The International Forum on Diplomatic Training: Past and Present
In December 2023, I was privileged to attend the 49th International Forum on Diplomatic Training (IFDT), hosted by the Devawongse Varopakarn Institute of Foreign Affairs in Bangkok, where I reported some of our project’s key findings in a two-page brochure. The generosity of our Thai hosts underlined how this meeting was in itself a diplomatic event as much as a meeting of educators, involving delegations from diplomatic academies across the globe. The number of IFDT member organisations has grown in recent years, and the list of offers to host the annual meeting has lengthened. This suggests that, after more than fifty years of existence and a degree of dependence on its co-chairs in the Diplomatische Akademie Vienna and Georgetown University to host it, the IFDT has a bright and increasingly global future ahead.
Credit: Devawongse Varopakarn Institute of Foreign Affairs, 2023
The IFDT started in 1973 with an ‘informal gathering’ at the Vienna Academy, where “a Secretariat for a loose organization to facilitate communication”[1] was established. Training programmes were expanding: Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service increased student numbers by 90% from 1971-1976, and its reports from the time indicate that their main interest in the IFDT was to facilitate exchanges and placement opportunities for its growing student body.[2] From the very beginning, directors of African diplomatic academies were present, namely Adamou Ndam Njoya of the newly-established International Relations Institute of Cameroon and Amb. Ibrahim Sabri of the Egyptian Diplomatic Institute. All the other academies represented were Western, but many trainers such as Ralph Feltham of the Oxford University Foreign Service Programme (FSP), and Lucius Caflisch of the Graduate Institute were training African diplomats at the time. As a consequence, in the course of our archival research we have frequently crossed paths with the IFDT. Its story is told more fully elsewhere, and this month’s blog does not seek to evaluate its activities in any comprehensive sense. Instead, it uses some of these moments of connection across several different archives to offer an incomplete picture that nonetheless draws attention to the role of training by and for African diplomats in the wake of decolonization, within the developing international landscape of diplomatic training.
African Presence, Eurocentric Leadership
As the IFDT felt its way in its early years, there was a clear sense of European leadership on the one hand and a Third World ‘problem’ on the other. This is clear in the reports and presentations of Ralph Feltham, who was a particularly enthusiastic member, which give us insight into what was discussed in the early meetings. These mostly reflect his perspective, but also give insight into the collective experience and thinking of the forum, relating to pedagogy, curriculum and the changing nature of diplomacy. At the first meeting, he presented a “projection of educational needs for future professional training” where he outlined four ‘deficiencies’ that clearly relate to his view of trainee diplomats from the ‘developing world’:
Lack of knowledge of recent diplomatic history - more important than learning about Old Europe and its empires.
‘The UNCTAD ethos’ - diplomats were both part of the problem and solution
Population growth and underemployment in the ‘developing world’ - its impacts on trade and economic policy
Rising ‘One-man government’ - professional diplomats challenged to achieve the right relations with the ‘political masters’
After returning to Oxford from this first meeting of the IFDT, Feltham reported to his colleagues that ‘especially for those new states which lack traditions and resources, countries no longer know what they should teach their diplomats, how they should teach it or why’.[3] Before the end of the 1970s, the IFDT would publish Training for an International Career, in which Feltham elaborated a framework for designing and assessing courses for teaching the ‘international man’. Whilst we note with approval Feltham’s foregrounding of ‘geography and geopolitics’ in the curriculum, we also note its clearly gendered discourse and Eurocentric framing of ‘international intercourse’, which parallels the ‘cosmopolitan’ ideal in diplomatic training recently critiqued by Kira Huju.
Challenge and Change
The Deans and Directors making up the IFDT in the 1970s were almost all male, but the minutes of the 1976 edition did reference the role of diplomatic training in shaping ‘the leading men and women of to-morrow’.[4] In 1985, when the IFDT met in Vienna, not only were several women present, but a formal discussion ‘concerning the role of women’ in diplomacy was minuted. The short report states only that a distinction was identified between ‘the wife whose spouse is in the Foreign Service and the problems of female career diplomats’, and that ‘this issue will continue to appear on the agenda’.[5]
The first, and second, IFDT meetings held outside the West were in Cairo in 1980 and 1990 respectively. There is evidence that these meetings, more so than others, were Third World-oriented. Attendance from academies in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America was strong. In 1990, Egypt’s Boutros Boutros Ghali, who was foreign minister at the time, welcomed delegates to the IFDT. Though he welcomed the end of the Cold War, he warned the diplomatic community against setting aside ‘the Arab world, Latin America and Africa’ by turning to the concerns of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Instead, he said, the time had come to address the ‘enormous’ divisions ‘between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres’. Among calls by African trainers like David Gachuki (Nairobi Diplomatic Training Programme) and Peter Oyedele (Nigerian Foreign Service Academy) to pay attention to “Africa and the rest of the developing world”, European trainers like Feltham and his successor Anthony Kirk-Greene recognised their Euro-centric perspective and openly considered how to teach “the fundamentals of diplomacy while retaining the integrity of the individual diplomat’s cultural heritage”.[6]
The Eurocentrism that characterised the IFDT’s early years was challenged by the early investment of African, Asian and South American representatives in the forum. There was a marked difference when the meeting took place outside the West, for the first time in Cairo. Since the 1990s and into the 21st century, its meetings have increasingly travelled the world and in fact the last eight meetings have taken place on each of the six inhabited continents. These meetings remain spaces for the articulation of training, diplomacy and geopolitics, and with the 50th edition set to take place in the former Yugoslavian state of Montenegro, there will plenty of opportunity to discuss the role of diplomatic training for newly independent states - this time within Europe.
[1] Kirk-Greene A, Feltham R and Sucharipa E (2004) International Forum on Diplomatic Training. In: Jahrbuch Der Diplomatischen Akademie Wien. Vienna: Diplomatische Akademie Wien, pp. 283–300.
[2] Georgetown University Archive: Report of the Dean for the Academic Year 1975-1976 School of Foreign Service
[3] Oxford University Diplomatic Studies Programme Papers, uncatalogued.
[4] British National Archives BW 91/230: Proceedings of the Fourth Meeting of Directors of Diplomatic Academies and Institutes of International Relations
[5] Archives Nationales de France 20190005/14: 13th Meeting of Deans and Directors of Diplomatic Academies and Institutes of International Relations
[6] Graduate Institute Archives HEI 792: Summary Proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of Deans and Directors of Diplomatic Academies and Institutes of International Relations, September 17-20, 1990