Podcast: "Success is rarely the effect of one moment"

New book interview with Catherine Ashton

Listen to my interview with Catherine Ashton for New Books in European Politics about her And Then What? Inside Stories of 21st-Century Diplomacy (Elliott & Thompson, 2023) on Apple or Spotify.

When she was chosen as the EU's first High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HRVP) in 2009, Catherine Ashton admits she "felt no exhilaration" and feared she had "few obvious credentials and lukewarm support".

On leaving office five years later - 19 months before the Brexit referendum - this former British minister had confounded her inner doubter and many of her initial detractors. A new European External Action Service had been built from scratch and the HRVP had become a pivotal global player - brokering what had seemed to be an impossible settlement between Serbia and Kosovo and performing the role of closer in the multi-party Iranian nuclear negotiations.

Ashton's memoirs of those five years go behind the scenes during critical moments in recent diplomatic history including Egypt's excruciating transition from dictatorship to uneasy democracy, the Iranian nuclear deal, the brittle Serbia/Kosovo talks, and the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and its aftermath.

She writes: "Success is rarely the effect of one moment but of thousands of interlocking actions over a sustained period; and tiny details, especially in difficult negotiations, can make the difference between success and failure even if they seem arbitrary or inconsequential".

For my Writers’ Writers reading list, she chose Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis by Graham Allison (Longman, 1971) and Never by Ken Follett (Macmillan, 2021).