diplomccy 6

 DIPLOMACY AND POLITICS

Diplomacy was inspired similarly, for its most basic premise—open covenants openly arrived at—was, at root, a change in diplomatic method. However, the New Diplomacy then went much further because its aim was to govern a new world of imperial successor states that all adhered to the same liberal principles. The New Diplomacy took the Westphalian order a step further: no longer was state sovereignty enough; public opinion now counted, or was said to count, a great deal more than it had before, for the general public was much more interested, it was also said, in foreign affairs. The citizens of these states also had to be sovereign; they had to select and determine their own governments; they had to combine together to govern the world in a way that set their mutual interest over particular interests; and they had to choose and enforce a just world order. None of this was new. Rules of conduct, including principles of universal character, date back, at least in the Western tradition, to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Among other things, the Greeks developed the concept of the collective will, and the cultivation of it through negotiation, cooperation, precedent, rules, and norms. So were certain familiar impediments to sound diplomacy, as Nicolson has noted them: a tendency to prize the clever over the reliable; the interference of legislatures in external affairs; and the proliferation of political quarrels (Nicolson, 1954, 10–11). Yet the Greeks also employed the basic article of diplomacy—the treaty—to settle disputes and preserve peace; they established the viability of leagues and alliances; the ‘Amphictyony,’ or ancient league of Greek tribes, for all its faults, was a worthy institution that was among the first successful attempts to stabilize and civilize the exercise of politics across borders; indeed, this early diplomatic institution became almost a spiritual buttress to politics by enshrining the league as a sacred body. The effect was to combine politics and culture—or, to be more precise, to couch a divisive politics within a common culture—so as to regulate the former and promote the latter. As such institutions later formed the basis of empires, they would see the subordination of power to law, or rather, the exercise of power through law, which diplomacy served. This was the political tradition to which Wilson and his New Diplomacy adhered. By Wilson’s time, there had begun “a shift in the centre of power” from monarchies and aristocracies to cabinets to citizenries (Nicolson, 1977, 30). Yet Wilson’s proposed vehicle for collective security—the multilateral congress to be known as the League of Nations—was not too different, at least in spirit, from the many congresses and conferences that had come before. Even what we now call public opinion, so championed by Wilson, had had an important influence on diplomacy going back at least to the time of