My understanding of the diplomacy today.

Generally speaking my understanding of diplomacy changed completely since I started attending this module. I have never actually been thinking about the role of diplomacy in a world of modern politics before – I just had a very imprecise idea about it. I thought that it is secretive and is very needed because diplomats have a big influence on international political decisions. My first impressions about the new diplomacy were as well quite different at the beginning than they are now.

In the first place I thought that the main trait of the new diplomacy was that it rejected all of the means worked out through the decades by the traditional diplomacy. In fact all of the old ways have been improved and combined with the new things. For example the most traditional bilateral diplomacy didn’t fade away with an appearance of multilateral conferences.

My second impression about the new diplomacy was that it is designed to maintain world peace and solve international problems. In fact I realised that the main diplomatic actors – states try usually and mainly to achieve their goals and improve their national image. As a contrary a lot of others actors appeared. They took a role of taking care of internationally important issues. Different kinds of NGOs created hundreds of experts on different areas of international political life.

As a result of attending The New Diplomacy classes I understood that new diplomacy is very complex. It appears in different areas of political world and it’s used in a lot of aspects. The good example is public diplomacy or trade diplomacy.

I was expecting to gain knowledge about how current problems and conflicts aroused. It was true because during the seminars we discussed as well about what’s happening now. Contribution of other students helped me a lot and because of them I got interested in many new things. It was very helpful that all of us are from different parts of the world because we had different points of view about one issue.

In fact working in diplomacy seemed to me a prestigious job with only a lot of benefits. Because of things that I learned during this semester I have better outlook on a work of a diplomat. It has a lot of disadvantages as well. Nowadays the majority of decisions affecting international politics is made on high-level summits of states’ officials. Diplomats are becoming less and less important because of the appearance of NGOs and other non-state actors. The case of WikiLeaks shows that their work is just doing what government tells them to. And due to ICT revolution they’re on ‘the leash’ all the time.

In my opinion role of diplomacy is fading away. It might develop into a new system of running world politics based on NGOs and high-rank state officials with no need of embassies and ambassadors anymore. It could become more and more globalised and modernised. Of course states would still need consulates to deal with their citizens’ problems abroad but only to practical purposes. I hope that I’m wrong because I quite like the idea of professional diplomats.