Carl Bildt at his TedX talk.
Photo: Foreign Ministry/Flickr
Foreign Minister Carl Bildt dissected
"digital diplomacy" on Thursday at his TedX debut, speaking with The Local about
the world's first social media civil war, whether Twitter can heal Syria, and
when the White House couldn't "operate" emails.
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At Thursday's TedX conference in
Stockholm, Foreign Minister Carl Bildt took the stage to discuss the potential
of digital diplomacy.
"We live, thank god, in a much more open
world where the voice of individual people means more, thus public diplomacy is
becoming more important," he told the crowd. "It's about getting the pulse of
what's happening."
Indeed, the minister (and former prime
minister) is no stranger to social media and boasts over 250,000 followers on a
Twitter account he updates regularly. He acknowledged that social media is the
fastest way to get information about world events, and pointed to Egypt's recent
referendum, Ukraine's new "draconian laws", and how Syria marks the world's
first social media civil war as examples.
But can social media actually help to
resolve the conflict in Syria?
"That's a good question to which I wish
I had a good answer," he told The Local after his speech. "I don't think it's
necessarily resolved through social media. When it comes to resolution, then
classical diplomacy has to come in. But classical diplomacy and conflict
resolution can be facilitated by social media.
"Civil war by its nature not only
involves two army commanders, it involves groups and societies that are opposed
to each other. Reconciliation is about reaching out to all of them. While I
don't know the level of connectivity in Syria, I think [social media] can play a
role there," Bildt said.
He stressed that social media can also
be put to good use by illuminating the often mysterious life of a diplomat, a
topic also covered by a 24-hour "diplohack" that took place this week as part of
the Stockholm Initiative for Digital Diplomacy (SIDD), and which included the
TedX event. The initiative featured a dozen diplomats from around the world
working together with leading minds from academia, business, and media to
discuss the diplomacy of the future.
But why is it that Bildt is
spear-heading the push, besides the fact that he's already shown a strong
interest for the digital world?
"I think one should always look at new
possibilities that might be there. I've been working with internet issues since
the internet started, which is quite some time ago now. Social media and Twitter
were obviously going to be important to diplomacy...that is why we started
fairly early," he explained.
Bildt can also boast being behind an
email in 1994 to then US President Bill Clinton, which became the first-ever
electronic message to be sent between two heads of government.
"That was way, way, way back, 20 years
ago," he told The Local. "Things have changed quite substantially since then. At
that particular time, email was a rather exclusive thing, not many people in
Stockholm had it and the White House was hardly able to operate it either. But
now it's used by billions of people around the world."
And things continue to change. Bildt
himself admitted that in today's world of "hyper-connectivity", people are
connected in a way that was never possible before. Digital diplomacy, while
still in its early stages, will fundamentally transform public diplomacy,
interaction between people, governments and the two together, he argued.
"It might not save the world, that's
rather ambitious. But I think it will give us possibilities to work together for
a better world, and that is not a small thing in itself."
Oliver Gee
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