Understanding International Diplomacy

Theory, Practice and Ethics

Corneliu Bjola, Markus Kornprobst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351766821
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the study of international diplomacy, covering both theory and practice. This second edition has been revised and updated, with new material on such key contemporary issues as Syria, Ukraine, migration and the South China Sea.

The text summarizes and discusses the major trends in the field of diplomacy, providing an innovative theoretical approach to understanding diplomacy not as a collection of practices or a set of historical traditions, but as a form of institutionalized communication through which authorized representatives produce, manage and distribute public goods. The book:

• Traces the evolution of diplomacy from its beginnings in ancient Egypt, Greece and China to our current age of global diplomacy.
• Examines theoretical explanations about how diplomats take decisions, make relations and shape the world.
• Discusses normative approaches to how diplomacy ought to adapt itself to the twenty-first century, help re-make states and assist the peaceful evolution of international order.

In sum, Understanding International Diplomacy provides an up-to-date, accessible and authoritative overview of how diplomacy works and, indeed, ought to work in a globalized world.

This textbook will be essential reading for students of international diplomacy, and is highly recommended for students of crisis negotiation, international organizations, foreign policy and IR in general.

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Part I

Introduction

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1 Why and how to study diplomacy

Why study diplomacy?

There are many very good reasons to study diplomacy right now. The outstanding economic progress of China, increasingly also India, in recent decades makes scholars and policy makers alike investigate the question whether the potential redistribution of power from the West to the East would lead to regional and global stability or instability. Diplomacy will have a lot to do with the trajectory of these changes. The Middle East is in turmoil. The breakdown of state authority in Libya, the fragile statehood in Iraq, regional rivalries such as the one between Iran and Saudi Arabia, civil wars in Syria and Yemen, and the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian Conflict pose serious challenges. Coping with these challenges requires skilful diplomacy. The Paris Agreement remains a landmark agreement for countering climate change. Yet Washington’s announcement to opt out of the agreement as well as a plethora of implementation issues will keep diplomats busy for some time to come. In the wake of the process that led to the Sustainable Development Goals, African states have agreed to specify their developmental goals in the Agenda 2063. Making progress towards these goals requires, among other things, negotiation and renegotiation – in other words, diplomacy. This list could be extended almost indefinitely. There are innumerous challenges, pertaining to conflict and peace, economics and development, health, migration, disaster relief and many others, that states cannot address appropriately without sending their representatives onto the diplomatic stage.

The forces of globalization, and with it the need to steer these forces into warranted directions, underpin many of these challenges. We seem to be situated in an ‘in-between era’, where international politics – and with it diplomacy – needs fresh ideas and new initiatives of diplomatic engagement to engage with a changing world. The need for such a re-orientation is nothing particularly new. Diplomacy has a history of adapting and re-inventing itself to changing political conditions. However, the challenge for diplomats has surprisingly remained similar throughout different historical ages: how to properly recognize, interpret and project relevant forms of power by communicating with one another? In other words, what exactly is there to understand about diplomacy and how can we make sense of it? This book does not aim to provide the answer to this question, but to explore how this question can be addressed from a variety of perspectives: historical, legal, cognitive, social and ethical. In so doing, we hope to convince the readers that diplomacy represents a unique, multi-faceted, effective and highly relevant instrument for managing relationships of estrangement between political communities, while retaining their institutional, ideological and social differences.

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As a way of unpacking these arguments, this chapter will proceed in four steps. The first section will discuss the reasons for the continuing relevance of diplomacy in the twenty-first century. The second part will explain the centrality of communication to the diplomatic practice. The third section will explain why and how we plan to broaden the toolbox available for studying diplomacy by drawing on insights from related disciplines. The chapter will conclude with an overview of the themes to be covered in each chapter of the book.

Does diplomacy (still) matter?

“States receive so much benefit from uninterrupted foreign negotiations”, Cardinal Richelieu, the founder of the first-ever professional diplomatic service, once argued, but the nature of the much praised “benefit” has not always been clear.

As argued elsewhere (Bjola, 2013), diplomacy, at its core, is about relationship management and maintaining international order. At the micro-level, this translates into diplomats building and managing relations of friendship. At the macro-level, diplomacy contributes through its core functions of representation, communication and negotiation to producing and distributing global public goods (security, development, sustainable environment, etc.). Diplomatic success is therefore arguably an equal matter of maximizing the number of allies and friends and reducing that of enemies and rivals on the one hand, and of creating a stable and self-sustainable international order, on the other. However, what is less clear is how diplomats can actually accomplish these worthy undertakings. What exactly do they need to do in order to live up to these expectations, especially since their profession is going through some critical transformations with respect to the nature of the actors, issue areas, and methods of diplomatic engagement? Put differently, what is the value of diplomacy in the twenty-first century?

Actors

We are witnessing a multiplication of diplomatic actors in Europe as well as worldwide. The field of diplomacy is no longer populated just by representatives of foreign services, but also by representatives of other ministries, multinational corporations, civil society organizations, and even influential individuals who do not represent a particular state, organization or corporation. As insightfully noted by the authors of the Futures for Diplomacy report (Hocking et al., 2012), the nature of the national diplomatic environment is changing from one which privileges the role of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) to one which places it within a broader construct – that of the national diplomatic system (NDS), which covers the complex network of governmental and non-governmental institutions that inform and shape a country’s international policy objectives. Assessing the value of diplomacy in this context is no longer an issue of measuring solely MFA performance. It has to involve a more sophisticated analysis of mapping and comparing NDS configurations that prove most conducive to addressing and managing core files of foreign policy. The European refugee crisis has shown, for instance, how important it is for MFAs to collaborate with local NGOs, charities, international institutions (such as the UNHCR), aid agencies and industry groups in order to make sure that countries’ immigration policies and their humanitarian commitments remain reasonably aligned with each other.

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Issue areas

Diplomacy, on the one hand, and regional and global governance, on the other, are inextricably intertwined. As a key mechanism of regional and global ordering, diplomacy increasingly gets involved in issue areas that, until quite recently, had been primarily dealt with at the domestic level (economics, environment, health, migration). Most critically, many of these issue areas mutually influence each other, and, consequently, they are often discussed in the same breath in international fora (e.g. migration and security, environment and trade, economics and health, etc.). What this means is that the value of diplomacy may not be properly captured by sector-specific measures, but rather by compact-sensitive tools that take into account the complementary and added value of integrated issues areas. For example, the 3D concept (Diplomacy, Development, and Defense) put forward by the U.S. State Department in collaboration with USAID and the Department of Defense recognizes the mutually reinforcing capacity of the three dimensions and seeks to leverage their joint potential through combined strategic planning. One could probably add “Digital” as the fourth logical extension of this approach (4D), as digital technologies are becoming indispensable tools for conducting diplomacy, promoting development and boosting defence.

What needs to change is our method of assessing the mechanisms by which these objectives can be reached.

Methods

The multiplication of actors and issue areas also changes the ways diplomats do their work. It changes both their daily practices and their methods for handling international negotiations, public engagements and situations of international crisis. The 2015 Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) calls attention, for instance, to the fact that the fluid nature of global events requires the U.S. State Department to respond quickly and to deploy expertise whenever and wherever it is needed (U.S. State Department, 2015: 68). The twentieth-century mantra of diplomats being able to excel in their work as long as they had a strong sense of history and a good grasp of general economic, political and international issues is no longer sufficient. Rather, professional aspects of diplomacy can be found in a range of different occupational roles requiring multiple competences and trans-professional skills (strong leadership qualities, good analytical intuitions in economics and data science, proven negotiation abilities, deep know-how of organizational management, etc.). Good diplomatic performance is therefore not only an issue of suitably linking capacities to outcomes, but also of demonstrating the capacity and talent to do this in a way that embraces multi-tasking, welcomes improvisation, controls uncertainty and complexity, and maximizes real-time impact. In short, the method of evaluating diplomatic performance must take note of the hybridity of professional competences required to function efficiently in the diplomatic environment of the twenty-first century.

To sum up, the core mission of diplomacy to manage relationships and maintain international order has hardly changed in the twenty-first century. What needs to change is our method of assessing the mechanisms by which these objectives can be reached. A stronger focus on the strength and efficiency of national diplomatic systems, on the added value and degree of compactness of integrated issues areas, and on the level of hybridity of professional competences and skills required for delivering results in a dynamic environment, could offer a more balanced perspective to understanding the value of contemporary diplomacy.

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How to define diplomacy

What distinct insights does diplomacy offer to us for understanding how the world “hangs together”? What ontological boundaries (→ glossary: ontology) delineate the field of diplomatic inquiry and how helpful are they in assisting scholars to theorize about conditions of conflict and cooperation in world politics or about considerations of power, authority and legitimacy as constitutive frameworks of international conduct? In short, what turns diplomacy into a core analytical and practical method of international engagement? The answer we provide in this book is that diplomacy cannot be understood without taking seriously the role of communication as an ontological anchor of diplomatic interaction.

Diplomacy is the institutionalized communication among internationally recognized representatives of internationally recognized entities through which these representatives produce, manage and distribute public goods.

This definition has three key features. First, diplomacy is, on its most fundamental level, about communication. More precisely, it is about a peculiar form of communication that is highly institutionalized. There are a plethora of rules and norms that diplomats become socialized into and these rules and norms govern the communication among diplomats. On the one hand, therefore, our definition is not far removed from Adam Watson’s (1982) highly influential claim that diplomacy revolves around dialogue. He, too, wrote about diplomacy as an institution and, choosing the term ‘dialogue’, he also put communication centre stage in his writings on diplomacy. On the other hand, we use the term communication more broadly. There is a wide variety of diplomatic communication, ranging from dialogue on the one hand to coercive diplomacy (Schelling, 1966) on the other. Note also that we do not subscribe to a celebratory view of diplomatic communication. While diplomacy has plenty of potential to resolve conflicts peacefully, it is not always innocent. Declaring war, for instance, is as much a diplomatic act – very much an institutionalized communicative act – as mediation and negotiation of peaceful resolution of conflicts. So are attempts to build coalitions with other states to go to war.

Second, processes of double recognition make an individual an actor in the diplomatic field. These processes are very straightforward when it comes to an ambassador representing a state. States are recognized as entities on the diplomatic stage, for instance through the UN Charter and the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The latter also codifies the accreditation process (→ glossary) through which a host state recognizes the ambassador of a sending state. Some books on diplomacy put this much simpler. Watson, for instance, writes only about states (1982). Yet this is, in our view, a bit too simple, especially in our global age. Of course, states are still key entities in the diplomatic game. To this very day, diplomacy privileges states. It is, for example, states that hold membership of the UN. But this does not mean that we can understand today’s diplomacy by looking only at states. The UN Secretariat, for example, is oftentimes recognized as a diplomatic player in its own right. Its representatives, above all the Secretary-General but also his Under-Secretary Generals, are recognized to act on behalf of this recognized international entity. In similar ways, the chairpersons and other high-ranking representatives of, say, Amnesty International and Greenpeace, are diplomatic actors (although they may not necessarily self-identify as such). Diplomacy, in other words, has a lot to do with recognition. Who is recognized changes over time. Thus, our definition stays open regarding who is recognized. This enables us to discuss changes from, say, Richelieu’s times to our global age of diplomacy.

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Third, diplomacy is about producing, managing and distributing public goods, that is, goods that are important for the well-being of a community and where the use by some members of the community does not reduce the availability of the public good to others. Traditionally, diplomacy has been primarily about engaging in communication for the purpose of achieving a particular type of public good: the protection of the state against external interventions (i.e. security). In the twentieth century, diplomatic communication has expanded to address a growing number of other public goods, including economic welfare, development, environmental protection, health safety and migration control. More recently, it has become increasingly evident that many of these public goods are interrelated and hence diplomats need...