At the turn of the year, a sharp and obvious increase in the discontent of people across the Middle East and North Africa, caused by a feeling of disenfranchisement, blossomed into protest movements and revolutions dubbed the ‘Arab spring’.
The UK government had to formulate responses to these fast-moving situations in a highly volatile area that contains many British interests. Speaking about these challenges last week at Civil Service Live, the joint director of the Foreign Office’s Middle East and North Africa Directorate, Dr Liane Saunders, explained how foreign policy decision-making processes were stretched – particularly because of the formation of the new National Security Council (NSC).
The NSC was only six months old when the Arab spring began, and “the Foreign Office [FCO] was still really beginning to find its way, its path of dealing with the National Security Council,” she said. Saunders explained that the NSC had been meeting on a fortnightly basis to consider large-scale, strategic issues into the medium term, and ministers were not familiar with the region’s problems because they had not been at the top of the foreign policy agenda previously.
The Arab Spring changed the operation of the NSC, which started meeting on a daily basis to make immediate, tactical decisions as well as the “crunchy, strategic decisions,” Saunders said. In turn, it demanded more from departments, asking for hard, raw, new data rather than the considered analysis which is the FCO’s forté. “The NSC created a huge amount of work because it really is an action-oriented organisation and co-ordination body, and I think that was to some extent quite a shock for the Foreign Office,” Saunders said, adding that “the FCO is a policy organisation used to dealing with and developing analysis, particularly analysis for the medium-term in very polished papers.”
“When you have an NSC meeting every single day, and in some cases discussing three or four different countries each time it meets, then ministers clearly do not want a carefully polished analysis and, actually, it’s not appropriate for the circumstances,” Saunders explained. Technology also changed the requirements, she said: ministers and officials accessing updates on their smart-phones wanted concise, to-the-point messages rather than lengthy essays.
The FCO therefore had to adapt quite significantly. “We had to shift our method of working,” Saunders said. “We [still] need to do the analysis... but actually, we need to turn that into actions and outcomes very quickly.” The Arab Spring and its effect on the operation of the National Security Council has caused not only the FCO, she said, but also other departments working in foreign policy to “respond much more effectively and think through those issues on our feet, rather than with the luxury of a great deal of time to polish and craft and hone.”
In a time of spending cuts, this is a useful transition, Saunders thinks. “There is a lesson here in the austerity that we face, because actually, we can gold-plate things too much,” she said. “One thing we have learnt in our interaction with ministers throughout the Arab spring is that there are times when something is good enough and does fit the remit, even if it isn’t as gold-plated as we might want it to be with the luxury of planning and time to think about things in advance.” This change also suits ministerial working habits better, she said. “We need just enough detail, and not too much detail, because ministers are making a hundred and one decisions in the space of ten minutes and it’s hard to keep them interested in the details.”