High-Table Diplomacy

The Reshaping of International Security Institutions

Kjell Engelbrekt

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781626163133, 9781626163126
• eBook ISBN: 9781626163140
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The proliferation of “minilateral” summits is reshaping how international security problems are addressed, yet these summits remain a poorly understood phenomenon. In this groundbreaking work, Kjell Engelbrekt contrasts the most important minilateral summits—the G7 (formerly G8) and G20—with the older and more formal UN Security Council to assess where the diplomacy of international security is taking place and whether these institutions complement or compete with each other.

Engelbrekt’s research in primary-source documents of the G7, G8, G20, and UN Security Council provides unique insight into how these institutions deliberate on three policy areas: conflict management, counterterrorism cooperation, and climate change mitigation. Relatively informal and flexible, GX diplomacy invites more countries to take a seat at the table and allows nontraditional security threats to be placed on the agenda. Engelbrekt concludes, however, that there is a continuing need for institutions like the UN to address traditional security problems.

High-Table Diplomacy will provoke discussion and further research on the role of minilateral summits among scholars of international relations, security studies, and international organizations.

Chapter 1

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A Puzzle and Conceptual Framework

What is high-table diplomacy, and what is its appeal in the early twenty-first century? Why do leaders of established and emerging great powers reshape international organizations and arenas of negotiation in the realm of international security, promoting institutions that lack universal legitimacy and accountability mechanisms, yet fail to reform those to which the latter properties are ascribed? Furthermore, how do contemporary great and middle powers employ existing formal and informal institutional arrangements to address the major challenges of our time, encompassing traditional and nontraditional concepts of security in conflict management, counterterrorism cooperation, and climate change mitigation? Does high-table diplomacy provide a solution to complex governance issues in the realm of international security so promising that the experience can be emulated in other policy areas? In other words, is the theory of a “stakeholdership of the few” plausible?

These are the most straightforward and central questions that this book seeks to answer, and the argument will unfold in this sequence in five chapters and a conclusion. The normative query at the end of the list will be addressed only in the conclusion, taking into consideration the results of this study as well as relevant work by other authors. The core of the book is made up of three analytical chapters that examine policy areas within international security, starting with conflict management, moving on to counterterrorism cooperation, and ending with climate change mitigation. As will be argued later in this chapter, contemporary international security issues extend from traditional to nontraditional types, depending on the character of the potential threat they pose and the resources required for an effective response.

Chapters 1 and 2 both deal with the concept of high-table diplomacy, the latter in historical context and in relation to changing relations among great and middle powers. The former sets out to describe the contemporary phenomenon and its key characteristics and further to justify its use in the study of international relations. It also explains the rationale for promoting international security institutions that rely on informality, such as summits of heads of state and government, without undermining their formal and legally grounded counterparts. Today’s high-table diplomacy very much revolves around the summits of heads of state and government; nonetheless, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) remains critical to institutional arrangements in the realm of international security.

Introducing the Concept

This study identifies, explores, and renders visible the growing significance of high-table diplomacy in international security and in international relations more widely. High-table diplomacy is conducted within institutional arrangements in which great powers enjoy special status and to which they have privileged access. From well-established historical accounts we are aware that the phenomenon of “concert diplomacy” helped to hold balance-of-power dynamics at bay in nineteenth-century, post-Napoleonic Europe and “served as a device for identifying and advancing membership in the great power club.”¹ Predating this experience in diplomatic history are instances of non-Western great powers forging security institutions in the premodern era, a particularly successful one underwriting the sophisticated trade and transport system linking Southeast and South India from the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf coast region in the 1400s and another helping to sustain the intricate political economy encompassing China and most of East Asia in the same period and several centuries ahead.

Part of what constitutes high-table diplomacy today is in the scholarly literature referred to as summit diplomacy, or more precisely, serial summit diplomacy.² More recently, scholars began using “minilateralism,” the notion that major actors can “bring to the table the smallest possible number of countries needed to have the largest possible impact on solving a particular problem.”³ High-table diplomacy is compatible with minilateralism (which will be further discussed later), though the former term more poignantly expresses agnosticism about the format of deliberations and an evolving overlap of institutional arrangements across adjacent policy areas.

High-table diplomacy involves meetings of heads of state and government, encounters that are part of a process to which the parties have committed in advance, or an open-ended series of meetings between especially skilled and trusted diplomats who continuously brief heads of state and government and consult them on major decisions. High-table diplomacy is thus a regularized diplomatic practice, often accompanied by meticulous preparations regarding which issues to address and how to try to accomplish a desired result or prevent an undesired outcome. From time to time, though, high-table diplomacy is undoubtedly a crisis-driven phenomenon.⁴

This study is not chiefly concerned with unofficial (secret), or track II, diplomacy aimed at advancing negotiations without committing governments to a particular outcome of a political process.⁵ Nor is it primarily preoccupied with ad hoc activities that non-diplomats engage in to further diplomatic ends. But the institutional arrangements, diplomatic practices, and governance mechanisms that I seek to identify, highlight, and theorize are nonetheless at variance with methods and techniques that belong to the orthodox repertoire of diplomatic activities. The high-table diplomacy envisaged here constitutes deliberate practices that are performed within international security institutions, at the nexus of formal and informal governance and that of traditional and nontraditional security. The former is typically conducted with the aim of rendering institutional arrangements in the realm of international security more le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• 1. A Puzzle and Conceptual Framework
• 2. Great-Power Diplomacy and International Security in Historical Context
• 3. Conflict Management
• 4. Counterterrorism Cooperation
• 5. Climate Change Mitigation
• Conclusions
• Appendix: List of Interviewees
• Bibliography
• Index