The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2015

18 JANUARY FEBRUARY 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL SPEAKING OUT Defining Diplomacy BY EDWARD MARKS M ost countries provide profes- sional education for their diplomats, and some operate establishments speci cally for that purpose. Few of us would claim that the Department of State or any other U.S. foreign a airs agency provides the equivalent with any degree of seriousness or comprehensiveness. Our Foreign Ser- vice Institute, for all its virtues (and our fond memories), is essentially a training, not an educational, institution. However, there are signs of grow- ing interest in diplomacy education, expressed, for example, in a paper the American Foreign Service Association recently submitted to the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review drafting team. If that proposal is pursued, we may yet see a serious program of professional education put in place for America’s professional diplomats. First, though, we need to reach agree- ment on what diplomacy means. ere is much confusion about the concept—and not just among lay people, but among its practitioners, as well. Part of this derives from the fact that English is a tricky language, requiring a good deal of care to ensure that what is said is what is meant. Even at the level of single words, misun- derstandings can occur, given that words often have multiple meanings. A good example is the word “diplo- Edward Marks spent 40 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, including an as- signment as ambassador to Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. A senior men- tor at various military institutions, Ambassador Marks currently serves as a retiree representative on the AFSA Governing Board, a member of the American Diplomacy board and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at George Mason University. macy”—which, in addition to its formal reference to a specialized activity of gov- ernments, has come to denote personal qualities involving pleasing manners. Even in the context of its original mean- ing, there is much confusion among sev- eral terms that many people erroneously believe are synonyms for diplomacy: e.g., foreign a airs and foreign policy. Using some fairly standard dictionary de nitions, we nd that “foreign a airs” means “matters having to do with inter- national relations and with the interests of the home country in foreign countries.” e term “foreign policy” introduces a further distinction: it means “the diplo- matic policy of a nation in its interactions with other countries.” In contrast, diplomacy is generally de ned as “the art and practice of con- ducting negotiations between nations” in order to implement those polices and pursue those interests. A Semantic Overlap is gives us a nice progression from the general subject (foreign a airs) to a speci c manifestation (foreign policy), and on to implementation (diplomacy). But that leads, in turn, to another poten- tial source of confusion. In the policy context, each govern- ment has its own diplomacy. But in the operational sense, diplomacy also refers to the conduct of business between and among governments, carried out through bureaucratic institutions and processes. Or, to put it another way, the former is loosely intended to refer to a country’s “foreign policy,” while the latter concerns the activity of a country’s foreign policy bureaucracy. Obviously, these terms and what they represent overlap. e continuing and inevitably intimate relationship between foreign policy and diplomacy—between the objective and the means—ensures they can never be completely separated, at least in the mind of the general pub- lic. But there are fundamental di er- ences between them. For instance, most Americans would probably agree that U.S. foreign policy includes support for democratic govern- ments; consequently, it is appropriate for our diplomats to pursue activities that support democratic governments. Yet that objective is a comparatively recent addition to our foreign policy structure. For most of our history, John Quincy Adams’ 1821 declaration that the United States “does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy” was a more accurate representation of American diplomacy. In any case, as we know, many other governments do not include democracy promotion in their foreign policy; nor do their diplomats pursue such activities or work with those who do. Diplomacy is the instrument of com- munication, not the message commu- nicated. George Kennan, who thought about his profession as seriously as he did about foreign a airs and foreign policy, noted: “ is is the classic function of diplomacy: to e ect the communica- tions between one’s own government and other governments or individuals abroad, and to do this with maximum accuracy, imagination, tact and good sense.”