First, I wish you a comfortable and speedy convalescence; may God’s favor attend your recovery. Taking time to engage amidst your personal challenges is salutary. I am enamored by your sterling robust will; and honored to debate someone of your legacy.
It’s impossible to miss the passion oozing from your response; endearment to the topic is un-betrayed. The matter at hand however, requires dispassionate distillation instead of emotional rapture/compromise; but given your lifelong involvement in the area, I understand. As a cricket enthusiast no doubt, I’m sure you can appreciate that your long-handled approach of coming out swinging, carries high incidence of being caught in the deep, stranded down the wicket, or bowled through the gap. I’m sorry my friend, but having chosen to voop on this wicket- yours is the ignominy of being summarily caught, bowled, and stumped all at once.
Caught in the Deep
Interestingly, you characterize my article on the subject as laughable. I draw comfort from two points of observation. 1. George Bernard Shaw asserts “it’s the things in life we are most serious about, we laugh over.” That you take what I’ve said serious enough to laugh; and are courageous enough to confess it, is honorable. 2. More importantly and less amusing, you’ve arbitrarily selected sentences out of my text and attacked them without even once sharing my seminal thesis with readers. Please Mr. Hurst, even freshmen know text without context is pretext. Selective deflections may reveal political savvy; but do little to advance appreciation of your scholarship.In pertinent part, the thesis of my critique re Dr. Newton’s seeming lecture to politicians on the need for professionalizing diplomatic corps is that- once elected, political executives ought not to be prescribed to on diplomatic appointments. I argued in support of this position that the left handed undercurrents which often pervade diplomatic practice help to account for the apparently queer intelligence which seems to pre-dominate calculations of political executives in considering diplomatic appointments. I further asserted that by limiting his assessment of dynamics attending diplomatic appointments to the purview of intra nation state politics, Dr. Newton’s article strangled itself by its own definitional insufficiency; and as a consequence, lacked requisite sophistication needed to account for the complex left handedness in foreign affairs that often plays out among and between nation states - A dynamic which in fact is often primary in the calculus of political executives and cannot be ignored (an observation that even Dr. Newton rightly accedes he overlooked).
So where do you stand on the critical issue Mr. Hurst? Should political executives be prescribed to on their diplomatic appointments? And if so what ought to be the prevailing consideration? I can only invite you to join the debate at its deep end, and not disparage the content. Readers deserve analysis of body line features instead of cosmetic, emotional flair.
Stranded down the wicket- and Stumped
But let me indulge your sidebar taste a bit. You mock my allusion to sinister agendas in elite multilateral bodies (as an example of left handedness in diplomatic practice) and claim that whereas that may apply to big players such as USA etc, CARICOM knows no such behavior. You paint CARICOM as an entity of pristine collective will and egalitarian bliss. Seriously, Mr. Hurst, where have you been? I would wager Caribbean entities and their pursuits have more relative diplomatic intrigue than wider multilateral organizations. The history of CARICOM, even OECS is replete with maneuvers of distrust, betrayal and even outright lies. If the minimum threshold is: have they done anything; the answer is of course yes. But raise the bar and ask: have they done their best or even enough to advance human flourishing and improve quality of life in the region; the answer is of course no. The reason in primary part is that nation state political executives have learnt to fulfill unilateral interests over and above regional interests; even when it means sacrificing the latter to accomplish the former. And just why you may ask? Because they are realists and pragmatists; and are less given to the ideals of career diplomats, as you. The thing about ideals is that they are often dependent upon illusions to be preserved- illusions that reality based political principals can ill afford. Bowled through the Gap
In your haste to defend the profession, I suspect you also overlooked a critical and germane linkage in my argument. I was not in the least suggesting (in what I termed) the foreign relations or under the table behaviors that attend diplomatic relations are born out of a caviler fetish or mischievous ilk for that which is dark, subversive and sinister. Instead my article pointed out that left handed diplomatic behavior can be accounted for by understanding the virtues of selfishness and benefits of self centeredness in the political sphere- over and above the virtues/benefits derived from bilateral/multilateral interests. Your straight and simple ideological bat leaves you vulnerable to the seam and swing of the ball that attends diplomatic appointments. At the end of the day all politics is local. Caribbean politicians are returned to office, not on the merits of their regional integration dossiers/pursuits; but on the strength of their preservation and advancement of national interests- and unilateral interests are not always in confluence with bilateral/multilateral interests but often are at variance with such interests. The crude hard fact of this reality is that political executives will always appoint diplomatic personnel who have the ability to bring home the bacon of unilateral interest over and above multilateral/bilateral interests, even if they have to do so under the pretext of operating under the latter.
Dr. Raymond S. Edwards
President/CEO, MOHDC
http://www.mohdc.com
Raymond Edwards, Ph.D. Organizational Psychologist & Minister of Religion: is an international development consultant and executive Leadership behavior specialist.
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