Diplomacy then and now

Traditionally, diplomacy has been seen as an ‘application of intelligence and tact to conduct official relations between governments of independent states; or, more briefly still, the conduct of business between states by peaceful means’ (Satow et al, 1995: 3). ‘Together with the balance of power, which it both reflects and reinforces, diplomacy is the most important institution of our society of states’ (Berridge, 2015: 1).

The roots of diplomacy can be traced as far back as the 15th century BC (Potemkin, 1947), but like any other human activity, the content of diplomacy changes over time. It is determined by the given situation at a certain point of history (Benko, 1997: 256). So, for example, in a 1945 article published in Foreign Affairs, Andre Geraud found the system of alliances as obsolete – as a kind of ‘old’ diplomacy. For him, the collective security introduced by the League of Nations represented an entirely new context, in which multilateralism played a bigger role than in the past, hence the dawn of the ‘new’ diplomacy as he has called it (Geraud, 1945: 256). In the new global order, emerging after the end of the World War Two, the term diplomacy has been given new meanings and interpretations to reflect changes in the conduct of international politics. This is how we can explain the modern interpretation of the term conference diplomacy. Kaufmann defines it as a ‘part of the management of relations between governments and of relations between governments and inter-governmental organizations that takes place in international conferences’ (Kaufmann, 1996: 7). Changes caused by globalization have demonstrated that classic, state-to-state diplomacy cannot always equally address all walks of international life. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) feature ever more prominently in international negotiations, for example in the field of environmental protection, which has led authors to introduce NGO diplomacy as a research field (Betsill and Corell, 2008).

Studies of diplomacy in which not just states but other actors may be involved are many. Human rights diplomacy, for example, is defined as the ‘utilization of diplomatic negotiation and persuasion for the specific purpose of promoting and protecting human rights’ (O’Flaherty et al, 2011: 1).