A conservative foreign minister in a tweed suit sat in his office on King Charles Street, contemplating his government’s engagement in Afghanistan. There was a knock at his door and his secretary entered, a grin accenting her misaligned teeth. “Extraordinary!” she exclaimed. She went on to describe the technology that had allowed a message to be transferred from the French Embassy to the Foreign Office in mere seconds. The furrow of his brow piqued, her boss responded somberly, “This is the end of diplomacy.” 

The year was 1840, the occasion: the arrival of the first telegraph at the Foreign Office. Lord Palmerston went on to negotiate the Treaty of Washington, among others. He died the father of “gunboat diplomacy.”

Diplomacy survived the telegraph. But will it survive WikiLeaks?

This question is central to the recently released collection of essays, Diplomacy in the Digital Age (Random House, 2011). Appropriately, this series of ruminations on social media’s impact on diplomacy is written in honour of Allan Gotlieb, the most socially networked diplomat Canada has ever known. 

In the words of Marc Lortie – the current ambassador to France who, 30 years ago, acted as press secretary to Gotlieb’s embassy in Washington – Gotlieb “took public diplomacy to new heights.” His Washington Diaries 1981 – 1989 (Random House, 2006) depict a man who, aided and abetted by his wife, recognized that diplomacy was transforming. Gotlieb cultivated relationships with George H.W. Bush and Caspar Weinberger, but he devoted just as much time to establishing rapport with Ben Bradlee and Joe Alsop. Well before The Gates Foundation or Independent Diplomat, Gotlieb identified that diplomacy was not just about diplomats.

When Gotlieb lived in Washington, Bradlee mattered because people read The Washington Post. Today, The Washington Post Company has rebranded itself as an “education and media” company, and its testing and prep company, Kaplan, accounts for at least half of its revenues. 

The media landscape has flattened and, if you agree with Parag Khanna’s analysis, so has the landscape of diplomacy. “Diplomacy today,” he explains, “takes place among anybody who’s somebody.” Where authority – not sovereignty – is the prerequisite for diplomacy, Canada’s diplomatic core is made up of Bombardier executives and Free the Children volunteers – not UN representatives. 

His diplomatic diagnosis is not so dire, however. Chronicling the evolution of diplomacy from long before the Westphalian system existed, Khanna demonstrates that the second-oldest profession is as resilient as it is old. “No doubt the mass media and internet have forced diplomats to be quicker on their feet,” he writes, “but that doesn’t mean diplomacy is dying. Instead, it is adapting as it always has.”

To make sense of the new business model of diplomacy, we interview four contributors to the Gotlieb volume. William Thorsell and Ed Greenspon draw lessons from journalism’s tumultuous transition, while Brian Bow contemplates the effects on the U.S. relationship, and Drew Fagan argues that the Department of Foreign Affairs never had that much power anyways. We are left with a sense that Canada needs an Allan Gotlieb 2.0, with more Facebook friends than Mark Zuckerberg and more Twitter followers than Anne-Marie Slaughter.