Diplomacy

Diplomacy and Realism

The realist core of orthodox approaches to diplomacy is undisputed and is clearly evident in a number of key features found in this prevailing approach. The most telling is the focus on the sovereign state as the primary unit of analysis in diplomacy such that the study of diplomacy is confined to the study of the process and content of interstate relations—that is, how sovereign states seek to engage with each other. Prevailing models of diplomacy focus almost exclusively on singular state-to-state relations. The orthodoxy defines diplomacy as processes of communication, negotiation, and information sharing among sovereign states. Diplomatic processes revolve around the activities of professional diplomats—that is, officials of foreign ministries and overseas missions. More common, especially in North American scholarship, is the narrower definition of diplomacy as a foreign policy tool of states—that is, diplomacy as statecraft. This more limited definition has led to a great deal of foreign policy analysis passing itself off as diplomatic studies, despite the fact that it does not consider the processes of interstate relations as its main focus. Both definitions, however, share the view that diplomacy has an ordering role to play in the otherwise anarchic and unstable international system of states—a view that has theoretical roots in realism. Successful diplomacy, it is argued, creates a system of states. It constructs balances of power, facilitates hegemonic structures, and fashions post-hegemonic regimes. When diplomacy fails or is absent, conflict and war usually follow. Indeed, it is the very fact of conflict between states (a core realist assumption) that warrants the emergence of diplomatic systems.

...