Diplomacy

• 1. Introduction

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  Diplomacy is the communication by representatives of state, intergovernmental, or non-governmental institutions intended to influence events in the international system. The word itself comes from the ancient Greek diploma, meaning roughly an object folded in two. That folded document was once handed out by sovereigns to confer an official privilege. Before the envelope existed, folding a page was simply how you protected what it said.

  The Amarna letters survive from the 14th century BC, written between Egyptian pharaohs and the rulers of Canaan. Around 2100 BC, the Mesopotamian city-states of Lagash and Umma concluded peace treaties. Thousands of years later, an ambassador in Rome might keep a retinue of a hundred. How did a habit of exchanging folded letters grow into a profession with its own immunities, its own spies, and its own quarrels over who stands where? This is the story of how states learned to talk to one another, and of what happened when they did.

• 2. Letters And Tributes

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  The Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BC, fought during Egypt's nineteenth dynasty, produced one of the first known international peace treaties. The pharaoh of Egypt and the ruler of the Hittite Empire set down their agreement, and fragments of it survive in stone tablets now called the Egyptian-Hittite peace treaty. War, it seems, taught rivals to write things down.

  The ancient Greek city-states sent envoys to settle specific questions of war, peace, or trade, but kept no permanent representatives abroad. Some of those functions fell instead to a proxenos, a citizen of the host city who held friendly ties, often family ties, to another city. Even the Achaemenid Empire of Persia was a partner in negotiation during peacetime, before Alexander the Great of Macedon conquered it. Alexander understood the craft too. He had his Macedonian and Greek subjects intermarry with native populations, and after the siege of the Sogdian Rock he took the Bactrian woman Roxana as his wife to calm a rebelling people.

  From the Battle of Baideng in 200 BC to the Battle of Mayi in 133 BC, China's Han dynasty paid the northern Xiongnu nomads an exorbitant tribute in silk, cloth, grain, and other foodstuffs, sustained by a marriage alliance. A treaty drafted in 162 BC declared everything north of the Great Wall to be the nomads' land, and everything south reserved for Han Chinese. That treaty was renewed no fewer than nine times, yet some Xiongnu horsemen kept raiding the Han borders all the same.

• 3. The Persuader's Art

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  Sun Tzu, the 6th-century BC military strategist who died in 496 BC, wrote The Art of War and stands among the earliest realists in international relations theory. He lived as rival states paid less heed to the Zhou dynasty figureheads and each grasped for total conquest. Building allies, bartering land, and signing peace treaties became survival skills, and the idealized role of the persuader and diplomat took shape.

  The oldest treatise on statecraft, the Arthashastra, is attributed to Kautilya, also known as Chanakya, the principal adviser to Chandragupta Maurya. Chandragupta founded the Maurya dynasty and ruled in the 3rd century BC. Hidden inside its 6,000 aphorisms of prose is a full theory of diplomacy. A wise king, it argues, builds alliances and tries to checkmate his adversaries. It even advises on the envoy's conduct, with the blunt suggestion that he should sleep alone.

  The rajmandala sits at the heart of the Arthashastra, a model placing the home state amid twelve competing entities, each a potential adversary or a latent ally depending on how it is handled. The text offers four policy approaches, the upaya: conciliation, gifts, rupture or dissent, and force. War is named the last resort, since its outcome is always uncertain. The work also counsels that conquered people must be treated fairly and assimilated, an early expression of humanitarian law.

• 4. War By Other Means

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  The Byzantine Empire kept a regular army of 120,000 to 140,000 men after the losses of the 7th century, yet its security rested on activist diplomacy. Surrounded by Georgians, Bulgars, Slavs, Armenians, Huns, Avars, Franks, Lombards, and Arabs, Byzantium held one resource its neighbors lacked: a formalized legal structure inherited from Rome. When those peoples built their own political institutions, they leaned on the empire. For the Byzantines, diplomacy was a form of war by other means.

  The Bureau of Barbarians was the first foreign intelligence agency, gathering information on the empire's rivals from every imaginable source. On the surface it was a protocol office, ensuring foreign envoys were properly housed and funded, and it kept all the official translators. Its security role was unmistakable. The 6th-century text On Strategy advised that envoys be received honorably and generously, while their attendants were kept under surveillance to stop them from gathering information by questioning the locals.

  Relations with the Ottoman Empire, known to Italian states as the Sublime Porte, reshaped the diplomat's very purpose. The maritime republics of Genoa and Venice came to depend less on their ships and more on staying in the Ottomans' good graces. Through contact among merchants, diplomats, and clergymen of the Italian and Ottoman worlds, the diplomat evolved from a mere negotiator into a figure who represented an autonomous state across all political affairs.

• 5. The Italian Invention

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  The first embassies were established in the 13th century in the states of Northern Italy, where early modern diplomacy is often traced. The Republic of Venice, Milan, and Tuscany flourished as centers of the craft from the 14th century onward. It was on the Italian Peninsula that traditions like presenting an ambassador's credentials to the head of state first took hold.

  Milan was the first to send a representative to the court of France, in 1455, yet it refused to host French representatives in return, fearing espionage and meddling in its affairs. As Spain and France grew entangled in Italian politics, the need to accept emissaries became plain. Spain sent the first permanent representative, appointing an ambassador to the Court of St. James's, meaning England, in 1487. By the late 16th century permanent missions were customary. The Holy Roman Emperor stood apart, since permanent legates could not represent the interests of all the German princes.

  French replaced Latin as the language of diplomacy from about 1715. An ambassador was a nobleman whose assigned rank rose with the prestige of his posting. He was expected to keep a large residence, host lavish parties, and play a central part in court life. In Rome, the most prized posting for a Catholic ambassador, the French and Spanish representatives might keep a retinue of up to a hundred. France, with the largest foreign affairs department in Europe, employed only some 70 full-time staff in the 1780s.

• 6. Rank And Precedence

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  Representatives from republics were ranked the lowest, a slight that often angered the leaders of the many German, Scandinavian, and Italian republics. States were normally ranked by the title of their sovereign. For Catholic nations the emissary from the Vatican stood paramount, followed by those from kingdoms, then from duchies and principalities. Settling precedence between two kingdoms hinged on shifting factors and produced near-constant squabbling.

  The French Revolution tore the whole edifice apart. Commoners took over the diplomacy of the French state and of the territories conquered by revolutionary armies, and ranks of precedence were abolished. Napoleon refused to acknowledge diplomatic immunity, imprisoning several British diplomats he accused of scheming against France.

  The Congress of Vienna in 1815 established an international system of diplomatic rank after Napoleon's fall. Disputes over precedence were first addressed at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, but they lingered for more than a century, until after World War II made the rank of ambassador the norm. Diplomats often name a foreign ministry by its address: the Ballhausplatz in Vienna, the Quai d'Orsay in Paris, the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, Itamaraty in Brasilia, and Foggy Bottom in Washington, D.C.

• 7. Immunity And Spies

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  Genghis Khan and the Mongols were known for fiercely insisting on the rights of diplomats, and they would wreak horrific vengeance on any state that violated them. The sanctity of the envoy has long been observed, and killing a diplomat has long been seen as a great breach of honor. The Mongol Empire even created an early diplomatic passport, the paiza, issued in golden, silver, or copper depending on the envoy's importance. It let the bearer demand food, transport, and lodging from any city, village, or clan in the empire.

  The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations formalized rights first established in mid-17th-century Europe. It protects diplomats from being persecuted or prosecuted while on a mission. A diplomat who commits a serious crime may be declared persona non grata, an unwanted person, and is then often tried back home. Diplomatic communications are treated as sacrosanct, carried across borders unsearched in the so-called diplomatic bag or pouch. Some countries, including the United States, declare entire shipping containers as diplomatic pouches to move sensitive material.

  Embassies serve as bases for both diplomats and spies. Military attaches openly learn all they can about the military of their host nation, attending parades and air shows. Deep-cover spies hold fake embassy positions while coordinating spy rings of locals. Their identities are often known to the opposition, and counter-intelligence agencies frequently prefer to keep them in place under close watch. Arms-control treaties, the source notes, would be impossible without reconnaissance satellites and agents to monitor compliance.

• 8. Many Kinds Of Talking

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  The Camp David Accords were convened in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter at Camp David, bringing together Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. After weeks of negotiation the accords were signed, leading directly to the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979. President Theodore Roosevelt earned the Nobel Peace Prize for the Treaty of Portsmouth, after he personally brought Russian and Japanese delegates together to settle the Russo-Japanese War. Much modern arbitration now runs through the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

  Appeasement, the policy of making concessions to an aggressor, lost its standing as a legitimate tool after it failed to prevent World War 2. Gunboat diplomacy uses conspicuous displays of military power to intimidate, as when the United Kingdom blockaded the Greek port of Piraeus in the Don Pacifico Incident of 1850. Debt-trap diplomacy saddles a borrowing nation with enormous debt to gain leverage over it. Hostage diplomacy, the taking of hostages to win diplomatic goals, has been practiced from prehistory to the present.

  Soft power, defined by Joseph Nye and sometimes called hearts and minds diplomacy, draws on a country's culture, political values, and foreign policies. China's use of giant panda bears as a diplomatic gift is known as panda diplomacy. Small states, with equal votes in the UN General Assembly, form coalitions to gain traction on shared concerns like climate change and water security. As digital tools spread, world leaders now reach foreign citizens directly through methods named Facebook diplomacy and Twitter diplomacy, the newest chapter in a craft that began with a folded sheet of paper.