Diplomacy and Public Imagination

Abstract

For too long, the craft of diplomacy has been studied in isolation from the historical setting that necessitates its contingent practice. This claim may seem like a sweeping generalization, for diplomats do indeed appear to be in the business of mediating between differing views of history: they gather historical facts to support their interventions; they are often appointed on the basis of their acute familiarity with the history, culture and politics of a country or region; and above all, as human beings, they are historical agents, products and producers of histories. Yet, as operators within and of the states-system, diplomats mainly function as representatives of sovereign histories: they belong primarily to, as the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) states, a ‘diplomatic mission’, charged with the ‘promotion’ and ‘protection’ of the interests of the states they represent. State-sanctioned diplomacy is in large measure, then, the practice of mediating state-sanctioned histories. According to this conception, diplomacy is largely a derivative venture: it is an intervention into an already specified set of events and modes of reasoning – it is derived from and necessitated by fixed perspectives on history. This is not to say that diplomacy lacks vigour or flexibility – to the contrary, its successful operation relies a great deal on ingenuity and subversion.1 But it is important to note from the outset that as a key ‘institution’ of the international society of states (Bull, 1977, p. 161) diplomacy does not engage directly with the historical currents and contingent imaginations at work in the de-centered, borderless world society of human beings.