This article was originally published in the Fall 2011 print edition of The Diplomatic Courier.
Diplomacy is an old activity, dating back to ancient Greece and Rome. Homer’s Iliad and Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian Wars contained many references to diplomatic missions, treaties, negotiations, and other concepts associated with diplomacy. Ancient Rome also engaged in extensive diplomacy, although the Roman Empire is more noted for its military conquests.
As far as is known, the first professional diplomatic corps appeared in the Byzantine Empire following the collapse of Rome in 476 AD. Byzantium established the world’s first department of foreign affairs, developed strict and complex diplomatic protocols, and actively sought intelligence about friend and enemy alike. Surrounded by enemies, Byzantium needed all the skill in diplomacy it could muster.
The art of diplomacy was carried to the next higher (some might say lower) plane in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Italian city-states of the era engaged in constant intrigues against each other. During this era, diplomacy became identified with behind-the-scenes scheming, duplicity, and double-dealing. Niccolo Machiavelli of Florence, whom many consider the father of “realist” views of the international system, stressed in his book The Prince (1532) that rulers should use whatever means they had at their disposal to stay in power.
Western European diplomacy continued to evolve in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in France. Under Louis XIV, the minister of foreign affairs, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis of Torcy, became an important adviser to the “Roi Soleil” (English: Sun King). Louis XIV also established embassies with permanent ambassadors who served as his official representatives in all major European foreign capitals. For the first time, international treaties and agreements also required exact and specific wording.
The next stage in the evolution of Western diplomacy began at the end of the Napoleonic Wars with the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Throughout the nineteenth century, diplomatic practices were formalized and regularized. Ambassadors and their embassies attained an immense international importance, often creating and implementing their country’s foreign policy on the scene with little control from their home capital. Diplomats were drawn almost exclusively from the nobility. Most diplomacy was conducted in secret. More often than not, diplomacy was bilateral, directly between two countries. For the most part, nineteenth-century diplomacy sought to preserve the European balance of power as diplomats tried to maintain a rough status quo in Europe and in the colonial empires.
World War I is frequently viewed as the watershed between “old” diplomacy with its emphasis on elitism, secrecy, bilateral agreements, and the importance of the embassy, and “modern” diplomacy with its emphasis on competency, openness, multilateral agreements, and personal conduct of affairs. With many people believing that nineteenth-century diplomacy’s practices had caused World War I, it was perhaps inevitable that old diplomatic practices would change.
Following World War I, more and more countries began to emphasize competency as opposed to class connections in their diplomatic corps. Increasingly, diplomats came from a wider cross-section of society. This democratization of the diplomatic corps came in part from the belief that elitist diplomacy had lost touch with reality and as a result had spawned World War I. Competency – at least in theory – replaced class connections as a prerequisite for the diplomat.
In theory, open diplomacy also replaced secret diplomacy. Many people, particularly U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, believed that secret treaties concluded by secret diplomacy had been a primary cause of World War I. Wilson and others therefore called for “open covenants, openly arrived at.” Thus, following World War I, open diplomacy became an ideal of modern diplomacy.
So, too, did multilateral diplomacy, in which many countries participated in diplomatic activity. Woodrow Wilson again led the way with his appeals for a League of Nations. Even after the league failed, the world’s statesmen eventually created the United Nations. The states of the world also began to meet more frequently in conferences to discuss specific issues. Importantly, beyond these world bodies and multilateral conferences, an immense network of multilateral contacts also developed between states following World War I, the creation of a string of International Governmental Organization (IGOs) being an important feature of that period.
After World War I, personal diplomacy on the part of leaders of states also replaced reliance on ambassadors and embassies as a hallmark of diplomacy. One criticism of “old” diplomacy’s reliance on ambassadors who operated relatively independently of control from their home government was that an ambassador might be working at cross-purposes to the home government. Some experts believed that this was one cause of World War I. Following World War I, in part because of this belief and in part because of technical breakthroughs in transportation and communications, many governments placed tighter reins on ambassadors and embassies. They relied more and more on personal diplomacy conducted by senior members of the government, usually the president and secretary of state in the United States, and their equivalents in other countries. These changes led to a new emphasis on “summitry” and public diplomacy, both of which are discussed in details in this special issue of The Diplomatic Courier.
Modern diplomacy is a multisided, loosely constrained and multidimensional game. There is not just one mode of play. Instead, like all the most fascinating games, modern diplomacy is intricate and involves considerable strategy that can be employed in several ways. While diplomacy is often portrayed by an image of somber negotiations over highly polished wooden tables in ornate rooms, it is much more than that. Modern diplomacy is a far-ranging communications process.
However, as a result of communication and transportation revolutions and the concomitant process of political centralization in highly developed countries, “public diplomacy” has become a critical part of the diplomatic repertoire. At the highest level, leader-to-leader and summitry diplomacy – superpower summitry during the Cold War – is certainly the main evolving characteristic of modern diplomacy and the epitome of “public diplomacy.”
Leader-to-Leader and Summitry Diplomacy
Modern transportation and communications have spawned an upsurge of high-level diplomacy. National leaders regularly hold bilateral or multilateral summit conferences, and foreign ministers and other ranking diplomats jet between countries, conducting “shuttle diplomacy.” One hundred thirty years of American history passed before a president (Woodrow Wilson) traveled overseas while in office. Richard Nixon departed on his first state visit to Europe only 33 days after his inauguration, and each president since has surpassed his predecessor’s record of foreign travel. When, in May 1997, Bill Clinton visited his 36th country while president, he surpassed George Bush’s previous presidential record of 35. In his fist overseas trip after taking office on January 20, 2009 Barack Obama visited four countries – England, France, Germany and the Czech Republic – in only five days. The once-rare instances of meetings between heads of state have become so common that in some cases they have become routine. For example, the leaders of the Group of Eight (G-8), comprising the seven largest industrialized countries plus Russia, meet annually; G-20 finance ministers and central bank governors meet once a year; the leaders of the European Union’s countries meet at least twice a year. Antonio Missiroli, director of the European Policy Centre, told EurActiv in February 2010 that “Europeans in general tend to hold too many summits.”
The advent of globe-trotting, leader-to-leader diplomacy, or summitry, and the increased frequency of telecommunications diplomacy are mixed blessings. There are several advantages. The first is that leaders can sometimes make dramatic breakthroughs. The 1978 Camp David Accords, which began the process of normalizing Egyptian-Israeli relations after decades of hostility and three wars, were produced after President Carter, Egyptian President Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Begin isolated themselves at the presidential retreat in Maryland. Meetings on arms control and other subjects by President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at the Reykjavik summit in 1986, as well as by their successors throughout the post-cold war period, are examples of summit diplomacy.
Second, rapid diplomacy can help dispel false information and stereotypes. George Bush Sr has argued that the telephone helped avoid specific misunderstandings. “I want to be sure [that U.S.-USSR agreements are] real and they’re based on fact, not misunderstanding,” the president explained. “If [another leader] knows the heartbeat a little bit from talking [with me], there’s less apt to be misunderstanding” (G. bush, A World Transformed, 1998).
A third advantage of personal contact among leaders is that mutual confidence or even friendships may develop. It would be an overstatement to say that President Clinton and President Jiang Zemin of China became friends, but they had established a level of ease with one another in the more than a half dozen meetings they had. As one U.S. aide put it during Jiang’s trip to the United States in 1997, "I think there has developed over these … meetings a bond. I think when Jiang talks about ‘my friend Bill Clinton’ and having met with him five times, he’s doing more than going through the motions” (New York times, October 30, 1997). Clinton and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien (1993-2003) no doubt discussed U.S.-Canada relations on golf courses as both played together their favorite sport.
Clear vision and good feelings are laudable, but there are also several potential disadvantages to leader-to-leader and summitry diplomacy. One problem is that summits may lead to ill-conceived agreements. According to Henry Kissinger, “Some of the debacles of our diplomatic history have been perpetrated by Presidents who fancied themselves negotiators.” An irony of modern diplomacy is that the interdependent and technical natures of global issues are making them increasingly complex at the very time when summitry diplomacy is ever-increasing. There is, many observers and officials worry, a tendency to oversimplify problems. Great power leaders assume five or six people can do anything. Summits involving heads of state and their unseasoned advisers make it a lot easier to negotiate. The danger is that if they continue to push the experts aside, the whole world will suffer in the end as a result of flawed and shaky agreements.
A second problem with leader-to-leader diplomacy is that it may lead to misunderstandings. There are numerous instances where leaders have made and reached what each thought was a mutual understanding, only to find to their equally mutual surprise and anger that they had misunderstood one another. Furthermore, as tricky as personal contacts may be, the telephone may present even greater difficulties. Henry Kissinger, for example, argues that "the telephone is generally made for misunderstanding. It is difficult to make a good record. You can’t see the other side’s expressions or body language."24 And as e-diplomacy becomes increasingly important, leaders must also beware of the Internet problems of flaring (escalating tensions through e-mail misunderstandings) and other communications problems endemic to indirect nonverbal communications.
Third, while mistakes made by lower-ranking officials can be disavowed by their superiors, a leader’s commitments, even if not well thought out, cannot be easily retracted. “When Presidents become negotiators no escape routes are left,” Kissinger warns. “Concessions are irrevocable without dishonor” (H. Kissinger, the White House Years, 1979)
Fourth, specific misunderstanding and general chemistry can work to damage working relations between leaders instead of improving them. Many ministers and journalists have observed that most world leaders are characterized by a “healthy dose of ego,” and when two such egos collide, ‘negotiations can rapidly deteriorate from intractability to confrontation," says Kissinger.
The agenda of world leaders is packed with summits and conferences. However, the way ahead is to focus on fewer summits in which substance would prevail and to ensure more continuity in relations between states from one summit to the other. World leaders and their advisers believe that summits are the best way to accelerate decision-making. Fixing deadlines and insisting on “photo opportunities” seem to be the only way foster quicker decisions-making. This is a perverse development in foreign relations. Substance of things rather than protocol dimensions should be the prime concern.
Richard Rousseau, Ph.D. is a professor of international relations at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy in Baku and a contributor to Global Brief, World Affairs in the 21st Century (www.globalbrief.ca) and to The Jamestown Foundation.
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From Ancient Greek Diplomacy to Modern Summitry
September 20, 2011
This article was originally published in the Fall 2011 print edition of The Diplomatic Courier.
Diplomacy is an old activity, dating back to ancient Greece and Rome. Homer’s Iliad and Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian Wars contained many references to diplomatic missions, treaties, negotiations, and other concepts associated with diplomacy. Ancient Rome also engaged in extensive diplomacy, although the Roman Empire is more noted for its military conquests.
As far as is known, the first professional diplomatic corps appeared in the Byzantine Empire following the collapse of Rome in 476 AD. Byzantium established the world’s first department of foreign affairs, developed strict and complex diplomatic protocols, and actively sought intelligence about friend and enemy alike. Surrounded by enemies, Byzantium needed all the skill in diplomacy it could muster.
The art of diplomacy was carried to the next higher (some might say lower) plane in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Italian city-states of the era engaged in constant intrigues against each other. During this era, diplomacy became identified with behind-the-scenes scheming, duplicity, and double-dealing. Niccolo Machiavelli of Florence, whom many consider the father of “realist” views of the international system, stressed in his book The Prince (1532) that rulers should use whatever means they had at their disposal to stay in power.
Western European diplomacy continued to evolve in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in France. Under Louis XIV, the minister of foreign affairs, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis of Torcy, became an important adviser to the “Roi Soleil” (English: Sun King). Louis XIV also established embassies with permanent ambassadors who served as his official representatives in all major European foreign capitals. For the first time, international treaties and agreements also required exact and specific wording.
The next stage in the evolution of Western diplomacy began at the end of the Napoleonic Wars with the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Throughout the nineteenth century, diplomatic practices were formalized and regularized. Ambassadors and their embassies attained an immense international importance, often creating and implementing their country’s foreign policy on the scene with little control from their home capital. Diplomats were drawn almost exclusively from the nobility. Most diplomacy was conducted in secret. More often than not, diplomacy was bilateral, directly between two countries. For the most part, nineteenth-century diplomacy sought to preserve the European balance of power as diplomats tried to maintain a rough status quo in Europe and in the colonial empires.
World War I is frequently viewed as the watershed between “old” diplomacy with its emphasis on elitism, secrecy, bilateral agreements, and the importance of the embassy, and “modern” diplomacy with its emphasis on competency, openness, multilateral agreements, and personal conduct of affairs. With many people believing that nineteenth-century diplomacy’s practices had caused World War I, it was perhaps inevitable that old diplomatic practices would change.
Following World War I, more and more countries began to emphasize competency as opposed to class connections in their diplomatic corps. Increasingly, diplomats came from a wider cross-section of society. This democratization of the diplomatic corps came in part from the belief that elitist diplomacy had lost touch with reality and as a result had spawned World War I. Competency – at least in theory – replaced class connections as a prerequisite for the diplomat.
In theory, open diplomacy also replaced secret diplomacy. Many people, particularly U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, believed that secret treaties concluded by secret diplomacy had been a primary cause of World War I. Wilson and others therefore called for “open covenants, openly arrived at.” Thus, following World War I, open diplomacy became an ideal of modern diplomacy.
So, too, did multilateral diplomacy, in which many countries participated in diplomatic activity. Woodrow Wilson again led the way with his appeals for a League of Nations. Even after the league failed, the world’s statesmen eventually created the United Nations. The states of the world also began to meet more frequently in conferences to discuss specific issues. Importantly, beyond these world bodies and multilateral conferences, an immense network of multilateral contacts also developed between states following World War I, the creation of a string of International Governmental Organization (IGOs) being an important feature of that period.
After World War I, personal diplomacy on the part of leaders of states also replaced reliance on ambassadors and embassies as a hallmark of diplomacy. One criticism of “old” diplomacy’s reliance on ambassadors who operated relatively independently of control from their home government was that an ambassador might be working at cross-purposes to the home government. Some experts believed that this was one cause of World War I. Following World War I, in part because of this belief and in part because of technical breakthroughs in transportation and communications, many governments placed tighter reins on ambassadors and embassies. They relied more and more on personal diplomacy conducted by senior members of the government, usually the president and secretary of state in the United States, and their equivalents in other countries. These changes led to a new emphasis on “summitry” and public diplomacy, both of which are discussed in details in this special issue of The Diplomatic Courier.
Modern diplomacy is a multisided, loosely constrained and multidimensional game. There is not just one mode of play. Instead, like all the most fascinating games, modern diplomacy is intricate and involves considerable strategy that can be employed in several ways. While diplomacy is often portrayed by an image of somber negotiations over highly polished wooden tables in ornate rooms, it is much more than that. Modern diplomacy is a far-ranging communications process.
However, as a result of communication and transportation revolutions and the concomitant process of political centralization in highly developed countries, “public diplomacy” has become a critical part of the diplomatic repertoire. At the highest level, leader-to-leader and summitry diplomacy – superpower summitry during the Cold War – is certainly the main evolving characteristic of modern diplomacy and the epitome of “public diplomacy.”
Leader-to-Leader and Summitry Diplomacy
Modern transportation and communications have spawned an upsurge of high-level diplomacy. National leaders regularly hold bilateral or multilateral summit conferences, and foreign ministers and other ranking diplomats jet between countries, conducting “shuttle diplomacy.” One hundred thirty years of American history passed before a president (Woodrow Wilson) traveled overseas while in office. Richard Nixon departed on his first state visit to Europe only 33 days after his inauguration, and each president since has surpassed his predecessor’s record of foreign travel. When, in May 1997, Bill Clinton visited his 36th country while president, he surpassed George Bush’s previous presidential record of 35. In his fist overseas trip after taking office on January 20, 2009 Barack Obama visited four countries – England, France, Germany and the Czech Republic – in only five days. The once-rare instances of meetings between heads of state have become so common that in some cases they have become routine. For example, the leaders of the Group of Eight (G-8), comprising the seven largest industrialized countries plus Russia, meet annually; G-20 finance ministers and central bank governors meet once a year; the leaders of the European Union’s countries meet at least twice a year. Antonio Missiroli, director of the European Policy Centre, told EurActiv in February 2010 that “Europeans in general tend to hold too many summits.”
The advent of globe-trotting, leader-to-leader diplomacy, or summitry, and the increased frequency of telecommunications diplomacy are mixed blessings. There are several advantages. The first is that leaders can sometimes make dramatic breakthroughs. The 1978 Camp David Accords, which began the process of normalizing Egyptian-Israeli relations after decades of hostility and three wars, were produced after President Carter, Egyptian President Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Begin isolated themselves at the presidential retreat in Maryland. Meetings on arms control and other subjects by President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at the Reykjavik summit in 1986, as well as by their successors throughout the post-cold war period, are examples of summit diplomacy.
Second, rapid diplomacy can help dispel false information and stereotypes. George Bush Sr has argued that the telephone helped avoid specific misunderstandings. “I want to be sure [that U.S.-USSR agreements are] real and they’re based on fact, not misunderstanding,” the president explained. “If [another leader] knows the heartbeat a little bit from talking [with me], there’s less apt to be misunderstanding” (G. bush, A World Transformed, 1998).
A third advantage of personal contact among leaders is that mutual confidence or even friendships may develop. It would be an overstatement to say that President Clinton and President Jiang Zemin of China became friends, but they had established a level of ease with one another in the more than a half dozen meetings they had. As one U.S. aide put it during Jiang’s trip to the United States in 1997, "I think there has developed over these … meetings a bond. I think when Jiang talks about ‘my friend Bill Clinton’ and having met with him five times, he’s doing more than going through the motions” (New York times, October 30, 1997). Clinton and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien (1993-2003) no doubt discussed U.S.-Canada relations on golf courses as both played together their favorite sport.
Clear vision and good feelings are laudable, but there are also several potential disadvantages to leader-to-leader and summitry diplomacy. One problem is that summits may lead to ill-conceived agreements. According to Henry Kissinger, “Some of the debacles of our diplomatic history have been perpetrated by Presidents who fancied themselves negotiators.” An irony of modern diplomacy is that the interdependent and technical natures of global issues are making them increasingly complex at the very time when summitry diplomacy is ever-increasing. There is, many observers and officials worry, a tendency to oversimplify problems. Great power leaders assume five or six people can do anything. Summits involving heads of state and their unseasoned advisers make it a lot easier to negotiate. The danger is that if they continue to push the experts aside, the whole world will suffer in the end as a result of flawed and shaky agreements.
A second problem with leader-to-leader diplomacy is that it may lead to misunderstandings. There are numerous instances where leaders have made and reached what each thought was a mutual understanding, only to find to their equally mutual surprise and anger that they had misunderstood one another. Furthermore, as tricky as personal contacts may be, the telephone may present even greater difficulties. Henry Kissinger, for example, argues that "the telephone is generally made for misunderstanding. It is difficult to make a good record. You can’t see the other side’s expressions or body language."24 And as e-diplomacy becomes increasingly important, leaders must also beware of the Internet problems of flaring (escalating tensions through e-mail misunderstandings) and other communications problems endemic to indirect nonverbal communications.
Third, while mistakes made by lower-ranking officials can be disavowed by their superiors, a leader’s commitments, even if not well thought out, cannot be easily retracted. “When Presidents become negotiators no escape routes are left,” Kissinger warns. “Concessions are irrevocable without dishonor” (H. Kissinger, the White House Years, 1979)
Fourth, specific misunderstanding and general chemistry can work to damage working relations between leaders instead of improving them. Many ministers and journalists have observed that most world leaders are characterized by a “healthy dose of ego,” and when two such egos collide, ‘negotiations can rapidly deteriorate from intractability to confrontation," says Kissinger.
The agenda of world leaders is packed with summits and conferences. However, the way ahead is to focus on fewer summits in which substance would prevail and to ensure more continuity in relations between states from one summit to the other. World leaders and their advisers believe that summits are the best way to accelerate decision-making. Fixing deadlines and insisting on “photo opportunities” seem to be the only way foster quicker decisions-making. This is a perverse development in foreign relations. Substance of things rather than protocol dimensions should be the prime concern.
Richard Rousseau, Ph.D. is a professor of international relations at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy in Baku and a contributor to Global Brief, World Affairs in the 21st Century (www.globalbrief.ca) and to The Jamestown Foundation.
