diplomcy 7

 DIPLOMACY AND POLITICS

the only other popular alternative then on offer: ‘Bolshevism.’ History would appear to have worked in their favor. One of Wilson’s bitterest critics—his fellow American, the diplomat George Kennan—admitted many decades later, just before the Berlin Wall had fallen, that Wilson had been far ahead of his time. In other words, the international system had reached a point where the world itself had become too small for interstate rivalry to flourish. The world’s politics was on the path to becoming, to use a phrase known to political scientists, fully ‘interdependent.’ Politics were transformed; so too was diplomacy. The choice facing statesmen and diplomats was not whether or not such transformations could be halted or perhaps hijacked; rather, it was how best to adapt official structures and both official and unofficial relationships to the ‘new’ circumstances; that is, to master rather than fight a political transformation as it was widely understood. 

Order and Governance To the diplomat, ‘order,’ however durable, is negotiable and temporary and requires frequent tending and cultivation, as would a garden. Since the late Renaissance, order has been measured by standards of external behavior irrespective, in principle, of internal politics. That is to say, states ought to be judged by their actions toward other states, less by how they treat their own people or how they otherwise govern their own affairs. The peak of this separation in practice was the period of “Old Diplomacy,” during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. In general, according to Nicolson, it was the …method… that best adapted to the conduct of relations between civilised States. It was courteous and dignified; it was continuous and gradual; it attached importance to knowledge and experience; it took account of the realities of existing power; and it defined good faith, lucidity and precision as the qualities essential to any sound negotiation. The mistakes, the follies and the crimes that during those three hundred years accumulated to the discredit of the old diplomacy can, when examined at their sources, be traced to evil foreign policy rather than to faulty methods of negotiation. It is regrettable that the bad things they did should have dishonoured the excellent manner in which they did them (Nicolson, 1954, 72–73). This division of official action—between internal and external—was eroded by the failures leading up to the First World War and by Wilson’s