bout de papier, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1985) — Fall 1985 // Automne 1985, p. 5
Foreign service people, diplomat and support staff alike, come from all corners of Canadian society. Undaunted, they valiantly learn the rules and social forms of a bygone era that lingers on only among the very rich and the diplomatic corps. Dabbling in nostalgia is fun but it puts us in conflict with the reality of Canadian family life.
Who joins the foreign service? Where do they come from? There is no single answer, or even a majority answer. They may share a few character traits but not a common background or ancestry. A girl who grew up in rural P.El. or Victoria, B.C., who attended public school and Mount St. Vincent University or Havergill College and Queen’s University; a boy from Chicoutimi and a boy from Mount Royal may all find themselves in diplomatic drag, hobnobbing with the hoipoloi.
Until recent years the pervasive traditions of the service squeezed these diverse people into similar molds, but too much is changing too rapidly for the old ways to persist. There are too many unique people with an unwillingness to submerge their individuality, there is too much happening in society for a miniscule segment to resist the pressures. Why should it resist? Presumably, the foreign service represents the best of Canada. Should it perpetuate a reality that is outmoded? Many, if not most, foreign service people assigned overseas are required to establish a style of living different from that with which they grew up.
By osmosis, everyone learns about precedence and protocol, seating plans and calling cards, shaking hands and taking off one’s shoes, multiethnic communication and crosscultural adaptation, inventories and lift vans. All this is stimulating and exciting, but the cost of the experience keeps increasing. To individuals and to governments, the cost in terms of an increasingly artificial lifestyle, of interrupted or lapsed spousal careers, of failed marriages and substance dependencies, of personal debt and of transporting people and property may eventually outstrip the usefulness of the traditional style of foreign service.
Depending upon the assignment, housing may be much grander, or less amenable; one’s living arrangements may be the subject of local curiosity and gossip; one may experience the insidious nature of an inflated status; social activity may take on aspects of the grandiose, or, conversely, cease to exist; diplomatic personnel cease to be private citizens and become characters out of a Noel Coward play. If there is a representational aspect to the overseas assignment, there is often a large financial outlay for clothes and hospitality hardware.
There are a plethora of variables, but some effort must be made to assess the changes and plan for the future. At a guess:
® the days when only sons of wealthy families join External are gone — foreign service personnel come from all segments of society and regions of Canada, the number of women in the foreign service will continue to grow,
® the demand for career couple opportunities will increase,
® more spouses will refuse to allow the foreign service life of the employee to interfere in their personal lives,
® the cost of fulfilling representational hospitality in the old way will continue to increase and become less feasible for many individuals and governments,
® more two career families will emerge and make assignments overseas less attractive for employee families.
The nuclear family will continue to exist, but there will be many options and variations: single parent families with either male or female heads; homogenous families with or without children; multiparent families; blended families; dual-tracking marriages; commuter marriages; split families with shared custody; families where the nurturing/accompanying spouse is male.
It is also becoming clear that the person who remains at home to raise children risks financial insecurity and real poverty in old age.
As children grow older, the aspirations of the stay-at-home parent change and imaginative options will be explored to allow them to use their skills, expand their experience and secure a financial future: job sharing; more part time opportunities with better benefits; more self-employment; more late careers; more demand for training/ retraining/continuing education; more opportunities for employment while remaining at home. Avant-garde options will become acceptable and people will come to feel that freedom of choice is an inalienable right.
There are two basic tenets of foreign service life — rotationality and representationality — and it is around these that the conflict will revolve. That is not new, they have always been the linchpin in foreign service dilemma and distress. Paradoxically, they are also its main attractions. However, any adjustment to the new circumstances, that requires the spouse to other than be an appendage, begins to fall apart as any solution tries to incorporate them. Will there continue to be enough compensations in the lifestyle to offset this?
Lifestyle options and career concerns for spouses are rapidly being joined by a third major consideration for families assigned overseas. Civil unrest, political instability and terrorism are increasingly factors in the rejection of an assignment. And, if Geoffrey Pearson, Executive Director of the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security, is right, this trend toward unrest will continue to grow as the disparity between the haves and have nots becomes even more obvious. These troubled spots are, of course, exactly the places where on-the-spot, person-to-person interface and reportage are most needed.
Regardless of what solutions people devise to meet their changing situations, can we reasonably insist that host countries provide conditions of life for Canadian foreign service personnel that conflict with local practices? Can we reasonably expect tolerance for lifestyles that offend local mores? How far can the department be expected to act like a benevolent godfather, cushioning us from social change and ensuring our progress toward a comfortable retirement?
Easy, almost unavoidable, access to a smorgasbord of ideas and options has diversified and changed individual goals and expectations in North America to such an extent that even the adaptable and ingenious foreign service family is hard pressed to accommodate them.
Trying to evolve individual lifestyles today is like buying shoes for a toddler. Before he learns to walk in one pair, his feet have grown too big and you have to buy another pair. None of them ever become broken in and comfortable.
Until we individually and collectively revise our concept of what diplomatic life should be, we will never resolve the dichotomy between what our foreign service life demands, and the pressure society puts on us to achieve our potential as individuals. We will always feel guilty of doing neither job properly.
Although the trend is most obvious to us in North America, the traditional patterns of society are following the inexorable path of change in every country. It is the differing pace of change that will cause the problems. Someone is going to have to decide what form Canadian international diplomatic representation is going to take, because the day when an upper class male foreign service officer, wife and children form a family unit in which mother bakes apple pies, prepares elaborate representational dinners and arranges charity bazaars as other than a sideline, is gone.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1985) — Fall 1985 // Automne 1985, p. 5. Read the rest of this issue →
