Whether it’s Putin’s table, Erdogan’s sofa or Biden’s fireside chair – the staging of political negotiations often follows the guiding principle: How you sit down, so you win.
Of course, Vladimir Putin had something in mind. After all, Russia’s head of state will not have placed his French colleague Emmanuel Macron at the end of a seven-meter-long marble table because there was nothing free at the smaller tables in the house that February day. Coincidences have no place in top diplomacy. Certainly not when it comes to explosive issues like war and peace in Ukraine. Rather, in the run-up to such a summit meeting, it is regulated what can be regulated somehow. This includes choosing the furniture.
For the host, this means asking oneself in good time: Should someone sit higher, enthroned above the others? Or is an encounter at eye level recommended? Is it a matter of humiliating a guest, letting him sit on deep cushions where he has to look up to others? Does it need a table? An elongated one, for example, that allows important visitors to be placed on the front side and less important ones to be pushed off to the side? Should the furniture radiate coolness, should the arrangement create distance? Or is it a matter of spreading a feel-good atmosphere and enabling closeness?
What seems to come from times when kings gathered the nobles of the empire around them, honored them or humiliated them, stems from sober calculation. Summit declarations, sometimes filed beyond recognition by diplomats, receive little public attention. Pictures from the summit attract more interest. Messages can be conveyed with them. At first glance they show people and furniture. On the second, they often tell of power and powerlessness.
At the most recent crisis meeting on Ukraine, Putin arranged for Macron to meet at eye level. Which, however, did not prevent the Russian from using a monstrous piece of furniture to illustrate the monstrous power he enjoys. Or did he have something else in mind?
As Swiss ambassador, Tim Guldimann looked behind the scenes in Tehran and Berlin. As head of the OSCE peacekeeping mission in Chechnya, he was involved in the Moscow peace talks that the then head of state Boris Yeltsin was conducting with the acting president of the breakaway republic. Even then, the negotiating table provided topics for discussion, even fuel, says Guldimann. Yeltsin claimed the head end for himself, and the rebel leaders only wanted to concede the side. In the end, it was agreed to come together at a round table.
Another former ambassador, the German Berndt von Staden, makes it clear in his memoirs that a demonstration of power and a feel-good atmosphere do not have to be mutually exclusive. He refers to the Oval Office, the official residence of the US President. Von Staden describes the room as “bright and graceful, two colonial-style chairs in front of the fireplace, a Swedish-blue carpet on the floor, behind it a curved wall of windows – like the study of a wealthy Virginia plantation owner”.
In April last year, Turkish head of state Recep Tayyip Erdogan demonstrated that furniture can spread discontent. He staged a spectacle of humiliation in his palace. Victim was the EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
An irritated “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand after having realized that the host had only provided chairs for himself and the EU Council President Charles Michel who had traveled with us, but not for her. She had to sit down on a sofa that was offset to one side. It was so low that she couldn’t help but look up at the two men. And that’s probably how it was meant to be. After von der Leyen called on Turkey to “respect women’s rights”, the head of state apparently wanted to make it clear what he thought of it.
Erdogan will have known what it feels like to have to look up from low-lying cushions. His ambassador in Tel Aviv must have told him. After a Turkish television series that the Israelis found discrediting, the diplomat was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, where after a long wait he had to answer questions on a low sofa.
But Tim Guldimann also had to endure being put down. You can still see his resentment about it today. It was at the British ambassador in Berlin, where the Swiss represented the interests of his country from 2010 to 2015. The host sat at the head of the table, with one of his employees seated opposite him. “I was assigned the side,” says Guldimann, “at first glance a banality, but not at second glance”.
The fact that the composition of the furniture is not due to chance does not mean that the intention behind it is always obvious. Tim Guldimann, who himself has already conducted crisis talks in Moscow, suspects that the choice of the XXL table at the most recent meeting was simply due to Putin’s fear of contracting Corona from Macron.
