Diplomacy: Theory and Practice, 6th ed. – Online updating pages
Chapter 4: Diplomatic Momentum
p. 54, Box 4.1 The Non-paper: Another good example is provided in the memoirs of Peter Westmacott (p. 137, see Further reading below). He records that, when British Ambassador at Ankara in 2003, he wrote a non-paper, purely on his own authority, designed to jolt the Turkish foreign ministry into making a fresh effort to deliver the Annan Plan for a federal solution to the Cyprus question. The ministry was responsive but in the end it all came to nothing.
p. 55, self-imposed deadlines, line 9 up, ‘excessive pressure of time might assist an agreement but not necessarily one likely to endure’: This point needed more than an aside. As Jean Galbraith says (see Further reading below), ‘deadlines are a double-edged sword, as the values of avoiding delay are paired with the costs that come with haste’; in other words, a tight deadline can leave insufficient time for creative thinking and instead lead negotiators to fall back on an exchange of crude trade-offs and old habits of thought.
line 6 up: I should have been more guarded here and said ‘some chance’ rather than ‘a good chance of proving realistic’ because – for any number of reasons, among them the need to garner political support – negotiators tend to be over-optimistic about completion dates; this is the so-called ‘planning fallacy’.
Further reading
Galbraith, Jean, ‘Deadlines as behavior in diplomacy and international law’, in Harlan Grant Cohen and Timothy Meyer (eds), International Law as Behavior (Cambridge UP, 2021). This is an extremely impressive essay: thoughtful, thorough and tight.
Westmacott, Peter, They Call It Diplomacy: Forty years of representing Britain abroad (Head of Zeus, 2022)