the english school on diplomacy: scholarly promise unfulfilled

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2003 17: 341International RelationsIver B. Neumann

The English School on Diplomacy: Scholarly Promise Unfulfilled

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International Relations Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol 17(3): 341–369[0047–1178 (200309) 17:3; 341–369; 036057]

The English School on Diplomacy:Scholarly Promise Unfulfilled

Iver B. Neumann, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs

Abstract

As pointed out by earlier theorists associated with the English School, if one viewsworld politics as an historically emerging and social phenomenon, then diplomacy playsa key role in it. For the last 15 years, however, diplomacy has been at the margin of theSchool’s interests. The article aims to rectify this by: a) introducing English Schoolthought on diplomacy as it evolved through an original series of books; b) reviewing thework of the next generation of scholars with a view to seeing how and why the interestin diplomacy stalled; and c) arguing that the English School has indeed made animpressive contribution, but one which we can only follow up by wedding it to morewide-reaching projects of social theory.

Keywords: diplomacy, governance, history of diplomacy, IR theory, states system

Recent interest in the English School has coincided with a renewed interest in thespecific practices which together constitute world politics. Instead of assuming aset of functions and a state structure and then deducing a set of truth claims fromthese assumptions, a growing number of scholars have begun to scrutinize howworld politics are actually performed. As pointed out by the English School, if oneviews world politics as an historically emerging and social phenomenon, thendiplomacy plays a key role in it. The renewed interest in the English School and insocial practices like diplomacy should, therefore, be mutually reinforcing. To theextent that Tim Dunne is right in maintaining that ‘few academics who identifywith the English School today are interested in the processes of diplomacy’, this isdefinitely a situation which should be remedied.1 Part of the groundwork for sucha revival must be to scrutinize and critique what the English School has had to sayabout diplomacy. That is the job to be undertaken in this article. Part oneintroduces English School thought on diplomacy as it evolved through an originalseries of books. Part two looks at the work carried out by the next generation(s).Part three draws attention to the limits of the present English Schoolconceptualization by arguing that it is not sufficiently tied in with an overalldiscussion of social change. The conclusion reached is that the English School has

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indeed made an impressive contribution, but one which we can only follow up bywedding it to more wide-reaching projects of social theory.

The original series

On the first pages in the first chapter of the first book to emanate from the BritishCommittee on the Theory of International Politics, Martin Wight famouslycontrasts political theory with what he refers to as international theory. Whereasthe former consists of a succession of ‘classics from Bodin to Mill’, there is no‘succession of first-rate books about the states-system and diplomacy’.2 Thisspecification of the international as being a question of the states system and itsfunctions – with functions being used here in its general meaning as tasks which itis expected to perform – can actually be deduced even earlier, from the choice oftitle for the published collection of papers – Diplomatic Investigations. As pointedout by Suganami, inasmuch as ‘politics’ concerns the working of the polis, that is,the working of a social collective which strives to maintain its boundaries towardsthe outside, there can be no such thing as ‘international politics’.3 As a response tothis situation, Wight fastened on the concept of ‘diplomatics’ as a more accurateand more technically correct way of referring to his preferred object of study than‘the international’ of everyday speech. Everything which is not ‘politics’, then, is‘diplomatics’, but by the same token, everything which is not to do either with theinternal life of the state or with the specific relations between states is ruled out asan object of study. By the same token, in his lecture course on the three traditions,he treats foreign policy, the balance of power and diplomacy alike under theheading ‘theory of diplomacy’, giving as his explicit reason that diplomacysignifies ‘all international intercourse, its purposes and objects, in time of peace’.4

As noted below, elsewhere he even broadens this definition by doing away with itsqualifying tail. This is the same usage as the one which is found in the title toDiplomatic Investigations.

Also famously, in the opening chapter of that book, Wight defined the study ofdiplomatics as a continuation of the ‘speculation’ by international lawyers on theworkings of the states system, pointing out that when the first British chair ofInternational Law was established at Oxford in 1859, it was as the Chichele Chairof International Law and Diplomacy. He went on to specify the extra-legal rawmaterial for such speculation as consisting of the writings of the irenists, theMachiavellians, the parerga or asides of the political philosophers, and ‘thespeeches, despatches, memoirs and essays of statesmen and diplomats’. Wight’scomplaint is that ‘few political thinkers have made it their business to study thestates-system, the diplomatic community itself’.5

Onomastically, textually and practically, then, diplomacy is central to Wight’sconceptualization of international relations. Crucially, however, Wight does notexplicitly raise the question of method. For him, it is simply a given that thematerial to study is texts. It is the textual ‘speculation’ of the international lawyers

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which interests him, and he concludes that international theory must be the‘rumination about human destiny to which we give the unsatisfactory name ofphilosophy of history’.6 From the point of view of social science, then, there mustbe an unacknowledged tension between Wight’s stated overall aim of wanting tostudy ‘the diplomatic community itself’ and his preference for ‘speculation’ and‘rumination’. Wight extracts a living social reality – the diplomacy of the statessystem – from the overall field of the social. Methodologically, he reduces theways of investigating this extract of the social to textually based approaches. Thisamounts to a double abstraction of diplomacy as a social practice which may serveas a point of departure for studying diplomacy, but hardly as the end point of suchstudy.

Wight’s second contribution to Diplomatic Investigations, on ‘Western Valuesin International Relations’, demonstrates that the tension between the textual andthe practical is present in Wight’s work in an implicit form, and so my critique ofit is a critique immanent to the School itself. Wight states that ‘there is no simpleway of deducing Western values from Western practice. For example, the traditionof British diplomacy is by itself a weak authority for Western values’. Theexpression ‘pattern of ideas’ is used interchangeably with ‘values’.7 What Wightmaintains here is that diplomacy must be something other and more than thepattern of ideas in relation to which it exists. The practice is more than the theoryabout that practice. But in that case, the study of that practice must, in order tocapture more than a pattern of ideas about it, fasten on more than speculation andrumination about diplomacy. It must also include the study of diplomacy as whatWight himself refers to as a practice. There are, Wight points out, such things as‘requirements of social existence’, ‘the constant experience of diplomatic life’,and these things should be a crucial site of study.8

These programmatic statements notwithstanding, nowhere in DiplomaticInvestigations is there any trace of any attempt to subject diplomacy to this kind ofscrutiny. This lack seems to emanate directly from a central lack in Wight’s work.Robert Jackson is surely wrong when he calls Wight an ‘historian of internationalideas’.9 By definition, historians contextualize ideas. Wight, on the other hand,follows the western philosophical tradition as it stood up to Kant’s Copernicanrevolution, and treats ideas as if they simply emerge, and do not relate to anythingelse than previous philosophical ideas. He thus treats international theory as atimeless dialogue, rather than as a dialogue across time. Jackson, like Bull beforehim, points to Wight’s Christianity in order to understand how it is that he caninsist on the international being such a timeless sphere, where recurrence andrepetition reign supreme. Wight, then, has a view of history which ipso factoprecludes the possibility of change. Far from being a historian of ideas, he is aphilosopher of history, and one whose philosophical credo is the simplest possible:nothing ever changes.

Wight is true to his credo when he sees his intellectual function as being that ofcollecting and classifying ideas about diplomacy and other international phen-omena. He is what the anthropologist Edmund Leach calls a ‘butterfly collector’,

THE ENGLISH SCHOOL ON DIPLOMACY 343



who draws together an enormous amount of gems and chestnuts, but who refrainsfrom making that leap of faith which may bring forth something new from hismaterial.10 It is, therefore, only logical that he complained of not experiencingthose flashes of creativity which could make the material come together, and thathis papers had to be collated and edited by others for posthumous publication. Itwas his own credo that made him stumble. And by undermining those who saw itas the supreme intellectual business to create new meaning – his colleague CharlesManning at the London School of Economics is the key example here – he alsothrew a spanner in the works of what was to become the English School.11

In Diplomatic Investigations, only one chapter, written by Wight’s co-editorHerbert Butterfield, is devoted to diplomacy in its entirety. The major thrust of thischapter is that the ‘new diplomacy’ championed by Woodrow Wilson and othersafter the First World War and emphasizing parliamentary participation and trans-parent practices broke with what Butterfield refers to as social ‘laws’:

We may wonder whether the proclamation of a ‘new diplomacy’ and ‘simpler’types of policy in 1919 was not [. . .] a facile attempt to pander to the self-esteem of the masses. [. . .] It might have been better, after 1919, therefore, notto humour the inexperienced democracies so much, but to press upon them theurgent need for education in the whole problem of international affairs [. . .] itwould have been better to take the line that here was the moment for asserting(and insisting upon) the continuity of history [. . .] if there are rules ofdiplomacy and laws of foreign policy, these must be valid whether the businessis conducted by men or women, whites or blacks, monarchies or democracies,cabinets or parliaments. [. . .] It may be true that some of the routines ofdiplomacy – some of the techniques and detailed practices – may depend onconditions (on the state of communications, for example, or the character of therégimes involved); but this can hardly be the case with rules of policy and theway in which consequences proceed out of causes in international relations.[. . .] If the principle of the balance of power was useful or valid in theeighteenth century, it was likely to be useful or valid in the twentieth century.12

Butterfield’s choice of the balance of power is hardly coincidental, inasmuch ashis other contribution to the volume bears the title ‘The Balance of Power’. Ittakes the form of a discussion of how humankind gained insight in this ‘idea’: ‘theidea of the balance of power [. . .] did not exist in the ancient world [. . .] it wasGuicciardini, who ultimately made the crucial advance and gave the first vividpicture of the balance of power [. . . .] The eighteenth century regarded it rather asa law which operates wherever there is an international order and a states-system,a law which operates if governments are alive to their long-term interests’. ToButterfield, the growth of human insight into the workings of the balance of power– glimpsed by Guicciardini, worked out by Fenelon, applied by politicians – isrepresentative for diplomatics at large, for, as he states programmatically, ‘aninternational order is not a thing bestowed upon by nature, but is a matter ofrefined thought, careful contrivance and elaborate artifice’.13




Butterfield seems to make two central assertions about diplomacy. First, whathe writes about the epiphenomenality of the social characteristics of its bearersmeans that, to him, diplomacy should not be seen as an incorporated practice.Butterfield’s diplomats are simply not (corpo)real. They are not participating in aspecific social activity with a specific set of norms. As argued convincingly byPaul Sharp, Butterfield is consistently interested in diplomats as individuals, withtheir quirks and their dislikes.14 Such a tack is potentially of great value, for it maydemonstrate how a specific diplomatic sequence may lead to unexpected changein the institution of diplomacy overall, and how change in the institution ofdiplomacy may even affect other institutions. This, however, is not the tack takenby Butterfield. The reason may be simple: he seems to have no concept ofstructure whatsoever. Second, to Butterfield, insights about diplomacy – perhapseven the social overall functions – lie dormant in human history, waiting to bediscovered. They can then be lost – witness how he sees developments from the18th to the 20th centuries as a qualitative fall but they are there, and it is the job –of the practitioner to make themselves acquainted with them and to follow them,and of the scholar to study them. The point for this article is not whether thereexists such a movement in human history – this is indeed a point which belongs tothat realm of philosophy of history to which Wight rightly appoints it – but thatthis way of studying diplomacy, like Wight’s, blocks the study of diplomacy as asocial phenomenon which is of interest in its own right, regardless of meta-historical speculation about evolutionary principles.

Butterfield’s major legacy is his critique of ahistorical liberal or ‘Whig’accounts of history as a movement of progress. This is a critique of writing ahistory of the present in terms of the future. But in his English School work,Butterfield is clearly guilty of another kind of ahistoricism, namely writing thehistory of the past in terms of the present. Where Wight is concerned, he deliverspathbreaking analyses of how diplomacy changes historically, while at the sametime insisting on diplomatics being the realm of ‘recurrence and repetition’. But,as these analyses themselves demonstrate, the trait which most blatantly singlesout diplomacy as a social practice characterized by ‘recurrence and repetition’, isthat it has at any one time over the last 500 years had bearers who have character-ized it as such. Everything else is in flux. We seem to have here a special case ofthe phenomenon that Rob Walker has located in IR theory at large: the originalseries of books by the English School is a practice which plays a crucial role inmaintaining social practices as they are by insisting on them not changing.15 Onemust ask how such a programmatical insistence on recurrence and repetitionaccording to ahistorical social laws as that which one finds among the firstgeneration of English School scholars is possible. The answer, as spelled out bytheir successors from Bull through Vincent to Dunne, is lodged in the meta-physical presuppositions which these scholars brought to their scholarly work. ForWight and Butterfield, diplomacy is not an incorporated practice because it isassociated with something spiritual.

Where Butterfield is concerned, he carries his Christian belief on his scholarly




sleeve, seeing an idea of God as the only guarantee against human excesses andgiving to his major work on diplomacy the title Christianity, Diplomacy andWar.16 Wight, on the other hand, contents himself with insisting on the prolongedrelevance of our present predicament. In his major work, the posthumouslypublished edition of Power Politics, he does repeat the crucial credo of hisphilosophy of history in this regard, stating that ‘The notion that diplomacy caneradicate the causes of war was part of the great illusion after 1919. Diplomacycan do a little, perhaps, to mitigate the social conditions of war; it can circumventthe occasions of war; but the causes of war, like the need for diplomacy itself, willremain so long as a multiplicity of governments are not reduced to one govern-ment and international politics transformed into domestic politics’. The book has aseparate chapter on diplomacy, which opens by stating that ‘Diplomacy is thesystem and the art of communication between powers. The diplomatic system isthe master-institution of international relations’.17 He then goes on to discuss it interms of the history of resident embassies and conferences, respectively.18 Theseworkings-through take the form of general observations on how these patterns getmore complicated, and perform a great service by beginning to trace the emer-gence of a specific pattern of interactions by excavating a series of facts andordering them chronologically.

There are also interesting observations on resistance to diplomacy. In thechapter on revolution, giving the examples of the French Directory, Soviet Russiaand Wilson’s new diplomacy, he underlines how ‘Revolutionary politics tend tobreak down the important distinction between diplomacy and espionage’, and alsothe distinction between diplomacy and propaganda: ‘Diplomacy is the attempt toadjust conflicting interests by negotiation and compromise; propaganda is theattempt to sway the opinion that underlies and sustains the interests’.19 In thechapter on diplomacy, he specifies this further, stating that information, nego-tiation and communication are the three basic functions of diplomacy; thatespionage, subversion and propaganda are their perverted forms in revolutionarydiplomacy; and that ‘an evolution of emphasis from the first to the third may betraced in the history of Soviet diplomacy’.20 Yet again, however, he does notproceed to substantiate this very promising hypothesis by undertaking a scrutinyof Soviet diplomatic practice. Neither does he spell out the feeling impressed onthe reader that these characteristics of revolutionary diplomacy also to someextent seem to have spread to diplomacy at large, so that part of the achievementthat was 18th- and 19th-century European diplomacy has been lost.

The major contribution of Power Politics was the conceptualization of diplo-macy as an institution of the same kind as war etc., but one which in key respectsencompasses the others and so is in certain (unspecified) respects a ‘master-institution’. The major contribution of Systems of States was in the direction ofwhat he refers to half-jokingly as ‘the sociology of states-systems’, namely tothrow out and begin to substantiate the hypothesis that a diplomatic system isdependent on certain common institutions, which Wight refers to as ‘a commonculture’. He postulates that there have been three states systems, and begins to




chart the common institutions of the Graeco-Roman one (language, the Olympicgames, religious beliefs centred on amphyctionies such as the Delphic Oracle) aswell as the modern European one (religion, transformed into what he calls values),but leaves the one of the Chinese Warring States (771 BC to 221 AD) out.21 Butagain there is little sustained comparison, and no attempt is made to identifythreshold values which characterize a states system as such.

In Systems of States, Wight also offers observations on diplomatic practices ofwhat he calls secondary states systems, that is, systems where the acting entitiesare themselves suzereign and not sovereign systems. This is an interesting moveinasmuch as it stands in contradistinction to the assertion made in DiplomaticInvestigations, that diplomatics concerns relations between sovereign systemsexclusively. For example, there is a concrete step away from this stance when heuses the concept of a ‘diplomatic system’ about the multiperspectival system ofpre-states system Europe, writing that ‘the real diplomatic system of the MiddleAges was the system of papal legates, who “carry out direct papal governmentthrough the length and breadth of the societas” ’.22 Similarly, in his lectures, heused the phrase ‘colonial diplomacy’ as distinct from ‘foreign affairs’ aboutChamberlain’s relations with Krüger in 1896.23 If practices of information, nego-tiation and communication between entities other than sovereign states are openedto scrutiny where historical systems such as the Tell-el-Amarna system, theEuropean Middle Ages or the British Empire are concerned, then there is nological reason why such practices should not also be made the object of inquiryinside what Wight calls primary states systems. Wight opens the door to studyingpresent-day diplomacy as something more than state-to-state relations, but hehimself seems to have no inclination to walk through that door.

To sum up, the great value of these assertions is that they place the conduct ofdiplomacy squarely at the centre of international relations, and that they give anaccount of how diplomacy has evolved historically. The original series of booksby members of the English School has been, and should be, criticized for beingstatist and evolutionist. These are first and foremost criticisms of the kind ofphilosophy of history that is on offer in these texts. The major criticism offeredhere is of a different kind. It is that the philosophizing of history is allowed tocrowd out sustained scrutiny of the actual practices of diplomacy as they playthemselves out in the different time frames investigated by Wight, Butterfield andtheir collaborators.

The next generation

Hedley Bull, universally hailed as the major English School scholar of the secondgeneration, fully acknowledged that the insights of the former generation ofEnglish School scholars belonged to the realm of speculation and rumination,writing, for example, in the introduction to his co-edited edition of Wight’s PowerPolitics that ‘It is not a work of history but of reflection about history’.24 He was




also indirectly dismissive of their work on diplomacy when he wrote that JohanGaltung’s ‘article with Mari Ruge on diplomacy is the best thing written on thissubject since Sir Harold Nicolson’s Diplomacy, published in 1939’.25 In light ofthis, it is appropriate that the works on the history of diplomacy in the 30 yearssince the original series of English School works appeared, have not been writtenby members of the English School, but by scholars who do not refer to it or whohave been openly critical to it.26 Inasmuch as the English School was almost theonly scholarly quarter where diplomacy was taken seriously during the Cold War,however, it would be worthwhile to investigate further whether there is at least ageneral way in which the existence of the English School lent credence andinspiration to these undertakings.

There are two traits of Bull’s own treatment of diplomacy, in The AnarchicalSociety and elsewhere, which deserve special mention. The first is his refinementof Wight’s taxonomy. Wight had offered a number of different lists of whichinstitutions that international relations were made of. Bull concentrated on five –the balance of power, international law, diplomacy, war, and great power (concert).Diplomacy seems to have lost the standing of a ‘master-institution’. No argumentsare given for this, and there is little by way of discussion of how the differentinstitutions interact with one another. The book basically enumerates the functionseach specific institution is supposed to serve, and leaves it at that. This, however,is done with an historical touch and an incisiveness that has still, as far as I amaware, to be bested. To Wight’s list of diplomacy’s functions – the spreading andgathering of information, negotiation – Bull adds ‘minimisation of the effects offriction’ and ‘symbolising the existence of the society of states’.27

As argued by Hurrell, given that the existence of a procedural rather than asubstantial value consensus is at the heart of Bull’s problematique, the former ofthese two functions should place diplomacy at the centre of international society,but Bull nonetheless seems to treat diplomacy as derivative of other functions.28

Judged by what he actually published as well as the lack of notes and drafts for thechapter on diplomacy in The Anarchical Society, Hurrell concludes that Bull ‘doesnot seem terribly interested in diplomacy’. He certainly does not unpack the ideathat diplomacy is about minimizing friction, but rests content with asserting it.

The second function of diplomacy singled out by Bull, that of ‘symbolising theexistence of the society of states’, is hardly crucial sociologically; Vincent makesthe point that one may use international law to locate international society in theway a miner’s lamp locates gas, and there is a way in which every function of anyinstitution must be said to symbolize the whole.29 Bull’s observation has signif-icance, however, because it constitutes a break with Butterfield’s framing ofdiplomacy as not being an incorporated practice. Diplomacy’s symbolic functionis perhaps more visible than that of other institutions exactly because diplomatswander around in the host country and assert their physical presence there. Thisfocus on diplomats as actual human beings allows Bull to make the other movewhich deserves special mention here, namely the idea of a diplomatic culture. Bullforeshadows the introduction of this idea by a discussion of the kind of infor-




mation that it is the diplomat’s function to gather. To him, the diplomat (or‘diplomatist’, as he has it) will easily lose out to the journalist on speed and to thescholar on depth, but he (or, one may add, she) is:

uniquely skilled in gathering a particular kind of information that is essential tothe conduct of international relations. This is information about the views andpolicies of a country’s political leadership, now and in the near future. It isknowledge of personalities rather than of the forces and conditions whichshape a country’s policy over the long term. It is knowledge of the currentsituation and how it is likely to develop rather than of the pattern of pastregularities. It derives from day-to-day personal dealings with the leadingpolitical strata in the country to which a diplomatist is accredited, sometimes tothe detriment of his understanding of society at large in that country.30

After four years in their midst, I still think that Bull hits the nail on the head here.He points out that the diplomat’s skill and trade is of a practical manner, tied tospecific situations and contexts, not built to last but eminently useful here andnow. There is a shift here away from speculation and rumination towards thespecific nitty-gritty of micro-power. The concept of a ‘diplomatic culture’ is a leapof faith (a hypothesis, if you like) built on empirical observations. Bull defines itas ‘the common stock of ideas and values possessed by the official representativesof states’.31 It is part of a wider international political culture which Bull,following Wight, sees as a necessary precondition for the emergence of what he(again famously) calls an international society. The concepts come across assomewhat underdeveloped. Although Bull’s major concern is with functions andinstitutions, he sees diplomatic culture in terms of a set of ideas only. Thus, thefocus on practices that led him to introduce the concept in the first place is lost.This is a step back to Wight’s approach, where ideas and practices lead separateexistences, and the study of the latter is bracketed.

In Bull’s other major contribution, his co-edited Expansion of InternationalSociety, he fruitfully employs the concept of an international political culture inorder to discuss the diffusion of ideas and practices, and in his stock-talking of towhat extent, what he refers to as ‘The Revolt against the West’, challenges worldorder at large.32 Neither here nor elsewhere in his work is there any expansion ofthe concept of diplomatic culture, however. Overall, the scholarly attention paid todiplomacy in this book is a disappointment. Wight had insisted that diplomacyplayed a crucial role in diffusing the ideas and practices of the European system ofstates to ever new parts of the globe, and one could therefore reasonably haveexpected an introductory chapter on this. Instead, the institutions that are allottedseparate introductory chapters are war and trade. There are some intriguingexamples of the role of diplomacy scattered throughout the book, as when HidemiSuganami notes how Admiral Perry used deliberate mistranslation of a key treatyto secure the United States permanent representation in Japan. It is observationssuch as these which lead Suganami to insist that where Japan was concerned,‘Among these new methods, or institutions, introduced by the West, the most




fundamental were the diplomatic/consular system and international law’.33 ButSuganami’s empirical findings seem to have been brushed aside by the editors. Atleast they have not made what seems to be its logical impact on the outline of thebook. Instead, chapters on these two institutions are included only at the very end.It does not help matters that the chapter on diplomacy is distinctly pedestrian,offering observations of the following kind: ‘The number of British missionsabroad accredited to capitals has expanded to more than 150, though they includetwenty-six capitals in which we [the ‘we’ in question is obviously the British]have no resident mission’.34

To sum up, Bull does not treat diplomacy and the other four institutions asconstitutive of international society, but as reflective of it.35 To him, what con-stitutes order are the primary goals of states – security, the sanctity of agreements(pacta sunt servanda) and territorial property rights – and international society isno more than the form a particular order happens to take. In this way, diplomacyand international society are framed simply as ideational and reflective of inter-national order, and begin to take on an epiphenomenal hue. Wight’s insight thatdiplomacy is a social practice is lost, and Bull’s treatment of diplomacy emergesas being first and foremost taxonomical. On that score, the rigour with which Bulltreated the institutions of international society in The Anarchical Society haslargely been lost in The Expansion of International Society. In terms of the studyof diplomacy, it added little and muddied a lot. The sudden and unexplainedintroduction of trade, while being of course warranted and much overdue as such,rests uneasily with the listing of institutions in the overview chapter, where theyare given as balance of power, law, congresses and diplomacy. Although the latteris given scant attention, it is nonetheless said by Adam Watson in the first mainchapter to have ‘spanned the others and enabled them to function’.36 This faintecho of Wight’s view that diplomacy is the master institution of the system ofstates is, however, drowned out by Watson himself, in his role as Bull’s co-editorof The Expansion of International Society.

Still, of all the members of the original British Committee it was Watson whogave most persistent thought to diplomacy as a social practice. In Watson’s case,the tension between the weight of present philosophy of history and the itch ofabsent work on social practice that is so marked in the original series of books hasbeen solved in a very promising way. Watson dedicated a major work to each. TheEvolution of International Society, which is by dint of its hypothesis of there beinga historical pendulum movement between sovereign and suzereign systems amajor contribution, need not concern us here, except as an indirect argument forstudying diplomatic practice as it appears both in sovereign and in suzereignsystems.37 Diplomacy: The Dialogue between States should, on the contrary, be ofkey interest.38

The book’s gestation history carries the marks of that collective effort which isa necessary element for a body of work to be referred to as that produced by a‘school’. It was noted above how recent book-length contributions to the historyof diplomacy had been written by scholars who were not members of the English




School. Yet some historical work of this kind was indeed carried out. Thesuccessor group to the British Committee which gathered in Leicester had in itsmidst Maurice Keens-Soper, who presented a paper to the Committee in April1972 entitled ‘The Awareness of Diplomacy: François de Callières’.39 At the sametime, he published an article on the first known attempt to set up a diplomaticacademy. He followed up on this in his chapter in the book which was producedby the successor group, The Reason of States, and he has done the scholarlycommunity an estimable service by publicizing and introducing classical works byearly diplomatic theorists such as Callières and Wicquefort.40 His work was also acatalyst for Watson’s book, inasmuch as it was Keens-Soper who suggested toWatson, after he had also read a paper to the British Committee, that a book ondiplomacy ought to be written. Indeed, the piece was planned as a joint effort, butin the end, it was published as Watson’s own work.41

In keeping with Wight’s (and before that, Carr’s) conceptualization of inter-national relations at large as a meeting of different conceptualizations of the basicrelationship between sovereign units, Watson sees diplomacy as dialogue. Also inkeeping with general School thought, he underlines that this dialogue has arecorded history stretching back to the Tell-el-Amarna correspondence, that it is anecessary ingredient of a world of many sovereigns, and that the major point ofstudying it is ‘to determine the functions’. He shies away from making sover-eignty an explicit precondition for diplomacy, however, defining it rather as‘negotiation between political entities which acknowledge each other’s indepen-dence’. It is the institution of diplomacy as such which is of principal interest, notits constitutive parts such as resident embassies, foreign ministries etc.42 Thedialogue may turn on compatible demands, or on incompatible ones, in which caseits function is ‘either the search for a compromise, or else is designed to transcendthe dispute and to bring in a new element that makes a wider agreement palatableto both sides’.43 The latter may also be settled by means other than diplomacy:

In a civilized community, which is not a mere tyranny, the power to judge andthe power to enforce judgements must rest mainly on consent. This is true of asociety of individual states, as it is of a society of individual men. In the days ofthe Vikings and other wild peoples, when the king was little more than theleader of a band of warriors and did not have the authority to dispense justiceaccording to his judgement, two other ways of tackling the problem wereevolved. The first was trial by combat, or by ordeal; and the second was thejudgement of a man by his peers. Both are still highly relevant to an inter-national society of independent states where by definition there is no overallauthority.44

Diplomacy is about what to do before one reaches the point where resort is madeto these other mechanisms, about extending the period up to that point for as longas possible and, once it is nonetheless reached and a break-off of diplomaticrelations ensues, of maintaining contact with a view to resorting to the dialogicalmode at the earliest possibility. This involves persuasion, but this persuasion will




necessarily be predicated on so many different matters that it is ‘not an exactscience; it remains a matter of human skills and judgements’. It is, therefore,something more than a cloak to cover a given balance of primarily military power(as Wight’s Machiavellians would have it), or a ‘deceitful activity’ (as Wight’sKantians would have it).45

To Watson, then, diplomacy is a practice. Without attempting to specify therelationship between diplomacy and war further, he stresses how by preceding,succeeding and also accompanying war it emerges as a constant institution ofinternational society, where war in conditions where such a society exists is tied tothe exceptional circumstance: ‘In general, where war is an instrument of politicalcompulsion in the way suggested by Clausewitz, rather than a way of takingrevenge or inflicting punishment, its own political purpose requires that thoseengaged in using force pay constant attention to relations with the enemy in orderto test his willingness to negotiate’.46

Wight’s historicization of diplomacy opened up the possibility of treating it asan emergent practice. As a sometime serving diplomat, Watson embodies thispractice, and this allows him to begin to sociologize what is much too often treatedby International Relations scholars and others as theoretical givens. His treatmentof the maintenance of the balance of power is a case in point, as is discussion of thenational interest. He begins from a general observation about consensus-formationover time, stating that ‘Men who have known each other and who have read eachother’s letters and telegrams (for these are widely copied within a service) for manyyears, learn to allow for each other’s biases and tendencies, as one allows for afriend’s judgement of a book or a play. In this way a kind of consensus emergesabout men and issues’.47 The outcome of these discussions, Watson maintains, isnothing less than the formulation of the national interest:

The ambassadors of George I and George II implemented and to some extentmade foreign policy in the interests of the House of Hanover, rather than anabstract national interest, and none would have remained in office under aJacobite restoration. But in the nineteenth century we begin to see statesmenlike Talleyrand consciously serving what they conceived to be the long-terminterests of the state. In Talleyrand’s view, the welfare of France required theremoval of his master Napoleon, and he remained in office to protect the sameFrench interests after the Bourbon restoration. [. . .] The formulation of thenational interest, and especially of the available ways to promote it, is made bydiplomats who in the exercise of their profession are brought into continualcontact with the similar purposes of other states, and study in great detail howthey converge or conflict, and what inducements could bring about greaterconvergence. So the national interest emerges in practice from these diplomaticdeliberations as a many-faceted affair, tempered by the art of the internationallypossible, the art of the negotiable, rather than as simply the determinedassertion of the national will.48

This is a convincing argument. Watson advances our understanding of the oft-




discussed shift away from the king’s body to the nexus between state apparatusand the people that it governs by spelling out how this shift involved new andspecific acts by a specific class of actors, namely diplomats. Conversely, the roleof diplomats in the general historical shift is highlighted. Watson does not,however, push on to ask whether we may be in the midst of a similar shift now.But that suggestion was made in another School text, Human Rights and Inter-national Relations by John Vincent.49 He criticizes Watson for treating the subjectmatter of diplomacy simply as being more sand for the machinery to grind. Theimplication is that, in the case of the subject matter of human rights, there isindeed a systems-transforming potential. Thinking about human rights takes theindividual as the point of departure, not the state, but they are handled by statesand so are a potentially disruptive subject of international relations. Vincentadvances the argument that attempts to resolve the clash between an inherentrights logic and the logic which dominates the working of the states system seemto focus crucially on the institution of international law, where a body of what iscalled ius gentium intra se is being worked out. This body of law regulates theboundary and working of a bundle of human rights defined as a common concernto states, the violation of which may lead to a humanitarian intervention beinglaunched. Whereas this is the major thrust of Vincent’s argument, he also toucheson the institution of diplomacy by insisting that diplomats find a way of dealingwith this new subject matter, and by insisting that to the extent that they succeed,this will strengthen international society. The argument, then, is that if diplomatssucceed in taking on not only the running production of the national interest oftheir specific states, but also the maintenance of a common interest of humankindin maintaining human rights, this communal achievement will strengthen the roleof diplomats, and not weaken it. So, to Vincent, everyone would be a winner:international society would be strengthened by having incorporated a new swatheof responsibilities, states would be strengthened by having more versatile diplo-mats, and diplomatic culture would be strengthened by having gained responsi-bility for a common subject matter. Here is a reading of a possible evolution ofcontemporary diplomatic practice that deserves more attention.

To my knowledge, Watson has never responded to Vincent’s critique.50 To him,the crucial work of diplomats seems to remain the production of a consensus thatgoes by the name of the national interest. This process is seen as being similar toall diplomatic services. Where diplomacy’s role in maintaining internationalsociety is concerned, however, Watson explicitly plays down the importance ofmaintenance work, and plays up the question of overall generalized standing. ToWatson, the great powers are the great responsibles. This picture emerges in anumber of places, but perhaps most clearly in the way he plays down actual dip-lomatic performance relative to overall standing in the case of what happens whendiplomatic relations are broken off. In chapter IX, he relates how:

Nowadays, before a temporary closure comes into effect an embassy arrangesto hand over the management of its interests to another embassy, with the




approval of the host government. The embassy of the ‘protecting power’ opensa ‘British (or Indonesian, or Ruritanian) Interest Section’ in its embassy or inthe embassy now nominally closed down, to transact the necessary diplomaticbusiness. This may amount to more than the business it conducts on its ownaccount. Often the host government will allow staff from the expelled embassy– other than the ambassador, whose person is symbolic – to man or partly mantheir interests section under the control of the protecting power. The staff whocontinue in this way may include senior political diplomats who continue adiscreet dialogue with officials of the host government and report it through theprotecting power to their ministry of foreign affairs. [. . .] The country whoseservices are most in demand is Switzerland. That country and certain otherslike Sweden maintain foreign services that in size and especially in calibre arein excess of their strict national requirements. For instance, the Swiss Ambas-sador in Havana for many years protected the interests of a score of countries,most notably the United States. This made him the most informed non-communist diplomat in Havana and the most in contact with Castro and theCuban authorities.51

In chapter XII, by comparison, he goes on to write that:

I have cited in Chapter IX some of the services rendered by Switzerland to thediplomatic dialogue. The contribution of the Netherlands to the development ofinternational law is also impressive. Some states are more acceptable thanothers when it comes to making up a peacekeeping force. [. . .] the impact of agroup or bloc on smaller states, such as OPEC, may be considerable. Even so,these variations are minor. It is the larger powers that determine the effective-ness of diplomacy. This mechanical fact goes far to explain why in manysystems of states special responsibilities for the functioning of internationalrelations, the management of order and the leadership of the diplomatic dia-logue have been entrusted by a general consensus to great powers.52

This may or may not be so; most likely, the generalization is valid. But the keyinterest of this quote is that, by treating this as a mechanical fact rather than assomething to be made the object of sociological inquiry, Watson defines a limit tohis approach. Rather than asking how great powers are actually able to achieveand maintain a position where they can lay down the order of conduct – that is,treating this aspect of diplomacy as an aspect of practice – Watson simply makesan assumption. The advance on the previous generation of English Schoolscholars was that something, most likely his 30 years of service as an actingdiplomat, made Watson stress the study of diplomacy as a social practice. Still, asseen here, this only happens within certain rather narrowly drawn limits. All in all,the book probably succeeds in its stated aim, which was to be the first ‘good bookon the wider aspects of diplomacy [. . .] since Harold Nicolson’s classicDiplomacy, which was first published in 1939’.53 Judged as a work on socialtheory, however, it has tangible limits. Formally, it is a non-referenced work.




Substantially, it is still more a number of (often highly fruitful and stimulating)observations rather than a sustained effort to theorize diplomacy as an historicallyand socially occurring phenomenon.

To sum up, the next generation kept up the historical work and firmed up thetaxonomical work which the original series of books had initiated. Bull, Watson andVincent also followed up by postulating the existence of a diplomatic culture, byfocusing on the actual practices which formed part of that culture, and by specifyinghow changes in the stuff which is made subject to these practices make for changesin diplomacy understood as an historically emerging social practice as well.

The English School and social theory

As noted at the outset, in his history of the English School, Tim Dunne notes thatthe voyages of the third generation of its members have so far stayed clear ofdiplomacy. There is a central exception to this observation to which I will returnbelow. First, however, I want to use Dunne’s framework in order to launch anattack on the work on diplomacy reviewed so far. Dunne gives three principalcriteria for delineating the School and for equating it with the British Committee,namely that:

theory-building must take place in a formal institutional setting, drawing froma shared body of knowledge and ideas; the invention of an interpretativeapproach to the history of ideas about International Relations; and therecognition that the society of states embodies rules and norms which must bethe subject of academic scrutiny and critical judgement.54

Although this starting point lends itself easily to criticism,55 I think Dunne is rightin stressing that the invention of an interpretative approach to the history of ideasabout International Relations is a constitutive as well as a crowning achievementof the School. However, when compared with other and parallel attempts to inventsuch approaches in the social sciences, I think that the School comes up a bitshort. Three such attempts, one from each of three major centres of social researchin the 20th century, stand out as particularly apposite for comparison. The firstbegan to emerge concurrently with the first English School writings, in the early1960s, when Reinhart Koselleck contacted some of his old professors with a planfor a broad work on what he baptized conceptual history. The first volume ofGeschichtliche Grundbegriffe emerged in 1972, the seventh and final volumecame twenty years later. Each volume contains 400 densely packed pages,dominated by footnotes. Altogether, 115 concepts are treated from their inception– often from the ancient world – and up to our own time. Article No. 97, on ‘Staatund Suverenität’, runs to 154 pages, and No. 111, on ‘Volk, Nation, National-ismus, Masse’, to 290 pages. The undertaking also involves a HistorischesWörterbuch der Philosophie (10 volumes available at present), and a Handbuchpolitisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, 1680–1820 (12 volumes so far).




Meanwhile, in France, Michel Foucault initiated a number of studies where thehistory of ideas is paired to social history in a different but comparable manner.The Foucauldian literature now runs to hundreds of volumes, including a numberof studies of sovereignty, governmental techniques and other matters apposite tointernational relations. Finally, in the very same university where the BritishCommittee met, at the same time, and out of the same broadly empirical Anglo-American tradition to which the English School itself belongs, there emerged anundertaking spearheaded by Cambridge historians such as Quentin Skinner towrite the history of the past in terms of the ideas which animated it. Thisundertaking has resulted in a number of meticulously researched monographs, aswell as methodological essays.56

If one compares the results of these three developments in social theory to thework done by the English School, the family resemblance is that they both use thestudy of ideas as an access point, but with a view to grasping an historically andsocially evolving reality in its entirety. However, whereas the conceptualhistorians, the Foucauldians and the Cambridge historians each in their differentways relate their chosen subject matter holistically to social developments at large,the English School has so far rested content with tracing the developments in thesubject matter only along its own trajectory. As seen from Wight’s foundationalessay ‘Why Is There No International Theory?’, this may be traced back to anexplicit move, predicated on the hypothesis that the international realm issufficiently cut off and insulated from other social spheres to call for specialattention. When assessed from the other end of the tradition of scholarship thatthis essay helped to spawn, however, it seems clear that diplomacy, and the otherinstitutions of international relations for that matter, are not special enough for thissplendid scholarly isolation to be warranted.

The upshot is that the English School has cut itself off from whole swathes ofextant work. This is a problem in and of itself: it is a problem inasmuch as theresults of the valuable work which has actually been performed within the Schooldoes not reach the general community of scholars working on social theory (andthey are many), and it is a problem inasmuch as it means that the most pithy workson these matters may not emerge from within the School. To quote a concreteexample, nowhere does the English School scrutinize one of the institutions ofinternational relations in the same way that, say, Schumpeter scrutinized war in hisclassic work on imperialism. In that work, he begins by seeing war as a socialpractice which must be studied in relation to other social practices. Noting thatwar was traditionally the prerogative of the nobility, that the nobility came underthreat from the bourgeoisie during the 19th century, and that the beginningbourgeois hegemony threatened to marginalize the importance of war, he hypo-thesized that imperialism can be read as the historical answer of the nobility to thebourgeoisie’s threat of marginalization. His work demonstrates how one of thechanging faces of warfare can be better understood by being studied as a part ofthe social in its entirety. By comparison, Wight begins to make the same point byquoting John Bright’s 1865 assertion that ‘the foreign policy of this country for




the last 170 years has been a system of gigantic out-door relief to the Englisharistocracy’. In the same breath, he notes that Richard Cobden, whom he calls ‘thegreatest of the English international idealists’, observed that ‘he felt the mostsovereign contempt for aristocracy’.57 Once again, the comparison with how asocial scientist like Schumpeter conducts his scholarly work points up the limits ofWight’s approach. His stunning erudition enables him to pose problems and quotean incredible range of textual sources, but there is no will to knowledge beyondthe textual bricolage and the bold assertion. Data are collected, problems areposed and assertions are made, but there is little engagement with social practicesthat could substantiate those assertions. I do not have in mind here any naturalscience-style testing procedure, but merely the kind of prolonged scrutiny thatSchumpeter allots to imperial warfare.

It need not have been like this. As noted above, Charles Manning had givenvent to a similar sentiment as the one that sustains this article when he criticizedWight for not empathizing with his aim of establishing International Relations as asocial science.58 Charles Jones has convincingly demonstrated Karl Mannheim’srole as a central source of inspiration for another towering figure who wasengaged in a similar pursuit slightly earlier, namely E. H. Carr.59 Carr lauded theprogenitor of the sociology of knowledge for his interest in how political thinkingis embedded in the wider social structure, and applied this central insight in hisown work. I would argue that the scholars I have treated here consistently under-estimate this insight. Tim Dunne includes Carr in his history of the EnglishSchool, basically because everybody doing international relations in 1950s Britainhad to relate to this towering figure. He criticizes the School for not taking powerand power differentials as seriously as did Carr.60 To this, I think, should be addeda more wide-ranging criticism, namely that the School would have come off on aneven better footing if they had followed Manning’s and also Carr’s aspiration towrite works which were both studies of international relations and contributionswhich were explicitly dialogical in their relation to the (rest of the) literature onsocial phenomena. As I have tried to demonstrate above for the case of diplomacy,this is indeed the direction in which the School moved before its work ondiplomacy was cut off. A new beginning should be launched, and it should belaunched along this path.

I noted above that there is an exception to the observation that third generationEnglish School scholars have not made diplomacy a key concern. The case inpoint is James Der Derian. I would argue that the most mature work on diplomacyto emerge out of the English School is James Der Derian’s On Diplomacy.61 Therecan be no doubt that this work emerged as part of the School’s output. It builds ona doctoral thesis supervised by Bull and is dedicated to his memory, its publicationwas helped by Vincent, and its gestation involved contact with, among othersWatson (who later wrote a preface to an IR reader edited by Der Derian).Furthermore, the book announces itself as advancing a ‘post-classical’ approach.When the question of whether it belongs in the School has to be raised at all, it isbecause its scant reception inside the School raises the issue of whether that ‘post’




means that it is so far removed from the classical approach to be beyond its pale.The answer to that question should in my view be a clear ‘no’. In my view, thebook is an example of the kind of work the School should aim to produce.

Der Derian explicitly gives his aim for the book when he writes that he wantsto ‘. . .restore the neglected (some might say illegitimate) parentage of adiplomacy left as a foundling by historians at the doorstep of the diplomatictheorists, who only investigated when mature noises like [Hugo Grotius’] De jurebelli ac pacis were to be heard’. The reason he gives for this emanates perhapsmost clearly in his critique of Harold Nicolson’s work, when he charges that:

Nicolson almost axiomatically precludes the violent and uncertain periods inwhich early diplomacy is formed (and radically transformed), apparentlyin order to preserve the image of a seamless, upward development. Anunfortunate consequence of this is that glib descriptive pronouncements notinfrequently stand in for explanatory statements.62

This is, of course, also an attack on much of the work reviewed above. It is thealternative view of history and the state’s role in it on show here that makesfor one of the two key senses in which the book is ‘post-classical’. Der Derian’salternative to telling the history of the states system is to follow the growingtendency inside the School, which has been charted above, and look at diplomacyas a practice which emerges across both sovereign and suzereign systems: ‘Whatgives definition to a diplomatic system, I have argued, is not the structure itself,but the conflicting relations which maintain, reproduce, and sometimes transformit’. As an example of what kind of readings this tack allows for, one may quotehow Der Derian takes up and firms up an aside by Wight noted above, namelyhow diplomatic relations were run in the European Middle Ages. In the 8th and9th centuries, the Holy Roman Empire had two kinds of legates, missus regis andmissus comitis, who were literate and therefore usually monks, and who travelledin pairs. From Pepin II onwards, the missi were used for carrying information toand gathering information in the duchies. Under Charlemagne, this wasinstitutionalized:

Missi were said to carry staffs; being short and often ornate, it can be surmisedthat these were intended for symbolic, rather than physical protection. Thestaffs were handed over to the missi at the court ceremony; it was often thepractice to place the message inside it. Karl von Amira, the noted Germanmedievalist, believes the staff and the protection granted to its carrier arerelated to the angelology inherited from Ambrose and Augustine. He givesnumerous examples, taken from iconography of the period, in which angelscarrying staffs with messages wrapped around them bear a strikingresemblance to the written accounts of the missi paraphernalia.63

The second principal way in which Der Derian’s work is ‘post-classical’ ratherthan classical lies in its use of the genealogical method, as distinct from the losehistory of ideas-approach favoured by the School from Wight onwards. A




genealogy is a history of the present told in terms of the past. He orders thenarrative in terms of what he refers to as ‘six interpenetrating paradigms toanalyse the origins and transformations of diplomacy: mytho-diplomacy, proto-diplomacy, diplomacy, anti-diplomacy, neo-diplomacy, and techno-diplomacy’.The breaks between paradigms, then, are vague and non-final: ‘Occasionally, aftera great conquest or defeat – be it military, diplomatic, or even technological – thehistorical flux seems to crystallize, sometimes long enough for us warily to speakof a paradigm’.64 For example, the emergence of the missi are part of the changefrom mytho-diplomacy to proto-diplomacy, and the spread of resident embassiesamong Italian city states and then northwards of the change from proto-diplomacyto diplomacy. The diplomacy paradigm is defined as a reification of the idea ofraison d’état.65

In Der Derian’s reading, what characterizes the very different paradigmssubsumed under the heading of diplomacy, that is, what gives the phenomenon itscoherence, is its function as a mediator of estrangement between human col-lectives. Thus, he studies diplomatic culture as ‘the mediation of estrangement bysymbolic power and social constraints’.66 In keeping with this, the focus is onspecific practices, studied in their historicity. Whereas Watson has already under-taken work along these lines, as noted above that only happened within ratherconstrained limits. Der Derian is much more radical in this respect. As an exampleI quote his use of the diaries left by England’s ambassador to the King of France1685–1686 and to the Sublime Porte 1687–1691. The entry for 15 April 1689consists of a long harangue about sleeplessness and stomach pains, and then, withno introduction, these sentences appear: ‘In ye evening received from mr. Jacobsye news of ye Prince & Princesse of Orange being proclaimed King & Queen ofEngland etc. upon which mr. Haley the Chaplain alter’d his Prayers’. This is agraphic way of making the point that diplomacy, seen as a social practice, must bestudied alongside other social practices of the everyday life of its bearers. It isembedded in the social at large, and so something is lost if it is abstracted fromthat placement. Der Derian goes on to comment that ‘it is as much the “petty”rituals and ceremonies of power as it is the “great” events of power politics or thefamous developments of international law which define diplomacy’.67 Actually,Der Derian’s more radical approach to diplomacy as a social practice leads him toa conclusion which is the exact opposite of Watson’s where diplomatic innovationis concerned:

. . . it is not necessarily the preponderant accumulation of power – be itmaterial or spiritual – which will determine diplomatic forms; rather, it is thecirculation, exchange and exercise of alienated power which generates therules of diplomacy which dominant power(s) might impose, especially if themilitary production of intended effects prove inappropriate or just impossible.68

Whereas Der Derian follows Watson on diplomacy being an art that cannot eitherbe detached from or subsumed by military prowess, he then insists that smallpowers may be as important in re-presenting overall diplomatic practice as are




great powers. In hindsight, On Diplomacy comes across both as a summing up ofEnglish School work on diplomacy and, in its introduction of new methods andconcepts, an attempt at renewal. The book has had a broad reception. Over-whelmingly, however, this reception has not taken place inside the EnglishSchool. One possible reading of this is that Der Derian’s attempt at renewal in thedirection of general social theory was largely refused.

There exists a recent coda to the tale of the School’s missing reception of OnDiplomacy, namely the scant reception that now seems to be given to ChristianReus-Smit’s The Moral Purpose of the Modern State.69 Reus-Smit also crossesEnglish School work and newer social theory. He did his basic IR training inAustralia, where The Anarchical Society is an institutionalized starting point formost IR theorizing, and his doctoral work at Cornell, where Katzenstein’s thincomparativist constructivism sets the tone. As was the case with Der Derian, theresult of the mix is a fortifying one. Reus-Smit is first and foremost interested in awhy question – ‘we presently lack a satisfactory explanation for why differentsocieties of sovereign states create different fundamental institutions’ – and toanswer that, he investigates the constitutive principles of international society asthey stood around the Second World War.70 That cut-off point seems to beinformed by the basic thrust of the book, which is to demonstrate John Ruggie’sthrowaway line that states historically seem to have undergone a whole series ofsystemic changes before landing on multilateralism as the modus operandi for aninternational society during the aftermath of the Second World War. Contra DerDerian, however, Reus-Smit’s central subject matter is not diplomacy, and so areading informed by that concern cannot do it full justice as a scholarly work.

The constitutive principle of systems of states as well as of internationalsociety is generally held to be sovereignty. Reus-Smit acknowledges the defin-itional character of sovereignty, but he highlights its intersubjective character. Thefact that sovereignty is reciprocal, that it depends on being recognized by othersovereigns, means that they have to justify not only their existence, but also theiraction. This is crucial, for:

when states are forced internationally to justify their actions, there comes apoint when they must reach beyond mere assertions of sovereignty to moreprimary and substantive values that warrant their status as centralized, auto-nomous political organizations. This is a necessary feature of internationalcommunicative action, and historically it has entailed a common moral dis-course that grounds sovereign rights in deeper values that define the socialidentity of a state: ‘We are entitled to possess and exercise sovereign rightsbecause we are ancient polises, Renaissance city-states, absolutist monarchies,or modern liberal polities.’71

Inasmuch as saying that states must justify their actions seems to be a corollary ofthere existing a society and not merely a system of states, Reus-Smit seems to beplaying well within the bounds of the School yard here. It follows from this thatsovereignty is underpinned by what Reus-Smit calls constitutional structures and




defines as ‘coherent ensembles of intersubjective beliefs, principles, and normsthat perform two functions in ordering international societies: they define whatconstitutes a legitimate actor, entitled to all the rights and privileges of statehood;and they define the basic parameters of rightful state action’.72 He then arguesthat these structures have three primary normative elements, the moral purpose ofthe state, the organizing principle of sovereignty, and the norm of proceduraljustice. On empirical grounds, the first of these takes precedence, for ‘Historicallycontingent beliefs about the moral purpose of the state have provided the just-ificatory foundations of sovereign rights, and as these beliefs have changed fromone society of states to another, so too have meanings attached to sovereignty’.73

The upshot is that, whereas sovereignty is still definitional of international society,it is so only as a part of a single, coherent normative system where it takes secondplace to what actors think is the point of existence, the meaning of life etc. etc.Furthermore, sovereignty is not what gives rise to international institutions.Rather, these emerge out of the entire normative system of which the principle ofsovereignty is but one element. Reus-Smit has now set up the analysis in such away that he can answer his question of why different international societies arehistorically constituted by different fundamental institutions, for the other stuff inthe system is of course historically contingent.

For the study of diplomacy, this argument is particularly apposite in tworespects. Using these as an implicit baseline, he compares them to other constel-lations of constitutive principles that have held sway at earlier stages of itsgestation. Three of his findings are of immediate relevance here. First, Wight andBull’s treatment of contemporary international society as one historical phenom-enon is revised. Inasmuch as the international society of Renaissance Italy,absolutist Europe (16th–18th centuries) and the modern world (Versailles to theCold War) are constituted according to different principles, they must be seen asthree different phenomena. This increases the overall tally of sovereign historicaldiplomatic systems from three to five. Reus-Smit shares Der Derian’s will tofurther periodization, and, treading a different path, reaches similar results (seeabove). Second, diplomacy may be among what Reus-Smit calls the fundamentalinstitutions of an international society. Indeed, he holds what he terms ‘oratoricaldiplomacy’ to have been the only fundamental institution of the internationalsociety of the Italian Renaissance, and ‘old diplomacy’ to have been one of thetwo constituting that of absolutist Europe (the other being natural internationallaw). The importance of this is to salvage and specify diplomacy as a constitutivepractice from Bull’s attempt to reduce it to a reflective one. Third and most impor-tantly, Reus-Smit offers a reading of how diplomacy as a social practice isembedded in the social overall, for if diplomacy and international society flowsfrom a general system of morals and justice, then it cannot be understood withoutreference to the social surroundings from which it grows and of which it is a part.Diplomacy emerges as a social practice among others.

Reus-Smit’s historical readings of how Renaissance and absolutist or ‘old’diplomacy were embedded in the general life of those periods equal Der Derian in




setting a new standard for what diplomatic studies should be supposed toaccomplish, and must therefore be mentioned at least briefly. The moral purposeof the Italian city states was the pursuit of grandezza, of civic glory. Its judicialprinciples were ritualistic, in the sense that social concord added to the glory ofthe city, and weeding out vice hence became a step towards larger grandezza.Political autonomy and actor capacity rested on a patronage system, where a knotof leading families held sway by conducting the lives of their clients. Reus-Smitsuggests that this normative system also caused the rise of oratorical dipomacy:

Renaissance individuals responded to the anxieties and uncertainties generatedby the erosion of guild-based corporate structures, and the retreat of papal andimperial sources of authority and identification, by embracing traditionalpatronage relations. In such relations, the operative norm of procedural justiceentailed the ritual expression of honor and self-worth through ceremonialrhetoric and gesture. These practices established an individual’s identity, legit-imacy, and status as a social agent, and situated that individual within aframework of obligatory social relations. While the construction of relationsbetween states that were as formally hierarchical and reliably binding asrelations between individuals was impossible, political elites observed thesame norm of procedural justice when seeking to establish the social identity,legitimacy, and status of their city-states within the international system, andwhen courting the cooperative relations with other states. In other words, thesame mentalié that shaped how individuals responded to the anxieties ofRenaissance social life also informed how princes and oligarchs reacted to theanxieties of ‘anarchy’, as they understood it.74

Politically and diplomatically, agents were empowered not only by material factors,but also by honour, glory and virtue. Thus, it was no coincidence that Lorenzo’sFlorence, which was seen as being foremost in the arts and in learning, and whichmade a point of sending diplomats who also possessed these skills, was the majordiplomatic arbiter of international society, despite its lack where material resourceswere concerned. Reus-Smit underlines, however, that this situation rested on aspecific social configuration, and that the specific characteristics of Renaissancediplomacy can therefore not be treated frictionlessly as a forerunner of moderndiplomacy or an effect of Oriental influences, as is often the case in the extantliterature. To take but one obvious example, Renaissance diplomacy played itselfout as ritual, which is to say that it was by definition public, whereas the diplomacyof the succeeding absolutist age was first and foremost private and secret.Diplomacy, like other social practices, has to be understood on and in its own termsfirst, and then only secondly if at all as a forerunner of the ‘old’ diplomacy ofabsolutist Europe.

That diplomacy, in turn, rested on a moral purpose of heavenly salvation.Earthly powers were ordered in a hierarchy of descending closeness to God, withFrance on top, then other Christian rulers, then non-Christian rulers (and one mayadd people who were seen to be without rulers altogether). Having broken away




from the overlordship of the church, these emerging states ‘re-imagined’ theworld; ‘the moral purpose of the state was defined as the preservation of adivinely ordained, rigidly hierarchical social order. To fulfil this purpose,monarchs were endowed with supreme authority – their commands were law [andlaw was first and foremost command rather than an outcome of negotiation,enacted ritual, codification, or the like]. Procedural justice was thus defined instrict, authoritative terms. God’s law and natural law were the ultimate arbiters ofwhat constituted justice, and they received worldly expression in the commands ofthe dynastic monarchs’.75 Law became a divinely sanctioned instrument of, ratherthan a frame for, the circulation of power. By isomorphism, emerging internationallaw (increasingly understood as ius inter gentes rather than ius gentium) was alsorooted in something divine, namely human nature – as natural law. These socialconditions, Reus-Smit argues, were specific prerequisites for the emergence of‘old’ diplomacy. Negatively, the facts of sovereign inequality and the lack of aconcept of legal contract barred multilateral interaction. Positively, old diplomacyhad four characteristics. It was incidental, bilateral, secretive and hierarchical:

incidental [rather than contractually regular] in the sense that absolutist stateswere less concerned with the negotiation of generalized, reciprocally bindingrules of international conduct than with the resolution of particular conflictsand crises. [. . .] The incidental nature of old diplomacy privileged narrow,bilateral negotiations between conflicting parties over broader, multilateralnegotiations [. . . Secrecy] suited the age, an age when monarchs consideredforeign policy their private domain and thought themselves accountable only toGod [. . .] The general assumption that sovereign states differed in status, andthe preoccupation with preeminence and precedence this generated, gave olddiplomacy a distinctly hierarchical character.76

When placed next to the work of the School as reviewed above, these concretereadings of how diplomacy is imbricated in its age point up Butterfield’shankering back to 18th-century diplomacy as an ideal for post-war diplomacy asbeing not only politically driven, but downright unhistorical, as the social pre-requisites for such a development simply did not and do not exist. Not leastbecause of such stark contrasts, English School scrutiny of Reus-Smit’s workshould be considered urgent. As was the case with Der Derian, however, thereception of Reus-Smit’s work inside the English School has been rather limited.Still, before jumping to the conclusion that the School’s interest in social theoryremains as low as it was in the mid-1980s, one must concede that four years maybe too short a period to judge in these matters.

Conclusion

The scholarly promise of extant English School work on diplomacy is unfulfilled.The School has not led to sustained analyses of how diplomacy works and how it




changes. Specifically, the insight that diplomacy is a practice has been appliedonly intermittently. As a result, international society emerges as a less malleableand reflective phenomenon than it could have. The reason for these sins ofomission seems to be that the School has followed Wight’s lead and styled itswork as a series of comments on the general flow of history, rather thanMannheim’s, Carr’s and Manning’s competing vision of doing something more inthe vein of the sociology of knowledge of international relations. Judging by thework reviewed here, what the English School seems to need at the present jun-cture is to complement the, in many ways unique, historical and taxonomic workalready carried out by sustained, theory-led studies that may bring the Schoolcloser to the general style of work in the social sciences. Having described andclassified diplomacy in many of its varieties, we should now proceed to attemptfully fledged theorization. The situation so far is that the one attempt that has beenmade in this direction, namely Der Derian’s attempt to bring the concepts ofalienation and genealogy to the study of diplomacy, has led him away from theSchool. Characteristically, the major work inspired by it, Costas Constantinou’sOn the Way to Diplomacy, does not speak directly to the School.77 Der Derian’sattempt to move the School in this direction was not successful, perhaps becausethe School repeated its originating sin of following Wight in ruminating abouthistory rather than Manning, who wanted to root the inquiry into global affairsmore firmly in social theory overall. Reus-Smit’s work demonstrates one of manyways in which this may be done.

A number of projects offer themselves readily. For example, writing in thetradition from Marcel Mauss, Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu, one could buildon Bull’s idea of a diplomatic culture and analyse to what extent there exists acertain diplomatic habitus, that is, a set of regular traits which dispose its bearers toact in a certain way. In this way, one may specify what a diplomatic culture actuallyentails, to what extent it is present in a similar degree in different foreign ministries,and to what extent it has spread beyond foreign ministries.78 Habitus is also a keyfactor in delineating the collective of diplomats from other human collectives,which means that we have here a way of specifying how far apart diplomats and(other) bureaucrats, politicians etc. are in different states and in different settings.This would be one way to specify what Bull refers to as the difference betweendiplomatic culture and international culture, as well as the difference between thediplomatic culture and the elite or mass culture of any one given state. ToBourdieu, specific actions entail the bringing together of the habitus of the differentactors involved and a specific strategic field situation. This would be one way ofapproaching the study of what kind of difference the actualization of a diplomaticculture makes for a particular process of international decision making. Similarly,Elias’s analyses of what he refers to as the civilization process and Bourdieu’sanalyses of taste as a key factor in constituting and maintaining the boundariesbetween groups could be used to theorize the historical emergence of a diplomaticculture as a process of adding ever new distinctions and refinements to the set ofregular traits which dispose diplomats to act in a certain way.




To give another example, diplomacy is an excellent example of a practicewhere the textual plays a key role. Etymologically, the very concept of diplomacyhails back to the Greek diploun – to double-fold – and what was to be double-folded were the documents which were carried by heralds and negotiators,certifying and empowering them as what we would now refer to as diplomats. Asimilar practice may be observed in present-day diplomacy, where newambassadors must show their credentials upon arrival in the host country. Theconstitution of diplomats, then, is a textual affair. Furthermore, Harold Nicolsonand other writers on diplomacy underline how diplomacy is the art of negotiationthrough written documents. To date, however, we have no study of how thisdistinctly textual character of the practise works to shape it in detail. Again, thework done by the English School would be an excellent starting point from whichto perform such theorizing work.

Let me end by giving a third example. Foucault notes that to Machiavelli, theobjective of power is for the sovereign to hang on to his realm.79 The point is notfirst or foremost to defend a specific group of people or a specific territory, but todefend possessions. The anti-Machiavellian literature which emerged between the16th century and the Napoleonic wars had as its main target the ensuing lack offoundations for an historical, organic or in any other sense ‘real’ tie between thesovereign and his realm. The development which made this an ever more pressingtask was the emergence of a dense reality between the sovereign and the house-holds which were part of his possessions. This reality was society. As a responseto these developments, as a way of ordering power relations so that a tie wasestablished and society governed by indirect means, Foucault sees a new form ofpower emerging. He uses the concept of governmentality for this indirect form ofpower, and separates it from other forms of older standing, namely sovereigntyand domination. Now, if one brings this overall reading of social developments tothe study of diplomacy, one notes at once that Watson’s reading of how diplomatschanged from seeing themselves as performing the will of the sovereign to actingin accordance with a raison d’état may be rephrased as a shift inside the powerform of sovereignty – a consequence of sovereignty moving away from the king’sbody. This is hardly noteworthy. Perhaps more fruitfully, one may hypothesizethat Vincent’s reading of how diplomacy may at present undergo a change bybeginning to make human rights part of its subject matter may be rephrased as aquestion of how diplomacy may begin to take on elements not only of the powerform of sovereignty, but also of governmentality. If so, then one should expect theinterface between foreign ministries and resident embassies to other social loci tointensify, one should expect a blurring of agency in the sense that a number ofquasi-diplomats should emerge, and one should expect there to emerge a numberof new techniques whereby the traditional loci of diplomacy would try toorchestrate the developments by indirect means. Governmentality is, after all, theconduct of conduct, a form of power where the point is to govern from afar. I havetried to work out a model of how these suggestions may be applied to the study ofdiplomacy elsewhere.80




A new enterprise must be launched in order to follow up on these and relatedissues of diplomacy. On the strength of the work reviewed above, I would arguethat the work on diplomacy carried out by the English School remains the bestdock from which to depart. The challenge for the School will be to maintaindialogical contact with these new enterprises, so that they will not slip out of itsrange of communication.

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank the participants at the workshop on the English School at the fourth ECPR IRStanding Group Conference, Canterbury, 10–12 September 2001 for oral, as well as CostasConstantinou, Seán Molloy, Jacinta O’Hagan, Paul Sharp and Hidemi Suganami for written commentson an earlier draft.

Notes

1 Tim Dunne (1998) Inventing International Society: A History of the English School. London:Macmillan, p.181. The general impression left after rereading the canon is indeed that the study ofdiplomacy has played a very peripheral part in the English School revival after the end of the ColdWar. Whereas as witnessed below diplomacy is a major concern in all the books of the originalseries as well as in members of the new generation which were directly involved in the work of theBritish Committee, there is only a short section (pp.108–11) in a work such as Ian Clark ([1980]1989) The Hierarchy of States. Reform and Resistance in the International Order. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, and only scattered references in James Mayall (1990) Nationalismand International Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. David Armstrong (1993)Revolution and World Order: The Revolutionary State in International Society. Oxford: Clarendonhas a chapter on diplomacy, but again almost no heed is paid to it in B[arbara] A[llen] Roberson(ed.) (1998) International Society and the Development of International Relations Theory.London: Pinter. The other recent major collective volume has only one chapter of direct relevance,namely James Der Derian, ‘Hedley Bull and the Idea of Diplomatic Culture’ in Rick Fawn &Jeremy Larkins (eds) (1996) International Society after the Cold War. Anarchy and OrderReconsidered, pp.84–100. Houndsmills: Macmillan. Instructively, whereas Dunne’s book wascriticized at length on a number of scores by Tonny Brems Knudsen, Samuel Makinda and HidemiSuganami in two consecutive symposia in Cooperation and Conflict (Vol. 35, No. 2: 193–238;Vol. 36, No. 3: 325–42), no mention was made of diplomacy. It was only in 2002 that the EnglishSchool website (www.ukc.ac.uk/politics/englishschool/) attained an entry for ‘diplomacy’.

2 Martin Wight, ‘Why is There no International Theory?’ in Martin Wight & Herbert Butterfield(eds) (1966a) Diplomatic Investigations. Essays in the Theory of International Politics,pp.17–50. London: Unwin, p.18.

3 Hidemi Suganami (1983) ‘The Structure of Institutionalism: An Anatomy of British MainstreamInternational Relations’, International Relations 7 (5): 2363–81.

4 Martin Wight (eds Gabriele Wight & Brian Porter) (1991) International Theory. The ThreeTraditions. Leicester: Leicester University Press, p.137.

5 Wight, note 3, pp.18, 20, 22.6 Wight, note 3, p.33.7 Martin Wight ‘Western Values in International Relations’ pp.89–131 in Martin Wight & Herbert

Butterfield (eds) (1966) Diplomatic Investigations. Essays in the Theory of International Politics.London: Unwin, p.90.

8 Wight, note 8, p.116.9 Robert Jackson (2002) ‘Martin Wight’s Thought on Diplomacy’, Paper presented to the 37th

annual conference of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, LA, 24–7 March 2002.10 Edmund R. Leach ([1961] 1971) Rethinking Anthropology. London: Athlone, p.2.




11 See below and Hidemi Suganami (2001) ‘C. A. W. Manning and the Study of InternationalRelations’, Review of International Studies 27 (1): 91–107; Dunne, note 2.

12 Herbert Butterfield, ‘The New Diplomacy and Historical Diplomacy’ in Martin Wight andHerbert Butterfield (eds) (1966) Diplomatic Investigations. Essays in the Theory of InternationalPolitics, pp.181–92. London: Unwin, pp.182–3.

13 Herbert Butterfield, ‘The Balance of Power’ pp.132–48 in Wight and Butterfield, note 13,pp.133, 136, 147.

14 Paul Sharp (2002) ‘The English School, Herbert Butterfield, and Diplomacy’ Paper presented tothe 37th annual conference of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, LA, 24–7March 2002.

15 R. B. J. Walker (1993) Inside/Outside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.16 Indeed, Herbert Butterfield (1953) Christianity, Diplomacy and War. New York, NY: Abingdon-

Cokesbury, p.76 comes close to leaving the job to God: ‘Steady conditions, historical continuity,and the healing effects of time – these are historical factors the force of which we greatly under-estimate when we try to play Providence for ourselves. It is through these that the process isencouraged by which power gives way to diplomacy, diplomacy in turn becomes more urbane,the diplomatic profession develops into an international society. . .’. This view of diplomats asmundane angels may be compared to Der Derian’s observations noted below.

17 Martin Wight (1979) Power Politics, Second ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp.138, 113. In thechapter on international society, p.111, he writes: ‘The institutions of international society areaccording to its nature. We may enumerate them as diplomacy, alliances, guarantees, war andneutrality’.

18 The latter point is given a much fuller treatment in Martin Wight (1977) (ed. Hedley Bull)Systems of States. Leicester: Leicester University Press, esp. pp.143–6. Firsts and lasts playcrucial roles in these discussions. To give but one typical example, quoting Sir Ernest Satow(1922) A Guide to Diplomatic Practice, Second ed., Vol. II London: Longmans, Green & Co,p.52. On p.31 Wight states how ‘The last surrender of hostages to ensure the performance of anagreement other than a military convention was apparently at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in1748, when “the King of England undertook to send to the King of France two persons of rankand consideration, to remain as hostages, until a certain and authentic acount [sic] should bereceived of the restitution of Cape Breton and of all the conquests made by his arms or subjects inthe East and West Indies” ’.

19 Wight, note 18, p.89.20 Wight, note 18, pp.115–17. In Systems of States (note 19, p.31), he notes that Kautilya’s

‘Arthashastra is probably unique among books on international relations in containing only onechapter on envoys and much more about spies. Was the early Hindu states-system run onespionage rather than diplomacy?’.

21 Wight, note 19, p.33. Christian Reus-Smit (1999) The Moral Purpose of the State. Culture, SocialIdentity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, p.44, argues that the Oracle at Delphi was less important for advice than for‘the amphictyony. These cult-based religious leagues, of which the one centered at Delphi wasthe oldest, sought to protect common religious sites, guarantee the water rights of their members,and manage intraleague conflicts. Toward these ends, league members were bound by oath, andamphyctionies were empowered to wage “sacred” war against delinquents’. In an understudiedSchool book, Carsten Holbraad has detailed how 19th-century European diplomats regularlyinvoked the amphictyony as a precursor of the Concert of Europe. These practices played animportant role in legitimizing contemporary diplomatic practices, and are interesting in their ownright (where the lack of historical accuracy where the parallels are concerned is less interestingthan the sociology of knowledge). See Carsten Holbraad (1970) The Concert of Europe: A Studyin German and British International Theory 1815–1914. London: Longman.

22 Wight, note 19, p.28.23 Wight, note 5, p.204.24 Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad, ‘Introduction’ in Wight, note 18, pp.9–22, on p.10.25 Hedley Bull, ‘International Relations as an Academic Pursuit’ in Kai Alderson and Andrew

Hurrell (eds.) ([1972] 2000) Hedley Bull on International Society, pp.246–64. Houndmills:Macmillan, p.264 note 5; the reference is to Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge (1965)‘Patterns of Diplomacy’, Journal of Peace Research 2 (2): 100–35.

26 See especially M[atthew] S[mith] Anderson (1993) The Rise of Modern Diplomacy 1450–919.London: Longman; G[eoffrey] R. Berridge (1995) Diplomacy. Theory and Practice. London:




Prentice Hall; Keith Hamilton and Richard Langhorne (1995) The Practice of Diplomacy: ItsEvolution, Theory and Administration. London: Routledge; the exception here is the livelydiscussion of revolutionary diplomacy in Armstrong, note 2, esp. Chapter 7.

27 Hedley Bull (1977) The Anarchical Society. A Study of Order in World Politics. London:Macmillan, pp.171–2.

28 Andrew Hurrell (2002) ‘Hedley Bull and Diplomacy’ Paper presented to the 37th annualconference of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, LA, 24–7 March 2002.

29 John Vincent, ‘Order in International Politics’ in J. D. B. Miller and R. J. Vincent (eds) (1990)Order and Violence. Hedley Bull and International Relations, pp.38–64. Oxford: Clarendon, onp.55.

30 Bull, note 28, p.181. Hurrell, note 29, quotes from an ms. for a talk Bull gave at the FCO 6 May1969 where he elaborates on this point by looking back at his own stay there, praising thebureaucratic skills of dipolomats but complaining about ‘. . . how lacking they were inprofessionalism, in the sense of knowledge of subjects or disciplines relevant to what they weredoing’. He takes care to underline that his is a criticism of diplomats generally, and not of Britishdiplomats specifically.

31 Bull, note 28, p.316.32 Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds) (1984) The Expansion of International Society. Oxford:

Clarendon.33 Hidemi Suganami, ‘Japan’s Entry into International Society’ in Bull and Watson, note 33,

pp.194, 193.34 Michael Palliser ‘Diplomacy Today’ in Bull and Watson, note 33, pp.371–85, on p.381.35 I thank Cornelia Navari for alerting me to this.36 Adam Watson ([1982] 1984) Diplomacy: The Dialogue between States. London: Methuen, p.25.37 Adam Watson (1991) The Evolution of International Society. London: Routledge.38 Watson, note 37.39 See Dunne, note 2, p.133, note 49.40 Maurice Keens-Soper (1972) ‘The French Political Academy, 1712: A School for Ambassadors’

European Studies Review 2 (4); Michael Donelan (ed.) (1984) The Reason of States. London:Allen and Unwin; Maurice Keens-Soper, ‘Wicquefort’ and ‘Callières’ in G. R. Berridge, MauriceKeens-Soper & T. G. Otte Diplomatic Theory from Machiavelli to Kissinger pp.88–105 andpp.106–24. Houndsmills: Palgrave.

41 Watson, note 37, p.12.42 Watson, note 37, pp.212, 33. At first sight, this may seem to be an obvious point. However, as

witnessed by Andrew Hurrell’s pertinent critique of regime theory for neglecting the generalinstitution of international law to which regimes have a strong affinity and by which they areoften subsumed in his ‘International Society and the Study of Regimes: A Reflectivist Approach’in Volker Rittberger (ed.) (1993) Regime Theory and International Relations, pp.49–72. Oxford:Oxford University Press, once the specialization of knowledge production in the sciences reachesa certain point, such holistic points become crucial.

43 Watson, note 37, p.69.44 Watson, note 37, p.45.45 Watson, note 37, pp.53, 55. Wight, note 5, pp.187, 189, 190, 196, holds that whereas for the

Grotian, ‘the art of diplomacy is to conceal the victory’, ‘diplomacy is for the Machiavellian theintelligent application of pressure or inducement in pursuit of one’s own interests in such a wayas to make the full exertion of one’s power unnecesssary’, the victories of which are ‘the changesforestalled, the crises foreseen and averted’. The Kantian ‘does not believe in diplomacy, exceptunder protest’.

46 Watson, note 37, p.67.47 Watson, note 37, p.131.48 Watson, note 37, p.148.49 John Vincent (1986) Human Rights and International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, pp.150–2.50 Adam Watson, ‘Diplomacy’ in John Baylis & N. J. Rengger (eds) (1992) Dilemmas of World

Politics. International Issues in a Changing World, pp.159–73. Oxford: Clarendon, a chapter in abook dedicated to the then recently deceased Vincent, would have been an obvious place for sucha response, but turns out to be a précis of Watson’s book on diplomacy.

51 Watson, note 37, pp.129–30.52 Watson, note 37, p.198.




53 Watson, note 37, p.12.54 Dunne, note 2, p.16.55 That the emphasis on this equation is somewhat overdone may be seen, for example, from the

fact that a number of the most important intellectual beginnings in social theory have notinvolved the kind of collective undertaking which makes up the first criterion. Nietzsche is anextreme example, but also where principal 20th-century thinkers such as Weber and Foucault areconcerned, the collective aspect of the undertaking was only a consequence of their work, not aprecondition for it. Where the English School is concerned, as pointed out by Suganami andKnudsen (both note 2), the approach has the unfortunate effect of leaving out Manning’s crucialcontribution.

56 Andrew Hurrell has efficiently brought the work of the Cambridge historians into his own. For anexcellent introduction and comparison with Begriffsgeschichte, see Melvin Richter (1995) TheHistory of Political and Social Concepts. A Critical Introduction. New York, NY: OxfordUniversity Press.

57 Wight, note 18, p.118.58 Dunne, note 2, p.52.59 Charles Jones (1998) E. H. Carr and International Relations: A Duty to Lie. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.60 Dunne, note 2, p.31. Carr was sceptical to the idea of international society because of its power

differentials, and particularly because the argument in favour of order was a conservingargument. Dunne lauds this stance. The critique is of course apposite. There is, however, no suchthing as a society without power differentials, or an order which does not privilege a particularkind of agent. International society is and can be no different. It seems to me, therefore, that thisparticular criticism of the English School has a limited area of validity.

61 James Der Derian (1987) On Diplomacy. A Genealogy of Western Estrangement. Oxford:Blackwell; the discussion builds on Iver B. Neumann (1999) ‘Det 20. århundres klassikere.Diplomati som skiftende sosial praksis’ Internasjonal Politikk 57 (3): 473–92.

62 Der Derian, note 62, pp.107, 81.63 Der Derian, note 62, pp.106, 74.64 Der Derian, note 62, pp.5, 70.65 A genealogist is, however, programmatically reluctant to define, since he or she follows

Nietzsche’s dictum that only that can be defined which has no history. Flux is ever present in thehuman condition. When writing for a publication where he had to define diplomacy, however, hegives the following definition: ‘Above and before all else, diplomacy is a system of com-munication between strangers, it is the formal means by which the self-identity of the sovereignstate is constituted and articulated through external relations with other states. Like the dialoguefrom which it is constructed, diplomacy requires and seeks to mediate otherness through the useof persuasion and force, promises and threats, codes and symbols. It is also, according toAmerican humorist Will Rogers, ‘the art of saying “Nice doggie” until you can find a rock’; DerDerian, note 62, p.244.

66 Der Derian, note 62, p.42.67 Der Derian, note 62, p.114.68 Der Derian, note 62, pp.86–7.69 Reus-Smit, note 22.70 Reus-Smit, note 22, p.5.71 Reus-Smit, note 22, p.30.72 Reus-Smit, note 22, p.30.73 Reus-Smit, note 22, p.32.74 Reus-Smit, note 22, p.80.75 Reus-Smit, note 22, p.94.76 Reus-Smit, note 22, pp.107–9.77 Costas Constantinou (1996) On the Way to Diplomacy. Minneapolis, MN: University of

Minnesota Press.78 Pierre Bourdieu (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. London: Verso.79 Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’ in Michel Foucualt (ed. James D. Faubion) (2000) Power:

Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. Three, pp.201–2. Penguin: Harmondsworth.80 Iver B. Neumann (2002) ‘Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn: The Case of Diplomacy’,

Millennium 32 (3): 627–51.




the english school on diplomacy: scholarly promise unfulfilled

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