Diplomacy is not just about economics

WORLDVIEW:The closure of the Vatican Embassy does not chime with our ethical foreign policy

IT’S OFFICIAL. We are, as Napoleon put it of the English, “a nation of shopkeepers”. Trade is all.

That at least appears to be the message from Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Éamon Gilmore in his announcement last week that he is closing the Vatican Embassy because “it yields no economic return”.

Of course, that’s if we are to take the Minister’s statement at face value. Some have suggested, most unkindly, that it was merely a convenient line to avoid elaborating the more plausible, defensible, and much more widely believed, explanation – that the Government wanted to demonstrate its displeasure at the Holy See’s attitude to abusing priests and failure to co-operate with Ireland’s official inquiries into the issue. Yet why deny it?

The Minister’s fallback position – that something had to be cut because of the state we are in, and that the Vatican, Iran and Timor Leste drew the short straws – is, however misjudged, somewhat more arguable.

In truth, however, as a variety of correspondents to this paper, Catholic and non-Catholic, have pointed out, the wrong-headed closure of the Vatican Embassy both cuts off access to an invaluable source of diplomatic intelligence – the “best listening post in the world” – and will reduce important contacts with an organisation to which the majority of our people adheres.

Like it or not, the church’s policy impinges on huge swathes of our life. Not to engage closely with it will not change that reality, and will undermine the State’s ability to influence it.

(Even though, as I’ve argued here previously, diplomatic recognition of the Holy See as a state, and its dubious “sovereign immunity”, is questionable – another form of close bilateral relationship should be possible).

To return, however, to the question of the “economic return” of an embassy. Fr Vincent Twomey’s somewhat desperate and implausible case on this page on Thursday that Ireland’s representation to the Holy See somehow seals business deals by reminding potential African and Asian contacts of how much they owe our missionary tradition, does not help the argument.

Far better to say quite simply that our diplomatic outreach is not, and should not be, solely, about trade and economic interest, however important they are. Otherwise, we should close “non-performing” embassies to the UN, OECD, Unesco, and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

Indeed, the Minister himself will spend much of his valuable time, and without any economic return, next year circling the world as chairman of the latter.

On the other hand Prof Rory Miller, director of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College London, welcomes what he sees as an explicit recognition of an unacknowledged reality: that Irish foreign policy “is driven as much by economic considerations as it is by a desire to provide a force for good in international affairs”.

It’s a belated recognition, he says, reflecting the formal merging of the Departments of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the reality that for some years embassies have integrated trade increasingly into their remit.

Key relationships, like that with the US or much of the Arab world, he argues have been driven by a desire not to alienate trading partners, sometimes producing an uncomfortable reconciling of the ethical imperatives supposedly at the heart of our foreign policy with trade interests. “In February 2003 . . . the government engaged in intellectual acrobatics to avoid having to either support or openly condemn the US invasion of Iraq,” he writes in an unpublished article.

The same could be said of the Shannon stopover saga.

And he tellingly quotes from Brian Lenihan snr’s cautious response to the Eksund arms seizure in 1987 in arguing against breaking diplomatic links with Gadafy’s Libya on the basis that:

“It would be unwise and remiss if . . . withdraw diplomatic relations from a country . . . [with which we] have trade relations, in advance of ascertainment of all the facts.”

But Miller's foreign policy "realism" notwithstanding – and there may indeed at times have been an element of Skibbereen Eagle-like romantic guff to some of our international posturing – the downplaying of the fact that we have distinct political as well as economic interests is what disappoints in what was in effect a redefining by Gilmore of the State's foreign policy imperatives.

Our most important diplomatic engagement, after all, is with the EU – not just an economic but a political peace project for the continent and its neighbourhood.

Ireland’s engagement in peacekeeping, its campaigning for nuclear disarmament and championing of food security in the developing world all reflect a values-based “ethical” foreign policy. Our relationship with our nearest neighbour is also far more than economic.

Such values – a post-colonial empathy with developing and smaller countries, support for the UN and collective security, a commitment to European integration, an active neutrality, promotion of human rights and conflict resolution, a strong commitment to development – all have important resonances with the public.

These resonances do not chime with the ostensible rationale for the closure of the Vatican Embassy, nor indeed that in Iran.