Should we start with the book dating back to 1917, the diplomatic practice of satow?
satow’s was republished last year by sir ivor roberts, president of trinity college, oxford. It is the only book that explains what diplomacy is and how it is organized around the world, with the United Kingdom at its center. it is a thick book and is full of details and documents about all the world organizations, but it is an extremely interesting account of how diplomacy works and what its machinery does. As a diplomat, I found that people don’t really understand what diplomats do. no joe bloggs sitting in the pub is going to read satow’s diplomatic practice, but if you check it out you’ll find some fascinating glimpses of what really goes on in embassies, in international organisations, in governments when it comes to international relations.
You are reading: Books on diplomacy and international relations
Does the book focus on certain historical incidents or episodes? how is it organized?
follows a fairly standard content list, which was originally drawn up by satow in 1917 and has now been updated. It goes through a history of diplomacy and what diplomacy does and how it deals with politics and power. the book talks about the machinery of diplomatic relations in countries, talks about the technical side of diplomacy and its immunities, the way embassies work in countries. It sets out in considerable detail what international organizations are and how they work.
And the book is still relevant despite being so long ago? Is it relevant in the internet age?
has been updated six times, so this edition is from 2009 and is brand new and absolutely up to date. your question about the relevance of diplomacy is different from the value of satow’s book on diplomacy. satow is explaining how diplomacy works and how diplomats work. what diplomacy achieves and why it is needed is a slightly different question.
let’s move on to kissinger’s diplomacy book and why he chose it.
The importance of kissinger’s book is that it is fundamentally about power. it’s amazing how little people (newspapers, blogs, speeches) talk about power, but power is the raw material at the heart of every political unit. the central unit in international affairs is the national government; In political matters, there is no higher level of decision-making in the world than the national government. everything supranational that happens in the eu, the un and nato is always a grouping of national states. the councils of all these supranational organizations are representatives of the national states. even in the eu, in pillar one, countries can retract, if they really want to, as nation states.
what kissinger does is relate diplomacy to power and relationships between people of power. She does so by describing various stages she has observed in 20th-century American history: how Americans have sought to further their interests and protect their nation and national sovereignty through diplomacy. she discusses the relationship between diplomacy and the use of force and the importance of individual leaders who hold power, speaking in particular about the great power holders of the 20th century: nixon, mao zedong and zhou enlai, reagan, gorbachev . She returns to Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to talk about the collective effort after World War I.
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Is it about realpolitik and your own personal views and experiences or is it trying to be more objective?
kissinger is a great figure of 20th century diplomacy and therefore it is his experience: you are seeing diplomacy through the eyes of a great exponent of diplomatic art. it’s about what happened around him, what happened that he had to try to promote, reorganize, manipulate and direct and how it worked and what the effects were. it is about what he observed other people doing when he was subordinate to them, because he was just a foreign minister, not a head of state. he then recounts his twentieth-century experience and his own diplomatic career with the new world order he sees taking shape in the post-cold war period. he is, above all, the great link between the cold war period and the post-cold war period in terms of the practice of diplomacy and the effect of diplomacy.
Is there a specific point that he makes that really stood out to you, that really rings true?
I think it’s his realpolitik message. You can follow a line of diplomatic principles, as Woodrow Wilson did, and try to create a doctrine for collectivism, but power will always intervene, particularly at the national level, and therefore you must be prepared to create enough power to defend your interests. own interests. against the competition of others. you must be able to conjure, before force is used – through persuasion, words rather than weapons – the attacks that may be on your interests and on your lines of activity. Increasingly, in the post-cold war period, this is manifesting itself in areas such as trade and attention is being paid to the developing world, rather than between the great powers. he is trying to explain how he should adapt in this new era. but this book was published in 1995, and global change eludes it. his example of how you relate power to interests, and how you organize a peaceful structure of international relations around the circumstances of the time, is relevant to his lessons, but more and more the world looks different from the one he was looking at when he wrote the book. the importance of the book is to understand the effect of power and the input of those who understand how to use power.
what about douglas hurd’s book, choose your weapons?
this is a newer book and to some extent is a continuation of kissinger’s theme. in choosing your weapons he refers to the castlereagh-canning duel of the early nineteenth century, which he uses as a symbol of the duel between principles and realpolitik. Castlereagh is the specialist in realpolitik: the Machiavelli, the Metternich, the Kissinger. Canning is the man of principles, the Woodrow Wilson in the plot. Hurd then takes him to the post-millennium era: he must choose whether he thinks principle comes first or circumstances come first. And as always with Douglas Hurd, and that’s the intelligence of the book, he says (or at least implies) that there doesn’t need to be a hard choice between those two; there is a balance you can achieve. both are important: if you do one without the other, you’ll make serious mistakes, but if you understand the nature of the power of principle and the power of events and relate the two, and keep the two in touch with each other, I’ll come out with a sensible set of policies, and you will be able to implement those policies in the real world without falling off the cliff. So what he’s really saying in choosing your weapons is that you can choose which side of the field you come from, but if you’re sensible, whichever side of the field you come from, you’ll end up in the same place – sensible politics.
one of the amazon reviews said it was a complete turn of the page. is it a very interesting read?
It’s not a dramatic reading, because he’s not that kind of writer, but as a writer of novels he has a good ear for anecdotes. he tells many charming stories in the diplomatic arena. the clarity of what he is saying comes through especially strongly at the end.
your next pick is thomas ricks book on iraq, fiasco.
because iraq was the pivotal event at the end of my career, and because my name is connected in people’s minds, at least in recent memory, with iraq, both at the un and in baghdad, i thought it was right to put on my list a book that tries to explain why iraq went wrong, particularly after the invasion. yes, there were a large number of people who were very angry about the principle of going to war in iraq – but, really, if iraq had been well managed after the invasion, and it was clear that the state of iraq and the people’s lives were improving as a result of what we had done, much would have been forgiven around the decision to go to war with or without the necessary legitimacy. I chose the book by Thomas Ricks because it is an anecdotal book without prejudice. It consists primarily of interviews with soldiers and civilians working on the ground in Iraq, members of the US and Iraqi armed forces, members of the Coalition Interim Authority. As these interviews and anecdotes accumulate, the book shows how difficult it was for people on the ground trying to make sense of the iraq mission they had been given when their directors at home didn’t seem to understand the mission or dedicate the adequate resources for it. o Fix early mistakes early enough so they don’t become existential mistakes for the Iraq mission. You get a better and more accurate picture of that fiasco thing than you get from any other book written within five years of the invasion in 2003. That’s why I invite people to read it: to try to understand what happened. many of them illustrate error rather than conspiracy theory: people don’t mean to make mistakes, they want to do it right, a lot of people strive to do the right thing in the work they’ve done. assigned, but the macro picture, the big mission concept, the resources in men and dollars that are assigned to it, and the international and regional structure, for what is supposed to be done, just have not been set up in the right way to allow the micro-effort of all these individuals, to come together in one success. that’s a great lesson. the mission was set up incorrectly and the resources were allocated incorrectly. and the magnificent work that was done was largely wasted, and lives with it, both the lives of Iraqis and outsiders.
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his feeling is that it was not a mistake to go to iraq; the mistake was what happened next, what is this book describing?
I think the legal grounds were thin, but almost bearable, but the political legitimacy (the degree of support we had internationally) was not broad enough to give us the feeling that we were doing something on behalf of a community. broader and thus lost legitimacy, which was a mistake that mattered more to the UK than to the US. but the planning and execution of the post-invasion phase could have been done much more effectively. we could have had a chance to succeed in iraq at a much earlier stage than now. what has happened is that the political process has held up well in iraq, but the security and economic and social development of iraq have been too slow. and that in itself has security consequences, and it will have political consequences… we still don’t know if iraq will be a success story within the post-invasion generation or not. it takes so long to change a country; the same is true for afghanistan and any other country we try to fix.
finally, david hannay’s new world mess.
This is a book about the UN, which is the only diplomatic mission where I still speak a lot, and retirement diplomacy. I chose this to give the general reader an idea of what the UN is like after the cold war. david hannay stepped down as the uk’s ambassador to the un in 1995, but has remained closely associated with it ever since, both on the cyprus issue, as president of the united nations association in the uk, and as member of kofi annan high level panel on threats, challenges and changes.
hannay tries to explain what the UN is doing right and what it is doing wrong. It tries, I think successfully, to keep people’s morale high about the fundamental usefulness of the UN, if we understand what its limitations are and what the limitations of governments are in their use of the UN. Because the UN is an intergovernmental organization, not a separate agency that governments can turn to to fix the china when they’ve broken it.
the un and governments are the same agency, in the political and intergovernmental arena. The UN also has a secretariat and many funded agencies and programs that do magnificent work: setting standards, depositing treaties, maintaining international agreements on all sorts of things: aviation, shipping, trade unions, the mail system. many international things happen without you or me knowing about them, or understanding the way states work together in all their machinery. david hannay highlights this and reminds us that we have reached a higher level of collectivism in this age of humanity, the post-cold war era, than ever before, but there are still major flaws in the ability of our international institutions to deal with to all our problems without reform.
so are you advocating change at the un or are you saying it will always be flawed by definition, because it’s all these different countries working together?
In effect, he is pointing out what opportunities have been lost since the end of the cold war to make the UN a more useful forum and structure. it illustrates this by showing how the world moved from the cold war era to the post-cold war era, and how governments failed to realize that they had to go the extra mile to take over the multinational machine. you can see that on climate change now, after copenhagen, that’s a continuation of what david hannay says. nation states and governments themselves are not investing enough in the multilateral machinery to ensure that there is lubrication for world peace and security and world relations and economic exchange in the future. So there is, to some extent, a pessimistic message there: we could have done well, we didn’t do well, there are things we need to do, if we don’t do them, we may be headed for more trouble. that’s the general message.
You alluded to it earlier, but do you want to add anything about the relevance of diplomacy in the modern age?
yes i do, because i think the uk is underinvesting in diplomacy and as a result is much more likely to need its armed forces, which are also shrinking in number at the moment. a vacuum is opening up in our ability to protect our own interests and our own affairs as the uk, because we are not investing enough in a practice, a profession, a mechanism, that is still as valuable as ever. , whatever forms or channels you use. because power always has to be negotiated between the centers of power, to avoid wars and to reach agreements and compromises, preferably in a constructive way instead of zero sum. And it’s the judgments, the negotiation skills, the understanding, the analysis that you get from your diplomatic service as a government that makes it possible. you cannot get that degree of quality from the internet or from the media, from the private citizen or from the business sector. there are skills of judgment and action involved in experienced diplomacy that you can’t get anywhere else, and those remain as necessary in the modern world as they ever were.
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