The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2015

40 JANUARY FEBRUARY 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL ally do. e best of what we publish in this section is very good indeed, but most of the submissions we get from diplomats in the eld are not quite what we are looking for. Instead of re ecting on their own professional experience, they tend to describe the great international episodes they were privileged to witness in the course of their careers, or ponti cate on the great international issues of the present and what, in the author’s view, should be done about them. So it would appear, at times, that even diplomats are not inter- ested in the nitty-gritty work of diplomacy. Instead, many of them would very much like to be statesmen orchestrating and presiding over the sort of “l’unité de direction” (literally, uni ed direction) in policy for which Cardinal Richelieu argued, but to which even Henry Kissinger could only aspire. Theory vs. Practice? Everyone feels a bit embarrassed about this state of a airs. e academics acknowledge that diplomacy ought to be important, and the diplomats keep showing up at professional conventions, hoping that academics will have something interesting, impor- tant or useful to say about diplomacy (though they often leave disappointed and determined to write a book about diplomacy themselves). Of course, worrying about the relationship between theory and practice is nothing new. e American political scientist Alexander George spoke many years ago about bridging the gap between international relations and foreign policy by generating hard propositions about what sort of coercive diplomacy is likely to work and under what conditions. And back in the 1970s, retired FSO Smith Simpson found himself in a battle with his colleagues at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service over whether they should be teaching diplomatic theory to future diplomats, or exposing them to what were regarded as more practical things which it might be handy for them to know as they embarked upon their careers. at debate led to the founding of the school’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy in 1978. However, the intensity of that argument has sharpened over the past couple of decades for two reasons. e rst has been the increasing pressure on those teaching and conducting academic research to justify themselves in terms of their usefulness, not just to the direct bene ciaries of their work but, in public institutions at least, to the taxpayers who fund them. e second factor has been the emergence of an attempt to place diplomacy at the center of the academic study of interna- tional relations by claiming precisely this practical quality for it. In this view, the majority of important international relations work done today continues to be undertaken by diplomats. Furthermore, in an era where the strategic interplay of super- powers and the adventures of the unipolar interlude have been replaced by a steady slide towards multipolarity, in which no one country dominates, it has been argued that we should expect diplomacy to become more important. Diplomacy should there- fore be a primary focus of academic research because it remains, in Raymond Cohen’s phrase, “the engine room of international relations.” It should also be a principal focus of international relations instruction because it o ers one of the best chances for obtaining a job in the eld. Discourse analysis, deconstructions of constitutive ideas and theories about the international system, in contrast, may equip a student only for staying in school. Despite these pressures and e orts, however, the study of diplomacy remains on the margins of consciousness for both diplomats and international relations academics. Why is this so, and should we worry? What Do Diplomats Want? Part of answering these questions lies in asking what diplo- mats would really like to hear from the people who study them. In the main, they seek usable insights from the management sciences about how to organize complex organizations and how to operate e ectively within and between them. Practitioners are not interested in hearing from academics about the mysteries and particularities of being a diplomat, any more than professors are interested in hearing from outsiders about the mysteries and particularities of teaching and undertaking research. Rightly or wrongly, both camps think they have this covered. e other part lies in asking what the people who study diplo- macy are interested in and, perhaps more importantly, whom they consider their primary audience. On the whole, they are not inter- Fortunately (at least if one values symmetry in relationships), the diplomats’ lack of interest in academics is fully reciprocated.