Volume 8, Issue 1 - Editors’ Forum: Who is a Diplomat? Diplomatic Entrepreneurs in the Global Age, Guest edited by Giles Scott-Smith

Orthodox Diplomatic History, with its focus on government sources, aims to piece together the decision-making reasoning of policy-makers and the apparatuses and outcomes of foreign policy implementation. In contrast, New Diplomatic History looks to broaden and deepen the analysis of international interactions along three planes: spatially, in the sense of granting more importance to the role of individuals and non-governmental institutions; temporally, since the examination of a wider field of diplomatic ‘actors’ challenges the standard periodisations; behaviorally, in that the very nature of diplomatic practice and the role (indeed the very notion) of the diplomat is being transformed in an ever-more-dynamic global context of multilateral agreements and transactions. Once the frame of ‘diplomacy’ is altered, so the kinds of actors who become visible change with it – and the designations ‘diplomacy’ and ‘diplomat’ become more fluid. The articles collected in this special issue of New Global Studies examine the input and influence of particular individuals in international relations who were able to pursue their own agendas either in alliance with, separate from, or sometimes against the interests of states. Such ‘private international relations’ opens up a rich research field highly relevant in the context of increasing global flows of people and ideas.

Drawing on source material from archives in Vienna, Berlin, London and Jerusalem, this article aims to reconstruct the circumstances, methods and mechanics of informal diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire under the rule of Sultan Abdülhamit II between 1876 and 1909, answering the following questions: How did the special social, political and economic circumstances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ottoman Empire affect the effectiveness of informal diplomacy? Who was part of informal diplomatic networks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ottoman Empire and who employed their services? How were these networks created, how did they function and what motivated their members?

The main hypothesis of this article contends that unofficial, informal, private, or alternative variants of diplomacy are by no means a recent phenomenon, but rather belong to the key, indeed constitutive elements of traditional aristocracy- and court-based diplomacy. In order to illustrate the continued effect of unofficial or semi-official diplomatic networks on the perception and making of policy I use the example of the relations between neutral Sweden and the German Empire during the First World War. It is here, enabled by the neutral abstention of Sweden from the conflict, that politics and diplomacy most effectively preserved their function and even enhanced their significance, while increasingly obscuring the delineation between the official and the unofficial, almost to the point of rendering such distinctions useless.

As one of the most widely-respected German writers of the twentieth century, Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was a key figure in supporting and communicating the idea of a free and democratic Germany during a period of enormous international tension and conflict. While a professor of literature at Princeton (1938–41) and a resident of Los Angeles (1941–52), he became a highly active participant in the war effort, giving anti-fascist speeches around the country and recording a series of broadcasts to Germany on the BBC, calling for an end to National Socialism. He and his wife Katia became America citizens in 1944, and three of their children served in American uniform. This paper focuses on Mann’s position as an “unofficial diplomat” in 1949 while receiving the Goethe Prize, then the most prestigious literary prize in Germany, from two different locations: Frankfurt am Main in western Germany and Weimar in eastern Germany. This situation thus placed Mann in the unique position of being able to address the citizens of two diverging states who were at the heart of Cold War Europe: the two Germanies, and to emphasize what they held in common. During the postwar era, Mann’s political position shifted from one who spoke mainly about a democratic Germany to one who was a strong proponent for international peace and cooperation. Nonetheless, some Western journalists depicted him as a dupe for communism, and the FBI increasingly tracked his movements. This paper thus discusses both the opportunities and challenges for international relations by a major cultural figure and one of the leading “unofficial diplomats” during the onset of the Cold War.

In September 1960, Leonard Bernstein brought the New York Philharmonic to Berlin to play two concerts at the Berlin Festival, where they would also tape a program to be aired shortly thereafter on American television. Sponsored by the Ford Motor Company, the trip, which occurred at the height of the Cold War, was of considerable political significance. Berlin was one of the most contested places on earth, and the western section of the city, a democratic island in a communist sea, had been a focal point of Cold War tensions since the late 1940s. Thus, the orchestra’s journey to Berlin must be seen as part of the fabric of Cold-War history. The article looks closely at the Philharmonic’s performance before an audience of German students, in which the orchestra taped Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto with Bernstein as conductor and soloist, a lecture-concert that would be shown a few weeks later on U.S. television. This event provided a brilliant showcase for Bernstein’s many talents, allowing him to play, conduct, teach, and even to speak about politics and God. Among the matters Bernstein discussed with the young German audience was the idea that musicians of particular nationalities were uniquely suited to play music from the land of their birth – an idea Bernstein rejected, calling it outmoded. The American maestro also explored what he described as the universal character of German music, which he claimed was impossible to quarantine. According to Bernstein, German music transcended ethnic and national categories, though he argued that the idea of musical development lent German music its unique quality. Next, Bernstein the educator became Bernstein the political activist. He explained why his musicians had crossed the ocean to perform the music of Beethoven before a German audience in Berlin, noting, “We have come to take one more step through this kind of cultural exchange along the paths of international understanding that lead to peace.” As will be seen, the Philharmonic’s journey points to the intersection between art and politics during a perilous era.

The multifaceted career of the French lawyer, political advisor, voluntary intelligence officer, and anti-communist “freelancer” Jean Violet illustrates the growing importance of “informal diplomacy” during the second half of the twentieth century. In highlighting the decisive steps in Violet’s political life, aimed at defeating the communist regimes and “winning the cold war”, this paper discusses the role played by private and non-state actors in the development of a transnational European and transatlantic policy after World War II as well as the extension and professionalization of the informal diplomatic sector since the 1960s which was accompanied by an increasing lack of democratic legitimacy.

This article focuses on the Dutch Atlanticist Ernst van der Beugel (1918–2004) as an ‘unofficial diplomat’ by demonstrating how he remained a prominent actor in Cold War transatlantic relations after he had left the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1959. More specifically this article concentrates on the continuation of Ernst van der Beugel’s ‘diplomatic role’ after 1959 by showing how he was able to continue many activities that were diplomatic in nature in a private capacity, what these activities entailed, why he chose to pursue them and how his unofficial endeavors related to formal transatlantic diplomacy. In addition, it touches upon the question who or what Ernst van der Beugel represented as an ‘unofficial diplomat’.

Individual citizens can often wield considerable influence in international affairs. In 1955, prominent American journalist Norman Cousins launched an initiative to bring 25 Japanese victims of the atomic bomb to the United States to receive treatment. The U.S. State Department made concerted efforts to stop the project, fearing that it would generate negative publicity and conflict with government policy to de-emphasize the dangers of nuclear weapons. Refusing to accept official policies that he believed to be wrong, while at the same time working to “shame” the United States into providing treatment for atomic bomb victims, Cousins used his international contacts, prestige, and the reputation he had built in Japan as a humanitarian, to overcome the U.S. State Department’s attempts to stop the project. The overwhelming success of Cousins’ private diplomacy initiative resulted in greatly improved U.S.-Japanese relations and eventually garnered Cousins a letter of commendation from the White House and an honorary citizenship in the city of Hiroshima. This article highlights an early instance of citizen diplomacy during the atomic age. It shows how an individual civilian balancing the delicate issues of humanitarian aid, sensitive international relations, and protest against official government policy, managed to have a major impact and achieve both a positive political outcome in the United States as well as improved relations with a foreign nation.

This article offers a case study that addresses two themes central to the notion of a New Diplomatic History. The first concerns the wish to expand the spatial dimensions of diplomatic history, in the sense of expanding the range of those whom we can arguably identify, in terms of their behavior, motivations, and interactions, as ‘diplomats’. The second concerns the practice of diplomatic history itself, which in the Netherlands has largely been dominated by orthodox representations of the profession marked off by strict boundaries. From this perspective, ‘high politics’ is not a domain for the uninitiated, and this attitude was long perpetuated by both the academic and diplomatic professions themselves. The subject of this article, Ernst van Eeghen, due to his unique contacts and level of expertise, was able to challenge these boundaries and for a period of five years was able to place himself near the centre of negotiations on East-West security relations. He did so out of a combination of motivations: religious, commercial, and personal.