Nor have diplomats played the passive and pessimistic parts assigned to them by some commentators in which they simply go with the flow or, to put it more professionally, do their best to execute the will of their political masters without making things worse. More research is needed on the role of diplomats in policy formulation, but it is clear that some have taken the lead in advocating peace through the construction of an order which circumscribed the autonomy of their sovereigns.
They did so because they thought it was a good idea. They continue to do so, however, not as cosmopolitans in the pejorative sense used by critics to call into question their patriotism. Roberts makes no explicit judgment about his conduct and discusses neither his conception of his role nor the issues raised by his carpeting.
Nevertheless, one senses a confidence bordering on smugness that Roberts believes that he was right, Mountbatten was wrong, and that anyone with a grasp of diplomacy would agree. This interpretation involves a degree of reading into the text, one of the professional hazards of studying people who write carefully but not necessarily transparently. Although unabashed and assertive cosmopolitanism is hard to find in the writings of diplomats, in one case at least, there is little need for such interpretive skills.
Nor is it the remarkable rhetorical finesse by which he proposes to give people what they want, rather than what they think they want, because he respects them. It is the underlying professional confidence, shared with Roberts, that he knows best because he has a grasp of what is needed and what is possible in international politics.
This confidence in a grasp of the essentials is a dominant theme in writings of diplomats. They present themselves as practical men and women who take the world for what it is, rather than what it might be, and who let reason, rather than emotion, govern their actions.
This professional detachment, however, is made possible only by a philosophical distance from the idea of international politics. Diplomats see themselves as more aware than those they represent of the conceptual sand on which the international order is built and believe that it is their professional duty to let this awareness guide their actions. It is the amateurs, in this view, who, when it occurs to them to think about it at all, will take an idea like sovereignty literally and insist upon its implications uncompromisingly.
The professionals, by contrast, keep the notional world of sovereign states running by curbing the impulses to apply its principles too vigorously. They can do so because, thanks to their expertise and training, they do not inhabit the international world in quite the way the rest of us apparently do.
It is this which may be called the diplomatic disposition. Leaving aside the accuracy of the assumptions on which it is based, it has important and paradoxical consequences because diplomats believe it. On the one hand, their professional detachment from international politics inhibits them from defending the representational requirements of an effective system of diplomacy among sovereign states, even though their own positions would be inconceivable without such an idea.
Besides, diplomats know that in an important sense France, Japan, and Britain are not real and that bad things can happen when foreign policy is dictated by those who believe they are. On the other hand, they cannot welcome their publics sharing their own convictions about the notional quality of international politics because, in the end, they think that international order depends upon such notions being accepted.
A world of states whose citizens possessed the consciousness of diplomats would be unrepresentable, and a world of states whose diplomats possessed the consciousness of citizens would be unmanageable. Ideally, therefore, people should live with the consciousness of citizens within their countries, accepting the claims of their governments while acknowledging the expertise of their diplomats in the conduct of relations among them. Insofar as this state of affairs pertains, diplomats enjoy considerable leeway in establishing procedures for pursuing and reconciling the interests of the states they represent.
The trick, as ever, is knowing what one can get away with. However, in the twentieth century public opinion had to be palliated before it would allow diplomats to do anything. Rather, the rise of public opinion coincided with the emergence of the great ideological conflicts whose strategic and material consequences impelled diplomats to accompany their political leaders from serving peace through international adjustments to building it through international reform.
Grave threats and great promises enabled governments to embark on this adventure and their publics to support them. The diplomats went along with both because they had little choice. They went along with equanimity because, at heart, they were confident that the sovereign state system, notional though it might be, was real in that it enjoyed more correspondence with the fragmented human condition than any other way of expressing it.
This confidence, too, is part of the diplomatic disposition. So long as the countries remain real, everything else fits comfortably into place. But is Roberts right? Is the confidence of the diplomatic disposition in the sovereign state system which allows him to tell his story in the way he does justified? After all, it is not merely the sterile, frightened ideologues of the Politiburo who have recently been swept away. It can be argued that European great powers face a similar, if gentler, fate.
It may be symptomatic of international political change that one must turn to diplomats from the remaining superpower for clear reaffirmation of the priorities of princes over peace. Ask EU diplomats about their daily work and they will describe in great detail the multilateral committees in which they try to establish a better way of solving this problem or regulating that behavior for the benefit of all.
Skepticism about the complacency of the diplomatic disposition is, indeed, widespread. It is most obviously called into question by aspects of the complex pattern of relations which is emerging among the members of the EU. Much of it remains recognizably diplomatic, the bilateral relations between members, for example, and, if the diplomats themselves are to be believed, even a great deal of the complex and technical bargaining around the operations of common policies.
It is less easy to regard the activities of the Permanent Representatives Committee, the Commission staff, or even the people seconded to the European presidency in the same vein. Who do they represent as they engage in the construction of new policies, regimes, and, in the latter case conceivably, a politico-diplomatic entity? Can French policy on monetary union be interpreted as a security strategy against Germany when, if it is implemented, it will possibly be no longer clear just what is being secured against whom?
Only the intense difficulties which the representatives of the member states experience in accomplishing common objectives permits agreement with those who contend that the whole ensemble may still be regarded as an exercise in conference diplomacy.
A far more common scholarly reaction to the diplomatic disposition is the increasing body of international theory which assumes that the sovereign state system is fading and that this is not necessarily a bad thing.
Brian Hocking, for example, identifies catalytic diplomacy, in which new kinds of actors deal with new kinds of issues in new ways. His ambassadorial position gives him certain assets, but it does not appear to be essential. If they are right, the institution of diplomacy as it has emerged over the centuries is certainly in deep trouble because it is built upon the notion of representation, and, problematic though this is, on what basis might diplomats be said to represent anything other than states?
One could imagine replacing them with a new sort of profession defined in terms of the functional skills of negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and conciliation, contracted on a commercial basis, but its agents would not be diplomats because they would lack both the symbolic and political significance of servants of the state. Nor, one suspects, would they be as effective.
However, the possibility that diplomacy might disappear or be transcended should be treated with considerable skepticism on empirical grounds. Diplomacy has not changed all that much because, on close inspection, it turns out that it was never quite the way we have learned to remember it. At the end of the fifteenth century, two French diplomats on the way to visit the Sultan were killed by Spanish troops on behalf of Margaret of Hungary, then the governor of the Spanish Netherlands.
We may conclude then that, with a few exceptions resulting from undiplomatic excitement or most diplomatic ketman, the diplomats were right. Nevertheless, the imperatives of world war and cold war which made serving peace in a transformative sense seem so necessary, and the certainties of the ideologies which made it seem so attractive, have been greatly weakened.
They have been replaced by a world of relative security in which fragmentation is as much a fact as interdependence, and in which diversity and separateness have re-emerged as a counterpoint to cosmopolitanism. The challenge which confronts post-cold war diplomacy, therefore, is not how to respond to the erosion of its own premise; it is to reassert the extent to which that premise, the problem of relations in a fragmented human community whose components value their sovereignty, remains operative.
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The United States supports those persons who long to live in freedom and under democratic governments that protect universally accepted human rights. Tools to advance a freedom agenda:. Local ownership has become a central norm of international statebuilding while its practice is seen as failure. This is explained either as an instance of organised hypocrisy where the norm is de … Expand. Retrieving how diplomacy writes subjects, space and time: a methodological contribution.
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