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Foreword
- Geoff Heriot
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- Book:
- International Broadcasting and Its Contested Role in Australian Statecraft
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 15 November 2023
- Print publication:
- 14 March 2023, pp ix-xii
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Summary
Since the end of the Cold War, few foreign-policy concepts have drawn as much attention as soft power – the ability to influence the behaviour of others through the power of culture, political ideals and sound foreign policies. The normative underpinning was that a soft power–minded foreign policy could strengthen a country’s reputation and hence its ability to shape and influence its international environment. When Joseph Nye Jr. published Bound to Lead in 1990, coining the soft-power term as a conceptual rebuttal to Paul Kennedy’s American-decline thesis in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, he could hardly have predicted the worldwide scholarly and policy debates that it has generated in the decades since. Nye himself has been an active and generous participant in those debates, engaging his critics – from leading scholars and practitioners to students at the School of Marxism at Peking University – with several books and many articles. Geoff Heriot joins these debates at an auspicious time.
In its simplest and most intuitive form, soft power is the opposite of hard power, the latter usually associated with the use or threatened use of military force and coercive economic measures. A key question of the many that were raised in both policy and scholarly debates was how to find a balance between hard and soft power. A conceptual compromise was developed as smart power, devised and promoted in a 2007 independent commission report co-authored by Nye under the auspices of the influential Washington DC-based Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS). Smart power was seen as ‘the successful combination of hard and soft power resources into effective strategy’. For Nye, smart power, more so than soft power, ‘was deliberately prescriptive rather than just analytical’.
The smart power term was subsequently used by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the Obama administration and in many other countries as well, tellingly in China. If a weakness of soft power was its perception as a blunt instrument largely out of reach from governmental facilitation in democracies, then smart power honed it. This refinement allowed for a more judicious balance between ‘measured national self-interest’ (to paraphrase Princeton University’s John Ikenberry) and ‘good international citizenship’ (in the words of former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans).
20 - Diplomacy
- from Part III - The traditional agenda: States, war and law
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- By Geoffrey Wiseman, Professor and the Director of the Asia Pacific College of Diplomacy at the Australian National University, Paul Sharp, Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
- Edited by Richard Devetak, University of Queensland, Jim George, Australian National University, Canberra, Sarah Percy, University of Queensland
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- Book:
- An Introduction to International Relations
- Published online:
- 21 June 2018
- Print publication:
- 11 September 2017, pp 296-308
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter makes three main arguments. First, ideas and practices of diplomacy have a multi-millennial history – much longer than is generally thought. Second, this long history has been characterised by both continuity and change. As a result, diplomacy has been as much adaptive as resistant to change. Third, diplomacy is not diminishing in importance and both it and the diplomats who carry it out should be regarded as evolving and as important to the theory and practice of international relations. To assess these claims, the chapter first addresses the issue of defining diplomacy, before examining the evolution of diplomacy in terms that may be characterised broadly as pre-modern, modern and postmodern. The relationship between diplomacy and the study of international relations (IR) is then evaluated.
BOX 20.1: TERMINOLOGY
Some definitions of diplomacy
Diplomacy is the application of intelligence and tact to the conduct of official relations between the governments of independent states, extending sometimes also to their relations with vassal states; or, more briefly still, the conduct of business between states by peaceful means. (Satow 1979 [1917]: 1)
Diplomacy is the management of international relations by negotiation; the method by which these relations are adjusted and managed by ambassadors and envoys; the business or art of the diplomatist. (Harold Nicolson 1969 [1939]: 4–5)
[Diplomacy is] the conduct of relations between states and other entities with standing in world politics by official agents and by peaceful means. (Bull 1977: 162)
Diplomacy is concerned with the management of relations between states and other actors. From a state perspective diplomacy is concerned with advising, shaping and implementing foreign policy. (Barston 1988: 1)
Diplomacy is the conduct of international relations by negotiation rather than by force, propaganda, or recourse to law, and by other peaceful means (such as gathering information or engendering goodwill) which are either directly or indirectly designed to promote negotiation. (Berridge 2015: 1)
Diplomacy is the peaceful conduct of relations amongst political entities, their principals and accredited agents. (Hamilton and Langhorne 2011: 1)
Diplomacy is conventionally said to refer to the processes and institutions by which states [and others with standing] represent themselves and their interests in the conduct of their relations with one another. (Sharp 2019: 1)
18 - Diplomacy
- from 2 - The Traditional Agenda
- Edited by Richard Devetak, University of Queensland, Anthony Burke, Jim George, Australian National University, Canberra
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- Book:
- An Introduction to International Relations
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 17 October 2011, pp 256-267
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter makes three main arguments: first, that ideas and practices of diplomacy have a multi-millennial history, much longer than is generally thought. Second, that this long history has been characterised by both continuity and change. As a result, diplomacy has been as much adaptive as resistant to change. And, third, that diplomacy is not diminishing in importance and that it – and the diplomats who carry it out – should be regarded as evolving and as important to the theory and practice of international relations. To assess these claims, the chapter first addresses the issue of defining diplomacy, then it examines the evolution of diplomacy in terms that may be characterised broadly as pre-modern, modern, and postmodern, and finally the chapter evaluates the relationship between diplomacy and the study of International Relations (IR).
Defining diplomacy: what is diplomacy and who are the diplomats?
Diplomacy is conventionally understood as the processes and institutions by which the interests and identities of sovereign states are represented to one another. Diplomats are understood to be people accredited by those they represent to undertake this work. We should be careful with definitions, however (see Box 18.1 for examples). They clarify the ways in which people use a term; they do not capture its true meaning, if there is such a thing, or its best use. Thus, some definitions of diplomacy emphasise a particular diplomatic activity: for example, negotiation (Nicolson [1939] 1969). Others stress the manner in which the activity should be undertaken: for example, with honesty, tact and understanding (Callières [1717] 2000; Satow [1917] 1979) or peacefully (Berridge 2010). Still others pay attention to who is entitled to undertake it and on behalf of whom – claiming, for example, that only the official representatives of sovereign states and international organisations may be properly viewed as engaging in diplomacy (Vienna Convention 1961). Rather than trying to pin down the best definitions of diplomacy and diplomats, therefore, it is more interesting to chart how and why the popularity and use of different ones changed over time and from place to place. Why, for example, did Edmund Burke feel the need in 1797 to anglicise the French term diplomatie (E. Burke [1797] 1899: 450)? Why, in America, is the distinction between diplomacy and foreign policy less acknowledged than in Europe (Kissinger 1994, David Clinton 2011)? And why, nearly everywhere, do people now seek to broaden the use of the term and call a wide range of humanitarian, cultural and commercial activities diplomacy, and whoever undertakes them diplomats (Leonard and Alakeson 2000)?
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