28 January 2016

Geneva

A seating plan for peace.

By Chin Chin

If there is one thing which permeates the Christmas holiday it is seating plans.  It may be a season for goodwill but if you put Great Aunt Margaret next to her sister-in-law at lunch you will discover that the only references to charity will be to that lady’s late husband having been supported by the state during the whole of his work-shy existence.  Then you mustn’t put Bertie next to the cousin whose wife he seduced, or that socialist worker activist next to the Colonel. A hundred sensitivities must be observed or you can forget about peace on earth. Any angels which may decide to drop in on the party will be of the avenging variety.

Pity then those who have to organise the table settings for the opening dinner of the Syria peace talks which begin in Geneva next Friday.  Remembering who is friends with whom and what they eat and drink must be a challenge in itself. “Kurds, Froplinson?” you would call out to the diplomat-type lounging around in a slightly too well-cut suit in the corner and reading a magazine.

“Delicious” he would reply. “Everyone likes them. Big portion for me”

“ No, not curds,  you fool. The Kurds, you know, like Saladin”.

“What sort of Salad, did you say?”  He glances up, his attention engaged.

“Kurds from Kurdshire,” you bellow. “You know, Kurdshire in Syria.”  All sense of place names has now deserted you. “Who are their friends?”

“Not sure about that,” he replies, looking at the ‘friends’ list in his foreign office crib. “They are certainly against Isis.”

“Shall I put them next to Turkey then? No?” With a gesture he has sunk that proposal.

“Well, who should go next to Turkey?”

“The Russians have a border in common but, on reflection…”

“OK then.  Let’s start with someone easier.  The Iranians are in fashion at the moment.  They have been doing a series of state visits to Europe.  What about putting them next to France?”

“It all depends. If it’s that cosmopolitan Mr Rouhani, all will be well; but what happens if it’s some fire-breathing ayatollah and he sees his neighbour drinking wine?”

“We could ask the French not to drink?”

“Yes, well…” His expression indicates that that may not be the way forward.

Still, seating plans alone will not guarantee the success of the conference.  There is an agreement to be reached as well, and no doubt the organisers will have consulted psychologists and business schools in search of the techniques most conducive to compromise.  The best aren’t necessarily the newest ones, however, and they might do worse than to look at the comments of Herodotus on how the ancient Persians reached their decisions.  For the benefit of those who have temporarily forgotten the passage:

“If an important decision is to be made, they [the Persians] discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.”

It’s not a bad idea on the face of it.  Mix up the delegates. Give them plenty to drink. Let the ideas flow with the brandy and whizz out Ban Ki Moon to pick up the threads as the hangovers clear in the morning.  It might work but, then again, it might go very badly wrong.  Suppose they all become aggressively drunk; it might not just be threads that need pulling together as the troops on the ground respond to their orders; or suppose that the terms agreed don’t look so good next morning and it all comes unravelled?  That can happen all too easily after a glass or two.

Years ago, a friend of mine was involved in negotiations for the sale of a company.  The terms offered were generous and agreement of the documents was proceeding smoothly.  At about midnight it looked as if contracts would be in place in twenty minutes time so someone rang the chairmen of the two companies. They were told that matters were more or less agreed and that if they came round they could be photographed signing the documents; the photographs would just be in time to catch the morning press.

Actually progress was a bit slower than expected and there was still a bit to do when the great men arrived. They were much too important to be asked to wait and if the photo was to be in the papers it needed to go immediately, so someone suggested that they should be photographed together signing a blank piece of paper and that the actual agreement would be completed and signed by their respective staffers once they had gone.  Naturally they had a couple of glasses of champagne together and naturally everyone else had some too.  Then, the photographs having been taken, they left the mere mortals to finish things off.

Five minutes later one of the finance directors frowned. “We didn’t agree this,” he said. Everyone crowded round as the point with disputed. The mood got ugly when someone claimed they had been misled. The point was a small one but everyone had had a drink or two and before long the two sides had become so distrustful of each other that it was plain that the documents would never be signed.  Rather a pity then that the great men had telephoned one or two of their media friends to brief them on the deal.

That puts you off the “drinking early” idea, but actually there is a more fundamental objection. It clearly won’t work where many of the parties are teetotal, and if there is one thing which the Middle East is full of it’s teetotallers. No, I don’t think that can really be the answer.

Another well-known way of getting people to agree is to put them in a small room. Any negotiator will tell you that people crowded together tend to trust each other and that you can alter the temperature of a meeting by moving it from a large room to a small one or vice versa. Now international conferences normally take place in the largest rooms and an excuse would be needed for using a small one. If the meeting was being held in, say England or France, that would be easy.  One could claim double-booking or that the room had been infested by fleas or rats or one hundred and one other possible inefficiencies. The trouble is that the Swiss take their efficiency rather seriously and even the prospect of improving world peace would not induce them to admit to an inefficiency of which they were not really guilty.

Perhaps, though, we are on the wrong track altogether. Perhaps one should look to the imagination of the delegates rather than to that of the organisers to keep things fluid and conducive to agreement.  Sometimes the right comment can disarm an opponent.  One of the most famous examples of this occurred during the negotiations between Churchill and the Irish Patriot Michael Collins in 1921. The two men were bitterly opposed. Collins had been responsible for many British deaths in the long and bloody Irish struggle and Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, represented everything against which he had fought. When he met Churchill he opened aggressively: “You’re the man who put a price on my head.”

“Yes,” replied Churchill, “and a very good price too. I put £5,000 on your head. The Boers only put £25 on mine.”  Collins was hugely amused and from then on the two men worked together to agree a compromise.

Let’s just hope then that there is someone at the Geneva summit who is capable of making the sort of joke which will appeal to Americans, Europeans, Sunnis, Shiites, Turks and Russians.  Tricky, I suppose, but probably rather easier than arranging the seating plan.