Getting to yes is not the objective of a diplomat. Adopt clear red lines and do not compromise beyond them. Build long-term physical and mental stamina. With the exercise of power and responsibility comes continuous hour days, filled with pressure and stress. Be fit. Accept dangerous assignments. Diplomats frequently serve in menacing locales, sometimes die in the line of duty. From Libya to Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond, this is not a line of work only conducted in rarefied surroundings.
Reflect on your degree of anticipated personal courage before entering this profession. Study history. Former Harvard faculty giants Ernest May and Richard Neustadt eloquently counsel thinking in the context of time.
They insist that knowledge of history does not provide exact policy prescriptions in present circumstances, but it does illuminate choices and raise central questions of policy formulation and implementation. Prudently speak your opinion to power. Be ready to disagree with evolving policy when it really matters. But choose your dissenting moments wisely. Be loyal and truthful to your boss. Never question outside of government a decision made further up your bureaucratic chain of command, no matter how much you disagree with it.
Once such a decision is made, your professional duty is to try your best to implement it. And never misrepresent or lie to your official superiors, no matter how expedient it might appear at the moment. If you do so, you should be fired. Cultivate policy resilience. If the Duke of Wellington never lost a battle, most generals do — and so will you.
Expect periodic policy defeats and energetically move on to the next challenge. Acquire relevant work experience. Invest time, energy and effort in your own professional development.
In diplomacy — as in most endeavours — experience is a crucial component of success. As Renaissance painters demanded, apprenticeship is a necessary step in professional enhancement. Would you hire a plumber who was academically well versed in water distribution, but had never installed a pipe? Know your political ideology. After all, if the idea of representing sovereigns posed practical, political, and conceptual problems, why would the idea of representing a transformational conception of peace be any easier?
One does not have to like a prince, state, or nation to be able to see on what basis diplomats attempt to represent them.
One may like the idea of peace, but on what basis do diplomats claim to represent it and act on its behalf? In a transforming system, why does peace need diplomats, rather than politicians and other civil servants, to represent it?
As the historical narrative makes clear, diplomats faced immensely mitigating circumstances as they wrestled with these questions, but their answers directly impinge on the larger question: what next?
After a mere ninety years, the universals have departed and the disciplines of grand strategy have been relaxed. The simplest explanation for why diplomats became representatives of a transformative conception of peace, and one to which they are surprisingly willing to subscribe when the heat is on, is that they are a pretty over-determined crowd. Two other explanations for this professional passivity might be explored. The first is that it is not a function of their professional self-image as public servants but arises from a pessimism about the human condition which resides in the bosom of the best diplomats and is confirmed by their experience.
Secondly, the experiences which feed world-weariness may also give rise to cynicism, laying diplomats open to the charge that they simply seek power or, worse, to be close to it without responsibility. The Nazi seizure of power provoked only one ambassadorial resignation. Indeed, the Russian experience from Tsarist empire to Bolshevik state and from USSR to Russian republic provides remarkable examples of shifts in the allegiances of professional diplomats.
However, the most one can conclude from this is that diplomats are neither more nor less virtuous than the rest of the population.
For every quote about power, there are many more about restraining and tempering its use. 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.
A failure to be effective here courts two dangers. Every diplomat who does not represent a country faces the questions: who do you represent and in whose name do you make your requests and suggest your policies?
The more institutionally removed diplomats are from their established positions as representatives of their governments, the harder these questions are to answer. The claim to represent countries has problems, but the answers that diplomats represent no one or everyone, or different people and different things in different contexts, are no answers at all.
To obscure this is to do him and his profession a disservice. In sum, the skills required here are restraint, integrity, dignity, professionalism. Diplomats working to serve their countries should therefore display qualities of patriotism , loyalty , national pride , and a good knowledge of their national policies. In a bilateral context, between two governments, irrespective of the scope of the negotiation from a protocol arrangement for an official visit to a wide-ranging trade agreement , negotiation skills require: good knowledge of the topic or reliance on experts ; flexibility and readiness for compromise at the proper moment and not without compensation ; and a sense of win-win outcome.
In a multilateral context, with potentially multiple partners and adversaries, negotiation is more complex but requires the same skills, and, in addition, a sense of initiative and coalition building. Five ways to remain diplomatic without shaking hands. Read now. This calls for skills that can be acquired and developed on the job: prior knowledge of the situation and willingness to understand it better; good contacts and interaction with all sectors of society, from officials to civil society; agility in writing timely, clear, and concise reports to the right echelon, with the added value of analysis compared to information available from other sources mainly media, including social media.
This requires active contacts with all sectors of the local population, not only the officials and the elites.
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