CAREER REPORT BY ALYSON J.K. BAILES

(The Belvedere School, 1961-66)

Happy to report on my career, but which career? In 38 years of working life so far I have gone from official defence expert to unofficial peace activist, from managing British to international work teams, and from secret negotiations to public lecturing and writing. Later in 2007, at age 58, I shall be re-inventing myself yet again as a university teacher (in Iceland!) and free-lance researcher. The only regular thing about my experience has been the regularity of my changes of scene—plus, perhaps, the fact that two themes have always linked the substance of my work: European affairs (EU, NATO, Central and Northern Europe), and security and defence. Perhaps this very variety may make my story more relevant for the next generation, if the pundits are right in predicting increasingly mobile (and self-steered) career models in future.

In practical terms, I went from Oxford - straight after my BA in Modern History  - to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office which remained my principal employer for 33 years. During those years I had official posts abroad in Hungary, Brussels (at NATO), Bonn, Beijing, Oslo, and Helsinki (as Ambassador), and periods in London working i.a. in the FCO’s Policy Planning Staff and Security Policy Department. However, I also had a total of five major ‘exchange’ jobs and career breaks outside the Diplomatic Service, ranging from the Ministry of Defence and work for the EU and Western European Union to periods at security think-tanks in New York and London. In 2002 I got an offer I couldn’t refuse to leave the British civil service for good and become Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), an international think-tank of over 50 people best-known for its ) annual Yearbook and statistical data-bases on military spending and armaments. The ending of my contract there in August 2007 gives me the chance to move to Iceland—always my favourite holiday country—and to teach M.A. students at the main university in Reykjavik. I will also devote half my time to an individual, paid research project for the Swedish government on ‘homeland security’ and will advise several other European think-tanks as a member of their advisory boards.

For a career like mine in the field of public policy, the choice of university degree is less important than using one’s later school years and tertiary education to build strong skills in: reading fast, summarizing and memorizing detail; weighing up evidence and reaching an independent judgement; communicating well in speech and writing, and doing your best to observe and understand your fellow human beings. If you also choose a career that will take you abroad (which can happen with academic, media, or commercial as well as government work), language skills are an obvious bonus. But you also need extra flexibility, tolerance and resilience and more inner toughness than many white-collar jobs at home would demand. For much of the time, life abroad is indescribably fulfilling; but when things go wrong the isolation, loneliness and communication problems can magnify even small misfortunes. It helps a lot, paradoxically, if you have strong roots in Britain and/or in your family background that guard against losing your confidence in who you really are and what matters to you. It also makes obvious sense to make friends of your colleagues in any given foreign work-place (whether British, local, or other countries’ diplomats) and to have some hobbies that really matter to you and are independent of time and place. Music has been almost literally a live-saver for me, together with nature study and various (low-brow as well as high-brow) cultural obsessions.

To get into the Diplomatic Service means taking a series of special examinations that test mental skills, alertness and judgement rather than knowledge (and language ability rather than languages already learned). There are tests of personal psychology, mental toughness and ability to communicate and interact with others. A physical check and background security check are also compulsory—the latter to dig out any criminal connections, extremist political links or serious personal weaknesses that could expose you to disloyalty or blackmail. Once you’re at the FCO, on the other hand, training is minimal and you are soon in at the deep end of corresponding with posts abroad, negotiating with others in Whitehall, advising Ministers and—even from a quite early stage—helping to develop policy. The first posting abroad normally comes after 1-3 years: I was still only 20 when I arrived in Communist Budapest, but that is abnormal. Some overseas jobs, at international organizations or in big capitals, have the same sort of very specialized assignments and very long hours as in the busiest FCO departments. In others, you will spend less time at your desk and more out interacting with official contacts, with other parts of society, or with customers (for aid, consular and commercial services), plus the ‘extra shift’ of official entertainment in the evening which is strictly for influencing people and gathering info rather than having fun. If an all-hours commitment is not for you, don’t even think about it.

My own jobs ranged from the very pleasant and varied, through times when I was regularly doing 12 hours at the desk, to high-stress episodes like the Tian’anmen crisis in Beijing. Nothing was ever as difficult as succeeding in my management duties, as I gradually rose to be deputy head of two Embassies and head of my own in Helsinki. While women are as good as men at making the rules work, and often more interested in balancing the budget, not just I but other women diplomats have found it hard to strike the right balance in leadership between authority and openness, between sharing a vision and not becoming hostage to emotion. Instinct can lead us either into the trap of being too self-effacing and nurturing (the ‘mother’) or too tough and strident (the ‘honorary man’). Apart from getting hardened by experience, what I found helped me most were good quality management courses including a high proportion of other women. When I started to manage international teams in my career breaks from 1994 onwards, I also found it easier to distance emotions and try to judge people professionally than I had with my purely British teams.

For five years now I have been an institute director and in management terms it is not so different from being an Ambassador—though the system is much more democratic! What I have gained in ‘liberating’ myself from the national service is, rather, the freedom to look at (and write and talk about) international issues objectively, with the aim of finding lessons, warnings and solutions that might help everybody and not just my own country. The material rewards and comforts of this kind of work are less than those of official diplomacy but the sense of personal responsibility and achievement can be far greater. If I hadn’t passed my FCO exams in 1969, I was thinking of going straight into think-tank work and it probably would have worked out OK for me even starting from the bottom. You also have less security, of course, in the sense of no official back-up and a constant struggle for funding; but the fact that I’ve never acquired a long-term partner or family of my own allows me to take such risks more or less cheerfully on my own shoulders.

What has become hardest, as I approach 60 and accumulate some more serious health worries, is the constant travelling within Europe and further afield. Since security and defence research is all about international relations and a researcher’s name is made largely by appearing on the ‘seminar circuit’, not just I but many younger SIPRI colleagues live with our travel bags permanently packed and can expect to fly abroad between one and four times a week. My schedule has been like that since 1994 and it is starting to become just too much. I also want more time to do my own writing instead of finding it squeezed out by my duties to edit and comment on others’ work. My new portfolio of duties at Iceland should solve these problems while also altering my type of responsibility from organizational leadership to the influencing and empowering of young minds. And when my two-year contract in Reykjavik is up? Not only do I not know, but—true to my post-modern career pattern—I’m honestly quite happy not knowing.