Diplomatic Negotiation

242 Diplomatic Negotiation
authoritarian and even totalitarian regimes had to take into account potential rivals. They
also had to depend on support at home in order to prevent their downfall. They therefore
had to work from a position of strength, and this strength had their ego-system as its
backbone. How could they convince others if they were in doubt about themselves? Some,
like Chamberlain and Kennedy, did doubt themselves – and perhaps this was the case with
Hitler and Stalin as well – so they had to compensate for this by acting in an overconfident
way. It should be noted here that the ego question is, of course, not the only indicator for
their behaviour. Former UK Minister of Foreign Affairs and neurologist David Owen takes
us one step further. He explains their behaviour from the angle of mental and physical
health (Owen, 2008).
Alfred van Staden wrote that leadership in modern times – and especially in modern
democracies – is an increasingly difficult task to fulfil (Van Staden, 2008), one of the
reasons being the growing role of the public and social media. As populations become
better educated and have the means to voice their concerns, leaders have a problem in
forcing their will – and thereby their ego – on national and international politics. Another
reason is globalization and the multi-polar system that is on the rise. This will make
leadership increasingly uncertain and will therefore hamper leaders’ effectiveness in
negotiation. This is because, on the one hand, it is vital for negotiation to flow unseen by
public opinion before they are made and the agreement has been reached, and, on the
other hand, because of the competition between more and more leaders with relatively
small power asymmetry, which complicates the option of drawing negotiation processes
to a successful closure. Finally, it is their own representatives who can limit the grip of the
leader on the negotiation process and its outcomes:
[…] the agent is able to weaken the principals’ incentives to control in order to
promote the successful accomplishment of the delegated task, in casu negotiating
an international agreement. An agent who wants to weaken the control incentives
of its principals in order to avoid involuntary defection and a loss of face vis-à-vis
its negotiation partners at the international level can strategically make use of the
mechanisms that are established by the principals to control the agent during the
international negotiations’ (Delreux and Kerremans, 2010: 372).
If these trends can be projected into the future, we can expect political leaders to have less
influence on negotiation processes and the ensuing agreements. On the negative side,
this will lead to less-effective – or no – outcomes as a consequence, but on the positive
side it will limit the impact of the leader’s ego on the bargaining process. It will diminish
unpredictability and it will stabilize the process. Yet a perfect equilibrium makes it hard to
push for results in crisis situations where strong and powerful leaders are the ones who
make the difference, who can break the ‘mutual hurting stalemate’ and work towards the
‘enticing opportunity’, even in ‘a soft, stable self-serving stalemate – from which neither
party has an incentive to move, the hallmark of intractable conflict’ (Zartman and Anstey,
2012: 5).