Diplomatic Cultures and International Politics

Jason Dittmer, Fiona McConnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317541738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume offers an inter-disciplinary and critical analysis of the role of culture in diplomatic practice.

If diplomacy is understood as the practice of conducting negotiations between representatives of distinct communities or causes, then questions of culture and the spaces of cultural exchange are at its core. But what of the culture of diplomacy itself? When and how did this culture emerge, and what alternative cultures of diplomacy run parallel to it, both historically and today? How do particular spaces and places inform and shape the articulation of diplomatic culture(s)? This volume addresses these questions by bringing together a collection of theoretically rich and empirically detailed contributions from leading scholars in history, international relations, geography, and literary theory. Chapters attend to cross-cutting issues of the translation of diplomatic cultures, the role of space in diplomatic exchange and the diversity of diplomatic cultures beyond the formal state system. Drawing on a range of methodological approaches the contributors discuss empirical cases ranging from indigenous diplomacies of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, to the European External Action Service, the 1955 Bandung Conference, the spatial imaginaries of mid twentieth-century Balkan writer diplomats, celebrity and missionary diplomacy, and paradiplomatic narratives of The Hague. The volume demonstrates that, when approached from multiple disciplinary perspectives and understood as expansive and plural, diplomatic cultures offer an important lens onto issues as diverse as global governance, sovereignty regimes and geographical imaginations.

This book will be of much interest to students of public diplomacy, foreign policy, international organisations, media and communications studies, and IR in general.

Part I
Translating diplomatic cultures

1
Everyday diplomacy: mission, spectacle and the remaking of diplomatic culture

Costas M. Constantinou

Images, narratives and practices of diplomacy occur on a daily basis. The everydayness and ordinariness of diplomacy, however, is not readily acknowledged – at least within the discipline of International Relations (IR). In matters diplomatic, during the last century, the discipline predominantly concentrated on the activities of the official agents of states as infused by the aristocratic and bureaucratic tradition of the European international society (Satow 1922; Nicolson 1939; Kissinger 1994). Even among critical IR scholars considering the ‘future of diplomacy’ more recently, diplomacy is only reserved for the work of diplomats representing sovereign territorial units. It is not meant for the representatives of non-territorial units (e.g. NGOs, humanitarian agencies, religious missions and so on) whose activities only ‘resemble’ those of state diplomats and consequently, according to this view, only catachrestically bear the formal title diplomacy (Sending et al. 2011).

This chapter takes issue with this restricted account of diplomacy. It concurs that the development of modern diplomatic thought and practice is primarily linked to the development of the international relations of the modern territorial state. But it also recognises that the modern territorial state constitutes itself partly by monopolising, through the practice of diplomacy, the international representation of a specific territory and the block negotiation of human interests linked to that territory (Constantinou and Der Derian 2010: 8–13; Black 2010: 56–57). Such monopolisation reserves diplomacy as an exclusivity of sovereignty, whilst the diplomatic world, currently and diachronically, has been far richer and more complex than interstate diplomatic culture allows for. This chapter argues that diplomacy can be broadly understood to emerge whenever someone successfully claims to represent and negotiate for a territory or a group of people or a cause, or successfully claims to mediate between others engaging in such representations and negotiations. In the quotidian, diplomacy ceases to be a professional skill or special technique and thus captures a wider spectrum of social activities as outlined below.

For Richard Sennett (2012), everyday diplomacy involves the use of indirection and dialogic conversation in ordinary life. It deploys civility and cultural codes developed, at least in the context of Europe, during the late Renaissance and early Reformation by courtiers and professional diplomats. Notwithstanding that ‘civility on the modern street looks little like the courtesy so elaborately deployed in old embassies and salons’, Sennett argues that ‘the organizing principles of secular ritual have endured’ (2012: 221). Sennett’s thesis is interesting and useful but I depart from his notion of ‘everyday diplomacy’ as merely a means of conflict management or fostering cooperation, ‘one way people deal with people they don’t understand, can’t relate to or are in conflict with’ (Sennett 2012: 221). I fully agree with his insightful suggestions and examples on how ‘everyday diplomacy’ occurs and is operationalised through codes of indirection, listening skills, tact, coded gestures, staged performances and empathy, yet I see everyday diplomacy as covering a wider spectrum beyond collaborative togetherness. Everyday diplomacy, as diplomacy in general, can sometimes be simply a means of getting one’s way, presenting the case for something or promoting the interests of someone, influencing or forcing others to do what they would not otherwise do. In short, there is a more dubious side to diplomacy, which is linked to self-promotion, deceit and coercion, and which can certainly feed into the everyday.

With these in mind, one challenge in this chapter is to revise the standard high-born portrayal of diplomacy as a special craft meant for the chosen few and detached from the everyday. Detached ambassadorships of this kind are condescending and not in sync with ‘where diplomacy is at’, where meaningful, effective and affective representations/negotiations/mediations are taking place. As argued elsewhere, the shifting location of diplomacy is an ontological puzzle that practitioners and theorists of diplomacy can only ignore at considerable risk with respect to what kind of knowledge they need to acquire in order to understand the setting they operate in and engage diplomatically (Constantinou 2013). Indeed it makes quite a difference in terms of action or inaction if a diplomat thinks s/he is a representative or a mediator or both, i.e. ‘on the side’ of someone or a particular cause, or ‘in between’ actors and conflicting positions, or charged to do a mixture of both.

Throughout history, if we are not restricted to looking at it from a state-centric perspective, diplomacy has been practised by different actors and via different media over different issues. Beyond the work of authorised representatives sent to negotiate in the name of collective groups – often depicted as a precursor of state diplomatic practice – it could be located in the work of missionaries delivering new religions and building institutions to minister foreign communities; explorers encountering foreign lands and having to deal with foreign peoples and customs; merchants promoting ideas and values while exchanging commodities; mediators and intermediaries bringing together and seeking to conciliate rival parties; and so on and so forth (Numelin 1950). Around such interactions, ‘high’, ‘low’ and alternative cultures of diplomacy have developed, tasked with mediating and regulating otherness, formulating and renegotiating identity while retaining marks of distinction and degrees of separateness (Der Derian 1987; Constantinou 1996; Sharp 2009).

Changes in diplomatic practice over the last decades have been especially dramatic and difficult to ignore. The portrayal of diplomacy as a static immemorial institution that is tightly and exclusively associated with sovereignty and statecraft is increasingly untenable in theory as well as in practice. Beyond professional diplomats, movie stars, athletes, scientists, intellectuals, entrepreneurs and others are tasked to serve as officially or media appointed ambassadors of nations, communities and a long list of worthy causes (Cooper 2008). Their ability to impart knowledge and support action through spectacle and/or expertise is the distinctive feature of their mission. The proliferation of such missions means that diplomacy has acquired many prepositions and gone in many different directions with regard to scholarly investigations: ‘public’, ‘digital’, ‘indigenous’, ‘human’, ‘corporate’, ‘ecological’, ‘activist’, ‘military’, ‘guerilla’, ‘multi-stakeholder’, ‘celebrity’, ‘scientific’, ‘educational’, ‘sportive’, ‘integrative’, ‘transformational’, ‘quantum’ and so on.

This plurality of diplomacy in public discourse and scholarly work has been persuasively and comprehensively examined (Cornago 2013). At the same time, national diplomatic services are changing, striving to integrate the output of different stakeholders (Hocking et al. 2012) and discovering the outreach advantages of everyday diplomacy as they seek to partner with and coopt the activities of NGOs and civilians (Constantinou and Opondo 2014). What requires further investigation is how diplomacy is increasingly and deliberately intertwined with a wide range of new cultural forms and exchanges (Gienow-Hecht and Donfried 2010) that allow it to be practised from anywhere. This is not to say that anything and everything is diplomacy, but rather that any actor and any encounter with otherness can be potentially diplomatised. Any mission in the name of a territory, a group or a cause can become a diplomatic mission. At stake therefore is what it means in specific contexts to adopt the diplomatic identity; i.e. what the adoption of diplomatic identity entails in terms of seeking to promote a specific issue as a diplomatic problem or the interests of a particular group as pertaining to those of a diplomatic interlocutor, and whose concerns are consequently open to negotiation rather than the mere exercise of domestic governance and authority (Constantinou and Der Derian 2010; Opondo 2012).

While reflecting on these developments with regard to the practice of diplomacy, this chapter seeks to re-consider the notion of diplomatic culture, which in the IR discipline has been predominantly viewed as the stock of ideas, values and skills possessed by the professional diplomatic corps (Bull 1977). It tries to rethink diplomatic culture in the context of the plural channels and cultural resources employed to service and enact contemporary diplomacy. One consequence of the rise of diverse everyday diplomacies, as elaborated below, is that diplomatic culture can no longer be credibly understood independently of world culture and cultural diplomacy. It is simply impossible to disentangle the various ways and means of ‘professional’ diplomats from the plethora of ‘glocal’ cultures and subcultures that develop around missions promoting territories, groups and causes. Put differently, the professional and the quotidian are intertwined in ways that render claims about a singular diplomatic culture untenable.

To that extent we should not be merely concerned with the transformation of the diplomatic culture of foreign ministries and their officials, and their now frequent partnering with non-state actors and civil society to deliver ‘transformational diplomacy’ or more ‘effective’ implementation of foreign policy in ‘new’ ways and in ‘new’ places.¹ We ought to be concerned with understanding the wider spectrum of practices beyond the ‘high’ culture of the official diplomatic service – looking at cultures of diplomacy that are not merely linguistic and effective, but visual and affective.

If we are living in the age of the homo globalis, how should we rethink diplomatic culture vis-à-vis global culture and cultural diplomacy? How does this redraw the traditional picture of diplomacy we are accustomed to? In responding to these questions, we need to delve beyond the exclusivist culture of the diplomatic corps and into the spectacles and performances that emerge within and around a wide range of missions, historical as well as contemporary.

Rethinking diplomatic culture

Within International Relations, the notion of diplomatic culture was first given prominence in the work of Hedley Bull, and specifically in his development of the concept of the international society. Bull defined diplomatic culture restrictively as ‘the common stock of ideas and values possessed by official representatives of states’ (1977: 316). Note in this definition the notion of possession – meaning that some people seem to have it and some do not. In other words, he understands culture as a personal trait, rather than as something that collectively emerges out of social encounters. Note also that those who have it are officials and agents of power; i.e. diplomatic culture is not extended to non-official or subaltern agents that may have developed interesting ways of diplomatising, practical mechanisms of dealing with others of equal or different status. Diplomatic culture for Bull (1977: 317) is nothing less than ‘elite culture’.

Bull followed on from Marin Wight (1979: 113), who approached ‘the diplomatic system [as] the master-institution of international relations’. He thus claimed that the ‘diplomatic profession itself’ has been ‘a custodian of the idea of international society’ – itself viewed as the society of states rather than global civil society (ibid.). Specifically, the ‘willingness’ of Western as well as non-Western states ‘to embrace often strange and archaic diplomatic procedures that arose in Europe in another age’ was, for Bull, less suggestive of cultural imperialism or the obsessive continuation of an anachronistic tradition, and more indicative of the ‘symbolic role’ diplomacy plays in ‘the universal acceptance of the idea of international society’ (1977: 183).

From this perspective, the body of professional diplomats was idealised as they were seen to constitute the guardians of the common interests, rules and institutions that were formally acknowledged and more or less adhered to in building durable international relationships within an anarchical international society. That is to say, the aristocratic, cross-national culture of the diplomatic corps – the practices of this club of noble initiates – was positively valorised and indeed their members romanticised as worldly-wise overseers, whose cultural practices nourish a permanent universalist aspiration. They were seen not only as followers of raison d’état but of raison de système; having a permanent universalist aspiration which endures in the midst of rival national interests and diverse and sometimes hostile national cultures (Watson 1982; Sharp and Wiseman 2007).

It is important to note, in this respect, how such claims to universalist aspiration change when one considers world culture as opposed to diplomatic culture. Let me quote in some detail from the work of R. J. Vincent, which followed from Hedley Bull’s conceptualisation:

Diplomatic culture is the culture derived from the aristocratic cosmopolitanism of dynastic Europe which provides custom, precedent and manners for the rather precious society of diplomatists. These diplomatic niceties are social manifestations of a more substantial culture underlying the society of states – the international culture whose values find formal expression in the treatises of international law, and whose character is revealed in quasi-legal principles like the balance of power … My starting-point for thinking about world culture is where international culture stops. International culture is a minimalist culture of procedure rather than substance, of agreed ways of disagreeing, of cuius regio eius religio [whose region, his religion]. Its cardinal principles of sovereignty and non-intervention unite international society around the doctrine that independence is the value which above all requires respect. They seek to exclude states from each other’s areas of competence. By world culture, I intend something more inclusive, which unites across international frontiers rather than relying on a principle of division, and which can be said to have in it substance as well as mere rules of procedure.

(Vincent 1975; my italics)

So with Vincent we have a clear division, in fact a severance, of diplomatic culture from world culture. Diplomatic culture is inextricably linked to international culture, which underlies the society of states, the formal diplomatic relations between sovereign political units. Diplomatic culture is minimalist, elitist and exclusivist; i.e. it is not for everyone but for the chosen few. Its common stock of ideas and values have a very specific purpose and function; they are meant to support the ‘rules of the game’, reduce tension, service channels of communication and so keep the engine room of intergovernmental relations in good working condition. From this angle, diplomatic culture features a procedural, functional universalism – not substantial universalism.

By contrast, for Vincent, world culture is maximalist, plebian and can underpin the cosmopolitan world society of the multitude. Potentially we can all partake in it, though in practice its...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: reconceptualising diplomatic cultures
• PART I Translating diplomatic cultures
• PART II Spaces of diplomatic culture
• PART III Alternative diplomatic cultures
• Index