dip 9

 DIPLOMACY AND POLITICS

accusations of hypocrisy, and with blind interference. The diplomatic task is thereby inverted: diplomats are meant to persuade others to do what is, ideally, in their mutual interest—or, as it has been said by cynics, to do what is in the diplomat’s interest while thinking it is in their own. Now, diplomats are meant to persuade others that they are acting against their own interests, and what ought to be their own values, because they do not comply with particular standards. It would be difficult not to apportion some of the blame to Wilson. Politics, in his progressive tradition, ought to be overtaken by superior administration. Interests and passions were no longer political subjects, but rather technocratic objects. Diplomacy, accordingly, has become the exercise of ‘ensuring compliance,’ to use another popular Americanism. In such a world, diplomats are again mere political auxiliaries. This depiction of governance is not meant as a caricature. The ideology of good governance is a fact. So too have been many positive results. However, what role is there for diplomats in a world ruled by legal regimes, norms, and institutions? Diplomats do not eliminate politics from human affairs, but their political methods resemble bureaucratic or legislative logrolling more than diplomacy. The most familiar case of this is the European Union, whose origins were in a diplomatic agreement between France and Germany over their respective steel and coal industries. The development of the European Communities, and eventually the European Union, became an exercise in multilateral diplomacy of the first order, featuring a series of negotiations, summits, and treaties. Yet now that the EU and its many institutions exist, where do the diplomats fit? One place is in the new European External Action Service, a de facto EU foreign ministry. Most of its officers come from national foreign ministries. Yet within the EU itself, there is little for national diplomats to do; most decisions are left to politicians and bureaucrats. This again is consistent with the Wilsonian vision. Its governing body was meant to be the League of Nations, which would not have been so much a league or an alliance, but rather a supranational organ that would have eliminated the need for traditional diplomacy. So much for the theory. Yet even the broadest sketch of contemporary international relations would show that they have much more in common with the Wilsonian legal-moral-institutional tradition than with any alternative, the persistence of realpolitik notwithstanding. Today’s diplomats find themselves less occupied in resisting the obsolescence of their profession than, at least in principle, in devising more adaptations to an ever more complicated world. The intricate inter-state negotiations of the past now join other negotiations among states and other entities, and even among parties within states. Diplomacy has not seen so