Music is not disconnected from diplomacy. Far from being an ornament during international ceremonials, it appears as a necessity. This idea was developed by Baldassare Castiglione in his major work, The Courtier, published in 1528, and one of the best-selling books of the Renaissance. Certainly, musicians are more involved in some diplomatic functions than others, such as representation rather than information.1 Few of them combine a musical activity and international political responsibilities.2 Nevertheless, music helps the diplomatic rites accompanying ceremonies and celebrations, by investing in spaces during major conferences’ informal negotiations or by inspiring an international order based on a harmonic model. In fact, similarities appear, “diplomacy as music is made of practice: this art is learned in its conditions and its expectations but it cannot be taught to be applied directly in an effective way. It assumes experience-based know-how and a disposition and temperament reinforced by habituation of education, all of which constitute (…) a way of being.”3
This is what Jean-David Levitte (former representative of France to the United Nations, 2000–2002, and French Ambassador in the United States, 2002–2007) evokes while comparing the diplomat to an artist who must practice his scales by accessing all information resources placed at his disposal, such as the previous negotiations in the Security Council.
The exploration of the links between music and diplomacy has gained renewed interest in recent years, around what is called the acoustic turn in international relations. Initiated by an international conference co-organized by the CERI-Sciences Po and the CERLIS ( CNRS, Universities of Paris Descartes and Sorbonne Nouvelle—Paris 3), the reflection presented in this book aims to contribute to this turning point by putting the emphasis and the focus on the notion of “scenes.”
The Acoustic Turn in IR: Origins and Trajectories
The acoustic turn results from the merging of three different trends: international concerns in musicology, the aesthetic turn in international relations (IR) and the cultural turn in international history.
For several decades, using their own tools, musicologists have worked on the role of music in international relations. They have focused on musical change in the context of modernity and especially on how traditional music and folk music interact with music coming from other localities. Contextualist approaches in the field contribute to exploring transnational interactions. Armed conflicts during the 1990s, especially in Eastern Europe and Africa, have generated new research on the role of music in conflict transformation. This academic literature takes into account the power of music on mobilization or justification of war but also how this art may be used as a resource in peace-building processes.4 The seminal book edited by Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco and John M. O’Connell in 2010 shows how ethnomusicologists address these questions and the “paradoxical nature of music in conflict.”5 As Castelo-Branco underlines in the epilogue, this description may highlight major dilemmas because music by itself cannot generate peace: “as we identify ways through which ethnomusicologists can catalyze and mediate processes that can attenuate conflict and violence, we must also be aware that political action resulting in structural changes is a necessary condition for the effectiveness of conflict resolution and the establishment of peace.”6 Paradoxically, the input of musicology is greater for the field of international relations than that of historians or political scientists. Luckily, these two disciplines have initiated an acoustic turn that aims at filling the gap.
In international relations, the initiative did not come from the liberal theory, even though they consider “world politics like playing music, and states … just like members of a band or orchestra.”7 These are the critical theories that support the development of links between aesthetic and international relations. An article by Roland Bleiker published in the journal Millennium in 2001 provides the pillars of this approach.8 Powered by a will to redirect the way to grasp the object, such turning point goes against the approach referred to as “mimetic” or scientist “realist.”9 Scientific realism turns its back to representations, which are considered nothing more than acts of power or the secondary factors in the understanding of politics. To this mimetic approach, Bleiker opposed an aesthetic posture which focuses on representations.10 He promoted three ideas: to adopt post-modern categories and tools; to highlight the cross-fertilization use of discordant faculties that are needed to understand politics as Kant pointed out (reason and imagination are part of political action); to explore new objects and new ways of dealing with the dilemmas in world politics.11 More generally, “the aesthetic turn was and should continue to be about opening up thinking space.”12 In this perspective, some research focuses on music by depicting international relations as “an audible world” that can be “studied and experienced as sound—music, noise, silence.”13 Another way is to scrutinize the sensual appreciation of the “(diplomatic) world in general.”14
Finally, interest for the arts in general and music in particular in the history of international relations has come from the cultural turn.15 The origin is the analysis of American diplomacy, which, during the 1970s, intended to integrate a cultural dimension in order to capture the United States ’ foreign policy.16 But this turning point goes beyond the study of both American diplomacy and foreign politics, because the objects are studied as ways to understand the so-called “deep forces” (forces profondes) Pierre Renouvin and Jean-Baptiste Duroselle referred to in the perspective of the Annales school. Among the several founding texts of this approach, those by Jessica Gienow-Hecht are worth acknowledging, including her well-known monography dedica...