French Revolutionary Transformations of Diplomatic Practice: The Case of Franco–Ottoman Relations, 1792–17971

Abstract

This article focuses on questions of rupture and continuity in European international relations around 1800, taking French revolutionary diplomatic practice in the Ottoman Empire as a case in point. Historians who have studied the conduct of French revolutionary diplomacy tend to emphasize the ruptures in revolutionary diplomatic practice. The analysis of Franco-Ottoman alliance negotiations (1792–1797) does not fully match with this assessment. Although it is certainly true that the Revolution led to great alterations in French diplomatic culture, French diplomats were often far from discarding all diplomatic conventions. The article gives a short overview over the diplomatic agents working for the French embassy and their reactions to the Revolution in France. It then presents the Ottoman reaction to the regime change in France, in particular with regards to the transition from monarchy to republic. The main focus is on the question of innovation and continuity in diplomatic practice and on the self-representation of the new French state.     

The role of ‘diplomatic lobbying’ in shaping US foreign policy and its effects on the Australia–US relationship

Lobbying as a form of engagement with the US Congress has long been studied from a domestic perspective. Lobbying, however, is not a practice confined to actors with domestic interests—it is also used as a form of diplomacy by many foreign governments, including Australia. Diplomatic lobbying is a vastly understudied phenomenon and its impact on US foreign relations is rarely examined. Unlike most Westminster-based democracies, the USA has two branches directly involved with foreign affairs—the Executive and Congress—each of which is important for different aspects of foreign policy development. Australia has found lobbying the US Congress to be a powerful tool for diplomatic engagement. This article looks at the role of the US Congress in foreign affairs, the effects of lobbying, and the ways in which diplomats engage with and lobby Congress. Australia’s specific lobbying efforts and their effects on the US–Australia relationship are then examined.     

Beyond the Foreign Office Papers: The Making of an International Historian

This article reflects on the changing discipline of diplomatic history/international history through the author's own experience in the field since the 1950s. It also draws wider lessons about the craft, especially the importance of understanding the people behind the papers – illustrated with vignettes of diplomats whom the author interviewed, including Harold Nicolson, William Strang and Owen O'Malley. Woven into this is some discussion of the author's own books, especially those on the pre-1914 Foreign Office, Britain and the origins of the First World War and, most recently, her two volumes on Europe's international relations between the world wars.     

毛泽东与新中国谈判建交的开创

谈判建交是新中国独立自主外交的一项重要实践,是毛泽东将中华民族争取独立、平等和获得尊重的努力与国际法相结合的一次成功创新。毛泽东不仅是谈判建交的首倡者,而且在具有开创意义的中国同印度和英国的建交谈判中,扮演了决策者、设计者和领导者的角色,起到了举足轻重的关键作用。     

Walking the Thin Line: India's Anti-Racist Diplomatic Practice in South Africa,Canada, and Australia, 1946–55

Historians of India's foreign policy have often failed to see beyond the ‘Great man’ Jawaharlal Nehru. This Nehru-centric vision is not only misleading, but also unfair to Nehru. Here, we seek to take the gaze off Nehru and New Delhi so as to view Indian foreign policy from different locations. We examine the ways in which India's diplomats in Australia, Canada, and South Africa resisted racial discrimination. India's anti-racist diplomacy has most often been viewed as pointless moralistic ranting: the domain of the ‘hypersensitive, emotional’ Indian. We argue, however, based on largely unexamined archival material and an emphasis on the practice of Indian diplomacy, that India's diplomats in these bastions of settler-colonial racism were tactful, strategic, and effective in challenging racist, colonial practices and bringing an anti-racist discourse to international politics. Nehruvian foreign-policy discourse, and its goal of an anti-racist world order, then, was tempered by its diplomatic practices. In particular, this occurred outside of New Delhi in places where India's hopes for productive international relationships clashed with its Nehruvian worldview.     

Being international in times of war: Arthur Sweetser and the shifting of the League of Nations to the United Nations

Transnational actors are increasingly surfacing when it comes to understanding the global dimensions of the modern nation-state. Thinking of the modern state from the diversity of its personnel and its many intersections with private and semi-private actors or institutions with a transnational reach, the new diplomatic history acknowledges the embeddedness of states in border-crossing agencies. What has been conceptualized as ‘network diplomacy’ grasps both the role of transnational epistemic communities for the making of particular policy fields and the perception of diplomats as an integral part of transnational initiatives. Taking the League of Nations as a case study, this article analyses how its personnel attempted to spell out ideas of network diplomacy and to make their exposed position at the intersection of transnational civil society, state politics and international institutions work to effect political change. We focus on the transnational career of Arthur Sweetser (1888–1968) who, as a journalist, a long-term member of the League secretariat, the UN staff and the US administration, was at the forefront of developing new techniques of diplomatic practices beyond institutional mandates. Sweetser’s trajectory allows us to illuminate the mechanisms of network diplomacy by probing into multi-layered negotiation processes that engaged state practices, international institutions and the border-crossing agency of individuals. Characterizing him as transnational enables one to interlink his mobile trajectory with a particular scope of action that unfolded beyond the political demarcation of the nation-state and its instituted logics of rule and diplomacy. We further carve out the main features of a diplomatic practice that was formally non-existent yet crucial to the transfer of League principles, practices and personnel to the new United Nations.     

National subjects and subversive subjectivity: Deportation and the paradox of the anarchist citizen in the era of the First Red Scare

According to the Westphalian system of international law, all people are meant to be citizens or subjects of territorially bounded and sovereign nation-states, which in turn guarantee certain rights to, and impose certain duties upon, their members. Anarchism, by contrast, is predicated upon a rejection of the legitimacy of state sovereignty, and a refutation of the justness and practicability of representative government. Anarchists took individual and collective “self-determination” to their logical extremes—and in the process confounded state legal regimes and bureaucracies that understood national belonging and individual rights only in terms of citizenship. From the perspective of the United States, alien anarchists “belonged” back in their countries of origin, but from those European states' perspective, anarchists had no place in their national communities. This article examines how both radicals and governments in the era of America's “First Red Scare” engaged with the rules governing the interstate system. As individual radicals, government functionaries, and international diplomats wrestled to define where anarchists belonged in the international order of nation-states, the solutions they found simultaneously reinforced the boundaries of the Westphalian system and revealed contradictions and fissures within it.     

The transformation of diplomacy: mysteries, insurgencies and public relations

There has recently been a resurgence of interest in the art of diplomacy, fuelled by the growing popularity of the idea of 'soft power'. This article reviews three books key to this revival, all of which argue that a transformed and revitalized diplomacy can and should play a positive role in international politics. One calls for diplomats to overcome their traditional reserve and become 'guerrillas' fighting for human security, peace and development; another for a broader and deeper engagement with 'public diplomacy'—the practice of speaking to foreign peoples rather than just foreign sovereigns. The last favours a return to inherited diplomatic wisdom now half-forgotten. While welcoming this renewed concern for diplomacy, this review article argues that its place in contemporary international politics is perhaps less secure than the works reviewed allow. The 'management of legitimacy'—the central task of diplomats—is a much more difficult task than is often acknowledged.     

The case of the World Trade Organization

This article explores the relationship between power and rules within the context of international relations, utilizing as a case‐study what is arguably the most powerful international juridical institution in the world today, the World Trade Organization (WTO). The author draws upon a number of his previous works on the subject of the WTO and its predecessor, the GATT, wending through such topics as: the way that political and diplomatic leaders improvized and filled in the gaps of international institutions when the original idea for an International Trade Organization (ITO) failed; the remarkably elaborate development of the particularly deep and rich WTO Dispute Settlement (DS) jurisprudence (over 60,000 pages); and the constant tension between the role of nation‐state power and the power allocated to international institutions, apparently necessitated by the huge impact of ‘globalization’ and interdependency in world affairs (especially economic) today. Various specific issues and cases illustrate these tensions and allocations, including treaty interpretation techniques, the degree of deference towards the members’ government actions, the arguments about the appropriate role of the ‘adjudicators’, and the delicately sensitive approach of the DS system towards clashes of policy necessitating ‘balance’. Throughout, particular emphasis is laid upon the ‘rule oriented’ (‘more legalization’) approach of the WTO DS jurisprudence, both in reflection on the historical and current developments of that juridical system—from ‘power oriented’ to ‘rule oriented’—and also in the important roles regarding tensions between ‘sovereignty’ concepts and international rule needs.     

中印建交与新中国外交抉择

新中国成立后,印度是第一个同中国进行建交谈判的国家,也是资本主义国家中第一个同我国建交的国家。同印度建交是新中国外交的一次重要实践,它不仅确立了中国同其他国家先谈判后建交的外交原则,还赋予了"一边倒"更丰富的内涵,开创了中国周边外交的新局面。     

从地缘政治视角看美国边界安全的空间特征与政策变化——兼论对中国边界安全的启示

本文将美国边界安全置于地缘政治视角之下进行研究,通过对美国边界的空间形态与特征进行分析,总结美国边界安全在当前空间状态下存在的有利和不利因素。在全球反恐背景下,以"9·11"事件作为转折点,对比恐怖主义袭击前后20年美国政府在边界安全政策问题上的认知和态度变化,在对美国边界安全政策进行梳理后,阐述在新的边界安全环境下,美国所采取的保障陆海空边界安全的一系列强有力措施。在此基础上提出了美国经验对中国边界安全的五点启示,以期对中国的国家安全政策和实践提供借鉴。     

NATIONALIZING HISTORY AND THE CHALLENGE OF DISCORDANT TEMPORALITIES1

Christopher Hill's National History and the World of Nations reminds us of the conjunctural moment of an emerging world market in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the promise it offered for vitalizing a “world history” yet to be written. More importantly, it supplies the silhouette of a radically different interpretive approach, formed by the force of a centrifugal perspective that—through its concentration on how France, the United States, and Japan were simultaneously motivated to construct representations of self‐identity in national narratives—converged to disclose the possibility of a wider world no longer held hostage to the geopolitical category of the “West.” Hill's account shows that the impulse behind the formation of national history employed different strategies to imagine a singular linear historical narrative of national identity that aimed both to remove the spectacle of coexisting, different, multiple temporalities and to weld large and regionally disparate populations into a single people who, in a new time, would be instructed to recognize themselves in the nation's story. In Hill's reckoning, national history in France, the United States, and Japan appears simply as another name for historical necessity that sought, through processes of naturalization and nationalization, to overcome the unstable and uneven relationship between state and capital but that failed to conceal the deeper reality of determinations demanded by the relations of capital at the local and international levels.     

‘A Hazardous Task’: Britain and the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations

In 2014, the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations celebrated its fiftieth anniversary since its coming into force in 1964. Setting out the privileges and immunities accorded to diplomats and diplomatic missions, the negotiations of this convention were part of the United Nations' plan to strengthen the international rule of law. This article analyses the role of Britain, one of the major actors in the negotiation process. It explores how Britain's negotiation position was shaped by diplomatic realities of the 1950s, and the strategies used to ensure Britain's interests being reflected in the final convention. The focus will be on the overall political pressure that underlined Britain's negotiation position, in order to reveal the general UK position on the codification of diplomatic privileges and immunities. Despite the remarkably friendly atmosphere at the 1961 Vienna conference, Britain could not press through all its amendments which, through the concluding legislation process, protracted Britain's ratification process. The article shows while London was supporting the codification of international law, codification by convention was not its ultimate choice. Therefore, the subsequent legislation process was marked by an inter-departmental dispute between the Foreign Office and Treasury, inter alia, on the exemption of Scotch whisky from excise duties.     

‘Raging Rumors’: American Diplomats’ Reportage from Latvia and Estonia, 1938–1940

‘Raging Rumors’ examines how the Soviet invasion and annexation unfolded in Latvia and Estonia. The reportage of American diplomats documents Nazi and Soviet aggression and the loss of neutrality for Latvia and Estonia. American diplomats at post recorded what they witnessed, but also what they were told by their contacts, thus providing readers with Latvian and Estonian governmental perspectives and world views. As spectators with a front-row seat watching how the Second World War began, the American diplomats reported back to Washington. This article sheds light on what transpired in Latvia and Estonia, how Latvians and Estonians perceived of their situation, and how the US government engaged and failed to engage in the Baltic.     

It's the Lungfish,stupid: knowledge fights,activism, and the science–policy interface

Since the post‐positivist turn in the 20th century, many scholars and philosophers have argued for the importance of Other Ways Of Knowing – including local, embodied, situated, partial, and indigenous knowledges – in developing a better understanding of the world. This argument has been further stressed by a large subset of scholars working in the fields of geography, policy, planning, natural resource management, and community development, yet in practice, positivism retains its epistemological dominance. Drawing from a case study of a dam proposal at Traveston Crossing, Queensland, Australia, this paper will explore these epistemological tensions from the perspective of those whose first/primary ways of knowing about the issue were marginalised, namely the local activists who opposed the proposal. Using data gathered from document analysis and interviews, the paper will explore how these activists implicitly understood this epistemological marginalisation, how they adopted and employed positivist knowledge and language to further the exposure and credibility of their campaign, how this credibility was mediated by their identities, how they strategically deployed different forms of knowledge at local, national, and international scales, and how their successful navigation of these epistemological tensions was critical to the ultimate success of their campaign.     

南北朝交聘使节行进路线考

南北朝时期为南北对峙的局面,双方除了军事冲突,也有和平的外交往来。交聘使节通常是由本国国都出发,前往他国国都进行访问与交涉,由于事属公务,交通路线大致上是比较固定的。不过,由于北朝政权更迭,曾经数次迁都,因此,交聘的路线也随之改变。本文根据正史与诗歌中有关使节行迹的资料,逐一考证“平城—建康”、“洛阳—建康”、“邺—建康”与“长安—建康”这四条路线,希望能将当时使节穿梭往来的具体路径勾勒出来。     

Territory,sovereignty and entitlement: Diplomatic discourses in the United Nations Security Council

This paper builds upon feminist approaches within political science, international relations and geography that study how bodies haunt global politics, by exploring how entitlement to power connects through the scale of the body to that of the state. In a context of rising populism and political bluster, as well as post-#metoo discussions of personal entitlement displayed by well-known political figures, there is a need to take seriously how discourses of statehood within security crises are gendered in specific ways. This paper argues that the concept of entitlement offers potential for geographic enquiry by opening up new perspectives on masculinist framings of territory and state in critical geopolitics and in critical international relations. It considers specifically how diplomatic discourses ground and naturalize claims to territory by showing how states’ entitlement to territory and masculinist forms of personal entitlement are connected. Drawing upon feminist approaches to language, discourse and power, this paper studies diplomatic interventions at the United Nations Security Council in New York in 2014–2017 on the crisis in Ukraine. Methodologically, it analyses diplomatic speeches through the concept of entitlement to show how territorial claims are naturalized through rhetorical devices grounded in hegemonic forms of masculinity. It argues that a clearer understanding of the connections between discourses of personal entitlement and state territorial sovereignty can further our understanding of territory.     

Italy and Yugoslavia: from distrust to friendship in Cold War Europe

Considering the relations of two neighbouring countries with a difficult past and separated by ideological barriers, this article takes a look at the relations between Italy and Yugoslavia in a long perspective during the Cold War. The aim is to portray the development of relations from enmity after the Second World War to good neighbourly relations in Cold War Europe. Including new archival sources of Yugoslav origin, the article shows how mutual relations between Italy and Yugoslavia developed, considering the importance of economic factors, political ambitions, but also the impact of diplomatic agents and political leaders for cooperation on the Adriatic. Taking the international environment into account, the article shows that many developments leading to détente in Europe had indeed their precursors on the Adriatic. This makes the development of relations between Italy and Yugoslavia a success story during the Cold War which has hitherto not been thoroughly acknowledged in historiography.     

Herbert Butterfield, the English School and the Civilizing Virtues of Diplomacy

This article seeks to establish the elements of a diplomatic theory of international relations and argues that this is implicit in the works of Herbert Butterfield on international relations, historiography, diplomatic history and Christian ethics. As a founding member of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, Butterfield shared with his colleagues the conviction that diplomacy and diplomatic systems lie at the heart of what happens, might happen and ought to happen in international relations. Like his colleagues, however, he failed to produce a work on diplomacy that attracted the sort of attention garnered by their work in other areas, for example on international systems and societies. Indeed, his own theoretical work on diplomacy is often regarded as a blind alley exhibiting nostalgia for the 'old diplomacy' of eighteenth-century Europe or a fatal attraction towards the more scientistic elements of political realism. It is argued, however, that in the broader corpus of Butterfield's work there is to be found a theory of diplomacy advocating self-restraint and charity towards others based upon recognizing both our common humanity and the impossibility of achieving a full understanding of one another. For Butterfield, this would have been a theory applied to states; but, employing one of Butterfield's own techniques for interrogating dead historians, it is argued that this holds up as a theory of how to conduct relations between groups that regard themselves as distinctive, hold their separation from one another to be a good and, hence, value their independence.     

Nature,space and distances in an imperial boundary network: The delimitation of the Nyasa-Tanganyika plateau boundary

This article discusses an episode of boundary delimitation/demarcation conducted between British and German imperial powers on the central African Nyasa-Tanganyika plateau in the late 1890s. I situate vignettes on the boundary's delimitation in 1897-98 within broader processes of imperial territorialisation to note that the boundary eventually produced on the plateau represented a fabrication resolving tensions between its ‘natural’ and textual sources. Specifically, I argue the boundary was produced to mediate between a diplomatic nature, written in metropolitan worlds by diplomats and cartographers, and a colonial nature, a zone of phenomenal experiences, inhuman encounters and ‘sensation’ (Wark, 2016). I emphasise the experience of technical practice to suggest that this itself represented a form of imperial power, capable of challenging or ‘deferring’ (Bhabha, 2012) metropolitan circuits of governance and knowledge production, not least by revealing the liveliness of the material world undergoing imperial territorialisation. Sensation produced the form of the writings and archives of survey-exploration: often confounded by problems of their data and surroundings, commissioners made the epistemological and subjective manoeuvrings through which they appeared to rise above their inert surroundings to master them. But this does not characterise the experience of fieldwork on the plateau, which was constituted by a panoply of technical situations wherein delineations between objects, observers and their material settings were indeterminable.