The idea of ‘diplomacy’ is used in a variety of rather vague ways in political language, all deriving from the techniques and styles developed by European foreign affairs representatives during the 18th century, though, of course, diplomacy as behaviour and political strategy is as old as politics. Technically the diplomatic corps consists of all the men and women professionally engaged in representing the interests of their countries abroad. This activity varies from the gathering of information and evaluation of the politics of the host country, via the direct protection of the legal interests of any fellow nationals who are in trouble in that country (the consular function) to international negotiations and the delivery of special messages to the host government. Diplomacy has come to mean something slightly apart from this, however. It has come to describe an entire method of resolving international conflicts which, though very often referred to in the media, is rather hard precisely to define. At a simple level diplomacy covers anything short of military action, and indeed it is often alleged that ‘diplomacy’ has failed when countries do engage in outright fighting. The broadness of the concept is demonstrated by some of the ways in which subcategories of diplomacy have had to be invented to describe more precisely what goes on when diplomacy is resorted to. Thus one reads of ‘personal diplomacy’, when a particular national leader tries to sort out an international problem on the basis of their own personal relations with, and understanding of, other national leaders. A subcategory even of this is the notion of ‘shuttle’diplomacy, engaged in almost exclusively by the USA when an influential or important foreign affairs spokesman will travel backwards and forwards between hostile states trying to find grounds for compromise between opponents on the basis of building up a personal connection and understanding with both sides.
Alternatively one reads of ‘diplomatic channels’, for the delivery of ideas or the collection of information, which essentially means using the diplomatic corps for its proper function, and indeed actually stands in contrast to the amateurishness involved in ‘personal’diplomacy.
In as much as there is a further real content to the notion of ‘diplomacy’ per se it comes from the idea that diplomats are professional experts in negotiation and information transmission in the international arena. Here it is felt that particular techniques and training are necessary to ensure that no personal emotion or style should colour the message, that two diplomats of different nations have more in common, and are better able to treat the matters they discuss objectively and unemotionally than are two ordinary politicians. As foreign policy is increasingly made, in all countries, directly by the heads of the executive, and as international conferences increasingly depend on direct confrontation between senior politicians, it might be thought that diplomacy as a special technique, and the diplomatic corps as professional experts both in the making and execution of foreign policy, are going out of date. There is probably considerable truth in this. It was noteworthy that a British cabinet ‘think tank’report on the foreign service urged its radical cutting, and the replacement of most functions by ordinary civil servants who were technical experts in the area in question. No action was taken on this report, but it caused considerable public debate. In the USA the tendency for foreign policy to be taken out of the State Department and into the White House has not attenuated over the years.
One development that has strengthened the idea of diplomacy as a special endeavour has been the growth of importance of transnational bodies, the European Union (EU) in particular, which have no direct capacity to use force, but do represent a huge potential power. Thus the presence of EU negotiators in recent conflicts like the Gulf War or the Yugoslavian crisis has been a vitally important example of purely diplomatic activity. The international crisis following the terrorist attacks in the USA in 2001 again demonstrated both the importance of the EU and the highly personal nature of diplomacy as consisting of face-to-face meetings between heads of state. In particular the clear personal empathy between Tony Blair, as prime minister of the UK and both President Bush of the USA and President Putin of Russia became crucial.
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