The simplest explanation for why diplomats became representatives of a transformative conception of peace, and one to which they are surprisingly willing to subscribe when the heat is on, is that they are a pretty over-determined crowd. It may be that "the vices of diplomacy appear to be in general. . .those of the surrounding society and of the time" and that diplomats spend most of their time simply trying to carry out the instructions of their governments.(33)  If the prevailing assumption among governments and people is that a stronger world order is needed, then it should come as no surprise that diplomats will be engaged in its construction. But this begs the question of where the prevailing assumptions about diplomacy come from in a way which is unflattering to the profession, and it sits uneasily with the sense diplomats have of themselves as an élite.

Two other explanations for this professional passivity might be explored. The first is that it is not a function of their professional self-image as public servants but arises from a pessimism about the human condition which resides in the bosom of the best diplomats and is confirmed by their experience. In Ernest Satow’s study, the Austrian diplomatist, Hubner, was "compelled to contend for a bad cause" and the author concludes that the most one can attain by "prudence and love of peace is the postponement of the evil day."(34)  This might be a reasonable conclusion if one had spent one’s professional life in the service of the Ballhausplatz, but it is a remarkable one for a Briton lecturing in the midst of his own country’s greatness. In a similar vein, the Englishman, Harold Nicolson, noted that diplomats tend to develop certain "functional defects" because of the "human folly or egotism" they are forced to witness during careers in which they know the facts and others do not. As a result, they may mistakenly regard serious passions as transitory emotions and "thus underestimate the profound emotion by which whole nations may be swayed." The danger is that the diplomat "often becomes denationalized, internationalized, and therefore dehydrated, an elegant, empty husk." Yet Nicolson also notes that a profession should not "be judged by its failures" and elegant, empty, diplomatic husks are rare outside the world of fiction and popular imagination.(35) 

Secondly, the experiences which feed world-weariness may also give rise to cynicism, laying diplomats open to the charge that they simply seek power or, worse, to be close to it without responsibility. In accounting for his own success, the British Foreign Office permanent under-secretary, Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, declared in the early 1900s that his "theory in the service was that ‘power’ is the first aim."(36)  Diplomats have served some fairly odious regimes. The Nazi seizure of power provoked only one ambassadorial resignation.(37)  Dobrynin, for all his efforts to present himself as a civilizing influence on Soviet power, remains remarkably glib about the activities of his colleagues. Indeed, the Russian experience from Tsarist empire to Bolshevik state and from USSR to Russian republic provides remarkable examples of shifts in the allegiances of professional diplomats.(38)  It can be argued that the evolution of the European Union (EU) is providing us with others.

However, the most one can conclude from this is that diplomats are neither more nor less virtuous than the rest of the population. For every quote about power, there are many more about restraining and tempering its use. Nor have diplomats played the passive and pessimistic parts assigned to them by some commentators in which they simply go with the flow or, to put it more professionally, do their best to execute the will of their political masters without making things worse. More research is needed on the role of diplomats in policy formulation, but it is clear that some have taken the lead in advocating peace through the construction of an order which circumscribed the autonomy of their sovereigns. They did so because they thought it was a good idea. They continue to do so, however, not as cosmopolitans in the pejorative sense used by critics to call into question their patriotism.

More typical than Nicolson’s elegant husks is what might be called the practical - or even unreflective - cosmopolitanism exhibited by Frank Roberts when he recalls his role as Britain’s ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the 1950s. He suggests that his position was unusual because he was "like any Ambassador, the representative of his country, but at the same time share[d] a collective responsibility as a member of the Council." As a consequence, it was his duty "not only to represent British views on the Council but also to press upon London, when required, the collective views of the Council in addition to reporting those of Spaak, Norstaad and individual national representatives." It is "pressing" rather than reporting which is important here, and on one occasion "pressing upon London" resulted in Roberts being summoned to 10 Downing Street after Earl Mountbatten complained about his support for American generals in an argument with their British counterparts. Roberts makes no explicit judgment about his conduct and discusses neither his conception of his role nor the issues raised by his carpeting. Nevertheless, one senses a confidence bordering on smugness that Roberts believes that he was right, Mountbatten was wrong, and that anyone with a grasp of diplomacy would agree.(39) 

This interpretation involves a degree of reading into the text, one of the professional hazards of studying people who write carefully but not necessarily transparently. Although unabashed and assertive cosmopolitanism is hard to find in the writings of diplomats, in one case at least, there is little need for such interpretive skills. Dag Hammarskjöld, in writing about the impact of public opinion in the 1960s, maintained that, while diplomacy had changed little from ancient times until the nineteenth century, it now needed "new techniques" for a "new world." The challenge was to gain acceptance of the new techniques when neither diplomats nor the general public were "fully acclimated" to the role now played by public opinion. Too often, public opinion meant that compromise would be shunned "out of fear that it will be labeled appeasement or defeat." If that was so, Hammarskjöld argued, "no diplomat is likely to meet the demands of public opinion on him as a representative in international policy unless he understands this opinion and unless he respects it deeply enough to give it leadership when he feels that the opinion does not truly represent the deeper and finally decisive aspirations in the minds and hearts of the people."(40)  What is remarkable in this quote is not the internationalist claim implicit in it. After all, Hammarskjöld as secretary-general of the United Nations was an international civil servant in a sense that goes beyond Roberts’ experience of trying to wear multiple hats. Nor is it the remarkable rhetorical finesse by which he proposes to give people what they want, rather than what they think they want, because he respects them. It is the underlying professional confidence, shared with Roberts, that he knows best because he has a grasp of what is needed and what is possible in international politics.

This confidence in a grasp of the essentials is a dominant theme in writings of diplomats. They present themselves as practical men and women who take the world for what it is, rather than what it might be, and who let reason, rather than emotion, govern their actions. Mattingly notes with approval the "platitudinous character" of the advice-to-ambassadors literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because "the simple and difficult rules of any enduring art" always sound like platitudes.(41)  Diplomacy "does not so much require special qualifications as make special calls for common qualifications."(42)  To the honesty at its heart might be added "the application of intelligence and tact" and "a ready wit and sense of proportion."(43)  Diplomats "are not inclined to separate questions of principle from their practical affairs, or to neglect administrative problems because of their more theoretical preoccupations."(44)  Lord Carnock, for example, was convinced that Anglo-Russian differences at the turn of the century "were caused by simple misunderstanding of each other."(45)  His grandson, Harold Nicolson, maintained that foreign affairs consisted of "the development of perfectly simple and ascertainable probabilities." Indeed, he was highly critical of those who persisted in seeing them "as some elaborately shifting pattern" or who made diplomacy more complicated than was necessary.(46)  The corollary to straightforward, honest men capable "of seeing the right people at the right time and saying the right things to them in the right way" is that the world is populated by people who are not.(47) 

Thus, like Dobrynin with his "reassuring presence," diplomats see themselves as the steadying influence when others - publics and politicians alike - are carried away by the heat of the moment to demand the satisfaction of national honour with war, or be tempted by fear and selfishness to renounce important international responsibilities when they become dangerous or expensive to uphold. This professional detachment, however, is made possible only by a philosophical distance from the idea of international politics. Diplomats see themselves as more aware than those they represent of the conceptual sand on which the international order is built and believe that it is their professional duty to let this awareness guide their actions. It is the amateurs, in this view, who, when it occurs to them to think about it at all, will take an idea like sovereignty literally and insist upon its implications uncompromisingly. The professionals, by contrast, keep the notional world of sovereign states running by curbing the impulses to apply its principles too vigorously. They can do so because, thanks to their expertise and training, they do not inhabit the international world in quite the way the rest of us apparently do.

It is this which may be called the diplomatic disposition. Leaving aside the accuracy of the assumptions on which it is based, it has important and paradoxical consequences because diplomats believe it. On the one hand, their professional detachment from international politics inhibits them from defending the representational requirements of an effective system of diplomacy among sovereign states, even though their own positions would be inconceivable without such an idea. Representing one’s literal prince in a God-ordained order has a plausibility which representing one’s figurative prince, be it a government, country, or people, can never quite attain. Besides, diplomats know that in an important sense France, Japan, and Britain are not real and that bad things can happen when foreign policy is dictated by those who believe they are. On the other hand, they cannot welcome their publics sharing their own convictions about the notional quality of international politics because, in the end, they think that international order depends upon such notions being accepted. A world of states whose citizens possessed the consciousness of diplomats would be unrepresentable, and a world of states whose diplomats possessed the consciousness of citizens would be unmanageable. Ideally, therefore, people should live with the consciousness of citizens within their countries, accepting the claims of their governments while acknowledging the expertise of their diplomats in the conduct of relations among them.

Insofar as this state of affairs pertains, diplomats enjoy considerable leeway in establishing procedures for pursuing and reconciling the interests of the states they represent. They can "cheat" on the rules and even, on occasion, on their princes to keep the world running smoothly. The trick, as ever, is knowing what one can get away with. However, in the twentieth century public opinion had to be palliated before it would allow diplomats to do anything. Hammarskjöld suggested that this would result in nationalist or statist restrictions imposed on diplomatic practice, but it did not, at least not in any simple sense. Rather, the rise of public opinion coincided with the emergence of the great ideological conflicts whose strategic and material consequences impelled diplomats to accompany their political leaders from serving peace through international adjustments to building it through international reform. Grave threats and great promises enabled governments to embark on this adventure and their publics to support them.