Diplomacy and Politics

BY KENNETH WEISBRODE

Introduction For much of history the terms ‘diplomacy’ and ‘politics’ have been intimate, as diplomacy regulates and mediates politics between sovereign entities, which have principally meant nation-states and their governments. The diplomatic record includes episodes of rupture, namely wars. Military history, strictly speaking, is a subcategory of diplomatic history, which was once among the most prestigious of fields for professional historians. This is no longer the case and has not been for some time. Diplomacy has not really recovered its prestige since the cataclysm of 1914. Some scholars, reacting to Woodrow Wilson’s promotion during and after the war of what he called the “New Diplomacy,” invented something ‘new’ of their own called the discipline of international relations. That some of these scholars sought to repudiate Wilsonianism—the ideology of the New Diplomacy—was beside the point. Its basis was not historical in the traditional sense outlined by Leopold von Ranke, in that it did not seek to uncover and reconstruct the past for its own sake, but rather to draw lessons about the ways statesmen ought to act. In this respect, international relations was not that much different from Wilsonianism: that is, it was a normative, programmatic discipline that derived from general laws of human behavior. This trend continued into and well beyond the Second World War, and was buoyed by the popularity around the world of Anglo-American social science, where international relations resided. As late as the 2000s, students in introductory “IR” courses were assigned E.H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis and Kenneth Waltz’s Man, the State, and War, first published in 1939 and 1959 respectively, as the foundational texts of their discipline. The first was a