The Dance of Negotiation

By LANCE MORROW

The negotiating process: our man (George Steinbrenner, let us say) and their man (Leonid Brezhnev, perhaps) approach a dance floor that is covered with a layer of wet cement. The tinny band strikes up a slow, interminable version of One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall. Steinbrenner and Brezhnev come together and lock in a sort of oafish sumo embrace. Slogging, they circle the floor, glaring at each other. They mutter into each other's ears: "Not that way, you clumsy idiot! This way, you capitalist (or Commie) dog!" They wait for something to happen between them: for the music to stop, for the floor to dry around their ankles and hold them forever in place. Or, in one of those rare moments of international grace, for an understanding to blossom. If that occurs, the dancers rush to the lobby, sit down upon straight-backed, gilt chairs and, using 17 pens each, sign documents that look like the wine list in an elegant restaurant.

Negotiation can be an ungainly and primitive business. Sometimes the dance floor is an entire continent (Europe, for example); the superpowers gallumph, they shake the earth underfoot (a premonition of the last dance) and terrify all those who find themselves standing between them. The spectators flap and screech and march. The U.S. and the Soviet Union have been practicing a saturnine transcontinental nuclear muscle-and-tooth display. It is really a form of negotiation, or a preliminary to it. But the thunder-footed dance (the idiot dares the music of doom) has left millions of Europeans in a state of nerves and incipient neutralism.

Anyone who watches such bargaining (watches it in a cold sweat) might conclude that civilization is losing its touch for that sort of thing. It is an optical illusion, maybe, but we suspect it was once done with more style. Eighteenth century diplomatists liked to think of themselves as elegant wits and dissemblers. Henry Kissinger goes in for that kind of ballroom performance (Metternich played by Fred Astaire), but he is temporarily unemployed. Today, in all forms of haggling, from arms-limitation treaties to used-car deals, the art seems to suffer. Despite improvements in some industries, labor and management still spar lumberingly, in brute confrontation, like slow-motion monsters in the Pleistocene. The air-traffic controllers made a bargaining miscalculation last summer that destroyed their union. Through a combination of blind greed and intellectual brownout, the baseball players and owners sacrificed 50 days of the recent season. If that was a sort of surly burlesque, the failure of negotiation in Northern Ireland remains a disgusting tragedy; the ancient bargaining there goes on by bomb blast and spectacles of starvation in the Maze.

It is, of course, arrogant, a fallacy of rationalist optimism, to imagine that all differences in the world can be settled by well-meaning conversations. Neville Chamberlain went to Munich entertaining that notion. Not every human conflict is ripe to be settled in the court of reason. Still, certain kinds of tragedy have become intolerable in the world as they never were before: the lushly cataclysmic plot development that history could once absorb (even to the extent of permitting two "world wars") will no longer do. When the world has so armed itself as to make the use of those arms a stroke of global cancellation, then the casual "Let's talk about it" takes on a ticking urgency. Che sar`a sar`a is not an intelligent policy this side of the Last Day.

Even leaving aside the nuclear Caliban, the future will have to be built by elaborately constructive conversations. The Third World's claims upon the First World's wealth, the rising global sense of entitlement, the abrasions of change on a crowded planet--all demand a high order of bargaining intelligence. Social solutions require space and resources (Go West! Enlarge the pie!) For many disputes and angers and injustices today, there are no solutions, only settlements.

The sort of negotiation that most postwar diplomats practice (the years-long process that has turned Geneva into the world capital of niggling, for example) has a dreary reputation; so does the brute punch and counterpunch of labor bargaining--the two sides staring at one another across the table with reptile's eyes (their bladders nagging, their minds beginning to buzz and fray, the brain cells winking out like campfires). No Exit, a purgatory of silence and cultural incomprehension and stolid grievance, waiting for the other side to crack and start giving away points.

Negotiation should have more elan than that. Negotiators ought to be the future's heroes (in the way, perhaps, that Sadat and Begin and Carter were for a time after Camp David). To make something out of nothing, to fashion possibilities out of dead ends, is to be literally creative. Negotiation is one of the serious arts of the imagination. The deeper resources of wisdom must collaborate with the nimblest reflexes: the gambler's touch, the athlete's tuning, the magician's tricks, the gentleman's equilibrium.

Negotiation rarely works if it is a merely mechanical compromise of polar extremes conducted, as the behavioral scientist says, "in a complex mixed-motive ambience of trust and suspicion." The best negotiations are inventive. A feistily savvy book, Herb Cohen's You Can Negotiate Anything, manages to convey the impression that all negotiations should even be fun; at the end of each, like the six solved faces of a Rubik's Cube, lies a "win-win" settlement--a mutuality in which both sides profit. Another recent book, Getting to Yes, arrives (a little more rigorously) at the same conclusion. The authors, Roger Fisher and William Ury, are members of the Harvard Negotiation Project, which explores various bargaining issues.

An instinct for improvisational psychology helps. "Ultimately," write Fisher and Ury, "conflict lies not in objective reality but in people's heads." In confrontation (trying to get the child to bed, trying to get the hostages out), the natural impulse may be either to harden one's position or to be soft and conciliatory, to be nice. Both approaches may be wrong. "Change the game," say Fisher and Ury. Do not negotiate positions, but interests, the real goals that lie behind positions. Separate the people negotiating from the problem being negotiated. When ideology is in heat, it will sometimes emit the cry of "nonnegotiable demands"; but that is mostly just an aggressive display of plumage, a preliminary, and even itself a form of negotiation. The secret always is to figure out your opponents, to find out what they really want. Explain what you want, and see if there are alternatives outside the fixed positions, accommodations that would satisfy both sides. Often a rigid position is only a symbol of what one thinks one needs or wants; fixed positions tend to be crude and unreflective. They've had no test of process. Develop deeper alternatives, including fall-back positions to adopt if the negotiation does not work out--this allows one to negotiate with the strength of detachment. There is always power in knowing you can walk away.

Good negotiations demand trapeze work across wide cultural gaps, sometimes even across cultural time. As Saul Bellow wrote: "Some minds . . . belong to earlier periods of history. Among our contemporaries are Babylonians and Carthaginians or types from the Middle Ages." The Shi'ite ayatollah in Qum was negotiating across several centuries with a President whose working models of reality had to do with nuclear submarines. The oldest American negotiation, the endless business between black and white, may be subverted more than we know by disharmonies of expectation and assumption.

Dirty tactics can often be deflected simply by recognizing them and exposing them in a bemused but unaggressive way: "I assume that tomorrow we will switch chairs, so you will have the sun in your eyes." The secret is to notice them immediately and, if necessary, to make the dirty tricks themselves a subject of negotiation: "Not bad, not bad," you imply, "but shall we get serious now?" Also: never forget the power of silence, the massively disconcerting pause that goes on and on and may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously.

Cohen supplies a few "Soviet-style" ploys of his own: hanging up the phone in midsentence, for example, giving the impression you were cut off and thus gaming a little additional time to think things over. Then there is the "nibble": leading your opponent deep into negotiations, so that he has invested much time and effort in them: seeming to make a settlement, then demanding one last concession: a free neck tie, for example, to go with a couple of suits. There is a wonderfully grasping vulgarity in the ploy, an effrontery that should be greeted with admiration, at least in a clothing store. Sometimes the nibble can be immense and sinister--like the bite that Hitler took at Munich. In less apocalyptic negotiations, the nibble should generally be greeted with dignified amusement. If conflict is the natural state of the world, then negotiation may be an unnatural medium, one that goes against the centrifugal force of things. On the other hand, almost every human transaction (sex, marriage, politics, for example) and even human traffic with the divine (religion), is a form of negotiation, the everlasting mating dance of the quid pro quo. Those engaged in negotiation, even when they are the bitterest of enemies, are held together within a membrane of hope and desire and (presumably) enlightened selfishness.

Negotiations can be merely a smokescreen, of course: like the bargaining that the Japanese were conducting with the U.S. before Pearl Harbor. Sometimes negotiations are only empty dances of punctilio: at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, it took the delegates six months to decide in what order they would enter and be seated in the negotiating chamber; the U.S. and North Viet Nam held similarly intricate discussions about the shape of the table in Paris. Negotiations can produce their own tragedies, as Versailles did, as Yalta did. But without negotiation, things tend to fall more quickly of their own weight into patterns of force and submission, autocracy and abjectness. If the future is forever dark and fogbound, negotiation can sometimes fill the landscapes with better shapes and paths than they would otherwise contain.

--By Lance Morrow

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