3. Modern diplomacy

The World War I era serves as a benchmark in the transition to modern diplomacy. It was the beginning of the end of European world dominance. It also marked the fall of the German, Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian emperors. Nationalistic self-determination stirred strongly in Europe and other parts of the world. New powers - the United States, Japan, and China—began to assert themselves and they joined or replaced the declining European countries as world powers. The "old diplomacy" did not vanish, but it changed substantially. The "new diplomacy" includes seven characteristics: expanded geographic scope, multilateral diplomacy, parliamentary diplomacy, democratized diplomacy, open diplomacy, leader-to-leader diplomacy, and public diplomacy. These new practices have been greeted as "reforms," but many also have drawbacks.

Expansion of Geographic Scope

Modern diplomacy has been marked by expansion of its geographic scope. The two Hague Conferences (1899, 1907) on peace, particularly the second, with its 44 participants, included countries outside the European sphere. President Wilson’s call for national self-determination foreshadowed a world of almost 200 countries. Today, the United Nations, with its nearly universal membership, symbolizes the truly global scope of diplomacy.

Multilateral Diplomacy

The use of conferences involving a number of nations has expanded greatly in the modern era. Woodrow Wilson’s call for a League of Nations symbolized the rise of multilateral diplomacy. There are now a number of permanent world and regional international organizations. Ad hoc conferences and treaties are also more apt to be multilateral. Before 1900, for example, the United States attended an average of one multilateral conference per year. Now, the United States is a member of scores of international organizations and American diplomats participate daily in multilateral negotiations.

Multilateral diplomacy has increased for several reasons. One is that advances in travel and communications technology allow faster and more frequent contacts among countries. Second, many global concerns, such as the environment, cannot be solved by any one country or through traditional bilateral diplomacy alone. Instead, global cooperation and solutions are required. Third, diplomacy through multilateral organizations is attractive to smaller countries as a method of influencing world politics beyond their individual power.

A fourth factor promoting multilateral diplomacy is the rise of expectations that important international actions, especially the use of military force, will be taken within the framework of a multilateral organization. President Bush said in 2001 that he would act alone if necessary against Afghanistan, but he was also careful to engage in the multilateral diplomacy necessary to win both UN and NATO support for the U.S.-led campaign.

Parliamentary Diplomacy

Another modern practice is parliamentary diplomacy. This includes debate and voting in international organizations and sometimes supplants negotiation and compromise. The maneuvering involved in parliamentary diplomacy was strongly evident in the UN with regard to North Korea during 1993 and 1994. The United States had to proceed cautiously with threats of UN-endorsed sanctions against North Korea because both China and Russia were averse to sanctions and each possessed a veto.

Despite the reluctance of China and Russia to act, parliamentary diplomacy did eventually play a role in putting pressure on North Korea. In May 1994, the five permanent members of the Security Council issued a joint statement calling on North Korea to provide evidence that it was not reprocessing spent nuclear reactor fuel rods into plutonium for weapons. Among other benefits, this statement signaled to Pyongyang that the five permanent members of the Security Council were united in opposition to a North Korean nuclear-weapons capability and that even Chinese and Russian patience was not inexhaustible.

Democratized Diplomacy

The elite and executive-dominant character of early diplomacy has changed in several ways. One change brought about by democratized diplomacy is that diplomats are now drawn from a wider segment of society and, thus, are somewhat more representative of their nations, rather than of their state.

A second democratic change is the rise of the roles of legislatures, interest groups, and public opinion. Executive leaders still dominate the foreign policy-making process, but it is no longer their exclusive domain. Now, as discussed in the earlier section on the domestic setting, national executives often must conduct two-level diplomacy by negotiating with domestic actors as well as other countries to find a mutually agreeable solution to outstanding issues.

Third, the democratization of diplomacy has promoted the conduct of public diplomacy aimed at influencing not just leaders, but also the legislatures, interest groups, and public opinion in other countries. UN secretary-general Kofi Annan has said, "If I can’t get the support of governments, then I’ll get the support of the people. People move governments."

Open Diplomacy

Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points called for open covenants, openly arrived at. As such, Wilson would have approved of the fact that, much more than before, diplomacy and even international agreements are now widely reported and documented. One advantage of open diplomacy is that it fits with the idea of democracy. Secret diplomacy more often than not is used by leaders to mislead the populations of their own countries rather than to keep information from international opponents.

There are, however, advantages to secret diplomacy. Most scholars and practitioners agree that public negotiations are difficult. Early disclosure of your bargaining strategy will compromise your ability to win concessions. Public negotiations are also more likely to lead diplomats to posture for public consumption. Concessions may be difficult to make amid popular criticism. In sum, it is difficult to negotiate with someone kibitzing over your shoulder. Indeed, domestic opposition to dealing with an adversary may be so intense that it may be impossible to negotiate at all.

Soon after the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the Bush administration made a series of demands on Pakistan that, in Washington’s view, were crucial to the success of the U.S. response. Secretary of State Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage drew up a list of seven demands. Many of these, such as the right to use Pakistani military bases, were difficult for the government in Islamabad to accept because of the large number of militant Muslims in the country and the connection between Pakistani Pashtuns and their ethnic brethren who made up the bulk of the Taliban ranks in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the requirements were presented strongly. The demands and the pressure were all applied in secret, however, because open diplomacy might have caused such a reaction among Pakistanis that Musharraf might have been forced to reject the U.S. requirements or might have been toppled from power if he accepted them.

Leader-to-Leader 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 diplomat’s jet between countries, conducting shuttle diplomacy. One hundred thirty years of American history passed before a president (Woodrow Wilson) traveled overseas while in office. George W. Bush departed on his first state visit only 27 days after his inauguration, and presidents now travel frequently. The once-rare instances of leader-to-leader diplomacy meetings between heads of state have become so common that in some cases they have become routine, as for example, the annual meetings of the leaders of the G-8.

The advent of globe-trotting, leader-to-leader diplomacy, or summit meetings, and the increased frequency of telecommunications diplomacy are mixed blessings. There are several advantages. The first is that meetings between leaders can demonstrate an important symbolic shift in relations. One of the most significant moments in the more than 50 years since the outbreak of the Korean War occurred in June 2000, when the presidents of North and South Korea met for the first time. Some agreements were reached during the meeting in Pyongyang, but their importance paled compared to the symbolic televised image of the two shaking hands, smiling, bantering, and drinking champagne.

Second, 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. A third advantage is that rapid diplomacy can help dispel false information and stereotypes. President G. H. W. Bush lauded the telephone as a helpful tool.

A fourth advantage of personal contact among leaders is that mutual confidence or even friendships may develop. It is probable that adversarial diplomacy that marks much of U.S.-Russian relations will be somewhat easier in the near future than might otherwise have been the case because Presidents Bush and Putin seem to have struck up a friendship. After the two presidents and their wives spent a night at the Bush’s Prairie Chapel ranch in Crawford, Texas, in November 2001, the leaders seemed like real good buddies. According to a news report, the two had a "love fest of backslapping and wisecracking" that included commiserating with one another about the travails of having teenage daughters and jesting about which is worse: Texas in the heat of August or Siberia in the frigid winter.

A bit more seriously, Bush gushed, "A lot of people never really dreamed that an American president and a Russian president could have established the friendship that we have." "The best diplomacy starts with getting to know each other," Bush added. "I knew that President Putin was a man with whom I could work to transform the relationship between our two countries."

Clear vision and good feelings are laudable, but there are disadvantages to leader-to-leader diplomacy. One problem 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."

Second, 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. Concessions are irrevocable without dishonor.

Third, specific misunderstanding and general chemistry can work to damage working relations between leaders instead of improving them. Kissinger, who should know, has 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."

Public Diplomacy

The communications revolution has placed leaders and other diplomats in public view more than ever before, and their actions have an impact on world opinion that is often distinct from their negotiating positions. Among other things, this means that diplomacy is often conducted under the glare of television lights and almost everything that officials say in public is heard or read by others. Additionally, a country’s overall image and the image of its leaders have become more important because of the democratization of the foreign policy process discussed above.

These changes have meant that international relations are also increasingly conducted through public diplomacy. The concept of public diplomacy can be defined as a process of creating an overall international image that enhances a country’s ability to achieve diplomatic success. This is akin to propaganda. Public diplomacy includes traditional propaganda, but goes beyond that: it also includes what is actually said and done by political figures, practices of national self-promotion that are much the same as advertising, and other forms of public relations that are utilized by business. In practice, as we shall see, propaganda and public diplomacy overlap substantially. One scholar’s concept of public diplomacy envisions a "theater of power" that is a "metaphor for the repertoire of visual and symbolic tools used by statesmen and diplomats." As players in the theater of power, leaders "must be sensitive to the impression they make on observers... They surely [are] subject to the same sort of dramatic, if not aesthetic, criticism of other kinds of public performances". There are even times when the symbolic theater becomes real theater.

There is also an element of public diplomacy that goes beyond presenting one’s best face and that involves distortions through propaganda and even outright lying. Propaganda is an attempt to influence another country through emotional techniques rather than logical discussion or presentation of empirical evidence. It is a process of appealing to emotions rather than minds by creating fear, doubt, sympathy, anger, or a variety of other feelings. Although the use of propaganda is as old as history, advances in communication, democratization, and the understanding of psychology have made propaganda increasingly important. In essence, if you cannot persuade another country’s leaders through force or diplomacy, you can try to affect policy by persuading its people through propaganda.

By any standard, propaganda is big business. The United States, for one, operates or sponsors the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Marti. The U.S. Information Agency also produces WorldNet, a television service available globally, provides Web sites, and has other modern communications capabilities. Still, the end of the cold war has dealt harshly with most such efforts. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, for example, has just 200 employees, down from 1,700 in the 1980s.

This does not mean that propaganda is dying. It is not. A plan proposed by the U.S. Defense Department in 2001 would have created an Office of Strategic Information, reportedly in order to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy-makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries. The plan to spread what is euphemistically called disinformation was quickly killed once it became public, but it is unclear whether it was rejected because of the U.S. aversion to such tactics, as the Bush administration claimed, or because of the uproar it caused in the domestic and foreign press.

KEY POINTS

• National diplomats serve as communication links between their country and the rest of the world. Traditionally, diplomacy has focused on the national interest.

• Diplomats play several roles, among which are: observer and reporter, negotiator, policy representative

• The nature of diplomacy and how it is carried out are also affected by its setting. The setting can be roughly divided into three parts: the international system, the diplo¬matic environment, and the domestic connection.

• Modern diplomacy has been marked by expansion of its geographic scope. The use of conferences involving a number of nations has expanded greatly in the modern era.

• Multilateral diplomacy has increased for several reasons:

- advances in travel and communications technology allow faster and more frequent contacts among countries;

- many global concerns cannot be solved by any one country or through traditional bilateral diplomacy alone;

- diplomacy through multilateral organizations is attractive to smaller countries as a method of influencing world politics beyond their individual power.

• Parliamentary diplomacy includes debate and voting in international organizations and sometimes supplants negotiation and compromise.

• The democratization of diplomacy has promoted the conduct of public diplomacy aimed at influencing not just leaders, but also the legislatures, interest groups, and public opinion in other countries.

CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS

Diplomacy: a process of negotiation and communication between states that seeks to resolve conflict without recourse to war; an instrument of foreign policy.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. What is the traditional focus of diplomacy?

2. List the roles diplomats play in promoting the national interest?

3. Speak about the role of observer and reporter.

4. Why is the value of this function especially evident when it is absent?

5. Why has the role of the ambassador as an observer and reporter declined?

6. Prove that the negotiating role of ambassadors has declined.

7. Speak about the role of policy representative.

8. What parts can the diplomatic setting be divided into?

9. How does the anarchical international system affect the diplomatic setting?

10. What determines the diplomatic environment?

11. Discuss hostile diplomacy.

12. Discuss adversarial diplomacy.

13. Discuss coalition diplomacy.

14. What factor made G.W. Bush change his unilateralistic approach to diplomacy and turn to coalition diplomacy?

15. Discuss mediation diplomacy.

16. What is the concept of the two-level game theory?

17. What does the "new diplomacy" include?

18. List the reasons why multilateral diplomacy has increased.

19. Speak about democratized diplomacy. In what way has the elite and executive-dominant character of early diplomacy changed? (3 ways)

20. What are the advantages/disadvantages of open diplomacy?

21. Why is leader-to-leader diplomacy a mixed blessing?

22. Speak about the similarities and differences between propaganda and public diplomacy.

References

Heywood, A. (2011). Global Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jackson, R., and Sorensen, G. (2003). Introduction to International Relations. Theories and Approaches, Second Edition. New York: Oxford University Press Inc.

Kegley, C.W. Jr., and Wittkopf, E. R. (1999). World Politics: Trend and Transformation, Seventh Edition. New York: Macmillan Press LT