Diplomatic tenses: A social evolutionary perspective on diplomacy 9781526148735

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DIPLOMATIC TENSES A social evolutionary perspective on diplomacy ..... ......................................................... ... ...........................................

Iver B. Neumann ...

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Key Studies in Diplomacy

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Diplomatic tenses

Key Studies in Diplomacy Series Editors: J. Simon Rofe and Giles Scott-Smith Emeritus Editor: Lorna Lloyd

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The volumes in this series seek to advance the study and understanding of diplomacy in its many forms. Diplomacy remains a vital component of global affairs, and it influences and is influenced by its environment and the context in which it is conducted. It is an activity of great relevance for International Studies, International History, and of course Diplomatic Studies. The series covers historical, conceptual, and practical studies of diplomacy. Previously published by Bloomsbury: 21st Century Diplomacy: A Practitioner’s Guide by Kishan S. Rana A Cornerstone of Modern Diplomacy: Britain and the Negotiation of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations by Kai Bruns David Bruce and Diplomatic Practice: An American Ambassador in London, 1961–9 by John W. Young Embassies in Armed Conflict by G.R. Berridge Published by Manchester University Press: Reasserting America in the 1970s edited by Hallvard Notaker, Giles Scott-Smith and David J. Snyder Human rights and humanitarian diplomacy: Negotiating for human rights protection and humanitarian access by Kelly-Kate Pease The diplomacy of decolonisation: America, Britain and the United Nations during the Congo crisis 1960–64 by Alanna O’Malley Sport and diplomacy: Games within games edited by J. Simon Rofe The TransAtlantic reconsidered edited by Charlotte A. Lerg, Susanne Lachenicht and Michael Kimmage Academic ambassadors, Pacific allies: Australia, America and the Fulbright Program by Alice Garner and Diane Kirkby A precarious equilibrium: Human rights and détente in Jimmy Carter’s Soviet policy by Umberto Tulli US public diplomacy in socialist Yugoslavia, 1950–70: Soft culture, cold partners by Carla Konta Israelpolitik: German–Israeli relations, 1949–69 by Lorena De Vita

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Diplomatic tenses

A social evolutionary perspective on diplomacy

Iver B. Neumann

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Iver B. Neumann 2020 The right of Iver B. Neumann to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4871 1 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: US ambassador to Tokyo Caroline Kennedy arriving at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, 19 November 2013 (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

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To my comrades from the XIV Norwegian Army Language Course in Russian, 1978–1980, in and out of the Foreign Service: long may we run

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‘Jaw jaw is better than war war’ Winston Churchill

Contents viii ix x xiv

1 Introduction: the nature of diplomacy 2 The evolution of diplomacy 3 The evolution of the consular institution (with Halvard Leira) 4 The evolution of visual diplomacy 5 Presentability 6 Diplomatic subjunctive: the case of Harry Potter’s realms 7 Conclusion: towards diplomacy as global governance

1 8 26 46 72 87 104

References Index

108 123

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List of figures List of tables Preface Acknowledgements

Figures

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4.1 US ambassador to Tokyo Caroline Kennedy arriving at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, 19 November 2013 (reproduced by permission of Associated Press) 4.2 Ambassador of the Republic of Mongolia to the Court of St James’s His Excellency Tulga Narkhuu presents his credentials to Her Majesty the Queen, 13 November 2013 4.3 Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran Seyyed Kazem Sajjad presents his credentials to the President of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan, 9 October 2015 5.1 Norwegian ambassador to Tehran Aud Lise Norheim hands over her credentials to the President of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, 28 October 2014 5.2 Collage of Iranian Print Media coverage of Aud Lise Norheim’s accreditation (reproduced by permission of Anders Tvegård and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation)

60 61 64 81 82

Tables

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2.1 Two proto-tipping-points and four tipping-points in the evolution of diplomacy21 3.1 One proto-tipping-point and three tipping-points in the evolution of the consular institution 41

Preface

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In the summer of 1980, I went to work as a guard and interpreter at the Norwegian embassy in Moscow. The work was my partial payment to the Norwegian Army for having taught me Russian. There was a guard at the gate, put there by our Soviet hosts, so the guarding basically consisted of sleeping on the premises at night and hoisting the flag in the morning. Then there was the interpreting, which turned out to be mostly translation – that is, the work was written rather than verbal. I had ample time to watch diplomats at work, and to ponder the peculiarities of the Soviet Union in general, and its Ministry of Foreign Affairs in particular. One stood out: we were not allowed to travel more than 40 kilometres from the city centre without permission. I returned from Moscow and went on to finish a doctorate on Russia. When the time came to pick a topic for my post-doc, I settled on diplomacy. My first book on the topic was an ethnography on discourse and practice: what do diplomats do, what do they say they do, and what is the difference between the two (Neumann 2012)? My second book on diplomacy was on the places where diplomacy plays out, and detailed how diplomats put an exorbitant amount of energy into planning and preparing the sites where their trysts are about to happen (Neumann 2013b). Once one has committed to writing a book on space, a book on time follows logically. There is really only one way of finding out why my sometime Russian hosts insisted on restricting diplomatic travel from Moscow, and that is to trace the practice back in time. As it turns out, the practice is centuries old. When Russians began to host Western diplomats on a regular basis from the sixteenth century onwards, the visitors were met at the border, their coaches were draped so that they should not see their surroundings, and only then were they escorted to Moscow, where they were not allowed to move around unescorted. As this example is meant to demonstrate, and given diplomacy’s world-historical ubiquity, there is a need for a book that discusses the emergence of diplomacy over the longue durée. Extant histories of diplomacy, which are without exception written from a Western perspective (e.g. Anderson 1993, Berridge 1995, Hamilton and Langhorne 2011), tend to treat changes in diplomacy as something planned by states, which is of course perfectly legitimate. Such an approach should nonetheless be complemented by one that looks at the social institution of diplomacy as something that has emergent properties – that is, that evolves as a result of ever-new changes. The past is definitely still with us. To take a leaf out of the phenomenologist’s book, when we take action, it is always informed by our past experiences, and also by our expectations about future events. Temporality – that is, the way time appears to humans – is a many-tensed affair. There are three tenses in the English language: past, present and future. They are all in what a grammarian would call the realis mood, which means that they purport to state facts. It is a delightful part of human existence, however, that we do not

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limit ourselves to thinking about a phenomenon like diplomacy only in terms of facts. In addition to the realis mood, we also have the irrealis mood, the what-ifs and the might-have-beens. The English irrealis mood par excellence is the subjunctive mood, which, Wikipedia tells us, is ‘typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgement, opinion, obligation, or action that have not yet occurred’.1 In order to include what we may call the social imaginary of diplomacy, the book also offers a chapter on one of the ways in which diplomacy is imagined in a world of fiction that has had a very wide reception indeed, namely that of Harry Potter. Chapter 1 introduces the book by discussing how diplomacy is about handling the Other, noting how extant theoretical and historical approaches have conceptualized diplomacy, particularly in relation to other ways of dealing with the Other such as war, and stating how an evolutionary approach may complement extant approaches. These extant discussions of diplomacy understood as a social institution take the form of either histories or genealogies. Chapter  2, ‘The evolution of diplomacy’, attempts to complement these discussions by understanding the emergence of diplomacy in terms of evolution. Specifically, I draw on Eldredge and Gould’s ([1972] 1985; see also Schelling 1969) idea of punctuated equilibria or tipping-points, understood as the culmination of long-term trends. Taking note of two tipping-points for human cooperation generally, namely big game hunting and classificatory kinship, I go on to identify four tipping-points for diplomacy. These are regular and ritualized contacts between culturally similar small-scale polities; regular and ritualized contacts between culturally different large-scale polities; permanent bilateral diplomacy; and permanent multilateral diplomacy. I  round off by discussing what seems to be a trend on its way to become a new tipping-point, namely that states increasingly hybridize their diplomacy by working with and through non-state actors. This possible tipping-point comes in for more thorough scrutiny in the concluding chapter. Chapter  3, ‘The evolution of the consular institution’, is co-written with Halvard Leira and discusses the evolution of what we have come to call the consul. The first part looks at consular work avant la lettre. We discuss the emergence of intermediary functions between a polity or a group within a polity and a group from another polity, and excavate the phenomenon’s Muslim origins. We trace how, beginning in the sixth century before the common era (bce), the consular institution evolved to reach a tipping-point in the Eastern Mediterranean at the beginning of the second millennium ce, as the judge of a trading colony. A second tipping-point was brought on by the emergence of sovereignty in Europe, which transformed the judge into a representative of the state. This tipping-point was reached in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. A short century afterwards, a third tipping-point enveloped the consular institution in the emergent unitary foreign services. We end by speculating that with increased density of global communication the consular institution may be on the way to a return to separate institutions and a new tipping-point. Seeing is believing. Extant literature on diplomacy is thoroughly text-oriented. While texts are obviously very central indeed to diplomacy, diplomacy precedes literacy as a phenomenon, and diplomats still spend large chunks of their working

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time on planning for and executing what we may call visual work. Beginning with a discussion of how the visual emerged in diplomacy, Chapter 4 goes on to lay down the groundwork for the study of visual diplomacy in three ways. First, it establishes diplomacy’s visual modalities  – that is, how seeing is constitutive of this particular social institution relative to other social institutions. Secondly, it draws attention to the importance of the diplomatic practices that make the visual visible – that is, how diplomats spread images to wider audiences. Thirdly and in conclusion, it draws up a taxonomy of three visual strategies used for this purpose – a hegemonic and Western strategy, a national strategy, and a strategy that is spiteful towards Western hegemony. The power differentials involved between these strategies make visual diplomacy constitutive of the lingering Western hegemony in international relations (IR) at large. Chapter  5, ‘Presentability’, gives concrete examples of how the visual diplomacy discussed in Chapter 4 is actually carried out. Diplomats have to be presentable – that is, ‘clean, smart, or decent enough to be seen in public’.2 The first part of the chapter discusses why visual and aesthetic aspects tend to be under-communicated by Western practitioners and scholars of politics and diplomacy and accounts for this by pointing to a deep-seated scepticism of visual props and a twentieth-century reaction against Nazi aestheticizing of politics. The second part sets out what it takes to stage a successful visual performance and points to three factors:  the agent’s own preparations, audience assessment and mediation to a broader public. The third part uses the typology suggested in the previous chapter to analyse two particularly successful performances of accreditation and to highlight how they succeeded because they were deemed to be particularly presentable as a result of being particularly smart and decent, respectively. It also discusses two spiteful performances. In conclusion, I argue that smartness trumps decency and spitefulness. Chapter 6, ‘Diplomatic subjunctive: the case of Harry Potter’s realms’, opens with a short discussion of how diplomacy is represented in popular culture and art. Since very few people have first-hand knowledge of diplomacy, and diplomacy as such is rarely given much exposure in the news, most people owe their understanding of it to representations in popular culture and the arts. These representations have legitimacy effects. They feed back into how diplomats represent themselves to the public and, by extension, into how politicians represent issues to the public. In this sense, representations of diplomacy have an indirect constitutive effect on diplomacy. The main chunk of the chapter gives the concrete example of an imagined diplomat, from the globally well-known world of Harry Potter. When the headmaster at Harry’s school, Albus Dumbledore, is drawing up a plan for how to defend his magical world from the coming onslaught of Voldemort, he pays particular attention to how to forge an alliance against him. One particularly hard group to get on board is giants, and so Dumbledore decides to try diplomacy. He sends a man, or, more specifically, a half-man-half-giant by the name of Hagrid, as his envoy to the giants. The chapter discusses the ensuing diplomatic mission and suggests that we may think of this case of imaginary diplomacy as a comment on how states have tried and are trying to liaise with the indigenous peoples of this world. However, the general and important point that emerges from this discussion of imagined diplomacies is that a version of diplomacy

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that is now rarely found in the realis mood, namely so-called anti-diplomacy, which sees relations to the Other in terms of a confrontation between good and evil and diplomacy as an exercise in gathering the forces of good, seems to be hibernating in irrealis mood. The introduction to this book will begin to argue that diplomacy is in the throes of a tipping-point that may see it transformed from a primarily states-oriented business to a multi-oriented activity focused on global governance. While the change in agents that this would entail has been much discussed, this book’s approach to diplomacy as an emergent phenomenon allows us to complement these debates by focusing on possible changes in subject matter. Increasingly, diplomats seem not only to represent states and negotiate with one another but also to work in tandem to shore up the global system overall. Diplomats are trying to reduce tension and state collapse by mediating in crisis environments. Not only multilateral diplomacy but also bilateral diplomacy seem to be focused increasingly on global governance. Chapter  7 therefore concludes the book by arguing that, while the rise of non-Western powers like China and India and the continuing Realpolitik approach to diplomacy taken by Russia seem to uphold and strengthen a state-centric ‘old’ diplomacy, we are nonetheless witnessing the emergence of a new variant of diplomacy that may be traced back to the European Enlightenment and that has by now come to focus on global governance. Chapter 2 has a precursor in Iver B. Neumann (2018), ‘A Prehistorical Evolutionary View of Diplomacy’, Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 14 (1): 4–10, used by permission from Palgrave. Chapter  3 builds on Iver B.  Neumann and Halvard Leira (2013), ‘Judges, Merchants and Envoys: The Growth and Development of the Consular Institution’, pp.  113–132 in Iver B.  Neumann and Halvard Leira (eds), International Diplomacy, Vol I, Sage Library of International Relations (Los Angeles: Sage). Chapter 5 has a much shorter precursor in Iver B. Neumann (2019), ‘Diplomatic Representation in the Public Sphere: Performing Accreditation’, The Hague Journal of Diplomacy 14 (4): 447–466, used by permission from Brill Nijhoff. Chapter 6 draws on research that also grounded Iver B. Neumann (2006), ‘Naturalizing Geography: Harry Potter and the Realms of Muggles, Magic Folks, and Monsters’, pp. 157–175 in Daniel H. Nexon and Iver B. Neumann (eds), Harry Potter in International Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).

Notes

1 https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Subjunctive_​mood, retrieved 25 April 2019. 2 https://​en.oxforddictionaries.com/​definition/​presentable, retrieved 2 February 2019.

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Acknowledgements

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Thank you to Halvard Leira for letting me include our co-written work in this monograph. Thank you to Morten Skumsrud Andersen and Ole Jacob Sending for collaboration that has spawned some of the ideas presented here, to Mathias Albert, Hauke Brunkhorst and Stephan Stetter for conversations about evolution, and to Lene Hansen, Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Megan Mackenzie and Michael C. Williams for conversations about the visual. Thank you to Kåre Hagen at Oslo Metropolitan University for freeing up the chunk of time I needed to finish the book. Thank you to Wrenn Yennie Lindgren and Alireza Shams-Lahiani for help with Japanese and Iranian cultural references. Thank you to the project Feminist Foreign Policy and the Battle for Civil Society (Vetenskapsrådet 2017–01426) and to Ann Towns and Katarzyna Jezierska for financial support. And thank you to Cecilie Basberg Neumann and Kristin M. Haugevik for reading the entire manuscript.

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Introduction: the nature of diplomacy

Diplomacy is about handling the Other. Whether it is defined as ‘the transmitting of messages between one independent political community and another’ (Bull 1977: 164), ‘the conduct of business between states by peaceful means’ (Satow 1979: 3) or ‘the mediation of estrangement’ (Der Derian 1987), the overall theme is one of establishing settings where possible conflict and cooperation may play out, and establishing ways in which to play. Traditionally, students of diplomacy looked mainly at negotiation games and their outcomes. In the phrase of G.M. Young (1936: 103), he and his fellow diplomatic historians produced ‘the record of what one clerk said to another clerk’. However, over the past three decades or so, diplomatic studies has emerged as a vibrant interdisciplinary field with its main mooring in the discipline of international relations. The focus on diplomatic action has been complemented by a focus on the preconditions for and effects of action. The new diplomatic studies bring theory of many hues  – Derridean (Constantinou 1996), Foucauldian (Der Derian 1987, Rumelili 2007), constructivist (Sharp 2009, Rathbun 2015), Bourdieusian (Pouliot 2010), organizational (Bátora 2013), Goffmanian (Adler-Nissen 2014a), feminist (Towns 2015), post-colonial (Datta-Ray 2015), Deleuzian (Dittmer 2017) – to bear on diplomacy understood as a social institution. The result is a richer and better understanding of diplomacy as an international institution. This book stands firmly in this tradition. It asks down-to-earth questions about what kinds of practices diplomats engage in, where those practices came from and how they are changing. It does so, however, with a view to establishing insights not about any one particular agent’s handling of a specific crisis or any one particular state’s style of diplomacy but about how diplomacy has evolved as a social institution over time. Ever since the species was new and lived in hunter-gatherer bands of about 20 to 200 individuals, different human groups have had to relate to one another on a more or less regular basis. Diplomacy has a prehistory, a history and a future. As can readily be seen in the prominent role played by diplomats and diplomacy, in whatever guise, in novels, TV shows, films, comics and games, diplomacy is also an integral part of the social imaginary (Castoriadis [1975] 1998). It is not quite a total social fact – that is, always present in social life – for one has to be a representative of other humans in order to be

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a diplomat, and there is plenty of social interaction that does not involve humans who are representatives of others. This means there are plenty of people and situations that will be only indirectly affected by diplomacy. However, if diplomacy is not ubiquitous in social life, it is definitely ubiquitous in time. It is nothing less than a trans-historical mainstay of human social interaction. Diplomats themselves often argue that diplomacy is the opposite of war. This is not obvious, for, understood as processes, diplomacy and war are complementary ways of dealing with the Other (Neumann, C.B. 2012, Barkawi 2015). Diplomacy shades over into warlike behaviour when it includes threats of war and deployment of means of violence (so-called gunboat diplomacy). During wartime, diplomacy runs parallel to the waging of war (albeit in different forms and via different channels). One could say that the opposite of diplomacy is not talking to the Other, but that would not be specific enough, either, for extending threats is a way of talking. Both diplomacy and war are ways of communicating with the Other. The difference between the two, I would aver, is to do not only with verbal and material processes but also with the implied goal of the interaction. Is the goal to elicit a response from the Other of some unspecified kind? That would be diplomacy. Or is it to break the other’s will and call forth the Other’s surrender? That would be war. We clearly have a continuum here. One way to capture this is to talk about two approaches to communication, where diplomacy leans towards a dialogical stance and war towards a monological stance. If this is so, it follows that to act diplomatically is to privilege a certain kind of speech act – the dialogical one – and stay clear of monological speech acts such as braggadocio and bullshitting. In the study of security, speech act theory has been all the rage for the last quarter of a century. It centres on the process of securitization – that is, the political process which spawns a security problem by lifting that problem out of general political discourse and privileging it as part of security discourse – and in security discourse, the possibility of war is ever-present. If we see diplomacy as privileging the dialogical where war, and we may add, militarizing securitization, privileges the monological, then there is a sense in which diplomacy is indeed an alternative to war and securitization, for diplomacy tries to maintain normal, dialogical politics. Where securitization is a question of intensifying a political problem, what we may call diplomatization is a way of upholding it as part of running political debate. By the same token, if war intensifies a security problem by trying to solve that problem by violent means, diplomacy tries to contain the security problem by continuing the conversation. In this sense, diplomacy and diplomatization is indeed an alternative to war. One thing students of diplomacy may learn from students of security, then, is to conceptualize how and when something becomes a matter of diplomacy  – that is, how a phenomenon becomes diplomatized. Consider, first, how securitization is conceptualized: [I]‌ssues become securitised when leaders (whether political, societal, or intellectual) begin to talk about them – and to gain the ear of the public and the state  – in terms of existential threats against some valued referent object.

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Introduction: the nature of diplomacy

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Securitisation can thus be seen as a more extreme version of politicisation. It is the inter-subjective establishment of an existential threat with a saliency sufficient to have substantial political effects. In theory, a public issue can be located on the spectrum ranging from non-politicised (meaning that the state doesn’t deal with it, and it is not in any other way made an issue of public debate and decision); through politicised (meaning that the issue is part of public policy, requiring government decision and resource allocation or more rarely some other form of communal governance); to securitised (meaning that the issue is presented as an existential threat requiring emergency measures, and justifying actions outside the normal bounds of political procedure). In principle, the placement of issues on this spectrum is open; depending on circumstances, any issue can end up on any part of the spectrum. (Buzan 1997: 14)

Securitization also works in reverse:  a phenomenon may be securitized, and then de-securitized. A  number of peaceful de-securitizing practices are to do primarily with endogenous changes that are the traditional haunt of peace and conflict studies. Examples include social peace movements. Others are to do with economic or legal intervention by third parties. The use of legal practices stands out in this regard. What interests us here, however, is how de-securitization may take the form of diplomatization, with diplomatization being the process of lifting a phenomenon (an issue, and issue area or, as we shall see an example of in Chapter 3, another institution) from some other discourse into the diplomatic one, and so make that phenomenon subject to diplomatic practices. As highlighted perhaps most clearly by Jönsson and Hall (2005: 21 et passim), diplomacy, like security, is a process. Since diplomats specialize in non-violent practices, they will have a penchant for employing such practices. It is a key point of the sociology of professions that any profession will try to frame new issues and new issue areas in such a way that the relevance of their own profession is at a maximum (Abbott 1988). Hence, we are warranted in speaking about a structural diplomatic penchant for the use of peaceful practices. Let me once again emphasize that a structural penchant will not necessarily determine the course of action taken. Empirically, we have plenty of examples of how diplomats have recommended and partaken in the use of force. And yet, the thrust of diplomacy is to seek de-securitizing courses of action. To theorize the social means to evolve a certain perspective which may highlight a certain aspect of social life. One inevitable cost of illuminating something is that it twilights or even occludes everything else. Securitization theory has been very successful in theorizing the speech act of security. We need look no further than the emergence of speech act theory itself to see the cost incurred by doing so. The pioneers of speech act theory, philosophers J.L. Austin and John Searle, appropriated Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of the language game, that is, that utterances only make sense if studied as actions taken in specific contexts, and used it to look at ideal-typical situations. That proved to be a legitimate and fruitful thing to do, but the cost was that Wittgenstein’s general understanding of practices, linguistic or otherwise, was left in the dark (compare Schatzki 1996). Their move towards analytics and first principles

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meant that the constitutive role of practices for everything social was bracketed. Indeed, abstract analytics forced out the interest in how the social is constituted. Speech act theory is, then, a potential threat to our understanding of the social. As Thierry Balzacq (2005: 192) has pointed out, however, it is also possible to understand securitization as ‘a strategic (or a pragmatic) practice, as opposed to one of universal pragmatics (speech act), the aim of which is to determine the universal principles of an effective communicative action of security’. When social scientists ask about the nature of diplomacy, or anything else for that matter, they do not ask about the eternal truth of something. They ask about what a certain phenomenon does: how it changes social forms, how it affects the life chances of respective groups and so on. For a trans-historical phenomenon like diplomacy, the answers to such questions must be historically manifold, for a trans-historical phenomenon does not stand still for its picture. We already have a rich literature that tries to answer such questions in their historical specificity. Indeed, we have an entire scientific discipline that tries to do so, namely what used to be called diplomatic history and is now usually called international history. Historians overwhelmingly take a certain historical constellation of the social institution of diplomacy as a given, so that they may focus on specific historical processes and outcomes. When they look at the history of the institution of diplomacy as such, which is much rarer but does happen, they invariably focus on how interaction between diplomats themselves deepened the institution by institutionalizing what had not before been institutionalized (the exemplars for this kind of history remain Anderson 1993 and Hamilton and Langhorne 2011). This is an important perspective. It is also not the only perspective possible. One way of complementing it, and so arriving at a richer understanding of diplomacy’s past, is to add to the historians’ inside-out perspective on the emergence of diplomacy an outside-in perspective, where the emergence of the institution of diplomacy is treated as an outcome of human cooperation in general. Put differently, where a historical perspective would highlight how diplomats themselves change the institution of diplomacy, an evolutionary perspective would rather highlight how changes in general social conditions shape the specific institution of diplomacy. Technically put, I  treat diplomacy as a meso level of cooperation, with environmental factors understood as social selection processes taking the role of macro levels (Messner, Guarín and Haun 2013). In more straightforward terms, the perspective on the past taken here is that diplomacy as an emergent institution is shaped by its social and material environment. Before I set out the book’s specific approach to diplomacy and apply it to the longue durée of diplomacy in the next chapter, I should like to bring this introductory chapter to an end by stating two foundational points about social evolution and giving a short example of how they pertain to diplomacy. The foundation for all evolutionary ways of thinking is to postulate change as a formal triad of variation, selection and re-stabilization. At a baseline point in time, there exists variation in different types of unit (species, societies, types of diplomacy …). There follows a process of selection, which privileges certain types of unit (Homo sapiens, states, permanent diplomacy …) to the detriment of other types of unit (Neanderthals, empires, peripatetic diplomacy …). Then, at a new baseline point

Introduction: the nature of diplomacy

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in time, there is re-stabilization. However – and this is absolutely crucial – while there are selection mechanisms at work in all evolutionary approaches, the mechanisms that bring about natural selection do not apply to social selection. Social evolution differs from natural evolution in two respects. First, there simply is no social functional equivalent of the fairly straightforward biological and sexual selection processes on which natural selection rests (Neumann 2014). Theories of natural evolution cannot account for the processes of cognitive and normative evolution that are characteristic of complex social contexts. Secondly, natural selection cannot account for the social tipping-points that characterize revolutionary social evolution, and which will be crucial to the account of diplomacy given in the following chapters (Buzan and Albert 2010, Adler 2019, Albert et al. forthcoming). By way of initial illustration, consider the use of the epithet ‘new’ to characterize a new variation in types of diplomacy. With the coming of modernity in the mid-eighteenth century, the kind of highly stylized and secretive diplomacy that had by then been honed by aristocrats for four hundred years came under direct attack by a new style of diplomacy. French Enlightenment philosophers presented an alternative that they saw as a negation of the old diplomacy. As a result, there were now two styles of diplomacy where previously there had only been one. Felix Gilbert (1951: 15) explains how The future diplomacy would be the reverse of the diplomacy of the past. Relations among nations should follow moral laws. There should be no difference between the ‘moral principles’ which rule the relations among individuals and the ‘moral principles’ which rule relations between states. Diplomacy should be ‘frank and open’. Formal treaties should be unnecessary; political alliances should be avoided particularly. Commercial conventions should refrain from all detailed regulations establishing individual advantages.

Revolutionary France tried to implement this ‘new diplomacy’ as an alternative to the old, aristocratic diplomacy conducted by its non-revolutionary contemporaries, so for a few years there existed variation in actually existing diplomacies. Variation did not come to an end when the French Directorate reverted to ‘old’ diplomacy, for early American diplomacy continued to be of the ‘new’, revolutionary type for some years, until the situation re-stabilized along the lines of ‘old’ diplomacy. However, with Woodrow Wilson as US president (1913–1921), ‘new’ diplomacy was back, and so there was once again variation. This time, re-stabilization involved a certain hybridization of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. However, revolutionary Russia, and then revolutionary China and revolutionary Iran, but also the new diplomatic practices ensuing within the European Union, continued to stand out from the majority of states in their diplomatic practices. Re-stabilization, then, was, and remains, only partial. For a fairly recent example of how this is acknowledged by agents themselves, consider European reactions to Russia’s 2014 invasion and incorporation of the Ukrainian peninsula of the Crimea. The land-grab and the way Russia presented it to other states was a clear-cut example of a practice characteristic of nineteenth-century European ‘old’ diplomacy

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and known as a fait accompli (Constantinou 1996). The idea is to have one’s way by presenting other states with an arm-twisting shock rather than aiming for the more complex and ‘new’ diplomatic practice of a pre-negotiated solution. This activation of an ‘old’ diplomatic practice by Russia created variation where European states did not expect it to occur. German chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly told American president Barack Obama in a telephone conversation of 3 March 2014 that ‘Putin lives in another world’ – that is, an ‘old’ diplomatic world, different to what Angela Merkel thought had by now become Europe’s new diplomatic world.1 We will return to ‘old’ and ‘new’ diplomacy in the concluding chapter to this book. In the case of variations between ‘old’ and ‘new’ diplomacies, we are moving on historical ground and can draw on the statements of self-reflective agents for our analysis. For a longer evolutionary time perspective, we must look elsewhere for data, first and foremost to prehistorical material data and data about polities living under technological conditions similar (but not identical) to how the species lived in prehistoric times. Students of diplomacy and other social scientists are in the fortunate situation that they may draw on two centuries of archaeological work in this regard. The promise held out by this material is obvious and considerable. Instead of developing the generalizations in which we trade based on the very limited periods of human history for which we have written sources, we may base our generalizations on a much more variegated material from a much longer period of time. To scholars who are used to handle only text-based material, it is equally obvious that it will be challenging to think with this new kind of data, for it comes with other challenges than does textual data. I  will round out this chapter by taking note of three of them, namely uncertainty about first occurrences, argument by analogy and argument from silence. First, with regard to the dating of first occurrences, because dating depends on findings, all ancient dating comes with an ‘as far as we know’ caveat, for a new finding may always prove to be older than the oldest extant one. The second challenge is analogy: given that archaeologists work with material sources  – cemeteries, weapons, pot shards, bones, wheel tracks, pole holes – they define culture in exclusively materialist terms, as ‘a recurring set of artefact types that co-occur in a particular region during a set time-period’ (Anthony 2007: 130). As will be immediately clear in the next chapter, in order to get from materiality to social structure and meaning, archaeology frequently draws analogies to observed knowledge about groups whose lives depend on similar material preconditions. This is an inherently tricky exercise (Wylie 1985). Thirdly, and inversely, although it is generally a weak kind of argument, the argumentatio ex nihilo is de rigueur in archaeology. If a large midden of debris is found but no remnants of housing, given that a certain kind of housing is generally established for the time and place in question, the archaeologist must assume that the housing was there. Taken together, the three factors of possible future finds, possibly false analogies and possible unknowns explain why the words ‘probably’ and ‘perhaps’ tend to litter archaeological texts. We should pause before being too sceptical of this, for if we want to establish knowledge on the strength of what evidence we have, then drawing on more conjecture than is needed for later periods is an unavoidable necessity for social scientists, as it has proven to be for archaeologists. With these caveats in mind, the following

Introduction: the nature of diplomacy

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chapter takes the deepest historical view, and then the perspective will become increasingly presentist, until the book ends with speculation about the future.

Note

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1 ‘Ukraine-Krisentelefonat mit Obama – Merkel schimpft: Putin lebt in einer anderen Welt’, Bild.de, 3 March 2014, consulted 25 October 2019.

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The evolution of diplomacy

In 1937, Harold Nicolson, still the best-known modern writer on diplomacy, wrote a slim volume with the title The Evolution of Diplomatic Method ([1937] 1998). In 2011, Keith Hamilton and Richard Langhorne released the second edition of their The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory, and Administration. The last century has seen a series of books, essays and even blog spots on diplomacy that advertise themselves as somehow evolutionary. However, almost all of them use the concept of evolution in the everyday sense of emergence.1 They do not make reference to evolutionary theory, and they do not try to understand diplomacy as an institution evolved by the species. On the contrary, pre-Darwin style, they tend to place the beginnings of history either with the beginnings of writing or, following Hegel, with the emergence of what they refer to as states. Either way, they tend to treat diplomacy as something evolved not by the species in general but by specific states or by diplomacy itself. As a result, eight decades after Nicolson, the standard thing to do in the general literature is still to place the beginnings of diplomacy in ancient Greece (Nicolson [1937] 1998, Kurizaki 2011). Within the multidisciplinary field of diplomacy studies that has emerged since around 1990, there is a slight twist to this theme where the beginnings are concerned. Impressed by work carried out by the likes of J.M. Munn-Rankin (1956) and Raymond Cohen (Cohen and Westbrook 2000), scholars now increasingly place the beginnings of diplomacy in the Eastern Mediterranean during the third millennium bce. It is certainly a fact that the first documented diplomatic system we know of, the so-called Amarna system, emerged in this geographical area some time around the middle of the second millennium bce. The word ‘documented’ should give their game away, however, for this way of dating the origins of diplomacy hangs on the nineteenth-century idea that history equals writing. The basic idea behind this dating is still that the institution of diplomacy follows the emergence of a particular political order, namely that sustained by what are usually but misleadingly referred to as pristine ancient states such as Mesopotamia, China and the Aztec polity (Fried 1967; compare Renfrew and Cherry 1986). This book is written as a complement to such stories. I treat diplomacy as a meso level of cooperation, with environmental factors understood as social selection

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processes taking the role of the macro level (Messner, Guarín and Haun 2013). Put differently, the perspective taken here is that diplomacy as an emergent institution is shaped by its social and material environment. Humanity shapes diplomacy, and diplomacy shapes humanity. The two are co-constitutive (Dittmer 2017). Cooperation, with diplomacy being one kind of cooperation, constitutes humanity (compare Jackson and Nexon 1999). The stress is on the other story, however: how humanity evolves diplomacy. This is because one point of the exercise is to say something about how diplomacy is changing here and now, and in order to do that, it is optimal to focus on how it changed in the past. I begin this chapter by discussing the general emergence of human cooperation and how it relates to diplomacy. Given the state of our knowledge, this part is necessarily speculative. The second part of the chapter discusses earlier evolutionary work, or, to be more precise, the earlier work, on diplomacy. The third part tries to move the discussion forward by introducing the idea of evolutionary tipping-points and applying it to the study of diplomacy. A tipping-point is understood here as the moment when long-term selection processes crystallize in diplomatic institutionalization. Let me give an example of concrete procedure. I do not argue that, say, the founders of the League of Nations had no agency, or that questions of culture-specific power were not very important indeed to this process. Far from denying this, I  use an evolutionary perspective to focus on the long-term preconditions for this tipping-point of multilateral diplomacy. Evolutionary thinking enables a focus on the line to be drawn from early gatherings of tribes in a number of global locations, via Christian church meetings in the medieval period and so-called congress meetings by states, to the early stirrings of permanent multilateral diplomacy in nineteenth-century institutions such as the Central Commission for the Navigation on the Rhine and the International Telegraph Union. Having introduced the idea of tipping-points, the rest of the third part of the chapter looks for moments when the institutionalization of diplomacy firmed up historically and identifies six candidates for tipping-points. In conclusion, I  speculate about the emergence of a seventh tipping-point. There are obvious costs involved in using an evolutionary perspective on diplomacy. When the focus is on humanity’s agency in general, the agency of specific humans is occluded. So are issues of power, and also of meaning. An evolutionary perspective is necessarily functionalist – it focuses on how tasks or functions find their solution, which easily spells circularity if a causal reading is insisted upon. By the same token, organicism is a dangerous trap for the social scientist. Natural selection is guaranteed by biological factors that do not immediately translate into the social. There is no biological mutational logic in the social. When we speak of social mutations, we are speaking metaphorically. There is no such thing as social natural selection. Social selection processes are to do with factors such as density of habitat, social complexity, competition and cooperation regarding resources. They give rise to social phenomena such as specific forms of signalling and communication. The emergence of language would be a key example. A  more recent one would be the emergence of the world wide web. These are stochastic factors, as opposed to natural ones. Given the obvious pitfalls, there are good reasons why nobody has really applied an evolutionary way

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of thinking to diplomacy before. If I nonetheless think this is an exercise worth the candle, it is because an evolutionary frame gives us a kind of longue durée overview that is not readily available from elsewhere. It is in this spirit, and keeping in mind how evoking evolution may all too easily steer us down an asocial biologistic path, that I find it useful to apply evolutionary thinking to the case of diplomacy. In terms of beginnings, there is no reason why we should not begin our investigation as early as extant proof of human cooperation allows. The longue durée view allows us to speculate about the further evolution of diplomacy from a wider and hence more solid base than if we think more short-term, say in centuries. Here we may already complement dominant approaches within diplomatic studies, which tend to see change in diplomacy as a result of dynamics internal to diplomacy itself (but see Der Derian 1987, Neumann, I. 2012, Bátora and Hynek 2014). Applying an evolutionary perspective to diplomacy is one way of demonstrating how diplomacy grows out of general social and environmental change.

Evolution and cooperation

If, in the spirit of evolutionary theory, we discard the idea that history starts with writing and that civilization somehow starts with the ancient Greeks and instead think of diplomacy as the institutionalized communication between groups, we get another picture. We must then not start from today and go back, genealogy fashion, but complement the genealogical perspective by reversing temporality and ask how the species was able to evolve cooperation in the first place. Humanity evolves cooperation, and cooperation evolves humanity, in standard evolutionary circular fashion. Homo sapiens sapiens has lived in foraging bands since it emerged some two hundred thousand years ago, by which time Homo sapiens had already done the same since its emergence. Such bands are dependent on a certain level of cooperation for finding and processing food, reproducing, etc. Note that inter-group relations were probably fairly intense: ‘Contemporary foraging groups, which are probably not that different in migratory patterns from their prehistorical ancestors, are remarkably outbred compared to even the simplest farming societies, from which we can infer that dealing with strangers in short-term relationships was a common feature of our evolutionary history’ (Gintis et al. 2005: 26). By archaeological consensus, the level of cooperation increased radically as a response to an environmental factor, namely the possibility of capturing big game. Regardless of hunting method (driving animals into abysses, digging holes, spearing etc.), this would take a group rather than an individual. As demonstrated by a succession of scholars reaching from Peter Kropotkin (1902) via John Maynard Smith (1964) to Matt Ridley (1996) and Christopher Boehm (1999, 2011), the result of collaboration was pivotal in evolutionary terms, because it immediately led to a change in the unit of natural selection. Thus, we might add ‘natural cooperation’ as a third fundamental principle of evolution beside natural and sexual selection (Nowak 2006: 1563).

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With increased cooperation, the unit of selection changed from individual to group. I will follow Boehm and take the increased level of cooperation to follow on from the event of big game hunting, and see big game hunting as ushering in a political revolution (often called the Pleistocene revolution, after the geological epoch within which it occurred). For leading individuals, this revolution posed a challenge, for the superior individual hunting skills that had made them leading were no longer an optimal environmental fit on their own but had to be complemented by skills pertaining to leadership and collaboration. This change was driven by levelling behaviour, which means that alpha males were faced down by coalitions who went in for sharing of food, group sanctions and suchlike (compare Shostak 1976).2 As is the rule in archaeology, if we want to date this, we are dependent on material findings. We have no guarantee that our findings equal the first occurrences of the phenomenon in question, for new findings may always antedate our oldest findings to date. Boehm (2011) talks about the explosion in cooperation as a ‘Late Pleistocene revolution’, and dates it to about 100,000 bce. This dating is not very convincing. In the mid-1990s, eight throwing spears were found together with thousands of horse bones in Schöningen, Germany (Thieme 2007). That find dated big game hunting to about 300,000 years ago. Big game hunting may be even older, however: witness the find of stone-tipped spears used by Homo heidelbergiensis, the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, that dates back more than 500,000 years (Wilkins et al. 2012). Note that even if the qualitative increase in cooperation was immense, changes were rather limited in terms of group size. Our best estimate of the average size of hunter-gatherer groups, based on anthropological studies of bands living under conditions roughly similar to those that dominated Pleistocene habitats, would be 20–200, with most Pleistocene humans probably having lived in a group numbering some 70 to 120 individuals.3 All this is fairly well established by archaeologists. The key reason why this knowledge has not been applied to the study of diplomacy is probably to do with the focus on another social response to group selection, namely war. Extant evolutionary literature has focused on how cooperation may help one group to outcompete another. In a primer on microeconomic foundations, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis state that [I]‌t has been conventional since Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan to attribute the maintenance of social order to states. But for at least 95% of the time that biologically modern humans have existed, our ancestors somehow fashioned a system of governance that without the assistance of governments avoided the chaos of the Hobbesian state of nature sufficiently to become by far the most enduring of social orders ever. The genetic, archaeological, ethnographic, and demographic data make it quite clear that they did not accomplish this by limiting human interactions to a few close genetic relatives. [Rather,] a particular form of altruism, often hostile toward outsiders and punishing toward insiders who violate norms, coevolved with a set of institutions – sharing food and making

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Diplomatic tenses war are e­ xamples – that at once protected a group’s altruistic members and made group-level cooperation the sine qua non of survival. (Bowles and Gintis 2011: 5)

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Following Darwin ([1873] 1998:  134–135), they argue that group conflict is an important driver of evolution, for it lays down an imperative that groups have to galvanize against other groups, and those who evolve the highest level of what they call parochial altruism will have an advantage that will crowd out other groups (Bowles and Gintis 2011: 133–147).4 The debate over whether war is an evolutionary necessity or not – and this debate is of interest to us, as its existence is arguably the main reason why so little attention has been paid to Pleistocene non-conflictual inter-group relations  – is as old as the social sciences themselves. From Darwin there winds a continuous line of thought that argues in favour of war’s necessity, usually under the banner of conflict theory of the origin of the state. Conflict theorists tend to stress the key evolutionary advantage of effective leadership for war, and war’s key role in securing new ecological niches for certain groups at the expense of others.5 Against these thinkers stand those who stress that war is but one of the institutions of social history. An early example is Kropotkin, author of a famous 1902 monograph on cooperation, but Kropotkin had little to say on intra-group relations. Another is the last of the post-Second World War generation of evolutionists, Elman Service, whose work on the origins of large-scale political organization focused on the classical functionalist theme of systems maintenance rather than on conflict. But Service, too, no more than hints at the importance of what he refers to as external relations. Here is the key quote on the matter from his magnum opus: primitive people recognize the danger of warfare and take measures to reduce its likelihood. These measures are various, of course, but they are all reducible to one generic mode of alliance-making, the reciprocal exchange. Reciprocal exchanges are the ways in which all kinship organizations extend or intensify the normal interpersonal bonds of kinship statuses. Any two relationships of kinship imply standardized obligations and rights that are symbolized by exchanges of goods and favors (as well as by prescribed forms of etiquette). Such exchanges are normally both utilitarian and symbolic. [… They are mainly of two kinds:] marriages and exchanges of goods. (Service 1975: 60–61)6

Standardized obligations and rights, reciprocal exchange, prescribed forms of etiquette; here we have come to the subject at hand, namely diplomacy. With the partial exception of Ridley’s already referenced book, later archaeological work has not followed up on Service’s observation, however (Ridley 1996, but see also Haugevik and Neumann 2018). To sum up so far, for reasons that are to do with pre-Darwinian approaches to our past, the field of diplomatic studies has largely ignored the period before the third millennium bce. Whereas some kind of small-scale collaboration seems to be as old as the species itself, big game hunting inaugured a political revolution based on heightened levels of cooperation. However, Pleistocene inter-group relations have been studied

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largely in one aspect only, namely that of warfare. The observation is sometimes made that other environmental challenges, such as natural catastrophes, may make for inter-group collaboration, and it is acknowledged that gift-making, most basically in the Lévi-Straussian accentuating of the exchange of women, is an ancient phenomenon. That, however, is where extant scholarship seems to stop.

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Earlier work Well, not quite. As far as I am aware, there is one, and only one, scholar who breaks with this pattern. In the 1930s, Ragnar Numelin left his native Finland to write his doctorate with his compatriot, evolutionary anthropologist and LSE professor in sociology Edvard Westermarck. The result was published in 1950 (when Numelin was working at the Finnish legation in Brussels) as The Beginnings of Diplomacy: A Sociological Study of Intertribal and International Relations.7 Numelin (1950: 14) is a bit shy, stating at the outset that he is not thinking in terms of evolutionary anthropology or history [but only wants] to emphasize the sociological side of the question: that we should study also the social ‘diplomatic’ culture in the savage world and not, as has often been done, confine ourselves to conditions prevailing among ‘historical’ peoples.

Already on the next page, however, he states that ‘it is an astonishing fact that we can observe, among savage peoples, the beginnings of a great many forms of development which actually belong to far higher stages of civilization’ (1950: 15) If this is not evolution-speak, then what is? There follow chapters that set out detailed catalogues of embryonic forms of hospitality, inter-group heralds and messengers, peace negotiators and war emissaries, treaty-making and trade. Numelin begins, in the tradition of Kropotkin, with a critique of other theorists, evolutionists included, for their making the unwarranted assumption that war was the key political phenomenon of hunter-gatherer existence. For example, he notes that Herbert Spencer admitted ‘the peaceful origin of primitive political organization’ but nonetheless held the ‘false conception’ that war was key to it, simply because he had, by drawing on Ratzel and other German researchers, ‘deliberately selected features from later savage and “barbarous” life as the starting-point of his political theories’ (Numelin 1950: 67). Here, Numelin is foreshadowing present-day attacks on the entire political canon from Thomas Hobbes to Stephen Pinker for its having, wilfully and on weak or even non-existent empirical grounds, created a prehistory which the archaeological evidence, such as it is, does not support. Numelin goes on to note examples which were known at the time, such as pre-contact Tasmania. He sees what we may call an early tipping-point in totemism, as ‘members of tribes with the same totem are generally well treated even if they should be strangers’ (Numelin 1950:  111). Drawing on Malinowski’s classical work on the Trobriands, he notes the practice of cleansing strangers of their taboo by having a village girl ‘act

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as the stranger’s partner for the night’ (Numelin 1950:  113). Another widespread practice was the presentation of (other) gifts (1950: 156). There is also the practice of the peace-invocating festival, such as the Mindarie-feasts of the Diery of Australia (1950: 141). The general practice on display here is hospitality, offered not least out of fear of unknown supernatural powers. Numelin (1950: 130) goes on to detail the emergence of the messenger, who was personally inviolable and who was ‘selected with great discrimination out of those members of the tribe or local group who enjoy general esteem and often belong to the most outstanding persons in the tribe’. Inviolability sometimes spread to commercial agents (1950:  152). War messengers are widespread among hunter-gatherer populations; Numelin (1950:  178) takes issue with older literature which held that formal declarations of war among ‘primitives’ were not necessary. The central case is the peace messenger, however.8 Numelin (1950: 170–171, compare 214) gives as one example the Arunta of Australia: When a fight breaks out among the Arunta, and one of the parties wish to make it up, they send a man and his wife as messengers to the other camp. In order to try the adversaries’ readiness to make peace the messenger has to put his wife at their disposal. If the offer is accepted and the men accordingly enter into intercourse with the messenger’s wife  – this act is called Noa (conjux) or Ankalla (‘cousinship’) – a favourable issue of the political situation may be expected; if it is rejected, the fighting continues.

Note the use of kinship terminology here. A typical accoutrement of tribal messengers, which may be traced on all continents, is the message stick (1950: 164) which served as identification and as a mnemonic aid for the messenger, a clear forerunner of the ancient Greek double-folded sheets framed and carried around the neck by messengers and called diploun – the phenomenon that has given diplomacy its name. A key finding, to which Numelin (1950: 203) struggles in vain to find exceptions, is the appearance of ‘feasts and drinking bouts’ when peace is negotiated. The seemingly ubiquitous appearance of feasts gives the lie to those who see all the eating and drinking entered into by diplomats as an unnecessary luxury. The commensality of eating and drinking is an institution which can be observed among all known polities that do business with one another, and must therefore be seen as a historically necessary practice of diplomacy (Neumann 2013b). A special, and widespread, case is the blood-brotherhood, often sealed by the drinking of blood.9 We need not heed Numelin’s (1950: 211) speculation that this may be a forerunner of the drinking of one another’s health, but do note that kinship terminology makes yet another appearance in the so-called pledging in blood. To sum up, Numelin certainly looks at diplomacy as something that is being evolved by the species itself. He does identify a number of precursors of phenomena that we may trace down through written cultures (more on this below). As seen from the present, however, there is a key weakness in Numelin’s method. His sources are – and had to be, given the time at which he was writing – exclusively those of anthropologists who

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had studied hunters and gatherers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and he jumbles them all together. Some of these groups may be similar to pre-sedentary human polities in their material base, but we would not know, for Numelin does not discuss the matter. In their social organization, however, these groups have had just as much time – up to 11,000 years – to evolve as have sedentary societies, and a number of them will have been marked by their contact with those sedentaries. James C. Scott (2009), who has written insightfully on how states may actually produce non-state societies (through forcing people off their land by threatening taxation and thereby giving rise to ‘tribes’ where before there were simply polities living their lives), has gone so far as to argue that ‘we have virtually no credible evidence about the world until yesterday and, until we do, the only defensible intellectual position is to shut up’ (Scott 2013: 15). This is clearly an overstatement. As demonstrated at the beginning of this chapter, archaeologists have excavated a lot of stuff that they have turned into evidence, although Scott is of course right that this evidence is tentative and so not necessarily credible, particularly to someone who does not seem to have taken the time to examine it. This is, however, a point one could argue against all knowledge about the social, as Scott himself has repeatedly underlined. Principally, it is therefore an untenable position for a working academic to not build on our scholarly knowledge such as it is and try to widen and deepen that knowledge. Indeed, far from shutting up, Scott (2017) himself went on to write a book on deep history.

A new approach: tipping-points

If Numelin is building exclusively on evidence culled from hunter-gatherer groups observed by anthropologists, this is because the data available at the time when he was writing, in the 1930s, made it very hard to do anything else. As a result, Numelin was condemned to stop at cataloguing relevant phenomena (as they were evident from the anthropological record) and could not go on to attempt much theorization. He does not look at what the evolutionist Morton Fried (1967, in the context of the change from chiefdoms to states) refers to as ‘leaps’ of evolution. It seems to me that an attempt to pinpoint candidates for such leaps, tipping-points or, to use evolution-speak, punctuated equilibrium effects (Eldredge and Gould [1972] 1985; for a recent critical assessment, see Scott 2007) must be the next logical step in applying evolutionary thinking to the case of diplomacy.10 For an illustration of how such leaps or tipping-points work analytically, let me reproduce an example from a much-used primer on game theory, whose subtitle is An Evolutionary Theory of Institutions (Young 1998). The example concerns not diplomacy but the rather less unwieldy (because binary) example of which side of the road to drive on: In the early stages, when there was relatively little traffic on the roads and its range was limited, conventions grew up locally; a city or province would have one convention, while a few miles down the road another jurisdiction would have the opposite one. As use of the roads increased and people traveled

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Diplomatic tenses further afield, these local rules tended to congeal first into regional and then into national norms, though for the most part these norms were not codified as traffic laws until well into the nineteenth century. In areas with highly fragmented jurisdictions, the congealing process took longer, as an evolutionary model would predict. Italy, for example, was characterized by highly localized left-hand driving rules until well into the twentieth century. Once conventions became established at the national level, the interactions are between countries, who [sic] are influenced by their neighbors: if enough of them follow the same convention, it pays to follow suit. Over time, we would expect a single convention to sweep across the board. While this intuition is essentially correct, it ignores the effect of idiosyncratic shocks, which can displace one convention in favor of another. Remarkably, just such a shock occurred in the history of European driving:  the French Revolution. Up to that time, it was customary for carriages in France as well as in many other parts of Europe to keep to the left when passing. This meant that pedestrians often walked on the right to face the oncoming traffic. Keeping to the left was therefore associated with the privileged classes, while keeping to the right was considered more ‘democratic’. Following the French Revolution, the convention was changed for symbolic reasons. Subsequently Napoleon adopted the new custom for his armies, and it spread to some of the countries he occupied. From this point onward, one can see a gradual but steady shift  – moving more or less from west to east  – in favor of right-hand rule. For example, Portugal, whose only border was with right-driving Spain, converted after World War I. Austria switched province by province, beginning with Vorarlberg and Tyrol in the west and ending with Vienna in the east, which held out until the Anschluss with Germany in 1938. Hungary and Czechoslovakia also converted under duress at about this time. The last continental European country to change from left to right was Sweden in 1967. Thus we see a dynamic response to an exogenous shock (the French Revolution) that played out over the course of almost two hundred years. (Young 1998: 16–17)

Since I have tipped my hat to economics by quoting the likes of Samuel Bowles and Peyton Young, it is only fair that I now be allowed a moment to blow my own horn: when Young the economist is looking around for a key example, he comes up with stuff that foregrounds politics:  the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War, the Anschluss. There is a pointer here to how tipping-points, understood as the culmination of long-term trends, are institutionalized; it often happens in the context of attempted learning once the victors (and sometimes the losers, too) have had the chance to sit down and ponder what went wrong the last time. Note, however, the contingent character of the social changes that brought on right-hand driving. By the same token, I am not prepared to privilege any one set of factors that determine diplomacy. Social evolution does not work like that. Stuff emerges, becomes problematized and leads to cooperational and conflictual behaviour without the organic laws of biology to underpin the process, which therefore remains stochastic.

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Young’s binary example (left-hand driving vs right-hand driving) may only help us part of the way, for it occludes the analogue nature of more complex social changes such as those pertaining to diplomacy. Most social stuff is not like the question of which side of the road to drive on, but rather preserves pre-tipping-point practices as part of the whole picture. The social is like a palimpsest, where older practices shine through among the dominant and newest ones.11 Specifically, diplomacy may reach a tipping-point and, as seen from the time intervals between them, history seems to be speeding up so that we now spend centuries or even decades rather than millennia in reaching a new tipping-point. Once the tipping-point has been reached, however, previous practices do not simply disappear but tend to hover. One contemporary example would be how a state like Russia is markedly less involved in multilateral practices than is, say, Germany. In the first part of this chapter, we already encountered one leap or tipping-point that has been further evidenced by fossil findings, namely the Pleistocene political revolution brought on by the possibility of big game hunting some 300,000 years ago. Here, the selection process was driven by increased complexity in signalling. While this revolution first and foremost had the effect of increasing the value of in-group cooperation, it also suggested the possibility of cooperation between groups. Such cooperation would take diplomacy to come into being. Let us call the Pleistocene revolution a proto-diplomatic tipping-point. Note that ‘cooperation’ is a positively loaded word, and this occludes the importance of social relations for it to work. Every social scientist is, for example, familiar with Rousseau’s fable of the stag hunt, where the point is that if only one of a hunting party spots a hare and breaks rank by killing it, the cooperative scheme to catch a stag will fall apart. The antidote to this is the wielding of social power. To pick an example from the life of contemporary hunter-gatherers once again, in an ethnographic study of the !Kung, Shostak (1976) found that of the hours of quotidian conversation that she had recorded on tape, over one-third was spent on criticizing selected good hunters for not being cooperative enough, often within their earshot or even to their faces. If all known human settings display the use of power to keep cooperative schemes on the tracks, it is a safe assumption that the same went for the Pleistocene revolution, and that it was, consequently, power-laden. This is important, for it should remind us of how cooperative schemes such as diplomacy are shot through with power relations. It is, for example, not the case that diplomacy is the opposite of war (see Barkawi 2015). It is, rather, the opposite of not talking to the enemy. Diplomacy is the attempts by socially designated representatives to handle difference on group level by means of a cocktail of practices, with talk being paramount among them. The major importance of the Pleistocene revolution to diplomacy, then, lies in the way it further institutionalized cooperative schemes as a standard modus operandi of human life in general. It enhanced the social space for action taken on other bases than at spear-point as well as for non-verbal and, in historical perspective, verbal communication of a non-violent but definitely power-laden kind.12 Numelin’s work suggests another tipping-point, namely totemism, which may serve as a template for turning living beings who were before considered impossible

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to talk to into interlocateurs valable by offering a ground on which to cooperate, namely the fact of sharing a common totem. While this is a highly tentative idea, if we fast-forward from hunter-gatherer groups to societies about which we have written knowledge, we do see a similar mechanism in operation. In all known early examples of diplomatic practices, kinship appears as a template. The Amarna system, named after the findings of stone tablets documenting correspondence between 1300 bce polities such as Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria and the Hittite polity Hatti, a key theme is the ongoing attempts by the other kings to have the Egyptians acknowledge them as brothers and not sons. The ancient Greek practice of ‘discovering’ kin – invariably groups of barbarians so strong that they could not be ignored but had somehow to be dealt with, with the Macedonians being a prime e­ xample – brings out the logic (Haugevik and Neumann 2018). Kinship offers a language of categorization within which diplomatic manoeuvring may take place. This still goes on within what is, appositely, often diplomatically called the ‘family’ of nations, i.e. the states system. Similar practices are known from other diplomatic systems, such as the Iroquois League which operated ca.  1300–1750 ce. Given the overwhelming importance of kinship for all political organization, we are on fairly safe ground in assuming that the use of kinship-speak constituted a tipping-point of very old standing. How old, we have no way of knowing. Note that, contrary to the proto-diplomatic tipping-point of big game hunting, which springs from a material factor, namely that the end of the Pleistocene ice age brought a warmer climate conducive to the emergence of edible megafauna, this second tentative proto-diplomatic tipping-point is brought on by social organization itself. Yet another tipping-point, and the first that concerns complex polities, relates to the process of sedentarization. The selection process that drove this was certainly habitat density, which led to increased competition between like units and also to cooperation among them. First, consider the emergence of villages. The earliest known cropped up in Anatolia some 7000 years bce and were not directly tied to agriculture. However, those that emerged in Sumer around 3500 bce were. For our purposes, the key thing to note is that there was more than one. Thus a pattern was initiated where culturally similar but politically distinct entities emerged in the same place. Renfrew and Cherry (1986) have called these peer-group polities. These polities interacted on a regular basis, from territorially stable positions. The result was institutionalized patterns of interaction, which we may see as the first embryonic diplomatic patterns. They have been studied first and foremost for their state-building results; Sumerian polities were united under a king already around 2900 bce. The Neolithic period is better understood than earlier periods because it left more material remnants. We are on ground firm enough here to talk about the emergence of sedentary polities and the relations between them, as well as with contemporary non-sedentary polities, as the first diplomatic tipping-point. One example of how this tipping-point works would concern the erection of stone megastructures in what we now call Northern Europe, which has been interpreted as constituting a second variant of this third tipping-point. Some of these monuments have been read as representing the graveyards of different polities, gathered in one place, and serving not only as

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focal points for gatherings of the tribes but also as material constitutive elements of what we may see as early diplomatic systems. For example, Renfrew (2007) interprets Stonehenge in this way. Noting that there was too much rainfall in Northern Europe for conditions to allow the kind of mud-hut-based villages that were in evidence in places like Sumer and further south in Europe, he postulates that the emerging sedentary culture needed a focus, and that ‘the great henges would have served as ceremonial centres and perhaps also as pilgrimage centres for their parent communities […] the end product was the emergence of a coherent larger community where none was before’ (Renfrew 2007: 155–156). If Renfrew is right, then there is a line to be drawn from the constitution of diplomatic relations centred on henges to the further rise of chiefs heading peer-group polities and on to these chiefs vying for supremacy in early state-building processes that resemble those found in Sumer. Examples include not only British but also Scandinavian kingdoms and their offspring, such as the Rus’, arising around 800–1000  ce (Earle 1997, Neumann 2013a). What we may call the Viking world evolved stable patterns of diplomatic relations in the area stretching from Britain in the West to Rus’ in the east, as well as diplomatic contact with dominating polities further south, such as the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium, with its patterned diplomatic relations with surrounding polities, was late to the ball, however, for the large-scale diplomatic relations between culturally distinct polities in evidence here were spearheaded in the area where Sumer was based, the East Mediterranean. Sumer’s successor polity, Akkad, had regular diplomatic contact with other kingdoms already in the third millennium bce, and eventually became a founder member of the first diplomatic system, the second-millennium bce Amarna system, consisting of polities such as Babylonia, Egypt and Hatti, whose lingua franca was indeed Akkadian (Cohen and Westbrook 2000). The emergence of this first large-scale diplomatic system clearly constitutes a fourth tipping-point in the evolutionary history of diplomacy, driven by increased social complexity. Note that Greece, which is so often seen as the cradle of Western civilization and of diplomacy both, constitutes an example of the third tipping-point – culturally similar peer-group polities interacting – at a time (the fourth century bce) when the fourth tipping-point had been in evidence elsewhere for fifteen hundred years or so. Where diplomacy is concerned, the Greek poleis are an example of evolutionary re-emergence; this is not a tipping-point, but a fairly late example of a group of peer-group polities repeating the by then already well-established first diplomatic tipping-point sequence. The same would be the case for the already mentioned Iroquois diplomatic system in Turtle Island (see Neumann, I. 2012). A third tipping-point was reached as social interaction between large-scale polities intensified, and the need for more permanent exchanges than those afforded by messengers made itself felt. Once again, increased social complexity and more advanced signalling characterize the process. The answer was to base exchanges not only on messengers but also on letting people who were sedentary within one polity handle relations with other polities on a running basis. There are early examples on this, for example traders within the Amarna system, the institution of the proximos

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in ancient Greece, which involved citizens of one polis who were particularly close to some other Greek polis, and also in Africa. From the fourth century ce, different branches of Christendom evolved the institution of apocrisiarii, whereby some representative of the Catholic Church was resident in Byzantium. The first permanent, reciprocal and so fully-fledged example of this institution, which came to be known precisely as permanent diplomacy, hails from the fourteenth-century Italian city-state system (Neumann, I. 2012). After centuries of wrangling about reciprocity, permanent diplomacy went on to become a global phenomenon in the twentieth century. By then, a fourth tipping-point was already well in the making, driven by increased social complexity but also by technological innovation in the area of communication, particularly in infrastructure. We know it as internationalism or, eventually, as multilateral diplomacy. Its prehistory reached back to the institution of the gathering of the tribes, which we touched on already in our discussion of Stonehenge. A more elaborate version of this institution took the form of the irregular church meetings of the Catholic Church from the fourth century onwards and the kurultais that were called to choose successor rulers in the Turko-Mongol tradition of Eurasian steppe politics. The emergence of ‘international’ (that is, with states as members) organizations such as the Central Commission for the Navigation on the Rhine (1815) and the International Telegraph Union and International Postal Union during the second half of the nineteenth century brought permanence to what was soon to be called multinational diplomacy, just as permanence had been brought to bilateral diplomacy some centuries before. With the founding of the League of Nations in 1919, permanent multilateral diplomacy went global. The work of the thousands of international organizations in evidence today has increased the number of people doing diplomatic work enormously, and has lent to global diplomacy a much, much more socially dense quality than it had only a hundred years ago. Whereas the number of diplomats on the eve of the First World War could be counted in four-digit figures, diplomats working for the state today are counted in six-digit figures, and if we add international civil servants, activists in non-governmental organizations, consultants, spin doctors and so on, we probably reach a seven-digit figure.

Conclusion

The evolutionary history of diplomacy may be told by way of identifying two proto-diplomatic and four diplomatic tipping-points. The two proto-diplomatic points are the Pleistocene political revolution 300,000  years ago and totemism understood as a system of classificatory kinship that could serve as a template for regular cooperation (date unknown). The four diplomatic tipping-points are regular and ritualized contacts between culturally similar small-scale polities (5,500 years ago); regular and ritualized contacts between culturally different large-scale polities (4,000 years ago); permanent bilateral diplomacy (five centuries ago); and permanent multilateral diplomacy (one century ago). This story is summed up in Table 2.1.

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Table 2.1  Two proto-tipping-points and four tipping-points in the evolution of diplomacy When A. Pleistocene revolution 300,000 bce (?) B. Totemism Nomads

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1. Peer-group polities 2. Amarna system

Agents

Scale

Individuals Culturally homogeneous Sedentaries bce kingdoms

In-group

7500 bce Second millennium bce 1430s ce City states

3. Permanent representation 4. Multilateral institutions 1810s ce

States

Culturally homogeneous Culturally heterogeneous Homogeneous → heterogeneous International

The nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century saw a tipping-point in the evolution of diplomacy as it went permanently multilateral, and the years since then have seen an enormous quantitative increase, as the number of practitioners has gone from a five-digit to a seven-digit figure. In evolutionary terms, diplomacy, as an institution of human cooperation, is a great success. Extant work on diplomacy tends to discuss change in the institution as a function of developments internal to it. However, diplomacy is embedded in everyday social life. One strength of an evolutionary approach is that it can clearly demonstrate this, by directing attention to how diplomacy’s social and material environment sets in motion developments which lead to tipping-points. So it is with possible future developments:  their origins must be sought outside of the institution of diplomacy itself, in diplomacy’s environment. There is little doubt that candidate number one is the shift away from a world centred around the states system, towards a globalized world, with globalization referring to the increase in global social density and the condensation of spatiality and temporality. Like its forerunner, internationalism, the selection process is characterized by technological innovation in the area of communication, particularly software infrastructure and so-called social media. The explosion in public diplomacy is a key development here. As a result, to an unprecedented degree, what happens in one local site is imbricated in developments elsewhere. As flows of people, ideas, trade and services increase rapidly, the importance of boundaries between states changes. State discreteness is challenged, and with it, state agency. To put it differently, the environment for state action changes rapidly, and this cannot but have repercussions on a diplomacy whose major agents are state, for it brings into question the centrality of the states system to global politics, and raises the question of how states change as they try to optimize their role in the new environment. There are two conventional answers to this question.13 The first is that other, non-state agents threaten to overtake states. The second is that states keep on as before, with the one proviso that they delegate functions to other agents and become the principal agent of those other agents. In an evolutionary perspective, the first answer is wanting, for there is little or no evidence that the new environment fits

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other agents better than it does states. The second answer also comes up short, for in an evolutionary perspective, state delegation means reshuffling, and reshuffling has recursive effects that will change the states that delegate. We must somehow account for all that, and I  think the best way to do it is to grant the point that new agents become more important, and also the point that states seem to be able to harness most of the activity of these new agents for their own uses. What is about to happen, then, is that the former hierarchy of agents, with states firmly on top and with various kinds of non-state agents layered below them, is being condensed and hybridized. States retain their key status, but they become less like territorially bound entities that serve as containers for social life, and more like central nodes in networks of agents. This has immediate repercussions for diplomacy, for it means that state agents may be found in other kinds of organization. The posting of British and French diplomats to posts in ostensibly non-state development organizations dates back more than a decade. Non-governmental presence in Canadian and Norwegian negotiation teams emerged in the 1990s. Less formal use of seemingly free agents by key diplomatic agents is as old as institutionalized diplomacy itself. It also means that other organizations try to copy diplomatic organizational models for how to operate ‘in the field’. Military attachés have done this for centuries. The ‘expat’ divisions of transnational companies are usually organized along lines first laid out by diplomats, and former diplomats are often employed by them. Non-governmental organizations specializing in development aid, humanitarian relief, peace and reconciliation work, and so on similarly organize their expatriates on models lifted from diplomatic services. The new tipping-point, which is already well advanced, is what we may call the hybridization of diplomacy; state and non-state actors become more similar, they face similar cooperation problems as did other constellations of diplomatic agents before them, and they partake in shifting alliances. The central role of states will probably not fade, but states will increasingly have to work with and through other kinds of agents, rather than on them, as they usually did before. As always when a new tipping-point arises in social spheres, this is not totally new. In a social setting, as the example of how right-hand driving conquered Europe bore out, a tipping-point is something that is reached gradually. Britain and most of Asia still drives on the left-hand side of the road. A tipping-point is not something that does away with previous practices overnight. When looking back at the emergence of diplomacy with a hunch that the next tipping-point is the hybridization of agents, one spots plenty of forebodings. Neither – and this is where the digital example of left-hand vs right-hand driving no longer speaks to more complex social stuff such as diplomacy – do new practices totally eradicate old ones. The coming of hybridized diplomacy does not mean that a number of time-hallowed diplomatic practices will automatically disappear. Punishment is famously costly (war) or ineffectual (sanctions, embargoes), as are rewards (development aid, intention agreements), but the logics are broadly the same as those we may identify for cooperation generally. As for the mechanisms concerned, while diplomacy is ubiquitous throughout human history, reciprocity was key to the formation of diplomatic systems such as the Sumer system, the Amarna system, the Iroquois system and the European post-Renaissance system. While scattered cases of diplomacy based

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on symmetrical reciprocity may be observed elsewhere – Sverdrup-Thygeson (2011) looks at the Chinese case and highlights relations with the Liao in the ninth century and with the Russian Empire in the seventeenth, and we could add relations with the Hsiung-nu during the last two centuries before our era  – they were not permanent enough to take root. While power asymmetries between Europe and the rest of the world over the last two hundred years are of course absolutely central to understanding how European practices became the major source for today’s global diplomacy, and examples of how European states drew on power asymmetries to ram through diplomatic rules and treaties are rife, the fact that there already existed a European system based on reciprocity that could be exported globally is, in the light of the introduction to this book, also a factor in understanding why it is that other origins have left so few marks on current diplomatic practices (Neumann, I.  2012). A particularly illuminating example is the emergence of permanent representation, where powers such as the Ottoman Empire and China failed to reciprocate by not sending permanent representatives to European powers exactly because this would be a sign of accepting these powers on an equal basis and so would give up on the claim to superiority. As late as the turn of the twenty-first century, the importance of reciprocity was perhaps most easily observed in the quid pro quo practices of declaring foreign diplomats as personae non grata. Interestingly, since then, there has been a movement away from host countries expelling people, towards a practice where states which expect that the host country is about to take such action voluntarily send back the diplomats involved. In our perspective, such anticipation must be interpreted as yet another victory for cooperation, because it forestalls overt quarrels. The factors that create an institution are not necessarily the same as those that uphold it, however. When discussing the future of diplomacy, the relevant thing is not how trust, communication, the ability to determine people’s reputation as trustworthy partners, and the perception that the interaction is fair played out in previous centuries, but rather what is the current state of play. Trust and communication are fairly well established. So, as is evident in the existence of an increasingly thick diplomatic culture, is we-feeling. To give but one example, Wille (2013) recently reported that, when asked why he taught diplomatic skills to young Eastern European diplomats that his own country would one day meet in negotiations, their German instructor answered that the higher the common understanding of the rules of the game, the easier the negotiations, and the higher the chance of getting to yes. At certain historical junctures, diplomacy has been singled out as the root cause of the world’s ills. After the First World War, many liberals pointed to secret diplomacy as the major cause for war breaking out. Revolutionary regimes from France via Russia to Iran have blamed diplomacy for why the world order was as it was. Today, we sometimes hear not so much that diplomacy is evil as that it is out of touch with key issues that call for more cooperation. I would argue that all of these views are mistaken. As I have tried to demonstrate in this chapter, diplomacy is a hard-won triumph of the species. In an evolutionary perspective, it is the recursive result, and not the cause, of cooperation between human polities. It has intensified from small scale to large scale, from intermittent to permanent, from bilateral to multilateral. Viewed closer up, all

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kinds of specific changes in diplomatic practices are in the making, with the articulation of sundry non-state agents to state agents being perhaps foremost among them. The conclusion to this book will discuss this new tipping-point that seems to be in the offing. Diplomacy will once again change as a result of changes in the overall social fabric in which it is embedded. Meanwhile, I will bring this chapter to a close by concluding that it would be highly detrimental for the future of human cooperation to throw away the hard-won institution of diplomacy, for it would do no more than face us with the task of building something similar all over again. This is a conclusion that will also apply to an institution that has for the last hundred years or so been part of diplomacy, but which has a separate history of emergence that will be the topic of the next chapter, namely the consulate institution.

Notes

1 I will return to the one exception, namely the work by Ragnar Numelin. 2 ‘The regulation of social interactions by group-level institutions plays no less a role than altruistic individual motives in understanding how this cooperative species came to be. Institutions affect the rewards and penalties associated with particular behaviors, often favoring the adoption of cooperative actions over others, so that even the self-regarding are often induced to act in the interest of the group’ (Bowles and Gintis 2011: 5). Where political theory is concerned, it is interesting to note (but not necessarily damning to Hobbes, since he is operating at the analytical plane) that these findings rather puncture Hobbes’s thought experiment of the social contract, which turned on humans giving up their freedom and uniting under a leader. Historically, it was the other way around: cooperation evolved exactly to take leaders down some notches and not to exalt them. Exaltation came later, with large-scale polities. On the other hand, Rousseau’s thought experiment of the stag hunt overlaps with an absolutely essential evolutionary moment, for it is groups that are able to cooperate in bringing down big game and megafauna that gain an evolutionary edge by dint of which they crowd out less socially advanced groups. 3 ‘[D]‌uring the Late Pleistocene [126,000–12,000 bce] a far greater fraction of hunter-gatherers than today lived in large, partially sedentary villages in the relatively densely populated resource-rich coastal and riverine environments from which they were subsequently expelled by Holocene farmers’ (Bowles and Gintis 2011: 95; see also Marlowe 2005). 4 Pointing to the frequent need for galvanizing against natural disasters, however, Bowles and Gintis do not see war as a necessary driver of social evolution, as did Darwin. 5 Service (1975: 41) notes a line running from Darwin via Spencer and Bagehot to sociologists such as Ludwig Gumplowicz, Franz Oppenheimer, Albion Small and Lester Ward. 6 In a Kantian moment some pages later, he adds hospitality: ‘[I]‌ntersocietal relations are typically maintained by reciprocal exchanges of presents, people (in marriage), and hospitality. And if two groups can exchange local specialties that the other lacks, amiable relations are better assured’ (Service 1975: 100).

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7 Numelin also published a later and more detailed monograph about Australia and Oceania, as well as books in his native Swedish and articles in both languages, but they add little to his doctoral work. 8 Numelin (1950: 176) stresses its relative rareness in South America, though. 9 Numelin (1950: 213) also notes the Maasai habit of letting women from opposite parties in peace negotiations suckle one another’s unweaned children. 10 Mention should be made here of Hendrik Spruyt’s (1994a, 1994b: 188) work on the states system, which did bring the idea of punctuated equilibria to the study of IR. However, as Bátora and Hynek (2014) argue, ‘since diplomacy is not seen [by Spruyt] as a specific institution, but rather as a centralized gatekeeping tool of newly formed political units, it cannot be linked to the discussion of social evolutionary change per se. This can be seen when Spruyt tackles adaptation to environmental demands in the context of evolving units in the international system but never in the context of diplomacy.’ Finnemore and Sikkink (1998) talk about ‘turning points’ in the life cycle of a norm when enough states join its institutionalized form; this is an agency-focused use which is very different from an evolutionary take. 11 Sometimes, only a metaphorical echo remains. Where humans are concerned, the expression ‘prick up your ears’ would be an example of this. 12 The use of ‘verbal’ here may not be correct, for we do not know when language emerged, or even whether it emerged suddenly or gradually. Most guesses place the event in the 100,000–70,000 bce range. One unresolved tension is the relationship between the actuality of big game hunting, which demands advanced signalling, and the emergence of language. 13 This paragraph summarizes Neumann and Sending (2010).

3

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The evolution of the consular institution: With Halvard Leira1

So far in the twenty-first century, everyday mediation of relations between a state and individuals or groups of individuals from other states has often being performed by a group of personnel inside ministries of foreign affairs (MFAs) called consuls. This is a fairly new state of affairs. As will readily be seen by comparing this chapter with the previous one, the evolution of consuls is different from, and socially less elevated than, that of diplomats. The consular institution may be traced back to the firming up of long-distance trade networks during the Bronze Age. The increase in trade on land and at sea spawned what we may in hindsight call a myriad of consular tasks or functions, building to a tipping-point that came only at the beginning of the second millennium ce, when the consular institution stabilized around a form in which the consul was a judge of fellow traders living in a foreign colony. The function of judge then expanded into the function of leader of the trading colony. With the onset of state sovereignty, the consular institution became an overseas arm of emergent sovereign states. The envelopment of the consular institution reached a tipping-point around the Napoleonic Wars. The nineteenth century, arguably the classical period of the institution, built to a new tipping-point. In 1906, Sweden merged what had until then been three distinct branches of government – the diplomatic institution, the consular institution and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (itself an institution that hailed only from the late eighteenth century; Neumann, I.  2012)  – into what became the world’s first unitary foreign service. Throughout the twentieth century, first Europe and then the rest of world followed suit. By the second half of the century, there was stabilization (with stragglers like the Netherlands coming around to forming a unitary foreign service only in the 1980s). The consular institution had become, and remains, diplomatized as part of a unitary foreign service, and the consul became a fully-fledged state employee. This chapter begins by highlighting some etymological and epistemological challenges. The major chunk of text traces the evolutionary process of consuls and the consular institution in more detail. I conclude by speculating about where the institution is headed.

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Etymological and epistemological challenges

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Although etymologically descending from the highest offices of the Roman republics, in modern times consuls have tended to be the poor cousins of ambassadors and ministers. They have largely dealt with judicial and economic matters, but where diplomatic representation was scarce, consuls have also reported to their sending polities about political affairs.2 The standard diplomatic function of reporting home has been of particular importance in countries and territories that lack formal/​recognized external sovereignty. Consuls have also performed a host of tasks that transcend diplomacy. As consular offices were institutionalized well before diplomatic services, the history of the consular institution cannot be reduced to the history of diplomacy. On the contrary, the consular institution evolves in the grey area between diplomatic history, commercial history and international law. The designation ‘consul’ has been used for a host of disparate functions. On the one hand, Platt (1971:  13) recounts how the British consuls as late as at the time of Canning’s reforms in 1825 were ‘a group of individual state servants overseas, whose only common denominator was the name of consul’.3 Inversely, people carrying out consular functions have been known by a number of other titles, such as consul-general, vice-consul, consular agent, consular mandatory, correspondent and trade commissioner. As late as 1957, when preparing for what was called the codification – in evolution-speak, that would be the willed stabilization – of consular relations, Zourek (1957: 81) lamented that a ‘[c]‌omplete lack of uniformity is to be noted in the generic appellations of consular representatives abroad’. Whereas classes of diplomatic agents were codified at the Congresses of Vienna and Aix-la-Chapelle (1815 and 1818), codification of consular titles appeared only with the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations in 1963. What constitutes the historically amorphous personnel under study here as a group worth studying together is that their commerce-oriented operations were in one way or another foreign to the polity within which they unfold. Tracing what we, on highly doubtful etymological authority, may call the consul is also an epistemological challenge. Whereas diplomacy may be traced in government archives, the consular institute has a less socially exalted, more winding and often confusing history. The modern version of the consular institution grew out of several distinct traditions. Judicial, mercantile, political and representative functions have had varied importance at different times and in different places. We focus on the Mediterranean and the Baltic Sea because other historical consul-like offices were selected out of the consular institution as it developed and spread across the globe in the second millennium.4 Even for the European states, the source material is scanty. G.W. Rice (1977:  834) comments, regarding Britain, that there is an ‘extreme scarcity of private consular correspondence which could amplify the apparently scattered and fragmentary official sources before 1800’. Although we have nineteenth-century examples of consuls acting in unison towards local authorities and, from the twentieth century onwards, examples of the formation of Corps Consulaires built on the model of Corps Diplomatiques, consuls traditionally form much weaker ‘third cultures’ than

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do diplomats. They uphold no, or at least much weaker and less wide-ranging and long-term, networks propped up by specific practices between themselves. With less written internal communication, consuls leave fewer traces of their professional life behind than do diplomats. Still, there is a literature. General interest in the consular institution has correlated with perceived crises in sovereignty and traditional diplomacy, when the consular institution seemingly provided an alternative to the diplomatic one. Intellectual interest in the institution has tended to peak in periods when international society seemed to be in flux. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, theorists of international law found it hard to account for consular practices.5 Histories of the institution started to appear during the Napoleonic Wars (Borel 1807, Warden 1813). During the 1920s, and again in the 1960s, interest was high in the institution and its possible transformative role in furthering international government based on practical interaction and cooperation (Slessarev 1967, Stensgaard 1967, Platt 1971). After the end of the Cold War, the consular institution was studied again, by historians of commerce, international lawyers and students of diplomacy (Coates 1988, Brooks 2000, Müller 2004, Murdoch 2006, Ulbert 2006).

From intermediaries to judges

The standard story of consuls largely screens out variation by unwarrantedly projecting the nineteenth- and twentieth-century subordination of the European consul to the diplomat onto people fulfilling consular functions in previous periods and places as well. Building on previous work (Neumann and Leira 2013), we may identify three major problems with this story. First, it downplays the continuous existence of people with consular functions throughout known history. Secondly, by focusing on only one geographical area, namely Europe, it filters out the crucial non-European developments that shaped the consular institution not only as it first emerged in the Bronze Age, but also as it reached its first tipping-point at the beginning of the second millennium ce. Thirdly, it fixes the subjugation of the consul to sovereignty to some time around 1648 when, as we will go on to demonstrate in the next section, this subjugation was only firmed up almost two centuries later, in the decades following the Napoleonic Wars. A recent stock-taking of what we know of the Bronze Age period focused on the Mediterranean bears the title Interweaving Worlds:  Systemic Interaction in Eurasia, 7th to the 1st Millennia BC (Wilkinson, Sherratt and Bennet 2011). Already the title bears out the key point, which is that inter-polity contact, among other things in the form of long-distance gift exchange/​trading, has a long history that has tended to be underappreciated by scholars. We know that there was long-distance traffic in stones like obsidian and lapis lazuli as far back as in the Neolithic period. We do not know exactly who administered the mining. We may speculate that there were proto-consular functions involved, perhaps in the form of information traders along the routes to different quarries. We are on safer ground when the archaeologist Gil  Stein (1999)

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demonstrates the existence of Mesopotamian trade networks in Anatolia during the fourth millennium bce and highlights how they were also a conduit for communication between rulers (see Cohen 1969 for a comparable account of Hausa traders living among the Yoruba in the 1950s). Here we have a proto-tipping-point of the consular institution, namely the emergence of specialized intermediaries Among the ancient Greeks, we find an institutionalization of the intermediary functions that accompanied this trade, namely the proxenia of the city states, which date back at least to the sixth century bce: The Greeks knew three kinds of representative:  the angelos or presbys, the keryx and the proxenos. The first two, meaning messenger and elder respectively, were envoys used for brief and highly specific missions; the second was a herald, having special rights of personal safety; and the third was resident and informal, perhaps akin to a consul, though so different as to make any detailed comparison impossible. (Hamilton and Langhorne 1995: 9, also Liu 1925: 24)6

The institution of proxenia marked an extension of ancient proto-Indo-European guest-friendships (Gr. xenia) of individuals to communities or their representatives (Adcock and Mosley 1975: 11). This is of interest not because it is historically unique or even new but because it is the first institutionalization of a by then widespread general phenomenon of which we have detailed written information. The proxenos, who was a citizen of the host (receiving) polis, would act as legal representative of the foreigners that he represented, and he could also act as a commercial agent (Gerolymatos 1986: 8–9). The proxenos also acted as host when citizens of the state that he represented were visiting (Zourek 1957: 73, Adcock and Mosley 1975: 160). As the proxenos held prestige both in his host state and in the state that he represented, he would be generally acceptable as an arbiter and ad hoc envoy (Gerolymatos 1986: 116–117). The proxenos was also important in providing all sorts of intelligence (Russel 1999). Ancient Greece also saw the existence of prostatai, who acted as intermediaries between the polis and foreigners living in it, and were chosen by the foreigners themselves. Prostate was also the name given to the intermediary whom Greek colonists would elect when settling outside of Greece (Zourek 1957: 73).7 Note that here we are moving from intermediaries living in their home communities (proxenai) to intermediaries hailing from somewhere else but living among the people with whom they trade (prostatai). Herodotus details how Greek poleis were given exclusive precincts around the largely Greek ‘treaty port’ of Naucratis, east of Alexandria in Egypt, in the sixth century bce – that is, in a territory ruled by the Pharaohs of Egypt – and how Greeks furnished prostatai as some sort of magistrates or overseers of the port (Herodotus 1972:  178).8 What we see here is, as far as we have been able to establish, the first stirrings of a tipping-point that would occur only some one and a half millennia later, namely the consul as judge of a colony of his fellow foreign traders living in a host polity. Note that this shift occurs in a situation where trade around the Mediterranean – that is, across sea – had been well established, and that the first judges of fellow foreign traders seem to crop up in colony cities.

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It is, of course, true that the title ‘consul’ is Latin, first used in Rome for the two elected heads of state during the republic. During the empire, the title survived. In the middle of the third century bce, the Romans also established a special office for settling judicial cases where non-citizens were involved, the praetor peregrinus (Liu 1925: 25–27).9 In lieu of a specific distinction between inside and outside of the empire, what is now called ‘personality of law’ applied, so that what law was applied to a specific case was determined by the status of the subject(s) in question, as opposed to by territory on which they happened to reside. Personality of law – the practice of judging subjects according to the laws of their home polis rather the laws of the host polis – is essential for understanding the development of the consular institution well into the modern age, for the judicial competencies of the consuls rested on it, and the emergence of the consul as judge is what this first tipping-point of the consular institution is basically about. The title ‘consul’ for a member of the executive political body continued into medieval Europe, where members of city councils could be known as consules (Borel 1807: 2, Ljung 1972: 1). Furthermore, the personality of law was a well-established principle in the Teutonic polities that followed the Western Roman Empire. The Visigothic code, codified in the middle of the seventh century in the Iberian peninsula, declared that ‘[w]‌hen any legal cause of action arises between foreign merchants, it shall not be heard by any of our judges, but by their own, and it shall be decided according to their own laws’ (Scott 2010). These judges, the so-called telonarii, thus settled cases according to the customary law of the sea, which goes back at least to the Roman Empire and probably even earlier to the Rhodian laws, and which was later codified in the so-called Consulate of the Sea (to which we will return). Since the Muslim rulers of the Iberian peninsula allowed the Christians to govern themselves according to their own laws, and since the Visigothic code was also in force in the slowly expanding Christian monarchies, this law carried over into the era of early modern consuls, when it was merged into and replaced by revived Roman law (Green 1996). With the fall of Rome and the western part of the empire, the eastern trade routes were taken over by Jewish Radhanite traders, who maintained them for the next half-millennium. We know that the Radhanites had a sophisticated network of sedentary contacts as well as a differentiated internal organization, which is enough to conclude that consular functions were in evidence (Gil 1976). Garret Mattingly (1955: 58–60) notes the Italian consuls in the Levant as one of the main precursors of resident embassies, and thus of diplomacy as such. Here we have an example of how what contemporaneity clearly considered consular activity is read retroactively by a twentieth-century scholar as a precursor to diplomacy. Reading the history backwards, from where we are today, invariably creates a picture of how there were ‘always’ attempts to diplomatize consular work. This is problematic, for whereas diplomats were representatives of entire poleis, being envoys of leaders, sovereign or not, and so always already associated with the powers that be, consuls existed apart and eventually had to be brought under the sway of those powers. To foreshadow our discussion in the next section, the diplomat and the consul thus have very different histories in terms of their respective relationships to sovereignty. One reason for this is the pre-historical

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factor identified by Mattingly, namely the importance of Islamic rulers and traders to the emergence of the consular institution. During the Middle Ages, variation in the consular institution diminished, as ‘consul’ largely came to signify different institutionalized offices (Ulbert 2006). What were called ‘consuls of traders’ and ‘consuls of the sea’10 can be found merging in the Western Mediterranean around the dawn of the second millennium ce. What brought them together was their tribunal function. With local authorities, they adjudicated disputes over maritime trade, between different merchants, between merchants and authorities, or between merchants and their employees.11 Note that the functions of the two offices are not clearly disentangleable, so that, in an evolutionary perspective, it is no surprise to find that the office of consul of the sea became subsumed by that of consul of traders. Selection increased, a tipping-point was reached and stabilization ensued. What emerged was one consular institution, where the consul was understood to be a magistrate and sometimes leader of a colony of compatriots in a foreign polity. According to Ulbert (2006: 12), the first such usage of the term hails from 1117. Note that the variant of the consular institution that became productive and crowded out the others had roots in the Eastern Mediterranean, whence it had spread to the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere along the northern Mediterranean coast. Internal jurisdiction was granted to groups of foreign merchants in Asia at least from the eighth century onwards (Stensgaard 1967:  17),12 and the internal jurisdiction granted to consuls could, at least at the outset, be understood in the context of the system of internal rule that organized religious minorities in the Muslim polities – in the later Ottoman Empire known as the millet system – rather than as a special privilege (Stensgaard 1967: 16–19).13 The European merchants were at the fringes of the Eurasian trade system, and had no choice but to enter it on the terms of their Arab hosts.14 In addition to Ottomans and Arabs, Byzantines also saw this version of the consulate institution. In the Eastern Roman Empire, bolstered by the principle of personality of law, colonies of foreigners in Constantinople had some sort of autonomy and their own special magistrates from at least the ninth and tenth centuries (Zourek 1957: 73–74).15 From the twelfth century onwards, these magistrates were known as consuls, a title imported from the Western Mediterranean. In the Western Mediterranean, between 1060 and 1230, the Italian port cities (Pisa, Genoa, Venice) already made treaties with the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim rulers of the Eastern Mediterranean that allowed the city states to place compatriots with commercial jurisdiction over their own citizens in central ports (Borel 1807: 13–14).16 A treaty from the latter year, between Frederic II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, and the ‘Saracen prince’ Abbuisac,17 is notable due to the fact that it allowed for a Muslim consul at Corsica (Borel 1807: 16–17).18 Such treaties involving resident consuls thus predate similar diplomatic treaties by three centuries. Expanded interaction capacities were about to allow the consular institution to deepen in terms of numbers. The upswing in Western European trade with the Eastern Mediterranean was closely connected to the Crusades. Economic historians have stressed how institutions were important enablers of the commercial revolution of the earliest centuries of the second millennium. Put briefly, for long-distance trade

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to flourish, transaction costs had to be reduced. For traders this implied that they had to be able to trust counterparts whom they might meet only once, and merchants had to be able to trust agents in foreign ports taking care of their business for them. Different solutions to these problems, at heart problems of information, have been discussed by institutionalists drawing on game theoretic insights. At large fairs, particularly the Champagne fair, the law merchant and a system of judges enabled trust in the absence of repeated interaction. However, among the Jewish Maghribi traders a de facto coalition ensured compliance, and the Genoese gradually secured their investments by establishing family firms, and thus repeated interaction, as well as by sending individual agents abroad permanently (Milgrom, North and Weingast 1990, Greif 1989, 1992, 1993). These permanent trading agents had to be ruled, and it was consuls that ruled them. In other words, the number of people ruled by the consular institution increased, and the form of the consular institution that saw the consul being a judge of polities or nations of foreign traders once again spread westward in the Mediterranean. This spread was accompanied by the emergence of new variation, as the consuls began to take on new functions. In addition to being judges in mercantile disputes, the consuls gradually became responsible for all the behaviour of merchants that originated in their own polity. The consul went from being a judge to being a fully-fledged leader of his polity of traders. Here we have the beginnings of an important historical break which invests in consuls a key quality that remains with them to the present day. The European consuls of the Eastern Mediterranean were gradually granted both criminal and civil jurisdiction over their compatriots, and ultimately jurisdiction also where their compatriots were involved in regular cases of the receiving polity.19 With the Mediterranean having selected and stabilized a consular institution in which the consul was the head of a polity of compatriot traders located on another polity’s territory, this model began to spread even beyond the Mediterranean. When the new Mongol Empire established itself north of the Black Sea and beyond in from the 1240s onwards, the Golden Horde on the Volga concluded a commercial treaty with the Egyptian Mamluks. Genoese and also Venetians traders established posts on the north coast of the Black Sea. These new polities of traders proceeded to take with them the model of organizing themselves under a consul leader that they knew from the Mediterranean (Spuler [1960] 1969: 393 n. 30, 506–507).

From local leader to arm of a sending state

More momentously, when the Ottoman Empire followed the Byzantine Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean, the consular institution continued as before. When new powers from the North – France (1536), Britain (1580), the Netherlands (1612) – wanted to secure treaty rights in order to trade throughout the empire, the Sublime Porte obliged. From a Muslim perspective, the privileges were unilaterally granted and could be revoked at any time, for example during wartime. As a result, regardless of whether European representatives were presented as diplomats or as consuls by European sending states, there was no such thing as immunity for them in the Ottoman Empire

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during wartime. The representatives were seen as traders who had had their trading licences revoked, and were treated accordingly. As late as in 1596, a French consul was executed in Alexandria, while dressed in his consular uniform (Stensgaard 1967: 18).20 Another French consul was almost kicked to death in a meeting of the divan in Algiers, and several consuls in Salé around the mid-seventeenth century suffered imprisonment and had their houses looted (Wilson 2003: 35, 162–163).21 During French bombardment of Algiers in 1683, the French consul was tied to the mouth of a cannon and blasted off. What we see here is variation between a Muslim understanding of the consul as a foreign element on his own, on the one hand, and a European understanding of the consul as also, and increasingly, a representative of the state from which he hailed, on the other. In particular, Northern European powers, which had not partaken in Mediterranean consular practices with Muslim polities down the centuries as had the Southern European powers, were emergent states that began to order themselves according to the principle of sovereignty. The consular uniform in which the French consul found his death was the uniform of the state. Here was an example of a new variation in the consular institution, where not only was the consul the leader of a separate polity of traders as before, but that polity also began to be nested in the sovereign state whence the traders came. As so often, once the variation became pronounced, one could find precursors. For example, when the ruling Genoese elite was replaced by a broader coalition in the late twelfth century, the established administrators of Genoese affairs in today’s Syria were put under the supervision of consuls appointed from Genoa itself (Byrne 1920: 210). At the time, this would simply have appeared to be an anomaly. With fully-fledged variation again in evidence in the sixteenth century, and with hindsight, this incident looks like a harbinger of things to come. The first Northern consuls in the Mediterranean had been appointed by the local polities of traders themselves, according to the Mediterranean model of the consular institution. For example, the first English consuls came into existence at the end of the fifteenth century (Platt 1971:  5) and were organized on this model.22 These consuls were seldom in touch with England, and more often than not they were not appointed by the king but were elected and, probably more importantly, reimbursed by the local merchants – their ‘nation’.23 As a consequence of this, the consuls did not protect general English interests (Platt 1971: 6). In other words, the consular institution was not yet diplomatized, in the sense of having been made part of diplomacy’s reach. However, the sixteenth century saw increasing diplomatization. The coming of polities of Northern traders to the Mediterranean roughly coincides with the emergence of the first stirrings of the consular institution in Northern Europe itself. Around the Baltic Sea and into the Atlantic, jurisdiction over foreigners by other foreigners was established through institutions like that of the alderman of the Hanseatic League. The merchants of the Hanseatic cities in Germany established major offices (Kontor), communities of merchants, at major trading ports in Northern Europe:  Novgorod, Bruges, Bergen and London (the Steelyard). In London, their alderman ‘exercised certain important judicial powers at least as early as 1282’ (Palais

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1959:  854). At the office in Bergen, they had ‘their own executive, consisting of a council of 18 and two aldermen, who were responsible to the headquarters in Lübeck’ (Rafto 1961: 209). In England, the activities of the Hanse merchants led to a codification of foreign jurisdiction. As early as 1303, Edward I declared in his Carta Mercatoria that in trials concerning foreign merchants, where the death penalty was not called for, ‘one halfe of the Iurie be of the sayd marchants, and the other halfe of good and lawfull men of the place’. Cases between merchants were to be decided ‘according to the lawe of marchants’ (quoted in Hakluyt and Goldsmid 1885: 121, 122). In 1404, Henry IV gave the English merchants in Prussia, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany the right to assemble and to ‘choose among themselues certaine sufficient and fit persons for their gouernours in those parts at their good liking’ (Hakluyt and Goldsmid 1885: 137–141). Note that these fledgling undertakings demonstrate variation between a variant where polities of traders themselves chose a consul as leader and one where that consul was sent by the head of the home polity, so that the polity of traders that he came to lead was nested directly within the sending polity. Note also that the more centralized emergent states of Northern Europe were pushing more forcefully for a sovereign take-over of the consular institution than were polities in Europe’s south. Around the middle of the seventeenth century, there was a marked increase in states’ interest in what were now increasingly becoming ‘their’ consuls abroad. There was also a further increase in receiving states’ interest in consular activities on their own territory. For the first time, we see examples of local rulers who disregarded the wishes of merchants who wanted to appoint consuls for a ‘nation’ only to take it upon themselves to appoint consuls (Barbour 1928: 556, Murdoch 2006: 156). In other words, leaders of hosting state recognized the consul institution as a useful instrument in furthering their own sovereign claims. The old principle of personality of law further gave way to the principle of sovereignty. By the same token, states now increasingly wrested from the consuls most of the extraterritorial privileges and immunities that they had enjoyed until the seventeenth century. Foreign consuls were often merchants, and the mercantilist state preferred not to give foreign merchants any privileges. In this, they could lean on the support of their own merchant subjects, who saw an opportunity to put the boot in to foreign competition. With the rise of the fiscal-military states in Europe and the formation of the system of sovereigns, it began to matter more who acted in the name of the king and his state. Centralization of power in the hands of the monarchs meant that the practice of merchants electing their own consuls was gradually brought to an end. Increasingly through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, consuls were appointed by the state (or the king). The appointed consuls could, as previously, be chosen from among the merchants at the port. Alternatively, they were sent from the home state. By actively picking a consul, the sending polities confirmed their responsibility for, and control over, compatriots in foreign ports, and gave the consuls clearer responsibilities for the general interest of the polity (Platt 1971: 7). The consul’s role as servant of the state became ever more accentuated. The first actual consular regulations were published by Colbert in France in 1681, followed by the first instructions to consuls of France in 1690 (Platt 1971: 75, Poumarède 2006: 25). The process may be understood as the

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simplest possible case of David Lake’s (2011) point that sovereignty deflects attention away from the fact that there are a plethora of hierarchies in international relations. In this case, communities of foreign merchants were made the object of hierarchical claims by both the host sovereign, who had sovereign territorial claims, and the sovereign of the polity from which the merchants hailed, who tried to convert the old to the new by forwarding new sovereignty claims on consuls, rooted in the old personality of law. The move towards stricter sovereign control of representatives abroad was also tied in with a number of other key state-building themes. The doctrine of raison d’état led to an increasing interest in the demographic features of the state and a desire for knowledge about the sending state’s subjects abroad. The parallel doctrine of mercantilism emphasized support for the state’s own trade and for increasing long-distance trade. The growing networks of trade and the integration of the Northern and Central European state systems facilitated the spreading of the Mediterranean consular institution to Western and Northern Europe. New markets were opened for more countries and the mercantilist states were increasingly willing to support the trade of their own citizens. Sweden saw an institutionalization of a division between consular and diplomatic functions during the latter half of the seventeenth century, largely as a result of the establishment of the chamber of commerce in 1651. The Swedish consular service was governed by that chamber until 1906.24 To the mercantile factors were also added political factors, particularly the need for better political intelligence. As interaction and conflict increased between the centralizing states of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the need for all sorts of political, military and economic intelligence grew, and such needs added to the economically driven growth of consular services.25 It was thus common for states to have regular ‘correspondents’ in different cities of importance, who would communicate directly with the state or, alternatively, with the closest diplomatic representative of the state.26 As new consulates were established, correspondents were often made consuls, with a confluence of political, economic and representative functions (Müller and Ojala 2001:  27). Such corresponding consuls could be found, alternatively, in cities that were not capitals, in states where the home state had no diplomatic representation (like Sweden in the US; Müller and Ojala 2001: 29) and finally in territories that were not formally sovereign. The attempted state take-over of the consular institution became particularly visible during wartime. Whereas the need for information was constant, warfare led to periodic surges in the piecemeal need for consular offices. Neutral states gained opportunities for trade, and consuls followed. States at war also expanded their consular services in neutral states, so as to be able to bolster trade and protect ships and men. States with active privateers would establish consulates in ports where prizes were brought in for condemnation, to support and control the privateers, and with consuls often acting in more or less open collusion with the privateers. Finally, stricter state control implied more room for patronage, where the title of ‘consul’ might follow from political ties rather than mercantile experience (Barbour 1928, Platt 1971: 9, Coates 1988).27 There are a number of examples of French and British consuls being chosen with complete

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disregard for mercantile competence. While certain British consuls were known to be absent from their posts for months (or even years) at a time, some of their French counterparts settled as absentee consuls in France, skimming off the surplus of far-away consulates (Barbour 1928: 562, Stensgaard 1967). It would be a mistake to overestimate the degree of centralized organization and control that was exerted by states. To sum up so far, with increased state-building, the consular institution became increasingly imbricated in the whole gamut of state concerns, far beyond the traditional consular function of trade. If, in the first half of the second millennium ce, the consul went from being a judge to becoming a leader of his colony, then in the last half of the second millennium he went from being a leader of his colony to becoming a representative of the state from which he and his colony of traders hailed. While the theme of the first transformation was increased efficiency in trade, the theme of the second was the coming of the sovereign state and the increased pressure that made the consul a direct subject of what now came to be known as his sending state. As a result, consuls increasingly dealt with political concerns in addition to their traditional economic ones, and the consular institution became more and more imbricated in sending state bureaucracies. The latter half of the eighteenth century saw the establishment of the first actual ministries of foreign affairs (Neumann, I. 2012), and from about the same time the activities of consular services were codified more clearly. Around 1800, more and more states started to publish state calendars, detailing both their own consular representation abroad and the foreign consuls on their own soil. At the time of the Napoleonic Wars, then, a new tipping-point had been reached, where the consul stopped being a leader of a trading community of compatriots on foreign soil and instead became a representative of the sovereign of his state of origin to the city where he resided.

The consul as state employee

As the rule of law was expanded to include consuls in foreign ports, a distinction was established between what anachronistically could be called ‘career’ consuls, who were subjects of the sending polity and dispatched from this polity, and honorary consuls, who could in principle belong to any polity but in practice tended to be subjects of the receiving polity or permanent expatriate subjects of the sending polity. Again, the degree of sovereign control exercised by the sending states should not be exaggerated. Some consuls in some ports clearly acted as relatively integrated parts of the foreign apparatus of the sending states. In contrast to the previous period, external sovereignty did increasingly matter in consular relations; consuls were to some extent seen as representatives of ‘their’ polity. As for internal sovereignty, we find it expressed clearly in the curtailment of consular immunities, but, at least in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, the practice of consuls having extensive judicial rights over their compatriots was continued. Receiving states thus accepted exceptions to sovereign territoriality, but they were exactly exceptions: as an effect of sovereignty, the rule was that rights followed territoriality. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

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the consular institution saw increased professionalization and standardization, which was eventually legalized with the adoption of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations of 1963. The period from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century could well be called the classical age of the consul. Here we have the historical situation that the traditional account of the consular institution has tended to be extrapolated back in time, with the consul having been increasingly diplomatized. However, there were also pressures, not surprisingly primarily from mercantile circles, in favour of privileging the bourgeois consul with a primary interest in trade over what was made out to be the aristocratic diplomat with a primary interest in war. In countries with large merchant marines, like the US, Britain and Norway, calls were repeatedly heard for a more ‘consular’ foreign service, with increased emphasis put on the furthering of trade and support for merchants. However, when, from the early twentieth century on, consular services were gradually fused with the greater foreign policy apparatus of most states, it happened on the terms of the aristocratic diplomatic service, with the bourgeois consuls having to follow suit. Calls for more focus on consular affairs were more often than not accompanied by complaints about the lack of relevant expertise among the consuls. States continued to extend patronage through consular appointments, and in 1809, British Foreign Office bureaucrats, for example, complained that many consuls were ‘like lost sheep in the Wilderness’ and were, according to the merchants, doing more harm than good (Platt 1971:  11). The British service (with the possible exception of the Levant and China services) won notoriety ‘as a refuge for the lazy and incompetent who had some claim on the Secretary of State’s patronage’, and the failings of the service had reached ‘the level of practically a national scandal’ by 1900 (Byrd 1972:  127–145, 128–130, Dickie 2008:  chapter 1). Supporting the trade was, nevertheless, only one of the tasks of the consuls. Political representation outside of recognized capitals, and in particular information-gathering, continued to be important tasks. One obvious example concerns the Swedish consul-general Martineau, who was dispatched to Christiania in 1787 with orders to explore and possibly exploit the rumours of growing Norwegian dissatisfaction with the central authorities in Copenhagen.28 Although he did report on commercial issues, the bulk of his reports dealt with the political situation, and Martineau self-consciously described himself as a ‘diplomatic bastard’ (Nielsen 1877:  121). Later historians have described his consulate as a veritable ‘spy-central’, and he was followed by undercover government officials when he travelled around the countryside (Steen 1933: 126–127). A key factor that impinged on the consular institution in its heyday was the shift to popular sovereignty. This change, and the nationalism in Europe of which it was an integral part, led both to a much stronger drive for control over compatriots abroad and to the abolishment of consular jurisdiction domestically. Here we have the root cause of a sweeping change in the consular institution, whereby a consul, in his historically new role as a state employee, is supposed to lend a hand to all compatriots and not just resident traders. The Napoleonic Wars seem to have put an end to most explicit consular privileges and consular jurisdiction over compatriots. With the growth of

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nationalism and the growing reach of the state, the ‘nations’ of merchants became less significant, as did the task of keeping order among them. The consuls shifted their focus to visiting compatriots. The relationship between consuls and compatriots moved from being permanent to being periodic. This change also made possible a change in personnel. While foreign merchants dominated well into the eighteenth century, from that point onwards they were in many countries replaced by local citizens or career consuls. In the former case, the political functions largely disappeared; in the latter cases they were strengthened. Finally, the imperial thrust of Western policies left its stamp on the consular institution, This is perhaps best illustrated by a short discussion of developments in the ‘Barbary States’ and East Asia. The drive for control over compatriots abroad was most explicit in relation to the Barbary States of North Africa, where the consular institution retained many of the long-standing features of the Eastern Mediterranean. The consuls to these polities were considered to be more similar to diplomats than were regular consuls, but they could not be given the title of envoy or ambassador since the states were formally vassals of the Ottoman Empire (Platt 1971: 10 n. 2; Fisher 1957). In many countries, these consular posts were distinct from other consular posts in their remuneration, in recruitment to the posts and in the existence of a separate government structure that organized them (Jespersen and Feldbæk 2002: 251). The diplomatic character is obvious in one episode from 1808. The Danish consul to Algiers had to inform the dey that he would not receive any gifts from Denmark that year, due to the ongoing war. The consul was promptly chained and sentenced to slave labour, but the following day the other European consuls made a joint démarche to the dey and had the consul released (Jespersen and Feldbæk 2002: 488). Such action is perfectly parallel to what could be found in a regular diplomatic corps (Anderson 1993: 54), but with the consuls it happens with a century’s delay. The delay reflects the long time it took to inscribe the consular institution with sovereign meaning. Treaties with reciprocal consular representation as well as full or partial extraterritorial jurisdiction over the consul’s compatriots were made regularly between Christian and Muslim political entities well into the nineteenth century (Liu 1925: 31–42). A treaty between Morocco and Britain in 1721 stated that ‘[i]‌n the event of a dispute between two British subjects in Morocco, the British consul was to adjudicate and “do with them as he pleases”, whereas in the event of a dispute between two Moroccans in British territory, it was to be settled by a tribunal of one Christian and one Muslim in accordance with British law’ (Piscatori 1986: 58). The British seem to be privileged here, but this was not the norm. The treaty of Meknes, between Spain and Morocco, signed in 1799, included an article which ‘stipulated that both sides would judge and punish the crimes of their own subjects committed on the territory of the other’ (Pennell 1994: 174). The US treaties with the Barbary States also regularly included a paragraph on consular jurisdiction over compatriots in conflict with one another, and on consular rights to assist in mixed murder cases (e.g. involving both Americans and locals).29 The treaty with Morocco, signed in 1786 and renegotiated in 1836, which includes both these paragraphs, is still in effect today, even though the extraterritorial jurisdiction was relinquished by the US soon after Moroccan independence in 1956.

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As recent scholarship by economic historians has demonstrated, interaction between consuls and the receiving polities in North Africa had the character of repeated accommodation and the creation of new and creative judicial spheres, allowing both parties to represent the end results as conforming to their own legal system (Pennell 1994, Windler 2001b). With regard to jurisdiction, the consuls regularly considered it part of their extraterritorial right of sovereignty to control all members of their ‘nation’.30 For the local rulers (the beys, deys and divans), on the other hand, such rights were privileges and could be granted to collectives or individuals at will. Christian individuals could thus seek the protection of the local ruler, to avoid the control of the sending state, exercised through the consul (Windler 2001b: 250). Until the revolutionary wars, such interaction was possible since ‘the diversity of the legal situations that characterized relations between Europeans and Maghrebis, but also between Europeans residing in Tunis corresponded to the plurality of status and jurisdictions in Europe’ (Windler 2001a: 93). Furthermore, since the development of ‘international’ law during the eighteenth century happened through the gradual expansion of positive law, through treaties, rather than through the application of ‘the universalist principles of a natural law of nations’ (Windler 2001b: 274), a distinct set of norms for interaction could emerge in the Mediterranean. The revolutionary period, the turn to Enlightenment rationalism and the emergence of nationalism saw a marked reduction in plurality in Europe, and, combined with the rapidly growing European power, this led to relationships turning gradually towards domination. Domination was the order of the day from the outset in East Asia when extraterritorial consular rights, including judicial authority over compatriots, were established by the so-called unequal treaties in China (1843–1943), Japan (1858–1899), Korea (1876–1910) and Siam (1855–1938). However, in accordance with what one would expect from an evolutionary perspective, as soon as the states on the fringes of the European state system regained the requisite power and status and started to conceive of themselves as nation-states, stabilization around a sovereign principle kicked in here as well and consular jurisdiction was abolished. The pressure exerted on the consular institution by the emergent sovereign state from the sixteenth century onwards drove the institution’s second tipping-point, and made the consul a charge of the state. With the consular institution having been enveloped by sending states, state pressure increased, until we reach a third tipping-point where the consul became a fully-fledged state employee, submerged in a new type of organization called a unitary foreign service. This occurred in 1906, when Sweden formally created a unitary foreign service out of its diplomatic service, its consular service and its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The twentieth century saw the stabilization of this variant of the consular institution. In the wake of the Second World War, the entire institution was regulated by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (1963).31 The major change in the consular institution during the twentieth century flowed from its imbrication in state apparatuses and concerned its further functional division, from being centred on trade to being centred on all subjects of the sending country: sailors, visiting politicians and businesspeople, expats, exchange students, lost tourists – and the list goes on.

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The consecration of the consul as the sending state’s man, and eventually woman, and the abolishment of the role of the consul as judge of compatriots abroad, streamlined the institution in terms of sovereignty. However, it also bore within itself an interesting tension. Should the consul be the sending state’s representative in the full sense of being a professional, trained in the sending country and sent abroad on a salary to spend a specific ‘tour’ in a host country, or should the consul simply be a non-salaried subject of the host country appointed by the not-so-sending country? The difference is marked by the simple epithet ‘honorary’. A consul, or consul-general (a consul with ambassadorial rank), is a salaried professional whereas an honorary consul is a non-salaried local citizen of the host country. Might we have here a tension that is driving a new tipping-point?

Conclusion

The evolutionary history of the consular institution may be told by way of identifying one proto-consular and three consular tipping-points. The proto-consular tipping-point is the fastening of long-distance interaction centring on gift exchange/​ trade during the Bronze Age, which increased and regularized the intermediary role. Distances were constrained by the ratio of weight of goods to profit, which meant that trading networks operated by personnel who hailed from one place and traded in another were not that far-flung. Given the low degree of functional specialization among these traders, we may think of the emergence and firming up of these networks as a proto-tipping-point. Ancient Greeks began to institutionalize such networks by drawing on the ancient proto-Indo-European institution of the gift relationship. With sea trade taking off in the Mediterranean from the second millennium bce, there slowly emerged different ways of institutionalizing the small polities or colonies of traders that emerged around the Mediterranean. The first consular tipping-point was the institutionalization of what we may in hindsight call consuls as judges, chosen from among their own number by trader colonies living away from the place from which they hailed. Our first documented case of this is in the Greek colony of traders in Naucratis in Egypt during the sixth century bce. A long and winding history, centred around the Eastern Mediterranean and eventually involving the Mediterranean in its entirety, led to stabilization at the beginning of the second millennium bce. The consular institution continued to evolve, as the consul went from being a judge to becoming a leader of his trading colony. With the emergence of the sovereign state, however, the consul’s leadership became subsumed by the ever-longer arm of his sending state. A new variant of the consular institution, in which it was to be understood as an apparatus of a sending state rather than as a way of ruling a self-organizing trading colony, was at hand. The new version came on more strongly in the north of Europe than in the south, for state centralization was stronger in the north than in the south. By the Napoleonic wars, the second tipping-point of the consular institution had been reached. The consul had gone from being the colony’s own elected man to becoming the state’s representative not only vis-à-vis foreign resident traders but in relation to all comers from the sending state that he represented.

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Once the state had enveloped the consular institution, its direct control increased. The third tipping-point of the institution made the consul a fully-fledged state employee who had found his, and eventually her, place as a dominated part of a so-called unitary foreign service whose two other elements were the diplomatic service and the ministry of foreign affairs. This tipping-point reached its culmination in the twentieth century, as more and more states followed Sweden’s 1906 lead and established unitary foreign services. Consuls became state employees working in a state MFA, frequently sent abroad on tours to serve as consul. Alternatively, they could be non-salaried honorary consuls – usually lawyers or businesspeople – permanently resident in a hosting state. The work of both of these types of consul is highly variegated. They extend visas to locals who want to visit the state that they represent, assist subjects from the sending state on business trips, help stranded and imprisoned subjects of the sending state, and so on. This is a rather different workload than that which characterized consular work before the twentieth century, carried out by personnel that is rather different from consuls as the world knew them before the nineteenth century. This story is summed up in Table 3.1. If we want to speculate about a future tipping-point for the consular institution, an immediate observation is that consuls face the same situation as was discussed in the previous chapter, on the evolution of diplomacy. We find hybridization and shifting alliances between state and non-state actors. As do diplomats, consuls increasingly work with and through other kinds of agent rather than on them. Consuls have done this kind of casework since the institution’s inception, so for them this is less of a change than it is for diplomats, who traditionally dealt primarily with other diplomats. In an evolutionary perspective, possible changes in the consular institutions are probably more likely to result from the qualitative effects of quantitative changes than from qualitative changes themselves. If we turn from the possible effects of changes in quality to those of changes in quantity, the obvious place to start is with contemporary evolutionary variation. The key factor here is the tension between salaried consuls working in a unitary foreign service who are sent abroad for tours that typically last three to five years, on the one hand, and non-salaried honorary consuls who are living permanently in a host state of which they are usually citizens, on the other. The rapidly increasing number of expats, tourists and travellers worldwide exerts pressure on honorary consuls, by increasing their workload to a point where it is increasingly hard to get the job done without spending considerable resources. If the honorary consul is to survive, sending states will probably have to

Table 3.1  One proto-tipping-point and three tipping-points in the evolution of the consular institution

A. Trading networks, often land 1. Trading colonies, often sea 2. Colonies of traders and others 3. Citizens abroad

From when

Agents

Fourth millennium bce Sixth century bce Sixteenth century Nineteenth century

Mediators Traders as judges Traders as state representatives MFA employees and honoraries

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spend more resources on them. That, however, would beg the question of whether that money is not better spent on dispatching more consuls directly from the sending state. One makeshift response to this situation has been to send consuls whose job it has been to coordinate the work of honorary consuls. For example, in the 2000s, Norway liaised a consul-general to its embassy in Madrid whose job it was to take care of Norwegian expats (primarily pensioners) in Spain, with an important part of the work being to supervise honorary consuls. The attempt was abandoned. In an evolutionary perspective, this is hardly surprising, for the move did nothing to address the variation itself by selecting one variant. Consequently, there was no possibility of re-stabilization. In an evolutionary perspective, the honorary consul is a historical remnant, whose time may be up and who is about to give way to consuls on tour from the sending state. Another key tension in the consular institution’s organizational environment concerns its cohabitation with the diplomatic institution. On the one hand, the fact that it has lower prestige than the diplomatic institution that has enveloped it makes it a dominated institution. On the other hand, consular work expands at an even more rapid rate than does diplomatic work. For example, European states that belong to the Schengen system extend an annual four million visas to citizens of the Russian Federation alone. Where there is work, there are resources, and where there are resources, there are new employees. The enlargement of the consular portfolio cannot by itself raise the status of the consul vis-à-vis the diplomat. What it can do, however, is to build pressure to separate, or at least loosen, the consular institution from its diplomatization. Perhaps we are already on our way to a new tipping-point which will see first a partial, and then perhaps a full, decoupling of the consular institution from the diplomatic institution. After all, what was once separate may yet be separate again.

Notes

1 I should like to thank Halvard Leira, who is the lead author on our fifteen-year long cooperation on consuls (e.g. Leira and Neumann 2008, 2011, 2012, Neumann and Leira 2013) for allowing me to build on our common work and for cooperation on this chapter. 2 We draw on the following for consular terminology: http://​untreaty.un.org/​ilc/​texts/​ instruments/​english/​conventions/​9_​2_​1963.pdf, retrieved 22 January 2017. 3 Satow (1979: 211) flatly states that ‘there can be no precise and at the same time universally acceptable definition of the term’. 4 We know, for instance, of ‘special judges for foreigners among some of the peoples of India’ in the first millennium bce (Zourek 1957: 73). Furthermore, we have the office of wakil al-tujjar among Egyptian trading communities in the Indian Ocean in the first centuries of the second millennium ce, and the office of shabandar in Malacca in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The former were recognised as leaders of the communities by the local governments. The latter were representatives of the merchant communities in interactions with both the authorities and other merchants, but interpretations vary as to whether they were hand-picked as intermediaries by the sultan or elected by the merchant communities themselves (Curtin 1984: 115, 130, 245; also Chaudhuri 1985: 112).

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5 In his work on the functions of ambassadors published in 1681, Wicquefort treats the consuls as ‘but merchants’ and denies them extraterritorial rights. He nevertheless contradicts himself by reporting that states treated acts of violence against consuls as a breach of international law. Bynkershoek (1721) followed Wicquefort, and their statements had a major influence on later court decisions (Zourek 1960: 3–5). The contradiction in Wicquefort is indicative of how knowledge production struggled to reconcile new claims rooted in sovereign territoriality, which would make foreign merchants somehow representative of another sovereign, with claims rooted in old personality of law, which would indeed make them ‘mere merchants’. By functionalist evolutionary logic, increased struggle between two variants means increased need for selection. A change in international law’s evaluation of consular status followed when Vattel argued that since the consuls were appointed by a sovereign and accepted in that capacity by another sovereign, they were to some extent protected by international law. However, even Vattel ([1758] 1883: book II, chapter II, § 34) had a hard time fitting all consular activities into the framework, arguing that ‘[t]‌he functions of a consul require, in the first place, that he be not a subject of the state where he resides: as, in this case, he would be obliged in all things to conform to its orders, and thus not be at liberty to acquit himself of the duties of his office’. Such an assertion was at odds with the already established practice of having citizens of the receiving state as consuls, as well as with the subsequent widespread use of honorary consuls. Vattel’s stress on the sovereignty principle clashed with practices on the ground, which did not adhere to this principle. 6 Harold Nicolson ([1937] 1998: 8), on the other hand, simply equates proxenos with consul. 7 Prostates was most commonly used as a term for a political leader. 8 Whether the prostatai were leaders of their compatriots or of the entire town is not entirely clear (Roebuck 1951: 212–220). 9 The peregrines originally were the citizens of states with friendly ties to Rome. As the empire grew, the group expanded to include inhabitants of the empire who were not Roman citizens or Latini – thus encompassing most inhabitants of most Roman provinces. The distinction lost meaning with the granting of citizenship to all provinces by Antoninus Caracalla in 212 ce. 10 The consolato del mare was built partly on the customary law of the sea, partly on Byzantine inspiration (Geanakoplos 1976: 72). 11 Borel (1807: 4) holds that the first such consulates could be found in Messina from 1128, in Genova from 1250, and thereafter in Valencia, Majorca, Venice and Barcelona over the next century. Stanley Jados (1975) generally finds that the office of consul of the sea was well established in most centres of trade around the Mediterranean at the end of the fourteenth century. 12 Unfortunately, the character of such jurisdiction remains unclear. In China, Muslim traders were allowed to conduct commercial and communal affairs through their own institutions in the eighth century, and the trading emporia of the Indian Ocean offered at least political neutrality to foreign merchants (Chaudhuri 1985: 51, 224). 13 Van den Boogert (2005) argues forcefully in favour of thinking about consular practices, particularly those involving Ottoman subjects, within the framework of Ottoman law. Privileges were granted as Ahdname, known in English as ‘capitulations’ (from Lat. capitis, head).

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14 The same was presumably the case with respect to European–Mongol interaction, e.g. when Venice was represented by a consul in Soldaia on the Crimea in the late thirteenth century (Vernadsky 1953: 187). 15 The Rus’–Byzantine treaty of 945, between Kiev and the Byzantine empire, stipulates that Rus’ merchants be provided with an official who should protect them and settle disputes between them. 16 The first granting of protection to Christian merchants in a Muslim state can be dated back to 1133, covering the rights of inhabitants of Pisa in Morocco (Zourek 1957: 73). 17 Most likely Abu Zakariya Yahya, founder of the Hafsid dynasty in North Africa. 18 Throughout the Norman period, Muslims had their own magistrates and officials (Ahmad 1976, Udovitch 1993). It is not entirely clear by what authority Frederic II allowed for a consul at Corsica, since the island was in principle controlled by Pisa. 19 Thus, in the final centuries of the Ottoman empire they became virtually independent of local authorities (Müller 2004: 77). 20 When the entire French nation in Aleppo, including the consul, was incarcerated in 1623, this was nevertheless a result of the French envoy to Istanbul trying to recoup expenses he had incurred on their behalf (Stensgaard 1967: 39–40). 21 In the same vein, during the reign of Charles II (1660–1685), the British consul to Algiers was killed. The British consul to the Canary Islands was driven from the islands, and consuls to Madeira and Cadiz were jailed (Barbour 1928: 571). 22 Most Northern European states had their first consuls in the Mediterranean. The first Swedish consuls, for example, were appointed to Lisbon and Cadiz, but not until the seventeenth century (Müller 2004: 40). 23 The concept of nationhood that underlay such an appointment is closer to that of the ‘nations’ of European universities, where a ‘nation’ was the collective of students from one particular province, than to our modern concept that conflates nation and people (Greenfeld 1992: 4). The usage of ‘nation’ to designate all merchants in one city originating in one city or state is traceable at least back to the Levant in the sixteenth century (Stensgaard 1967: 14–15). However, since merchants from smaller (or unrepresented) polities would regularly, with the consent of the Ottomans, sail under a covering flag, ‘[m]‌ost nations in the Levant thus comprised merchants from the areas ruled by the sovereign who had been granted capitulations by the Sultan, as well as an undefined group of other Western merchants’ (van den Boogert 2005: 37). 24 Even though the consular and diplomatic functions were formally separated, there was no corresponding separation in representation. Titles and functions would remain intermingled until the end of the Great Northern War (1721; Müller 2004: 39–40). In Denmark, the parallel structure lasted until 1848, while until 1825 the ‘British’ consuls in the Ottoman Empire were appointed by the Levant Company (Müller and Ojala 2001: 40–41, Byrd 1972). Horn (1961) notes overlap between diplomats and consuls in the English Foreign Service during the same period. 25 In England, such an expansion of the field of work took place during the civil wars (Barbour 1928: 556, Horn 1961: 237–238). 26 The English consuls to Bergen in the eighteenth century regularly reported on the movements of French ships on the possibility that ‘rebels & Jacobite agents’ might use the Norwegian coast as a base for strikes against Scotland (National Archives (NA), London, Foreign Office, SP 75/​87). 27 Such practices were known in the English case as early as in the 1630s (Dickie 2008: 59).

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28 Nielsen (1877) and the Swedish National Archives (SR), ‘J.C. Martineau Brev 1787–92’, Danica 447. 29 Available at www.yale.edu/​lawweb/​avalon/​diplomacy/​barbary/​barmenu.htm, retrieved 25 January 2017. 30 The urge to control compatriots in Barbary had obvious roots in the challenges posed both by European renegades and by the large numbers of European slaves in the area. 31 Available at http://​legal.un.org/​ilc/​texts/​instruments/​english/​conventions/​9_​2_​1963. pdf; quite tellingly, it appeared as the coda to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations from 1961; http://​legal.un.org/​ilc/​texts/​instruments/​english/​conventions/​9_​ 1_​1961.pdf (both retrieved 14 November 2019).

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The evolution of visual diplomacy

Extant work on the emergence of diplomacy is largely textual.1 And yet, diplomacy works not only through text but also in other social registers. One of these registers is visual. This chapter looks at how visual practices have come to constitute an international institution in the same way that diplomacy has historically, and identifies the evolutionary variation and stability in contemporary visual diplomacy. I draw up a taxonomy of three visual strategies, one of which is dominant, or hegemonic. The two others are subaltern, or dominated. When diplomats and the persons they serve meet, there is performance, and performances always have a visual aspect. Successful performances are often not understood as performances, but rather simply as the stuff that people do when they address an audience of one or more. It is only when things go wrong or when performers feel out of their element that the audience is reminded that the performance is indeed a performance, and not just the stuff that people do. Typically, therefore, most people will not necessarily think of state visits, TV appearances and other well-rehearsed performances when they think of visual diplomacy; that will rather be thought of as the stuff that politicians do. It is only when the performance is somehow unexpected and/​or not fluent – say, something like the annual summits of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and their practice of clothing visiting heads of state in local costume – that audiences are reminded that they are watching a performance.2 The reason that such awkwardness does not occur more often lies in the substantial and meticulous work diplomats put into the planning, execution and dissemination of such performances. It is the nature and effect of this work that will form the subject matter of this chapter. I take my inspiration from the so-called visual turn in IR (Millennium 2001, Bleiker 2001, Millennium 2006, Dauphinee 2007, Andersen, Vuori and Mutlu 2015) and attempt to do the groundwork for the study of visual diplomacy by establishing its visual modalities. The first part of the chapter discusses the historical emergence of visual diplomacy. I begin with polities that are past the first tipping-point of diplomacy (that is, as discussed in Chapter 2 above, diplomacy between sedentary and culturally homogenous peer-group polities). The exemplary case here is the Iroquois

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League. The exemplary case regarding the diplomacy of polities that are past the second tipping-point (early large-scale and fairly culturally homogeneous polities or kingdoms) is ancient Egypt. The second part of the chapter analyses what is visually specific about diplomacy as compared with other and previously studied international social institutions, such as security (Williams 2003, Review of International Studies 2009, Kennedy 2009, Hansen 2011, O’Loughlin 2011, Heck and Schlag 2013, van Veeren 2014) or torture (Friis 2015, Hansen 2015, Leese and Koenigseder 2015, Austin 2016). Just as textual diplomatic interaction plays out within specific genres (the démarche, the report, the verbal note and so on), visual diplomatic interaction has its visual modalities (or scopic regimes) and genres (the accreditation, the reception, the state visit and so on). I argue that diplomacy is characterized by three visual modalities. The visual tends, first, to be discursively unacknowledged by diplomats, even though it is consuming large resources practically. Put differently, little is said about it, although a lot of work goes into it. Discursively unacknowledged or not, the visual remains an inevitable aspect of diplomacy because much diplomacy is face to face. Secondly, given that these face-to-face meetings bring different aesthetics into contact, the visual remains inevitably contested. A third and final visual modality of diplomacy, which is also an additional reason why visual diplomacy is always contested, is the presence of multiple audiences at any one diplomatic visual performance. Diplomats perform not only for one another but also for their home audience (which they represent) and for third parties. Having established the specific visual modalities of diplomacy relative to other social institutions, the chapter goes on to discuss the visual aspect of a specific diplomatic genre.3 Given that the key precondition for the emergence of diplomacy in its modern form is recognition, I pick as my case study the one diplomatic genre where the performance of recognition is the basic theme. This is so-called accreditation, by which is meant the obligatory presentation of her credentials by a designated ambassador, as the personal representative of her sending head of state, to the court of the hosting head of state. When an envoy is accredited, then, the hosting head of state not only recognizes that envoy as an ambassador but also recognizes the sending head of state as an ostensible equal. Given the actual power differentiations of international life, and also the widespread historical resistance of a whole string of different polities to recognizing anyone as an ostensible equal, accreditation is a remarkable feat of social evolution in its own right. However, the focus here is on the differences in the practice, between three different variants, and how accreditation and indeed international visual diplomacy as such continue to be stabilized around one of them. The fourth part of the chapter draws attention to the specific practices that bring diplomatic genres such as accreditation to a wider public. Diplomats muster considerable resources in order to make the visual aspects of diplomacy visible to larger audiences. Images have to be made and then distributed to sundry media. This is an important but often overlooked aspect of diplomatic work, which further stabilizes visual diplomacy around its hegemonic variant. In conclusion, I  sum up what the chapter tells us not about seeing like a state (Scott 1998) but about being seen like a state. I offer a taxonomy of visual strategies

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on which contemporary states draw and name them Western hegemonic, national and anti-hegemonically spiteful. Given that the latter two strategies are derivative of Western practices, I conclude that the strategies are hierarchically ordered, that visual diplomacy remains constitutive of lingering Western hegemony in IR and that visual diplomacy contributes to the sustained stabilization of diplomacy overall. Chapter 5 follows up the broad discussion of emergent visual diplomacy in this chapter by looking further into the details of how the hegemonic Western variant of visual diplomacy is sustained.

Early complex polities

As discussed at some length in Chapter  2, diplomacy reached a first tipping-point with the emergence of early complex polities (that is, groups more complex than hunter-gatherer bands), and a second when there was a jump in complexity to early kingdoms. As examples of the visuals involved, I  now turn to the two most well-documented cases of such visual diplomacies, namely Iroquois diplomacy as reported by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European colonists and second millennium bce Egyptian diplomacy as reconstructed by Egyptologists.4 As also noted in Chapter 2, and with reference to Ragnar Numelin’s work, the diplomacy of early complex peer-group polities focused on face-to-face interaction, often before audiences. With a number of people involved, the staging of performances  – the ordering of bodies, the orchestration of accoutrements, the ritualization of movement  – took on key importance. While the spoken word might have been important to such performances (Goffman [1967] 2005), they were first and foremost visual affairs. They were spectacles (from Latin spectare, to watch). Note also that in pre-modern settings, ideas about agency differed from modern ideas. In particular, the agency of certain animals and charismatic objects tended to be stressed much more than even the most avid agency-network theorist would allow today (Vedeler et al. 2019). The most well-documented example we have of tribal diplomacy is, arguably, that conducted by the Amerindian Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) League towards European settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Richter 1988, Dennis 1993). While this example obviously cannot stand in for the diplomacy of early complex polities in its entirety, and it has the added drawback that only one of the parties to it is an early complex polity, it nonetheless has value as an example of how relatively small-scale and less technologically differentiated polities conduct visual diplomacy. In 1701, a ‘Grand Settlement’ established Iroquois neutrality between the English and the French. Ethno-historian Nancy Hagedorn (1988:  60–61) generalizes about their conduct as follows: Conferences [usually between the Iroquois, their allies and the English] opened with the ‘usual ceremonies’ of condolence, brightening the chain of friendship, and the reiteration of significant past treaties and agreements. Following these initial exchanges of amenities, the conferences generally

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proceeded to the specific business at hand and consisted of a series of morning and afternoon sessions constituting a formal dialogue between the two sides of the fire. Although the roots of forest diplomacy can be traced to the Iroquois Condolence Council, a ritual of mourning dead chiefs and installing their successors, by the mid-eighteenth century it incorporated many elements borrowed from European practices. Gun salutes, toasts, the distribution of European trade goods as presents at the conclusion of councils, and especially the keeping of written records of the proceedings and treaties were European innovations. […] In order to be successful in their dealings with the Iroquois, English government officials found it necessary to operate within the established system of Iroquois council protocol, just as the Indians had to accept and adopt certain colonial practices.

The visuals of Iroquois diplomacy were strictly regulated, with the two delegations facing one another not across a table but across a fire. Like any other known diplomatic system, the Iroquois system included a gift economy. The conferences focused on a particular form of messaging involving a particular kind of gift, namely wampum.5 Considered as artefacts, wampum were belts consisting of cylindrical beads made principally of quahog shells (Venus mercenaria) drilled through from opposite ends. They were then strung in rows with sinew, vegetable fibre or thread, forming a rectangular belt that was most often horizontal. Druke (1985: 88) reports that the beads are deep purple (black) or white in color. Glass was sometimes substituted for shell. Belts were made of beads of one color or of a combination of black and white beads often strung to form graphic patterns (emblems) of white on black or black on white. White was considered by the Iroquois to symbolize peace and/​or life, among other things, while black was said to symbolize war and/​or death. Red paint or other pigment was sometimes added to belts to signify war.

The importance of these belts went beyond graphic depiction, for the belt was said to carry the message of one council to another. Without the visual prop of wampum, then, communication was considered by the Iroquois side to be not only incomplete but politically worthless. In the case of the ‘Grand Settlement’, for example, the wampum confirmed that a state of ‘perpetual peace and friendship’ now existed between the Five Nations and the Western Indians (Brandão and Starna 1996: 218). These messages were literally read into the wampum before it was taken by a messenger to be presented to another tribal council, where the messenger lent the message voice.6 Words, it seems, did not come alive without the visual help of the wampum.7 The wampum was a charismatic object which could actually act – it was a so-called actant (a non-human agent). This is reflected in language, as the word for a wampum serving as an invitation is eētshatiyōtáhkwa˛ which literally means ‘that which stretches a person’s arm’. This word contains a morpheme –hkw-, the instrumental suffix, which has the effect of shifting the focus of action away from the agent to an object used to carry out

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The wampum served as a device not only for keeping track of meetings and agreements but also for organizing them (Jennings 1984: 103–104). Hagedorn (1988: 66–67) details wampum’s actual use in negotiations: the passing of a wampum string or belt punctuated each proposal or section of a speech. […] Once a belt had been received across the council fire, protocol demanded that similar belts or strings accompany each portion of the respondents’ reply. When responding, the speaker displayed the received belts and strings in the order they were delivered by laying them upon a table or hanging them across a stick and repeating what was said on each. At the end of every article, he returned thanks, added his group’s reply, and passed the new wampum across the fire. The return of the original belt without another one in reply indicated a rebuke or the rejection of the petitioners’ proposal.

The spiritual underpinnings of the wampum practice meant that the English, through their participation in that practice, took part in a diplomacy rooted in Iroquois religious practices. This does not seem to have constituted a problem for the English, but it was definitely experienced as a foreign practice, something that had to be learnt, and learnt well. It took time to master the new visual mode of Iroquois diplomacy. On the basis of archival studies, Hagedorn (1988: 70) reports how, at more than one occasion, Iroquois delayed meetings with the English because the wampum sent beforehand was said to be ‘no more than Strings’. One reading of this is that a word-oriented or logocentric Western culture came up against a more visually oriented one. With reference to the wampum’s mnemonic function, William M.  Beauchamp (quoted in Jennings 1984: 81) noted in 1901 how the use of emblems became more common in the mid-eighteenth century, perhaps as a response to the general lack of expertise on the part of the English to remember things precisely without the aid of specific references […] Euramericans never developed a system for transmitting oral tradition associated with wampum belts, so the specific meaning of belts were lost to them. Realizing this, Indians sometimes demanded that a written message explaining their meanings be attached.

To the Iroquois, the visuals of wampum seem to have been to the spoken word what writing is to the spoken word in literate cultures. In both cases, at formal occasions between two communities, the two go together. In both cases, the spoken word takes second place. The key difference seems to be that whereas in Western tradition, as demonstrated best by Derrida (1978; also Goody 1986), a strong current from the ancient Greeks onwards has always favoured the spoken word (logocentrism), in Iroquois tradition this does not seem to be the case. For example, at the ‘grand treaty

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council’ that negotiated the Grand Settlement between the Iroquois and New France in July and August 1701, in response to General Governor of New France (also known as the French king’s viceroy) Louis-Hector de Callière’s reiteration of a promise to mediate between Amerindians to their west and the Iroquois, the Iroquois spokesman stated that ‘we are delighted at all that you have done, and we have listened to what you have said, in recognition of which here are our words (gave four wampum belts) to assure you that we will adhere firmly to your requests’ (Brandão and Starna 1996: 230). Wampum was the key visual object of Iroquois diplomacy, but it was far from the only one. The basic presupposition that objects could be actants meant that the visual gravitas of Iroquois diplomacy was deeper than that of the colonists. Consider the well-known and widespread Amerindian practice of burying the hatchet. If other collectives did not follow the strict visual choreography involved, the consequences could be dire. For example, in 1755 the Mohawks, who were one of the seven Iroquois tribes, complained to the governor of Pennsylvania that the governor of New  York had failed to remove the hatchet from their hands at the close of hostilities against the French. According to Indian practice, before peace could be made between two offending parties and normal relations restored, the hatchet of war had to be removed from their hands and heads. New  York’s oversight kept the Mohawks from dealing with that colony and led them to approach Pennsylvania instead (Hagedorn 1988: 79). To sum up, there is a strong ‘seeing is believing’ side to Iroquois diplomacy, which to a large degree hangs on making specific objects like wampum and the war hatchet visible, investing them with agent-like qualities and placing them at the centre of rituals. From what we know of other well-documented cases of how early small-scale complex polities – say, Germanic tribes in the Roman and Viking periods – conducted their diplomacy (Vedeler et al. 2019), the central importance of the visual to what we may with some trepidation call tribal diplomacy seems to be a general phenomenon. Note, finally, that when coming up against Western visual and other practices, Iroquois wampum-based diplomacy, which was in evidence in the eighteenth and even into the nineteenth century, was eventually selected out. There was a re-stabilization around what had begun as a European and had been continued as a American colonial version.

Early large-scale complex polities

The emergence of large scale was a relatively late historical occurrence, in terms of size of polities as well as in terms of visuals.8 Egyptologist Jan Assmann (2011: 150, 127) has suggested that there is a direct link between the two. He notes that what he calls ‘monumental discourse’ and defines as the ‘dual references of writing, plus art and architecture, reflected the special relationship between the concepts of state and eternity (or immortality) in Egypt’, was actually what gave birth to ancient Egyptian polities. However, while ancient Egypt was the polity to evolve the most elaborate political use of what art historians call ‘hierarchical scale’ – that is, the use of larger-than-life proportions to underline a person’s or phenomenon’s political importance – they were not alone in doing so. The early large-scale polities were also peer-group polities,

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which competed with and copied one another. The practice of towering over subjects was already in evidence among small-scale polities in the form of megaliths such as Stonehenge, but it was taken to new heights around the Eastern Mediterranean from the late third millennium bce. Beginning with the Babylonian ziggurats (McMahon 2016: 322), pyramidal structures cropped up in assorted adjacent polities. Egypt soon took the lead. Pyramids are typically hierarchical, celebrating the community’s leader. For our purposes, it is of key interest that the ziggurats, although they sometimes had the names of kings engraved on them, did not have any other graffiti. If the central objects of early small-scale complex diplomacy were themselves small-scale, the central objects used to demonstrate the power of the early large-scale polities (and now also their heads) to subjects and other heads alike were themselves large-scale. The increased importance of leaders and hierarchy that came with large-scale polities focused not only on diplomacy but also on relations with other polities in general, on issues of respect for those leaders. One of the very earliest images we have of an Egyptian king hails from the thirty-first century bce (Baines 1989). The so-called Narmer Palette depicts Narmer, pharaoh of the First Dynasty, holding a captured enemy by the hair. The pharaoh is unnaturally large, the captured enemy unnaturally small. By the time of Ramses II (1279–1213 bce), this penchant for hierarchical scale had permeated most, if not all, public representations of the Pharaoh. We find drawings on him on temple gates, where all who passed could view the larger-than-life representations of Ramses II defeating foreign soldiers and lording it over captured enemies. The same stress on hierarchy is found in the diplomacy of early large-scale polities. We see it in the central preoccupation of the heads of other polities around the Eastern Mediterranean that constituted the so-called Amarna system with having the Pharaoh refer to them as ‘brother’ rather than ‘son’. We also see it in visual diplomacy, where the key seems to have been to impress the greatness of the Pharaoh on visiting diplomats (Podany 2012). Much is made in extant literature of how Byzantine diplomacy turned on overwhelming foreign diplomats with displays of splendour. The goal was for the emperor to appear sublime. The word for sublimity in Byzantine Greek was hupsos, which means height, and much turned on being visibly higher-placed than the visiting diplomats (Neumann 2006). While Byzantine diplomacy is much better documented than is ancient Egyptian diplomacy, there can be little doubt that all this had already been practised by Egyptians. An evolutionary perspective draws attention to how we will often find remnants or atavisms of earlier emergent forms in contemporary ones. Where biology is concerned, we have Heckel’s law, which lays down that ontogenesis (the creation of one individual) follows phylogenesis (the creation of the species to which that individual belongs), so human foetuses have gills although they will spend their independent lives on land, humans have ears although we may no longer point them in order to hear better, etc. While Heckel’s law is not universal, and while it may always be misleading to speak in biological terms about social phenomena (Neumann 2014), one of the uses to which archaic knowledge may be put is to alert us to contemporary remnants of once widespread but now less obvious practices. Evolutionary knowledge may sensitize us to

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social phenomena or even logics that we would otherwise have missed. The importance of objects to visual diplomacy, which was so tangible among early complex polities, lingers in the hunt by hosts for gifts to give visiting diplomats that tell the story of relations between the giving and the receiving polity (Leira and Neumann 2017). Hierarchy and attempted domination are still lurking everywhere in diplomacy, which may be exactly why there is a taboo on making such attempts visual. When it nonetheless happens, the consequences may be dire. By way of example, consider how, in 2010, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the Turkish ambassador and his entourage and put them in chairs much lower than their own, and then proceeded to make all this visible to the entire world by broadcasting newsreel and still photos of the event. The host of the meeting, the Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon, made the symbolic violation explicit by declaring gleefully that the point of the entire exercise was that Israel wanted to humiliate Turkey by placing its ambassador in a low chair ‘while we’re up high’.9 The insult contributed to an ensuing six-year-long rift in diplomatic relations between the two states.

Three visual modalities of state diplomacy

When we move from early large-scale complex polities to the second millennium ce, we find new forms of visuals on display. In the East Asian Middle Ages, embassies routinely included troupes of acrobats and jugglers (Woodside 1998). In the European Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, the arrival of embassies – a delegation of visiting foreign dignitaries led by an ambassador  – was a regular, if not highly frequent, occurrence, for which trinkets were distributed, pamphlets printed and high art produced (Um and Clark 2016, Roosen 1980). In Chapter 2, diplomacy’s third evolutionary tipping-point was identified as the firming up of permanent representation. With the spread of permanent representation throughout Europe from the sixteenth century onwards, the meaning of ‘ambassador’ changed to denoting the head of an embassy, understood as a permanent structure located in the host country (also, and to underline the continuity, called ‘a mission’). Permanent diplomacy or not, ambassadors still have to arrive, and I will return to the visual marking of ambassadors’ arrival by the ritual known as accreditation once I have discussed the visual modalities (or scopic regime; Jay 1994) that characterize permanent diplomacy between states. One way to identify these is to ask what aspect of the institution is the most striking compared with other international institutions, such as war or international law, on the three basic levels of social analysis: the epistemic, the ontic and the practical.

Unacknowledged Epistemically, visual diplomacy, and particularly Western diplomacy, is primarily characterized by being discursively unacknowledged by its practitioners. While the importance of the visual to politics in general may seem intuitive, for specific historical reasons, contemporary Western political debates downplay its importance. The

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result is an imbalance between the West and the rest, who do not seem to downplay their acknowledgement of the visual to the same degree. It is, furthermore, indicative of the poor state of scholarly knowledge about what it entails to be seen as a state that we know very little about the role of the visual in relations between non-Western states. Given that the general denial of the importance of aesthetics to politics is a problem that is also, I would argue, at the root of the proven inability of scholars of diplomacy to account for the visual, I begin with this point. The visual may be an aspect of all social fields (to the seeing, that is), but it will not be so in the same ways. The visual modalities of, say, warfare will differ from those of international law, which will be different again from those of diplomacy. Furthermore, different visual modalities will have different histories, as have ways of seeing. Gary Shapiro sums up three decades of continental philosophical debate on the matter in his observation that In a time that takes the thought of difference so seriously, there is an anomaly in thinking of vision as always the same, always identical, and so opposing it to other forms of perception and sensibility, which, it is claimed, offer more finely nuanced, more engaged, more historically sensitive ways of engaging with things. (Shapiro 2003: 6)

It follows that there cannot be only one diplomatic way of seeing. One striking aspect of this is the cross-cultural variation regarding the degree to which the visual is discursively acknowledged (as opposed to practically performed) as being important to diplomacy. Edward Hall’s (1976) distinction between high-context and low-context cultures is useful here. High-context cultures will create and expect settings (contexts) that are highly symbol-laden. Since the expression of these symbols will often take visual form, in these cultures the visual is expected to carry more weight in overall communication. By contrast, low-context cultures will stress settings relatively less, and other factors, notably deliberation, more. For our purposes, Western states, and particularly the United States, will acknowledge the importance of the visual less than do the rest (which, to repeat, is not to say that they hold the visual to be unimportant). I think there are two major reasons for this, both of which pertain to politics at large rather than specifically to diplomacy. The first reason has to do with how, following the Renaissance and particularly the Enlightenment, Westerners tended to hold that authority should be rationally established and maintained.10 This focus privileged the visual in the sense that what was real now became what was visible; the invention of microscopes and telescopes were followed by positivism. There were two flip sides to this, however. First, as argued by Bolter and Grusin (2000; compare Ruggie 1993), with the emergence of linear perspective from the fourteenth century on, it became a widespread Western pursuit to make the visual medium disappear. The image was supposed to be ‘true to life’, so the mediating element – that is, what comes, as it were, ‘between’ the phenomenon represented and the image representing it – had to go. This started in painting, and may then be observed again and again, as new visual media appeared technologically, only

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to be disappeared socially. If it had not been like that, it would hardly have been such big news when Marshall McLuhan ([1964] 1994) proclaimed that the medium was the message. Secondly, positivism’s focus on rationalism screened out everything that had to do with emotions (Damasio 1994), including our responses to the visual, with a key example, for our purposes, being the positivistic resistance to acknowledging the importance to social and political life of the visually pleasing and frightening. One epistemic casualty of the bracketing of the visually pleasing was analysis of how this works where the state generally, and the institution of diplomacy specifically, are concerned. This tendency not to acknowledge the importance of the visual maintained itself in subsequent European tradition (for France, see Jay 1994). When, in the 1930s, the focus on rationality broke down in a number of Western states, the standard intellectual explanation of how this could happen was to blame aesthetics (this is a question to which I will return in the following chapter). While it is easy to sympathize with the sentiment that reason is a better arbiter of right and wrong than is aesthetics, one should also be wary of the ahistorical hubris of such a view. It is simply not the case that Western modernity put paid to the importance of the visual to politics and diplomacy. Not acknowledging the importance of the visual and of aesthetics does not make these aspects of reality any less real. Historically, aesthetics predates deliberation as an aspect of politics, and there is no indication that it is going away. Be that as it may, in Enlightenment thinking, the disasters perpetrated by its aestheticizing fascist detractors, and the subsequent Western tendency not to acknowledge the importance of aesthetics to diplomacy, we have an explanation not only for why the importance of visual diplomacy tends to be less acknowledged in the West than elsewhere but also, I would argue, for why the visual aspect of diplomacy remains unaccounted for in scholarly literature.

Inevitable and contested Ontically, the visual in diplomacy is inevitable because trying to look good is part of being presentable, and is inevitably contested because there will be differences between as well as within polities as to what it means to look good. This stands in direct opposition to the former, epistemic point. The importance of the visually pleasing or beautiful – in any one realized form, what is at issue here is the category of the visually pleasing, as distinct from what any one culture may find to be so – is an inalienable aspect of the human condition. Given that the visual and the visually pleasing is a basic category of human life, it will be in play in any communication with Others. However, since the visually pleasing is demonstrably multiply realizable, particularly across polities, it follows that such communications will inevitably involve aesthetic clashes and negotiations. The importance of this to diplomacy should be obvious: the visual will always be relevant, and it may always be a field of potential clashes (that is, agonistic). Since this description also covers diplomacy at large, the visual is intrinsic to diplomacy. There is isomorphism between the potentially agonistic way that different visualities relate to one another in diplomacy, and the potentially agonistic way that different parties relate to one another in diplomacy at large.

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It is an empirical fact that humans may communicate in lieu of a commonly spoken language. Part of the explanation for this is visual. Even groups of humans that are culturally wide apart share basic visual modalities because they share the physiological substrate that defines humans as a species. The area that is best covered by scholars in this regard is facial expressions and the degree in which they are readable across wide cultural divides. Psychologist Paul Ekman (1999:  318), who spent his professional life on the issue, sums up by stating that: ‘Our evolution gives us universal expressions, which tell others some important information about us, but exactly what an expression tells us is not the same in every culture’. This insight may be generalized. The infinite variety in human visual modalities is offset by a physiologically guaranteed human psychological unity which means that certain basic stuff, in this case emotions, may be universally recognizable, in outline if not in specificity. As a category, emotions are also a total social fact – an experienced phenomenon that is always an aspect of sustained social interaction, such as food and drink – in that this category is an aspect of all parts of social life (Mauss [1925] 1966). This universality should not be overestimated. Every single phenomenon is multiply socially realizable and will, therefore, vary radically with social context. The point to be made is that certain human phenomena, like emotions, may be conceptualized as a series of units that belong together. They are of the same kind, but they are also unique, in the limited sense that they are different from the other units of the same series. The phenomenon that some things are visually pleasing while others are not is, I would argue, one such phenomenon. The name that we use for this category is beauty. It is beauty’s quality as a total social fact that explains why it was part of the basic triad of ancient Greek philosophical inquiry – the beautiful (kalon), the good (agathon) and the true (alethes) – and why it was, until the nineteenth century, a staple of Western social analysis. As psychologist Nancy Etcoff (1999: 8; also Neumann 2017) reports, Beauty is a basic pleasure. Try to imagine that you have become immune to beauty. Chances are, you would consider yourself unwell – sunk in a physical, spiritual, or emotional malaise. The absence of response to physical beauty is one sign of profound depression.

Etcoff highlights the bodily effects of beauty. The ability to induce bodily effects is one way of making people do what they otherwise would not have done, which is to say that the ability to induce bodily effects is a source of power. Putting people at ease by exposing them to beauty increases their willingness to listen and perhaps to compromise, and may even in certain cases affect outcomes directly by overwhelming people. While all humans, and seemingly also apes, can read bodily effects of this kind, diplomats are trained to do so, and good ones may produce such effects (Holmes 2013, 2018). Here we have one, but not the only, reason why the display of the visually pleasing is widespread in diplomacy. It is the mandate of human agents that represent polities to draw on any and all available resources to sway others. Since beauty is a total social fact as well as a potential power resource, one of these resources will be the visually pleasing. There is, however, no guarantee that fielding something that is expected to be visually effective will actually prove to be effective, for the simple reason that exactly what is

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visually pleasing varies so widely from polity to polity (and also within polities). The visual is, therefore, not only an inevitable but also a precarious modality in diplomacy, since it is always potentially contested. In diplomacy, it simply does not hold up that a rose is a rose is a rose, for the rose is a culturally specific visual inducer of pleasure. The rose only works on the initiated, and so its area of validity as a visual inducer of pleasure is limited. Two consequences flow from this, one practical and one methodological. Practically, we should positively expect diplomacy, which by definition takes place between polities and so in a social space where the common frame of references is generally thinner than it would be within any one polity, to lean on practices that are relatively independent of a common spoken language. Since the category of beauty is a total social fact, we should expect diplomacy to be shot through with what different polities think is visually pleasing, and since beauty is multiply realizable, it is equally inevitable that the visually pleasing will be contested and will make for challenges that are to do with its content.

Multiple audiences Representation must by necessity involve three discreet phenomena: the represented, the representing and the audience (Pitkin 1967). And since international institutions by definition must involve more than one audience, all such institutions have multiple audiences. Since representation is the presence of absence, that which is represented in diplomacy (e.g. the sovereign) must necessarily take semiotic, as distinct from embodied, form. This semiotic form is usually a text. Indeed, the word ‘diplomacy’ derives from Greek di-ploun, to fold a document, and the document so folded was a text issued by the represented verifying that he was represented by its bearer (Constantinou 1996). Note, however, how image interacts with text in the most literal form possible here:  the document that makes the diplomat textually takes its name from its visual form – it is double-folded – and it was usually richly ornamented, not least calligraphically, as are other diplomatic documents such as treaties. Given that the diplomat represents the sending polity by definition, she has to be presentable by the standards that that polity sets for its diplomats. When this is juxtaposed with the previous point, that diplomats must strive to be visually pleasing to the Other, the visual stakes of any one diplomatic encounter increase, for signalling to two audiences rather than one leaves less room for manoeuvre and intensifies the possibilities of failure. Visual diplomacy is not only about fielding objects that may (or may not) induce visual pleasure, such as daggers, necklaces and roses, or prepping the sites where diplomacy is to take place. Objects or vehicles, as well as the sites where they take place, are part and parcel of all diplomatic performances, but the key thing about performance is that it is embodied. Diplomacy is performative both in the everyday sense that representation has to be embodied and staged (Alexander 2011, Ringmar 2015) and in the Foucauldian sense that such iterative performances produce the phenomenon that is diplomacy itself. Put differently, diplomacy is a socially emergent phenomenon, in the sense that every staging is constitutive thereof. There is nothing special about that: one may say the same

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about any social institution or practice. What lends specificity to diplomatic performance is the multiplicity of implied audiences. Since diplomacy is about handling the Other, the Other – be that in the form of its diplomatic representatives only or also in a form that includes chunks of those represented by them – is by definition an audience for the diplomat’s performances. This kind of audience will ask how well the diplomat represents the Other. Furthermore, since the diplomat is representing a polity, the head of that polity – and possibly also other chunks thereof – is also by definition an audience to the same performance. This kind of audience will ask how well the diplomat represents their own polity. Any performance, then, should be visually pleasing to the Other as well as to the diplomat’s in-group or sending polity. This fact significantly shrinks the possible forms that any one polity’s visual diplomacy may take. In addition to the shrinkage caused by the inherent possibility of getting it wrong that is due to the multiple realizability of the visually pleasing across polities, as already discussed, comes the factor that the performance must be visually pleasing to the polity that the diplomat represents. In a word – and this is the theme of the following ­chapter – in addition to being presentable to the Other, the diplomat must be presentable by the sending polity’s own lights.11 In terms of visual modalities, then, the performance must be visually pleasing to the diplomat’s own polity  – it must be representative of and presentable for the in-group. It should also, however, if at all possible, give visual pleasure to the Other, for in this visual strategy inheres a potential source of power. This double requirement leaves little room for manoeuvre, and it is not an easy feat to bring off. The visual modalities of diplomacy, of which I have highlighted three in this section (unacknowledged; inevitably contested; pitched to multiple audiences) conspire to make diplomatic performances highly charged and potentially precarious affairs. When considered as an international institution (as distinct from, say, a series of functional outcome-producing organizations), the most public and highly charged diplomatic practice performed today is arguably accreditation, a practice that culminates in the first official meeting between a head of state on the one hand and the personal representative of another head of state, the ambassador, on the other. Accreditation of a new ambassador – a new personal representative of another head of state – confirms and renews the mutual recognition of and ties between the two states in question. Extant work on recognition in political theory and IR mostly follows Hegel in concentrating on the process leading up to recognition (Honneth [1992] 1995). IR studies have recently expanded the focus from questions of legality and sovereignty to consideration of how identity and moral politics may lead to a questioning of recognition of other states (Bartelson 2013, Daase et al. 2015, Adler-Nissen and Tsinovoi 2019) and of recognition practices that affirm sameness (Ringmar 2014, Strömbom 2014, Lindemann and Ringmar 2016, Haugevik 2018). Accreditation is definitely a recognition practice that affirms sameness and reciprocity, and yet it also grades states, for the hosting state will put more or less work into staging the performance, and its society may respond to the performance in different ways. Extant literature does not seem to discuss how even a highly formal and central practice necessitated by international law such as accreditation does not confer recognition on states in the same way and in equal measure. Accreditation is the

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precondition for permanent diplomacy to continue unabated, and yet it is meted out in a manner that grades recognition. The grading is mostly done visually. States routinely see to it that domestic and global publics at large are informed about accreditations by having photographers at hand. States make certain that this visual practice is made, as it were, visible to larger audiences. In some states, accreditations are announced on the radio and, as we will see, they are sometimes covered by TV and print media, but it is as the key self-reproducing genre of the institution of diplomacy that accreditation is of principal interest. It is only by dint of accreditation that you become an ambassador: no accreditations, no permanent diplomacy between states as we know it. Given that accreditations are also richly visual affairs, this is the critical genre for teasing out how the visual aspect of diplomacy plays out.12

Accreditation of ambassadors

On the morning of 19 November 2013, the Japanese prime minister’s office sent a zagyoshiki – a horse-drawn ‘state carriage’ – to the American Residence to fetch the new American ambassador, who was scheduled to present her credentials to the emperor of Japan later that day. On its way back, the horse-driven cortège was greeted by thousands of Japanese lining the route.13 The event was broadcast live on NHK, the major state television channel, where it was followed by millions more.14 The arrival of Her Excellency Caroline Kennedy was a major public event in Tokyo and beyond; years later, this photo was still available on 155 websites, and the total number of internet hits for this and other photos from the same series was 568. As noted at the beginning of the chapter, the spectacle of the ambassador of a foreign head of state who is arriving in style and is being brought to see the local head of state while being publicly gawked at by the crowds is a practice that harks back to the beginning of complex polities. The standard diplomatic functions are reporting, representing and negotiating. If considered in terms of the outcomes produced, the most important diplomatic practice is deal- and order-making. However, when considered as an international institution and a social form, the key diplomatic practice is mutual recognition, and the focal point of this general practice is the specific one of accreditation, where one head of state recognizes and welcomes another head of state’s representative and thereby also renews its recognition of the Other state as such. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which was drawn up after the Second World War in order to give a legal framework to diplomacy, specifies in art. 4, § 1, that ‘[T]‌he sending State must make certain that the agreement of the receiving State has been given for the person it proposes to accredit as head of the mission to that State’; and art. 14 specifies that heads of mission are accredited to heads of state, whereas chargés d’affaires are accredited to ministries of foreign affairs.15 Possible conflict having been averted by clearing the person in question, he or she is sent to the receiving state, where the practice comes to a head in the ambassador’s audience with the head of this receiving state. At the audience, text (the ambassador’s Letters of Credence) pairs up with performance to produce the highly staged and highly visual practice of accreditation. It is an instantiation of how ‘meaning is conveyed by images, [… and]

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images interact with more familiar forms of verbal discourse’ (Williams 2003: 527). The performance is usually documented and made available to a broader public. The accreditation performance crystallizes a key visual modality of diplomacy as discussed above, in that it is predicated on mutual recognition on the basis of equality, while at the same time being visually competitive and so potentially visually hierarchical. Kennedy’s accreditation was exceptional in one respect only, namely the reach of its public dissemination. The picture that is reproduced as Figure 4.1 is taken as the horse-drawn carriage has just arrived at its destination and Kennedy is making her appearance. A liveried servant bows as he holds the door, with another identically liveried servant doing the same at an identical carriage that is following the ambassador’s. He has already let out Kennedy’s entourage, who are standing to attention. The imperial servant, assistant to head of protocol Nobutake Odano, bows her welcome and gets ready to escort Kennedy to shake hands with her boss. Kennedy’s hair is styled and elegant. She wears a pearl necklace and a tight-fitting black number that leaves a little décolletage visible and stops above the knee, and is negotiating the rather short steps of the carriage in heels. The clutch is not her usual Chloe Edith, but something more sensible when documents are involved – a shoulder bag.16 The performance has its props.

Figure 4.1  US ambassador to Tokyo Caroline Kennedy arriving at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, 19 November 2013 Note: See www.dailymail.co.uk/​news/​article-2509795/​Caroline-Kennedy-gets-royal-treatment-stepsJapan-engagement-ambassador.html, retrieved 2 March 2016.

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Back in the digital public sphere that is the internet, a YouTube clip of Kennedy’s arrival shows a relaxed, measured comportment and a practised wave for the crowd – she has obviously made the renowned slowness of the European aristocracy her own.17 Her exit from the carriage onto the square happens in one smooth motion. This is not an easy thing to do, particularly in a tight dress and heels. On the contrary, it is a fully-fledged body technique (Mauss [1932] 1973) and a test of presentability. While the practice of making a public spectacle of an ambassador’s arrival is historically normal, over the last centuries its instantiations have become rarer. These days, the overwhelming number of accreditations take place behind closed doors. This is not to say that they are not public, for they go on to become public spectacles in various media. If one looks at the internet for other instantiations around Kennedy’s accreditation to the Japanese court on 19 November 2013, for example, it appears that only six days before, the new Mongolian ambassador was accredited to London – or, to use acceptable diplomatic language, to the Court of St James’s. Figure 4.2 is taken from The Sunday Times’s coverage of the event.

Figure  4.2  Ambassador of the Republic of Mongolia to the Court of St James’s His Excellency Tulga Narkhuu presents his credentials to Her Majesty the Queen, 13 November 2013 Note: See www.thetimes.co.uk/​article/​narkhuu-tulga-and-nick-clegg-h9pkzlwcfxb, retrieved 29 November 2016. Moroccan and Lesothoan examples of the use of national dress may be found here: www.presidence. ci/​galerie-photos/​427/​presentation-des-lettres-de-creance-de-l-ambassadeur-du-royaume-du-maroc; www.7sur7.be/​7s7/​fr/​16662/​Le-roi-abdique-Vive-le-roi/​article/​detail/​1707608/​2013/​09/​19/​Premiere-​ ceremonie-de-remise-de-lettres-de-creance-pour-le-roi-Philippe.dhtml, retrieved 2 March 2016.

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This was an altogether different event than was Kennedy’s. It was not public in the same face-to-face sense: there were no crowds watching the drive to Buckingham Palace, no one there to take pictures of the arrival, no televising, only an on-site photographer. The sartorial accoutrements are also very different. Like the ambassadors from a number of other states, Mongolia’s ambassadors routinely don national dress for the presentation of credentials. As will be readily seen, the ambassador has made a spectacle of himself, with a view to achieving an effect. We are watching an example of a conscious visual strategy, and it seemed to work. The Daily Mail ran the picture and commented that: The Queen is used to being the most stylish person in the room. But when she met the Mongolian ambassador yesterday, she may have felt a little under-dressed. […] He presented his Letters of Credence in traditional dress, with his bright royal blue outfit drawing the eye from Her Majesty’s rather muted mauve. His dazzling deel  – a traditional Mongolian double-breasted overcoat – was complemented by a matching hat and leather boots.18

Like the event itself, however, the full iconography of the performance is not immediately available to the uninitiated. Narkhuu’s outfit is arguably widely recognizable as a national costume. Where Kennedy wore an outfit that drew attention to her body, His Excellency Tulga Narkuu’s attire draws attention not to the body of its wearer but to itself. It is a national costume in the sense that it denotes the nation, and only connotes the body of its wearer. Kennedy’s dress, by contrast, denotes the gendered being that is wearing it, and connotes Western couture.19 The contrast grows even stronger if we note that this particular national costume, the deel, consists of parts and qualities, such as the symbolic dagger and a rich colour symbolism, with a millennium-long history, and that it definitely conveys stateliness on Mongolia’s own terms  – as distinct from in an already established common idiom  – but that its symbolism is largely unknown outside of Mongolia and, perhaps, the Eurasian steppe at large. The effect of the real deel outside of this cultural area is, therefore, and by necessity, limited. The accreditation of the Mongolian ambassador in his deel did, as we saw from the Daily Mail quote, manage to come across as visually pleasing. Note, however, the backhandedness of it all. In the text following the Sunday Times picture reproduced as Figure  4.2, the paper acknowledged the colourful dress but also went on to comment: ‘let’s hope that, for his official duties, Her Majesty’s ambassador to Mongolia doesn’t wear British national costume – jeans and football shirt’.20 Who is the butt of this joke? Is it ‘the British’ (which, given the national dress situation in Scotland and Wales, here seems to be used synonymously with ‘the English’)? Hardly. It is, arguably, everybody who dons a national dress, be that Mongols, Scots or others. The national dress strategy does not make ambassadors appear as clean and smart as does the hegemonic strategy. Ambassadors choosing the national dress strategy end up being less presentable, and so at a relative disadvantage, as seen, in this case, by the audience that is The Sunday Times and, we must assume, most of its readership. The reasons are to do

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with how a Western cultural hegemonic order has stabilized visual diplomacy, so that what began as culturally specific has come to be treated as universal.21 The lion’s share of diplomatic accreditations involve either Western-style haute couture or national dress. However, to these two visual strategies must be added a third way of managing presentability at such occasions, namely what may be called the anti-hegemonic spite strategy. The basic idea is to dress up in what is reluctantly acknowledged as global garb, typically a suit that is not dark, but to do it in such a way that any trace of haute couture or even chic is blotted out. The rare communist who could pull off wearing a dapper suit  – Stalin’s foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov would be the key ­example – would be regularly teased about it, not least by Stalin himself. During the Cold War, communists excelled in the use of spite, and post-communist countries still struggle with the concepts of black and white tie. For example, during the Russian state visit to the United Kingdom in 2003, President Putin admitted to being ill at ease at the centrepiece Buckingham Palace state dinner: he simply could not pull off wearing black tie (Neumann 2019). Since 1979, Iran has, as it were, followed suit. The tie, which is now never used by Iranian officials, is a loaded symbol in Iran, where one derogatory word for a Westernizer is focoli – literally someone wearing a tie.22 The tie, which in its native West has arguably gone from being an object denoting class to being an object denoting formality, has, in Iran, been made into an object which denotes decadent Western culture. Figure 4.3 captures an accreditation which involved both Iran and one of the post-communist states, namely Armenia. The presence of the visually pleasing at this event is secured by the props of architecture. The other elements of the aesthetic assemblage that were present at the Tokyo event are absent here. The body language on display is tense – people are not having a good time. Sartorially, the event is an abject failure by chic standards – as indeed it is intended to be. The Iranian ambassador, on the right, has no tie. Ill-fitting and crumpled suits are legion. The only person to wear a dark suit is the master of ceremony, to the left at the back.23 The effect striven for by all parties in Figure 4.3 seems to be spite:  spite at Western-dominated sartorial codes specifically, with a view to expressing spite at a Western-dominated world order generally. The visual strategy of spite is simply not geared towards giving pleasure, but turns on intimidation. The aesthetic category of the sublime, a category that European late eighteenth-century thinkers like Edmund Burke ([1757] 1990) carved out of what was until then simply called beauty, may be of help here. Where the hegemonic and national strategies try to knock people out by overwhelming their senses with beauty, the spiteful strategy tries to reach the same effect by projecting overwhelming power resources that instil humiliation and fear. I gave an example from 2010 above of how Israelis put Turks in low chairs. Yet another example should help to make the point. On 21 January 2007, German prime minister Angela Merkel visited Russian president Vladimir Putin at his summer residence in Sochi. Putin proceeded to intimidate his guest, whose fear of dogs was well known, by having his black labrador Konni sniff her. Even today, the incident is regularly used by German diplomats to illustrate Russian lack of good faith.24 To repeat a point, a spiteful diplomatic strategy has immediate and long-lasting, if somewhat intangible, consequences.

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Figure 4.3  Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran Seyyed Kazem Sajjad presents his credentials to the President of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan, 9 October 2015 Note:  Reproduced from the home page of the President of Armenia, www.president.am/​en/​ press-release/​item/​2015/​10/​09/​President-Serzh-Sargsyan-meeting-with-the-Ambassador-of-Iran, retrieved 18 April 2018.

When identifying the variants of a phenomenon for a taxonomy, one should always ask whether the categories are reasonably mutually exclusive, which I think they are in this case, as well as whether they are exhaustive of the universe of cases. Having waded through pictures of hundreds of accreditations and having consulted the literature and also the living memories of sundry diplomats, I have only found one case that may fall outside the proposed taxonomy of visual diplomatic strategies as hegemonic, national and spiteful towards Western hegemony. The case in point is the accreditation of the ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany, Rolf Pauls, to the president of Israel, Zalman S.  Shazar, on 19 August 1965. Pictures of the event show an incoming ambassador who is beyond anxious to please, and a hosting head of state who not only expresses reserve and reproach but is downright spiteful (Hebrew davka).25 However, spite only comes across in the body language and not sartorially or in other ways. There is no strategy here, only a specific instantiation of spite, directed against a specific country. Taking into consideration that His Excellency Rolf Pauls was the first German ambassador ever to the newly established State of Israel, that Israel had taken 17 years to accept Germany’s suggestion of exchanging ambassadors and that the decision to do so remained highly controversial in Israeli society even after it was taken, the spite on display may be allocated to

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a perceived lack of need to hide it due to Germany’s stigma in international politics and to a perceived need to put spite on display for disgruntled domestic audiences. Although spite on behalf of a host country towards a sending state, or even a specific envoy, is a common enough feature, it is truly exceptional in diplomacy to give such feelings free rein, as President Zalman Shazar and his entourage, which included his foreign minister Golda Meir, did here. As evidenced already by the example of the low chairs, the State of Israel has, quite uniquely among the world’s states and often at great cost, continued its spiteful diplomatic ways (Yair and Odom-Weiss 2014). The problem with placing Israel’s spiteful strategy in an overall taxonomy is that Israeli spite seems to be directed at non-Jews (goim) in general, rather than at the Western hegemonic world order as such as is the case with other contemporary spiteful states. If we look at the variation in visual diplomatic strategies regarding accreditation in terms of stabilization, one visual strategy seems to have a broader potential for pleasing than do the other two, and that is the one exemplified by Kennedy’s accreditation. It is Western, and it seems to be hegemonic, in the sense that it dominates the other variants. If we go back to Figure  4.1 and muster a historicizing gaze to look for further evidence of the stabilizing force of this variant of visual diplomacy, two things immediately stand out. Consider, first, the horse-drawn state carriage. Before the Meiji restoration, there were no horse-drawn carriages in Japan. Far from being an old Japanese court vehicle, then, the zagyoshiki is itself a hybridized phenomenon between Western hegemonic and Japanese traditional practices. Then, consider the person who is welcoming the new ambassador, Nobutake Udano. Her attire is Western. That would have been an impossibility before 1905. In that year, a Japanese court delegation, dressed in their traditional silk kimonos, went to New Hampshire in order to negotiate a peace treaty following the Russo-Japanese War. The attire caused a stir and was ridiculed by the American press, and the Japanese reacted by shelving it in favour of Western attire. Here we have a dramatic example of the risks of always having to pander to multiple audiences: while the diplomats of Japan’s vanquished enemy Russia and also those of the American hosting third party are not reported to have been visually displeased, the general public of the hosting third party was, and that was enough to make the Japanese visual performance a failure. Figure 4.1, then, displays among other things how the present Japanese aesthetic order is a result, among other things, of hegemonically conditioned hybridization with what we may inaccurately call a Western aesthetic order. In terms of social evolution, the shelving of court kimonos and the adoption of Western attire and of the horse-drawn carriage are all indications that a traditional Japanese variant of visual diplomacy was selected out in favour of a Western variant.

Making the visual visible Hegemony must be performed again and again, and these performances must be disseminated as far and wide as possible, or else hegemony will weaken. In order to gauge how this happens, we need a study of the practices that produce visual

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diplomacy, along the lines of what van Veeren (2014) and Austin (2016) begin to do for the social institutions of security and torture, respectively. All diplomats have in their job description the need to make visual diplomacy visible to wider audiences, but when we consider the practices and resources involved, we may add a material reason for why it is the ambassador of the United States, and not the one from Mongolia or Iran, whose accreditation receives the widest dissemination. Although Japan spent ample resources on disseminating the accreditation of Kennedy, the United States nonetheless topped it up by having the news agency Reuters shoot the picture series from which Figure 4.1 was taken. Given that a large number of photographers would otherwise crowd the scene, the Western practice at such occasions is for the organizers of the event to pick one agency to represent an entire pool of agencies. This means that although the number of photographers is limited, states like the United States and Japan, which will work with the whole range of international press agencies on a regular basis, will be able to draw on this multiplication effect to have these companies make visual diplomacy visible to multiple audiences. By contrast, neither Mongolia nor Iran spent resources on covering the accreditation of their respective ambassadors. By the same token, when the United States hosts accreditations, it may draw on the services of one of the two steady White House photographers, or of sundry stock photography services headquartered in the US. So did the Court of St James, which hired the services of Getty Images for the Mongolian shoot. By contrast, a reverse image search of the photos from the Armenian capital of Yerevan yielded images of the same stiff posture of the Armenian hosts when accrediting new Danish, Romanian, Dutch and Australian ambassadors.26 The number of pictures released and the postures used (standing to attention, shaking hands, talking amiably while seated in armchairs after the formal part of the ritual) seem to be uniform across Armenian accreditations, and the pictures are not credited to a specific photographer, which indicates that the Press Office of the Armenian president has a photographer on staff. However, a comparison of Figures 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 demonstrates that the Armenian photographer lacks the versatility and polish of the Reuters and Getty photographers. In the diplomatic competition to reach maximum exposure, having well-shot and lively photos to distribute is an important asset, so this matters. An additional reason why the Western hegemonic version of visual diplomacy is able to stabilize its hegemony over other versions, then, is to do with the material resources that are used in reproducing its instantiations. When it comes to the distribution of the reproduced images, we also find that Western states have the upper hand. As demonstrated by the case study on accreditation, heads of state apparatuses and foreign ministries draw on a whole range of practices that are geared towards making visual diplomacy visible to broader audiences, both domestic and foreign. When I interviewed a head of communication of a European MFA about his global assessment of this work, he answered: The resources are primarily spent on web pages and social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter. Certain MFAs also use Snapchat and Instagram. My team is recruited on a 50/​50 journalist/​diplomacy basis. We have a dedicated staff for social media and for graphics. We also have a team overseeing the rolling out of

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a complete line of lay-outs for embassy web pages. The US, the UK, Germany, the EU and Russia lead the pack. Most authoritarian regimes use talking heads and men in suits greeting one another.27

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The case study discussed here certainly bears him out. The case study and this assessment both point to what amounts to a Western hegemony when it comes to visual diplomacy. Indeed, leading Western states will have a full-time photographer on staff, who will usually be part of the minister’s entourage on official and unofficial visits. Even minor Western states will hire photographers for accreditations and larger conferences, put photos on Flickr and national equivalents, and furnish newspapers with images directly. As the already quoted head of communication put it, ‘in this respect the MFA works rather like a news desk, with the press spokesperson as a functional equivalent of a journalist’.28 The approach to making the visual visible is forward-leaning. By contrast, in an aspiring great power like Brazil, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs neither has an official photographer nor hires any external agencies, but has for years trusted a public servant to string as the press office’s photographer. On stations abroad, low-ranking diplomats are supposed to snap the pictures. Brazil is representative of most non-Western states in this regard. It turns out that my finding in the case study, that Western visual diplomacy is able to draw on a seemingly universal discourse in order to sustain its hegemony, is matched by the finding that Western states tend to be more highly professionalized and allocate more resources to practices that make visual diplomacy visible to a maximum number of audience members consuming a maximum number of different media. The stabilization of global visual diplomacy around a Western hegemonic version evolved during the imperial era, but the practices that sustain it are material and technological, and have to do with how images of diplomatic events like accreditations are produced and reproduced.

Conclusion

Despite widespread protestations to the contrary, not least in the form of scholarly neglect, the visual has always been, and remains, an inevitable aspect of diplomacy. Since any diplomatic performance involves multiple signalling to different audiences, the visual is not only inevitable but also inevitably divisive, at least potentially. The visual is a constitutive field of contest for diplomacy: it enables and constrains communication with and signalling to the Other. My discussion of the work that the visual does in what is arguably the most highly visually charged diplomatic practice, namely accreditation, yielded the answer that there now exist three variants of visual diplomatic strategy: a Western hegemonic, a national and an anti-hegemonically spiteful variant. The hegemonic visual strategy turns on performances that demand Western bodily comportment and Western props:  Western body language, Western clothes, Western accoutrements. It is hegemonic because Western props tend to be recognizable by global elite and often also non-elite audiences, whereas most non-Western props are not. Western props are

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therefore effortlessly global, whereas other props most often are not. The diplomatic hegemonic visual strategy also owes its hegemony to being stabilized by a wider Western visual order (as observed, say, in otherwise widely distinct institutions such as global fashion (Neumann 2017), the world of international law or the diplomatic meal (Neumann 2013b)). The stabilization of an entire diplomatic visual order or scopic regime around a Western hegemonic model is also made possible by the not inconsiderable resources that are involved in reproducing images of its performance and making them visible to global audiences in multiple media. The Western hegemonic visual strategy is only one of three strategies that are available to states. The two others are the national strategy and the anti-hegemonically spiteful strategy. The national visual strategy turns on performances of nation, first and foremost sartorially. By contrast to the hegemonic Western strategy, there is no direct claim to universality here. However, I would argue that the national strategy actually sustains the hegemonic Western strategy, for it operates within a register that Western states also master, and which they were actually the first to produce historically, namely the national one. A male Mongolian ambassador about to be accredited might, in principle, choose between wearing the deel and wearing a suit of some kind – casual, dark, black tie, white tie, morning coat – but if he opts for the latter, he is then operating in a foreign, because Western, register. In principle, a Scottish or Croatian ambassador has the same choice between Western and national attire, but would, ­ceteris paribus, operate the two different visual strategies with equal ease.29 By the same token, a female Scottish or Croatian ambassador may decide to wear a dress from national designers in order to give them a showing, but the choice is hers to make.30 Cultural hegemony may be defined as the ability to treat the culturally specific as the culturally universal. It follows that the Scottish or Croatian ambassador has hegemony on her side, whereas the Mongolian ambassador does not. The anti-hegemonically spiteful visual strategy attempts to undermine Western attire and Western props by modifying them (a coloured shirt instead of a white one), dropping them (no tie) or wearing them disdainfully (a crumpled suit). This was the explicit line of European communist states during the Cold War, and it remains so for authoritarian post-Soviet states. It is also the chosen visual strategy of Iran. As is the national visual strategy, the anti-hegemonically spiteful strategy is only seemingly anti-hegemonic, for it operates within a thoroughly Western idiom. Much like a Satanist contents herself with standing the Christian cross on its head and swapping black for white, and by doing so confirms the cross as a symbol and white as the colour of good, the spiteful ambassador simply inverts markers (tie/​no tie, dapper suit/​cheap suit, ironed cloth/​crumpled cloth), without showing any social creativity. This is hardly an effective way to reach the explicit goal of the strategy, which is to undermine Western hegemony, visual or otherwise. The national dress strategy does itself carry the marks of its Western origins. The spiteful strategy is simply one of ­ressentiment: it demonstrates no creativity but contents itself with turning details of the dominating version’s symbolism upside down. We may conclude that the Western hegemonic version of visual diplomacy continues to stabilize visual diplomacy overall not only because of its imperial roots and the considerable use of material resources to

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reproduce it, but also because the variation surrounding it does not add up to a creative and forceful evolutionary challenge. This chapter has discussed the evolution of visual diplomacy and how it has come to be stabilized and remains stabilized around a Western hegemonic variant. It has also begun to look at how this variant is performed by looking at the exemplary case of Caroline Kennedy’s accreditation to Tokyo. In the following chapter, I will inquire further into how performances maintain evolutionary stability.

Notes

1 Notable exceptions include Constantinou (1994, 2016, 2018), Bleiker and Butler (2016) and Haugevik (2018). 2 When he was hosting the APEC summit, US President Obama even tried to abolish the practice; see David Nakamura (2011) ‘Obama nixes funny shirts for APEC photo’, The Washington Post, 14 November, available at www.washingtonpost.com/​ blogs/​44/​post/​obama-nixes-funny-shirts-at-asia-pacific-leaders-forum/​2011/​11/​14/​ gIQA765OKN_​blog.html, retrieved 1 July 2020. 3 While previous work on the visual in IR has often focused on different visual genres (Campbell 2003, Lisle 2006, Sylvester 2008, Bleiker 2009, Gartner 2011, Hansen 2011, O’Loughlin 2011, Aradau and Hill 2013), my analysis foregrounds performance and genre and limits itself to photography. 4 Note that the methodic problems noted at the outset of the book apply here; the cases are exemplary, not representative. 5 The discussion of wampum draws on Andersen and Neumann (2012). 6 At least in the nineteenth century, wampum was also used for tasks such as reinforcing morality tales to children in school settings (Bieder 1980: 354). 7 However, even during its most popular period, other objects such as skins could be substituted for wampum. Still, as pointed out by Tooker (1985: 71) it is not correct when Aquila (1983: 34) maintains that ‘by the mid-1600s, wampum usually consisted of glass beads manufactured by whites’. 8 This section builds on Neumann (2018). 9 See https://​worldview.stratfor.com/​article/​israel-turkey-and-low-seats, retrieved 22 May 2019; also Faizullaev 2017. 10 It is a commonplace of historical literature on seeing to point out the irony in how little interest a period that used a visual metaphor as a self-description (‘enlightenment’) would take in ways of seeing. With the rise of populist politicians like Erdogan, Modi, Putin and Trump, we are once again reminded of how visual strategies rival rationalist ones in establishing political authority. 11 Since there will be no consensus about what is visually pleasing within the self polity either, this is also always a contested question. Diplomacy is an elite pursuit; it follows that the aesthetical repertoire of which the visual is a part will be that elite’s repertoire, where pluralist societies are concerned perhaps with certain trimmings (with British diplomacy post ‘Cool Britannia’ including elements of the visual traditionally associated with rock music, etc.) 12 Elegance will not necessarily be a dominating aspect of accreditation, and there is nothing inherently peaceful about the practice. For example, in 1858, acting upon

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orders not to engage in any practice that would question the reciprocity principle and so bring British honour into question, British ambassador Frederick Bruce tried to force entry into Beijing in order to present his credentials directly to the queen. When he and his entourage were stopped by gunfire, the British decided to make the incident a casus belli that escalated into what became known as the Second Opium War, and occupied Beijing (Wang 1971). 13 See www.youtube.com/​watch?v=UqR2-CsRQoc, retrieved 29 February 2016. I thank Wrenne Yennie Lindgren for help with Japanese cultural references. 14 See http://​news.yahoo.com/​us-envoy-caroline-kennedy-meets-​ japans-emperor-100234814.html, retrieved 2 March 2016. 15 ‘Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, Done at Vienna on 18 April 1961’, available at http://​unog.ch/​80256EDD006B8954/​(httpAssets)/​7F83006DA90AAE7FC1 256F260034B806/​$file/​Vienna%20Convention%20(1961)%20-%20E.pdf, retrieved 25 November 2016; also Denza (2016). 16 See https://​forum.purseblog.com/​threads/​what-bag-is-caroline-kennedy-​ carrying.61968, retrieved 1 March 2016. 17 www.youtube.com/​watch?v=euTisiwA3lA, retrieved 2 March 2016. 18 Amie Keeley, ‘How do you do … have you come far? New Mongolian ambassador wears traditional dress as he meets the Queen’, Daily Mail, 14 November 2013, available at www.dailymail.co.uk/​news/​article-2506952/​How-come-far-New-​ Mongolian-​ambassador-wears-traditional-dress-meets-Queen.html, retrieved 29 November 2016. This picture is available on 75 websites, and the other one in the series on 62. 19 The analysis of the Kennedy case is continued in the succeeding chapter of this book. 20 ‘Narkhuu Tulga and Nick Clegg’, The Sunday Times, 17 November 2013, available at www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/​sto/​newsreview/​theweek/​peopleoftheweek/​article1340709. ece, retrieved 29 November 2016. 21 Which is to say that symbolic violence is afoot. The literature on stigma in IR is relevant here, see Zarakol (2011), Adler-Nissen (2014b). In terms of social identification theory, the problem with both non-hegemonic strategies is that they display no social creativity. 22 From faux-col, false collar; the term also has connotations of snazzy haircuts and effeminate behaviour. I should like to thank Alireza Shams-Lahiani (2019) for help with Iranian cultural references. 23 www.president.am/​en/​press-release/​item/​2015/​10/​09/​President-Serzh-Sargsyan-​ meeting-with-the-Ambassador-of-Iran/​, retrieved 2 March 2016. This picture turns up on 35 websites, and the total number of internet hits for the four pictures in the series is 148. 24 According to a high-ranking German diplomat who was present, Putin took visible pleasure in the manoeuvre (personal communication, Berlin, 26 September 2017). 25 The image is not reproduced here, but may be consulted at http://​fast.mediamatic. nl/​f/​tqgr/​image/​439/​25488-608-500.jpg, taken from www.anp-archief.nl/​page/​ 25488/​nl. For an even more telling show of spite at the subsequent reception, this time on the part of Golda Meir, see www.israelis-und-deutsche.de/​en/​wp-content/​ uploads/​sites/​2/​2015/​09/​1965-Empfang-de-Botschafter-web.jpg, retrieved 2 December 2016.

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26 See, respectively, https://​news.am/​eng/​news/​298716.html; www.panarmenian. net/​eng/​photoset/​all/​5382; www.panarmenian.net/​eng/​photoset/​all/​5325; www. president.am/​en/​press-release/​item/​2016/​05/​25/​President-Serzh-Sargsyan-meetin g-with-Ambassador-of-Australia (all retrieved 29 November 2016). Interestingly, in all cases, the postures of all concerned were more relaxed afterwards: the posturing is first and foremost tied to the high point of the ceremony, as distinct from its afterglow, when commensality returns. 27 Interview, head of communication of a European MFA, 14 March 2017. 28 Interview, head of communication of a European MFA, 14 March 2017. 29 Note that this is a thought experiment built on visual empirics from other fields; as things stand, and as noted above, it is standard Mongolian Ministry of Foreign Affairs procedure to use the deel, as it is for male British (which still includes Scottish) and Croatian ambassadors to wear a dark suit. 30 This is an even more pronounced theme in the press coverage of first ladies (but so far not, to my knowledge, of first husbands).

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Presentability

While the previous chapter discussed the emergence of visual diplomacy and its present variations, this chapter further pursues the phenomenon of presentability. In order to perform as a diplomat, you have to represent a polity, and you have to be presentable. To represent, you have to be present where the polity itself is absent (Constantinou 1994, 1996, Hennings 2011). To be presentable, you have to be ‘clean, smart, or decent enough to be seen in public’, as the Oxford English Dictionary has it.1 Indeed, in languages closely related to English, like the Scandinavian ones, the word for presentable may be presentabel but it may equally well be representativ. If diplomacy is the mediation of estrangement, and if this mediation is face to face, then it follows that diplomacy is also a prolonged exercise in representation, which must include presentability. To be presentable boils down to having a pleasing comportment, measured body language, a well-groomed appearance, a decent sartorial profile and a pleasant manner of speaking. ‘The presentable’, then, concerns the aestheticized aspect of the diplomat, and of any person for that matter. People attending diplomatic academies are made subject to the diplomatization of their comportment, sartorial choices, table manners and speaking repertoires as an integral part of their training (Neumann, I. 2012). It takes one or more audiences in order to be presentable, so presentability always has to be performed. Performance demands a sphere. Some of these spheres are public. With some notable exceptions (Neumann 2008, Kuus 2015, Cornut 2015, McConnell 2018, Nair 2019), diplomatic representative work has gone largely unstudied. Given that representation has not been studied as thoroughly as information-gathering and negotiation, the first part of this chapter looks at the historical emergence of representation and of a public sphere. It turns out to have been there from the beginning, which raises the question of why it has been so neglected in diplomatic studies. I began to answer this question in the previous chapter, by looking at the particular Western proclivity for forgetting about the medium that serves as a platform for visual presentation. In this chapter, I discuss an added factor that was only mentioned in passing, namely how, after the Second World War, intellectuals came to blame some of fascism’s success

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on its successful aestheticization of politics: many proceeded to deny the importance of aesthetics in favour of deliberation. I then go on to tie the analysis to the literature on performativity, and I suggest that three factors determine the degree of success of a diplomatic performance. These are the presentability factor (body capital, work on enabling the presentability of the body), the media factor (the degree to which the performance will be distributed and received) and, finally, the audience factor (the degree to which a favourable reception emerges). The second part of the chapter returns to Caroline Kennedy’s performance and pursues the aspect of her presentability. I  then add a second and contrasting case study of how to be presentable. The two case studies have been chosen with a view to maximizing the cultural distance between the receiving states, and also because they were both deemed successful by mainstream audiences involved and were widely publicized, but for different reasons. The fact that the cases stand out as particularly successful means that they are chosen for their exemplarity, and not because they are typical of diplomatic performance in general. Kennedy’s performance was successful because the ambassador was held to be presentable in the sense of being clean and smart. The second performance, of how a Norwegian ambassador to Tehran delivered her credentials to the Iranian head of state, was held to be presentable in the sense of being decent. I decode the different ways in which these performances were deemed to be presentable by drawing on art historian Erwin Panofsky (1988: 28–30; compare Heck and Schlag 2013), and I think of diplomacy as a particular kind of iconography. Panofsky suggests that we conduct iconographic analysis in terms of three layers of consecutively more context-dependent signs. The primary layer consists of objects that most humans will immediately recognize, such as a human body. The secondary layer consists of conventional subject matter, which may be widely understood due to its function but not so widely as natural objects  – say, a necklace. Tertiary objects are those whose meaning is intrinsic to the cultures that produce them, such as a specific national dress. I conclude the chapter by reflecting on how radically variation in diplomatic presentability has shrunk over just the last century, and how there seems to be no new variation on the horizon. One of the few areas in which variation remains is in female diplomatic attire. Given that female diplomats have had a more than token presence as professional diplomats for less than half a century, and that women are in most places subject to stricter sartorial standards than are men, this is hardly surprising.

Performing (in) the public sphere

Presentability is an aspect of a performance, in both its senses. It is performative in the sense of being an enacting intended to make an impression (Alexander 2011, Ringmar 2015), and it is performative in the sense of creating the phenomenon that it enacts (Weber 1996). Another way of saying this is that performances are constitutive of public spheres.

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Public spheres – culturally ornamented places where people who are not necessarily kin and who hail from various social backgrounds socialize and are socialized – have been constitutive of polities from the very beginning. Contrary to popular belief, trade is not the only, and not even the oldest, constitutive factor in play. Trade is important but neither as important nor as ancient a factor as is religion. Regular congregations of people in a specific site, as would have occurred some 10,000 years ago around the megaliths of Göbekli Tepe and other Anatolian sites, and as we know them from later examples like Stonehenge in England, were constituted by the cultic, not by the commercial. These congregations centred on the staging of public ritual, where performers and audiences joined forces to instantiate, but not yet institutionalize, burgeoning polities. Göbekli Tepe and its public places began as a hunter-gatherer hang-out, and seems to have become a sedentary place that did not see the formation of polities, which are defined as complex societies (although this assessment may change as the site is further excavated). The first verified complex sedentary settlements, like Catal Hüyük from the eighth millennium bce, also in Anatolia, did not have public places for the performance of public ritual. They were clusters of buildings with entrances through the roof. Arguably, the birth of cities, and the further institutionalization of the polity which this entailed, only took place when public spaces and complex societies were both present. If so, then the first cities were those that we find in Sumer towards the end of the fourth millennium bce. It is as a corollary of this that publicly visual factors – in the form of architecture, monuments and ritual – must be said to have been constitutive of cities from the very beginning. Indeed, the existence of ornamented public places and the acting out of political ritual therein seem to be that rare thing, namely a trans-historical aspect of politics. All known early complex polities have them. When there is a jump in complexity in third-millennium Anatolia and Eastern Mediterranean, the jump arguably turns on this factor. Assmann (2011: 72) puts it like this: Cultural memory circulates in forms of commemoration that were originally bound up with rituals and festivals. As long as these rites were predominant, the knowledge that was all-important for ideology was handed down through repetition. It is the very essence of all rites that they follow a given, unchanging order. [… repetition compulsion] is what guarantees ritual continuity, and this is what societies free themselves from as they move over to textual continuity.

Egypt, and to a lesser degree other late Bronze Age complex societies, are at an intervening stage in this process, where ritual and textual continuity merge in what Assmann calls a ‘monumental discourse’, where the dual references of writing, plus art and architecture, reflected the special relationship between the concepts of state and eternity (or immortality) in Egypt. The state was not only an institution to ensure peace, order, and justice; it also made immortality  – or at least survival beyond death  – possible. (Assmann 2011: 150)

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Textual societies do not do away with ritual and public spaces, however, but continue to revolve around spectacles – the Olympic games of the Greeks, the circuses of the Romans, the Christian processions of the Middle Ages, the public appearances of the Chinese emperor, the human sacrifices in Mesoamerica and so on (Debord [1967] 1983). We often use theatre metaphors when we think of and speak of these things (Goffman [1959] 1990, Cohen 1987), and with good reason:  ethnologist Dorothy Noyes (2014: 209) draws attention to how theatre was ‘the true public sphere of early modern Europe’. The theatre, a spectacle if there ever was one, may be seen as the further institutionalization of the public sphere, for contrary to ritual, it happened independently of (and often in opposition to) cultic religion, and contrary to the public sphere that was the medieval carnival, it happened perpetually. It was only during the European eighteenth century, in the context of the Enlightenment, and very late in the history of complex polities, that deliberation became an additional constitutive factor of the public sphere. Representation was there first, by a margin of many millennia. Given that public spheres have been with us since the dawn of complex polities, one might have expected the question of presentable performances to have been thoroughly studied by students of politics and diplomacy. And yet, the solid ten-thousand-year history of how the visual has been constitutive of the public sphere notwithstanding, the vast majority of literature on the politics of public spheres revolves around the newcomer of deliberation. Clifford Geertz (1980: 121; see also Roosen 1980) nicely sums up the impoverishing effects for political discourse at large: That master noun of modern political discourse, state, has at least three etymological themes diversely condensed within it:  status, in the sense of station, standing, rank, condition – estate (‘The glories of our blood and state’); pomp, in the sense of splendor, display, dignity, presence – stateliness (‘In pomp ride forth; for pomp becomes the great /​And Majesty derives a grace from state’); and governance, in the sense of regnancy, regime, dominion, mastery – statecraft (‘It may pass for a maxim in state that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many’). And it is characteristic of that discourse, and of its modernness, that the third of these meanings, the last to arise (in Italy in the 1540s; it was not even available to Machiavelli), should have so come to dominate the term as to obscure our understanding of the multiplex nature of high authority. Impressed with command, we see little else.

If spectacle, pomp and ritual are so central to politics and diplomacy – and I think they are – then we must ask how they came to be occluded. How can it be that while the constitutive role of the visual for politics is still constantly on display, the cuckoo scholars of deliberation have been able so violently to empty the public sphere nest of the first-laid visual eggs? The answer is well known from other analytical contexts, and was noted already in the previous chapter: since the Enlightenment, reason has done its best to occlude the study of other phenomena, such as aesthetic orders.2 The attack on the motor behind these orders, beauty, fell into two phases. First, and as noted in the previous chapter with reference to Edmund Burke, in the second half of the

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eighteenth century the category of beauty was bifurcated into sublimity and beauty, and sublimity seemingly made off with all the action: it was sinister where beauty was sunny, northern to beauty’s southern, etc., etc. (Neumann 2006). This move also had a gendered aspect, since sublimity was supposed to be male whereas beauty was female (Etcoff 1999, Scarry 1999, Neumann 2017). What we now refer to as beauty – basically, that which gives pleasure and satisfaction (as opposed to shock and awe, which now became something sublime)  – was left by the wayside as politically irrelevant. If we think along these lines, the spiteful visual strategy that I identified in the previous chapter, with its emphasis on shock and awe, is gendered male. The hegemonic Western strategy, with its emphasis on beauty, is gendered female. There is an added reason why visual and performative aspects of politics and diplomacy are less studied than the phenomenon’s antiquity would lead us to expect. It is to do with the powerful and successful ways in which totalitarian movements were able to aestheticize politics in the interwar period. The so-called Frankfurt School famously tried to debunk the visual as a legitimate political phenomenon worthy of scholarly attention. This tendency came to a head with Jürgen Habermas’s ([1962] 1989) studies of the public sphere. Habermas argued that ‘the better argument’ and ‘the ideal speech situation’ should be (should be, not is) the focus of politics in general, and of scholarly attention particularly. Anything that stood in the way of this ideal should be abolished, as a phenomenon, and certainly as a focus of scholarly study. Habermas’s move was also cleverly historicizing, for it turned on his definition of the public sphere as a specifically modern phenomenon. It was made possible by the coming of modernity and the specific idea that the relationship between the king and his subjects should allow for politically relevant conversations between the two.3 So, by a sleight of hand, everything that had constituted public spheres before the coming of modernity, such as the visual, was simply chopped off and left behind as irrelevant. Habermas and his precursors in the Frankfurt School had their reasons. There was, after all, an important political reason why scholars rallied around the battle-cry of deliberation. Working under the growing shadow of Nazi aestheticization, the first generation of the Frankfurt School had made it a concern to warn against the aestheticization of politics (the locus classicus is Benjamin [1936] 1968) and the various forces that made for what was rightly seen as inauthenticizing aesthetics (Adorno and Horkheimer [1944] 2002, Jay 1992, Wiggershaus 1994). The practices of fascist, and we may add communist, regimes from the Soviet Union in the north to Greece in the south demonstrated the prescience of these warnings. Habermas’s answer to the experience of fascist aestheticization was to wage a normative campaign against it, a campaign that included an insistence on banishing the study of how aesthetics is imbricated with any politics, be it fascist politics or otherwise. There are a number of reasons to join this political critique of aestheticization. Political rallies orchestrated by contemporary politicians who otherwise differ widely  – say, Erdogan, Morsi, le Pen, Putin and Trump – unquestionably draw on some of the same visual tropes as did interwar politicians. From an ontic point of view, however, Habermasians simply overlook that beauty is a total social fact of life and so is inherently relevant to political action and analysis. From a scholarly point of view, Habermas’s and Habermasian

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understandings of public spheres are therefore inadequate, for they simply deny the existence of visual phenomena that are in clear view not only in rallies organized by authoritarian politicians but in all politics (Jay 1994, Hansen 2011).4 Furthermore, the studies which actually do exist tend to focus on the aesthetics of material culture – that is, on things: architecture (Loeffler 1998), peace gardens (Callahan 2017), pieces of art (Butler and Bleiker 2018) and so on.5 We need a more power-sensitive and historically attuned understanding of the public sphere than that presented by Habermas and the Habermasians. For an alternative, let us turn to Hannah Arendt. Arendt sees the public sphere as a frail construction, fully dependent on the state’s willingness to uphold it, where there may be room for debate and creativity, but where participants are also subject to ‘innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to “normalize” its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement’ (Arendt 1957: 40). For social analysis, the main importance of the public sphere lies not in a celebration of deliberation but ‘in its potential as a mode of social integration’ (Calhoun 1992: 6). Studying the role of performativity in diplomacy is, therefore, not only a legitimate but also a long overdue task. One discipline that has specialized in studying performance is ethnology. Ethnologist Richard Bauman defines performance as: a mode of communicative display, in which the performer signals to the audience, in effect, ‘hey, look at me! I’m on! Watch how skillfully and effectively I express myself ’. That is to say, performance rests on an assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative virtuosity, highlighting the way in which the act of discursive production is accomplished, above and beyond the additional multiple functions the communicative act may serve. In this sense of performance, then, the act of expression itself is framed as display. (Bauman 2004: 9)

For our purposes, this focus on the individual performance is useful, but note that Bauman follows the Frankfurt School in occluding the visual aspects of political performance by focusing on the deliberative aspects. The individual performance is also a visual affair (‘look at me’). The agents will also use what they have in this regard. To repeat a point, a successful performance will involve high body capital (a presentable body that is ‘clean, smart, or decent enough to be seen in public’), the right body props (the right clothes, the right accoutrements) and also the right habitus. To have the right body for the job is of the essence. Already the ancient Greeks held that human beauty beat material beauty hands down. No ancient Greek, god or human, not even the master smith Haephestus himself, would have dreamed of challenging the living beauty of Aphrodite (Konstan 2014). As this example demonstrates, bodily capital is a highly gendered affair. The rub where diplomacy is concerned is that the general cultural distance between polities engaged in it will usually also spell aesthetic cultural distance. As already noted in the previous chapter, Gary Shapiro sums up three decades of continental philosophical debate on the matter in his observation that

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As experienced by diplomats who plan a performance, this will mean that they have to dress and act in a way that is seen as presentable by both their sending and their hosting states. The success of any one performance, then, will hang on three commonsensical factors. The first factor is the body capital, the adornment and the work that goes into making a diplomat presentable. This is the presentability factor. The second factor is the degree to which the performance will be distributed to and received by audiences that are not physically present. This is the media factor. The third factor is the degree to which the various audiences involved will find the performer and the performance to be presentable. This is the audience factor.

Performing the smart and clean diplomat

We have already discussed a successful case of visual performance in the previous chapter, namely Caroline Kennedy’s arrival at the court of the Japanese emperor for her accreditation as US ambassador (see Figure  4.1 and discussion in Chapter  4, pp. 60–61). There have been important technological changes in what ‘public’ means. In addition to in-the-flesh encounters, historical extras like printed media, television and the world wide web keep appearing and making for public spheres that exceed face-to-face encounters. Still, mutatis mutandis, the scene that played out in Tokyo on 19 November 2013 was an instantiation of a practice that had constituted international and transnational public spheres for millennia, where visiting ambassadors show off the splendour of the polity they represent, and hosting rulers show off to an audience of presumably impressed subjects about how other rulers come and pay them respect. As noted in the previous chapter, there are clear political and aesthetic reasons why a Japanese public so easily finds pleasure in the props of Western diplomatic performances, and they antedate the American occupation following the Second World War. That goes some way towards explaining why, of all the hundreds of accreditations that involve Western ambassadors to non-Western states, an accreditation of a Western ambassador to Tokyo should cause such a stir. However, earlier American ambassadors to Tokyo did not do so, so why should Caroline Kennedy? While it is true that the rising tensions in the Chinese–Japanese relationship made the US ambassador an even more important person in Tokyo compared with recent years, this hardly translates directly into such commotion. I would argue that the answer is rather to do with how this typically Western gendered diplomatic performance interacted with other forms of power. Consider Caroline Kennedy’s family history. Back in the sender country, the New York Post, a tabloid, covered the event under the headline ‘CAMELOT LIVES: 50 Years after JFK, Caroline Represents US in a Gilded Carriage’. The picture it used (not

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reproduced here), was a Photoshopped one, with the original taken from the same series as the picture reproduced as Figure  4.1 and showing Kennedy with a slightly equine smile, in a more informal pose.6 This performance was deemed by the New York Post to be more suited to a domestic US audience. Caroline Kennedy drew the crowds in a way that was quite standard during the European Renaissance but is now quite unusual, among other things because her family background gave her an aura – that is, a unique manifestation of distance, no matter how far away the phenomenon is (Shiff 2003). Kennedy may be a state diplomat, but she is also a celebrity, at least by association: state diplomacy and celebrity diplomacy meet in her performance (Cooper 2007, Busby 2007). In this case, the aura is partly that of her father JFK and of Camelot, which are explicitly referenced in the caption, but it is also that of her mother the fashion icon. Not surprisingly, Caroline Kennedy dresses in the style that is known as ‘Jackie O’, short for Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: that is, in the style of her mother.7 Caroline Kennedy’s aura, then, is not only to do with her father and her own body. It also emanates from maternal inheritance. Caroline Kennedy puts ostensibly highly culturally specific objects – the Jackie O necklace, the Jackie O dress, the Jackie O je ne sais quoi – to such good use that the performance succeeded in invoking not only a political dynasty but an entire era, and not only for the US polity but also for the Japanese Other and, arguably, globally. To sum up, Caroline Kennedy’s score was very high on all three of the success criteria that I  identified at the outset of the chapter. The presentability factor was high: with her high body capital, her iconic sartorial style and her measured habitus, she looked exceedingly smart. The media factor was high:  national TV covered her journey, and a pool of photographers documented her arrival and went on to disseminate their photos globally. The audience factor was high:  multiple audiences picked up on the event, not least because of the Kennedy family aura with which it was suffused. Still, there were discontents. The afterglow included some debate about the gendered aspects of the performance, with some Japanese arguing that wearing a shoulder bag and such a short skirt was shitsurei – impolite bordering on rude. The only discontented audience in view, then, was a small group that did not find the presentation quite decent enough to be presentable. However, in societies where the state allows the public sphere to include debate, such differences of opinion are inevitable and, if the point is social integration beyond what may be reached by shock and awe, necessary. More to the point here, this conversation is constitutive of the public sphere in Japan, just as this instantiation of an ambassador’s accreditation was constitutive of a transnational public sphere. The discontent simply goes to show that even the most successful performance will inevitably be contested.

Performing the decent diplomat A year after Kennedy’s accreditation, the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran prepared for his accreditation ceremony for four new ambassadors, from Belgium, Italy, Norway and Turkey, one of whom was a woman. Iran has no specific sartorial rules for

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the occasion, but it is the only state in the world to legalize attire on a general basis. In Iran, it is the law that people have to be presentable, in the sense of being decent. More specifically, there are clear rules about what parts of the body have to be covered. These rules are formally implemented by a uniformed state morality police force and also, as we shall see, informally, by people in positions of power. In Iran, the accreditation of ambassadors is regularly covered by the media, and so it is a well-rehearsed genre. However, this was only the second time in the republic’s history that a female diplomat had received agrément, which means that she had been cleared to arrive in the country and to present her credentials to the head of state, so the occasion was a little out of the ordinary. There was little glamour, though. The president’s cars picked up the four ambassadors. An attaché from the Iranian Foreign Ministry accompanied them to the palace, where the ceremony was rehearsed. The press was there to take their photos, but there was no international photo pool, no TV crews. Figure 5.1 reproduces the official photo that was put on the Iranian president’s website. Nobody expected that this would go on to be the Iranian news day’s major media event. Against a background of upholstered chairs and a large Persian carpet, an avuncular-looking Imam is smiling down benignly at a discreetly smiling ambassador who is clutching her credentials to her chest. She is dressed in what the culturally initiated will recognize as a Norwegian national dress (bunad) specific to the county of Hedmark. Like all Norwegian national attire, it was invented at the end of the nineteenth century as a sartorial contribution to nation-building. This national attire covers the entire body. Since it is intended for all-year use in a cold climate, it is made of a sturdy material that also has the effect of smoothing out body curves. The result is that the female body loses most of its litheness and specificity relative to the male body, and that the individual female body is de-individualized by becoming one in a series of nationalized bodies. In Panofsky’s terms, a first-level object, the body, is partially smothered by a third-level object, the national attire, so that what is denoted is the nation first, the person second. However, to the culturally initiated Norwegian spectator, something is off in Figure 5.1. While a number of national attires come with headgear, the Hedmark attire does not. As per Iranian law, Norheim has added a local third-level object, a matching hijab, to the attire. The effect of this performance on the Iranian news desks and, judged by anecdotal evidence, also on the Iranian public, was highly favourable. As Norheim herself reports: Iranian media always cover accreditations, but this was exceptional. I was everywhere. The Iranians were enthusiastic because they liked the attire and also because I was so covered. […] I do not care too much for the Norwegian folk costume (bunad), but I own one and thought that it would do the job perfectly. I just needed to buy a hijab to match.8

Given that this sartorial choice was considered to be both novel and decent and so highly presentable in the receiving state, it was a lucky choice. It was also successful in the sense that Norheim stole the show from her three colleagues who were accredited at the same time, whom she reported to have been ‘humorously miffed’. The rest of

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Figure  5.1  Norwegian ambassador to Tehran Aud Lise Norheim hands over her credentials to the President of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, 28 October 2014 Note: Reproduced from the home page of the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, http://​president.ir/​fa/​82083, retrieved 28 January 2019.

the Tehran corps diplomatique also approved, as did Norheim’s Norwegian diplomatic colleagues. Furthermore, Norwegian journalists picked up and ran the story. Their angle was overwhelmingly the typical small-state one: that a larger country had noticed the smaller country.9 Figure  5.2 reproduces the collage from the story that went on to become the source for most subsequent non-Iranian press coverage. With regard to Figure  5.2, note that all three Iranian newspapers use the same picture. It is from the same series as the picture reproduced as Figure  5.1, but the protagonists are standing closer together and are leaning in rather than back. They are also tied together by the document they are both holding, and their poses and smiles are less contrived and more mirroring. This all makes for a more relaxed atmosphere than the one that emanates from Figure 5.1. Norheim herself singled out the relaxed picture and the Norwegian internet article with the collage of Iranian newspapers using it as being pivotal to the Norwegian reception of her performance: My favourite was the journalist from N[orwegian] B[roadcasting C[orporation], who called me a poster girl (forsidepike). Not bad for a 60-year-old (laughs). He told me later that he had taken a lot of flak from [Norwegian] feminists who objected on principle to women being talked about that way. The [Norwegian] embassy [to Tehran] also received a fair

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Figure 5.2  Collage of Iranian Print Media coverage of Aud Lise Norheim’s accreditation

Note: Reproduced from the home page of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, www.nrk.no/​ urix/​norsk-bunad-skapte-kommentar-storm-i-iran-1.12019782, retrieved 28 January 2019. For an  English-language report, see, for example, https://​thornews.com/​2014/​11/​05/​iranianmedia-praise-female-​ambassadors-​proper-folk-costume/​, retrieved 28 January 2019.

share of mail, so much so that we had to react. One group, mostly Iranians in exile, accused me of being the regime’s stooge. The other negatives were [Norwegian] women who policed the use of the national costume (bunadspolitiet). They saw the hijab as being out of place.

Norheim points to three groups of discontents here. Two of them – critics who saw the performance as pandering to an authoritarian regime and as diluting the pureness of the nation  – objected to the performance itself, while a third group  – those that Norheim calls ‘feminists’ – objected to an aspect of the Norwegian reception of the performance.10 However, there was also a fourth discontent, hidden from the public eye. Despite having pulled off a surprisingly successful performance, and despite being content and even happy about its reception, the performer herself was not altogether happy. Interestingly, the reason for the unhappiness was the same reason that grounded the performance’s success, namely its decency in an Iranian setting. Norheim reflected about her presentability in an Iranian setting that: I had to wear thigh-long dresses in public at all times [that is, outside embassies or residences …]. The hijab was the worst. I have tried to avoid using headwear ever since. It interfered with my side view, particularly when I was driving. It was hot. Nordic hair tends to be too slippery to sustain it, so it was forever coming

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apart. My Iranian female friends tipped me off about fastening the hijab with hairpins, but I  said no, I  wanted these men to know that it was a hassle. The [Iranian] men always wanted reassurances from me that I was treated well, and I always answered, well, why don’t we swap places for a day and then you can wear the hijab. That shut them up.

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As a diplomat, Norheim did her best to be presentable in the eyes of as many audiences as possible, and she generally succeeded – in the case under discussion here even spectacularly so – but her own experience of it all was that the emotional work that it took to pull it off was overwhelming. She was certainly presentable, and, as a diplomat and trained performer, she managed to be so even without being physically at ease. Two side remarks made during the interview further underlined this point. First, Norheim directed a dig at her colleague the Swedish ambassador, by telling me how he made a big spiel out of defending his local employees’ right to wear ties when they came under pressure from the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to take them off (recall that, in an Iranian context, the word for tie is focoli, which may also mean a decadent, Westernized Iranian). And then she added:  ‘I told him I’d be impressed the day he stood up for me getting rid of my hijab’. Secondly, she also remarked on how, following an official meeting with an allegedly liberal leader, the same leader had instructed his secretary to call Norheim’s female Iranian secretary so that she could tell Norheim that she had not been adequately covered during their meeting. What we see here is that, in Iran, the formal policing of sartorial laws is further strengthened by informal policing by political leaders, and that this policing includes female diplomats. Informal policing of the decency of feminine attire has a very long history in Iran. The policing of the female body was a major concern during the 1979 revolution that brought the present regime to power. If there were solid historical reasons why Japanese audiences were particularly amenable to a typical Western performance like Kennedy’s, the historical reasons why a performance of Western nineteenth-century nation-building decency was successful in Iran are equally well founded. To sum up, Aud Lise Norheim’s score was high on all three success criteria. The national dress and the concept of add-hijab-and-stir was an instant hit in the receiving state. The national dress bracketed the Western hegemonic version of visual diplomacy, which, given that the incoming ambassador was a woman, would have centred on a dress that showed more skin. There was not only an acquiescence to local costume, which demanded that female hair be covered, but an active use of a tertiary cultural object – a locally acquired hijab – which made for a dash of hybridization. Audiences in the sending state were happy because audiences in the receiving state were happy. Norheim came across as unusually decent for a Western woman, and this made for a high score on presentability. The media factor was high: front-page coverage in the receiving state, good uptake in the sending state. The audience score was high, with a number of favourable groups, although there were also three vocal groups that contested the performance. Iranian exiles and Norwegian nationalist purists contested its hybridity, while Norwegian feminists contested its reception in Norway.

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Conclusion

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Given that beauty, understood as the social validation of a high score according to some aesthetical standard, is a total social fact, it comes as no surprise to find that presentability is a trans-historical phenomenon. A  good body, decked out with the proper props, whatever a specific historical period and place may hold those to be, is an asset. So is the ability to have your image reproduced and talked about, preferably to the point where you develop an aura that works on others. Auras are built in direct meetings, and also in public spheres. The larger the aura, the better the chances that the diplomat will get the access, get the attention and make the impression that will further whatever diplomatic task is at hand. In evolutionary terms, there has been infinite variety regarding specific standards of presentability. Since the early nineteenth century, however, there have largely been two variants in play. These are the national dress and what, inaccurately, but accurately enough for our purposes, we may call more or less formal Western wear. It could be argued that, since the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955 or, more broadly, since de-colonization, this has been a division between the West and the rest. This would be erroneous. As a state-wide phenomenon, the invention of national dress hails from nineteenth-century Europe. The use of national dress at state occasions was spearheaded by Western states. For example, national dress was accepted as correct attire at receptions at the Norwegian Royal Castle already in 1932. As demonstrated above, national dress is still in use among Western diplomats. In an evolutionary perspective, it is simply not the case that national dress as such denotes a specific part of the world. Of course, any one unit in the series of national dresses will by definition denote a specific state, and that state will have a specific territory in a certain region, but that does not mean that the series of national dresses as such will have specific abodes. In Panofsky’s terms, the national dress as such has become a secondary object, readily recognizable globally, while any one specific national dress would be a tertiary object. When different aesthetic standards are at play, which is always the case in diplomacy, grabbing attention by dint of the most basic and hence most broadly appealing means possible is at a premium. The basic way of doing this is to play on what Panofsky calls primary objects. The body is a primary object while the national dress is a secondary object, so, other things being equal, the body is more presentable than a national dress. The body is gendered, so gender is important to presentability. The same goes for props. Indeed, if that key prop of presentability, clothes, has only three functions – physiological comfort, status marking and gender marking – then, in settings where the physiological needs of two parties are compatible and where they have established a certain status compatibility, which is usually the case in present-day diplomacy, gender is the only sartorial factor of any interest to the student of diplomacy. I  presented a case of clear-cut evolutionary out-selection of male diplomatic attire above, as Japanese diplomats journeying to a Western country for the first time in 1905 were hung out to dry for their use of court kimonos and responded by adopting Western attire. In an evolutionary perspective, the striking thing about diplomatic presentability, and particularly about its sartorial aspect, is the very high degree of stability on display.

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In this perspective, it is not a coincidence that the two exemplary cases of diplomatic presentability discussed here are both carried off by female performers. While women have always been present where diplomacy has been played out, they are relative newcomers as professional diplomats (Hochschild 1969, McCarthy 2014, Cassidy 2017, Aggestam and Towns 2019). Like women in general, female diplomats are held to higher visual standards than are male diplomats. Broader and at the same time more discerning visual standards for female than for male diplomats open a wider room for visual performance, but with greater choice comes a burden of unease that may constrain successful performances. Even so, the variation on display in female diplomatic performativity is very small. Consider the apples of discord identified above: knee-length versus ankle-length dress, shoulder bag versus clutch, head covering versus no head covering. Aesthetically and also politically, such shibboleths may be of key importance and may even get you killed. In an evolutionary perspective, however, we are talking about a situation of very high stability  – so high that we must conclude that performativity has come to be an important stabilizer of global diplomacy. Only a century ago, standards were so different that we saw selection, as non-European variants were cut out from diplomatic usage. Today, aesthetic standards have become so stable that they allow for global and in-depth attention to and discussions of their detail.

Notes

1 https://​en.oxforddictionaries.com/​definition/​presentable. Note also the synonyms at https://​en.oxforddictionaries.com/​thesaurus/​presentable: ‘smartly dressed, tidily dressed, smart, tidy, of smart appearance, well groomed, dapper, elegant, trim, spruce. Informal: natty’ (both retrieved 1 July 2020). 2 We may follow Bourriad ([1998] 2002: 113) and talk of relational aesthetics, defined as ‘a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context’ – that is, practices which hybridise different cultural elements. The inspiration for the term was the existence of and practices on the internet, but there seems to be no reason why we should not generalize the term and see it as an attempt at addressing transnational publics. For example, during state visits, female state leaders or first ladies will sometimes index the hosting state, for example by wearing clothes in its style, and hosting states do the same, for example by serving food which indexes the cuisine of the visiting state. I thank César Villanuova Riva for introducing me to Bourriad. 3 As Mah (2000: 166) points out, this argument hangs on Habermas’s insistence that earlier publics cannot be public spheres because people met there not on an equal footing but as socially ranked individuals, with the result that the meeting ground could not construct itself ‘as a unified entity’. 4 I would agree with Villa (1992: 716), who finds that the general approach ‘conceals the disciplinary underside of “acting together” and covers over the antiagonistic, antiinitiatory implications that flow from the regularization of moves in any language game’.

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5 The perhaps most conspicuous use of art in diplomacy concerns so-called signature buildings. MFAs are frequently shorthanded by their locations – ‘Ballhausplatz’ for the Austro-Hungarian MFA, ‘Itamarati’ for the Brazilian, ‘Kasumigaseki’ for the Japanese, ‘Quai d’Orsay’ for the French – and the addresses are shorthand for the building itself. The buildings tend to be monumental. By the same token, permanent embassies are often works of art, designed by architects with a view to capturing the face of the country being represented (the Nordic embassy complex in Berlin comes to mind), hybridization between the country represented and the host nation (the American embassy in New Delhi would be an example of this) or avant-gardism in world architecture (French embassies tend to be particularly elegant). Since the nations represented are often not satisfied with letting the buildings in question speak, they often raise their bragging to the second level by publishing richly illustrated brochures or even entire books about their embassy buildings. These publications mean that there exists a rich empirical literature about diplomatic buildings. There is, however, little of any scholarly value. The key work is a broad overview of American diplomatic architecture (Loeffler 1998). The American ‘fortress model’, which is a radical break with aesthetics and a turn towards a hedgehog model of security, aims to churn out embassies in three ready-made module sizes to be assembled on site. During the Cold War, a self-assured United States aimed to be a towering presence in the middle of the world’s capitals. Now, American diplomats cower in some suburb, inside heavily guarded and fenced-off compounds. Loeffler (2012) has also written about how diplomats have tried to stand up to this development, so far with little success. Meanwhile, the rest of the world continues to build embassies that fall within a variable but fairly limited aesthetic range. 6 See www.google.com/​search?site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1280&bih=932& q=caroline+kennedy+tokyo+credentials&oq=caroline+kennedy+tokyo+credentia ls&gs_​l=img.3…2047.9694.0.9993.34.34.0.0.0.0.227.2970.26j6j1.33.0…0…1.1.64. img..1.18.1727.OPeDKBhIkns#imgrc=6ne5EdiCPYS3YM%3A, retrieved 29 February 2016. Note that Kennedy preferred to post the more serene picture reproduced as Figure 4.1 on her Twitter account; https://​twitter.com/​ambckennedy/​status/​ 402725371595849729. I should like to thank Constance Duncombe for pointing this out to me. 7 To be distinguished from the derivative and hyphenated Jackie-O, the American radio host. During the swearing in as ambassador back in Washington, the Jackie O style was also on display; see http://​politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/​2013/​11/​12/​ caroline-kennedy-sworn-in-as-ambassador-to-japan/​, retrieved 1 March 2016. For examples of the style, see www.huffingtonpost.com/​2013/​07/​28/​style-lessons-fro m-jackie-kennedy_​n_​3660541.html, retrieved 1 March 2016. 8 Interview with Aud Lise Norheim, Norwegian ambassador to Tehran 2014–2016, 30 January 2019, Grand Cafe, Oslo, Norway. All subsequent Norheim quotes are taken from this interview. 9 I thank Paul Sharp for conversations about this point. 10 The emails that the embassy received have allegedly been deleted, and so are not available. Norheim reports some of them to have been threatening – so much so that her staff had avoided showing them to her.

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Diplomatic subjunctive: the case of Harry Potter’s realms

The English language has three tenses in the realis mood. The previous chapters have been devoted to two of them, past and present, and the following and final chapter will look at the third, the future. However, in addition to the realis mood, there is also the irrealis mood, which charts what might have been, might exist elsewhere, might come – that is, what is not (yet) real. This matters to our understanding of diplomacy, for most people will only experience diplomacy second hand, be that through news media (a realis genre) or through sundry irrealis genres such as films, TV shows, cartoons, paintings and novels. This means that we are not done studying the universe of diplomatic variation when we have exhausted contemporary and historical variation, for there is yet another place to look, namely at imagined worlds. Where there are different imagined polities that attempt communication, there is diplomacy. These representations of diplomacy matter to social life, for imagination and reality mesh inasmuch as imagined worlds and phenomena such as diplomacy legitimize, delegitimize and naturalize certain actually existing variants of diplomacy, at the cost of others (Neumann and Nexon 2006). Consider the irrealis genre of myth. Myth lends a specific initial grammar to contact with strangers. Myths are good to think. In his genealogy of diplomacy, Der Derian (1987; see also Chapter 2 above) stressed that the first diplomacy is mythical and turns on mediation between humans and gods. We have examples of this from the historical record: Columbus noted that the New World had to be paradise, thus echoing a Christian myth. The Spaniards were represented as gods by the Aztecs, as was Captain Cook by the Hawaiians. For a stranger, to be represented as a god rather than as a devil has clear advantages. There is a reason why diplomats, and all other professions for that matter, care about how they and their profession are portrayed (Abbott 1988). There is an evolutionary aspect to these representations of diplomacy, for  – just as do variants of diplomacy themselves – they vie with one another for hegemony. Against the representation of the diplomat as peacemaker stands the representation of the diplomat as warmonger, against the diplomat as a professional stands the diplomat as a twit, and so on. There is

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a reason why so many foreign ministries spend so much money on image, for the more positively diplomacy in general, and also the polity that a certain diplomat represents, is represented, the easier it is for diplomats to do their job.

Imagined diplomacy

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The genre of high culture where diplomats seem to be most present is literature, with the European novel standing out as the most crowded literary genre (Shapiro 1989). It is my impression (no more than that, since there is little research on the matter; Neumann 2016) that historically, English, German, French, Russian and Scandinavian literatures seem to treat the diplomat as a vain, over-sexed dipsomaniac. Paradigmatic examples include Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur (1968) and William Boyd’s A Good Man in Africa (1981). We need research that may confirm or disconfirm this hunch, as well as disclosing other representations and regional variation around the world. An exemplar in this regard would be the work that has been done on early modern Europe (Hampton 2009). Painting is yet another genre where representations of diplomats, and to some degree diplomacy, are rife (Constantinou 1994, Watkins 2008, Charry and Shahani 2009, Netzloff 2011). Luke (2002) and Sylvester (2009) have done groundbreaking work on international relations on display in museums; scholars of diplomacy should follow suit. While high culture is important, I  would argue that where the present world is concerned, three irrealis genres stand out when it comes to representing diplomacy. All three are ostensibly non-mimetic, and they are all, probably to some degree for that very reason, traditionally categorized as popular. These are games, science fiction and fantasy. Despite the fact that the turnover of the gaming industry has been larger than that of the film industry for years, the ways in which this entertainment industry represent diplomacy have not yet been studied (but see Bogost 2007, 2011). Science fiction fastens on the question of what it is to be human. One of the major ways of exploring the issue is by juxtaposing the human species with other animals on the one hand, and with cybernetic beings on the other. Another is to have humans interact with other self-aware (or, in the lingo, sentient) but extra-terrestrial species. We have some work on this (Weldes 2003, Kiersey and Neumann 2013). And then there is the genre of fantasy, which fastens on the question of fantastic beings, often in interaction with humans. In this chapter, I will explore imagined diplomacy in one fantasy universe, namely the one created by J.K. Rowling. In the Harry Potter universe (novels 1997–2007, films 2001–) there is plenty of diplomacy, but the best-developed sequence is the diplomatic mission of Hagrid, a half-giant half-wizard who is sent by his boss, the wizard Albus Dumbledore, to forge an alliance between the two species from which he hails. There are a couple of reasons that go beyond the opportunities offered by the genre of fantasy why I have fastened on the particular cultural artefact of Harry Potter. One is its popularity: at last count, the books alone have sold more than half a billion copies around the world, making it easily the bestselling fantasy book series ever. The film series is the most watched in the history of the medium, regardless of genre. Another reason is to do

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with substance. Diplomacy in Harry Potter is represented very differently from how it is represented in scholarly literature, and yet it seems to be recognized by audiences as intuitively understandable. If one consults the scholarly literature on realis diplomacy as it was discussed in the first two chapters of this book, it almost universally follows Hegel in thinking about interactions with the Other in terms of events where right stands against right. If we look at more folksy representation of diplomacy, however, an older representation – that war and diplomacy concern events where good stands against evil – seems to hold sway. In evolution-speak, the variation between the two representations has been stabilized within the scholarly literature, but not in non-scholarly representations, where the variation is still tangible. One reason for this, I would like to suggest, is that irrealis representations of diplomacy and politics like that in Harry Potter, where good indeed stands against evil, have enduring effects on the social reality in which we live. Irrealis genres and representations of diplomacy seems to counteract scholarly work and guarantee continued variation in how diplomacy emerges as a social fact overall. I begin the discussion of diplomacy in Harry Potter by demonstrating how space in this imagined world is divided into realms, by which I  mean dimensions between which only those with privileged access may slip. This is a way of imagining space that is well-known from religious discourse. For example, in the Old Norse religion, which is a stable influence on the genre of fantasy overall and on Harry Potter specifically, there is a realm of the gods (Ásgárd), a realm of humans (Midgárd) and a realm of giants (Utgárd). This is a sacred geography, where what happens in certain realms is held to be of more importance than what happens in others. The argument is that the sacred geography in Harry Potter is of a special kind, again quite representative of the entire genre of fantasy, in that it is formatted as an eternal fight between good and evil. Those who are able to move between realms will have a power advantage in such a world, because they may bring more resources to bear on a struggle in any one realm. I then turn to the question of power and argue that Dumbledore and Harry embody two different principles of power. There is also a third, and perhaps more unlikely, wielder of power in this universe, however, and that is Hagrid, the seemingly unlikely diplomat. I now turn to the realms between which Hagrid mediates. In order to demonstrate how the imagined world of Harry Potter is intertwined with our own, I then draw up Hagrid’s family tree or genealogy in European history, and demonstrate how figures such as Hagrid were actually pivotal to early state-building. In conclusion, I draw on these discussions to substantiate the claim that we have in much imagined diplomacy a representation of diplomacy as a fight between good and evil which has been selected out from scholarly literature and seemingly largely from real-world diplomacy, but which remains in play among other reasons exactly because it is so very much present in imagined worlds.

The intertwined realms of the Harry Potter universe All three realms of the Harry Potter universe, those of muggles, magic folks and giants, are what we may call geographically marked. Hagrid, who is the front man for the realm of giants, has a special rapport with monsters, to the extent that we may see the

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realm inhabited by giants and monsters as one realm. Hagrid is also marked in terms of geographical directions. Hagrid is of the North and East. Interestingly, in European history, at least up until the nineteenth century, the North was held to be a chaos to the South’s cosmos. A key idea was that the North harboured more originary human and non-human life forms. From the nineteenth century onward, the East becomes increasingly marked as a political danger. We recognize this in the geographical formatting of the realm of magic folks as well, where the arch-villain Voldemort is marked as Eastern. The wizarding school of the east, Durmstrang, has a greater emphasis on the dark wizarding arts than does the wizarding school of the west, Hogwarts; Voldemort and his followers are portrayed as having spent time in the east, etc. (Wolff 2003). In international relations, a number of scholars have drawn on the work of Edward Said and others in order to demonstrate how this has unfolded historically, and what repercussions this way of dividing the world has had on politics (Neumann 1999). In the world of Harry Potter, these representations of geographical dimensions are still very much present, and the West/​East divide corresponds with a good/​evil divide. The issues involved appear already in a riling question of fandom debate – that of where to find Hogwarts. We know that magic places like Diagon Alley and St Mungo’s Hospital are in London, and we know that when the Hogwarts Express leaves London on 1 September each year it aims ‘due north’ out of London, ‘winding its way past a snow-capped mountain’ (CS:  57–58).1 We also know that Hogwarts is in Britain, since Hogsmeade, the local village, is said to be the only wizarding village in Britain. In the Britain we know, however, one is hard put to find snow-capped mountains in September. So what kind of symbolic geography may provide for such a situation? An immediate clue is available in the form of the barriers that magic folks are able to place around Hogwarts and other places of their choice (such as the noted London locations, or the field picked for the Quidditch World Cup). Special attention must therefore be paid to the fact that it is only in wizarding parlance that Hogsmeade is supposed to be in Britain. We do not actually know whether Hogsmeade and Hogwarts are located in our Britain. There is an undecidability as to whether our Britain and the entity referred to by wizards as Britain are contiguous. We are talking about different realms here. The symbolic geography of Harry Potter’s world features different dimensions that exist side by side. Beings with the special knowledge required may move freely (or not so freely) between the realms. We know about this kind of symbolic geography from numerous other life-worlds, many if not most of which share a family resemblance in being thought of in terms of the sacred and the profane. Harry’s world, however, is not simply a two-dimensional world, consisting of a mundane (or muggle) realm and a magical realm. There exist other realms as well. An immediate clue that presents itself here is the existence of a Forbidden Forest just to the east of Hogwarts. This forest, which younger students are told is out of bounds, is home to a number of magical beings that have intricate relations with the magical world. These beings include monsters such as giant spiders, unicorns, thestrals and dragons. There are also centaurs. We know, furthermore, that the Forbidden Forest is not alone in harbouring such beings; the lake outside Hogwarts features merpeople, trolls and mountain trolls roam in unspecified abodes, and in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling

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2003), we are introduced to a giant population that lives in mountains somewhere to the east of Britain. We are also told that giants once lived in Britain itself. What ties the realms of Harry Potter’s world together is the cosmic fight between good and evil. It is immediately clear that the principles of good and evil are inherent to this world. Evil cannot be eradicated. Evil’s immanent character in the world is underlined in a number of places, as is the fact that evil is ceaselessly out to ensnare. Indeed, the fight between good and evil is at the heart of this world’s politics. Other potentially integrative factors, such as gender, family and species ties, clearly take a back seat to the clash between good and evil. Indeed, this clash dominates not only group conflicts but also the political and moral life of each specific being. Every being at least potentially has to choose between the forces of good and the forces of evil. This is a view of politics that has a history. For example, the idea that the life-world may be reduced to only two struggling groups has firm roots in Judeo-Christian tradition, in which two groupings are particularly apposite to an analysis of Potter politics. These are the Hebrews of the second temple and the Manicheans. A quick look at these two groupings should suffice here. Among the ancient Hebrews, Ezra and other leaders of the second temple stand out as particularly fundamentalist in their approach to other groups. They wanted to establish a clear-cut boundary between themselves – the Jewish elite which had suffered Babylonian captivity – on the one hand, and everybody else, including Jews who had stayed behind, on the other. This boundary they wanted to be not only social but physical, in the sense that the impure should be physically removed from the sacred land of Israel. The way to achieve this was war, and in this war there were no restraints whatsoever on the use of force (Harle 2000: 29). However, this war was seen as a war between Israel and its enemies, not between a principle of good and a principle of evil. The reason why this framing of the political takes on historical importance lies in its insistence that there exists a clear-cut boundary between us and them, between the pure and the impure. The idea that there is a cosmic dimension to the battle between the pure and the impure crops up with the Zoroastrian sect of the Manicheans, named after their leader Mani. In the early centuries of the first millennium, Manichean thinking strongly influenced early Christians. As Norman Cohn (1993: 226) puts it, All in all, it would seem that amongst the fringe groups in Judaism the Jesus sect was the one that was most exposed to Zoroastrian influence. There is nothing mysterious about that. The Iranian culture is now known to have been long and firmly established in areas into which early Christians moved.

As Cohn sees it, this exposure was a fateful one, inasmuch as it has informed the Christian tradition. The key figure here is Augustine, who was closely associated with the Manicheans, to the extent of probably having been one for nine years before becoming a Christian. His Confessions is actually our main source on Manicheanism (Chydenius 1985). Augustine is also the man who breaks with the pacifism of the early church, arguing that it is not a sin to kill and commit other acts of violence as long as you do not hate your enemy in your heart. What used to be an ethical ban on actions

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in the physical world was transformed by Augustine and became a question of the soul, a matter between the killer and his god rather than between the killer, his victim and other humans. This can only make sense if four criteria are fulfilled. First, there exists an eternal struggle for and between souls – a cosmic battle between good and evil. Secondly, there is a link between this battle of souls and the battles of men, so that the latter play themselves out as parts of the former. This is to say that the principles of good and evil must be incarnate – that is, present in our world either directly (God through his son Jesus; the devil) or indirectly (in human agency). Thirdly, some agency, in this case Augustine himself, must hold a recognized position from which to decide which humans represent good and which evil. Fourthly, this knowledge must be acted upon; somebody must legitimately raise their sword in order to complement by forceful means the spiritual fight for the good. Harry’s world is a world where all four of these criteria are fulfilled, and they seem to apply in all three realms. Perhaps they apply to an even greater degree than is realized at first. From a biographical sketch of Dumbledore (taken from the back of a Chocolate Frog card), we learn that he is ‘particularly famous for his defeat of the dark wizard Grindelwald in 1945’ (PS:  77), a hint that he has defeated dark wizards before, in an intriguing year, including one whose name is not only Teutonic-sounding (indeed, there exists an eponymous village in the German-speaking Berne canton of Switzerland) but also reminiscent of the monster Grendel from the best-known Old English text we have, Beowulf.2 A reading that seems to be invited is that the Second World War may be part of a cosmic battle that also enveloped the wizarding world. Given that the magic realm possesses privileged knowledge and a number of resources that do not exist in other realms, there is a hint here that what happens in the magic realm is more important than what happens in other realms. This hint is strongly reinforced by the opening of book six, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which centres on how, in Britain at least, the Minister of Magic duplicates, rounds out and even supervises the work of the prime minister in 10 Downing Street. It follows that muggle historical knowledge seems to be lacking in depth. We are also invited to think of politics as derivative of the fight between good and evil. Such a politics must centre on a) how to separate good from evil: the institution/​being which carries out this task will be the linchpin of politics; b) how to rally allies to the side of good, and how to keep them; c) when and how to strike out against evil. I ponder these questions in turn, and I do it from the point of view of wizards, who are the leading species among magic folks and so in a privileged position to form and lead alliances. The alliances that wizards make are fluid. Muggles have periodically persecuted wizards and are not particularly interesting allies. Inside the realm of magic folks, goblins, who run the bank Gringotts, are a key financial asset, but we know that they have rebelled against wizards in the past. House elves are the subalterns of the wizarding world, and so are not particularly well suited either. We do not know much about other species such as dwarves, except that they are introduced as being ‘raucous’ (PA: 57), that they deliver

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messages that cannot be sent by owl post and that at least one of their number occasionally drops his aitches (CS: 177). One species that has real potential as allies, however, is the centaurs, but they suffer serious internal fissures over these issues. The division of centaurs mirrors the deeper undecidedness about whether, and perhaps to what degree, centaurs belong to the realm of magic folks or the realm of giants. It is fitting in this regard that Hagrid is the messenger between magic folks and centaurs, since he is the key channel between magic folks and most of the species that populate the realm of giants and monsters. Indeed, giants themselves are problematic allies. They have been known to ally with evil, both during Voldemort’s first appearance and seemingly again upon his return (HBP: 18), but this seems to be the result of bad wizarding diplomacy rather than of any immanent quality. Sundry non-human species such as veelas (GF: 116), leprechauns (GF: 118), giant spiders (CS: ­chapter 15) and merpeople are potential flanking allies. The dementors, on the other hand, are said to be the ‘natural allies’ of the evil Voldemort, and sure enough, in book six, they float to his side. The mountain trolls also seem to have a proclivity for the dark side, as do snakes, but most other monsters seem to have no particular leanings one way or the other. To sum up so far, even in a Manichean world like Harry Potter’s, politics creates strange bedfellows, and beggars cannot be choosers. As summed up by a bureaucrat wizard, ‘you sometimes have to join forces with those you’d rather avoid’ (PA: 75–76, 180). Furthermore, you have to know your enemy and acknowledge that, however cosmically important it may be, the line between good and evil is often razor-thin. In Harry’s world, this undecidability is present not only in the character of Snape, but also in the link that was forged when the evil Voldemort tried to kill baby Harry. The idea that good and evil may have a mutually enhancing effect on one another as the struggle between them unfolds is firmly established in tradition. We find it, for example, in the Merlin legend, where Merlin is the offspring of evil and is only salvaged for the children of light by a quick-witted priest who has the wherewithal to have him baptized. Dumbledore and Merlin have a whole swathe of similarities. Harry’s nightmares about whether he has been put in the right Hogwarts house, and so on the right side in the fight between good and evil, is a reminder of how the two seem to be wedded at a number of levels. Note that neither in Mani’s world nor in Harry’s is any one individual doomed to be good and evil. It is good and evil as universal principles and moral categories that are ontic givens in these worlds, not individuals. Individuals have a choice, regardless of how far they have at one point strayed from good. The line between good and evil is a fine one, and those who are most adept at fighting evil are also those who have had the closest brush with it. Dumbledore and Harry are both examples of this, and so is Hagrid, by dint of his genealogy.

Hagrid, the hybrid mediator To ask who ties the realms of Harry’s world together is to ask who pulls the strings, which is a question of power, and who oversees the boundary, which is a question of diplomacy. Power in Harry’s world is to do with respect and magic, with who is

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authorized by the community to do what. For guidance on such questions, some international relations and diplomacy scholars turn to German sociologist Max Weber’s studies of legitimacy, others turn to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s studies of discipline and governmentality (1994, [1978] 2000). Since Harry’s world is saturated with references to other realms, however, we may be better served by people who have generalized about power from studies of traditional societies, where magic and religion remain aspects of most if not all other social institutions. One place to start would be a generalization made by French historian of religion Georges Dumézil. Dumézil (1977) notes how, in Indo-European conceptions, rule was a question of celeritas and gravitas both. Gravitas we know: it is to do with the wisdom, prudence and seriousness of the well-established king. In Harry’s world, Dumbledore stands out as an incarnation of gravitas. He is the one who holds the power to separate the good from the bad, so he is the linchpin of politics. Dumbledore is also, however, the lover of lemon sherbets and pranks, and this is where celeritas comes in. In the words of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1987: 90), celeritas is a question of ‘youthful, active, disorderly, magical, and creative violence of conquering princes’. Sahlins goes on to comment that ‘The combination of two terms produces a third, a sovereign power, itself a dual combination of the war function and the peace function, king and priest, will and law’. As head of the Order of the Phoenix, the key fighting force of good, Dumbledore is a warlord, and as headmaster of Hogwarts and pillar of magical society in sundry respects, he is the lord of peace. He is the white lord (albus: Lat. ‘white’). But he is also flanked by two other powerful protagonists, Harry and Hagrid. If we look at the symbolic geography of Harry’s world through Dumézil’s lens, it is immediately clear why Harry is so important. He has the power of celerity in abundance, and he uses it in order to deal with the general fight between good and evil. Danger, however, is not only to be found at this all-encompassing level. It resides not only on the boundary between good and evil, but also at the boundary of the different realms of the world. Harry has a foot in two of these realms. He is Dumbledore’s key mediator between the realm of magic folks and the realm of muggles. There also exists another key mediator in this world, however, one who mans (or rather half-mans) the boundary between the magic realm and the giant/​monster realm. This is Hagrid, Keeper of the Keys and Grounds of Hogwarts. Like Harry, he is the offspring of a liaison between beings from different realms. Like Harry, he has celerity. And like Harry, Albus Dumbledore trusts him with his life. To Dumbledore, alliances with other species such as giants are key to winning the imminent battle with evil, and Hagrid is key to forging such alliances. Hagrid is also a key with which to unlock the symbolic geography of the world of Harry Potter. Hagrid is a being of the boundary, a messenger, a mediator between species and realms, even between culture and nature. In a word, he is a diplomat. He is introduced as follows: ‘He simply looked too big to be allowed, and so wild’ (PS 16). At the end of book one, ‘Hagrid sidled through the door as he spoke. As usual when he was indoors, Hagrid looked too big to be allowed’ (PS: 219). In book three, he is described as ‘gigantic’, ‘twice as tall as a normal man’ (PA:  97, PA:  198), and in book four, we learn that he is indeed half giant. In book four, we also meet Olympe Maxime, who

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is introduced as being as large as Hagrid (GF: 268), and who also turns out to be half giant. In book five, Hagrid pays a visit to a giant refuge and brings back a full-blooded if somewhat impish giant, his half-brother Grawp. In unfailing accordance with the logic of realms in the Harry Potter universe, Grawp is placed in the Forbidden Forest, part and symbol of the realm of giants and monsters from which he hails. In book six, Grawp has embarked on his domestication, appearing at Hogwarts wearing clothes, but he still resides in the Forbidden Forest and so bears out how giants are perched on the boundary between the magic and the monster realms, between South/​West and North/​East. Hagrid’s very name bears the traces of his hybrid heritage. It is also a good place from which to begin unpacking how this imagined diplomat has been imagined from material straight out of the European Middle Ages. Hag (Middle English hagge) comes from Anglo-Saxon hægtesse, probably from the Anglo-Saxon haga meaning hedge, a place where witches were said to have their abode (Skeat 1993:  191).3 Hedges are boundaries of sorts, and witches belong along and astride boundaries. In Norwegian and other Scandinavian languages, the standard word for the concept of witch remains heks (compare the English expression to ‘hex’ someone for casting a spell on them). The Old Norse giants were called jotunn. The home world of the jotunn, Utgárd, was said to be located east of the human world. They are present in Beowulf as eotenas. The Old Norse and Old English jotunn/​eoten (two variants of the same word) were supposed to live in mountains and caves. During the Middle Ages, they were represented ever more interchangeably with the Roman giants (Lat. Gigantes), to the extent that the standard Norwegian dictionary defines the latter in terms of the former (Riksmålsordboken 1937). This confluence of Roman and Norse mythologies may be seen already in Beowulf, where the giants were said to hail from Cain. One notes a similar confluence where the half-giants of Harry Potter’s world are concerned. Hagrid’s name is Norse, whereas Olympe Maxime’s is Graeco-Roman. There are striking similarities between the realms of magic folks, muggles and giants in Harry Potter’s world and the realms of gods, humans and giants/​eotenas in Old Norse religion.4 The similarities between the life-worlds of medieval Europeans and the world of Harry Potter do not stop here, however. In 1555, the Swedish archbishop Olaus Magnus, who had been exiled to Rome as a result of the Reformation, wrote no less than twenty-two books about life in his native north. The full title of the work serves notice that Magnus intends to give a full description of ‘almost all the living creatures that dwell in the North and their characteristics’. Being true to his word, Magnus gives detailed descriptions of the giants that once lived in the North, and the monsters that still live there. A number of these monsters pop up in the world of Harry Potter as well: werewolves, mermen, trolls, no less than six different kinds of mountain trolls, etc.5 Magnus was widely read by the learned scholars of his day. It is not an overstatement to say that his presentation of the North lingered for centuries, not least through his influence on other widely read scholars such as Montesquieu and even Rousseau. When, in European tradition, the North is still marked as somewhat more originary, less complicated, and wilder than the South, it is among other things

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because of Magnus’s books. The Harry Potter universe perpetuates this marking and so contributes to upholding it as ‘normal’. The reason why we talk about two historical periods around the North Sea, Viking and Middle Age, and divide them at around 1050, is to do with the coming of Christianity and the social changes or ‘shift of mores’ that Christianity brought to this life-world. The confluence between Norse eotenas and biblical and Roman giants was part and parcel of this shift (and is, to repeat, echoed in the names of Hagrid and Olymp Maxime). Hags and giants were firmly ensconced in the life-world. Consider an example from Denmark of how hags were listed on a par with foreigners: in 1524, the head of the Jutland landsting gave as one reason for a rebellion against King Christian II that he had neglected the counsel of his peers, preferring instead those of ‘Scots, Dutch, Germans, Charlatans, Tyrants and Hags [Troldqvinder, literally troll women]’ (Gustafsson 2000: 77). Where giants are concerned, Kendrick (1950: 24) reports how a man called John Rous wrote a [now lost] book on giants, and had much to say about them also in his Histora [Regum Angliae, ca. 1460]: no one doubted the former existence of these creatures; there was abundant Biblical proof, and Sir John Mandeville had actually seen the forty feet long rib of one of them at Jaffa; giants’ bones had also been found in England, and Rous knew of life-size hill-figures of Gogmagog and Corinius that were kept scoured even in his own time.

So, who are the giants? Unfortunately, giant studies has fallen somewhat into disrepute since the days of John Rous and is no longer a well-established academic discipline. There seem to exist only two recent monographs on the topic. Furthermore, they seem to be at loggerheads. On the one hand, Stephens argues the orthodox view. To him, as giants appeared to humankind from the time of the Old Testament to Rabelais, they were wholly Other to humans.6 Against this, Cohen (1999: xiv), who is particularly interested in Augustine’s and Isidore of Seville’s views on the matter but who also sifts the evidence presented by Stephens, arrives at the heterodox and in my view more fruitful view that the giant is ‘a morally and physically deformed creature arriving to demarcate the boundary beyond which lies the unintelligible, the inhuman’. The giant is a hybrid, half-manning the boundary of humanity. To ask about the nature of giants is to ask about the nature of the relationship between realms, between the realms of humans, gods and giants, or those of muggles, magic folks and giants, for that matter. Cohen notes how The northern giants married freely with gods and men, as often representing a middle step between the human and the divine as an inferior genus between man and animal. The Aesir, the most powerful gods of the Norse pantheon, were descended from giants. An elemental, perhaps autochthonous being, giants were inextricable from the earth and stone they worked, so they gained an explanatory function as creators of landscape, ancient ruins, and mysterious architecture. […] Even after the Vanir and Aesir had been replaced by Christian monotheism, traditions of giants lingered. As erudite culture replaced the more indigenous,

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heathen tradition, this old order of giants became conflated with the vanished gods whom they had aided and battled so that both could then be denigrated as deceivers and impersonators, validating the superiority of Christianitatis as a homogeneous, erudite, right-thinking culture. (Cohen 1999: 6, 19)

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Even after this disenfranchisement, then, in British and Scandinavian folk traditions there were and are a number of tales about friendly relations between gods and giants. Male gods and female giants carry on affairs, and these affairs are frequently fruitful. There are also stories of how giants, usually the fathers of daughters who have fallen in love with gods, pay the gods valuable assistance. Gods and giants – that seems to be the ticket. By contrast, there seem to be no tales of interaction between giants and humans. The twenty-two-volume Encyclopedia of the Nordic Middle Ages states that ‘according to the legends, giants [jotner] do not interlock with human life as do trolls […], who are experienced as a presence in the human environment. In distinction to these, giants appear as a people of the earliest times, who have disappeared long since’ (Halvorsen and Rooth 1963: 697). In the Middle Ages, giants were located in a netherworld, in the midst of or east of our world. There was an easy passage between their world and our own. Beings with the special knowledge required could hence move freely between the two realms. One notes that, traditionally, these beings tended to be gods (for example, Odin). One also notes that, in Harry’s world, wizards may move into the realm where giants are to be found and vice versa, but few if any muggles who run into giants live to tell the tale (we are even told that tourists who stumble upon them by accident tend to be killed). There is a parallel between the Norse world and Harry’s world in this regard. Yet another parallel between the Norse world and Harry’s world is to be found in the domination of wizards/​humans over giants. As noted by Cohen (1999: 9–10), ‘Giants represent the unassimilated remnant of the past that, although it eludes the complete historical memory of the recorder, is integrally bound to the process of giving that history an identity’. As applied to Harry’s world, we note that there, too, giants are placed in a peripheral setting geographically, but that in former times they took centre stage (they used to live all over Britain). Giants were forced off the land. Giants must be seen as a constitutive Other to wizards in Harry’s world, and to humans in the Norse world, which is to say that a self, be that an individual or a group, forms itself in relations to other individuals and groups, and that its formation is among other things constituted by these relationships. Hagrid’s genealogy suggests that, as a giant, he stands in a long line of aboriginal beings who have been forced off the land. In the next part of this chapter, I want to tease out the relevance of this insight to contemporary politics. My argument is that the modern Northern European state is built on the bones of giants. The corpses of giants are, as it were, part of its foundation.

Giants and the state In the world of Harry Potter, Hagrid reminds us of how giants once lived all over Britain, and how they have been driven out. A similar story is well known where

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medieval Britain is concerned. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regnum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) corroborates a myth of origin that ties the Norman aristocracy to their new land, a land they had only possessed for about four generations when Geoffrey wrote his tale. According to Geoffrey, the Normans who invaded Britain hailed from Brutus of Troy. Again, Cohen is most enlightening. He points out that in creating a past, Geoffrey also shaped a future. The power of this ‘onceness and futurity’ is embodied in Arthur.7 Brutus became through Geoffrey’s account the founding father of Britain, but he and the giants that he conquers are described only to provide the heroic base on which the glory of King Arthur could be erected. The Historia culminates in the conflicted, ambiguous, but ultimately resplendent portrait of Britain’s greatest king. Geoffrey’s achievement was to bestow on the Middle Ages a monarchical body through which England dreamed its own prehistory and inhabited it as if it had always been home. […] Conveniently, the same king whom Geoffrey exalted as British could be admired by the reigning Anglo-Norman monarchy, who likewise claimed Trojan descent. (Cohen 1999: 36, 40)

In 1415, Henry II famously had two giants, Gogmagog and Corineus, erected on London Bridge. The king trooped his colours at the giants’ expense on a regular basis: ‘The giants were regularly featured in mayoral processions. Records indicate that they greeted Philip and Mary at their public entry into London on 1554 and hailed Elizabeth four years later as part of a ceremony preliminary to her coronation. Such occasions served as political theatre in which to repeat the legendary history of Britain, a performance that aimed to materialize royal power in the present through the invocation of a long and therefore authoritative genealogy’ (Cohen 1999: 29). To political entities that define and legitimate themselves in terms of their history, their origin is of the essence, for history is the chronological aspect of their identity. If we turn to the origins of modern states in the late Middle Ages, we find that it was a common trait for kings to draw up genealogies for themselves going back to a progenitor who is said to have taken over the country in a violent confrontation with an aboriginal population. The above-mentioned history by Geoffrey of Monmouth is, after all, the key source on royal British mythical genealogy. Written around 1135, it contained information that the author regarded as his own very special contribution to antiquarian studies. It was, Geoffrey claimed, a scoop, the triumphant publication of a most important discovery, a complete account of the British kings between Brutus the Trojan and Cadwallader, the last of the ancient rulers and a known historical personage. […] He maintained that his good fortune was due to a vetustissimus liber, a book in the British tongue brought from Brittany by a learned and important friend. (Kendrick 1950: 5)

Geoffrey recounts that the ancient Britons were the descendants of Brutus, who was himself the grandson of Aenaeas of Troy. Brutus established himself on the

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throne around 1170 bce by conquering a number of giants, among which we find Gogmagog, and founded London in celebration.8 Subsequently, he divided his realm for his three sons to share. His descendant Arthur (head of the Round Table) famously rebuffed a Saxon invasion, but the Saxons eventually triumphed over Arthur’s descendant Cadwallader. Before he died, however, Cadwallader saw an angel who told him that the sons of Arthur would once again rule in Britain. Both Edward IV and Henry VIII had genealogies drawn up for them which proved that they were the rightful descendants of Cadwallader and so rightful rulers of Britain. Henry VII even named his eldest son Arthur, having seen to it that he was born in Winchester, sometime home of Arthur’s Round Table. When the union was made between Scotland and England in 1707, the country was renamed Great Britain, the reason given being that this was what it had been called before Brutus divided it into England, Wales and Scotland (Thomas 1971:  416–417).9 Here we have an example of how, in Europe, these genealogies were key political assets into the eighteenth century. Indeed, making such use of history was the European rule at the time. Robert Filmer (quoted in Kendrick 1950:  76) was right when he stated that ‘most of the civilised nations of earth labour to fetch their original from some one of the sons or nephews of Noah’.10 In the case of Scandinavian kings, they were said to have taken over land that had once belonged to the giants after the Old Norse gods had victoriously conquered them. In 1544, the Swedish nobleman and former archbishop Johannes Magnus wrote a work that went on to become one of the key texts for Europe’s understanding of the North (Neumann 2002).11 He drew up a genealogy for the Swedish Vasa kings that stretched back to none other than the giant Magog. The numbering that he introduced for the kings is still in use, despite there being no referents for half a dozen Charleses and a sprinkling of Eriks outside that numbering system itself. Again, these practices stretch well into the modern period. In the early Norwegian stages of nation-building in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, authors referred to Norway as a ‘home of giants’ on a regular basis. Like the Norse gods before them, and like the wizards of Harry Potter’s world, Swedes and Norwegians were said to have conquered their land from the giants. To sum up so far, giants are written into the foundation of modern states by dint of their place in the mythologies of how rule was established. This may be read directly out of the listing of kings. As we have seen, in the case of Sweden, the numbering of kings that is still in daily use is dependent on giants to hold up. There is, however, yet another way in which giants remain relevant to contemporary international relations. As noted above, giants may be said to represent an autochthonous being, a people of the earliest times and the unassimilated remnant of the past. Why unassimilated? Because there remain traces and memories of giants that have not been fully erased but that surface in imagined worlds such as that of Harry Potter. If the story just told is Hagrid’s genealogy, then it stands to reason that Hagrid is that genealogy’s trace. However, there do exist not only traces and memories but peoples, even nations, that are categorized in contemporary debates in the light of this genealogy. I am referring to a number of aboriginal peoples.

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As we have seen, in the self-presentation of the victors of early Northern European state-building, the taking of the land from autochthonous giants played a key role. As also noted, in the Northern European life-world, there were no hard and fast boundaries made between humans, particularly foreigners, and giants. Indeed, as demonstrated by Viking historian Gro Steinsland, Vikings drew on the category of giants to make sense of the existence of autochthonous groups to their north and north-east. These were referred to as finnar, meaning Finns and Saamis. They were said to have strong magical powers and to live in Finnmork. The word mork meant forest or borderland. When Christianity came, laws were passed that forbade Christians from seeking Saami guidance (Steinsland 1991). The realm of the Finns, Finnmork, literally became the Forbidden Forest. The Finns and Saamis may be said to have been relegated to a magical realm east of the lands of humans proper. The use of giant categories for Saami aboriginals does not stop there, however. In a direct parallel to how human kings were said to have married giant women, stories began to appear about how Norwegian heroes beget offspring by or even married Saami women. For example, in one saga, ‘The hero, Ketill, has an affair with the daughter of a giant, Brúni, and has a son by her. […] in this text there is no sharp distinction between giants and Saamis, the brother of Brúni is said to be Saami’ (Mundal 1996: 101, 107). Viking historian Else Mundal suggests that we read such stories as legitimating stories of rule by a state-building people, Norwegians, over an autochthonous people, the Saami. Such a reading sounds eminently plausible to a social scientist, not least for comparative reasons. It is a fact that a number of aboriginal groups all over the world are being read into similar categorization schemes to the ones that were used in Viking and Middle Age Northern Europe to make sense of giants. To note but one example from the anthropological literature, the Korekore Shona of Zimbabwe tell a similarly structured story of how their people conquered and intermarried with the autochthons (Lan 1985). To sum up, the relationship between wizards, muggles and giants seems to be structurally similar to the one between Old Norse gods, humans and giants. In both cases, the three realms involved seem to be progressively more ancient, more north-easterly located and closer to nature relative to one another. In both cases, there is acknowledgement of the key role played by a founding victory over giants, and an uneasiness about what this victory tells us about the political project. The giants are the unassimilated trace of the political order. Hagrid is not only a boundary figure between realms and a link back to a past now (almost) lost. He is also the last and tamed remnant of the once-rightful owners of the land. Like the last of the Mohicans, he may stand as a symbol for all aboriginal nations that have been forced off their land, or that are engaging in last-ditch diplomacy of their own to remain there (Beyer 2005, Butler and Bleiker 2018).

Conclusion The structural parallels between Harry’s world(s) and the world(s) around the North Sea in the Viking Age and the Middle Ages are not only a matter of the belief system

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surrounding witches and astrology, then, but also extend to the political world of the time. While giants have been largely absent from most elevated Western life-worlds for centuries now, they remained a key presence into the first half of the twentieth century in Scandinavian peasant societies.12 As discussed in this chapter, they also keep appearing in imagined worlds. One of the reasons why Harry’s world is able to spellbind is that it recirculates historical and, for most readers, partially subconscious energies. As most convincingly theorized by the so-called New Historicism in literary theory (the locus classicus is Greenblatt 1989), this is exactly what animates a good imagined world; the irrealis genres succeed when they are able to tap in to real-world social and political energies in the way they tell their stories. By the same token, the subjunctives of such stories come back to animate our own social and political life. Recirculation between the real and the imagined is the general reason why irrealis genres are relevant to political analysis. Let me now return to the specific purchase for our study of diplomacy. A basic challenge for diplomacy to work is that polities recognize one another as ritually clean enough for interaction. As late as in the sixteenth century, Russians who had to shake hands with Europeans ritually washed their hands afterwards. In this case, Russians saw their interlocutors as unclean, but still clean enough to interact with. It is still clear, however, that Russians saw themselves as good, in the sense of closer to God, and Europeans as evil, in the sense of further from or even irrelevant to God. We discussed the archetype of this way of thinking about the world, Manicheanism, above. It states that there are two principles in the world, a good one and an evil one. In Christian tradition, this is considered apostasy, for in that tradition there is only one ontic principle, namely the good, and evil is defined not as a separate principle but simply as distance from the good. That, anyway, is the theory. In practice, the good/​evil dichotomy is still there. Sixteenth-century Russian Orthodox aristocrats had no compunction in thinking about fellow Christian Europeans as unclean. Militaries of ostensibly Christian states tend to hold that God and the good are on their side. Sundry recent presidents of the United States have singled out certain other states as an ‘axis of evil’. After the attack on the Twin Towers on 9 September 2001, President George Bush Jr, ostensibly a believing Baptist, held that the attack was a case of evil attacking good. These are just some scattered examples of a very widespread phenomenon indeed, namely the basic approach to the world that our polity is good and some or all of the others are evil. Such a stance will easily (but not necessarily) translate into what James Der Derian (1987) has called anti-diplomacy – that is, a proclivity for not talking to the enemy. Contemporary anti-diplomacy is not that much studied in extant literature (but see Sharp 2009). And yet, it is quite clear that, in evolution-speak, although the variation between diplomacy and anti-diplomacy may be historically low, the variation is still there. Where there is sustained variation, something has to sustain it. Something has to naturalize a variant for it to be able to go on. In the case of anti-diplomacy, which is a variant of diplomacy if only in negation, that naturalization is certainly not the work of scholars, who are otherwise always a prime suspect when it comes to naturalizing

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political phenomena. As just noted, hard-pressed politicians sometimes subscribe to it. Naturalization takes more than the occasional nod, however: it must be an ongoing business. Cultic religious life may be another suspect, but as already noted, Christians are divided on the issue, as are, by definition, all universalistic religions. In the irrealis genres, however, we find that sustained attention is paid to cosmic battles between good and evil. Such an ontic approach will necessarily translate into a view in which some polities are closer to good and some to evil. Diplomacy will then translate into questions such as who represents good and who evil, and who is able to rally an alliance of all good forces. I would aver that we have in the subjunctive diplomacy represented by the irrealis genres of video games, science fiction and fantasy a rich cache of cultural artefacts that serve to naturalize the anti-diplomatic view that diplomacy is all about the fight between good and evil.

Notes

1 In accordance with standard annotations in Harry Potter scholarship, references to the canon are by abbreviation, as follows: PS: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone; CS: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; PA: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; GF: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; OP: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; HBP: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; DH: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. See References under ‘Rowling’ for full bibliographical data. 2 The film prequels to the books, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (2016) and The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018), elaborate on Grindelwald’s back story. 3 Hagrid’s mother is thus a very special kind of hag. The perfect Norwegian translation of Hagrid’s name is Gygrid – a gyger was a female jotun or giant. 4 This kind of division is of course well known from The Lord of the Rings, and indeed, J.R.R. Tolkien, whose academic work centred on the Viking age in what we now call Northern Europe, definitely drew up his mythological world out of this historical material. In light of what has just been said about the fight between good and evil in Harry Potter’s world, it is worth noting that to the Vikings, gods and giants did not embody good and evil in this way but were rather seen as embodying two different kinds of will. 5 Magnus ([1555] 1996–1998). Of course, the Harry Potter world also harbours a number of monsters who were not part of this life-world. 6 See Stephens (1989). The Book of Wisdom (Wisd. 14:15–21) underscores how giants predate the flood. Genesis (Gen. 6:4) states how giants lived on earth, as children of sons of Gods (angels? devils?) and daughters of men. 7 Arthur wanted to secure world domination for Britain by conquering the Holy Roman Emperor, who was named Lucius. One notes that there is an Arthur and a Lucius in the Harry Potter saga, and that the relationship between Arthur Weasley and Lucius Malfoy is a fraught one. The hunt for a historical Arthur goes on; see, for example, Ashe (1985). In the eighteenth century, furthermore, a standard historical reading saw Odin/​Othwen as an historical person. Following a Roman battle, Odin was said to have travelled north, and to have died in the Swedish town of Sigtuna.

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8 See Kendrick (1950: 7). Throughout the Middle Ages, Gog and Magog appeared as the henchmen of Antichrist (see Cohn 1970). There is a riddle here, for before Brutus came, there were only giants, and the place was called Albion. A myth from the Auchinleck Manuscript: Albina, a Greek princess and her sisters cast out by their father for disobedience to their husbands were shipwrecked on the island, where they began lusting. The devil popped up, and the offspring was the giants. This is a nice reworking of the same theme (see Cohen 1999: 47–50). 9 One notes that Polydor Vergil’s scholarship, which proved decisively that these genealogies were mythical, was published before the forging of the union, but that neither this nor the widespread scepticism surrounding these stories barred them from being considered of use by the kings involved. An interesting reaction to Vergil was Bishop John Bale’s, when he raised the ante by drawing up an even more elaborate genealogy stretching back via King Albion, the Amphitrite King Neptunus and Osiris to Ham and Noah (Kendrick 1950: 34, 69–70). 10 Filmer was a key philosopher of his day, and remains perhaps the most eloquent apologist for patriarchy. 11 Johannes was Olaus’s brother. 12 Well, almost everywhere; anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup (1985, 1998) reports from field work in Iceland that there, they never left.

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Conclusion: towards diplomacy as global governance

The previous chapters of this book have discussed diplomacy’s deep past and its present, including how it is presently being imagined. When viewed as an evolutionary result of broader forces, diplomacy emerges as a hard-won achievement of the species. Chapter  2 stressed how, by the nineteenth century, diplomacy had adopted a form and a multilateral aspect that are still with us. Chapter 3 added the story of how, with the firming up of the principle of state sovereignty and territorial law, diplomacy enveloped the consular institution. Chapters 4 and 5 attempted to look for further variation in diplomatic practices by enquiring into diplomacy’s visual modes and forms of presentability, but came up fairly empty-handed. For the first time in world history, visual diplomacy now constitutes a strikingly stabilized and stabilizing aspect of diplomacy. Chapter 6, on the other hand, rummaged through the realms of popular culture for representations of diplomacy and uncovered a seemingly out-selected variant thereof, namely so-called anti-diplomacy. Where diplomacy stresses the fruitfulness of a dialogical stance towards the Other, anti-diplomacy stresses that the Other is evil and must be fought tooth and nail. It is one of the advantages of an evolutionary perspective that it may tease out how reversions to earlier variants of the phenomenon studied can never be ruled out, so it is a potentially significant finding that a seemingly dead variant of diplomacy is in hibernation in much-trafficked social imaginaries. And indeed, if we look at existing practice, we do find a smattering of anti-diplomatic practices around the world, perhaps most conspicuously among radical Islamists. Early instantiations of the Afghan Taliban demonstrated anti-diplomatic practices, as did the short-lived Caliphate established by the so-called Islamic State (2014–2019; see Friis 2015). However, as stressed by Sharp (2003), Taliban practices were quickly out-selected when they came into contact with the worldwide diplomatic institution. Anti-diplomacy seems to be an ineradicable tendency that hovers at the edges of institutional practices (Cohn 1970) but which is rarely if ever sustained by revolutionary regimes over time (Armstrong 1993). It is highly unlikely that we are seeing an anti-diplomatic tipping-point on the horizon.

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In lieu of radical variation in contemporary diplomatic practices, when it comes to speculating about diplomacy’s future, the most pronounced difference we may take as a starting-point is arguably the one hinted at in Chapter 1 – that between so-called ‘old’ and ‘new’ diplomacy. Old diplomacy is what we know from the European nineteenth century:  a Realpolitik-oriented state diplomacy focused on presenting the world with unilaterally wrought changes, so-called faits accomplis. Russia’s 2014 unilateral land-grab of the Crimean peninsula would be a case in point. Old diplomacy was first challenged discursively by Enlightenment thinkers, and then practically by eighteenth-century French and American revolutionaries. It resurfaced with the US president Woodrow Wilson in the early twentieth century. In both cases, contemporaneity named these forays ‘new’ diplomacy (Leira 2018). This style of diplomacy is readily recognized today in a watered-down version that is widely practised and centres on multilateral negotiations and verifiable agreements. As routinely observed by scholars and pundits alike, there is a pronounced difference in the diplomacy of the United States under presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The former was closer to new diplomacy than is the latter, and this is a difference that makes a difference. In an evolutionary perspective, however, the important thing is that the very same principle of state sovereignty grounds old and new diplomacy, and that both styles are carried out by the very same type of personnel, namely state employees organized into unitary services. President Trump has, it is true, attacked, ridiculed, decimated and even stonewalled his own State Department, but at no time has he actually done anything to substitute some other kind of institution for it. By the same token, the European Union, arguably the institution that comes closest to a consistently ‘new diplomacy’ agenda worldwide, recently institutionalized its foreign service on principles that did not diverge that much from already existing ones (Bátora 2013, Adler-Nissen 2014c). There is a general point to be made here. So far, old and new diplomacies have simply not diverged enough to be treated as two variants of diplomacy in an evolutionary sense. For that to happen, there would have to be changes in the principle that grounds both of these two styles of diplomacy. That principle is sovereignty, which during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries broadened to become a global principle for political organization. As discussed in Chapter 3, it also deepened to envelop ever new parts of global social life generally, and mediation specifically. Sovereignty remains the key phenomenon to frame the social and material environment within which diplomacy develops. However, sovereignty itself is a phenomenon that does not stand still for its picture. For example, it is less regulating of economic life than it was in the eighteenth century, to the extent that there is a key tension in global politics between a political sphere that is primarily framed by sovereignty, and an economic sphere that is primarily framed by other and competing principles. As argued perhaps most incisively by Jens Bartelson (2006: 474), we have reached a situation where the sovereign equality of states no longer constitutes the baseline for further stratification according to relative strength and power. In this world, there are several normative frameworks competing for both legality and legitimacy when it comes to justifying political practices.

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Competing frameworks translate into evolution-speak as variation. On the one hand, we see a traditional variant of sovereignty that insists on a world of clear boundaries between states that can always use their sovereign power to keep the state’s inside separate from outside elements. Sovereignty is rooted in the state, which rules by bidding other entities to carry out its will. On the other hand, we see a newer version of sovereignty that insists on a world of permeable boundaries between states that try to handle the ensuing flows between the inside and the outside of the state. This kind of sovereignty is rooted in the international community, the state citizens of which partake in global governance through other kinds of polities such as non-governmental organizations, companies etc. (Bartelson 2014). If we map old and new diplomacy onto these two variants of sovereignty, the fit is quite striking. State sovereignty grounds old diplomacy. Historically, the two have a complicated relationship, for in the eighteenth century the king’s diplomacy was a major target for those who argued that sovereignty should be popular. Today, however, the principle of popular sovereignty is well ensconced and grounds diplomacy quite frictionlessly. The preponderance of old diplomacy is also helped by the changing balance of power. Most political forces in China and India follow, in their different ways, the broad understanding of sovereignty that grounds old diplomacy. Old diplomacy, with its faits accomplis, is on ample display, for example, in the South China Sea, where China recently ‘created more than 12.8 million square metres of new land in less than three years’ as bases for military operations and new legal claims (Davenport 2018: 76). Furthermore, and as already noted, in the face of stiffer competition from China and India, and also Russia, the United States seems increasingly to follow the practices of old diplomacy. However, stabilization around old diplomacy is not in sight, and is unlikely to take place, simply because there exist too many well-ensconced ‘new’ diplomatic practices that are at variance with it. Perhaps the best example is how the international system is maintained in the face of crises (Neumann and Sending 2020). The practices of disaster relief and development aid cluster around a new diplomacy model of networked international organizations, their state members and sundry non-governmental organizations. In cases of threatened or actual intra-state breakdown, diplomats take on sundry functions of managing the disorder, from providing new physical infrastructure to mediating between warring parties (Barkawi 2015, Hurd 2015, Krieger, Souma and Nexon 2015, Sending 2015). Such practices have a long genealogy. Discursively, they go back to the Enlightenment. Since the foundation of the Red Cross and its subsequent consecration as a subject of international law, they have multiplied (Barnett 2011). The literatures on sovereignty and diplomacy are full of dismissals of such practices as anomalous. The most popular argument against their relevance is probably that they depend on the goodwill of states. If states remain sovereign and are the principal agents of diplomacy, then, so the argument goes, it follows that they may at any time reassert their sovereignty and simply stop engaging in these alternative practices (Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991). In an evolutionary perspective, this is not a convincing argument. First, it is not obvious that states which are able to get things done indirectly want to revert to a

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situation where they have to ram things through directly. States that are able to govern through societal agents may be more evolutionally robust than are states that have to rule society directly (Neumann and Sending 2010). Secondly, if the not-so-new diplomatic practices hail from a broad and almost three-centuries-old tradition, have a continuous and growing presence in international relations, are dominant among actors such as the European Union, and have an (admittedly subordinated) presence throughout the globe, then they add up not to an epiphenomenon but to a style that may yet grow into a separate variant of diplomacy. After all, this is the general way in which tipping-points begin to gather steam. First, there are sundry discursive stirrings that may not even be noticed. These stirrings are followed by scattered practices. Scattered practices go on to become institutionalized and clustered. At some point, institutionalized and clustered practices crystallize into an alternative variant. Variation then leads to selection, either of the old or of the young. Where new diplomacy is concerned, it seemed to be about to crystallize into a new variant of diplomacy at the turn of the millennium. At present, however, old diplomacy seems to be reasserting itself, but not to the point where the institutionalized practices of new diplomacy are decisively weakened. With no other contenders in sight, what we may call new diplomacy, networked diplomacy or diplomacy as global governance remains the major candidate for a fully-fledged new variant of diplomacy. Environmental and social factors, such as changes in how sovereignty works, will then decide whether or not diplomacy as global governance will grow to reach a tipping-point where it is selected as the new stabilizer of diplomacy overall.

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Wille, Tobias (2013) ‘The Diplomatisation of Kosovo’, paper read at the London School of Economics, 2 December. Williams, Michael C. (2003) ‘Words, Images, Enemies:  Securitization and International Politics’ International Studies Quarterly 47 (4): 511–529. Wilson, Peter Lambon (2003) Pirate Utopias. Moorish Corsairs and European Renegades, 2nd ed. New York: Autonomedia. Windler, Christian (2001a) ‘Diplomatic History as a Field for Cultural Analysis: Muslim– Christian Relations in Tunis, 1700–1840’ The Historical Journal 44 (1): 79–106. Windler, Christian (2001b) ‘Representing a State in a Segmentary Society: French Consuls in Tunis from the Ancien Régime to the Restoration’ The Journal of Modern History 73 (2): 233–274. Wood, Molly (2007) ‘“Commanding Beauty” and “Gentle Charm”; American Women and Gender in the Early Twentieth-Century Foreign Service’ Diplomatic History 31 (3): 505–530. Woodside, Alexander (1998) ‘Territorial Order and Collective-Identity Tensions in Confucian Asia: China, Vietnam, Korea’ Daedalus 127 (3): 191–221. Wolff, Larry (2003) ‘Die Erfindung Osteuropas:  Von Voltaire zu Voldemort’ in Karl Kaser, Dagmar Granshanmer-Hohl and Robert Pichler (eds) Wieser Enzyklopädie des europäischen Ostens, Vol. 2: Europa und die Grenzen im Kopf Klagenfurt: Wieser. Wylie, Alison (1985) ‘The Reaction against Analogy’ Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 8: 63–111. Yair, Gad and Sharona Odom-Weiss (2014) ‘Israeli Diplomacy:  The Effects of Cultural Trauma’ The Hague Journal of Diplomacy 9 (1): 1–23. Young, G.M. (1936) Young Victorian England:  Portrait of an Age London:  Oxford University Press. Young, H. Peyton (1998) Individual Strategy and Social Structure. An Evolutionary Theory of Institutions Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zarakol, Ayse (2011) After Defeat:  How the East Learned to Live with the West Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zourek, Jaroslav (1957) ‘Report on Consular Intercourse and Immunities’, UN Document A/​CN.4/​108, in Yearbook of the International Law Commission II: 71–103, available at http://​untreaty.un.org/​ilc/​publications/​yearbooks/​Ybkvolumes(e)/​ILC_​1957_​v2_​e.pdf, retrieved 25 February 2016. Zourek, Jaroslav (1960) ‘Second Report on Consular Intercourse and Immunities’, UN Document A/​CN.4/​131, in Yearbook of the International Law Commission II:  2–32, available at http://​untreaty.un.org/​ilc/​publications/​yearbooks/​Ybkvolumes(e)/​ILC_​ 1960_​v2_​e.pdf, retrieved 25 February 2016.

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Index

accreditation 47, 53, 58–​61, 62–​65, 66, 78 Iran 79–​82 United States 66 aesthetics 47, 54, 55, 73, 76, 77, 85 agents 21–​22, 27 Amarna system 18, 19, 52 ambassadors 47, 53, 58, 59–​61, 62–​65, 66, 68, 78 Anatolia 18, 29, 74 ancient Egypt 47, 51, 52 diplomacy 48, 52 ancient Greece 8, 18, 19, 20, 29, 40, 77 anti-​diplomacy 101–​102, 104 archaeology 6, 11, 15 Arendt, Hannah 77 Armenia 63, 66 Assmann, Jan 51, 74 Augustine 91–​92 Austin, Jonathan L. 3–​4 Balzacq, Thierry 4 Barbary States, North Africa 38–​39, 45 Bartelson, Jens 105 Bauman, Richard 77 beauty 55, 56–​57, 75–​76, 77, 84 Beuchamp, William M. 50 big game hunting 10, 11, 12, 17, 25 Boehm, Christopher 11 Bolter, J. D. 54 Borel, F. 43 Bowles, Samuel 11–​12, 24 Brazil 67 Britain 38, 97–​99 consuls 27, 36, 38, 44 British Foreign Office 37

Bronze Age 26, 28, 40, 74 Bruce, Frederick 70 Bynkershoek, Cornelius van 43 Byzantine empire 19, 31, 52 Cherry, John 18 China 23, 43, 106 Christianity 91, 96, 101 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 96, 97, 98 Cohn, Norman 91 complex polities 18, 48, 51, 53, 74 consular institution 26, 27, 28, 29, 31–​32, 33–​34, 35–​37, 39, 40–​41, 42 Barbary States 38–​39 consuls 26, 27–​31, 32–​33, 34–​38, 40–​42 Barbary States 38–​39 British 27, 36, 38, 44 Danish 38, 44 English 33, 44 European 28, 32 French 33, 34, 36, 44 honorary 36, 40, 41–​42 Italian 30 of the sea 30, 31 of traders 31 consuls of the sea 30, 31 consuls of traders 31 cooperation 9, 10–​11, 12, 17, 22, 23–​24 Crimea (Russian invasion, 2014) 5–​6, 105 deliberation 54, 73, 75, 76 Denmark 96 consuls 38, 44 Der Derian, James 87, 101 de-​securitisation  3

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Index

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diplomacy 1–​2, 3, 4, 8–​9, 14, 17, 21–​24, 46, 48, 57, 87–​88, 101, 102, 104–​105, 106–​107 ancient Egypt 48, 52 evolution of 8, 9–​10, 20, 21–​22 imagined 88–​89 Iroquois League 48–​51 new 5–​6, 105, 106, 107 old 5–​6, 105, 106, 107 permanent 20, 23, 53, 59 representation 57–​58, 72, 75 see also visual diplomacy diplomatic documents 57 diplomatic performance 57–​58, 67, 73, 78 diplomatic studies 1, 10, 12 diplomatic systems 18, 19–​20, 22–​23 diplomatic treaties 31, 38, 57 diplomatisation 2, 3, 42, 72 diplomats 1, 2, 3, 4, 20, 22, 23, 30, 47, 57–58, 66, 72, 87–​88 Druke, Mary A. 49 Dumézil, Georges 94 East Asian Middle Ages 53 Eastern Mediterranean 8, 31, 32, 40, 52 Egypt 42, 47, 51, 52, 74 diplomacy 48, 52 Ekman, Paul 56 emotions 55, 56 English consuls 33, 44 Etcoff, Nancy 56 European consuls 28, 32 European Middle Ages 53, 95 European system 23 European Union 5–​6, 105 evolution 9, 10, 12 natural 4–​5 social 4–​5, 16–​17, 24 Fascism 55, 72, 76 female diplomats 73, 85 Caroline Kennedy 59, 60–​61, 62, 66, 73, 78–​79 Aud Lise Norheim 73, 80–​83 Filmer, Robert 99 Finnemore, Martha 25 foreign service 26, 37, 41

Frankfurt School 76, 77 French consuls 33, 34, 36, 44 Fried, Morton 15 Geertz, Clifford 75 Geoffrey of Monmouth 98 giants 95, 96–​97, 99–​100, 101 Gilbert, Felix 5 Gintis, Herbert 11–​12, 24 global governance 106, 107 globalization 21 group conflicts 12 Grusin, R. 54 Habermas, Jürgen 76, 77 Hagedorn, Nancy L. 48, 50 hags 95, 96 Hall, Edward 54 Hall, Martin 3 Hamilton, Keith 8 Hanseatic League 33–​34 Harry Potter 88–​91, 92–​95, 96, 97, 100, 101 hatchets 51 Heckel’s law 52 Hegel 8, 58 hegemony 65 Western visual strategy 48, 66, 67–​68, 76 high-​context cultures  54 historical evolution 6 Hobbes, Thomas 24 honorary consuls 36, 40, 41–​42 humanity 9, 10–​13 hunter-​gatherers 10, 11, 15, 17 imagined diplomacy 88–​89 imagined diplomats 88 imagined worlds 87, 101 see also Harry Potter international institutions 1, 57, 58, 59 international organisations 20, 106 International Relations (IR) 1, 48, 58 internationalism 20, 21 Iran, Islamic Republic of 63, 66, 68, 73, 83 accreditation 79–​82 Norwegian ambassador 73, 80–​83

Index Iroquois League 18, 19, 46–​47 diplomacy 48–​51 Israel 53, 64–​65, 89–​91 Italian consuls 30

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Jados, Stanley 43 Japan 59, 60–​61, 65, 66, 78, 79 see also Kennedy, Caroline Jönsson, Crister 3 Kendrick, T. D. 96 Kennedy, Caroline (American ambassador) 59, 60–​61, 62, 66, 73, 78–​79 kinship 12, 18, 20 Korekore Shona, Zimbabwe 100 Kropotkin, Peter 12 Lake, David A. 35 Langhorne, Richard 8 large-​scale polities  51–​52 League of Nations 9, 20 Leira, Halvard 42 low-​context cultures  54

Magnus, Johannes 99 Magnus, Olaus 95–​96 Manichean politics 91 Martineau, J. C. (Swedish consul) 37 Mattingly, Garret 30 McLuhan, Marshall 55 mercantilism 35 Merkel, Angela 6, 63 Merlin legend 93 messengers 14 Middle Ages 31, 95, 97, 100, 103 Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFA) 26, 36, 41, 86 modernity 5, 76 Mohawks 51 Morocco 38 multilateral diplomacy 9, 20 Mundal, Else 100 myths 87, 89, 95, 103 Narkuu, Tulga (Mongolian ambassador) 62, 68 national dress 62–​63, 68, 83, 84

Mongolian ambassador 62, 68 Norwegian ambassador 80–​81 natural evolution 4–​5 Neolithic period 18–​19 new diplomacy 5–​6, 105, 106, 107 Nicolson, Harold 8, 43 Norheim, Aud Lise (Norwegian ambassador) 73, 80–​83 Norway 42, 99 Noyes, Dorothy 75 Numelin, Ragnar 13–​15, 17, 25, 48 Obama, Barack 6, 69, 105 old diplomacy 5–​6, 105, 106, 107 Old Norse 89, 95, 96 Ottoman Empire 23, 31, 32, 43, 44 Panofsky, Ewin 73, 80, 84 Pauls, Rolf 64–​65 peer-​group polities 18, 19, 51–​52 performance 46, 73, 77, 78 see also accreditation; diplomatic performance permanent diplomacy 20, 23, 53, 59 personality of law 30, 31, 34, 35 Platt, D. C. M. 27 Pleistocene revolution 11, 17, 20 presentability 61, 72–​73, 78, 84–​85 prostatai 29, 43 proxenia 29 public spheres 72, 73–​77, 79 Putin, Vladimir 63 pyramids, ancient Egypt 52 Radhanites 30 reciprocity 22–​23, 58 recognition 47, 58–​60 see also accreditation Renfrew, Sir Colin 18, 19 representation 57–​58, 72, 75 Revolutionary France 5 Rice, G. W. 27 Ridley, Matt 12 right-​hand driving  15–​16 Roman Empire 27, 30, 31, 43 Roman mythology 95, 96 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques  17, 24

125

126

Index Trump, Donald 105 Turkey 53

Sahlins, Marshall 94 Satow, Ernest 42 Scott, James C. 15 Searle, John 3–​4 Second Opium War 70 securitisation 2–​3 security 2–​3 sedentarization 15, 18–​19 Service, Elman R. 12, 24 Shapiro, Gary 54, 77 Sharp, Paul 104 Shostak, Marjorie 17 Sikkink, Kathryn 25 social evolution 4–​5, 16–​17, 24 social institution (of diplomacy) 1, 4 sovereignty 26, 28, 34–​35, 36–​37, 40, 105–​107 Spain 38 speech act theory 2, 3–​4 Spencer, Herbert 13 spite strategies 63–​65, 68, 76 Spruyt, Hendrik 25 Stein, Gil 28–​29 Steinsland, Gro 100 Stephens, Rebecca 96 stone megastructures 18–​19 sublimity 52, 63, 76 Sumer 18, 19, 74 Sweden 26, 35, 39, 41, 44, 99

Ulbert, Jörg 31 United States 5, 38, 86 accreditation 66

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Russia 101 Crimean invasion 5–​6, 105

Taliban, Afghanistan 104 Tasmania, pre-​contact  13 tipping-​points 5, 9, 15–​16, 17, 21, 22, 107 Tolkien, J. R. R. 102 totemism 13, 17, 20 trade 26, 28–​29, 35, 74 trading agents 31–​32

van den Boogert, Maurits H. 43 Vattel, Emeric de 43 Vergil, Polydor 103 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (1963) 27, 37, 39 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) 59 Viking world 19, 100 villages 18, 19 Visigothic Code 30 visual diplomacy 46, 47–​48, 53–​54, 55, 57–58, 65–​69, 104 spite strategies 63–​65, 68, 76 Western hegemonic strategy 48, 66, 67–​68, 76 visual modalities 46, 47, 54–​57, 58 visually pleasing 55, 56–​58, 69 see also beauty wampum 49–​51, 69 war 2, 11–​12, 13, 35 Western hegemonic visual strategy 48, 66, 67–​68, 76 Western Mediterranean 31 Wicquefort, Abraham de 43 Wille, Tobias 23 Wilson, Woodrow 5 Young, G. M. 1 Young, H. Peyton 16 ziggurats, Babylonia 52 Zourek, Jaroslav 27