What directions are embassies and diplomacy taking due to the rise of the Internet?
To an audience of 100 people, U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom Philip Lader offered an answer yesterday at the annual Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle, Jr. Lecture on International Studies.
"A new, new diplomacy is in the making," Lader, Trinity '66, said. "The culture, the content and the substance of the diplomacy that we offer are being changed.... Technology is transforming the implications and agenda of diplomacy."
Lader explained that because of technology, diplomacy is evolving away from closed matters of defense and economics to become more open and altruistic-much like the new technology itself. He compared it to the movement toward open-source software-where programmers no longer design software just for profit, but allow the public to view their codes and modify them. "Technology is no longer viewed as an industry. It is now cross-cutting," he said. "The consequences of the Internet for diplomacy are unfathomable."
Lader also referenced how events in Serbia and Israel get immediate attention because technology allows people to transfer images and sounds from around the globe in just minutes.
Lader's lecture, entitled "Embassy.com?" used humor and quotes from his predecessors to relay his message that the roles of diplomats have already changed.
In the past, the job of ambassador has not been defined by technology. Lader joked that given all the social events that make up his day-to-day life, "the job that being ambassador has best prepared me for is concierge at the Four Seasons."
However, Lader emphasized that embassies have a greater purpose than hosting social events. He gave a laundry list of some of the jobs that await the London embassy's staff of 650, including arranging for extradition, procuring child-care payments from divorced parents, providing thousands of visas and passports on a daily basis and even supplying birth certificates for the 3,600 American babies born annually in the United Kingdom.
Lader was appointed ambassador by President Bill Clinton in 1997. He has served as White House deputy chief of staff and as president of South Carolina's Winthrop College.
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