Diplomatic tenses

A social evolutionary perspective on diplomacy

Iver Neumann, J. Simon Rofe, Giles Scott-Smith, J. Simon Rofe, Giles Scott-Smith

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526148711
• eBook ISBN: 9781526148704
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Offering an alternative and a complement to existing histories of diplomacy, this book discusses change in the form of 'tipping points', which it understands as the culmination of long-term trends. Part I discusses social evolution on the general level of institutions. It argues that in cases where a diplomatic institution's tipping points are defined by the types of entities that make it up, the consular institution has evolved from concerning polities of independent traders to becoming ever more of a state concern. Part II challenges the existing literature's treatment of diplomacy as an elite, textual affair. It lays the groundwork for studying visual diplomacy and observes that the increasingly marginal vision of diplomacy as a confrontation between good and evil survives in popular culture. The book concludes by identifying the future of diplomacy as a struggle between state-to-state based diplomacy and diplomacy as networked global governance.

1

Introduction: the nature of diplomacy

Diplomacy is about handling the Other. Whether it is defined as ‘the transmitting of messages between one independent political community and another’ (Bull 1977: 164), ‘the conduct of business between states by peaceful means’ (Satow 1979: 3) or ‘the mediation of estrangement’ (Der Derian 1987), the overall theme is one of establishing settings where possible conflict and cooperation may play out, and establishing ways in which to play. Traditionally, students of diplomacy looked mainly at negotiation games and their outcomes. In the phrase of G.M. Young (1936: 103), he and his fellow diplomatic historians produced ‘the record of what one clerk said to another clerk’. However, over the past three decades or so, diplomatic studies has emerged as a vibrant interdisciplinary field with its main mooring in the discipline of international relations. The focus on diplomatic action has been complemented by a focus on the preconditions for and effects of action. The new diplomatic studies bring theory of many hues – Derridean (Constantinou 1996), Foucauldian (Der Derian 1987, Rumelili 2007), constructivist (Sharp 2009, Rathbun 2015), Bourdieusian (Pouliot 2010), organizational (Bátora 2013), Goffmanian (Adler-Nissen 2014a), feminist (Towns 2015), post-colonial (Datta-Ray 2015), Deleuzian (Dittmer 2017) – to bear on diplomacy understood as a social institution. The result is a richer and better understanding of diplomacy as an international institution.

This book stands firmly in this tradition. It asks down-to-earth questions about what kinds of practices diplomats engage in, where those practices came from and how they are changing. It does so, however, with a view to establishing insights not about any one particular agent’s handling of a specific crisis or any one particular state’s style of diplomacy but about how diplomacy has evolved as a social institution over time. Ever since the species was new and lived in hunter-gatherer bands of about 20 to 200 individuals, different human groups have had to relate to one another on a more or less regular basis. Diplomacy has a prehistory, a history and a future. As can readily be seen in the prominent role played by diplomats and diplomacy, in whatever guise, in novels, TV shows, films, comics and games, diplomacy is also an integral part of the social imaginary (Castoriadis [1975] 1998). It is not quite a total social fact – that is, always present in social life – for one has to be a representative of other humans in order to be a diplomat, and there is plenty of social interaction that does not involve humans who are representatives of others. This means there are plenty of people and situations that will be only indirectly affected by diplomacy. However, if diplomacy is not ubiquitous in social life, it is definitely ubiquitous in time. It is nothing less than a trans-historical mainstay of human social interaction.

Diplomats themselves often argue that diplomacy is the opposite of war. This is not obvious, for, understood as processes, diplomacy and war are complementary ways of dealing with the Other (Neumann, C.B. 2012, Barkawi 2015). Diplomacy shades over into warlike behaviour when it includes threats of war and deployment of means of violence (so-called gunboat diplomacy). During wartime, diplomacy runs parallel to the waging of war (albeit in different forms and via different channels). One could say that the opposite of diplomacy is not talking to the Other, but that would not be specific enough, either, for extending threats is a way of talking. Both diplomacy and war are ways of communicating with the Other. The difference between the two, I would aver, is to do not only with verbal and material processes but also with the implied goal of the interaction. Is the goal to elicit a response from the Other of some unspecified kind? That would be diplomacy. Or is it to break the other’s will and call forth the Other’s surrender? That would be war. We clearly have a continuum here. One way to capture this is to talk about two approaches to communication, where diplomacy leans towards a dialogical stance and war towards a monological stance. If this is so, it follows that to act diplomatically is to privilege a certain kind of speech act – the dialogical one – and stay clear of monological speech acts such as braggadocio and bullshitting.

In the study of security, speech act theory has been all the rage for the last quarter of a century. It centres on the process of securitization – that is, the political process which spawns a security problem by lifting that problem out of general political discourse and privileging it as part of security discourse – and in security discourse, the possibility of war is ever-present. If we see diplomacy as privileging the dialogical where war, and we may add, militarizing securitization, privileges the monological, then there is a sense in which diplomacy is indeed an alternative to war and securitization, for diplomacy tries to maintain normal, dialogical politics. Where securitization is a question of intensifying a political problem, what we may call diplomatization is a way of upholding it as part of running political debate. By the same token, if war intensifies a security problem by trying to solve that problem by violent means, diplomacy tries to contain the security problem by continuing the conversation. In this sense, diplomacy and diplomatization is indeed an alternative to war.

One thing students of diplomacy may learn from students of security, then, is to conceptualize how and when something becomes a matter of diplomacy – that is, how a phenomenon becomes diplomatized. Consider, first, how securitization is conceptualized:

[I]‌ssues become securitised when leaders (whether political, societal, or intellectual) begin to talk about them – and to gain the ear of the public and the state – in terms of existential threats against some valued referent object. Securitisation can thus be seen as a more extreme version of politicisation. It is the inter-subjective establishment of an existential threat with a saliency sufficient to have substantial political effects. In theory, a public issue can be located on the spectrum ranging from non-politicised (meaning that the state doesn’t deal with it, and it is not in any other way made an issue of public debate and decision); through politicised (meaning that the issue is part of public policy, requiring government decision and resource allocation or more rarely some other form of communal governance); to securitised (meaning that the issue is presented as an existential threat requiring emergency measures, and justifying actions outside the normal bounds of political procedure). In principle, the placement of issues on this spectrum is open; depending on circumstances, any issue can end up on any part of the spectrum. (Buzan 1997: 14)

Securitization also works in reverse: a phenomenon may be securitized, and then de-securitized. A number of peaceful de-securitizing practices are to do primarily with endogenous changes that are the traditional haunt of peace and conflict studies. Examples include social peace movements. Others are to do with economic or legal intervention by third parties. The use of legal practices stands out in this regard. What interests us here, however, is how de-securitization may take the form of diplomatization, with diplomatization being the process of lifting a phenomenon (an issue, and issue area or, as we shall see an example of in Chapter 3, another institution) from some other discourse into the diplomatic one, and so make that phenomenon subject to diplomatic practices. As highlighted perhaps most clearly by Jönsson and Hall (2005: 21 et passim), diplomacy, like security, is a process. Since diplomats specialize in non-violent practices, they will have a penchant for employing such practices. It is a key point of the sociology of professions that any profession will try to frame new issues and new issue areas in such a way that the relevance of their own profession is at a maximum (Abbott 1988). Hence, we are warranted in speaking about a structural diplomatic penchant for the use of peaceful practices. Let me once again emphasize that a structural penchant will not necessarily determine the course of action taken. Empirically, we have plenty of examples of how diplomats have recommended and partaken in the use of force. And yet, the thrust of diplomacy is to seek de-securitizing courses of action.

To theorize the social means to evolve a certain perspective which may highlight a certain aspect of social life. One inevitable cost of illuminating something is that it twilights or even occludes everything else. Securitization theory has been very successful in theorizing the speech act of security. We need look no further than the emergence of speech act theory itself to see the cost incurred by doing so. The pioneers of speech act theory, philosophers J.L. Austin and John Searle, appropriated Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of the language game, that is, that utterances only make sense if studied as actions taken in specific contexts, and used it to look at ideal-typical situations. That proved to be a legitimate and fruitful thing to do, but the cost was that Wittgenstein’s general understanding of practices, linguistic or otherwise, was left in the dark (compare Schatzki 1996). Their move towards analytics and first principles meant that the constitutive role of practices for everything social was bracketed. Indeed, abstract analytics forced out the interest in how the social is constituted. Speech act theory is, then, a potential threat to our understanding of the social. As Thierry Balzacq (2005: 192) has pointed out, however, it is also possible to understand securitization as ‘a strategic (or a pragmatic) practice, as opposed to one of universal pragmatics (speech act), the aim of which is to determine the universal principles of an effective communicative action of security’. When social scientists ask about the nature of diplomacy, or anything else for that matter, they do not ask about the eternal truth of something. They ask about what a certain phenomenon does: how it changes social forms, how it affects the life chances of respective groups and so on. For a trans-historical phenomenon like diplomacy, the answers to such questions must be historically manifold, for a trans-historical phenomenon does not stand still for its picture.

We already have a rich literature that tries to answer such questions in their historical specificity. Indeed, we have an entire scientific discipline that tries to do so, namely what used to be called diplomatic history and is now usually called international history. Historians overwhelmingly take a certain historical constellation of the social institution of diplomacy as a given, so that they may focus on specific historical processes and outcomes. When they look at the history of the institution of diplomacy as such, which is much rarer but does happen, they invariably focus on how interaction between diplomats themselves deepened the institution by institutionalizing what had not before been institutionalized (the exemplars for this kind of history remain Anderson 1993 and Hamilton and Langhorne 2011). This is an important perspective. It is also not the only perspective possible. One way of complementing it, and so arriving at a richer understanding of diplomacy’s past, is to add to the historians’ inside-out perspective on the emergence of diplomacy an outside-in perspective, where the emergence of the institution of diplomacy is treated as an outcome of human cooperation in general. Put differently, where a historical perspective would highlight how diplomats themselves change the institution of diplomacy, an evolutionary perspective would rather highlight how changes in general social conditions shape the specific institution of diplomacy. Technically put, I treat diplomacy as a meso level of cooperation, with environmental factors understood as social selection processes taking the role of macro levels (Messner, Guarín and Haun 2013). In more straightforward terms, the perspective on the past taken here is that diplomacy as an emergent institution is shaped by its social and material environment. Before I set out the book’s specific approach to diplomacy and apply it to the longue durée of diplomacy in the next chapter, I should like to bring this introductory chapter to an end by stating two foundational points about social evolution and giving a short example of how they pertain to diplomacy.

The foundation for all evolutionary ways of thinking is to postulate change as a formal triad of variation, selection and re-stabilization. At a baseline point in time, there exists variation in different types of unit (species, societies, types of diplomacy …). There follows a process of selection, which privileges certain types of unit (Homo sapiens, states, permanent diplomacy …) to the detriment of other types of unit (Neanderthals, empires, peripatetic diplomacy …). Then, at a new baseline point in time, there is re-stabilization. However – and this is absolutely crucial – while there are selection mechanisms at work in all evolutionary approaches, the mechanisms that bring about natural selection do not apply to social selection. Social evolution differs from natural evolution in two respects. First, there simply is no social functional equivalent of the fairly straightforward biological and sexual selection processes on which natural selection rests (Neumann 2014). Theories of natural evolution cannot account for the processes of cognitive and normative evolution that are characteristic of complex social contexts. Secondly, natural selection cannot account for the social tipping-points that characterize revolutionary social evolution, and which will be crucial to the account of diplomacy given in the following chapters (Buzan and Albert 2010, Adler 2019, Albert et al. forthcoming).

By way of initial illustration, consider the use of the epithet ‘new’ to characterize a new variation in types of diplomacy. With the coming of modernity in the mid-eighteenth century, the kind of highly stylized and secretive diplomacy that had by then been honed by aristocrats for four hundred years came under direct attack by a new style of diplomacy. French Enlightenment philosophers presented an alternative that they saw as a negation of the old diplomacy. As a result, there were now two styles of diplomacy where previously there had only been one. Felix Gilbert (1951: 15) explains how

The future diplomacy would be the reverse of the diplomacy of the past. Relations among nations should follow moral laws. There should be no difference between the ‘moral principles’ which rule the relations among individuals and the ‘moral principles’ which rule relations between states. Diplomacy should be ‘frank and open’. Formal treaties should be unnecessary; political alliances should be avoided particularly. Commercial conventions should refrain from all detailed regulations establishing individual advantages.

Revolutionary France tried to implement this ‘new diplomacy’ as an alternative to the old, aristocratic diplomacy conducted by its non-revolutionary contemporaries, so for a few years there existed variation in actually existing diplomacies. Variation did not come to an end when the French Directorate reverted to ‘old’ diplomacy, for early American diplomacy continued to be of the ‘new’, revolutionary type for some years, until the situation re-stabilized along the lines of ‘old’ diplomacy. However, with Woodrow Wilson as US president (1913–1921), ‘new’ diplomacy was back, and so there was once again variation. This time, re-stabilization involved a certain hybridization of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. However, revolutionary Russia, and then revolutionary China and revolutionary Iran, but also the new diplomatic practices ensuing within the European Union, continued to stand out from the majority of states in their diplomatic practices. Re-stabilization, then, was, and remains, only partial. For a fairly recent example of how this is acknowledged by agents themselves, consider European reactions to Russia’s 2014 invasion and incorporation of the Ukrainian peninsula of the Crimea. The land-grab and the way Russia presented it to other states was a clear-cut example of a practice characteristic of nineteenth-century European ‘old’ diplomacy and known as a fait accompli (Constantinou 1996). The idea is to have one’s way by presenting other states with an arm-twisting shock rather than aiming for the more complex and ‘new’ diplomatic practice of a pre-negotiated solution. This activation of an ‘old’ diplomatic practice by Russia created variation where European states did not expect it to occur. German chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly told American president Barack Obama in a telephone conversation of 3 March 2014 that ‘Putin lives in another world’ – that is, an ‘old’ diplomatic ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the nature of diplomacy
• 2 The evolution of diplomacy
• 3 The evolution of the consular institution: With Halvard Leira
• 4 The evolution of visual diplomacy
• 5 Presentability
• 6 Diplomatic subjunctive: the case of Harry Potter’s realms
• 7 Conclusion: towards diplomacy as global governance
• References
• Index