Diplomacy and Ideology

From the French Revolution to the Digital Age

Alexander Stagnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000076295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This innovative new book argues that diplomacy, which emerged out of the French Revolution, has become one of the central Ideological State Apparatuses of the modern democratic nation-state.

The book is divided into four thematic parts. The first presents the central concepts and theoretical perspectives derived from the work of Slavoj Žižek, focusing on his understanding of politics, ideology, and the core of the conceptual apparatus of Lacanian psychoanalysis. There then follow three parts treating diplomacy as archi-politics, ultra-politics, and post-politics, respectively highlighting three eras of the modern history of diplomacy from the French Revolution until today. The first part takes on the question of the creation of the term 'diplomacy', which took place during the time of the French Revolution. The second part begins with the effects on diplomacy arising from the horrors of the two World Wars. Finally, the third part covers another major shift in Western diplomacy during the last century, the fall of the Soviet Union, and how this transformation shows itself in the field of Diplomacy Studies. The book argues that diplomacy's primary task is not to be understood as negotiating peace between warring parties, but rather to reproduce the myth of the state's unity by repressing its fundamental inconsistencies.

This book will be of much interest to students of diplomacy studies, political theory, philosophy, and International Relations.

Part I

What is in a name?

1 War and diplomacy

War and diplomacy

The immediate purpose of this first part of the study is not only to lay out the theoretical foundation by which we shall approach diplomacy as such, but also to present the arguments for why the path we shall be taking is to be considered the most appropriate for answering the question regarding the nature of diplomacy. Following the outline of the problem presented in the introduction, this work constitutes an attempt to prove two hypotheses: first and foremost that diplomacy is a fundamentally modern invention, and second that diplomacy is an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) supporting “the reproduction of the relations of production” (Althusser 2008, 7) by displacing the inherent antagonism that pertains to the modern liberal-democratic state. In contemporary Diplomacy Studies, the first hypothesis certainly brings with it an air of times past, harking back to those IR scholars and historians of the post-war era who defined diplomacy as the cooperation or negotiation between nation-states locked within relations of mutual recognition, a system assumed to have arisen during the Early Renaissance. However, this standard definition, central to, for instance, twentieth-century Realism and Institutionalism, is overturned by the second hypothesis, namely that diplomacy is an ISA, meaning that the connection between modernity and diplomacy has very little to do with the way in which nation-states relate to something external (be it another nation-state, an NGO, a multinational company, etc.), implying rather that diplomacy’s primary function is internal to the nation-state. Furthermore, despite the potential for complicating the joint history of diplomacy and modernity as it was told during most of the twentieth-century, the second hypothesis might initially appear as counter-intuitive, almost foreign to the theme of diplomacy. Most notably, the notion of an ISA seems out of place in the realm of international politics since, at least in the traditional Marxist understanding, a state apparatus constitutes the “execution and intervention ‘in the interests of the ruling classes’ in the class struggle conducted by the bourgeoisie and its allies against the proletariat” within the state (Althusser 2008, 11). Could, then, diplomacy really be defined as a state apparatus – repressive or ideological – acting within the bounds of a state in order to minimize the risk of a proletarian uprising? In other words, could diplomacy be said to work in the same way as, for instance, the apparatuses of education, law or religion, keeping the citizen in place, either through force or through offering a subject position in the service of a certain ideology?

This work attempts to be an exercise in rather than on Žižekian thought, and as such the ensuing chapter will follow none of the more traditional forms for presenting the approach of one’s study. Having said this, it will be incumbent upon us to offer some reflections on certain elements of Žižek’s thought that can be identified as opening up the possibility for rethinking the nature of diplomacy, beginning with, on the one hand, Hegel’s and Freud’s respective understandings of the necessity of war and, on the other, Lacan’s comments on the diplomat in his eleventh seminar. Beginning with the most fundamental aspects of Žižek’s ontology, the aim is to proceed dialectically between the different concepts until we reach the level of ideology. As such, we will initially pass through the concepts of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz and its primordial repression, bringing us to the “barred subject,” its spectral counterpart, the objet a, and their joined formulation in a “fantasy” under a “Master Signifier.” This basic structure will then, in the following chapter, be related to Žižek’s critique of Althusser’s understanding of “ideology” and the “Ideological State Apparatus,” highlighting the Freudian “negations” and the idea of the “forgetting of the political” that Žižek finds in Rancière’s thought. Finally, these concepts will all be tied together through Žižek’s reading of Lacan’s theory of the “four discourses.” In the third chapter of this part, these structures will be applied to the first of diplomacy’s problems: that of the name. Taken together, the immediate aim of this first chapter is to provide two things: on the one hand an interpretation of Žižek’s concept of politics and ontology that will act as the background against which diplomacy will be understood and, on the other, a presentation of the basic concepts and procedures that are required when undertaking a Žižekian Ideologiekritik.

In order to provide an answer to what, for this project, are unavoidable questions regarding diplomacy and its problems, let us begin with two undoubtedly modern reflections on another concept which has, ever since the formulation of the word diplomacy, constituted its counterpart: war. These two reflections, by Freud and Hegel respectively, give an insight into the immanent nature of something which appears to concern a fundamentally external relationship, the war between nation-states. Our primary reflection hails from 1931, when the International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation (a branch of the then League of Nations) approached Albert Einstein with the offer to organize a scholarly exchange with an intellectual on a topic of his choosing. Einstein accepted the offer and chose to approach the topic of war and peace with Sigmund Freud as his partner, even though the two men had at the time only met once. In his answer to Einstein’s question regarding possible ways of decreasing the risk of war, Freud began by presenting a tale of the origins of society which in many ways echoed that of social contract theory: in some distant past, individuals stood against each other with only the strongest or the most intelligent surviving this violent encounter. Freud tells us that as knowledge and intelligence increasingly gained the upper-hand over brute force, the era of everyone’s war against everyone eventually came to an end when a small group of individuals made the choice to come together to live under one common law, giving up a little piece of their freedom in exchange for the protection and security offered by the community. However, in contrast to most social contract theorists, Freud concludes that the formulation of the law failed to bring with it the end of violence. Instead, it implicitly transformed it:

The situation is simple so long as the community consists only of a number of equally strong individuals. The laws of such an association will determine the extent to which, if the security of communal life is to be guaranteed, each individual must surrender his personal liberty to turn his strength to violent uses. But a state of rest of that kind is only theoretically conceivable. In actuality the position is complicated by the fact that from its very beginning the community comprises elements of unequal strength – men and women, parents and children – and soon, as a result of war and conquest, it also comes to include victors and vanquished, who turn into masters and slaves. The justice of the community then becomes an expression of the unequal degrees of power obtaining within it; the laws are made by and for the ruling members and find little room for the rights of those in subjection.

(Freud 1964, 205–206)

So, as Freud continues, the fact that a society in practice never consists solely of equals means that, on the one hand, the leaders will always attempt to move beyond or transform the law in order to secure their grip on power, while those oppressed by the same law will attempt to change the entire fabric of society by appealing to the claim that they are turning “unequal justice to equal justice for all.” It is owing to these conflicts of interest that, according to Freud, war becomes an eventual outcome, both within as well as between different communities. As a consequence “the attempt to replace actual force by the force of ideas,” replacing violence with the law, is doomed to fail since “the law was originally brute violence and […] even today it cannot do without the support of violence” (Freud 1964, 209). When exploring the reason behind this destructive tendency, Freud introduces the only theoretical concept that appears in his answer to Einstein: the death drive. It is, as he explains, the theory of the death drive that clarifies this duality of the law, acting both on an external object (the subject’s destructive instinct to destroy this object) and internally on the subject itself, in terms of self-destruction. Therefore, the only hope for a future sustainable peace that appears within the Freudian horizon is that the work of civilization – i.e., the internalization of the death drive – carries on unabated.

In the end, Freud nevertheless remains vague on the question of whether or not it is actually possible to eradicate war from the world. The reason for a certain reticence lay in the fact that the difficulties of avoiding war arise from an impasse in the organizing principle of the state itself. Thus, rather than in the clash of aims, goals or interests between states, conflict is driven by an immanent destructive tendency that forces states into either war or self-destruction. Such an understanding of conflict evokes one of the most famous dictums made by Hegel, namely that war is necessary. War, Hegel explains,

should not be regarded as an absolute evil [Übel] and as a purely external contingency whose cause [Grund] is therefore in itself contingent, whether this cause lies in the passions of rulers or nations [Völker], in injustices etc., or in anything else which is not as it should be. Whatever is by nature contingent is subject to contingencies, and this fate is therefore itself a necessity […].

(2015, §324)

So, any actually existing war is, according to Hegel, an event born out of, and thus dependent on, external contingencies, such as the desires and cravings of kings and republics to increase their territory or destroy their enemies. But how can war be necessary if it is only the effect of a number of contingent circumstances? Hegel’s explanation is that,

[s]ince states function as particular entities in their mutual relations, the broadest view of these relations will encompass the ceaseless turmoil not just of external contingency, but also of passions, interests, ends, talents and virtues, violence [Gewalt], wrongdoing, and vices in their inner particularity.

(2015, §340)

What the claim of the necessity of war thus entails is neither simply a pure realist description of functions nor an idealist normative injunction, but is an ontological postulate regarding the constitution of the state as such. Hence, the reason why war is necessary is not, according to Hegel, to be found in the positive, external contingencies, but in the internal gap of the state itself, its “inner particularity,” the constitutive negativity that, in the end, makes war unavoidable. The name for this self-relating negativity in Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right is the rabble (der Pöbel). With this notion, Hegel refers to the same sub-set of the population that Freud was to address just over a century later, namely those factions who through their move beyond the law threaten to destroy the state (thereby creating the need for war as a way of externalizing this threat). Hegel writes:

In Athens, the law obliged every citizen to give an account of his means of support; the view nowadays is that this is a purely private matter. On the one hand, it is true that every individual has an independent existence [ist jedes Individuum für sich]; but on the other, the individual is also a member of the system of civil society, and just as every human being has a right to demand a livelihood from society, so also must society protect him against himself. It is not just starvation which is at stake here; the wider viewpoint is the need to prevent a rabble from emerging. Since civil society is obliged to feed its members, it also has the right to urge them to provide for their own livelihood.

(2015, §240)

In one way or another, the emerging rabble threatens to undermine the social fabric of the state, either like the rich rabble, which “pulls itself out of many things and unbinds itself from them,” by pitting “its sovereign command of purely economical power against the sovereignty of the state and its institutions,” or like the poor rabble, “the impoverished masses that cannot ensure their subsistence” (Ruda 2013, 37–38, 62), by pointing out how society has failed to uphold its side of the social contract in not providing an opportunity to sustain oneself through labor. What Hegel lays out in the comparison between Athens and the modern state is the inherent antagonism in contemporary society, wherein every subject is assumed to be an individual, responsible for his or her own destiny. However, in order to subsist, this individual must become a part of the whole of society. The process through which the individual and society co-constitute each other is labor, meaning that society must offer the possibility for the subject to sustain itself through labor, and the subject, in turn, is obliged to partake in society through the act of laboring. Hegel expands on this apropos the poor rabble:

When a large mass of people sinks below the level of a certain standard of living – which automatically regulates itself at the level necessary for a member of the society in question – that feeling of right, integrity [Rechtlichkeit], and honour which comes from supporting oneself by one’s own activity and work is lost. This leads to the creation of a rabble, which in turn makes it much easier for disproportionate wealth to be concentrated in a few hands.

(2015, §244)

The poor and the rich rabble thus constitute two sides of the same coin, emerging from an inherent impossibility of the state: they both lose their sense of belonging since they either cannot, or do not have to (because of their wealth), support themselves through labor. Thus, a rabble emerges not because of any external or contingent reasons; the rabble (in)exists as an internal negation of the bourgeois state: “The poor, by being deprived of participation in an estate, is no longer something, but is rather a nothing that surfaces within civil society” (Ruda 2013, 32). Ruda summarizes Hegel’s problem of the rabble thus:

The decisive thesis is as follows: from a certain historical-logical moment in the necessary economical development onwards, civil society cannot grant everyone the access to labor and therewith the autonomous assurance of subsistence. This historical moment is the becoming-industrial of labor in the factory in which the machine takes the place of the human being. If the dynamics of civil society is untrammeled in its effects it produces a constantly enlarged population and at the same time a constantly diminished possibility of maintaining subsistences.

(2013, 12)

So, what the state faces in and through the unavoidable emergence of a rabble is its own inherent negation. It is neither something nor nothing, but a less than nothing; in Žižek’s words, it is “the inscription of this redoubling of the lack, not simply the lacking object – a nothing where there should have been something – but the object that redoubles the lack and is thus a paradoxical something subtracted from nothing” (2014a, 331). The rabble, in opposition to a people as a positive existence qua this or that particular group, represents a confrontation with the state’s own limit. And it is in relation to this immanent negativity that the problem of war appears; in order to retain its identity as a unified whole, the state is forced to negate this immanent negation and through this externalizes the internal threat. Hegel writes:

In existence [Dasein] this negative relation [Beziehung] of the state to itself thus appears as the relation of another to another, as if the negative were something external. The existence [Existenz] of this negative relation therefore assumes the shape of an event, of an involvement with contingent occurrences coming from without. Nevertheless, this negative relation is the state’s own highest moment – its actual infinity as the ideality of everything finite within it.

(2015, §323)

The necessity of engaging in a relation with the other through war is not an outcome of the fact that a fragile balance is at a certain point inevitably toppled because the desires and power of one of the parties become impossible to contain. Rather, it is owing to an impossibility that lurks at the very heart of the modern nation-state, which only “appears as the relation of another to another.” War is necessary in order to retain “the ethical health of nations […], just as the movement of the winds preserves the sea from stagnation which a lasting calm would produce – a stagnation which a lasting, not to say a perpetual, peace would also produce among nations” (Hegel 2015, §324). So, even if the circumstances regarding the outbreak of any specific historical war always are contingent, war is a necessary outcome of every state’s need to externalize its inherent negation, that is, the threat posed by both the rich and the poor rabble to its law. But since war is aimed at conservation rather than destruction, it must also, at one point, be succeeded by a return to the matters immanent to the state. In other words, it is important, as Hegel puts it, to “preserve the possibility of peace” even in war, “so that, for example, ambassadors should be respected and war should on no account be waged either on internal institutions and the peace of privat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: on the problems of diplomacy
• PART I: What is in a name?
• PART II: Diplomacy as Archi-Politics
• PART III: Diplomacy as Ultra-Politics
• PART IV: Diplomacy as Post-Politics
• Index