The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2013 23 Edward Marks spent 40 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, including an assignment as ambassador to Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Ambassador Marks is the director of the Simons Center for the Study of Interagency Coordination, a Distinguished Senior Fellow at George Mason University, and a director on the board of American Diplomacy magazine, as well as a retiree representative on the AFSA Governing Board and a member of the AFSA Awards and Plaques Committee. This article was originally developed for and presented at the 2012 Fort Leavenworth Ethics Symposium co-sponsored by the Command and General Staff College Foundation, Inc., and the U.S. Army Com- mand and General Staff College. macy”), a seminal text in the development of modern diplomacy and accompanying professional ethics. In the 19th century, European governments began to take on the form of the modern nation-state. For these states, diplomacy increasingly became a regularized bureaucratic function, mov- ing from personal art to organized profession. Ethical standards began to emerge, as well, drawing both on traditional personal standards of conduct and the rules and regulations essential to modern bureaucracies. Ethics for Professionals The belief that civil servants need ethical guidelines arises naturally from their role as professionals who exercise special- ized knowledge and skill. As such, they are capable of mak- ing judgments, applying their skills and reaching informed decisions in situations that the general public is not qualified to review. How the use of this knowledge should be governed when providing a service to the public can be considered a moral issue, to be managed or regulated by a set of standards, or code of ethics. Such a code gives officials and practitioners boundaries to stay within in their professional capacities. But no set of guidelines can cover all ethical or moral considerations. As Francis Fukuyama observes in The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011): “In most political hierarchies, principals hold authority and delegate the implementation of their policies to agents, whom they appoint. Many governance dysfunc- tions arise because the agents have different agendas from the principals.” For all these reasons, a code of ethics is essential to give practitioners guidance with respect to personal, as well as official, boundaries. Diplomacy Does Not Equal Foreign Policy It is important to differentiate ethics in diplomacy from eth- ics in foreign policy, as the word diplomacy has two general meanings. In the policy sense, it refers to “a government’s diplomacy;” in the operational sense, it describes the conduct of business between and among governments, carried out through bureaucratic institutions and processes. The former is also more generically called “foreign policy,” while the latter is the domain of the foreign policy bureaucracy. In his 1957 study, The Foreign Office , Lord Strange remarks: “The word diplomacy has always been a liability of the thing it represents. Nevertheless, it is important to bear in mind that by mere chance the dog was given a bad name, which has made it peculiarly liable to be blamed, if not actually hanged, for the sins of its masters. The master is called correctly ‘for- eign policy.’” Although morality is often a matter of judgment, most com- mentators would classify governments as essentially amoral in their external behavior. As Strange observes, “Diplomacy as an institution can never have morals markedly superior to those of the governments whose tool it is; though, owing to the force of its corporate traditions, they are likely nowadays to be never worse, and usually rather better.” Despite the distinction between foreign policy and diplo- macy, the inevitable, intimate relationship between power politics and the functions of diplomacy means that the two can never be completely separated, at least in the mind of the general public. This has contributed to a popular image of diplomats as untrustworthy double-dealers. Quotations along those lines are numerous. Here are just a few from Ambassador Charles W. Freeman’s Diplomat’s Dic- tionary (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2010): • Diplomacy is to do and say the nastiest things in the nicest way. (Proverb) • Diplomacy: the patriotic art of lying for one’s country. (Ambrose Bierce) • Diplomacy is to speak French, to speak nothing, and to speak falsehood. (Ludwig Boerne) This traditional view of diplomacy has been reinforced by a modern popular attitude that focuses on one particular aspect: its secrecy. Americans, in particular, remain influ- enced by Woodrow Wilson’s famous call for “open diplo- macy.” In some respects, the depreciation of diplomacy in the modern world reflects a lack of faith that it can really make a difference. As Hans Morgenthau notes: “There is nothing spec-