In defence of diplomacy
PERSONAL COLUMN
.J. H. PLUMB Mobs of blood-hungry students surge through embassy gardens, tear down flags, break win- dows, push into the embassy itself and insult the ambassador and his staff with impunity. Consular officers are daubed with glue and feathers: others spat on and reviled. The Chinese may have set new standards for con- tempt of ambassadors, but western diplomats do little better throughout the Middle East and Africa and indignities also occur in Mos- cow, Paris and London. Indeed, the am- bassador has become a target for abuse. Not long ago nations would have gone to war for such affronts offered to their sovereign's representatives.
The power of diplomats has, of course, been fading for decades. The growth of mod- em communications, first the steamship, rail- way and telegraph, and recently jets, telephones and radio, has deeply undermined their pur- pose and usefulness. Ambassadors are the shadow of what they were and embassies now are little more than centres for propaganda and intelligence. To some it might seem that the world would be healthier if ambassadors and their immunities were abolished. How the mighty have fallen!
Just about 200 years ago, when ambassa- dors were at the height of their powers, they met in solemn conclave to settle the problems of Europe once and for all. As their coaches rattled down the long roads to Cambrai, dash- ing horsemen in brilliant liveries led their cavalcades: fanfares of trumpets greeted their entrance to towns : mayors and aldermen turned up to meet them and waited humbly in the drenching rain, expecting nothing but a lofty greeting and a word of praise for the munificent hospitality that they dispensed. It was as if the kings and emperors themselves were passing by.
At Cambrai two years were spent in the examination and acceptance of credentials. Most of this time was taken up with the in- finitely thorny question as to whether the Holy Roman Emperor could possibly address, through his ambassador, the King of Sardinia as 'Good Brother.' Problems equally grave be.- set them on all sides—could the Papal repre- sentative be a member of the Congress or act merely as an observer? Which ambassador had precedence—England's, France's, or Spain's? Their excellencies whiled away the weeks and months with gigantic banquets whose magnificence became a matter of national honour. The English ambassador's health broke down under the strain and he was forced to request a separate table at hi§ rivals' dinners so that he could keep to his diet. Even when precedence was settled, business moved at a snail's pace—trivialities such as the ownership of two decrepit palaces in Rome kept them busy as one winter followed another.
Only modern disarmament conferences are in this grand old tradition of diplomatic activity.. But there was this difference: slow though it might be, the Conference of Cambrai did settle some issues and settle them permanently/ Even so, the mechanics of the Congress were worthy of the satire of a Swift—who could doff hats, who could sit on a stool,' whose consul should go first. National pride, it might seem, was carried to the point of lunacy. One might, indeed, be tempted to regard ambassadors as a gigantic and expensive fraud: men who achieved nothing, who neither stopped war nor made peace. But surely war settles issues. It stopped Louis XIV, Napoleon and Hitler. Where would diplomacy have left Israel? A sharp blow in Sinai is worth years of talk. Diplomacy is dead, even if it was ever alive. Even the very mention of a dialogue for peace leads to a cry of the old shibboleth 'appeasement.' Nowadays diplomacy is the double-talk of the weak. Action alone speaks strength.
And yet in the light of the past how erro- neous all this is! There is a great necessity to think clearly and historically about the diplo- matic history even of the last fifty years; to separate out real problems from the Nazi method of dealing with them. The question, for example, of Sudeten Germans was not ®s matter merely of propaganda or even agita- tion. They existed, and their plight required discussion. Or take even the Nazi Anschluss with Austria. There was, and is, an obvious economic and cultural case for Austro-German unity. The problem lay not so much in what was discussed, nor even in the diplomatic discussions themselves, but with whom they were held. Diplomatic action became appease- ment because of Hitler's ideology: his appall- ing racial theory, his irrationality, his aggres- sive nationalism and his utter refusal to accept the results of any diplomatic decision. Merely because of Hitler it is absurd to dismiss all negotiations, all diplomatic bargaining as a meaningless exercise that can only weaken one side and strengthen the other. Instead of diplomatic failures, let us consider some of its greater successes.
Europe has experienced aggression and war far more than any other continent. It has been torn by ideological strife to a degree unknown elsewhere in the world. And it was these con- ditions—war, aggression, ideological con- flict—which gave rise to the ambassador and all his works. And these men, the diplomats, helped to settle some of the gravest problems which have ever beset mankind. To realise the horror, the passion, the blind hatred and fury that Catholic felt for Protestant and Protestant for Catholic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries one needs to use a most active imagination. To get one's religion wrong did not mean merely sudden death but eter- nal death: so heresy needed to be burnt out.
In Spain Protestants and Jews were terrifying heretics, fit only for the flames which con- sumed them. In France Protestants were ex- ited, killed, bullied. In Elizabethan England Catholics were traitors, neither more nor less, and the fate of traitors awaited their priests. Their bowels were torn out and burnt before their eyes. During these centuries war, civil and international, raged, not for four or five years, but for decades, and the problems that war strengthened or created- seemed incapable of Solution. Armageddon had to be lived with.
In this maelstrom ambassadors and diplo- macy raised their status and began to create linkages, maybe as fine as gossamer and as easily ruptured, between the conflicting ideo- logies. Diplomacy had a wealth of failures, but some outstanding successes. The Calvinist Dutch who had wrested seven provinces from the Spanish Netherlands—rebels, therefore, as well as heretics—finally secured recognition of their independence after generations of both hot and cold war in the great diplomatic settlement which goes by the name of the Treaties of Westphalia and Munster, signed in 1648. This was the result of patient, hard- headed, determined bargaining by ambassadors who were loyal Spaniards and loyal Dutch, aided and abetted by their equally hard- headed allies.
And if diplomacy helped to solve problems in a war-torn and hostile Europe, far more hostile and war-torn than the present world, why should it not today? Firstly we must get rid of the insane notion that all negotiation is a preliminary to appeasement. Secondly we must learn again that bargains have to be two- sided, that 'concessions need to be mutual and fairly balanced. Bled to death and exhausted, the Protestant and Catholic powers gradually learned this simple lesson in the first half of the seventeenth century. And they learned more than this. They discovered that the self-interest of a nation is not always identical with its ideological aspirations. France realised that alliance with Protestant powers was a necessity for its own survival; even more daringly that an understanding with Moslem Turkey added strategic strength to her position. Amongst present statesmen only General de' Gaulle has a similar sense of the virtues and possibilities of classical diplomacy. Independent, rigidly con- cerned with French power, deeply conservative, disdainful of cries of 'Munich' or 'appease- ment,' he is willing to bargain with Ben Barka, Nasser or Ho ChiMinh.
The world is a sorry place, less so than seventeenth century Europe, but bad enough. Korea, Vietnam, Israel and Biafra spell out bloodshed, violence, destitution and misery for millions of ordinary men and women who only want to eat and love and breed and die. And these are the conflagrations only; dangerous flashpoints elsewhere crackle and splutter every month or so. Is it too much for humanity to ask that men should attempt not to win, but to bargain, and to keep the bargains made? After all, when Catholics and Protestants learned to live in suspicious friendship, is it too much to ask that com- munists and capitalists might do so too?
If the world survives, perhaps the hostility between capitalist and communist—both mere routes to industrialised society—will seem as foolish as the old religious hatreds. To achieve that desirable result will require years of patient negotiation : let us therefore revive the negotiators: give them back their status. To tar and feather an ambassador or his staff should seem even to a Red Guard, like an affront to humanity and its aspirations.
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