan had been finalized earlier, the history of European defense cooperation would have turned out differently.
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Because the course of negotiations and their outcome are undoubtedly affected by the time factor. Its positive impact may manifest itself in a positive sense, self-solving the problems facing the negotiators.
A good negotiator must have a sense of “timing”, i.e. doing the right things at the right time. He must know when to take advantage of an opportunity without delay, and when to delay the events, to put on the brake. And it’s not only about timing determined by the internal logic of negotiations, but also about the influence of external (political) time on the matter of negotiations.
During the negotiations on the CFE Treaty, it turned out that a significant problem in its implementation resulting from the unification of Germany would be the status of the Soviet armaments deployed in the eastern part of Germany. But the treaty limits were to be reached 40 months after the entry into force of the Treaty, counting from November 9, 1992. And in August 1994, there were no Russian troops in Germany at all. Time solved a problem that didn’t even emerge. So negotiators from some smart countries were instructed to let the problem drop.
Another example related to the CFE Treaty: within the so-called group of former Warsaw Pact countries, even in 1991 attempts were made (under pressure from the USSR) to establish a mechanism for agreeing on the division of the collective ceiling between individual countries. I managed to convince our head of delegation and superiors at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the best solution is to break off these negotiations. I argued that the USSR was guaranteed 50 percent by the treaty anyway, and will use the consultation mechanism to act as an arbiter between former allies. But most importantly, I believed that time would make discussions about our national limits pointless, because we would not be able to meet them. And time has shown that I was right.
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One of the stereotypes in resolving regional conflicts is the belief that time will heal wounds and extinguish emotions, so one should not rush the conflicting parties in negotiations too much and wait for the right time. This erroneous diagnosis was propagated by Russian diplomacy in relation to the conflicts in the territory of the former USSR. They argued that if there was no greater threat of a resumption of the acute phase of the conflict, then one should wait until the conflict dries up. And behind the screen of this thesis, they used the irresolvability of conflicts for Russia’s imperial purposes. This led to the phenomenon of the so-called frozen conflicts (Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh). And it turned out that with each passing year it became more and more difficult to achieve a breakthrough in the negotiations. As in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, the use of force seemed to be the only factor to make the negotiations more dynamic.
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Time is also an obvious pressure factor on negotiators.
During the Congress of Utrecht in 1712-1713, which was to end the so-called war of the Spanish Succession and lasted over 15 months, at the end of the deliberations the rumors about the deteriorating health of Queen Anne in London became so strong that the English and French negotiators decided on some compromise formulas (because despite the multilateral nature and the presence of over 80 delegates, including from Poland, the decisions were made by England and France) by throwing the dice. Blind fate decided the outcome of the negotiations! So much was feared that Anne’s death would undo the results achieved.
The Peace of Utrecht confirmed French acceptance of the Hanoverian succession in Great Britain. Anne died in 1714. There were no major perturbations when George I took the throne. And our Maria Klementyna Sobieska could only claim to be the titular queen of England, because her husband James Stuart never ascended the throne, although he did not give up his claims.
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Political time is not uniform time. In my book The Hourglass and the Throne, I describe how I observed the influence of time on the behavior of negotiators in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when political time in Europe accelerated markedly. The CSCE review meeting, which began on November 4, 1986, was to last until the summer of 1987. It lasted until January 1989. Western states wanted to make the most of the ongoing internal changes in the USSR and in the eastern camp, Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. They therefore raised the bar of commitments in the field of human rights and people-to-people contacts. They even led to the USSR agreeing to host one of the meetings of the so-called the human dimension of the CSCE in Moscow (which one Western diplomat compared to the fantasy of getting together for a “drinking party in Mecca”).
In the fall of 1988, Washington decided that the review conference should be concluded at the end of Ronald Reagan’s term. Although the election of George Bush ensured the political continuity of the administration, it was felt that enough had been obtained from the Soviets, the new team in the State Department (Baker was to replace Schultz in the new administration) should keep its head free from the Viennese dossier. And the negotiations in Vienna were pushed forward in great haste. Until the document was agreed on January 19, 1989, and on January 20, 1989, Reagan ceased to be president and Schultz formally ceased to be secretary of state.
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I described the accelerating effect of time on negotiations in my book on the example of CFE negotiations. In 1990, the Americans were so concerned that the collapse of the USSR would destroy all the achievements of the negotiations that, in order to meet the November 1990 deadline for concluding negotiations on the treaty, they entered into bilateral negotiations with the USSR and negotiated the treaty bilaterally, which was submitted to the other 20 parties for take-it-or-leave-it acceptance. The Americans were so afraid that they would not make it on time.
The factor of pressure is always the tenure of power. Every democratic leader wants his efforts to succeed in international negotiations to end within his political terms of office. Nobody wants to give gifts to his successors. Every American administration, anticipating a change of political affiliation in the position of president, acts under pressure in the international arena. Obama wanted the U.S. participation in the Paris climate agreements to be sealed until his departure. And Trump wanted a breakthrough in settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Autocracies have the advantage over democracies that the term of office factor does not play any role. Dictators look at the negotiating calendars without stress. They assume their not only political longevity. They can always afford to wait out an inconvenient leader on the other side. Putin even today thinks he can just wait out Biden.
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Experts say: negotiators must be given deadlines to complete their work. Without a deadline, negotiations can drag on indefinitely.
The Conference on Disarmament, which has been operating in Geneva since 1996, is plunged into stagnation. It is true that in 2009 working groups were even established there, but it was significant that negotiations on the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons were conducted outside its framework, even though it is declaratively a body specifically designed to negotiate universal disarmament agreements. Would setting deadlines for it change anything about its performance?
The Doha Round of trade negotiations has frustrated observers for more than two decades. However, it concerned difficult issues, especially agriculture and services. Many prominent participants in the negotiations called for its completion, despite the lack of expected results. But it seems to last forever.
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But even deadlines, negotiators can cope with them. In the CSCE process, it was practiced several times to stop the clock. The most spectacular stop of the clock took place in Madrid in 1983. The clock was stopped for several days at the Stockholm Conference in 1986.
A novice in negotiations may be surprised that negotiators ask to announce a “coffee break”, but they do not drink coffee during it at all, but only consult among each other vigorously. And a coffee break can last not minutes, but hours, and sometimes even extend into the next day.
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Negotiators must always take the time factor into account when evaluating their bargaining power. The worst is when all opposing parties decide that time is in their favor. This was the case in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 1994-2020. The Armenians believed that time preserves the situation in the field, i.e. the fact that they control the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and its adjacent areas. They hoped that time would make Azerbaijan, and especially its society, come to terms with the actual loss of control over this area. Azerbaijan, in turn, hoped that its growing military advantage over Armenia, resulting from the disproportionate military expenditure in its favour, would lead to a situation in which it would be possible to recapture the lost lands with the help of military force. And diplomatic negotiations for years crashed due to the lack of readiness of both sides to make the necessary concessions.
My findings were confirmed in the recollections of Ambassador Rudi Perina (my good colleague from the negotiations in Vienna in the early 1990s), who co-chaired the Minsk Group on behalf of the US at the beginning of this century: “…both sides felt that time was on their side. The Azeris felt that they were going to get all of this incredible oil revenue and they would be able to increase their military strength and overwhelm the Armenians who were losing population through emigration and in economic straits. On the other hand the Armenians also felt that time was on their side simply because they were holding the land and creating a type of fait accompli.”
The 2020 war showed that time was indeed working for Azerbaijan. It regained control over parts of Karabakh and the occupied territories. Armenia turned out to be entirely at the whim of Russia.
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Negotiations, especially multilateral ones, require now more and more time. Several factors contribute to the time-consuming nature of negotiations. First of all, the growing number of negotiating entities. There are almost two hundred of them at the UN forum. Sometimes negotiating global agreements is like turning the Vistula River around (“like herding cats”). The era when a few powers sat at the table and determined the fate of the world in a week or two, as at Yalta or Potsdam or Dumbarton Oaks, has gone forever. Even if the great powers agree something among themselves today, the probability that the other participants in international life will silently agree to it is slim. This is demonstrated by the history of the already mentioned trade negotiations under the Doha Round or the Geneva Disarmament Conference. The functioning of formats with limited membership, such as the G-7, shows that even if some common strategies are developed there, they do not translate well into the functioning of global institutions. Even the G-20, which would aspire to the role of building a global consensus between the rich North and the poor South, is unable to generate impulses that would ensure the control of the system of international relations on a global scale.
The increase in the number of negotiating entities in itself perhaps would not make the negotiations so time-consuming. Because during the Cold War there were quite many players, but global negotiations had a strategic dimension of the bloc-to-bloc confrontation, and the smaller members of both blocs behaved in a disciplined manner. The third bloc, that of the non-aligned movement, became an independent factor only in the 1960s, and the developing countries in the Group of 77 formula began to speak in a bloc voice only in the 1970s, and even to a limited extent. Today, the sovereign emancipation of states manifests itself in an unpredictable cacophony of views and positions. Harmonizing them takes more and more time. Talks about reforming the Security Council have been going on for thirty years. Agreeing to change its size objectively does not seem more difficult today than it was almost eighty years ago during the negotiations of the UN Charter. But politically it is an insurmountable challenge. The UN Charter cannot be revised in any matter, even as trivial as the removal of the so-called enemy clause, for fifty years.
The number of negotiation platforms, which are often difficult for political factors to control, is growing. Experts can sometimes effectively entrench themselves in their own positions. Only political decisions can make progress. But political decision makers don’t care about them. These are issues that never have a chance to reach their consciousness. In addition, decision-makers are afraid of responsibility for decisions whose consequences they cannot fully predict. And so the negotiations fall into a drift.
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The degree of technical complexity in international talks is also increasing. As a result, experts or, even worse, bureaucrats of ministries and branch institutions take over the leading role in the negotiations. They are generally less sensitive to the political implications of the negotiation process, more likely to lock themselves in an ivory negotiating tower, and less flexible than professional diplomats. The complexity of the negotiation matter pushes diplomats to the margins. Because it is increasingly difficult for them to master even elementary knowledge about the subject of negotiations. Sometimes they don’t even have time for that.
Undoubtedly, negotiations are shortened and facilitated by the growth of legal culture. It removes distrust and accelerates compromises.
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Imponderables do not succumb to time. Territorial issues have always been the most difficult to negotiate, especially the borders, even if it concerned uninhabited territories, and even those not necessarily rich in raw materials or important in terms of communication. In the case of negotiations ending victorious wars, even if the defeated side (like the Germans at Versailles or Potsdam) had nothing to say, the shifting of borders could cause disputes among the victorious Allies. It would seem that today, when territory is less important in building the power and wealth of the state, disputes over the shape of borders could lose their sharpness, but by no means: their symbolic and political importance makes the necessary concessions difficult, if not impossible.
At the San Francisco Conference in 1951, Japan relinquished its rights to the Kuril Islands to the USSR. But according to Japan, this did not apply to the inconspicuous and uninhabited islands (Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and the group of Habomai islands) which it calls the Northern Territories, not the Kurils. It did not sign a peace treaty with Russia. And Russia has no intention of removing this bone of contention so far. Because it would set an undesirable precedent? Because in a symbolic matter, these Kuril islands have not even managed to connect with the national identity and prestige of Russia in any way.
In the 1970s, a dispute over the boundary of territorial waters and the economic zone between Poland and the GDR emerged. As a result of Polish mistakes, the East Germans set their boundaries so that they interfered with the approach fairway to Świnoujście and the Polish anchorage. Official negotiations began in 1978 but quickly reached an impasse. When East Germany extended its territorial waters to a strip of 12 miles on January 1, 1985, the approach and anchorage came under its jurisdiction. The East Germans demanded formal notifications from Polish vessels about crossing foreign territory. Although the Polish side ignored these demands, incidents began to occur, including those involving warships (the GDR even painted over the identification marks on the sides). Polish sports yachts were rammed. It was an unprecedented example of the strength of the territorial dispute in relations between the states of the socialist bloc. After Jaruzelski’s talks with Honecker in 1988, tensions eased. Negotiations resumed in January 1989 and ended with a compromise in May 1989. I had the opportunity to listen to the personal account of the head of the Polish delegation to these negotiations, Director Władysław Napieraj. He was a tough negotiator. If I remember correctly, as a teenager during the German occupation he was sent to the Oranienburg concentration camp with his mother. He could not be suspected of being philo-German in any way. In his opinion, the East German tenacity (at the end of the GDR’s existence) was dictated primarily by the desire to demonstrate to all Germans, especially the West, that the GDR relentlessly defended all-German interests. A minor dispute in the “family” has become an issue of principle.
Sometimes it is easier to exchange millions of national minorities than to correct borders. Great migrations accompanied the establishment of borders between Greece and Turkey after World War I, or between Pakistan and India after their declaration of independence. Territories were also exchanged on a large scale. I have already mentioned on this blog how, after the Congress of Vienna in 1918, Sweden gave Finland to Russia, getting Norway in return. And in Potsdam in 1945, Poland received the Western Territories as “compensation” for giving up its Eastern provinces.
Today, such methods of solving territorial issues do not pass. Territorial conflicts today, even if they do not always lead to open warfare, are still the most difficult to negotiate.
For over 70 years, the Czech Republic has been delaying the return of approximately 400 hectares of land to Poland. It’s like a „trifle”, but it turns out that even a small piece of land is a sacred thing. Similar resistances affect the return of property or, in particular, cultural goods. The Swedes, who robbed valuable works of Polish culture during the Deluge in the 17th century, which have no connection with Sweden in the slightest, do not feel obliged to return them at all. Even if not plundered, but bought for the sake of protection against destruction, the monuments of ancient Greek culture from the British Museum are the subject of British-Greek contacts and one can be convinced that they will be returned to Greece someday.
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I described in „The Hourglass and the Throne” how the Middle East conflict is perceived as a clash of time perspectives. The approach of the parties to the conflict and the mediators is certainly a clash of time perspectives. Mediators, especially the US, but previously Norway and other involved players, look at the conflict through the prism of the present. For the parties to the conflict, the present bends under the weight of the pillar of the past. The parties to the conflict use a different gauge to measure time. Both Arabs and Jews can afford to wait.
Time is understood differently in different cultures. In Western civilization it usually has a linear form. It reflects the idea of progress. In the Eastern civilizations, and the Hindu in particular, time is arranged cyclically, in a great circle of recurrences of birth, growth and decay.
In the stereotypical perception, negotiators of Northern European countries, Germans, Americans, but also Japanese or Singaporeans appear as a “clock tribe”, where punctuality, time discipline, schedule and plan are important. In turn, Latinos (“manana culture”), Arabs, Africans (“African time”) are representatives of the “people of the sun”, where the needs of man, not the clock, regulate the schedule of the day. In diplomatic practice, these differences are not visible. In two sessions of the UN General Assembly at the beginning of the millennium, I deliberately observed the degree of time discipline of the delegates during the meetings of certain committees. Very often, the last people to appear in the room were representatives of European Union countries. But not because of time negligence, but because of the need to urgently exchange views among themselves.
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I would like to use today’s entry also to briefly discuss the issue of the external cultural factor in conducting negotiations. During the preparation process, one should always be aware of the cultural determinants of the negotiation behavior of other partners.
This applies not only to the time factor. There are also different understandings of the role of the diplomatic form, i.e. protocol and ceremony. The West is more direct. Shortening the distance is the norm. No offense is taken due to circumventing the protocol. Sometime in 2005, as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland, I was invited to present the key-note presentation at a debate at the OSCE Forum on Security Cooperation in Vienna. At a pre-session working lunch, one of the Western ambassadors seated me somewhere at the end of the table in a clear violation of protocol. I was not offended, however, and did not leave. Because in the “Western” circle, protocol is of little importance at such working meetings. Even Ursula van den Layen was not offended at all in April 2021 when Erdogan, instead of sitting her next to the President of the EU Council, put her on a side sofa, which was a flagrant breach of protocol. She didn’t leave. She pretended that her priority was the substance of the meeting, not the form.
The East is undoubtedly still very ceremonial. Every detail of the negotiation procedure is sensitive. In contacts, politeness, tact and titles count a lot.
In countries, especially in Asia, negotiations are a highly interpersonal relationship. In conversations, above all, you must not offend the partner sitting across from you. In many Asian cultures, it’s never appropriate to say “no.” Round expressions, Aesopian language and metaphors are used to make the partner understand your position on his proposal, but rarely he is told directly. And this lack of a clear “no” can be very deceptive, especially for novice negotiators. Just like saying “yes” by a partner from this cultural circle. I fell for it myself at the beginning of my career, when I had conversations with the Japanese. During my presentation of our position, every now and then I heard a nod “hai” from the interlocutor, which is the Japanese for “yes”. However, when he spoke, his views clearly differed from our position. It was explained to me that his “hai” only meant that he heard and understood what I was saying to him. It didn’t mean he agreed with me.
It is said that Western negotiators, who grew up in a culture of rational approach to negotiations, control their emotions more easily and show more flexibility in interstate negotiations. They are set to get the job done.
Oriental people treat the task as a derivative of the relationship between the negotiators. In some cultures, making concessions leads to losing face.
Diplomats imbued with a “bazaar” mentality, where everything has to be bargained for and everything is a matter of bargaining, are said to be more rigid in interstate negotiations.
In the opinion of the researchers of negotiation cultures, cultural differences have less influence on diplomatic negotiations than on business negotiations. And I can confirm this with my own experience. You need to be aware of cultural differences, be able to take them into account in your behaviour at the negotiating table, but they should not be treated as a significant factor, especially in the fora of international organizations such as the UN, WTO or others. There has long been a cultural convergence based on institutional culture.
One could also write about the differences in negotiation cultures in the Western camp.
It has been assumed that within the framework of the European Union the French are known for their coordination efficiency, almost Cartesian rationalism, always leaving room for manoeuvre. The British were famous for their pragmatism. The Germans acted, based on the stereotype, within the framework of rigid instructions. Poles, on the other hand, succumbed to conspiracy theories that someone was plotting something behind their backs. But although differences in cultures are noticeable, according to experts, their impact on the course of negotiations in the European Union is negligible.
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Looking out of the window is important but negotiations will still be conducted with the curtains drawn. The postulate of open-curtain diplomacy, so popular after World War I, did not lead to the removal of the confidentiality clause from the negotiations. The Bolsheviks wanted to end secret diplomacy, even President Wilson wanted it, but life dictates the need to protect talks from the sometimes prying eye of outside observers. We laid out the reasons earlier. Confidentiality is sometimes the most important condition for building trust.
The public has the right to control the actions of diplomacy. It must be informed. The time of salon diplomacy and secret negotiations is over. But there is a limit to everything, even in democratic systems. If only politicians wouldn’t abuse it too much. About them and about the political factor in the negotiations next month.
Next get together October 16, 2023.
