by Tom Fletcher
Diplomats gradually developed a sense of their own craft. As diplomacy took root as a profession, it was codified, analysed and described, mainly by French diplomats. In 1603, Jean Hotman de Villiers (1552–1632), an Oxford professor who led diplomatic missions for Henri IV, produced a guidebook for ambassadors, De la Charge et Dignité de l’Ambassadeur. Abraham de Wicquefort (1598–1682) was a Dutch envoy and spy who, after playing a central role in producing the Treaty of Westphalia, was found guilty of treason. Imprisoned in the water castle of Loevestein, he wrote the huge L’Ambassadeur et ses Fonctions in 1681. This became the handbook for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century diplomacy, and was based on real-world examples of his craft. Much of it stands the test of the time, including his advice that ambassadors need to combine the theatre of their public role with the discretion and often secrecy of their private negotiations. Loevestein was clearly a good place to think big. Another political prisoner was Hugo Grotius, often seen as the father of modern international law. More notable, for diplomats anyway, he went on to become Swedish ambassador to France. François de Callières (1645–1717), a diplomat for Louis XIV, analysed European diplomacy in his 1716 book De la Manière de Négocier avec les Souverains. He agreed with de Wicquefort that the ambassador had to be a good actor.
Diplomats also needed to stay in closer contact with their capitals. When envoys began to create too much information to pass by hand or official messenger, they instigated a mail service for handwritten correspondence, and a Postal Convention (of 1674) to try to protect confidentiality. Documents began to be transported by the more formal system still in use today, the diplomatic bag. This was meant to guarantee that messages between an embassy and its capital could not be interfered with by the curious or hostile. Naturally, this was usually ignored in the atmosphere of intrigue and mistrust surrounding the wars of religion.
The diplomatic bag still exists virtually unchanged today.
The bag has always been dogged by controversy. It is meant to be sealed and inviolate, but that has rarely been the case. Cardinal Wolsey, an adviser to Henry VIII, was a serial violator of its confidentiality, in order to supervise the intrigues of the increasing number of foreign envoys appointed to London. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, the ambassador Lord Curzon exploded with fury when the Turks searched his bags, ‘and condemned them to a thousand hells of eternal fire’. In 1964, Italian authorities violated an Egyptian bag, having heard moans from inside it, to discover a kidnapped Israeli. In the early twenty-first century, British minister Peter Hain described the violation of the bag by Robert Mugabe’s officials in Zimbabwe as ‘not the actions of a civilised country’. (In fact, opening a diplomatic bag was probably one of the more civilised actions undertaken by Mugabe.) I was involved in another African drama when a diplomatic bag seeping blood was found to be carrying bush meat, meant to arrive in London in advance of the visit of a head of state. He was clearly no fan of British cuisine.
With electronic communications more secure, there can be few items that really require such an elaborate means of despatch. (I suspect the modern diplomatic bag is normally filled with orders of DVD box sets.) The diplomatic bag has an important history. But it can be replaced by an email.
Meanwhile, diplomats from the great European states also developed a continental system of rules and processes to match the new confidence and structures of their states. The Treaty of Westphalia, hammered out in Münster and Osnabrück between the Habsburgs, French, Spanish, Swedish and Dutch in 1648, ended the Thirty Years War and explicitly recognised the existence of separate sovereignties. Diplomats and aristocrats – most were still both – from 140 imperial states took part. The treaty drew the new boundaries of Europe, allowed for freedom of worship, and established the principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other states.
Not everyone was happy with a system that prioritised national over transnational rights, especially those who derived their authority from other sources of power – in full flow, Pope Innocent X called the treaty ‘null, void, iniquitous, invalid, unjust, invaluable, reprobate, damnable, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time’. Diplomacy was never meant to be easy or uncontroversial.
Gradually, like all good bureaucrats, envoys involved in such negotiations built up entourages and embassies. And, to manage the networks of egos and prima donnas, capitals had to expand the foreign ministries from Richelieu’s dingy back offices into grander and more impressive buildings. The beginnings of empire brought their own demands. In 1660, Britain established a Council of Foreign Plantations, which grew in the eighteenth century into the Colonial Office. Ernest Satow’s massive Guide to Diplomatic Practice, first published against the undiplomatic backdrop of 1917, traces the first uses of the word diplomacy to mid-eighteenth-century Vienna, and in England in the 1787 Annual Register. But an English satire, The Chinese Spy, was unimpressed by these stirrings of activity: ‘The diplomatic body, as it is called, was at this ball, but without distinguishing itself to any great advantage.’
Nevertheless, the British Foreign Office was established in 1782, the year that the steam engine was invented, one of the building blocks of the British empire. Charles James Fox, the first Foreign Secretary, was backed up by a staff of twelve: ‘nine male clerks, two chamber keepers and a “necessary woman”’. This is roughly the size of the current Foreign Secretary’s Private Office, although the gender balance is now improved.
Dating from this period, many ministries of foreign affairs insist that formal communication between the ambassador and the host government is by a verbose letter covered in stamps and seals: the note verbale. A typical one might run: ‘The embassy of Tajikistan presents its esteemed compliments to the Foreign Ministry of Mali. The embassy respectfully requests that the ambassador be permitted to park his official vehicle in the main courtyard of the esteemed foreign ministry on his next visit. The embassy of Tajikistan takes this opportunity to share its respect and warmest regards with the distinguished ministry.’
Mostly, a note verbale is these days sent by fax, and therefore disappears without trace. An embassy will normally spend a great deal of time on the telephone, checking whether they have arrived and when a reply is likely. The average embassy is also expected to send such a note when the ambassador leaves the country, even temporarily. Many ambassadors even convey such earth-shattering news to their fellow diplomatic colleagues. In Beirut, I regularly received faxes telling me that ambassadors I had never met would be out of the country for three days.
Clearly this is all bonkers. The note verbale can be replaced by a text message.
The US was not far behind Britain. A Cabinet-level Department of Foreign Affairs was created in 1789 by the First Congress. It was later renamed the Department of State and changed the title of its top job from Secretary for Foreign Affairs to Secretary of State. Thomas Jefferson returned from a France in the grip of revolutionary fervour, where he had planted American sweet potatoes and corn on the Champs-Élysées, to take the position. Jefferson would have been staggered by the pace of modern communication, finding it harder to keep his diplomats on a short leash: ‘For two years we have not heard from our ambassador in Spain; if we again do not hear from him this year, we should write him a letter.’ At this point, the US foreign service had just two diplomatic posts and ten consular posts, so the silence of their envoy to Madrid must have been deafening.*
Gunboat diplomacy could be pretty ambitious, and remained high risk. Not everyone took envoys as seriously as they themselves had started to do. In 1793, Lord George Macartney led a doomed mission of 700 British diplomats and businessmen to try to establish permanent diplomatic relations with the Chinese emperor Qianlong. He failed because Qianlong could not accept the idea of diplomatic relations with a representative rather than the monarch himself. George III’s gifts were accepted merely as tribute, and Macartney was sent home with his tail between his stockinged legs.
Some decided that the whole bu
siness was too fraught with peril to be worthwhile. In his 1796 farewell message, US president George Washington counselled his successors against European entanglements: ‘hence therefore it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships, or enmities. Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course.’ Many current US politicians make the same argument for disengagement and splendid isolation.
Some American diplomats struck out nonetheless. Benjamin Franklin challenged protocol in his own way, shocking contemporary society by being the first diplomat to attend the king without a hat when he was received by Louis XVI at Versailles in 1778. He also invented bifocals in order to lip-read the asides and intrigues of his French interlocutors. But Washington’s instincts about dastardly Europeans were also proved right in 1798, when the French demanded that American diplomats pay huge bribes in order to see their foreign minister. The Americans rejected this preposterous offer, and have been making European statesmen pay ever since.
The French had more success elsewhere. In the eighteenth century, French took over from Latin as the language of diplomacy, a position it held until the Second World War. Much traditional diplomatic language is still in French – for example, démarche, chargé d’affaires and entente. The French also seemed to particularly enjoy the physical trappings of diplomacy more than most. Lord Gower, the British ambassador in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century, lamented the local requirement to bow three times to fellow ambassadors and twice to a chargé d’affaires. (Extraordinarily, in some southern European foreign ministries the practice of bowing to colleagues of ambassadorial rank continues to this day.)
Of course, bureaucracies feed themselves, and foreign ministries gradually expanded their back offices. The Duke of Wellington lamented the consequences. In 1812, while commanding the British army against Napoleon in Spain, he sent an exasperated note, loaded with sarcasm, back to the Foreign Office. It would strike a chord with many modern diplomats:
I have dispatched reports on the character, wit and spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence. Unfortunately the sum of one shilling and nine pence remains unaccounted for in one battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain.
This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstance, since we are at war with France, a fact that may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall.
This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from Her Majesty’s Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties. I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both. Is it 1) To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of accountants and copyboys in London, or perchance 2) To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain?5
The answer from the copyboys is not recorded.
* I recently found letters from my nineteenth-century predecessor in Beirut, George Wood, demonstrating the way that envoys, like Jefferson’s in Madrid, took advantage of this distance from the capital to freelance. Wood consulted his Foreign Secretary about arming the local Druze sect, and had done so with gusto by the time the terse reply reached him telling him not to proceed under any circumstances, so as not to annoy the Turks. By then the 1860 civil war was over. Every modern ambassador to whom I have told this story longs wistfully for the days when diplomacy was less burdened by swift communication with the centre.
3
Diplomacy’s Finest Century
The nation state … is not a quaint and anachronistic holdover but a compromise written in blood that just about managed in the second half of the last century to bind the demons that attend power to a peaceful and progressive policy.
Chris Patten, What Next? Surviving the Twenty-First Century (2008)
Wellington might have been exasperated by the bureaucratic and penny-pinching procedures of the Foreign Service. But the hundred years that followed the Congress of Vienna of 1815, while ending in the diplomatic failure of the First World War, were European diplomacy’s finest century.
Only with the continent at peace could European powers expand their global reach and build their empires. Armies provided the blood that established the era of the nation state. Diplomats provided the compromises. Less of a sacrifice, but no less important.
As ever, technological innovation spurred diplomatic changes. A Frenchman, Claude Chappe, had invented the semaphore in 1791. In 1819, the first steamship crossed the Atlantic. In 1837, Brits William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone invented the telegraph (using just twenty letters, which must have been awkward for diplomats in Quebec or Yugoslavia). All were to play their part in the evolution of statecraft.
This was the period in which the word ‘diplomacy’, from the Greek term for a twice-folded document, began to be used more frequently. This reminds us that there was a sense of purpose to diplomacy. It was not just about a discussion, relationship management or information-gathering, but about an outcome – the ‘diploma’ on which an agreement was written, or what we now often call the ‘deliverable’. Diplomacy had a point.
When backed up by force, diplomacy could deliver even quicker results than in the past – the British government could ‘change the balance of the Eastern question by sending a few frigates to Besika Bay’.1 Foreign Secretary Viscount Palmerston ordered the British fleet to blockade a Greek port in 1850 because a British subject, Don Pacifico, had been insufficiently compensated for his imprisonment. Defending his actions in Parliament, Palmerston claimed that ‘a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong’.2 Modern consular support is less dramatic, and our resources less intimidating, but the principle still applies.
This willingness to project power helped Europe become the centre of international gravity in this period. Diplomatic procedures and standards were developed and exported. Negotiation became more constant, not just based on a division of the spoils after each war. The habits of diplomacy – more frequent conferences and summits, more exchanges of envoys – took root. The great powers used statecraft and diplomatic craft as they jostled for mastery in Europe.
Political change once again increased the need for new rules to govern diplomats and diplomatic interactions. Diplomats started to take themselves even more seriously, and grant themselves new titles.
Diplomacy has retained many of the titles of this era. I frequently observed the frisson which some fellow Ambassadors Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary (to give them their full title, as some prefer to do) felt when addressed as ‘Your Excellency’. Very few who rely so heavily on the title are particularly excellent. Indeed, my standard rule is that the more a colleague tells people of their excellence, the less excellent they are likely to be. When in Downing Street, I dropped the practice of including the full titles of ambassadors (e.g. Sir Crispian Penfold-Thwaite-Penfold GCMG*) on standard records and minutes of meetings, halving the length of the average distribution list but pricking the vanity of some grander and more impressively titled colleagues.
The Civil Service still retains more confusing job titles from the nineteenth century than most. Hence the mix-up over my role as the prime minister’s intimate typist. I once tried to explain the title ‘Permanent Undersecretary’, the head of the Foreign Office, when introducing the last incumbent, Sir Simon Fraser, to a reception in Beirut. It was the least accurate title I could imagine – Simon was neither permanent, nor under anyone, nor indeed a secretary. Increasingly, we will discover that overdoing the title
s acts as a further barrier to communication with those we represent, and therefore to our continued usefulness and relevance.
Once again, Yes, Minister’s Sir Humphrey bursts the balloon when explaining to his new minister the job titles in his ministry: ‘Briefly, sir, I am the Permanent Undersecretary of State, known as the Permanent Secretary. Woolley here is your Principal Private Secretary. I, too, have a Principal Private Secretary, and he is the Principal Private Secretary to the Permanent Secretary. Directly responsible to me are ten Deputy Secretaries, eighty-seven Undersecretaries and two hundred and nineteen assistant secretaries. Directly responsible to the Principal Private Secretaries are Plain Private Secretaries, and the Prime Minister will be appointing two Parliamentary Undersecretaries and you will be appointing your own Parliamentary Private Secretary.’ ‘Can they all type?’ asks his mystified minister. ‘None of us can type, Minister,’ replies Sir Humphrey, ‘Mrs McKay types – she is your secretary.’
The demands of nineteenth-century diplomacy also meant that protocol was further codified, and treaties became longer. Rules were even needed to keep the diplomats apart. Foreign Secretary George Canning duelled with his Cabinet rival Lord Castlereagh in 1809, making today’s National Security Council debates seem somewhat tame. A gifted poet, songwriter and speechwriter, Canning had also shown himself an accomplished warmaker, whose belief that ‘we are hated throughout Europe, and that hate must be cured by fear’ would gladden the hearts of many modern Eurosceptics.3 Napoleon had also been happy to ignore the gentlemanly codes of diplomatic immunity and throw British envoys in jail for espionage. But after his fall, the Congress of Vienna of 1815 established a more robust system, for the first time regulating a profession of diplomacy that was distinct from politics and statecraft.