When I woke up this morning I was thinking about how Diplomacy was conducted in the years before WW.1.

Diplomats belonged to the same class. They were recruited from the aristocracy. So, many of them already knew or knew of each other. As a class they shared common values. They were highly gifted individuals who nearly all had a faculty for languages.

Speaking their language is of course the hidden door to entering the world of another culture.

Many were historians or had a keen interest in history. They had an eye for detail & could express themsleves with brevity & accuracy.

Some also excelled in geopolitical thinking and strategy, & had original minds.

They were also logical, intuitive, & could ‘join-up the dots!’, i.e. see a pattern in a fog of information, & had acute political judgement.

The insight I had this morning is that these qualities equipped this small & talented pool of individuals to be highly effective Mediation Advocates, i.e. negotiators, because they not only trusted each other i.e. had personal integrity, but could speak to each other as ‘colleagues’ behind the curtain of conflict, as they respected each other.

You could not recruit from such a small pool today, because that would be regarded as elitist and wrong. Professional diplomats today might also add that their forebears, which included Viscount  Castlereagh, were ‘gifted amateurs’. I think that is unfair as he was anything but an amateur.

Today, it is hard to talent spot such people. Perhaps, early at University, however many may chose to work in the private sector rather than pursue a career as a diplomat. Not least because since the time of Margaret Thatcher, Prime Ministers have had a fraught relationship with the Foreign Office. The same happened in the US, see, ‘War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence’ by Ronan Farrow, who describes diplomacy as an ‘endangered profession.’

There is likely to be more conflict in the world over the next 10 years, so we need more ‘peace-makers.’

Professional Mediators, i.e. in the UK – CMC Registered Mediators, are ‘Peacemakers’ in the sense that their raison d’etre is dispute resolution through negotiation.

So here is my idea – Side by side with & involving the Diplomatic Corps create a civilian corps of Mediators recruited by competition from the private sector to train with & work on secondment to the Foreign Office as ‘Negotiators.’

If this initiative were copied by the UN, BRICS, & the US foreign Service, then together these institutions could create a breeding-ground for ‘global’ diplomats of the future, who share common values, and many of whom will get to know each other.

In other words, create a new ‘negotiator class/aristocracy’, from which Mediators can be trained/recruited to become global ‘peace makers’, that is open to all & based upon merit.