Globalisation and Diplomacy

Abstract

When I was about 15 years old, I asked my godfather, a palaeontologist, whether he thought global warming was a man-made or a natural phenomenon. He replied that however substantive the changes wrought by human beings might be, there was no way we could have substantially affected the cycle of global warming that has covered the billions of years over which the earth had existed. When I pointed out that the time span that I had in mind was less than 20,000 years, during which human societies had been sedentary, he remarked that such periods were simply too short to be of interest to a palaeontologist and that was the end of the discussion. There is a lesson here. Without specifying a time interval, little of interest may be said about questions of newness. What is new about globalisation and what is relevant to diplomacy depends on your time perspective. I will begin by tracing the phenomenon as changes in the way space, time and density mould global politics. I will go on to argue that globalisation has a forerunner in internationalisation, and discuss some key changes that internationalisation brought to diplomacy. I will then proceed to ask whether there are ways in which the changes in diplomacy that characterised internationalisation are now being further intensified, whether there are new factors afoot, and whether we are looking at changes that cumulate to a major change in diplomatic practices overall. First, the phenomenon of globalisation.