Rethinking Diplomacy

It was striking to me how At Home with the Diplomats echoed my own two and a half years experience with a Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I would posit that the French MFA may be an extrapolated version of the Norwegian one, and both are an extrapolation of society. European MFAs undoubtedly live in this long aristocratic tradition—even in countries where the monarchy was overthrown: a great majority of French ambassadors had an aristocratic particle name until very recently and diplomats with an aristocratic background are still well represented—and this pyramidal structure. I think this later feature is even more obvious within actual embassies (Neumann’s experience was at the home ministry), where the ambassador reign on top, sitting on the chancery, which is followed by the different sections, hierarchically organized and generally ranging from defense or economic affairs to education or cultural cooperation. In my experience at an embassy in a developing country, all the high rank diplomats were men, the office assistants almost all women, and the rest of the staff positions were filled with “locals:” a quite telling picture.

Among the many directions we could take the discussion along, I found particularly interesting, and again accurate, the description of the self behavioral regulation that diplomats must adopt so as to to fit in, quite in the way Foucault demonstrates with his Panopticon: agents are not sure whether and when they are being observed so they conform at all times. Neumann suggests that perspicacity and sharpness in analysis are useful for being successful but must be moderated in order not to upset the hierarchy, depending on the point of departure of the civil servant. Furthermore, the type of knowledge production that Neumann describes fits such a structure: it has to be consensual, politically correct, and consequently never truly innovative. The description of MFAs as rigid bureaucracies completes this idea, as in the bureaucrat’s view “it is only when the system does not work that something new is produced, because the very fact that something new is produced shows that the system has failed” (p. 86, this could be applied to many governmental agencies and bureaucracies in general). The use of Hedley Bull’s definition of diplomatic knowledge seems also right on point: there is urgency and short-lived prospects for knowledge produced in diplomatic missions abroad, so the “deep structures,” as Gramsci would have it, that shape the political and socio-economic landscape of a country tend to be overlooked. It would be interesting to discuss further Neumann’s matrix of diplomacy as a particular ontology, epistemology and methodology of knowledge production, comparable to anthropology and political science.

The question of gender and class, the different femininities and masculinities, illustrate the arduous social mobility, in MFAs and the rest of society alike. If diplomats can in some instances be vector of change in governmentality, MFAs are probably not instigators of social changes and seem to be slowly conquered after the rest of society (interesting inversion of calendar regarding voting rights in the countries mentioned though). I need to evoke the French case again as a recent article illustrates the disparities in career advancement depending on the alma mater or marital status of diplomats: https://sociologies.revues.org/2936?lang=en. Nevertheless, and as Neumann highlights, there is an interesting “don’t ask don’t tell” tendency in this proper environment, with very different forms of outcome.

If the genealogy and historical account of diplomacy are important, and if Neumann is probably right when stating that diplomacy has been neglected in comparison to other areas of global politics and that it eurocentrism is evident, I do not think that mainstream accounts are as restrictive as he implies. He bases his argument on Satow’s and Nicolson’s works, but many classes and seminars on the history of diplomacy, at MFAs or universities, would mention Egyptian or Roman cases (for instance). Yet, his particular anthropological, historical methodology and critical approach should also be discussed.