Old Diplomacy Revisited: A Study in the Modern History of Diplomatic Transformations

A Study in the Modern History of Diplomatic Transformations

K. Weisbrode

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781137397324
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137393081
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In historical terms, the Old Diplomacy is not really that old many of its concepts and methods date to the mid-nineteenth century while the practices of New Diplomacy emerged only a couple of generations later. Moreover, "Diplomacy 2.0" and other variants of the post-Cold War era do not depart significantly from their twentieth-century predecessor: their forms, particularly in technology, have changed, but their substance has not. In this succinct overview, historian Kenneth Weisbrode reminds us that to understand diplomatic transformations and their relevance to international affairs is to see diplomacy as an entrepreneurial art and that, like most arts, it is adapted and re-adapted with reference to earlier forms. Diplomatic practice is always changing, and always continuous.

1

A Question of Novelty

Abstract: What is really new about the New Diplomacy? The conditions, methods, language, techniques and technologies may appear new and some are; yet the goals of diplomacy are roughly the same as they have always been, and always will be so long as there are disparate states and societies in the world: to serve the sovereign interest and to preserve peace by wise and diligent reporting, representation and mediation across borders. How diplomats have adapted to change, and why the measure of adaptation matters, are the subjects of this small book. It is not meant as a compendium but instead as a coagulant to assist its readers in understanding the complicated and subtle history of modern diplomacy. It first challenges the biases of novelty then follows with an examination of the diplomatic mind not from the perspective of a neuro- or any other scientist but with an inquiry into the artistry of the diplomat, on the one hand, and the exercise of diplomacy, on the other. Preserving peace begins with imagining it. Diplomats—at least the better ones—have the rare ability to blend a spatial imagination (what peace looks like in particular places) with an opportunistic talent for getting from here to there. To know their entrepreneurial capacity is the first step to understanding their role.

Kenneth Weisbrode. Old Diplomacy Revisited: A Study in the Modern History of Diplomatic Transformations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137393081.

“The truth of the matter was that I wasn’t entirely certain what I wanted to do in life,” the American diplomat, Cecil Lyon (1903–93), remembered. “I thought it was the diplomatic service, but I rationalized that this was probably more due to the fact that when I should have been reading the ‘Rover Boys’ I was reading E. Phillips Oppenheim and was fascinated by the smooth diplomat who invariably lunched at the Savoy Grill with the devastating Russian spy.”¹

Lyon went on to enjoy a full and happy career, serving as minister to France and ambassador to Chile and Sri Lanka. His life checked all the right boxes, as Americans like to say: St. Paul’s followed by Harvard (where he roomed with the banking heir Alexander Cassatt and the future diplomat Chip Bohlen), then a short tenure in investment banking, followed by the foreign service, where he met his soon-to-be wife, Elsie, the daughter of the man then regarded as the country’s top diplomat, Joseph Grew.

Lyon is almost totally unknown to the general public. This was typical. “Diplomacy,” in the words of A. J. P. Taylor, “is a strange profession.”

Its practitioners spend their lives either actually in foreign countries or else thinking about them. Often they seem to become half foreign themselves. They develop exceptional sensitivity in two opposite ways. On the one hand, they are more acutely obsessed than their fellow citizens with the interests of their own country. On the other, they are more anxious to know what other countries are doing. Diplomats find it hard to believe that an event anywhere in the world is literally alien to them. Bismarck, we know, gave himself nightmares, conjuring up hostile coalitions—most of them imaginary. Metternich, when told that Talleyrand was dead, reflected, “I wonder what he did that for.”²

Diplomats are not all this devious. Most like Lyon are not, in fact. He had a sunny, easy (but not carefree), personality, and a face that conveyed honesty with a touch of innocence, behind which lay a skeptical, but not cynical, mind. Lyon was the sort of person who is said to be “well liked,” appropriately serious but not dour, flexible but not flighty, humorous but not silly, rooted but not fixed, spirited but not zealous.

There may not be many people like Cecil Lyon left in the American foreign service. He was a man of his era, and that era, according to most Americans, is long gone. It was the era of the coterie, when, like most diplomatic corps, the United States foreign service was small, relatively intimate, more or less hierarchical, and comprised mostly of men who, despite being of varied social and geographical backgrounds, nearly all found ways to cultivate, promote or otherwise pay the appropriate amount of respect to the official mind of the so-called Eastern Establishment. George Kennan (1904–2005), one of America’s first professional diplomats, has captured its tone:

The bland urbanity of word and conduct; the graciousness of manner; the wit; the good humor; the refinement of taste; the breadth of cultural interest; the largesse of perspective; the shrewd and skeptical view of men and governments; the appreciation for the values, in diplomacy, of elaborate indirection; the keen sensitivity to irony (without which no understanding of international life can achieve profundity): these are not qualities that were universally present among an earlier generation of diplomatists, nor are they universally lacking among those of the present age. But they were more highly valued and more generally cultivated ... before the great democratizers began to address to the Foreign Service those attentions with which they have never ceased to encumber it.³

How accurate is this portrait? Like any stereotype, it contains some element of truth. Cecil Lyon found himself in such company in the various embassies in which he served. There were—and to a much lesser extent, still are—such people gracing the ranks of America’s diplomatic corps. But what about the rules of their game: their norms, methods, attitudes and mentalities, their modus operandi? Have these all receded into the distant past? Or do they survive mainly in caricature?

These questions matter because diplomacy matters, however much American popular culture has looked down upon it. Along with war and commerce, it remains the basic means of intercourse among nations: “the application of intelligence or tact to the conduct of official relations,” in Ernest Satow’s oft-cited description. Discussed in the next chapter, his book is the most familiar of its kind in English, although it is less familiar now than it once was. Even less well known are classics by Barbaro, Braun, du Rosier, Pecquet, Tasso and Wicquefort and many others like them. Better known are more recent ones by Kennan, Charles Thayer, Henry Kissinger and Harold Nicolson (1886–1968), who has modified Satow’s definition to “common sense and charity applied to international relations.”⁴

Today there is no definitive guide to what some people call the New Diplomacy, also known as Diplomacy 2.0 (and 3.0), “mega-diplomacy,” thematic diplomacy, para-diplomacy and several other names which all more or less describe a twenty-first century approach to international relations characterized by networking, flexibility, rapidity, mobility and redundancy. Memories of innovations tend to be short. New Diplomacy made an earlier appearance a century ago. Woodrow Wilson used the term to describe the transformation of international relations he sought. He called it New, not only because he meant it to overtake Old Diplomacy with its secret treaties, aristocratic salons, palace intrigue, balance of power and the rest, but also because it came as a gift of the New World, that is to say, America, which, after long delay, Wilson claimed, had finally come around to accepting the burden of world leadership. Wilson might have used the words of a British forerunner and “called the New World into existence, to save the Old.” Or so he may have thought. Either way, he refashioned a messianic language in order to persuade his countrymen to play an active role in the world and to reshape international relations so as to make such a role possible.

Over a century later the jury is still out on Wilson’s contribution. At the time it was regarded as something much less. Traditionalists saw it as a dangerous fit of idealism. Its followers castigated Wilson for lowering his sights in the face of opposition. Still others such as the British diplomat Thomas Hohler (1871–1946) faulted the tactical sense of the messenger more than the message itself: “Mr. Wilson sometimes gave way, but always at the most unfortunate moment.”⁵ One way or another, however, Wilsonianism survived.

Why? The answer has to do with the fact of American power and the necessity for a language and an ideology to defend and promote it. Wilson understood this, and nothing comparable has replaced them, at least not yet.

There is another, more subtle reason for Wilsonianism’s longevity. New Diplomacy shaped the milieu of young men such as Cecil Lyon. They may have admired their Old World counterparts who still ran the world (Lyon’s own father was born in Britain). A few may have sought to imitate them. But most probably wanted to be just as good, only on somewhat different terms. That is to say, many of the young Americans who joined the first professional ranks of the US foreign service—established in 1924—were self-proclaimed new diplomats. As jaded as a few of them would later become, many would retain the language and perhaps even some of the biases of Wilsonianism.

Their instincts were not misplaced. Just contrast for a moment the world of 1900 with the world of 2000. Where are the great European empires? Where are their colonies, and their formidable colonial services? Instead we have the United Nations and its dozens of international agencies, not to mention the thousands of non-governmental organizations that comprise what is now called the system of global governance. In 1900 there certainly were such groups—the Red Cross, various churches and so forth—but nothing like the number that exists today. And there was a different language of international relations; and language—that is, communication—is the core of diplomacy. Theorists of diplomacy then spoke mainly of concepts such as equilibrium, supremacy, Machtpolitik and Weltpolitik, alignments, alliances and rivalries. Some still do. But today there are other terms of reference: regimes, collective security, codes of conduct, integration, interdependence, community and so on. Some are genuinely new; others are old concepts with new names. What has changed is the setting in which they apply.

It is difficult to deny that today’s diplomacy is substantially different from what it was a century ago. This is more or less obvious. So obvious, in fact, that it is easy to gloss over the balance of tradition and novelty which contemporary diplomacy has for the most part managed to strike. Why then the demand for change? This is the central question of this book: what is so new about the New Diplomacy? What was so new about it in 1919 and what is so new about it today? What can we learn about these nominal transformations in diplomatic affairs? What causes them? What limits them? Do “old” and “new” forms of human interaction partake in a dialectic? Are their effects cumulative or exclusive? Is their nature reactive or derivative?

As we begin to answer these questions we may invoke the name of Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950). His idea of entrepreneurship cast adaptation for substitution. Some forms of social and economic life overtook others by “new combinations” of what already existed. Change was the result of reordering and reconfiguring social elements in “different” ways.

Schumpeter wrote about economic, social and political arrangements associated with modern capitalism. There is no obvious reason why a similar concept of entrepreneurship cannot be applied to the history of diplomacy. According to the conventional account, it changed forever in 1919. A formal, closed and rigid system gave way to an open, expansive and publicly accountable one. The change was mirrored by a basic shift in audience: whereas earlier diplomacy spoke to princes, ministers and cabinets, it was now responsible to something called “public opinion.”

Today’s rank and file diplomats probably spend much more time worrying about public opinion than their predecessors did; what they now call public diplomacy occupies a much larger part of their days, even in smaller countries where ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  A Question of Novelty
• 2  Old-Old Diplomacy
• 3  Old-New Diplomacy
• 4  New-New Diplomacy
• 5  The Diplomatic Imagination
• References
• Index of Names