At the beginning of this semester I was extremely excited about this module for I have been fantasizing about a possible career in the diplomatic service for a little while now – without having a perfectly clear idea of what this would actually entail nowadays.
In my ‘first impressions’ I suspected we would be dealing with the shift from ‘high’ to ‘low’ politics to address the multitude of tasks diplomats are facing these days and had a general idea that there was an ‘old’ diplomacy (a mean history teacher had once given me the horrendous task of writing an essay about the diplomacy of Fürst Metternich from Austria and what Woodrow Wilson would have thought about it) which had mainly been conducted in secrecy and that in recent years there had been a challenge to that. Of what exactly this new diplomacy consisted I didn’t know.
Over the course of this module I did not only learn how this change from matters of war and peace to an agenda so diverse that diplomats need to be dossier agents and not the generalists of former times came to be, I also learned that the challenge to ‘old’ diplomacy was much less recent than I had believed. I also began to grasp what this new diplomacy really is.
I learned about the new openness and inclusiveness and para-diplomats and how the involvement of new non-state actors from all sides of the political spectrum, plus some well-know actors, like heads of state, in new roles, had changed the face of diplomacy – beyond recognition, some claim. Others, I found out, conservatives like Berridge, who became my diplomacy guru, are much more critical and don’t see these novelties as a radical changes but rather as just another step in a long evolutionary process.
This debate followed through the whole module: was the new actually that new? And did it make the old obsolete? I learned about the traditional institutions, first and foremost embassies, and was surprised by their flexibility and ability to retain their relevance. The two visits were especially insightful and awakened my interest in the question why bilateralism was still so relevant even though multilateralism and summitry seemed to be very compelling alternatives.
I was intrigued by the discussion of propaganda vs public diplomacy which helped me to understand a whole variety of issues such as why Obama went to the trouble of addressing the Iranian people personally in a video message or why the German government sees the need to spend so much money on the Goethe Institute to promote its image abroad.
Then, fantastically, Wikileaks happened. While surely being embarrassing for the US and possibly unbalancing some established relationships of trust which are so important for diplomacy, it was an amazingly interesting event to follow and comment on, evaluating it against the backdrop of everything that we have learned in this module.
All those things and many more which I gained knowledge of from the lectures, seminars and all the books and articles (some of which were truly eye-opening!), fortified and supported my belief that diplomacy, regardless of if we call it old or new, is one of the fundamental pillars of world politics. Even if diplomatic channels are sometimes ignored when a nation decides to act unilaterally, the variety of issues which are nowadays found on the agendas of a diplomat make apparent the fact the diplomacy permeates every aspect of political life.
The most important thing for me, personally, is that, at the end of this module I am still as excited about diplomacy as I was before but so much more well informed. My understanding of diplomacy has not fundamentally changed, but has deepened and broadened. And most important: It has left me with a lot of hope! While getting into the classical diplomatic service is a threateningly difficult task, this module has showed me that there are so many other actors actively and meaningfully involved in diplomacy, that I only now realized the variety of possibilities open to me and everyone else interested in diplomacy! Thanks, new inclusive diplomacy!
PS: I would like to end on a humorous revelation about corridor diplomacy Wikileaks has failed to reveal:
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