author: Geoff Berridge
Twentieth-Century Diplomacy: A Case Study of British Practice, 1963-1976
2009
What is so original about the book is that the author has asked himself: What are the major forms of diplomatic contact? And followed this with the question: How and to what effect were they each employed by one state over a period sufficiently short to make detailed research possible but not so short as to make it impossible to identify trends? Having chosen Britain over the years from 1963 until 1976, he seeks to establish which diplomatic methods were the most useful for which purposes.
Young begins with two contextual chapters. The first provides a succinct overview of the issues confronting British foreign policy in the period, a penetrating – and at times amusing – analysis of how policy was made, and a most useful description of the significant changes in the composition of the diplomatic service during these years. The second chapter is on ‘the diplomatic machine’, which he tackles by examining in turn the three major official post-war reports of which it was the object, which happened to fall more or less within his period: Plowden (1964), Duncan (1969) and Berrill (1977). He rightly praises the first, salvages the second from the mistaken charge that it was inconsequential, and damns the last with faint praise (Berrill made the elementary mistake of failing to recognise that declining military and economic power meant more diplomacy not less). My only reservation about the account of the Duncan Report is its relatively slender treatment of its impact on the commercial priorities of embassies as opposed to the economies which it urged in the diplomatic service itself.
It is with chapter 4, ‘Resident Embassies’, that Professor Young gets into diplomatic method itself, and it is an impressive launch. The role of the British embassy, whether accredited to states or international organizations, did not diminish in either the volume of its work or its importance, he demonstrates; instead, the increase in ministerial visits and multilateral diplomacy simply produced a change in the character of its role. But this varied from embassy to embassy (“There is no ‘typical’ embassy.”) and could vary in the same embassy in just a matter of years. To support and illustrate his theme, he looks in some detail at the work of six ambassadors during these years: David Hunt in Nigeria (1967-9), John Freeman in India (1965-8), Patrick Reilly in Paris (1965-8), Christopher Soames in Paris (1968-72), Lord Caradon at the UN (1964-70), and Michael Palliser at the EC (1973-5). “Their experience confirms that … it was essential to have an efficient, permanent and large diplomatic service”, he concludes, adding interestingly that some of these ambassadors contributed not only to the efficiency with which foreign policy was executed but also to its content.
The chapter on special missions is illustrated with a multitude of examples, especially that of Rhodesia. Here the author demonstrates how such missions multiplied massively during the period, using a host of different kinds of person for a host of different purposes. He rightly concludes that while resident ambassadors sometimes saw special envoys as a threat to their standing as well as a practical nuisance (especially in the case of the much put-upon Washington Embassy), the relationship was symbiotic: each needed the other. The dependence of visiting envoys on their country’s resident embassy is obvious enough but why does the latter sometimes value the former? In light of his research, Young suggests that this is not just because of the specialist knowledge that visitors can bring but because it is easier for an embassy to preserve good relations with the government to which it is accredited if it can pass to the visitor the task of delivering any unpleasant message. This is certainly true but some governments in this period undoubtedly also valued visiting envoys, especially high-ranking ones, because there was no better way of getting the local government’s favourable attention, increasing the embassy’s access, and giving it a peg on which to hang its propaganda work. My own recent research has revealed that during the 1960s the Turkish government felt undervalued by an absence of high-level visitors from Britain, and as a result the British Embassy in Ankara repeatedly begged for more of them in order to improve the bilateral atmosphere and make its own job easier. The author later makes the same point in connection with bilateral summits (p. 140) but many embassies would settle for less!
In dealing with summitry, first bilateral and then multilateral, John Young confirms most of what we already knew about this subject. This is a relief! However, some interesting new points also emerge: summitry may be used to boost the domestic position of a favoured leader; the ‘exchange of views’ category, which I had favoured, is too broad; and at least during this period the telephone conversations between British and other leaders were too trivial to be bracketed with face-to-face summits. State visits are also dealt with at length in a particularly original and interesting chapter. ‘Outward’ visits by the Queen, which totalled 18 over the period, were designed chiefly to promote ‘Great Britain plc’ and were generally thought to be successful, and ‘inward’ visits by foreign heads of state, which came to 26 in all, were designed principally to advertise Britain’s achievements and show what it had to offer. The chapter on this subject brings out how difficult the planning of such visits could be.
The book’s final chapter deals with British diplomatic practice in these years in dealing with unfriendly governments, or at least governments making unfriendly gestures on a narrow front. In particular, it describes how and why Britain brought its policy on recognition into line with the less problematical one of its European partners, shifting from recognising regimes to recognising states; and then followed willingly a path pioneered by the Egyptians and West Germans in the mid-1960s in employing interests sections to preserve diplomatic contact with governments which had severed relations with it as a publicity stunt.
I am full of admiration for this book but no reviewer worthy of the name will pass up the opportunity to point to some sin of omission. So I shall say that it is a pity that Young does not say more about so-called ‘public diplomacy’. This is a pity not because this is now such a wearyingly fashionable subject but because it was roughly at the beginning of his period that the Drogheda Report, which had urged the importance of this in 1953 (it was then known as ‘information work’), first began to be taken seriously. But the author is aware of the gap and in any case does touch on it at more than one place in passing.
What is the general conclusion of the book? Special envoys, bilateral summits and multilateral conferences all increased in number over these years but still left “plenty of room for more traditional forms of diplomatic contact to flourish”. This was not just because each of them met different needs but because each was dependent in some degree on the others. And so does Young convincingly demolish the still widespread assumption that ‘new’ forms of diplomacy are by definition competitors to old ones. His book is not just a sound test of existing general ideas about diplomacy during this period but a model which, if carefully emulated by others, using different states in different periods or different states in the same period, would advance dramatically our understanding of diplomacy.
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International Regimes
Foreign Ministries: Managing Diplomatic Networks and Optimizing Value
This is a collection of papers presented at the 2006 Conference on Foreign Ministries hosted by DiploFoundation in May 2006, in Geneva. The overarching theme is the adaptation and reform that these ministries have undertaken, in the shape of country experiences and the transformation implemented in specific areas such as the application of information technology for outreach to domestic publics, adaptation in consular services and outsourcing options. Some of the challenging issues addressed cover relations between civil servants and politicians, the role of sub-state entities in diplomacy, an...
Blundering Into Disaster: Surviving the First Century of the Nuclear Age
Diplomatic Theory from Machiavelli to Kissinger
Diplomacy and Journalism in the Victorian era: Charles Dickens, the Roving Englishman and the “white gloved cousinocracy”
Applying the pedagogy of positiveness to diplomatic communication
Part of Language and Diplomacy (2001): Dr Francisco Gomes de Matos applies what he calls the "Pedagogy of Positiveness" to diplomatic communication. He proposes a checklist of tips for diplomats to make their communication more positive, emphasising respect and understanding of the other side, and keeping in mind the ultimate goal of avoiding conflict.
Reflections on Persuasion in Diplomacy by Ambassador Joseph Cassar
In our families, in our jobs, in our political dynamic at a national level, we always try to persuade others, first and foremost. Since, diplomacy is part of the global human existence, it is natural that persuasion is an essential part and an essential tool of diplomacy … as much it is in your family life, in my family life, when you try to sort out trouble within your family, between your brothers and sisters, between your children and between your grandchildren at my age.
The origins, use and development of hot line diplomacy
The Queen’s Ambassador to the Sultan: Memoirs of Sir Henry A. Layard’s Constantinople Embassy, 1877-1880
Once more students of Ottoman diplomatic history are in debt to the scholar-publisher, Sinan Kuneralp, for Sir Henry Layard was one of the most remarkable and controversial of British ambassadors to Turkey in the nineteenth century and served there during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 – and yet the volumes of his memoirs dealing with this period have hitherto languished unpublished in the British Library, in part perhaps because of their size. (Layard admits himself to having been ‘somewhat minute, perhaps a great deal too much so’, p. 692.)They are here published almost in their entir...
Preventive Diplomacy: Stopping Wars Before they Start
The Diplomatic Corps as an Institution of International Society
Diplomatic Notebooks 1, 1958-1960: The view from Ankara
Zeki Kuneralp (1914-1998) was one of Turkey’s most gifted, well-liked and influential diplomats of the second half of the twentieth century. This book, dispassionately edited, introduced and annotated by his son, the scholar-publisher Sinan Kuneralp, is the first of a promised series of six volumes. Beginning in January 1958 and ending in August 1960, when Zeki Kuneralp became ambassador to Switzerland, it covers all but the first seven or eight months of the period when he was assistant secretary-general for political affairs in the Turkish foreign ministry in Ankara (in May 1960 he was ele...
Diplomats as cultural bridge builders
Diplomats are people who are on the fringe somewhere, because they are either permanently living in or at least dealing with alien cultures, cultures with different values. The success of a diplomat depends on this brinkmanship because, on the one hand, they must remain credible with their superiors back home and, on the other hand, they must have access to the leaders in the country where they are posted. This paper discusses the role of diplomats as cultural bridge-builders.
Diplomatic culture and its domestic context
Is there a specific, distinctive diplomatic culture? Given the fact that the conduct of diplomacy is regulated by international law and by custom, and since the structures through which states conduct their external relations, both bilateral and multilateral, are standardized, it is fair to say that both the institutions and the process form a pattern of their own, unique to this profession. The professional diplomatist actors on the international stage, and their institutions, display certain shared characteristics.
Texts in diplomacy
Part of Language and Diplomacy (2001): Professor Dietrich Kappeler provides an overview of the various types of formal written documents used in diplomacy, pointing out where the practices surrounding these documents have changed in recent years. He also discusses multi-language treaties, including the difficulties of translation and interpretation.
DiploDialogue – Metaphors for Diplomats
On Diplo’s blog, in Diplo’s classrooms, and at Diplo’s events, dialogues stretch over a series of entries, comments, and exchanges and may even linger. DiploDialogue summarises. It’s like in sports events: DiploDialogue aims to bring focus by deleting what, in hindsight, is less relevant. In this first DiploDialogue, Katharina Höne and Aldo Matteucci discuss the usefulness of analogies and metaphors for understanding international relations and diplomacy.
Diplomacy, Force & Leadership: Essays In Honor of Alexander L. George
Lucky George: Memoirs of an Anti-Politician
This is a belated and less than comprehensive note on this book, which I stumbled upon in a second-hand bookshop while on holiday. It is one of the most lively, shrewd, and brilliantly written diplomatic and political memoirs that I have ever come across.
Switzerland’s good offices: a changing concept, 1945-2002
Lessons from two fields
The Work of Diplomacy
FDR’s Ambassadors and the Diplomacy of Crisis: From the rise of Hitler to the end of World War II
What effect did personality and circumstance have on US foreign policy during World War II? This incisive account of US envoys residing in the major belligerent countries – Japan, Germany, Italy, China, France, Great Britain, USSR – highlights the fascinating role played by such diplomats as Joseph Grew, William Dodd, William Bullitt, Joseph Kennedy and W. Averell Harriman. Between Hitler's 1933 ascent to power and the 1945 bombing of Nagasaki, US ambassadors sculpted formal policy – occasionally deliberately, other times inadvertently – giving shape and meaning not always intended by ...
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy
The Craft of Diplomacy: How to Run a Diplomatic Service
Satow’s Diplomatic Practice, 6th ed
Satow’s Diplomatic Practice is a classic work, first published 90 years ago and revised four times since. This is the first revised edition for thirty years, during which time the world and diplomacy have changed almost beyond recognition. The new edition provides an enlarged and updated section on the history of diplomacy and revises comprehensively […]
Ottoman Diplomacy
Embassies under Siege
The Contemporary Embassy: Paths to Diplomatic Excellence
Diplomats at War: British and Commonwealth diplomacy in wartime
In their Preface, the editors of Diplomats at War say that the two world wars in the twentieth century had a “catalytic impact upon the practice of diplomacy”; among other things, they continue, this produced “an unprecedented revolution” in the way heads of mission conducted their business.
Embassies in Armed Conflict
Enhancing Global Governance: Towards a New Diplomacy
Theatre of Power: The Art of Signaling
Persuasion, trust, and personal credibility
Ambassador Kishan Rana indicates the cultivation of relations and the credibility of diplomats as the basis for persuasion in diplomacy. He provides an initial taxonomy of the type of relations that diplomats should cultivate. When it comes to credibility, Ambassador Rana presents the main ways of developing and maintaining credibility in diplomatic relations. The more credible the diplomat, the more likely it is that their persuasion with local interlocutors will be successful.
Ever the Diplomat
DC Confidential: The controversial memoirs of Britain’s ambassador to the U.S. at the time of 9/11 and the Iraq War
The publication of these memoirs in autumn 2005 caused a public furore in Britain so I shall not waste time giving any background on Sir Christopher Meyer. (Just punch his name into Google, which will enable you in the blink of an eye even to find out from the BBC website which records he chose when he appeared on Desert Island Discs.)
Essence of Diplomacy
Christer Jönsson is Professor of Political Science at Lund University in Sweden, where Martin Hall is a Researcher. Their book is described as an exercise in ‘theorizing’ diplomacy, that is, an attempt to provide a general account of its causes and consequences. (The authors are thus severe in denying the title of ‘theory’ to the ‘prescriptive tracts’ which scholar-diplomats have written about their art over hundreds of years, though I notice that they are more indulgent to the use of the term ‘political theory’ as in, for example, ‘liberal political theory’.)
Inside Diplomacy
This is a book on diplomacy in general and the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) in particular. It is also a gem, and a large gem. It breathes life, wisdom, and good humour, and is full of rich detail. I found it thoroughly absorbing. Students of diplomacy at all stages of their careers will find it immensely useful, while those in a position to influence the future shape of the IFS will discover a whole raft of constructive suggestions for reform fearlessly advanced.
21st Century Diplomacy: A practitioner’s guide
Kishan Rana is a man of lengthy and varied experience in the Indian Foreign Service, ending his career as ambassador to Germany. Since then he has spent many years as a globe-trotting trainer of junior diplomats on behalf of DiploFoundation. Few people, therefore, are as well placed to write a practitioners’ guide to the diplomatic craft; and, insofar as concerns the content of his book, which can be found described here, he has not disappointed.
The Consular Dimension of Diplomacy
Why Persuasion? Reflections after 50 years of practising, teaching and studying diplomacy
From the faraway days when representatives of fighting tribes tried to arrange for a truce, thereby risking their head, to the often derided endless discussions within present day international frameworks, the common aim of diplomacy has remained persuasion. The better a diplomat is at persuading, the more successful he will be in furthering the cause he represents.
Beyond diplomatic – the unravelling of history
In his paper, Robert Alston travels through time to rekindle an important highlight – as well as a personal highlight – in the history of knowledge management. His journey takes him back to the 1850s, which saw Antonio Panizzi’s efforts in creating a universal repository of knowledge in the British Museum; and to the 1990s, a time in which he acquired first-hand experience at the same museum, drawing conclusions on the various available ways of navigating large bibliographical and archival databases.
Diplomatenleben
A must-have for German-speaking students of Swiss diplomacy (and diplomacy generally) since the Second World War is Dr. Max Schweizer’s recently published Diplomatenleben.
Modern Diplomacy: Dialectics and Dimensions
“Control yourself, Sir!”: A call for research into emotion cultures in diplomacy
This essay examines and seeks to explode the notion that diplomats are, or should be, immune to emotion in the conduct of their duties. It also discusses the concept of emotion cultures - cultural rules governing the experience and expression of emotion and suggests the possibility that modern diplomacy, perhaps a distinctive culture in itself, encourages the socialisation of diplomats into a distinctive, ostensibly global diplomatic emotion culture.
In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to Six Cold War Presidents
Bertie of Thame: Edwardian Ambassador
The Diplomats, 1939-1979
Twentieth-Century Diplomacy: A Case Study of British Practice, 1963-1976
Some years ago, John Young, Professor of International History at the University of Nottingham and long-serving Chair of the British International History Group, turned his thoughts and research in the direction of diplomatic procedure. This is the first monograph to be the product of his shift in direction and it is to be most warmly welcomed. It is original in focus, impeccably researched (private papers and oral history transcripts have been sifted as well official documents in The National Archives), crisply written, and altogether a major contribution to the contemporary history of diplom...
The Beijing-Washington Back-Channel and Henry Kissinger’s Secret Trip to China
Internet Guide for Diplomats
The Internet Guide for Diplomats is the first guide specifically conceived and realised to assist diplomats and others involved in international affairs to use the Internet in their work. The book includes both basic technical information about the Internet and specific issues related to the use of the Internet in diplomacy. Examples and illustrations address many common questions including web-management for diplomatic services, knowledge management and distance learning.
Journeying Far and Wide: A Political and Diplomatic Memoir
Kaiser was an active Democrat and 'noncareer officer' in the US Foreign Service under three Democratic presidents: Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter. His memoir, which is uncluttered with the trivial detail sometimes found in this genre and written with great verve, will be valued by diplomatic historians of the whole period since the Second World War. (Kaiser had served earlier as Assistant Secretary of Labor for International Affairs in the Truman administration.)
Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy
Japanese middle-power diplomacy
Diplomatic Education
Diplomatic Education’ was published as Chapter 11 in: An Anthology Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of the Higher Colleges of Technology, ed. Tayeb A Kamali, (HCT Press, UAE, 2007).
A Selection of New diplomatic memoirs
I have just written a review article on these six books of British diplomatic memoirs for the English Historical Journal, so here I shall just provide some notes on those that I believe to be most valuable to students of diplomacy.
The Professional Diplomat
