Nickles, who is a State Department historian, has written what I believe is the first full-length study of this important and intriguing subject. Excluding an introduction and short conclusion, it has seven chapters presented in three parts (‘Control’, ‘Speed’, and ‘The Medium’), each having a chapter devoted to a case study: the Anglo-American crisis of 1812, the further Anglo-American crisis of 1861 (‘the Trent affair’), and the Zimmerman telegram of January 1917 – which of course also involved the United States.
I must admit that I found the plan of the book rather confusing, and there is a certain amount of repetition. Some long sections, for example on nineteenth century diplomatic life and work patterns in Chapter 5, also tend to take a sledge hammer to crack a nut, and have too many quotations for my taste. In addition, there are some odd failings of language, two of them occurring in the opening paragraph of Chapter 3, at which point the attention of the Harvard UP copy editor must have been on something else. (‘In the autumn of 1861, public opinion [morale?] in the northern part of the United States had reached a low ebb. … Foreign exhaltation [exhultation?] at Southern excesses added insult to injury.’) Another weakness is the absence of a Selected Bibliography, with the result that one has to sift the copious footnotes to identify the most important secondary sources. Nevertheless, excepting the first, these are not serious criticisms and should not dissuade those interested in the evolution of diplomatic method over the last two centuries from poring over this book, which is full of interesting facts and suggestive hypotheses.
The result of the introduction of the electric telegraph in the middle of the nineteenth century was that thereafter diplomatic messages were much more quickly received. This is what everyone knows and the point is duly emphasised by Nickles. What is less well known beyond the ranks of the specialists, however, is that ‘cablegrams’ by no means arrived with the speed of light, were hopelessly insecure, and often quite incredibly expensive – especially if they had to be transmitted by submarine cables, as for example between Britain and America and Britain and France. Because of their expense and the need for laborious encoding, messages sent in this manner were also sparser in their language and shorter on information than the older, hand-delivered despatch. For a variety of reasons, which Nickles explains fully, they were also much more often garbled. Nevertheless, suggestive of modernity and exciting events, prestige attached to them. What were the results? Among those to do with diplomacy (as opposed to signals intelligence) two stand out. The first is the declining autonomy of diplomatic envoys in the late nineteenth century. This is the conventional wisdom but Nickles is careful to point out that this varied from state to state, and within the diplomatic services of the same state from envoy to envoy: the limitations of cablegrams, he demonstrates, ‘furnished independently minded diplomats with means to subvert their instructions and maintain their freedom of action’ (p. 31). The second consequence of the attributes of the cablegram, and according to Nickles ‘perhaps most important’, was that while (he hints) it had a benign influence on routine diplomacy, it contributed to ‘the accelerated speed of international crises’. This was serious because ‘[t]he faster pace of diplomatic disputes invited more emotional and less creative decisions on the part of statesmen, while public opinion, which sometimes moderates over the course of a long crisis, often exercised a belligerent influence on shorter crises’ (p. 191). This is inherently plausible and, in light of Nickles’ examples, historically persuasive, though no doubt diplomatic historians will argue furiously over it. I look forward to reading Thomas Otte’s review of this book, which is to be published in the European History Quarterly.
One final point: Nickles describes how the initial astonishment of politicians and journalists at the technical achievement of electric telegraphy led to much naive and ill-considered mid-century speculation that it promised the demise of the diplomatic service altogether. Of course, this did not happen, and prognoses of this sort diminished in the later decades of the nineteenth century (pp. 46-7). It is a pity that this was not recalled in the later years of the twentieth century, when a similar degree of intoxication was produced by jet aircraft and computer communication and produced exactly the same kind of rash predictions.
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Twitter for Diplomats is not a manual, or a list of what to do or not to do. It is rather a collection of information, anecdotes, and experiences. It recounts a few episodes involving foreign ministers and ambassadors, as well as their ways of interacting with the tool and exploring its great potential. It wants to inspire ambassadors and diplomats to open and nurture their accounts – and it wants to inspire all of us to use Twitter to also listen and open our minds.
The Cinderella Service: British Consuls since 1825
The Diplomatic Corps as an Institution of International Society
Yes, (Saudi) Minister! A Life in Administration
After a brilliant ministerial career in Riyadh, Algosaibi fell from grace at the Ministry of Health in 1984. This was the start of his diplomatic life, which commenced in Bahrain and continued in London. This is a shrewd and lively book.
Bertie of Thame: Edwardian Ambassador
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.
Language and Diplomacy: Preface
Part of Language and Diplomacy (2001): In the preface below, Jovan Kurbalija and Hannah Slavik introduce the chapters in the book, and extract the general themes covered by the various authors.
Born a Foreigner: A Memoir of the American Presence in Asia
This is the eighth volume in the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series, and is a very solid addition to it. Cross, who was born of missionary parents in Beijing, spent 32 years in the US Foreign Service, and though his tours abroad included Egypt, Cyprus and London, most were in Asia and it is on these which this memoir concentrates.
Pragmatics in diplomatic exchanges
Part of Language and Diplomacy (2001): Edmond Pascual interprets diplomatic communication with the linguistic tools of pragmatics. He begins by reminding us that while the diplomat is a "man of action," the particular nature of the diplomat's action is that it consists of speech. Pascual applies three concepts of pragmatics to diplomatic discourse: speech as an intentional act; the effects of the act of speech; and the role of the unsaid in the act of speech.
“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.
Diplomacy, Force & Leadership: Essays In Honor of Alexander L. George
The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell diaries
Until his resignation amid huge controversy in August 2003, Alastair Campbell was Tony Blair’s official spokesman and director of communications and strategy – ace spin doctor, closest confidante, and constant travelling companion. His diaries have probably been mined chiefly for their astonishing revelations about the internal machinations of his government and the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. However, they should also be read for the sharp and often amusing light they throw on certain aspects of diplomacy.
Switzerland’s good offices: a changing concept, 1945-2002
Embassies in Armed Conflict
Bilateral Diplomacy
Bilateral Diplomacy is the first of the DiploHandbooks, a new series on practical diplomacy. The book breaks new ground in the role ascribed to bilateral diplomacy, and its importance in international affairs today. It also covers the de facto “empowerment” of the embassy that flows from its new responsibility for relationship management.
The Nineteenth Century Foreign Office
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...
Diplomacy and domestic politics: The logic of two-level games
Politics Among Nations
Under the Wire: How the Telegraph Changed Diplomacy
Review by Geoff Berridge
International Encyclopedia Of Public Policy And Administration
Public administration - the implementation side of government - is becoming an increasingly international discipline.
Getting Our Way: 500 Years of Adventure and Intrigue: The Inside Story of British Diplomacy
The New Diplomacy
Diplomacy and the American Democracy
The Diplomats, 1919-1939
Embassies and Foreign Courts
Ottoman Diplomacy
Enhancing Global Governance: Towards a New Diplomacy
A Dictionary of Diplomacy
Like all professions, diplomacy has spawned its own specialized terminology, and it is this lexicon which provides A Dictionary of Diplomacy's thematic spine. However, the dictionary also includes entries on legal terms, political events, international organizations and major figures who have occupied the diplomatic scene or have written influentially about it over the last half millennium. All students of diplomacy and related subjects and especially junior members of the many diplomatic services of the world will find this book indispensable.
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy
Diplomacy: Theory and Practice, Fifth Edition
In 2005, I reviewed the third edition of Diplomacy: Theory and Practice by G.R. Berridge as essential reading for Robinson Crusoe, had he been a student of diplomacy. We all know that eventually Crusoe ended his assignment on the foreign island and returned to his native country where he found himself a wealthy man for whom bibliography no longer had a role to play … unlike the rest of us, who have continued to practise diplomacy and read books about it.
A weak diplomatic hybrid: U.S. Special Mission Benghazi, 2011-12
In the widespread coverage of the brutal murder of US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and others in the US mission in Benghazi on 11 September 2012, there has been much confusion over the character of the post. It has been repeatedly described in the media as the American ‘consulate’ but the official position, recently stated emphatically by the Report of the Accountability Review Board for Benghazi (ARB) convened by secretary of state Hillary Clinton, is that ‘the U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi was never a consulate and never formally notified [in any character] to the Libyan ...
The Turkish Embassy Letters
The inertia of Diplomacy
Diplomacy is used to manage the goals of foreign policy focusing on communication. New trends affect the institution of diplomacy in different ways. Diplomacy has received an additional tool in the form of the Internet. In various cases of interdependence and dependence interference in a country’s affairs is accepted. Multilateral cooperation has created parliamentary diplomacy and a new type of diplomat, the international civil servant. States and their diplomats are in demand to curb the excesses of globalization. The fight against terrorism also brought additional work for diplomac...
Diplomatic Persuasion: An Under-Investigated Process
The under-investigation in diplomatic studies of processes of persuasion in explaining diplomatic outcomes needs to be addressed in the interests of better scholarly explanations and diplomatic practice. Although such processes are implicit in nearly all concepts and practice of diplomacy, neither scholars nor practitioners explicitly investigate them. Yet other related fields of study and disciplines examine persuasion and demonstrate its explanatory value.
Diplomatic Security under a Comparative Lens – Or Not?
“Diplomatic security” is the term now usually preferred to “diplomatic protection” for the steps taken by states to safeguard the fabric of their diplomatic and consular missions, the lives of their diplomatic and consular officers, and the integrity of their communications; it has the advantage of avoiding confusion with the controversial legal doctrine of diplomatic protection.
Reforming Diplomacy: Clear Choices, New Emphases
True Brits: Inside the Foreign Office
To joke or not to joke: A diplomatic dilemma in the age of internet
Part of Language and Diplomacy (2001): The first paper, presented by Prof. Peter Serracino-Inglott as the keynote address at the 2001 conference, examines the serious issue of diplomatic communication in a playful manner, through one of the most paradigmatic and creative examples of language use: joking.
Renaissance Diplomacy and the Reformation
We invite you to continue our walk along timeline of Evolution of diplomacy and technology. In May, our next stop is Renaissance diplomacy and the impact of the invention of the printing press on diplomacy in the Reformation period.
Building relations through multi-dialogue formats: Trends in bilateral diplomacy
Twentieth Century Diplomacy: A case study of British practice, 1963-1976
Book review by Geoff Berridge 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 […]
The impact of the Internet on diplomatic reporting: how diplomacy training needs to be adjusted to keep pace
Over the last 20 years, the Internet has changed the ways in which we work, how we socialise and network, and how we interact with knowledge and information.
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).
Embassies under Siege
English Medieval Diplomacy
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.)
What Diplomats Do: The Life and Work of Diplomats
Sir Brian Barder’s book What Diplomats Do offers comprehensive insight into the life and work of diplomats. It deserves to be read by practitioners and aspiring practitioners of diplomacy, by students and teachers of diplomacy, and by anyone interested in what diplomats actually do. It crosses genres as easily as it addresses and holds the attention of a broad audience.
International Regimes
The School for Ambassadors
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.
