Commercial Diplomacy: A New Frontier

As global issues grow in importance, it’s time to get creative when promoting economic interests abroad.

For the past few weeks, I have been lecturing and travelling in the U.K. and Europe with a group of MA candidates in diplomacy and international business. They are studying at the University of East Anglia's London Academy of Diplomacy, and the subject of my short course is science, technology, and international policy.

Continuous learning and compelling conversation

Last week at Nyenrode Business University just outside of Utretcht, Netherlands, we listened to a very interesting lecture on “Commercial Diplomacy.” The subject also came up a few days later during a briefing at the Dutch Foreign Ministry, where we learned that in response to the Great Recession, the new emphasis for Dutch representatives abroad is “Economic Diplomacy.” Some missions are being closed (mainly in Latin America), and a few new ones opened (mainly in Asia) with that priority foremost in mind.

My preoccupations have always tended towards the analysis of world politics and global issues, and I have never spent much time reflecting on how best to use diplomacy to advance commercial and economic objectives.

Obtaining results usually requires something more

My overall impression, moreover, was that those companies that wanted help with exports generally weren’t ready, and those enterprises that were ready – and often already active in foreign markets – generally didn’t want or need the support or assistance of the state. From those observations, I concluded that while responsibility for the formulation of trade policy should likely stay within government, trade promotion might usefully be privatized and offered as a service only to those businesses that were prepared to pay. Some countries, such as Denmark and New Zealand, are already experimenting with this sort of model.

That said, many governments are still providing trade and investment promotion services abroad at public expense, so the main issues are value for money and performance improvement. In that respect, I see considerable scope to applying the principles of guerrilla diplomacy to economic and commercial work overseas.

Guerrilla diplomacy is about agility, acuity, and outside-the-box thinking. From that, it follows that effectiveness and results at the end of the day have little to do with knowing where the meeting rooms are or having an inside line on VIP room reservations at the airport. What counts most in terms of adding value and providing strategic advice will be the quality of networks and contacts: key players, opinion leaders, facilitators, potential partners. The guerrilla trade commissioner will be expert at cross-cultural communications, a source of grassroots market intelligence, and will know not only how things work but how to work the system.

Elsewhere I have remarked that the explosion of global issues – climate change, pandemic disease, resource scarcity – has eroded the monopoly of foreign ministries and implicated the work of line government departments in the management of many critical international policy files.