In her seminal essay “Truth and Politics”, Hannah Arendt argued that politics naturally lends itself to the distortion of truth. She suggested that in order to combat the inveterate lies of the political world, we must adopt the perspective of one who is “outside the political realm”.
If politicians are confined solely to Arendt’s political bubble, and scientists lie too far outside it, then the diplomat is perhaps somewhere in between: he exercises political judgement akin to that of a politician yet adopts the dispassionate demeanour of the scientist in his pursuit of truth. I had the fortunate opportunity to sit down with one such statesman, former British ambassador to Japan, Sir Tim Hitchens, to talk about the role of diplomacy in the post-truth era, just days after negotiations with the European Council led to further uncertainty on Britain’s exit from the EU.
While our current post-truth dysphoria may be concerning, its root causes are understandable. The way that information is gathered, disseminated, and consumed has fundamentally changed in the past decade. Today, citizens in a modern state can receive faster, free, and personalised news through their social media accounts and mobile phones. Market forces have disproportionately elevated the value of convenience over truth, leading to the worry that part of the diplomat’s old job as a source of reliable information about their assigned country has been outmoded by recent economic trends.
Hitchens sees the new media landscape as favourable to diplomats. Although the task of covering news may have been outsourced to journalists, he argued that diplomats now have a heightened responsibility in verifying and analysing the news: “it’s a brilliant thing,” he said, “because it allows the diplomat to concentrate on the places where he really adds value—an insight into what all the news really means”. The market obsession with speed may have threatened the overall credibility of any given news story, but it has opened up new demand for skilful synthesis and insightful analysis.
“The Financial Times could report on what’s happening in Japan much quicker than I was, but I could get in touch with senior politicians, understand a bit of the context of what’s going on, and offer advice to London on what this means and what the British government could do about it”, he said. As fact-based reporting has become the domain of larger news organisations, the diplomat is pushed into the native role of news interpreter. The abundance of smart political analysts in the world did not worry Hitchens either—he saw them as healthy competition: “it does force you into a competitive environment where you have to make sure that the quality of your analysis is better than others. But that’s good because it forces you to be sharp”.
The way diplomats engage with the news has changed in other ways as well: “the old habit of getting up in the morning and reading the morning headlines and then reporting—that’s completely changed” Hitchens noted. Instead, diplomats must now know when news breaks and how best to gauge public opinion. Hitchens found social media to be integral to this latter part of the job. During his tenure as Japan’s ambassador, he created an account on Twitter and began using it to engage with the public on major events. He stressed the importance of getting perspective outside of those in your immediate circle—a problem that he identified in past mistakes of the British government. “One of the greatest mistakes British diplomacy made very early on was with the Iranian Revolution. We had a big embassy in Tehran and we were only really listening to the people in government. Because of this, we didn’t have links into what became Ayatollah Khomeini’s group and the revolution. The key is to make sure you seek out the dissenters, listen to them, and understand their perspective,” he explained.
Yet social media is not always in harmony with diplomatic interests. Studies of online political debates have shown how online discourse can radicalise and jeopardise one’s political judgement. The corrosive discourse following Britain’s 2016 referendum to leave the EU may be a symptom of this wider divisive culture. In the aftermath of the referendum, Hitchens, despite voting to remain, found himself explaining the logic of the opposing side to an alarmed international community: “my worry was that people in the international community could not understand why anyone would possibly have voted to leave.” In words suited to that of a diplomat, Hitchens sought common ground by explaining how the choice to leave the EU stemmed from legitimate problems. “I was trying to explain why someone would want to leave. Even if you disagree with the Brexiteers’ conclusions, there were some real big issues behind their decision that we needed to deal with”, he said.
Among the core issues that may have motivated UK citizens to leave the EU, Hitchens focused on the problem of wealth inequality. He noted that while global inequality may have waned with the growth of India and China, several developed nations have experienced an opposite trend: “dealing with the question of inequality is at the heart of how we mend out societies”, he argued, “and the expressions of frustration at the European Union is, in some ways, an expression of frustration at inequality in general and the unaccountability of governments in particular”.
Although he was sympathetic to the inadequacies of international organisations to address the problems of wealth inequality, Hitchens was quick to denounce the reactionary response evident in the rise of right-wing nationalism. This political doctrine views a country’s domestic concerns as opposed to its international commitments. Hitchens painted this conflict between globalism and nationalism as a false dichotomy, arguing that “there might have been a tension 200 years ago, but now they are absolutely one and the same.” He went on to elaborate “we couldn’t retire from the world if we wanted to because so much of what any modern country is, is invested in trade with our neighbours, in the fact that we have populations that come from all across the world, and the idea that we could insulate ourselves from the rest of the world and sort ourselves out before we ‘go out there’ is misguided—we’re already out there”.
For Hitchens, anti-establishment politicians who seek to prioritise the nation-state over the current international order fundamentally “misunderstand how much there is in common between us.” He denounced the idea that “we would do better if we were to only put France first, Britain first, and American first because our interests are different from other people’s interests.” In his critique of nationalist politics, he put forth a view of how diplomats fit into this cacophony of dissent; the role of the diplomat is not so much to force a common viewpoint among disagreeing nations, he said, but to spotlight pre-existing commonalities that human nature tends to overlook.
The search for commonality will be put to the test in the next few years as China’s increased global presence begets cooperation from its neighbours. Hitchens identified two possible futures for China’s relationship to the current international order: “there is one version of China, which sets up a rival empire to the existing order of things, which sees itself as profoundly antagonistic to the current world order, and effectively destroys that world order in order to achieve dominance. There’s another future scenario where China continues to become implicated in the future world order and maintains a belief in an international rule of law that has adapted to new realities”. Which of the two options becomes a reality, he argues, depends on how the international community adapts to China’s rise.
He cites the US and Japan’s reluctance to accept greater Chinese input in the Asian Development Bank (ADB) as an example of how international institutions have failed to accommodate China in the past. China’s exclusion from the ADB had a direct impact on its establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a rival institution, in 2016. Hitchens saw this as a lesson for the future: “had the ADB adapted its rules and given China more say, they wouldn’t have founded a rival international institution—I think that’s quite a good metaphor for how international organisations need to accommodate China’s rise in order to have a future China which is a great advocate for the rule based system rather than one that is opposed to it”.
In Japan, the country where Hitchens served as ambassador, tensions with China are the rule not the exception. The recent US-China trade war and the tightening of the US economic market have, ostensibly, led Japan and China to become economic allies. Yet Hitchens was not deceived by the sudden cooperation. On a structural level, “these countries are still ones that see their interests as fundamentally opposed to each other, and that won’t change for the next few decades”. As an East Asian country with close ties to international organisations and the West, Japan is also heavily invested in the outcome of a rising China. Perhaps the biggest threat to the search for commonality is the volatility of the Japan-China relation, and whether the two countries can put their differences aside in a global order that requires them to share the stage.
In the era of fake news where truth bows to the malicious intents of power, the search for shared understanding can be a potent remedy. From his understanding of Brexiteers to his collaborative outlook on China’s role in the international order, Hitchens offers an alternative vision of the political, drawn from his 30-years of diplomatic experience, geared toward the identification of commonality and solidarity. If truth, as Arendt says, is wholly outside the political realm, solidarity cannot exist without it. Perhaps in an era where truth has lost its lustre, our second best option is to adopt a diplomatic stance and rebuild our discourse from the political edge—that is, to align our divergent interests within the political, for the pursuit of something greater outside it.