This is not the first time that the Stabroek Business has commented on official pronouncements on economic diplomacy and the particular role of the Foreign Service in pursuit of the goals of attracting external investors, creating openings for the growth of markets for goods and the marketing Guyana as a haven for external investment. With the prospect of oil revenues appearing to be setting the country on an altogether different development trajectory (though the experiences of some countries elsewhere suggest that the jury is still wide open on this issue) it would appear that this is yet another signal that our foreign policy outlook is set to extend beyond the confines to which we had grown accustomed in the period since independence.
What Minister Todd had to say in the National Assembly recently about economic diplomacy is nothing new. Similar sentiments have been trumpeted by successive political administrations. What we have been afforded has been a decidedly rough sketch of the shape that our economic diplomacy thrust is likely to resemble. It has been, more or less, about attracting investors and marketing in foreign markets. There is no real shape to these broad outlines.
Oil has expanded the envisaged vistas of economic diplomacy and Minster Todd, in his recent presentation in the National Assembly, dealt with the expansion of the country’s Foreign Service into areas of the Middle East, West Asia and Africa. What would appear to be an expanded 2021 Foreign Ministry budget will be used to create the requisite infrastructure to enable what appears to be the envisaged expansion of the Foreign Service to take account of what we are being told is the extension of our foreign policy deeper into the realm of economic diplomacy.
Up until now, more than two decades after government began trumpeting the idea of economic diplomacy there has been no real sign of the building of an infrastructure that enables its effective execution, we have not moved beyond the polemics. One would have expected, for example, that the basic ‘shape’ of the Foreign Ministry would, by now, have been adjusted somewhat to take account, first, of the need to reset its recruitment policy to take account of the need to attract skills that are relevant to the current focus. There is the need to see a much stronger indication of an intention to adjust the ‘shape’ of a Foreign Service that has historically been oriented towards what one might call political diplomacy. The available evidence does not suggest that over the past two decades or so there has been any significant corresponding shift in the structure and staffing of our overseas missions to take account of the need to put in place those skills that are required to support the envisaged support of an aggressive economic diplomacy initiative.
What Minister Todd said on the subject of the administration’s economic diplomacy (thrust?) in the National Assembly recently does not depart significantly from what has been said before. The difference, this time around, would appear to be on the somewhat stronger emphasis placed on our likely changing oil and gas-related economic fortunes and what would appear to be a deliberate focus on building strategic economic bridges with countries in the Middle East.
If one were to look at the economic diplomacy pursuits of countries in Asia, for example, we are likely to see the existence of robust support structures. While it is understood that the different strands of foreign policy are firmly anchored to the overall national interest of those countries, there can be no mistaking where the emphasis lies.
In the instance of Guyana the nuts and bolts of foreign policy are still anchored in the tradition fashioned in the period immediately following independence and which is set largely – though admittedly, not exclusively – in axioms like the sanctity of statehood, non-alignment and the rich/poor debate in the context of the dream of a New International Economic Order. That was the era in which, for poor countries (like Guyana) the effective pursuit of foreign policy was measured, to a greater extent, in the passion with which positions on the aforementioned issues were articulated on the international stage, never mind the fact that in far too many instances, sorry little came of that passion.
Economic diplomacy, therefore, amounts to a game-changer for Guyana’s foreign policy. If we examine, honestly, just where we are in our preparedness for effective execution we are bound to quickly discover that the polemics aside, we are still quite some distance from where we ought to be. One of the things that we have failed to do so far is to create and place in the public domain what one might call an economic diplomacy blueprint which goes beyond the articulation of definitions and extends into the realms of a blueprint for targeted actualization. After all, its foreign policy underpinnings aside, economic diplomacy in its real sense is as much a domestic issue as it is a foreign policy one.
The question arises, too, as to whether the serious grafting of economic diplomacy onto our foreign policy agenda may not, in effect, see the significant changing of the shape of the traditional foreign service, a notion that is by no means far-fetched when one looks at the tendency of the ‘heavy hitting’ countries in Asia and Europe to create some measure of separation between their conventional diplomatic infrastructure and business-oriented trade and economic missions with their own structures, skills and Czars. Is it not likely, for example, that, investment in an economic diplomacy infrastructure will create a new and powerful dimension to the pursuit of foreign policy that might conceivably change, perhaps even diminish the role of the Foreign Ministry? Here, at least at this stage, it is much more a question of raising an issue (which is eminently worthy of serious consideration) than making any kind of prediction regarding outcomes.
