diploomay 8

 innovation that followed it. The tone, character, and dimensions of domestic politics all have become difficult to separate from their international effects, and vice versa. The domestic and the foreign realms in many countries today are interpenetrated and even interdependent. They are also rather disordered. When politicians and diplomats speak of order, the term carries a whiff of reaction. Old Diplomacy did rely on a hierarchy of powers; the more powerful—which fashioned themselves as the Great Powers—certainly held sway over weaker ones. However, the Great Powers also bore the greatest responsibility for maintaining peace, or what they liked to call ‘equilibrium.’ This demanded as much, or even more, restraint and good sense than more overt forms of political interference meant to impress or compel obedience. The popular word today for the ways of responsibility is ‘governance.’ How does it differ from order? Less than we might think. Both terms connote stability, peace, and regularity, or at least some insulation from drastic political and social change. But they differ in their relation to politics. Order rests on the line drawn between the domestic and the foreign. Governance erodes this line by promoting a normative measurement of political rule both within and among states. Whereas, in theory, order is more or less stable, governance is rated as more or less ‘good.’ Good governance is judged, in other words, less by its political viability or longevity at particular junctures than by its adherence to certain standards and values in perpetuity. These differences may blur in practice. A stable order may cloak forces of instability, many deriving from bad governance. A good system of governance may cloak resentments that lead to social and political disorder. Yet with both conditions there is a dependency similar to the one between peace and justice. It is hard to imagine the promotion of good governance in the absence of a peaceful order. Put more prosaically, one must survive in order to thrive. For all that the proponents of good governance tout its superiority on moral and political grounds, it may be that they take the latter too often for granted. Few states at war find it easy to be well governed. Nevertheless, there is no desirable alternative to good governance, just as there is none for justice. Few responsible societies would advocate one. Nevertheless, for diplomats, many of whom have not disavowed the pursuit of order, the diplomacy of governance can pose difficulties. Such diplomacy can degenerate to what former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once dismissed as a “policy of scold.” There are other names for it: the “diplomacy of insult” or “megaphone diplomacy.” Most are variations on one of the more ineffective modes of politics, that of name-calling. The diplomat in such cases is converted into a cheerleader or taskmaster, passing and pushing judgments on the actions of foreign governments. Too often this merges with