di 11

 DIPLOMACY AND POLITICS

politics as usual. So far the record has been mixed—for example, in the declining utility of the summits of developed nations (G-7, etc.), which began in the 1970s as a small, informal collective meeting of finance ministers, have since devolved into a global circus at which neither state nor non-state actors achieve much of a concrete nature besides their own self-promotion. Some theorists of governance would call this evidence of ‘empowerment,’ but from the traditional diplomatic point of view, it is the opposite. Diplomacy is measured by its tangible results, however continuous the process of reaching them may be. Yet, at the same time, who can say that global governance does not require regular public affirmation? Diplomacy, after all, is both representative and representational. Diplomats represent their leaders and fellow citizens; they also represent an idea or concept of international society, and, again, of civilization. If the standards of representation change alongside society, so too should the shape of their expression, whether they come in summits (G-7, G-20, and the like) or some other forum yet to be invented. Geopolitics has not stood still either. In the middle-twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson’s concept of the universal community of power was replaced, partially, by a narrower concept: the regional security community. The most familiar example is the North Atlantic, later called the Euro-Atlantic. On the one hand, such a community was based on the rule of law and all the norms that Wilson espoused, with the partial exception of free trade, which took some time to negotiate. Wilson imagined that his international community would supplant forever the concept of the balance of power. In fact, such regional communities did the opposite: they supplanted Wilson’s universalism with smaller entities that took into account the realities—that is to say, the balances and imbalances—of power, including military power. A North Atlantic regional community probably never would have succeeded without NATO, for example; although, to be fair, the formal definition of NATO was never exclusively military. Such communities are nevertheless diplomatic inventions. They formed around treaties, understandings, and arrangements in the classic, Old Diplomatic fashion, but with the aim of furthering, piece by piece, a world order that was more Wilsonian than not. The final point is instructive for understanding today’s relationship between politics and diplomacy. Postwar regional communities were not fixed. They were, as the saying went, ‘organic.’ There had been a few diplomats and statesmen—notably the American diplomat Sumner Welles and the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who each imagined a world of sovereign regions in concert as larger versions of nineteenth-century European nation-states. This vision did not prevail because it was not consistent with the politics of the time. Both the Soviet Union and the United States would