Mark Sedwill is a serious man. He has a master’s in economics from Oxford. He worked in Cairo, Nicosia, Baghdad and Islamabad over several decades as a diplomat. He was a UN weapons inspector, Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Afghanistan and served as the Nato senior civilian representative there. He became cabinet secretary in 2018 after the death of Jeremy Heywood, and left just two years later after the first wave of Covid.
Throughout the document, thoughtless language produces thoughtless thinking.
A shame then, considering his pedigree, that he has entered the world of corpspeak and insubstantial guff. He is the co-author of a UCL report called ‘The World in 2040: Renewing the UK’s Approach to International Affairs’, in which he and his co-authors call for the Foreign Office to be abolished and renamed the ‘Department for International Affairs’. They also blame our foreign policy failures on the aesthetics of the Foreign Office: ‘modernising premises – perhaps with fewer colonial era pictures on the walls – might help create a more open working culture and send a clear signal about Britain’s future.’
The first clue that little thought has gone into the document appears before all that. On the first page, the co-authors declare that ‘the world is in flux’, and that ‘history did not end after the Cold War, as Fukuyama had predicted’. This is a cliché, and a lazy one at that. Francis Fukuyama did not predict that world events would end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama actually said in The End of History and the Last Man that liberal democracy could probably reconcile most conflicting values in the ‘perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history’. With nothing to fight for, we would all become ‘men without chests’. In a later afterword, Fukuyama clarified his thinking: following the fall of the Berlin Wall, ‘there didn’t seem to be a higher form of society that would transcend one based on the twin principles of liberty and equality.’ There is a ‘broad historical trend’ towards liberal democracy, he said, but that does not mean it’s inevitable, or easy.
Sedwill’s lazy citation of Fukuyama isn’t the only off-the-shelf, rote-learned bureaucratese in the report. There are sentences like: ‘a functioning global order is a core national interest. And we must be in shape ourselves to shape it’.
The meaningless word ‘engage’ (engage how?) is used 13 times, along with airy talk of ‘harness[ing] combined levers’ and ‘engagement with domestic stakeholders’. The City of London, the greatest financial centre of the past 30 years, is reduced to a ‘hub’. We are told that ‘the challenges and trends shaping the UK’s future prosperity and security are long term in nature’. When has that ever not been true?
It goes on. Throughout the document, thoughtless language produces thoughtless thinking. The co-authors write, as if it is a bad thing, that ‘all too often the National Security Council looks at the world through a security lens’. What?
It’s fitting that Sedwill’s report was sponsored by UCL, a university at which I spent three years. The university’s own rickety buildings around Bloomsbury are treated as an outdated quirk to be forgotten: the university is moving many of its facilities to a £151 million site in Stratford called ‘UCL East’. The talk at uni was that UCL wanted to sell off the valuable central London real estate.
Britain’s cultural power owes far more to these antiquated buildings than modernisers would have us believe. They root our foreign policy in a chain from past to present, hopefully furnishing our politicians and civil servants with historical knowledge. Sedwill would have the Foreign Office forget all that, move out of King Charles Street, and into a landfill modernist slab.
The UK faces real, moral foreign policy troubles over the next ten years. How to split the bond between Putin and Xi? How to balance human rights concerns with the economic necessity of Middle Eastern oil? How to find an end to the Ukraine war? History’s lessons are not clear cut, but they expand the minds of those who know them. Sedwill would have us forget them.
The lazy corpspeak of the Foreign Office establishment
19
1
09.04.2024
Mark Sedwill is a serious man. He has a master’s in economics from Oxford. He worked in Cairo, Nicosia, Baghdad and Islamabad over several decades as a diplomat. He was a UN weapons inspector, Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Afghanistan and served as the Nato senior civilian representative there. He became cabinet secretary in 2018 after the death of Jeremy Heywood, and left just two years later after the first wave of Covid.
Throughout the document, thoughtless language produces thoughtless thinking.
A shame then, considering his pedigree, that he has entered the world of corpspeak and insubstantial guff. He is the co-author of a UCL report called ‘The World in 2040: Renewing the UK’s Approach to International Affairs’, in which he and his co-authors call for the Foreign Office to be abolished and renamed the ‘Department for International Affairs’. They also blame our foreign policy failures on the aesthetics of the Foreign Office: ‘modernising premises – perhaps with fewer colonial era pictures on the walls – might help........
© The Spectator
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