Over the next year, I intend to share with you my comments, observations, suggestions and advice on diplomatic negotiations. I feel obliged, especially to the emerging generation of Polish diplomats, to share my knowledge, even if my experience may turn out to be of little relevance to today’s conditions. Because the role of diplomacy, including negotiation diplomacy, is changing rapidly and fundamentally. I’m aware of that.
I believe that my reflections will also be of interest to the so-called a wider audience, i.e. those of you who would like to learn more about diplomacy and its secrets, although they do not necessarily need such knowledge in practice (and in life). Well, but most of all I want to avoid the accusation from my colleagues, especially the younger ones, that I took everything I had learned with me when I retired, and I don’t want to pass on my wisdom to anyone.
I never intended to keep my knowledge of negotiation exclusive. There was simply no opportunity (maybe except for the case when in 2020-2021 the East European Studies of the Warsaw University used my expertise when training future diplomatic staff for the democratic and European Belarus which we all hope will materialize one day). No one bothered me about sharing my knowledge. I swear. Hereby I finally discharge this duty.
Over the course of almost four decades of my diplomatic activity, I have negotiated many treaties, conventions, agreements, understandings, declarations, resolutions, decisions, directives, recommendations, communiques, statements and other documents, both multilateral and (in the vast minority) bilateral. It would be hard to calculate exactly how many. Those who have read my blog in the earlier “doctrinal” edition already know something about it. I negotiated with rather good results, although I have never considered myself a born negotiator (but rather quite the opposite). But about my personal predispositions I will say something only be in the concluding post.
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Conducting negotiations with representatives of other countries is a diplomat’s task of the highest order, perhaps even the quintessence of the profession, a source of the greatest possible professional satisfaction.
Of course, diplomacy is a much broader concept than diplomatic negotiation. It consists of sometimes very mundane, routine, and sometimes tedious and thankless activities related to handling relations between states (and international organizations): collecting information, meeting people, processing acquired intelligence, handling visits and contacts, transferring correspondence and information, soliciting for a good image of their own country, not to mention the performance of various consular and administrative functions. Many diplomats end their career without being able to prove themselves as official negotiators, because of course, when communicating with representatives of other countries, they always have to negotiate something, such as the program of a visit or the price for services provided in the host country to their diplomatic mission, but conducting interstate negotiations personally, and not from the position of an adviser, expert or note-taker (reporter), but the so-called frontman, is sometimes an experience that is unavailable to many.
I got lucky. In the spring of 1986, barely three months after starting work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I was baptized in negotiations. I was sent to Stockholm as a member of the Polish delegation to the Conference on Confidence- and Security-building Measures in Europe.
There, I was assigned to one of the working groups that dealt with the issue of the non-use of force. The conference had already been in session for over two years. Of course, the negotiators knew each other like old horses. Discussions on specific provisions had already been conducted within some working groups (the so-called drafting work). In the non-use of force group, there was no talk of negotiating the texts yet, because the West rejected the concept of a separate declaration on this matter, pushed by the Warsaw Pact. But a compromise was already in the air by then. Eventually, the group’s work resulted in a chapter of the final document. We already submitted (in April-May 1986) concrete proposals for provisions and discussed them. Initially, I thought that I would just sit at the table for two weeks, listen and be silent, I would calmly get used to the work. But NATO negotiators immediately recognized the arrival of a new (and very young) participant at the table. They called me to the blackboard, addressing specific questions to me regarding the proposals submitted by our side earlier. I took up the challenge and joined the discussion immediately at my first meeting.
By July 1986, I had built up a pretty good standing among the negotiators in my group. But I did not go to the final round, despite the efforts of our head of delegation, Ambassador Konarski. The leadership of my department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs believed that no agreement would be reached at the conference, it would end in a fiasco, and I would be more useful in Warsaw. The management was obviously wrong, even though two months before the end nothing seemed to indicate success from Warsaw’s perspective. Intuition failed the management. Once again, it turned out that intuition plays a key role in the work of a diplomat. Me in Stockholm, despite many frustrating hours of work with no result, I felt that an agreement would be reached. I saw, above all, in the behavior of American and Soviet diplomats that they needed this agreement in the name of greater strategic goals, even though they gave no signs to other negotiators, neither verbally nor even by blinking an eye. The willingness to reach an agreement was evident, but the decision-makers in Warsaw could not feel it, for understandable reasons. So I did not go to Stockholm for the decisive game, but soon after that I was sent to the CSCE review meeting in Vienna, and I was included in the work of the Warsaw Pact Disarmament Commission. Negotiating has become my daily bread.
And so I had to spend long hours and days behind the negotiating table for many years.
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So I became a negotiator by accident without the slightest preparation. Negotiation techniques were not taught during the studies (at MGIMO). On the other hand, we were taught, and only quite roughly, how to make notes, telegrams, memos, how to write draft theses for conversations and communiqués, i.e. practical skills necessary in the work of a novice diplomat, but negotiating, after all, is initiation of a higher order, so in the first years of his work a diplomat ( in the Soviet system) a priori did not need it. So I learned to negotiate intuitively without any theoretical training. Because life itself teaches us how to negotiate. Continually. As Kevin O’Leary (Canadian businessman and aspiring politician) consoled negotiators in a similar like me situation: “So much of life is a negotiation – so even if you’re not in business, you have opportunities to practice all around you.”
The vast majority of excellent negotiators of the negotiating elite have learned and are learning the skills by doing. Ambassador Thomas Pickering, one of the most outstanding American diplomats of the second half of the 20th century (whose artistry I had the opportunity to admire with my own eyes), recalls that he learned the art of diplomatic writing through practice: “I picked up, if I picked up anything, by osmosis by having the stuff I had written looked at”. Similarly, by osmosis, diplomats learn to negotiate.
I was learning theoretically all the time, but in my free time, almost secretly. My first primer in the early 1990s was the now iconic work “Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In”. As I read it, I wondered how the authors of these right observations and wise advice would manage in practical action. I got the answer after many years, when I came across a memoir interview with Thomas Pickering quoted above. In the autumn of 1990, as the Permanent Representative of the United States to the United Nations in New York, he worked on Security Council resolutions that were to prepare the basis for the intervention liberating Kuwait from the Iraqi occupation. Four members of the Security Council, namely Colombia, Malaysia, Cuba and Yemen, formed a coalition aimed at preventing military action and continuing negotiations with Saddam Hussein. Well, these countries hired Roger Fisher, one of the authors of “Getting to Yes”, as an adviser. And Fisher used to call Pickering, asking him in a friendly way what advice he should give his clients. As the famous homegrown philosopher Yogi Berra used to say: “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is”.
Today, there are countless studies on diplomatic negotiations. Valuable research is being carried out at several universities (Harvard seems to be leading the way). Negotiations have resulted in the PhD and habilitation thesis of many talented scientists. International negotiations have been elevated to the status of a subject of science.
At the same time, training in the field of negotiation techniques was advertized to the incomprehensible limits. Every self-respecting business course today offers negotiation training. And every self-respecting diplomatic academy. Of course, the practical usefulness of these courses is very limited. Some malicious observers compare their effect to learning to ride a horse or swimming at home in an armchair from a textbook. Even the best textbook will not guarantee success.
Of course, there are views that negotiating is neither a science nor a technical skill, but an art that requires innate talent, the right personality, an almost artistic gift, a divine spark. No scientific theorems, no technical tricks, therefore, guarantee negotiating success. The negotiator is an artist.
My view? As with many things, quite middle-of-the-road. I advise students of diplomacy to read good scientific studies (I can recommend a few, but only a few), I advise taking practical courses in negotiation techniques. But above all, I advise you to find a master from whom you can learn as much as possible and to practice true apprenticeship with him/her. Watch him/her closely, in action, behind the scenes, as it were, follow good practices and reject bad ones. I advise looking at him/her how to work on your own ego, on emotional control, on behaviors that affect the work of the negotiator.
I will say right away: I did not have one role-model. But I had the opportunity to observe the work and cooperate with many excellent Polish negotiators in multilateral diplomacy. They were the undisputed leaders of conference diplomacy. They had a position far exceeding the parameters of Poland’s objective negotiating position. Who would new adepts learn from today? Please excuse me from answering.
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Diplomatic negotiations are a specific type of negotiation. After all, we all negotiate every day and throughout our lives. Not only when trying to get a good discount when buying a car or haggling for a carpet in a Turkish bazaar during the holidays. What distinguishes diplomatic negotiations from even business negotiations is the fact that the parties to them are state institutions (states), operating on the principles of sovereign equality within the international order, which is based on legal norms, but is devoid of the so-called superior authority. They are a process of concessions and compensation in order to reach a common position in a situation of conflict of interest. Contrary to political negotiations conducted internally (“let’s get along like a Pole with a Pole”), they are much more unpredictable, because they do not succumb to the pressure of imponderables, and even if such imponderables appear (“let’s get along in the interest of world peace”, „let’s do it in the name of Europe”), their influence is much smaller. Negotiations within the European Union are a qualitatively new phenomenon in which elements of interstate negotiations are mixed with elements of domestic decision-making processes, creating an interesting hybrid. I’m going to devote a separate post to this.
There are various typologies of negotiation. Due to the number of parties, we divide them into bilateral and multilateral ones. Due to their subject we divide them into political, legal, economic, military, cultural and others. Due to the form of the final agreement, we call them legal (giving rise to legal effects) and political (resulting in politically binding commitments and declarations of intent).
Real negotiation comes from a conflict of interests. Conflict of interest is more than just a difference of positions. Of course, you can negotiate even in the absence of contradictions, if only to confirm their absence, but these will be simulated negotiations. The essence of negotiations is a dispute and the desire to resolve it in the name of common interest. Of course, negotiations can become a cover for not so noble intentions, be a way to buy time. This is how historians perceive the policy of Louis XIV in particular, who made the negotiation and conclusion of treaties (usually politically empty) an element of war preparations. He instructed his diplomats that the purpose of their mission was to create strategic and tactical assets for the military operations of the French army.
Negotiations can be a form of probing the partner’s intentions. They can also be seen as an educational endeavor. When in December 1961 it was decided to create a new UN body for disarmament negotiations, the ten NATO and Warsaw Pact countries were joined by eight non-aligned countries (including Burma, Ethiopia and Nigeria), it was not only about increasing the legitimacy of this body. For example, the Americans did not hide that they also wanted to use this opportunity to promote responsibility and teach negotiation culture newly emerging states, because all real arrangements were made between the US and the USSR anyway.
Without awareness of the common interest, a lasting agreement is impossible. It is also not possible when one’s own views are imposed on the other party. The conflict of interest will be revived over time. Sometimes negotiations are conducted even though they do not lead to a resolution of the conflict. Pragmatists of diplomacy then explain their sense with the need to prevent the conflict from deepening, escalating and turning into an armed confrontation. Negotiations make sense as long as they protect against worse alternatives. They then have the preventive function.
War has always been the worst alternative. Until the 19th century, wars took precedence over diplomacy. Who is right (“God’s will”) in a dispute was usually determined by battles. You won the battle, so you were right. Since ancient times, diplomats have stepped in when peace terms (more or less severe) had to be negotiated after a war has been fought, such as in the first known peace treaty signed by Hammurabi in 1760 BC. with the kingdom of Mari, that, by the way, provided for the transfer of the fate of the city of Hit to arbitration (this method was already known at that time). But negotiations in antiquity were also for purely commercial purposes (King Solomon negotiated with the King of Tire for deliveries of cedar wood in the 10th century BCE).
Negotiations, of course, matured and civilized over the centuries. Firstly, a class of professional negotiators – diplomats – was formed. They began to enjoy immunity (more than once in the past, envoys of foreign monarchs were killed to send a signal that these monarchs were not treated as equals, envoys were locked in fortresses, tortured). Soothsayers and astrologers stopped watching over the good course of negotiations. Also, sacrifices are no longer made for the success of the talks (at most, a mass is ordered). Trust is not built between the parties to the conflict by exchanging hostages or marrying children. All in all, this is great progress.
Detailed negotiation procedures have been developed over the last three centuries, reflecting the equality of the parties and the democratic order of decision-making.
Negotiations over the Peace of Westphalia have been treated as the modern beginning of the era of multilateral negotiations. The nineteenth century is the heyday of the so-called conference diplomacy (Vienna Congress and others). The twentieth century, in turn, is the emergence of the phenomenon of the so-called institutionalized negotiations, i.e. conducted within international organizations.
Today, there are even rules for conducting international negotiations sanctioned by the resolution of the UN General Assembly (Resolution 53/101 of 8 December 1998). They contain a postulate to conduct negotiations in good faith (i.e. not to conduct the so-called fake negotiations), for the purpose and on subject matter consistent with international law and the principles of international coexistence, with the participation of all states that have a vital interest in the matter of negotiations (i.e. nothing about us without us); the purpose and object must be in accordance with international law and the UN Charter (i.e., they cannot be conducted in order to prepare war or aggression), arrangements should be made as part of proper negotiations (i.e. the result should not be determined apart from negotiations), and the parties should ensure a good atmosphere and not hinder negotiations, be focused on achieving the main goal of the negotiations, contribute to breaking the deadlock. Unfortunately, these principles are not always translated into practice.
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In our times, negotiations are treated as an imperative (political and moral imperative) in solving international problems. Of course, this is not the only way to resolve disputes peacefully. In the past, it was thought that it was by no means the main one. At the end of the 19th century, the ideas of arbitration became very popular (by the way, in the 14th century, Poland relied on arbitration in our dispute with the Teutonic Knights, but with poor results, so the power of the Teutonic Knights had to be broken by sword), mediation (The Russians did not want to end their war with Japan in 1905 through arbitration, but agreed to US mediation), ad hoc adjudication (e.g. it was by a commission decision that Taba returned to Egypt’s sovereignty in the dispute with Israel in 1973), jurisdiction of the international court (rulings of the International Court of Justice in The Hague ).
And yet, states prefer to resolve disputes between themselves through negotiation rather than relying on other factors, even seemingly impartial tribunals, to decide.
Negotiations have grown almost to cult status in politics in recent years. They are often perceived as the only desirable means of ensuring stability, harmony and development in the international environment. Not the dictate of (the stronger), not violence (even legalized), not the pressure of fait accompli (or restrictive measures), but conversation, mutual communication, clearing positions, building (even arduous) understanding. This is how the negotiating religion is being created before our eyes. One of the main truths of this belief is the belief that there is no contradiction that cannot be resolved through conversation. Nelson Mandela once put it this way: “No problem is so deep that it cannot be overcome, given the will of all parties, through discussion and negotiation rather than force and violence.”
Voices are still heard, especially from the camp of the so-called realists that negotiations are not an end in themselves, that they are only an instrument. As John Bolton, one of the most hardened hawks among diplomats, once said: “Negotiation is not a policy. It’s a technique. It’s something you use when it’s to your advantage, and something that you don’t use when it’s not to your advantage.”
You have to give him some truth. There are situations when negotiations are pointless, they can do more harm than good. Even if Churchill was right when he said “jaw, jaw is better than war, war”. But more about it later.
Is it always and possible to negotiate with everyone and about everything? More on that in a separate post. The key is undoubtedly the maturity of all parties to start negotiations. There is no shortage of views, for example, that negotiations with Iran on the nuclear program should have been undertaken at least in the first half of the 1990s. Similarly, the Americans are criticized for resisting recognition as a negotiating partner for the Palestine Liberation Organization for too long. One can argue, but this is only the domain of alternate history.
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Today, everyone negotiates with everyone and about everything. Not only about how to make peace after a conflict. First of all, how to prevent conflicts. The subject of negotiations expanded and became pyramidal in complexity. The number of parties has increased (because the number of countries has almost quadrupled in just one century). Negotiations have become more competitive. But through their proliferation and institutionalization, they add less value. They are more of an incremental organic process than a lever for abrupt changes. They are more focused on solving existing problems than creating a new reality.
With the flourishing of multilateral platforms, bilateral negotiations continue to dominate the world.
The pace of negotiations is accelerating. Either the task is solved quickly or not at all. If you fail, you wait for time to do its part. And possibly a new attempt is made. Political compromises achieved through fatigue and sitting are increasingly rare. Sir Antony Arthur Acland, head of the British diplomatic service and permanent undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the years 1982-1986, recalled how, at the beginning of his career, he was assistant to the British foreign minister, who in 1959, together with his counterparts from the USA, the USSR and France from May 11 to August 5 (with breaks) debated in Geneva on solving the German problem (without result). Let’s not mention the months of negotiations involving ministers or even leaders during the Congress of Vienna or Versailles. Today, no minister would be able to afford such dedication to negotiations. No foreign minister, even in a medium-sized country, will sit in one place (including his own country’s capital) for more than two weeks. As Sir Antony stated: “the speed of international affairs has quickened, (…) the merry-go-round is going faster and faster”.
Globalization homogenizes the culture of negotiation, although some authors still note cultural differences in the treatment of the role of negotiation. Western countries perceive negotiations as a linear process, focused on achieving a specific goal in a strictly defined matter. The East is to perceive negotiations as a circular process, an endless chain of communication, which is primarily intended to build trust and bonds between partners, not necessarily to solve any specific problems.
However, there is still no single recipe for success in negotiations, a universal prescription for a winning strategy, an algorithm to learn, a set of techniques that give an advantage in talks. There is still no secret knowledge about negotiations. It is impossible to effectively predict their outcome. Because beyond everything, reality is changing gallopingly.
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Many factors influence negotiations. Not only the objective negotiating position (related to the power of the state) and the so-called situational advantage, historical backgrounds, international connections, dependence on foreign influences. Not only cultural or ideological differences. Not only internal conditions (political and administrative). But still people. And their diplomatic preparation.
A good negotiator will never guarantee success, but a bad one can always ruin the negotiating process and bury a favorable outcome for his country.
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So I invite you to the next episodes of my story about negotiating. Monthly (on the first Monday after the 15th of each month) until the end of 2023.
