Posts

DC Confidential: The controversial memoirs of Britain’s ambassador to the U.S. at the time of 9/11 and the Iraq War

(Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London, 2005), pp. 301 incl. index. ISBN 0-297-851144

[ buy this book ]

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.) His memoirs have attracted attention in part because they reveal confidential information on very recent events and persons still in office and in part because they argue that British prime minister, Tony Blair – the ‘indispensable ally’ (p. 250) – missed the opportunity to moderate the actions of the US administration at the time of the Iraq War. As to the first point, I cannot help agreeing with Sir Christopher’s many critics: he broke a trust (though not as far as an outsider can judge on any vital questions) and may have weakened the important relationship between civil servants and ministers. As to the second, that is a serious question, though one for diplomatic historians to judge. How should the historian of diplomacy react to these memoirs?

The student of diplomacy will find much of value in DC Confidential – though no great surprises. In its intimate descriptions of the numerous encounters between Tony Blair and George W. Bush, and their respective camp followers, the book provides further evidence of the diplomatic advantages and disadvantages of summitry (chs. 19, 20, 23). It also provides a classic example of the way in which even a traditionally influential MFA, the British Foreign Office, can be effectively sidelined by a head of government on a key (the key) foreign relationship; as ambassador in Washington, Sir Christopher in practice answered directly more to 10 Downing Street than to the FO. Above all, the volume gives a lively and rich account of how a modern ambassador – a ‘professional networker’ (p. 223) – has to operate in Washington (esp. chs. 8, 9, 14, 15, 17, 21, 22). His ‘task’, writes Sir Christopher, who clearly enjoyed it immensely, ‘is simple to describe: find things out and influence decisions’ (p. 207). However, he must pursue the last aim without ‘being drawn into Washington’s inter-departmental rivalry’, which would ‘damage the embassy’s reputation for trustworthiness and impartiality’ (p. 210). Why would this be dangerous? He does not draw a picture for us because the implication is obvious: it would close off vital sources of information. In short, Sir Christopher draws our eye to the tension between the two main tasks of the Washington ambassador.

In general these memoirs are light reading and padded out with a great deal of ordinary (and much trivial) detail. There is also a strong whiff of score-settling in them. Nevertheless, Sir Christopher Meyer was obviously a successful ambassador in Washington (the British government wanted him to stay on for longer but he had to return home for personal reasons) and his account of his time there should not be read simply for its gossip and as a primary source for historians on the origins of the Iraq War. It also shows with great clarity how a Washington ambassador needs to operate in order to achieve success.

DC Confidential: The controversial memoirs of Britain’s ambassador to the U.S. at the time of 9/11 and the Iraq War2019-10-14T20:28:43+01:00

Essence of Diplomacy

(Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 2005), pp. ix, 207 incl. index. ISBN 13:978-1-4039-9225-3; 10:1-4039-9225-8

[ buy this book ]

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’.) Not surprisingly, therefore, the book is also described as a deliberate attempt to ‘build bridges’ between those who work in International Relations theory and those – like me – who focus just on diplomacy. Its thrust is that diplomacy is an ‘institution’ which has certain ‘essential dimensions’, among which communication between ‘polities’, the representation of principals abroad, and the reproduction of international society are chosen for special emphasis. These are analysed in separate chapters and subsequently tied together with a view chiefly to showing how diplomacy supports any international society, while at the same time being both adaptable to changing circumstances and instrumental in shaping them. This is a work of great erudition and historical depth, carefully worked out, and – in the main – tightly argued. It also has many lucid and stimulating passages. In the end, however, I was left with a sense of disappointment, as well as with a suspicion that the advantages of bridge-building – while real – can be exaggerated.

I have no quarrel at all with the general thrust of this book, not least in so far as it emphasises the importance of treating diplomacy as an institution from its first appearance. (The authors mistakenly number me among those who take the view that diplomacy only assumed the form of an institution in the early modern era. In fact, my view was – and remains – that the Amarna system in the Ancient Near East was crude and relatively ineffective but obviously an institution nevertheless.) However, I am bound to say that the conclusions of this work (summed up in barely four pages after central chapters that cover much familiar ground) are hardly startling, and they suggest that when diplomacy is treated on this level of generality its causes and consequences are not especially problematical, i.e. the ‘scientific’ theoretical challenge is not a great one. This would have been clearer, I think, if the authors had employed terms less vague than ‘essential dimensions’, alternatively described as ‘constitutive elements’, ‘component parts’, ‘basic parameters’, or ‘timeless features’ of diplomacy. All of these terms imply the machinery of diplomacy whereas what in fact Jönsson and Hall are in the main rightly talking about are its enduring functions.

Having said this, I found two conclusions exceptionable, the first being the claim that diplomats as a class ‘represent’ the international society as well as their immediate principals, thus strengthening ‘universalism’ relative to ‘particularism’. This seems to me a bit far-fetched. A number of writers are cited who assert this, or think it would be a good thing, but I would like to see the evidence for it. However, I thought the comments on the strengthening view ‘in a few democratic states’ that diplomatic services should now ‘represent’ their states in the sense of reflecting their ethnic mix were apposite. In Britain there is now also a great anxiety to achieve this in relation to gender. What Jönsson and Hall might have added here is consideration of the possibility that the trend towards increasing representation of this sort may be pushing the balance between particularism and universalism in the opposite direction.

The second conclusion on which I have a reservation is the claim that ‘It is primarily through recognition that diplomacy contributes to the reproduction [relative stability] of international society’. I think that this is exaggerated. First of all, it is not true that in the absence of recognition only ad hoc communication is possible (p. 166). For example, for the greater part of the 1970s the United States and Communist China communicated via liaison offices in each other’s capital, though the latter was not recognized by the former as the government of the state of China. Secondly, what about the absolutely vital role played by diplomacy in relation to the balance of power? Unless this point is lurking somewhere in the language about the role of diplomacy in mediating between universalism and particularism, or is regarded as too self-evident to require explicit comment, we may well have been offered Hamlet without the prince.

Finally, I am doubtful that the study of diplomacy is illuminated to the extent claimed by Jönsson and Hall not only by International Relations theory but also by ‘concepts, ideas and insights from other fields than IR’. I agree that the literatures on institutions and ritual are important, and they have drawn on them most instructively. However, I was left cold by the extra-mural sources of reflection on ‘representation’ which they detail at some length, which seem to add nothing at all to the explication of this concept in existing … ahem … diplomatic theory or to our understanding of the tensions to which in practice it perennially gives rise.

The serious diplomatic theory is analogous to political theory, where ‘What ought to be done?’ is always a central question. These days I suppose I should call this the ‘public policy’ approach to diplomacy. This is not a book dealing with this kind of theory, though it touches on it indirectly at many points.

Essence of Diplomacy2019-10-14T20:28:43+01:00

England and the Avignon Popes: The practice of diplomacy in late medieval Europe

(Legenda: London, 2005), pp. xiv, 304, incl. index. ISBN 1-904713-04-1.

[ buy this book ]

In England and the Avignon Popes, Karsten Plöger, who is a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in London, has provided an invaluable book not only for students of medieval diplomatic method but for students of diplomacy in general. It is a work of immense and meticulous scholarship: exhaustively researched, well organized, carefully worded, penetrating, and beautifully written.

The author concentrates on the period from 1342 until 1362, when the francophile popes Clement VI and Innocent VI sought to mediate a settlement to the renewed conflict (subsequently dubbed ‘the hundred years war’) between the English and French thrones and Anglo-papal relations were soured by disputes over rights to the wealth attached to ecclesiastical positions in England. These years thus witnessed a marked increase in the tempo of diplomacy between Avignon and London and suit the author’s purpose because they left behind a comparatively rich residue of primary sources, especially in the expense accounts of envoys and messengers.

Plöger begins by providing a detailed account of the strengths and limitations of his sources, both in the British National Archives and those of the Vatican. He then sets the scene with a long chapter of great authority (though perhaps with a little too much detail) dealing mainly with the ‘diplomatic agenda’ of the period. The meat of the book consists of the subsequent chapters on diplomatic personnel; organization of missions; means of communication; and protocol, procedure, and ceremonial. There are also long and juicy appendices, for example on the academic backgrounds of envoys and on diplomatic gifts. The bibliography, too, is lengthy and wide-ranging.

I mention the following points because I found them of particular interest and because they illustrate the riches to be found in this book. Kings’ confessors, Plöger tells his readers, were among the envoys employed in diplomatic communications with the curia. By entrusting messages to the pope to their confessors, the kings were confessing to him ‘by proxy’. This guarded the message en route since a priest could not divulge information imparted in the confessional without the express consent of the penitent. Presumably this form of communication also flattered the pope. This was altogether a brilliant device. Plöger also has an interesting if rather brief discussion (pp. 87-8) of the question of whether or not resident proctors at the papal court were actually the first resident ambassadors; if they were, the origins of this vital institution are to be found over a century earlier than is usually claimed, notably by Garret Mattingly. The author’s slightly hedged position is that while it is a mistake to deny that the proctors had diplomatic as well as purely legal functions, they had ‘no discernible connection’ with the residents who were established at the lay courts of Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century, who were shaped by ‘an entirely different political context’. Thus, he concludes, the curial proctors were not the first resident ambassadors. I shall have to think about this a bit more. Perhaps it is best to class them simply as a different kind of resident diplomat but as a resident diplomat nevertheless. It certainly makes a good exam question. Plöger also provides a most impressive account of the slippery question of diplomatic immunity, pointing out that practice squared with theory; and I was struck by the degree – on which he rightly lays emphasis – to which diplomatic communication continued almost unimpaired despite outbreaks of plague and war.

Drawing the threads of his argument together, Plöger concludes that medieval diplomacy had all the features required of a sophisticated diplomatic system that I had suggested in my chapter in the Cohen and Westbrook volume on Amarna Diplomacy – excepting continuous contact via resident diplomats. However, this did not matter, he maintains, because continuous contact was not always needed and, when it was, it was provided by ‘a rapid succession of missions’. As a follower of the great Richelieu, I am not altogether swayed by this last argument, since who is to say that the presence of capable and respected residents in Avignon might not, among other things, have nipped at least some emerging problems in the bud (when ‘need’ was relatively invisible) and prepared the ground for more effective interventions by special envoys when their presence was nevertheless unavoidable? Besides, in the absence of resident missions it is not merely the number of special missions that should be considered in assessing the quality of the continuous contact they provided but the extent to which they involved the rotation of the same people and the duration of their stays. In fact, Plöger had already shown that the same people tended to be used quite often and that their visits usually extended to months – they were not tourists. This obviously made a difference, so it might have been better had the author summed up his own argument a little more fully by referring to a rapid succession of relatively long-stay visits by persons often already familiar with the curial court. Thus, in any event, does my objection on this point fall away, and I have no hesitation in saying that Karsten Plöger has in general marshalled his voluminous evidence in support of a most convincing argument. This is one of the most important contributions to the history of diplomacy of recent years.

England and the Avignon Popes: The practice of diplomacy in late medieval Europe2019-10-14T20:28:43+01:00

The History and Politics of UN Security Council Reform

(Routledge: London and New York, 2005), pp. xii, 134, incl. index. ISBN 0-415-30845-3.

[ buy this book ]

Dimitris Bourantonis, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Athens University of Economics and Business and a well-published writer on the UN over many years, has provided a very valuable service for students of the world body by writing this short book. It surveys the history of efforts to reform the Security Council (mainly its membership but procedure as well) from the very beginning of the Cold War right through until the year 2000. Thus it provides the essential background to a full understanding of the current debate on the same issues, recently revived. The book has no selected bibliography as such, though the first endnotes to the Introduction in effect provide a good one.

The theme of Bourantonis’s work is that, except for the expansion of the non-permanent membership in 1965, reform has been perennially blocked by a clever rearguard by the Permanent Five and the inability of the wider members to agree among themselves on what should be done. Nevertheless, he maintains, if the Council is not modified to take account of changing international realities, it will before long be doomed, and the UN in general along with it. There can be little argument with any of this. As to particular points, I think the author is especially illuminating on the political significance of the 1965 enlargement, the manner of and motives for the swift coup that gave Russia the permanent seat of the former USSR in 1992, and the reasons for the collapse of the Razali proposal at the end of the 1990s. This is a politically sophisticated book, showing how the interests of the different states and different groups of states have influenced their attitudes towards reform. In style it is lucid, and brisk without being careless. Rare among books on the UN, it is also mercifully sparing in its reliance on acronyms. On the downside, I would like to have seen rather more on the origins and internal dynamics of the ‘Open-Ended Working Group on Security Council Reform’, which pops up unheralded on p. 54. I think also that the Conclusion might have been better judged had it concentrated on the main general points to emerge rather than providing only a fairly lengthy summary of the narrative. Nevertheless, these are only minor quibbles. I welcome this book very warmly and shall be immediately adding it to the recommended reading for my students.

The History and Politics of UN Security Council Reform2019-10-14T20:28:43+01:00

Lucky George: Memoirs of an Anti-Politician

(Allen Lane The Penguin Press: London, 1999), pp. xiv, 402, incl. index. Hb: ISBN 0-713-99316-2. Pb: ISBN: 0140282211

[ buy this book ]

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. The author is also engagingly frank about his early (and not so early) sexual adventures. Walden spent just over 20 years in the British Diplomatic Service (1962-83) before leaving to become an MP because he could not face becoming an ambassador. Here he gives a full account of this journey – from Hong Kong and Peking during the Cultural Revolution, through Paris, to the private office of two foreign secretaries (Owen and Carrington). He is particularly interesting for students of diplomacy on the expulsion of the 105 Soviet spies from London in 1971 (he was desk officer for the Soviet Union in the FCO at the time and this was his idea); Mrs Thatcher’s hostility to the FCO (more public than private); and the role of the modern ambassador. The pages dealing with the last of these topics (pp. 228-32) also have some great quotes for exam questions: ‘It is diplomats, not spies, who work under the deepest cover (Walden, Lucky George).’ Discuss; or ‘Diplomacy is about rank or it is about nothing (Walden, Lucky George).’ Discuss; or (for the sake of stylistic variety) ‘Examine Walden’s claim in Lucky George that “Ambassadors are … like expensively trained interpreters in a room where everyone speaks English”.

Walden’s main point about the modern ambassador – clearly influenced by his years in the frenetic position of principal private secretary to the foreign secretary – is the unoriginal one that the office has lost influence as ministers have established direct contact. His perspective on the ambassador is also coloured by his temperamental unsuitability to the role. The account provided here, therefore, is certainly not a rounded one, and at times verges on the polemical. Nevertheless, like the rest of the book, it is written with extraordinary verve and power.

Lucky George: Memoirs of an Anti-Politician2019-10-14T20:28:43+01:00

Managing the Cold War: A view from the front line

(RUSI: London, 2005), pp. 267. ISBN 0-85516-191-4

[ buy this book ]

Michael Alexander, a Russian-speaking senior British diplomat who died in 2002, was a major behind-the-scenes figure in what he calls the ‘management’ of the cold war to a peaceful conclusion. (For his career, see this obituary .) Since, furthermore, he is right to say that this, together with the reunification of both Germany and Europe without major violence, ‘was arguably the most important, most welcome and least costly … of the positive politico-military achievements of the twentieth century’, this book is most valuable. It not only contains many shrewd and stimulating reflections written after the events but confidential documents written at the time, including some letters to Margaret Thatcher when he was her private secretary for foreign affairs.

For students of diplomacy, as opposed to historians of the cold war, it is what Alexander has to say about multilateral diplomacy – especially in the CSCE negotiations culminating in the Helsinki Final Act (1975), the MBFR talks (1973-89), and within NATO itself – that is particularly instructive. He highlights the formality which tends to characterise pre-negotiations in multilateral diplomacy (which I have tended to overlook) (pp. 29-34), and provides a long paper written in 1975 on the strengths and weakness of the Russian negotiating style. He is illuminating – and wise – on the need for an informal ‘directorate’ of the most powerful members, albeit tactfully conducted, in such bodies as NATO (pp. 198-200). He draws attention to the less obvious functions of multilateral negotiations which last for years, like the Mutual Balance Force Reduction talks, but produce no formal agreements (pp. 134, 172). And, following from this, he stresses convincingly that multilateral institutions generally have an educational and restraining effect not generated by the shifting coalitions of the ‘posse diplomacy’ favoured by the Sheriff of Washington – though this will not, I suspect, be news to theorists of ‘international regimes’. In passing, Michael Alexander is also interesting, among other things, on Margaret Thatcher’s deeply obtuse attitude to the profession of diplomacy (pp. 215-16). There is much more besides in this book, including a most useful Introduction by the FCO historian, Keith Hamilton. I recommend it strongly.

Managing the Cold War: A view from the front line2019-10-14T20:28:43+01:00

Discourse on the Art of Negotiation

translated by Aleksandra Gruzinska and Murray D. Sirkis, Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures vol. 140 (Peter Lang: New York, 2004), pp. xlviii, 93. ISBN 0-8204-7436-3

[ buy this book ]

The translators of this modest, entirely abstract but nevertheless rather uplifting work on diplomacy, first published in French in 1737, are not new to the task of making the writings of Pecquet, a senior official in the French foreign ministry in the early eighteenth century, accessible to English readers, having earlier translated his philosophical tract, Diverse Thoughts on Man. Nevertheless, they have taken up a brave challenge here because neither are historians of diplomacy. Gruzinska is a student of French language and literature, and Sirkis is an electrical engineer (emeritus), both at Arizona State University in Tempe. (Sirkis stands in an admirable American tradition. Christian Detmold, the great translator of Machiavelli’s complete works – referred to in the notes of this book on p. 93 though unhappily misspelled ‘Detwold’ – was also an engineer.) Unfortunately, the lack of subject expertise occasionally shows.

For one thing the lengthy Introduction has only a short section on the content of the book itself and its significance, and is quite dwarfed by discussion of such relatively trivial matters as the identity of the ‘mysterious benefactor’ who helped to rehabilitate Pecquet following his fall from royal grace. In other words, what ought to be footnotes emerge as whole sections. As for the translation itself, unfamiliarity with the legal and diplomatic lexicons leads to a tendency to take refuge in a too literal translation and thus to odd lapses. For example, droit des gens [jus gentium] is rendered ‘law of the people’ when early modern English usage was invariably ‘the law of nations’ (or what we now call ‘international law’). There is also a major problem with the literal translation of Pecquet’s words ministre and ministère. In Pecquet’s time, indeed until the end of the eighteenth century, as Gruzinska and Sirkis are aware, the words ‘diplomat’ and ‘diplomacy’ were not applied to the business of negotiations between states and the common term for what we now call a diplomat (of any rank) was a ‘public minister’, in French ministre public or ministre for short. Unfortunately, the term also embraced home officials as well, and Pecquet even occasionally used the French word for ministry ( ministère) not only for what we would now call more often a ‘government department’ but also – logically enough – for any diplomatic mission (loosely, ’embassy’). To translate these terms literally, therefore, as Gruzinska and Sirkis have done, is likely to cause considerable confusion to the modern reader. At this point I must, however, confess that I also translated ministre as ‘minister’ in the passages from Pecquet that I selected for inclusion in my Diplomatic Classics, though ministère meaning ’embassy’ cropped up in none of these, and I indexed ‘public minister’ to the authoritative definition of Vattel, a contemporary of Pecquet’s. In sum, I think that ministère should certainly have been translated ’embassy’ when it meant embassy (though this only occurs at one or two points) and that it might have been advisable to have taken the bold decision to translate ministre either as ‘diplomat’ or ‘representative’ (Pecquet himself sometimes uses représentant as a synonym for ministre). This decision could have been flagged up in the Introduction, using as a peg on which to hang the discussion – as well as a justification for the decision – Pecquet’s own admission that ‘Minister’ is ‘a vague title’ (p. 73 in the book under review).

Having recorded these niggles, I must also stress that Gruzinska and Sirkis have provided a very serviceable and at some points quite elegant translation of a hitherto much neglected work – the only full length translation currently available. In the Introduction they also reveal some very interesting details of Pecquet’s career unearthed in the foreign ministry archives in Paris, present translations of some valuable ‘supporting documents’, and provide a very good bibliography. All things considered, I welcome the appearance of this book.

Discourse on the Art of Negotiation2019-10-14T20:28:43+01:00

Multilateral Conferences: Purposeful International Negotiation

(Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 2004), 281pp. (with index), ISBN 1-4039-3321-9 (hbk)

[ buy this book ]

Ron Walker was a member of the Australian diplomatic service for 37 years, for the last 22 of which (1975-96) he specialized in multilateral diplomacy. His book on this subject is not an academic book. Instead he has done for multilateral diplomacy what Kishan Rana has done for bilateral diplomacy, namely, provided on the basis of long and wide experience, much at a senior level, a splendid handbook of practical advice for the novice. As he says in the very first line: ‘This book is an elementary introduction to how multilateral conferences work and what you, as a participant in such a conference, can do to produce the outcome that you want.’ It is comprehensive in its coverage, ranging from discussion of the different purposes of multilateral conferences to advice on what to expect in the personas of different national delegations, how to manage delegations, and the importance of getting the air-conditioning right. It is written in a clear and lively style, with many instructive examples and a number of arresting metaphors. It is above all clearly very shrewd. Moreover, while it may not have been written with academics much in mind, there is a great deal of value for them in this book as well.

Of course, like many first books, Multilateral Conferences has some presentational and structural weaknesses. The result is that at one or two points the argument is not entirely clear and there is repetition. In fact, there are two books here struggling to get out, and I hope that in any future paperback edition the first five ‘contextual’ chapters (including ones on ‘Governments and Committees’ and ‘International Organizations’) will be compressed into an elegant introduction. The author might even with advantage be persuaded to save more space by abandoning his Glossary and the long terminological parentheses in the text by referring his readers instead to the Dictionary of Diplomacy by Berridge & James! Nevertheless, as it stands, this remains a book that provides sound practical advice and will be of absorbing interest to those wishing to embark on a career in multilateral diplomacy. It has no rivals in the field and I warmly recommend it. I was not surprised to learn that it has already been adopted by UNITAR, the training wing of the United Nations.

Multilateral Conferences: Purposeful International Negotiation2019-10-14T20:28:43+01:00

Under the Wire: How the telegraph changed diplomacy

(Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass. & London, 2003), 265pp. (with index), ISBN 0-674-01035-3

[ buy this book ]

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.

Under the Wire: How the telegraph changed diplomacy2019-10-14T20:28:44+01:00

The New Diplomacy

(Polity Press: Cambridge, 2003), 150pp. (with index), ISBN (pb) 0-7456-2790-0 ; (hb) 0-7456-2789-7

Shaun Riordan was a British diplomat for 16 years before resigning in 2000 to take up private consultancy work and journalism in Spain, where he had ended his diplomatic career as political officer in the embassy. He has written a conceptually flawed, often vague, sometimes contradictory, and essentially polemical attack on ‘traditional diplomacy’. It is also peppered with New Labour jargon (‘stakeholders’, ‘global governance’, ‘civil society’), has its fair measure of superficially examined mantras, misquotes Clausewitz, and sports a shop-soiled title – is he not aware that Abba Ebban published a much more substantial book under exactly the same title in 1983? However, though his attack also comes close to throwing out the baby with the bathwater, on some practical matters Riordan’s book has much authority behind it and a number of trenchant passages. It should therefore be taken seriously.

The major weakness of the book is that it repeatedly confuses the diplomatic machine (though he occasionally uses this term) with the realist foreign policy tradition. This emerges most clearly in chapter 3 where he attacks what he calls alternatively ‘the traditional diplomatic ideology’ or ‘the realist school of diplomacy’. It is true that ‘diplomatists’ (professional diplomats), as well as statesmen, have often leaned to realism but an attack on realism is manifestly not an attack on the suitability of a particular diplomatic machine to a particular historical juncture – or anticipated future. Riordan also takes inadequate account of the well known fact that professional diplomats are inclined to develop reflexes that at the least ameliorate their ‘realism’: a disposition to seek compromise, and – if resident abroad or at least in temporary face-to-face contact with their opposite numbers – an inclination to empathy. A perfect illustration of the mistake that this confusion leads him to make is his allegation that, among the consistent failures of ‘traditional diplomacy’ in the period after the Second World War, was Britain’s relations with ‘everybody [sic!] in the Middle East’. Was it not a politician, Anthony Eden, who was responsible for the worst fiasco of all, at Suez in 1956? And was not his policy opposed – to the extent that they knew about it – by the permanent officials in the Foreign Office? Completely innocent of the Grotian tradition in international thought, and incorrectly deducing international disorder from international anarchy (p. 31), Riordan is in any case doomed by this error to an inability even to contemplate the possibility that diplomacy might contribute to regulated relations between states. He appears not to have heard of international law.

Coming down to earth, Riordan tells us that governments (necessary for democratic accountability) require diplomatic machines but that traditional embassies and other resident missions, being physically expressed in ‘bricks and mortar’, have three serious disadvantages. They are costly to acquire and maintain; reinforce the hierarchical structures and departmentalization that discourage the free debate of original ideas; and are generally inflexible instruments of diplomacy. What should be put in their place? One is led to expect at least a short account of the diplomatic advantages of open plan bungalows and mobile homes – or perhaps trains. (There are precedents: a diplomatist of the despised old school, the British ambassador in Turkey, used a train for quite a while after Atatürk moved his capital from Istanbul to Ankara in the 1920s.) But alas, no. We get instead just the usual glossy prospectus for providing diplomacy without diplomats: the internet, jet-borne ministers and officials, consultancy and lobby companies – and American Express. Riordan admits in a number of asides to his main argument that there are advantages to resident representation (‘personal relationships … can still add value’, p. 64), and he implies that there are situations in which it is unavoidable. (He would probably concede that reliance by Britain on Zimbabwean PR and lobby companies would not be an effective alternative to a British embassy in Harare.) In arguing that much decision-making has now moved up to the ‘supra’ – and down to ‘sub-national’ levels, he is also right to conclude that this has weakened the case for the traditional ‘national’ embassy. However, what he seems to overlook is the significance of the fact that similar missions have sprung up on both of these other planes. In other words, an argument against national-level embassies is not an argument against embassies as such! While provocative, and at points appropriately qualified, the treatment of resident representation is in general shallow and one-sided.

Riordan’s book is not, however, quite without other virtues, and I think the main one – apart from its provocativeness – is that, albeit belatedly, he does not discuss diplomacy in general but how it should be conducted in the light of different circumstances. This is obviously the right approach, and his employment of the now conventional distinctions between post-modern, modern, and pre-modern states is instructive in this context. (Perhaps, however, it would have been a good idea to begin the book with the chapter in which he develops this line – ‘The New World of International Relations’ – rather than to leave it until he was over two-thirds of the way through.) There is also a good chapter on public diplomacy, the importance of which he rightly emphasises, though it is notable that once more he is forced to admit the usefulness of traditional embassies – here to encourage and coordinate public diplomacy (pp. 126-7). Western values must be broadcast in order to civilize the barbarians! The Byzantines would have applauded this. Riordan also has an interesting defence of political appointees, and it is refreshing to hear someone banging on about ‘civil society’ who emphasises nevertheless that NGOs are not virtuous by definition. Coordination of foreign policy remains necessary, he admits, but not necessarily by a Ministry of Foreign Affairs – a rose by any other name? The book also has a good index.

The New Diplomacy2019-10-14T20:28:44+01:00

Chinese Ambassadors: The rise of diplomatic professionalism since 1945

(University of Washington Press: Seattle and London, 2001), 259pp., with selected bibliography and index. ISBN 0-295-98028-1 (paper); 0-295-98087-7 (cloth).

[ buy this book ]

Xiaohong worked on Western European affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing from 1977 until 1989. At some point after this she entered the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, and in 1997 was awarded a Ph.D. This book is her doctoral thesis, and – on the whole – a very good one it is. Chinese Ambassadors is based on many interviews with former diplomats and a variety of Chinese primary sources (including memoirs), and is clear, well organized, and – in its main thrust – tightly argued. As a result, it offers a rare insight into the origins and development of the diplomatic service of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Xiaohong’s method is to present the biographies of a small number of ambassadors she takes to be representative of the four generations of Chinese ambassadors between 1949 and 1994 that she identifies. In between the biographical chapters she steps back and describes the sources of recruitment and typical attitudes of each generation. Those with military backgrounds and other veterans of the Long March only slowly ceased to dominate the ranks of China’s diplomats and for this and other well known reasons it is hardly surprising that, for some years after the revolution, there were many ‘baffled ambassadors’ perched on ‘cold benches’ abroad. The devastating impact of the cultural revolution, which began in 1966 and is the watershed between the second and third generations, is fully detailed. The rest of the book is an account of how the diplomatic service – overseen until his death in 1986 by Zhou Enlai – slowly clawed its way back, turning increasingly to university graduates for recruits and adopting a more ‘professional’ style. The fourth generation (1984-1990s) even began to develop a ‘collegial rapport’ with ‘fellow diplomats from other countries’.

It is not surprising to learn from Xiaohong’s book that in the last twenty years or so the PRC’s diplomatic missions have been doing essentially the same kind of work as those of other states. Public diplomacy began to take on more significance, especially in trying to repair Beijing’s image after the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989, when China’s ambassadors once more found themselves shivering on ‘cold benches’. (That this was too much for some to swallow is evidenced by the fact that this event was followed by an unprecedented number of defections from China’s missions abroad.) Commercial work also became extremely important, not least for embassies in the Arab world, where the PRC had developed major economic interests. (The desperate lengths to which Guan Zihuai, the ambassador to Kuwait, went to return to Kuwait City in 1991 after the expulsion of Saddam’s forces is fully described and extremely instructive in this regard.) The Chinese diplomatic service even began to appoint a few women ambassadors, and in the mid-1990s abandoned its long-established prohibition on locally engaged staff.

In view of the obvious patchiness of the source material available to her at the Chinese end, I think that – speaking as a non-Sinologist – Xiaohong has done remarkably well with this book. It is a pity, though, that where source material abroad was readily available she sometimes passed up the opportunity to consult it. Some parts of her work must as a result be treated with great caution, not least her account of Sino-British relations in late August 1967, which cites just one (Chinese) source. This is not only peppered with errors but provides a seriously flawed analysis. The burning of the British Office (not ’embassy’) of which Donald Hopson (not ‘Hobson’) was chargé d’affaires, and the sacking of the residence, did not provoke ‘the British public’ to take ‘revenge by staging a siege of the Chinese embassy [actually ‘Office’] in London’. (Because the British insisted on retaining consular missions in Taiwan, Beijing refused an exchange of missions headed by ‘ambassadors’, i.e. ’embassies’, though London continued to call its own mission in Beijing the ‘British Embassy’ until it was forced to leave the old building at the end of the 1950s.) It is certainly true that the FO fell in with Hopson’s plea that it should keep hold of the Chinese diplomats as hostages to be used in his negotiations for an amelioration in the appalling conditions of his own staff. Consequently, the staff of the Chinese mission in Portland Place were informed that they would not be allowed to leave the country without an exit visa, could not go further than five miles from Marble Arch without permission, and could not use diplomatic wireless. Shortly after this, the police guard on the mission was doubled in order to enforce these orders and as a precaution against protesters, though the only other persons initially present in any numbers were pressmen. Some ‘siege’. I concede, however, that, in the hysterical atmosphere provoked by the cultural revolution at its height, it could easily have felt like a ‘siege’ inside the Chinese mission.

Thereafter, a few hotheads and eccentrics began to gather and jeer at the Chinese diplomats, who periodically replied in kind by brandishing at them Mao’s ‘little red book’. However, on 29 August, to the evident astonishment of the police, who had only their batons and dustbin lids with which to defend themselves (Ah! Resourceful nation!) about 20 Chinese ‘diplomats’ sallied out of the mission (Aux armes, citoyens!) and attacked their lines with baseball bats, cudgels, bottles, and at least one axe. What was subsequently dubbed the ‘Battle of Portland Place’ lasted for about five minutes. It left not much worse than some nasty cuts and bruises on both sides, and was immediately followed by an order banning any further protesters (whether packers from Muswell Hill, drivers from Poplar, or sociologists from Hampstead – presumably siding with the ‘besieged’), from assembling in the vicinity of Portland Place. However, Xiaohong then makes another mistake by saying that the Chinese diplomats in London and the British diplomats in Beijing became hostages of each other’s government ‘[a]fter the incident’. In fact, of course, it was precisely because the British were already being held hostage in Beijing that London had placed tighter restrictions on the mobility of the Chinese diplomats – and all of this happened before the Battle of Portland Place.

All of these points would have been clear to Xiaohong if she had simply read The Times, which was then still a decent newspaper. The British position was also spelled out in the memoirs (published in 1971) of the British prime minister at the time, Harold Wilson. An even more illuminating British source on this incident is Percy Cradock’s Experiences of China (1994). Cradock was at the time truly besieged – in Beijing. Nevertheless, Chinese Ambassadors remains a valuable and very interesting piece of research. As Xiaohong says in her introduction, a serious deficiency in diplomatic studies is the absence of work on diplomats from non-Western cultures, and she has made an important step towards its correction.

Chinese Ambassadors: The rise of diplomatic professionalism since 19452019-10-14T20:28:44+01:00

The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution

(Sinclair-Stevenson: London, 1996), 367pp. (with index), ISBN (pb) 0-2266-1656-8; (hb) 0-2266-1653-3.

[ buy this book ]

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and third president of the United States (1801-9), was one of the warmest and most influential American supporters of the French revolution. He had also been a diplomat. In fact, he had joined the American mission in France in 1784, and replaced Benjamin Franklin as minister in the following year. He witnessed the outbreak of the revolution in 1789 and was then appointed secretary of state by George Washington. This scintillating book by Conor Cruise O’Brien, himself a former diplomat, analyses the blossoming and slow – very slow – fading of Jefferson’s love affair with the French revolution, and its implications for his domestic political manoeuvrings as well as his foreign policy.

For students of diplomacy this book is, of course, chiefly of interest for the light that it throws on diplomacy in a time of revolution. In this connection the chapters dealing with Jefferson’s Paris mission are interesting by way of prelude but most valuable of all is Chapter 5. Here O’Brien charts with his usual astuteness, forensic skills, and vigorous style, the swathe cut through the United States by Charles-Edmond Genet following his arrival at Charleston in April 1793 as the new minister plenipotentiary of the French Republic. The task of ‘Citizen Genet’ was nothing less than to export the French revolution to America, and his activities make modern-day exponents of ‘public diplomacy’ look as if they have taken vows of silence. Genet lasted less than a year, even Jefferson concluding in the end that he was an embarrassment. See also the pages dealing with James Monroe’s arrival in Paris in the turbulent days following the fall and execution of Robespierre in 1794 and his decision to present his credentials as the new American minister plenipotentiary to the National Convention rather than to the (non-existent) executive power, pp. 202-10.

The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution2019-10-14T20:28:44+01:00

Keeping the Peace in the Cyprus Crisis of 1963-64

(Palgrave-Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 2002), pp. 241 (with index). ISBN 0-333-74857-3.

[ buy this book ]

After some difficulties, a UN force was established in Cyprus (UNFICYP) following the collapse of the bicommunal independence constitution of this former British colony – a constitution which the Greek Cypriots had always felt too favourable to the Turkish minority – at Christmas 1963. In this book, Alan James, Professor Emeritus of Keele University and leading authority on peacekeeping, provides what is likely to be regarded as the definitive history of the creation of this force. He has scoured the archives not only of Britain, the United Nations, and the United States (the latter dragged into the crisis by the serious implications for NATO of any outbreak of fighting between Athens and Ankara), but also of those in two troop-contributing states, Canada and Ireland. He has also gathered much oral evidence. This has enabled him to produce an extremely clear and authoritative account. A particular strength of this is its lengthy and careful analysis of the West’s interest in a peaceful Cyprus, even though it contains no real surprises. But this is not just a history. James has also provided a persuasive defence of the difficult work of UNFICYP – the largely successful policing not of a ‘recognized international boundary, but a complex pattern of intercommunal hostility’. How did it do this, and to what purpose? Chiefly by ‘persuasion and conciliation’; and with a view not to halting determined military action by any party which might actually occur but to discouraging development of the kind of fear, animosity, accident, and misunderstanding that might produce this in the first place. However, he is also clear that the ‘prophylactic’ work of UNFICYP, both in 1964 and the many years since, has been secondary in the maintenance of peace on the island. The main contribution, he insists, has been the ‘strategic stalemate’ between the communities and their mainland backers.

While few would be likely to argue with the conclusion just noted, James is aware that he is on more controversial ground in rejecting the common criticism of UNFICYP that it has hindered the search for a political settlement of the Cyprus problem by ‘freezing’ the status quo. To this his reply is: first, that there is no way of knowing what would have happened in the absence of a UN force; and secondly, that it is more likely that it is the same stalemate that has kept the peace that has also blocked a settlement. By keeping the temperature on the island down at least UNFICYP contributed to an atmosphere favourable to negotiations should the parties have had sufficient incentive to take them seriously. Against this, though, it has to be said that stalemates themselves generally produce serious negotiations – provided they are ‘hurting’ stalemates and hold out no hope of improvement to either side. And James acknowledges that UNFICYP has prevented the Cyprus stalemate from hurting more than it might have done. What we should conclude, therefore, is that UNFICYP has assisted the search for a political settlement in one way but perhaps hindered it in another; that it has, in other words, been a mixed blessing.

Keeping the Peace in the Cyprus Crisis of 1963-642019-10-14T20:28:44+01:00

Cursed is the Peacemaker: The American Diplomat Versus the Israeli General, Beirut 1982

An ADST/DACOR ‘Diplomats and Diplomacy’ book (Applegate Press: Belmont, CA, 2002), pp. 488 (with index). ISBN 0-9719432-0-6.

[ buy this book ]

Philip Habib, a Brooklyn-born son of Lebanese immigrants, joined the US Foreign Service in 1949. Tough, direct, highly intelligent, and a gifted negotiator, by 1965 he had achieved the position of political counsellor in the hottest of all US embassies, Saigon. Thereafter – with an interlude as ambassador to South Korea – he rose quickly to the top of the bureau of East Asian and Pacific affairs. In 1976 he was appointed undersecretary of state for political affairs, the number three job in the State Department. Such was his diplomatic reputation by this time that, despite having been appointed by Kissinger he was retained in this post by the incoming Carter administration. However, at the end of 1977 serious heart trouble forced him to resign and in February 1980, aged 60, he formally retired. This book is a detailed account of how – continuing heart problems notwithstanding and to his great delight – the Reagan administration brought him out of retirement to serve as a special envoy in the Middle East. First he was given the task of negotiating a settlement of two dangerous Arab-Israeli skirmishes in 1981. Then he was charged with a peaceful resolution of the Israeli siege of the PLO positions in West Beirut in 1982, following the invasion of Lebanon by Israeli forces under the military – and to all intents and purposes political – command of the defence minister, Ariel Sharon. It is with this last responsibility that this book is chiefly concerned.

Sharon was determined to destroy the PLO, drive out the Syrians, and create an Israeli puppet state in Lebanon under the Maronite leader, Bashir Gemayel. However, having cornered the PLO in Beirut he found the prospect of street-fighting no more attractive than did the Phalangist allies upon whom he had previously been relying to execute this unpleasant task. As a result, he reluctantly made a deal with the Americans to allow the PLO to depart behind the shield of a multinational force including US Marines, Washington being anxious to avoid a bloodbath in the city which would seriously damage Israel’s reputation and – by association – its own. However, Sharon hated having to let the PLO go and was determined to make their departure as costly and humiliating as possible. This, among other things (e.g. finding states that would accept their fighters), rendered Habib’s task difficult, to put it mildly. (It also brought relations between the Marines and the Israeli Defence Force to an extraordinary – indeed combustible – low.) His eventual success was a personal triumph and he was awarded the US Medal of Freedom, though his reputation was subsequently tarnished when – to his intense fury – his guarantee of the safety of the Palestinians left behind proved worthless. The Phalangists, with the connivance of Sharon, conducted appalling massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

John Boykin, a freelance writer, has written a very good account of these affairs. It is based on voluminous documentary sources and many interviews with participants, though unfortunately not in any sustained way with Habib himself, who died in 1992, shortly before the author started work on his manuscript. The book has a somewhat journalistic style, it is true, and Boykins’s penchant for reporting conversations as they allegedly took place leaves the professional historian in me feeling a little uneasy. Nevertheless, he has a frank and substantially reassuring note on this aspect of his methods in ‘Sources and Bibliography’. Boykin is also frank about his bias: pro-Habib and very strongly anti-Sharon, though there is nothing wrong with that – as far as it goes. It is perhaps a pity, though, that Boykin is so determined to give us only the world through the eyes of Habib that he quite deliberately sets out to advance no opinions of his own. One consequence of this is that he does not succeed entirely in clarifying Habib’s negotiating methods, let alone subject them to criticism (though he reports the comments of others). For example, at one point Boykin notes Habib’s stated preference for proceeding from the particular to the general (p. 108), though in his subsequent description of his ‘plan’ makes abundantly clear that in reality his approach was – as might be expected – exactly the opposite (p. 129). Nevertheless, the main features of Habib’s methods stand out strongly enough from Boykin’s lively and well-organized narrative. This is an American account of an American diplomatic hero. The lives and achievements of such people need to be given prominence, especially at the present juncture in world affairs.

Cursed is the Peacemaker: The American Diplomat Versus the Israeli General, Beirut 19822019-10-14T20:28:44+01:00

The International Law Commission 1949-1998. Vol. One: The Treaties, Part I

(Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1999), pp. 608 (with index). ISBN 0-19-829803-X.

[ buy this book ]

This first volume of a three-volume set is – price apart – a marvellous text for any student of diplomatic and consular law. Four of its seven chapters fall under these heads: ch. 3, the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, 1961; ch. 4, the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, 1963; ch. 5, the Convention on Special Missions, 1969; and ch. 7, the (unratified) Vienna Convention on the Representation of States in their Relations with International Organizations of a Universal Character, 1975. In each chapter Sir Arthur Watts provides a useful introduction, summary ILC history of the topic, selected bibliography, ILC final draft articles and commentary, and then the full text of the convention as signed at the conference. What is particularly useful in this list is provision of the final draft articles as they emerged from the ILC, together with its commentary, i.e. thinking, on them. As far as I am aware, these have only been published before in the Yearbook of the International Law Commission. And, as Sir Arthur says, ‘for many practical purposes, and as a starting point for further research, primary importance probably attaches to the final products of the Commission’s work’ – its ‘considered views’.

The International Law Commission 1949-1998. Vol. One: The Treaties, Part I2019-10-14T20:28:44+01:00

Leadership Selection in the Major Multilaterals

(Inst. for International Economics: Washington, Nov. 2001), pp. 132 with index. ISBN 0-88132-335-7.

[ buy this book ]

Inspired by the damaging leadership contest fiascos of recent years in certain international organizations, not least that in the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1998-9, this is a timely and important book. Kahler emphasises that if these bodies do not abandon their old, creaking ‘club system of governance’ and get their acts together, they will lose their already precarious support in the US Congress and forfeit that of their increasingly assertive members among the developing countries, particularly the large emerging market-economies. With the institutions of global governance thus put at risk, ‘a global economic future consonant with liberal norms’ would also be in jeopardy.

Despite the title, this book is actually concentrated almost exclusively on the problems of leadership selection in the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, that is, the major economic multilaterals. Nevertheless, Kahler is surely right to emphasise their intrinsic importance and to argue that reforms in these international organizations would have implications for the others. In order to highlight the limitations of their existing leadership selection procedures, he provides detailed, lively, and extremely well researched accounts of their messy recent election contests. In the process he singles out for particularly sharp criticism the long-standing convention that the managing-director of the IMF should always be a European and the president of the World Bank an American, and the cumbersome consensus system of the WTO. (Kahler’s analysis of the last, where he draws attention to the serious consequences of not using straw votes, will be of particular interest to students of diplomacy.) At the end of the book he offers a list of badly needed reforms, many of which are clearly inspired by the procedures of major corporations. Some of those involved in the contests Kahler describes might find his insistence that they behave more virtuously a little unworldly but his appeals are made on the hallowed ground of enlightened self-interest. His book also has a good index. I recommend it strongly.

Leadership Selection in the Major Multilaterals2019-10-14T20:28:44+01:00

The Permanent Under-Secretary of State: A brief history of the office and its holders

History Notes, no. 15, April 2002 (FCO, Records and Historical Department: London), pp. 57. Free on request.

As the title of this booklet indicates, it is only a brief history of this increasingly influential office in the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Nevertheless, as one would expect from its provenance, it is completely authoritative, fluently written, draws on previously under-exploited archives, and includes many nineteenth century photographs never previously published.

Strongly recommended. This should be available on the FCO website by the end of July.

The Permanent Under-Secretary of State: A brief history of the office and its holders2019-10-14T20:28:44+01:00

A Diplomat in Siam (introduced and edited by Nigel Brailey)

first published 1994, rev. ed., Itineraria Asiatica, Thailand vol. VIII (Orchid Press: Bangkok, 2000), pp. 208, with index; ISBN 974-8304-73-6; price USD23.00

[ buy this book ]

email: wop@inet.co.th

Nigel Brailey, a University of Bristol historian who is well known to students of Sir Ernest Satow, is to be congratulated on bringing out a revised edition of this work, the fruit of Satow’s period as British minister-resident in Bangkok from 1885 until 1888. It is the journal which Satow, later the author of the famous Guide to Diplomatic Practice, kept on his long boat journey from Bangkok to the northern city of Chiangmai and back again, which took from the beginning of December 1885 until the end of the following February. The purpose of the trip, from which he returned with a serious case of malaria, was to investigate the delays in the Chiangmai ‘native’ court’s determination of disputes involving British subjects engaged in the teak trade, and to report on this trade generally. However, like the eminently professional diplomat he was, Satow noted down in his diary everything of conceivable interest – whether of plants and trees, wild life, ancient temples, agricultural practices, and so on – about which he learned on his journey. With hardly any political content in the diary at all, most of this makes dull reading for all but those with a general interest in late nineteenth century Thailand. Neverthless, it is revealing of Satow’s amazingly broad interests and of the kind of reporting that was expected of diplomats at that time. It is also a key primary source for the biography of Satow that is still awaited.

A Diplomat in Siam (introduced and edited by Nigel Brailey)2019-10-14T20:28:44+01:00

Bilateral Diplomacy

(DiploProject: Geneva and Malta, 2002), pp. 283, with index. ISBN 99909-55-16-6

[ buy this book ]

The second book on diplomacy by the former Indian ambassador, Kishan Rana, is hot on the heels of his first, Inside Diplomacy, reviewed with great enthusiasm on this site last year. It is the first in a new series called ‘DiploHandbooks’ that is being published by Jovan Kurbalija’s DiploProject, an educational and training operation based chiefly at the University of Malta and supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. Aimed principally at trainee diplomats, the book is the fruit not only of the author’s long and varied diplomatic experience but also of his teaching in Malta and, most recently, on a Commonwealth assignment at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Windhoek, Namibia.

The first part of the book deals with the purposes of bilateral diplomacy and has some emphasis on commerce, finance and aid. The second deals with institutions: the MFA, embassies and consulates, joint commissions and other groups, and bilateral summits. And the third covers methods: diplomatic reports, cross-cultural sensitivity, diplomatic signalling, negotiating, and performance enhancement. In the long conclusion, the author pulls together the threads of his theme. This is that the resident embassy is more important than ever, not least because so many ‘home-based actors’ are now involved in bilateral relationships that only the embassy is in a position even to approximate to a grasp of the complete picture. Not surprisingly, he concludes, we are witnessing a ‘renaissance’ of bilateral diplomacy.

I have heard it said that her readers would walk bare-foot over broken glass to get their hands on the latest Dorothy Dunnett novel. Trainee diplomats should be prepared to make a similar sacrifice to acquire the latest Rana – though I trust that Mr Kurbalija will ensure that this is unnecessary. Kishan Rana’s insistence on the importance of bilateral diplomacy is not only compelling because of the force and elegance of his reasoning but also because he is no dinosaur striving to conjure up a lost world. On the contrary, his book oozes the language of modernity and has no hesitation in claiming that diplomats have much to learn from ‘business management methodology’. As a teaching book, the style and presentation are also very good. It is lucid and economical, points are generally enumerated, examples are often amusing, and chapters are rounded off with a list of questions to stir student thinking. It has a good index. Above all, though, it will be a successful textbook because it conveys the author’s enormous enthusiasm for his subject.

I would disappoint Ambassador Rana if I did not mention a few quibbles. There is a fair degree of overlap with Inside Diplomacy, which is also more detailed on some subjects and should be used in conjunction with Bilateral Diplomacy. The guides to further reading are also, I think, too short. While agreeing that ‘performance enhancement’ both in foreign ministries and embassies is obviously important, I do not share the author’s enthusiasm for employing ‘corporate techniques’ in its pursuit. The Thatcherite philistinism that spawned this approach in Britain in the 1980s has left a trail of institutional destruction – not least in the universities – that will take generations to repair. Nor can I agree that ‘it is rare to have significant business’ conducted at state funerals (p. 165), as readers of my essay on … er … ‘working’ funerals will appreciate! But these, to repeat, are just quibbles. This is a splendid teaching book for trainee diplomats and I recommend it most warmly.

Bilateral Diplomacy2019-10-14T20:28:44+01:00

Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga

(I.B. Tauris: London and New York, 1999), ISBN 1-86064-497-X, pp. 352, incl. index.

[ buy this book ]

Question: When is a diplomatic victory not a diplomatic victory? Answer: When it is achieved by means of a veto in the Security Council of the United Nations. Nowhere is this maxim more tellingly illustrated than in the Council’s meeting in New York in November 1996 which voted on the issue of whether or not to give a full second term (five years) to the Secretary-General, the University of Paris educated Egyptian scholar-diplomat, Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Of the 15 members of the Council, 14 voted in favour and one voted against. Since that member was the United States this represented a veto – and that, to all intents and purposes, was the end of Africa’s first UN Secretary-General.

The US government had come to the conclusion that it did not want an independent spirit on the 38th Floor of the Secretariat and thought that ‘BB-G’ would make a useful scapegoat for the failures of US policy in the Balkans and Somalia. However, it had tried to avoid having to use its veto by going to extraordinary lengths to persuade his supporters to drop him. The State Department barnstormed an OAU summit, sent the Secretary of State himself on a trip to Africa, spread disinformation, and arm-twisted the other members of the Security Council. His official phone lines were tapped – or so he believes. The State Department even tried tempting him to stand down voluntarily with the offer of his own US-financed foundation and a new title – ‘Secretary-General of the United Nations Emeritus’. (Since this would signify ‘honourable discharge’ it was presumably intended to distinguish him from Kurt Waldheim, the predecessor with the somewhat questionable war record.) And yet, when it came to the vote on his future in the Security Council, not even the British supported the Americans – which tells us just what a diplomatic debacle for them this was.

But so what? As Boutros-Ghali says, ‘Only the weak rely on diplomacy [which] is perceived by an imperial power as a waste of time and prestige and a sign of weakness’ (p. 198). Of course, he exaggerates – as the half of his own book that I have summarised above amply demonstrates – but there is a kernel of truth in this observation. And this book, by any standards, is a quite riveting account of how and why the United States tried diplomacy but in the end shrugged its shoulders and cast its veto against Boutros Boutros-Ghali – even though its vital interests were not at stake. It is also likely to make angry anyone who thinks – as I do – that the world diplomatic system can only suffer from the political emasculation of the UN Secretariat. I have added some references to this valuable memoir, with its account of the ‘UN-vanquished’ but its Secretary-General morally ‘Unvanquished’ (the title is a clever pun), on the Updating Pages for my textbook.

Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga2019-10-14T20:28:44+01:00
Go to Top