Oil and foreign policy transformation
It is by no means the most common of occurrences for heads of governments to travel to foreign capitals for the formal opening of their countries’ diplomatic missions abroad.
Usually, the presence of the appointed Head of Mission is usually sufficient to meet the requirements of the occasion and while, presumably, there would have been more – in terms of cementing ties – that President Irfaan Ali would have wanted to accomplish in Qatar during his stay (on an official visit that appeared to coincide with the opening of the Embassy), one cannot help but feel that the ‘coincidence’ between his presence there at the opening of Guyana’s diplomatic mission amounted to what might be termed a planned coincidence, intended to provide the occasion with a generous measure of symbolism.
In more ways than one, oil has ‘worked wonders’ for Guyana. It is no secret that oil-producing countries still enjoy a measure of international recognition specially reserved for that cluster (an increasingly feverish global environmental lobby notwithstanding). In the instance of the Middle East, collectively, its oilproducing countries have demanded and acquired a special type of global branding that cause their assorted sheiks and emirs to be regarded globally, as unique personages on the international stage. The standing of these personages among the oil-guzzling countries of the West, to a considerable extent, allow them a special immunity from overdone public criticism on issues like democratic values and freedoms. With the Middle East it is their many billions of barrels of oil reserves that matter most to a global economy and which, over time, has significantly muted the voices of the global environmental lobbyists.
If history, tradition, and realpolitik continue to stand like guard rails against developing and underdeveloped countries’ downgrading their ties with the West, what the surfeit of high level missions to the Middle East in the past handful of years (and now President Ali’s presence in Qatar for the opening of Guyana’s diplomatic mission there) symbolizes, is something of a continual re-writing of the script insofar as the country’s foreign policy is concerned. This, in order to take fuller account of priorities that carry much greater weight now that we have been accorded seats closer to the ‘heavyweights’ in the global oil and gas industry.
How all of this may play out in the context of the wider timbre of Guyana’s diplomatic behaviour, going forward is not easy to tell. For instance, who’s to say that aspects of the governance culture in the Middle East are not likely to ‘test’ the resilience of Guyana’s some of Guyana’s foreign policy axioms, imposing ‘burdens’ on decision-making that, hitherto, had not existed?
Not least among the tectonic shifts in relations among states in the twenty-first century is the broadening of the base of ideologies that set the governance agenda in the various countries. What we have seen, for example, is a tendency for countries to assume a variety of contortionist positions in their public pronouncements, desperate as they frequently are to either go with the flow or else, to set their faces for or against issues whilst bending over backwards to try to assume a posture of neutrality.
The argument that Guyana can learn a lot and benefit significantly from the enormous experience which the Middle East has acquired in the oil and gas sector is not one that can be seriously challenged. There are those, too, who would resoundingly applaud our apparent choice of investors from the Middle East to be part of ‘makeover’ of the country which we appear to be anticipating. The substantive point about all this, however, is that the launch of a diplomatic mission in Qatar marks the latest notation on a foreign policy profile that fits into a pattern of what would appear to be inexorable change. Whether we are prepared to accept it or not, some of the shifts in our foreign policy profile are going to have a knock-on effect on both our domestic behaviour and on the postures that we strike on the global stage, going forward.
What this means is that the postures that we strike in pursuit of the realisation of our material goals are not unlikely to affect, almost certainly significantly, our relationships with other states in the international community with which we have traditionally enjoyed sturdy diplomatic ties. This is just one of the ‘challenges’ that our foreign policy could face in the period ahead. Scripts are going to have to be ‘rewritten’ and policy positions rearticulated. Those imperatives will bring with them their own likely exacting challenges.