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Diplomacy is conventionally understood to be the practice by which states represent themselves and their interests to one another. However, because something like diplomacy clearly predates the modern European system of states, because other actors in addition to states are increasingly said to engage in diplomacy, and because, as Hedley Bull notes, most of us have a notion of what it means for people to act diplomatically in everyday life, the exclusive association of diplomacy with the relations of states is untenable and becoming increasingly so.

Answers to the questions “What is diplomacy?” and “Who may properly be said to conduct it?” vary over time and across space. Diplomacy is defined neither by the types of actors on behalf of which it is undertaken nor the status of those actors vis-à-vis one another in the sense of their being sovereign and equal. What all instances of it seem to presume and affirm, however, are the following four assumptions:

That people live in groups that regard themselves as separate from, yet needing or wanting relations with, one another;
That these relations are somehow distinctive and different from relations within groups, in that people believe themselves to be under fewer obligations to those whom they regard as others;
That these relations require careful handling by specialists; and
That these specialists develop a measure of solidarity from their common experience.

Where these four assumptions are in play, we find relations that we would recognize as diplomacy.

Prestate Diplomacy

Accounts of diplomacy often imagine its origins in encounters between prehistoric groups of human beings. The accuracy of these efforts is doubtful. Nevertheless, they highlight the problems posed by the presence of strangers in a community and the development of what we would recognize as notions of immunity to address this problem. There seems to be a near-universal value that strangers carrying messages between communities should be protected and well treated, even when relations with those who sent them are not good. The Amarna tablets contain an archive of messages that were sent to Pharaohs Amenophis III and Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BCE from the leaders of their clients in the Levant and from the rival great kings of Babylonia, Assyria, Hatti, and Mitanni. The correspondence deals with attempts to arrange marriages, the exchange of gifts, visits of senior advisors, and appeals for help.

Diplomacy’s relationship with commerce is highlighted by the fact that missions traveled along caravan routes. We get intimations of the importance of prestige and intelligence but less sense of a system of continuous relations incorporating shared values. Diplomacy also can be seen in some of the great religious texts; for example, the Assyrian use of Hebrew, rather than Aramaic—then the language of diplomatic intercourse— in a parlay so that the inhabitants of Jerusalem might hear their fate debated (2 Kings 1:6–7). More recent diplomacy can be read of in the Koran, and between it and the Biblical example above, extensive evidence and records exist of relations between peoples of the ancient empires of the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. These accounts culminate in the Greek experience, plural in character and interesting, with its use of locals (proxenos) to represent other cities and the rarity of representatives with plenipotentiary negotiating powers. Rome and China are presented as less interesting because of universal ambitions and self-preoccupations that are said to be inimical to both diplomacy and their own well-being.

Diplomacy Of States

Contemporary developments have rekindled interest in the diplomacy of the ancient world. Nevertheless, the story of states and what is confusingly called modern, classical, traditional, or old diplomacy remains central to the story of diplomacy as a whole. This began to emerge in fifteenth-century Italy with the decline of the empire’s and the papacy’s secular power and flour ished in eighteenth-century Europe before spreading, while mutating, to the rest of the world. The story is dominated by questions about who is to be represented, how, and with what sort of problems for those representing them. The answer, that it should be sovereigns, and increasingly sovereign states, was more asserted than argued. The sense that it could be something bigger than states receded into a concern with peace and the dilemma presented when sovereigns asked their servants to threaten the latter. This gave rise to a literature on the qualities required by those representing sovereigns, the art of negotiation, and the conditions in which diplomats might be most effective.

The value of this literature has been doubted as anachronistic in its focus on the conduct of gentlemen at court, platitudinous in its appeal to common virtues, and ingenuous in suggesting these virtues actually prevail in effective diplomacy. There is something to all these criticisms, as there is to the rejoinders that “tact and intelligence” remain important, and many contemporary insights, for example on the importance of “ripeness” or body language in negotiations, are not new. As the site of sovereignty shifted from the monarch to the state and the people, this was reflected in discussions of the qualities of diplomats. So too was the emerging sense of diplomats as a distinct class of persons with their own outlook on, requirements in, and priorities for international relations. Concerns about the immunities and privileges needed to protect the work and the reputations of individual diplomats increasingly found expression in terms of how the whole body or corps of diplomats might to be safeguarded and facilitated. By the seventeenth century, this corps or “freemasonry” was seen as giving expression to a European republic of shared interests and ways of seeing the world. By the eighteenth century, the idea of la raison de système, serving initially as a descant to la raison d’état but eventually taking priority over state interests, had emerged, and it was possible to identify a system of modern European states with a corresponding diplomatic system of bilateral relations undertaken primarily through resident embassies and foreign ministries staffed by personnel animated by a sense of themselves as servants of their respective states and guardians of the society of which their states were members.

Since then, it is generally agreed that this system has been battered by a series of social and scientific revolutions and by the huge expansion of productive, destructive, and communicative capacities in which these resulted, although with consequences that are less clear. This is illustrated by the two great channels that diplomatic thinking about la raison de système carved out for itself. The first identified diplomacy with the balance of power. In this view, the main tasks of diplomats was to get those they represented to act with restraint—self-restraint where possible and external restraint by deterrence where necessary. This idea attracted controversy, but nothing in the great scientific and social revolutions at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries undermined it in principle. Overstimulated and over endowed national and populist states might suffer restraints on their practical and moral ambitions from diplomats less gladly, but getting them to accept restraints remained important.

However, not all the representation, reporting, bargaining, information dissemination, and intelligence-gathering activities of diplomats can be interpreted in terms of maintaining balances of power. Diplomats always had more to do, and there was always more going on in international relations, a state of affairs made more apparent by the new material and social technologies of the nineteenth century. Sovereigns and their diplomats might travel more easily, embassies might have more and easier access to information than they had in the past, but now and increasingly, so did other people. And in so doing, they also developed a greater say in what international relations were, and ought to be, about. These changes provided impetus for the second great channel in diplomatic thinking about la raison de système, seeing it less as a system of states and more as one for regulating them and rendering them less harmful. The principal consequences of this were the multilateral and conference diplomacy that appeared in the nineteenth century and gathered strength after the two world wars. The European congresses of the early nineteenth century sought to improve the great powers’ attempts to maintain international order on their own terms. The Hague and Geneva conventions attempted to reduce the prospect of war and its consequences. And the League of Nations and the United Nations sought first to regulate, then to reform the conduct of their members by encouraging multilateral collaboration.

Bilateral diplomacy directed at reconciling the interests of particular states was supplemented by multilateral efforts directed at seeking to ease common problems and improve the well-being of all. The growth of multilateral and conference diplomacy resulted in changes in the status of certain established types of diplomacy and diplomats. Consular diplomacy, concerned with private citizens, attracted more resources and began to lose the secondary status it had enjoyed when compared to political work. The broadly educated “generalists” gifted at a certain kind of human relations were supplemented by experts who had a grasp of the complex technical issues that increasingly became the subjects of negotiations. And the autonomy and negotiating capacity of the resident ambassador were widely seen to decline as a result of the emergence of the telegraph, the telephone, and air travel. A profession based on information scarcity and the costliness of communications was often presented as facing existential challenges from these innovations that made information accessible, communication cheap, and travel swift.

These changes were not matched by developments in diplomatic theory. The great burst of innovative thinking in diplomacy, beginning in fifteenth-century Europe and developing over the course of the next two centuries, ended with Cardinal Richelieu’s Testament Politique around 1688, and its practical expression was completed with the codifications of the Vienna règlement of 1815 and the modifications of Aixla-Chapelle three years later. What followed may be broadly interpreted as application (in the form of diplomatic history), exposition (to aid in the training of diplomats), and refinement (in response to critics). Innovations in diplomatic theory and practice came from outside the profession. The construction of international organizations, for example, may be presented as driven by the concerns of politics and political theory with how to escape from anarchy. The concern with commercial diplomacy and economic statecraft can be rooted in the rise of political economy. The focus on how foreign policy is actually made can be traced back to research into individual and group psychology, the operations of complex organizations, and rational choice models, as these have been applied to political behavior. Most recently, attempts to create a more open and representative diplomacy have applied the insights and understandings of marketing and public relations. Diplomatic studies certainly, and diplomacy and diplomats probably, have suffered as a result. Indeed, for much of the postwar period, it was possible to maintain that all three might be in terminal decline. Since the end of the cold war, however, this state of affairs has undergone an almost complete transformation, for reasons that are both surprising and paradoxical. Somehow, as our sense that a states system provides the basic political framework of the world has weakened, interest in diplomacy, diplomats, and the study of both has revived.

Diplomacy Beyond States

Diplomacy beyond states may be understood in two senses:

A temporal sense in which we think of states and their diplomacy fading, and
A conceptual sense by which we are reminded that diplomacy is not necessarily the exclusive preserve of states or professional diplomats.

Empirically grounded international relations research has develop both senses by testing conventional understandings of how social worlds are believed to work. At the system level, the expectation has been tested and confirmed that states regarded as most important will have the most diplomatic representatives from other countries in their capitals. In the study of diplomacy and foreign policy, positivist approaches have tracked and demonstrated the disaggregation of entities conventionally treated as wholes. The consequences of this kind of inquiry for our understandings of diplomacy have been impressive. We find foreign ministries do not dominate or even coordinate a country’s foreign relations. Other branches of government engage in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy and employ people acting diplomatically to represent them. Governments, even understood as loose ensembles of actors and institutions, do not exercise a monopoly on the conduct of the external relations of their countries. Private actors of all sorts are also engaged. Indeed, it becomes difficult to maintain the distinction between internal and external worlds on which the idea of international relations depends.

Investigators have not been sure what to do with these sorts of discoveries. Traditionalists insist that they are the product of category confusions. One cannot get closer to understanding how diplomacy operates as a meaningful social action by tracing behavioral patterns with greater precision. To say diplomats do not actually represent their states or sovereigns in the sense of standing in place of them is to misunderstand the nature of representation. Social worlds cohere despite evidence and knowledge that undermine the assumptions on which they rest, but we are still stuck with knowing that how things appear is not the full story. An alternative to the traditionalist reluctance to accept empirical evidence, therefore, is to use positivist approaches as a basis for critique and prescription. Thus, research has looked at why traditional institutions of diplomacy have been losing influence and why traditional diplomatic activities have become less effective, and it offers advice about how diplomats might become more effective by shifting, for example, from being communicators of positions and policies to becoming the instigators of coalitions of different people seeking to advance shared interests. Such approaches have great practical value but court inconsistencies, especially when governments apply the disaggregative insight to diplomats of other countries but not to their own diplomats and those diplomats’ claims to act on behalf of their countries.

Paradoxically, given diplomacy’s conventional identification as a conservative and even reactionary social practice, post positivist approaches have shown the most promise of innovation in diplomatic theory by unhitching it from state practices and exploring what people in different times and places have understood to be diplomacy. The thrust of these arguments can be critical, focusing on the alienation, estrangement, and exploitation that diplomacy may be implicated in reproducing. It can be emancipatory, emphasizing the virtues of conventional diplomatic attributes like ambiguity and imagination for improving human relations. And it can be whimsical, examining the more banal and human aspects of diplomatic life to demonstrate the tyrannies of circumscribed thought and action that closed and archaic social structures can impose upon those trapped within them. These approaches have introduced diplomatic studies to the constructivist and constitutive approaches to explanation and understanding in the broader field of international relations. They have also demonstrated how modes of thought associated with diplomats and diplomacy can enrich our accounts of international and social realities in general. Diplomats have long been familiar with the extent to which social realities are constructed, in the sense of being produced and reproduced with varying degrees of self-consciousness by the ways in which people live and the necessarily ambiguous consequences of this being so.

Far from fading, therefore, at a time of great change, we should expect diplomats, diplomacy, and diplomatic theory to prosper as new constellations of actors and new identities seek to establish the terms of their own existence and recognition of them as such, just as they did in fifteenth-century Europe. This is illustrated by the emergence of the “new public diplomacy.” Previously regarded as poor diplomacy of low standing or propaganda, because it violates the principle of nonintervention, public diplomacy in its “new” iteration is presented as repowering everybody (including states) and transforming international relations into a genuine dialogue of peoples and people. A major research effort has developed, with the funding to support it, exploring how to make public diplomacy more effective and evaluate it. The enthusiasm for this effort is prompted by the need for economic competitiveness and the need to manage the cultural and civilizational dislocations engendered by globalization, especially since the 9/11 attacks on the United States. In America in particular, agencies like the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (www. state.gov/r/adcompd/) and the U.S. Information Agency/U.S. Public Diplomacy Office (http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/usia/) have been strengthened to address this latter challenge. The success of the campaigns to ban landmines, to press banks to provide debt relief for poor countries, and to persuade others to reduce the carbon footprints of their economies demonstrate elements of a global civil society already talking to one another and acting to make their own contribution to what happens in international relations. “Outsiders,” as traditionalists point out, may have always been engaged so. What is novel and important, however, is the high importance attached to these activities by nearly everyone in the study of diplomacy.

Ever since Burke anglicized the term diplomatique in 1796, diplomacy has been a practice characterized by oppositions: universal yet specialized, commonsense yet esoteric, in decline yet in short supply, admired yet distrusted, and important yet neglected. In one sense, it involves representations to one another of collective identities that are necessarily ambiguous. In another, it merely refers to the state of affairs that arises between people who wish to live separately and maintain their own identities but who want or believe they must have relations with each other. Either way, general interest in diplomacy, diplomats, and how to act diplomatically always increases when, as now, the tensions between the pluralist and solidarist aspirations of human beings, on the one hand, and the pluralist and solidarist demands of the ways they actually live, on the other, weigh heavily upon them.

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