But is Roberts right? Is the confidence of the diplomatic disposition in the sovereign state system which allows him to tell his story in the way he does justified? After all, it is not merely the sterile, frightened ideologues of the Politiburo who have recently been swept away. So too has the USSR which Dobrynin served and about the impermanence of which he has little to say. It can be argued that European great powers face a similar, if gentler, fate. It may be symptomatic of international political change that one must turn to diplomats from the remaining superpower for clear reaffirmation of the priorities of princes over peace. The American Max Kampelman argues that one should be careful about creating too many international organizations because "experience shows that [their] staffs. . . begin to establish their own policy and goals."(48)  Few contemporary European diplomats would openly agree, and none would echo Robert Vansittart’s view of a half-century ago that "The more we are together" should become "the Froth-Blowers’ Anthem," at least not on the record.(49)  And yet the anchor remains. Ask EU diplomats about their daily work and they will describe in great detail the multilateral committees in which they try to establish a better way of solving this problem or regulating that behavior for the benefit of all. The operative pronoun is "we" and yet, ask them who they serve and they will say their government or their country.

Skepticism about the complacency of the diplomatic disposition is, indeed, widespread. It is most obviously called into question by aspects of the complex pattern of relations which is emerging among the members of the EU. Much of it remains recognizably diplomatic, the bilateral relations between members, for example, and, if the diplomats themselves are to be believed, even a great deal of the complex and technical bargaining around the operations of common policies. It is less easy to regard the activities of the Permanent Representatives Committee, the Commission staff, or even the people seconded to the European presidency in the same vein. Who do they represent as they engage in the construction of new policies, regimes, and, in the latter case conceivably, a politico-diplomatic entity? Can French policy on monetary union be interpreted as a security strategy against Germany when, if it is implemented, it will possibly be no longer clear just what is being secured against whom? Only the intense difficulties which the representatives of the member states experience in accomplishing common objectives permits agreement with those who contend that the whole ensemble may still be regarded as an exercise in conference diplomacy.(50) 

A far more common scholarly reaction to the diplomatic disposition is the increasing body of international theory which assumes that the sovereign state system is fading and that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Brian Hocking, for example, identifies catalytic diplomacy, in which new kinds of actors deal with new kinds of issues in new ways.(51)  Catalytic diplomats control resources, enjoy access, and possess certain skills which allow them to work at all levels of society building coalitions out of a shifting milieu of actors to secure interests and solve problems. Canada’s high commissioner to Britain, for example, can mobilize Cornish fishermen to press London for a European fisheries policy more friendly to the interests of the Atlantic provinces. His ambassadorial position gives him certain assets, but it does not appear to be essential. A lawyer or professional mediator representing Canadian fisheries might play nearly the same game, indeed, might do rather better than the professionals who "retain an overriding concern with principles of state sovereignty" and work with an overly narrow understanding of peace. Some think we need "field diplomats," distinguished not by whom they represent but by the skills they possess in mediating and facilitating conflict resolution.(52) 

Conceivably, therefore, diplomacy is losing both its professional and conceptual identity as we move towards an era distinguished by what George Kennan called "diplomacy without the diplomats." In an otherwise sympathetic treatment, Hamilton and Langhorne suggest that "diplomacy has been transformed and transcended."(53)  Such sentiments are expressions of the current movement among international theorists away from treating international relations as a distinctive branch of human relations. If they are right, the institution of diplomacy as it has emerged over the centuries is certainly in deep trouble because it is built upon the notion of representation, and, problematic though this is, on what basis might diplomats be said to represent anything other than states?

One could imagine replacing them with a new sort of profession defined in terms of the functional skills of negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and conciliation, contracted on a commercial basis, but its agents would not be diplomats because they would lack both the symbolic and political significance of servants of the state. Nor, one suspects, would they be as effective. Today, for example, an American’s negotiating skills may be formidable, but they are enhanced by the fact that he or she represents the United States and not the United Nations, the EU, the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe, or any other agency.

However, the possibility that diplomacy might disappear or be transcended should be treated with considerable skepticism on empirical grounds. Diplomacy has not changed all that much because, on close inspection, it turns out that it was never quite the way we have learned to remember it. At the end of the fifteenth century, two French diplomats on the way to visit the Sultan were killed by Spanish troops on behalf of Margaret of Hungary, then the governor of the Spanish Netherlands.(54)  Four hundred years later, Arthur Hardinge found himself presiding over Portuguese courts in Zanzibar and settling territorial disputes between his Portuguese and German neighbours, while Lord Carnock spent at least some of his time in Tangier building local coalitions to oppose the deforestation of the surrounding hills by charcoal burners and attempting to frustrate British gun-runners acting in the French interest.(55)  Even Hardinge of Penshurst describes how his efforts to marry Princess Marie to the Romanian Crown Prince did not detract from a parallel campaign to secure access to the Romanian market for British cotton.(56)  Sovereigns may have been a requisite of diplomacy in the past, but a tidy world of sovereigns with clearly demarcated political relations never was.

We may conclude then that, with a few exceptions resulting from undiplomatic excitement or most diplomatic ketman, the diplomats were right. One could serve peace, even in the sense of constructing international order, without damaging one’s foundations in the sovereign state system because essentially that system was and is not disappearing. Nevertheless, the imperatives of world war and cold war which made serving peace in a transformative sense seem so necessary, and the certainties of the ideologies which made it seem so attractive, have been greatly weakened. They have been replaced by a world of relative security in which fragmentation is as much a fact as interdependence, and in which diversity and separateness have re-emerged as a counterpoint to cosmopolitanism. The challenge which confronts post-cold war diplomacy, therefore, is not how to respond to the erosion of its own premise; it is to reassert the extent to which that premise, the problem of relations in a fragmented human community whose components value their sovereignty, remains operative.

A failure to be effective here courts two dangers. First, diplomacy’s legitimacy as an institution of international society may be weakened. Every diplomat who does not represent a country faces the questions: who do you represent and in whose name do you make your requests and suggest your policies? The more institutionally removed diplomats are from their established positions as representatives of their governments, the harder these questions are to answer. The claim to represent countries has problems, but the answers that diplomats represent no one or everyone, or different people and different things in different contexts, are no answers at all. Hocking’s high commissioner does not derive his authority from his skills, the situation he finds himself in, or the services he can provide, but from the fact that he represents his country. To obscure this is to do him and his profession a disservice.

Secondly, a failure to reassert diplomacy’s premise contributes to bad foreign policy. It is still too early to predict the consequences of community-building and community-expansion in North America, Europe, and elsewhere. I suspect that either the more grandiose schemes for building political order on economic and financial integration will subside into more prosaic exercises in intergovernmental collaboration, or that we shall witness a partial disintegration of the fusion between politics and economics which has been one of the hallmarks of the last century. If countries on the gold standard, or countries like Canada and the United States or England and Scotland, could pursue independent political policies and conduct intense arguments while their currencies intermingled, then conceivably the participants in a single European currency system could do the same. However, one does not need to speculate about the possible consequences of community-building in the absence of community to identify examples of bad policy. Several failures have already occurred in one area of traditional concern - getting the great powers to exercise their responsibilities towards the maintenance of international order.

As recent experiences in the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, and the former Zaire suggest, the consensus behind this traditional role remains shallow and fragile. The war against Iraq was won, but only after a major expenditure of diplomatic and political effort. Iraq had to be presented as a major threat to international order, nor because of any equalization of power brought about by changes in military technology - the course of the war demonstrated that no such equalization had taken place - but because this was the only way in which a variety of constituencies could be persuaded to support it. The wars between the republics of the former Yugoslavia proved impervious to the new type of military intervention practiced under United Nations auspices, described as humane and sophisticated by its supporters in Europe and timid by its detractors in the United States. Only direct but limited punitive intervention by the United States against one side arrested further deterioration, but the consequences of that action remain uncertain, principally because great-power commitment to raising the stakes, if necessary, remains equally uncertain. And in Africa, the general unwillingness of the great powers to intervene and their inability to agree with each other when one of their number risked a more assertive role - the United States in Somalia, France in Rwanda - were exposed by the demand that something must be done.

Whatever the answer may be to that problem of post-cold war great power intervention (and it is possible that it involves convincing publics that sending one or two thousand soldiers abroad is a small deal rather than a big one), it will not be found in improving the machinery for co-ordination at the interstate or supranational level. By concentrating on the architecture within which such problems might be managed, post-cold war diplomacy has done little to correct the lack of perspective and much to maintain the gap between the weak commitment to do something and the high expectation that something must be done. Even when the vast amount of diplomatic and political effort expended on these architectures succeeds in sending a few thousand soldiers into the field or committing a few score of aircraft to aerial policing, the best this approach seems capable of delivering in terms of great power engagement is over-commitment. This, in turn, courts disappointment, failure, and increased public skepticism about the value of foreign adventures which, when they become costly or dangerous, are exposed as serving no demonstrable national interest.

The worst it courts is great power disagreement. To date, such disagreements have resulted only in the immobilization of policies. Differences over Bosnia, for example, meant that United States preferences were not acted upon until European preferences had been demonstrated to be bankrupt. Differences between the French and the Americans over policies in central Africa resulted in the former’s withdrawal. Suppose, however, that the gap between the United States and other claimants to great power status narrows, as it eventually must, and suppose that in their efforts to secure domestic support for interventions, governments and their advisors are tempted to make their case in terms of national interests (how else are they to persuade their electorates to pay the necessary price in blood and treasure?). Either development might make it harder for great powers to resolve their differences over collective intervention by suspending their policies or by doing nothing.