By Victor Topouria, Managing Partner

A triumph for diplomacy

The apotheosis of the post-World War II international order was the diplomatic summitry between the United States and Soviet Union in the late 1980s, which ended the Cold War and the nuclear arms race that had overshadowed global politics during the previous 45 years. This was the culmination of a slow post-traumatic process by which diplomacy (as opposed to war) regained broad acceptance as the primary institution for the construction of the global order and brought about a period of (relative) peace and stability under the American-led unipolar order. The triumph of diplomacy was not only exemplified by successful bilateralism between two great powers but also the inclusion of virtually all nation-states as members of multilateral institutional frameworks, chief amongst them being the United Nations. The fruits of this triumph were further harvested following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which ushered in a period of rapid expansion of international society through the integration of Eastern European states into the EU and NATO, as well as further integration of non-Western countries into the global economy. The diplomacy involved in constructing this international order both gives credence to and provides historical material for the English School of international relations, the principles of which will help inform our understanding about the theory and practice of diplomacy as the creative art of global ‘order-making’.

Navigating the middle road

In the English School’s view, diplomacy is the institution that elevates the ‘anarchical’ world that is determined purely by the material power of states (the realist view) to a world that is fundamentally social, that is, constructed by the interests- and values-based interactions between states. This understanding helps us bridge the gap between practical demands and moral claims in international relations. By employing diplomacy as the vehicle that enables us to navigate this ‘middle road’, we may reconcile material considerations—physical size, geographic location, military strength, and financial resources—with moral considerations, such as protection for the weak, self-determination for small states, human rights, civil liberties, social justice, etc. Thus, diplomacy serves a ‘civilizing’ function, in the sense that it provides an avenue for great powers to conduct business without the use of violence and war, while at the same time allowing weaker states to exercise influence that is disproportionate to their material power.

It is a highly limited and cynical worldview that attributes political agency solely to the materially powerful and claims that ‘might is right’. This type of deterministic view renders humans as passive objects of the world and robs most people (and states) of their agency in shaping the environment around them, thus implicitly reinforcing the flaws and injustices that characterize the status quo power structure. On the opposite side, it is an equally limited and fallacious worldview that entirely rebukes power politics on the grounds of morality, especially if this view is rooted in the misguided feeling that the weak and oppressed hold the moral high ground over those who are strong and dominant. Even more dangerous is the conviction that, in history, moral positions will inevitably triumph over amoral ones. Such ‘progressive’ worldviews tend to breed highly imperfect theories, dogmas, and ideologies for overcoming those injustices. Such attitudes also rob people of their agency by removing their grounding in objective reality in a way that turns them into instruments of a particular ideology. Diplomacy, both in form and content, serves the essential function of mediator between these extreme worldviews and thus becomes a mechanism through which ‘the truth in the middle’ is allowed to emerge organically, over time and over practice. As Aristotle famously said, ‘virtue is the mean between two vices’.

Perspectives on what actually constitutes diplomacy are wide-ranging and difficult to pin down. At the broadest institutional level, Hedley Bull defines diplomacy as ‘the conduct of relations between states and other entities with standing in world politics by official agents and by peaceful means’. For most practical purposes, this definition is satisfactory as it is limited enough to allow researchers to focus on the study of official communications and interactions between states—the fundamental political units of international relations—while at the same time, it is broad enough to allow for the flexibility necessary for qualitative studies that allow theories to emerge organically, taking scholars on a bottom-up journey from the concrete to the abstract, as opposed to the reverse method of imposing theoretical abstractions onto concrete realities. This historically ‘grounded’ approach is one of the key differentiators of the English School from other theoretical schools in international relations.

A Christian ethic

Interestingly, the underlying assumption of this methodology is the essentially Christian notion of the imperfect and imperfectible nature of material human existence. This was explicitly articulated by the School’s founding scholars, the historians Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight—both were Christians in the Augustinian tradition who subscribed to the primacy of sin in human affairs and rejected the progressive doctrine about the perfectibility of humankind. But, prior to exploring the implications of Christian theology on the study of diplomacy and international order more broadly, it is important to briefly address the issue of religious influence on historical scholarship. Awareness of such influences could make any critical reader suspicious of a scholar’s biases and the rigors of his method, or even dismiss his work on the grounds that a ‘Christian approach’ will inevitably slide into moralistic interpretations and present a highly skewed version of reality.

However, Butterfield’s earliest historiographical writings give a very different view. He himself scolds the tendency of Protestant, progressive, and Whig historians to pass moral judgements on the events of the past and to interpret history as a deterministic march toward the present, supposedly morally superior state. He rejects their idea that history is ‘the study of origins’ of events, as this implies a teleological direction toward those events. Such an approach tempts historians into imposing meaning onto history in hindsight and ultimately projecting this meaning into the future by formulating misguided progressive theories of a utopian historical ends, which runs contrary to the Augustinian view that the greatest sin is committed when people think they can establish heaven on earth—equivalent to trying to take the place of God. The implication is that, even if history indeed has a ‘meaning’, it is beyond the capacity of the flawed human mind to grasp that meaning. Any attempts to do so are not only futile but also hubristic, and will always produce dangerous and destructive outcomes. From Bolshevism to Nazism, the twentieth century saw the culmination of such intellectual hubris in their most disastrous forms.

Analytical humility

To contextualize our thinking within a broader intellectual history, it is worth noting that an important prelude to the English School was the development of analytical philosophy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In contrast to the ‘subjective’ and ‘inward’ tradition of German continental philosophy, analytical philosophy put forth a more rigorous methodology for approaching philosophical problems, at the core of which was the analysis of the language and the terms in which those philosophical problems are expressed. The essence of analytical philosophy is captured by Wittgenstein’s milestone work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which opens with the following proposition and is then broken down into its sub-arguments hierarchically:

‘1. The world is everything that is the case.
‘1.1. The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
‘1.11. The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.
‘1.12. For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
‘1.13. The facts in logical space are the world.’

In the face of this reasoning, a scholar or theoretician who seeks to understand the world in its completeness (and thus formulate a perfect model for it) is rendered impotent due to the impossibility of analyzing the totality of facts by which the world is determined. The only choices he is left with are to either 1) ignore this reality and go about the task of analyzing data and formulating universal theories that will forever remain flawed, or 2) take the position of humility, acknowledge his limits in the face of infinite knowledge and abandon the impulse for perfect understanding in favor of a methodical approach that seeks to uncover the truth as it existed in a particular place, at a particular time, and among particular individuals. This means studying ‘the past for the sake of the past’, not for the sake of the present—that is, looking at historical events in the terms by which the historical actors conceived of them.

What is elegant and counterintuitive about this interpretative method is that, by foregoing the dispensation of moral judgements from the present, the form of the ‘good’ emerges from history organically. This is because, along with the primacy of sin, the traditional Christian view acknowledges the primacy of grace in human affairs. Thus, what becomes evident from Butterfield’s work is that the Christian ethic governs more the form and the method of historical interpretation rather than its content and its judgements. Thus, morality is not imposed onto history artificially, but instead, human grace emerges from the grounded study of social interactions in history. By these measures, international society organically establishes itself as a moral phenomenon through intersubjective mediations by states that inhabit an anarchical and amoral material world—that is, the manifestation of grace given the condition of sin. Diplomacy is the self-reinforcing mechanism through which this social international order is constructed and maintained.

Diplomacy as spiritual labour

The Christian ethic discussed so far is not limited to the historiographic study of diplomatic patterns. It is also useful in identifying both the professional nature and the normative ideals of diplomatic practice. The Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili identifies the exertion of ‘concentration’ and ‘effort’ as the bridge between subjective experiences and their objective manifestations. In this regard, an individual who practices a labour, a craft, or a profession is engaging in the act of taking her metaphysical essence and bringing it into the empirical realm. He refers to this act as the phenomenology of the ‘event’—the experience of which elevates a person from living in nature to living in history. By the same measure, such effort delivers man from living in a deterministic world of material power to living in a consciously-constructed society. Engaging in speech and communication with other individuals is one important form of this ‘effort’, and doing so in an official capacity in the conduct of international relations is the task of diplomacy. Thus, the professional practice of diplomacy lends itself to the label of ‘craft’ that Mamardashvili talks about. When viewed through the parameters of the ‘phenomenology of the event’, diplomacy takes on the dimension of a spiritual labour, and thus, when an individual merges herself with the labour of diplomacy, she is not only engaging in a creative pursuit by participating in the construction of the world order, but also in one that is essentially Christian in its form (although not always in content—for example, if you’re a ‘diplomat’ representing the Russian state apparatus).

The normative ideals of diplomatic conduct that have emerged through diplomatic practice and tradition are also reflective of this essence. Of course, the diplomatist’s fundamental role as messenger is evocative of the role of Christ as prophet. But beyond that, the values that have become organically entrenched in the conduct of diplomacy directly reflects those preached in Christianity—moderation, humility, restraint, respect, and charity. Again, these are ideals imposed neither by theology nor theory, but rather those that emerge organically from a social reality where human interests, life experiences, and fundamental assumptions diverge and where misunderstandings are common. In order to conduct business of international relations without resorting to violence and war, the values listed above are not only preferable but absolutely indispensable.

Again, the nature of international order is fundamentally incompatible with rigid structuralist conceptions or any meanings that are imposed top-down. International order emerges out of an ancient and inscrutable history that is deeply interconnected, intersubjective and mutable. Thus, the conduct of diplomacy, that is the negotiation of agreement by peaceful means toward the active construction of the international order, demands an appropriate level of flexibility on part of the diplomatist. As far back as 1716, the Francois de Calliers distinguished the ‘negotiator’ as a profession onto itself and argues that diplomatists should never be drawn from ecclesiastical, military, or legal professions largely due to the rigidity and inflexibility of those fields.

Enemies of diplomacy

English School scholars refer to diplomacy as ‘the master institution of international society’, but to understand its primacy, we must also look at the repeated attempts to subvert the institution. Even if it is conceived in Christian terms, diplomacy often draws scathing criticism on the grounds that its practitioners often condone and engage in cold pragmatism, moral flexibility, or even outright dishonesty in pursuit of their interests. These criticisms are usually directed from highly dogmatic positions where a person views his own ideology as the only ‘truth’ and is therefore intolerant of what he perceives to be the diplomatist’s impurity of spirit, weakness of conviction, and fluidity of loyalties—whether they be political, religious, national, ethnic, or other loyalties. Agents who are most hostile toward the institution of diplomacy are those with revolutionary dispositions, and they are most likely to use ‘diplomat’ as a term of derision. For example, Leon Trotsky viewed traditional diplomatists as aristocrats who had their own interests beyond those of the nation and as having a separate society of their own parallel to the international society. His other objections were to the secrecy by means of which they conduct business and their susceptibility to contamination and compromise by foreigners with different ideologies. And even though he served as the first Secretary of State of the U.S., Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward diplomats was not much different,

The underlying trait of all revolutions—from the English (1688) to American (1776) to French (1789) to Russian (1917) to Chinese (1949) to Iranian (1979)—is a revisionist disposition toward the international order, which is a byproduct of what the revolutionaries perceive to be their providential mission of globally exporting and universalizing their own revolutionary ideologies. (This does not mean, however, that there is moral equivalency amongst them). These efforts always begin with attempts to subvert and undermine the ‘corrupt’ or ‘impure’ institution of diplomacy that creates obstacles for implementing the revolutionary mandate. However, history has repeatedly shown that such attempts ultimately end up being futile, or even backfiring, and revolutionary states, time and time again, have been forced not only to make peace with the primacy of diplomacy in international politics, but also to develop and master the art of diplomacy so that they are better able to construct the world according to their own vision. The aggregate of all these competing visions and diplomatic mediations throughout history amounts to an image of the global order as a collectively-created, living piece of art that is always changing and is never complete, but also ingrained with deeply layered themes that, taken together, reveal the true meaning of human history.

Sounds almost romantic, until you remember all the nukes.