Enter a Haitian consulate, in Montreal, in Paris, in Miami. There you will find busy offices, apparently busy officials, forms awaiting a signature that will not come, telephones ringing in vain.
A country’s diplomacy is supposed to extend its power, defend its interests, protect its citizens and open economic horizons. It is normally the external arm of a living state. But what happens to diplomacy when it no longer represents anything more than a retreating state, weakened even in its essential functions?
Haiti today offers a worrying answer to this question.
Never has the country increased so many official trips, international summits, diplomatic missions and cooperation releases. Never have the Haitian authorities talked so much about “strategic partnership†, “international mobilization†, “strengthening regional cooperation†. However, Haitian foreign policy has rarely seemed to produce so few concrete effects for the population.
The contrast has become striking.
On the one hand, official representatives travel to international conferences, participate in multilateral forums, hold diplomatic meetings and take protocol photographs. On the other hand, the country continues to sink into a security and humanitarian crisis whose scale now far exceeds national capacities.
This diplomacy appears to operate in isolation, according to its own administrative logic, almost independently of the Haitian reality.
In several consulates and diplomatic representations, staff numbers are increasing while the results remain invisible. Dozens of employees coexist in sometimes overloaded structures, where appointments are more a matter of internal political balances than of a coherent external strategy. Diplomacy then becomes a space for bureaucratic redistribution, an extension of power arrangements, more than an instrument of influence.
The problem is not simply budgetary, even if, for such a weakened state, the question of priorities should be central. The problem is deeper: Haiti seems to have lost the very definition of what its presence in the world should be.
What is Haitian diplomacy looking for today? To attract investment? To defend a regional vision? To mobilize a stable international coalition? to structure the economic interests of its diaspora? To prepare a reconstruction strategy? Nothing appears clearly.
Foreign policy sometimes gives the feeling of being reduced to an activity of representation without a national project behind it.
However, in the current context, Haiti would precisely need a combat diplomacy: a diplomacy capable of coordinating international aid, of obtaining specific commitments, of structuring targeted economic partnerships, of defending the interests of millions of Haitians living abroad and to finally impose a coherent reading of the Haitian crisis on the international scene.
Instead, the country often gives the image of a diplomatic apparatus that is dispersed, cumbersome and difficult to read.
Even the migration issue illustrates this weakness. While Haitian communities face increasingly harsh migration policies in the United States, the Dominican Republic, Chile and elsewhere, the official response remains limited, fragmented, and often late. Consulates, although abundantly equipped in certain cases, struggle to become real centers of assistance and protection for their nationals.
This inertia fuels a silent unease among the diaspora itself. Many Haitians living abroad feel that they are contributing massively to the economic survival of the country – particularly through remittances – while receiving very little institutional support in return.
Haitian diplomacy ultimately suffers from the same evil as the entire state: administrative hypertrophy combined with operational weakness.
The structures exist. The titles exist. The missions exist. Travel exists. But the ability to produce tangible results gradually dissolved.
Perhaps the most worrying is this form of habituation. As if this inefficiency had become normal. As if we had ended up accepting that a diplomatic apparatus can function mainly for itself, without any real obligation to produce measurable results for the country.
However, in a world crisscrossed by power struggles, migratory crises, economic competition and geopolitical recompositions, fragile nations cannot afford decorative diplomacy.
They need useful diplomacy. Haiti, even more than others.
Josette Larosine
