Speaker A
[Music] well I suppose the standard definition would have to be the execution of foreign policy and the management of international Affairs which is what you would get in the textbook but that doesn't tell us everything we need to
A University of London lecture on diplomacy: its definition, purpose of creating friendly relations, and the growing focus on audience and public interaction.
Key Takeaways
- Diplomacy should be understood broadly, including both high-level and mundane work.
- Diplomacy involves representatives of many kinds of political communities, not only states.
- The public and audiences play an important role in shaping the diplomatic process.
- The core purpose of diplomacy is developing understanding and friendly relations, which is difficult to achieve.
What the video covers
- Diplomacy is commonly defined as the execution of foreign policy and management of international affairs, but this omits much of its everyday reality.
- Diplomatic work spans a range from high-level peace conferences to the routine, often tedious tasks of lower-ranking diplomats such as writing reports and attending functions.
- The speaker takes a broad view of diplomacy: any mediated or negotiated interaction between representatives of political communities.
- Diplomacy is not limited to states; cities, regions like Quebec, and entities like the European Union can conduct diplomacy.
- The Vienna Conventions describe the aim of diplomacy as creating friendly relations between countries.
- Achieving friendly relations is far harder in practice than stating it as a goal.
- The speaker's early training in international relations viewed diplomacy mainly as high politics involving statesmen and decision makers.
- As a historian, the speaker became interested in broader, more interactive understandings of diplomacy.
- A key research focus is the audience or reception of diplomacy, meaning how local populations and the public interact with and affect diplomatic events.
- Diplomatic skills are also used in everyday life, such as handling meetings and personal relations.
Chapters
- 00:00Defining diplomacy: foreign policy and daily realities
- 00:33Levels of diplomacy: from peace conferences to routine work
- 01:02A broad definition of diplomacy
- 01:31The purpose of diplomacy and the Vienna Conventions
- 02:06From high politics to interactive diplomacy
- 02:43Audience, reception, and local populations
- 03:51Diplomacy beyond states: cities and regions
- 04:25Diplomacy in everyday life
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
know um I think it's often forgotten perhaps how dull a lot of diplomacy actually is pushing paper left and right writing reports attending long functions that you probably don't want to be at so I think there's a variety of different
Speaker A
levels there there's the sort of the high-end peace conferences and and sort of the gold standard diplomacy that we might think of but it's very easy to forget the sort of the lower ranks the lower divisions of diplomacy and the
Speaker A
less interesting stuff so if I was to Define diplomacy I think it's some sort of balance between the two I think of diplomacy in Fairly expansive terms I try not to delimit it so much as to provide room for diplomacy so uh I think
Speaker A
of it in the broadest terms as any sort of interactions between people or things in which those people or things are representative in some way of a broader kind of category or polity well it's a very good question
Speaker A
Simon I think uh the word or the expression I like the most is is actually from the Vienna conventions which is uh creating friendly relations between countries and I think uh it's quite a sort of a gentle term friend
Speaker A
friendly relations but there's quite a lot loaded in there so overall I would say that the purpose of diplomacy is about developing some form of appreciation understanding and friendly relations with with countries of course achieving that is far harder than
Speaker A
setting it out as your purpose it's actually quite a complicated um process um in that when I first studied when I was a student 30 years ago um I I very much understood diplomacy as something which was uh almost purely H politics uh
Speaker A
involved Statesmen decision makers you know the kind of um uh you know very much along the lines of foreign policy analysis and that was probably because my background um uh was all in international relations and then I became a historian um and over you know
Speaker A
over my career as a historian I began to wonder whether one could understand diplomacy in ways which were more expansive than what I had learned as a student and so recently I've actually uh been working on on this idea of um
Speaker A
making the study of diplomacy as a more interactive process and when I mean interactive I don't just mean the interaction between you know obviously Statesmen diplomats and the people in the realm of high politics but what I'm very interested in is the interaction
Speaker A
between um the Diplomat Statesmen uh the kind of people who are seemed to be the the primary performers of diplomacy uh with the public so I'm very interested in the kind of what's called audience or reception of diplomacy and how the
Speaker A
Diplomatic process can actually be affected by this interaction that goes on between um the high politics type of performers and the audience or the local populations who may be there you know looking at diplomatic events and others who who involved in diplomacy in a much
Speaker A
wider sense of the word we could definitely go historical we we won't go historical uh I I I'd say I tend to stick with sort of a I said I wouldn't go historical but I go historical a Harold Nicholson type cut of sort of the
Speaker A
uh the mediated or negotiated relations between Representatives but I wouldn't get stuck at representatives of states uh so in a sense is this definition the one that I used to teach generally tends to be mediated or negotiated relations
Speaker A
between representatives of polities in the sense of political communities so you can speak of a diplomacy of the European Union uh or a diplomacy of the United States but you can also speak of a diplomacy of uh uh a city a region
Speaker A
like the diplomacy of Quebec for instance and so forth well diplomacy is at one level diplomacy is something we do every day so even though it's become this kind of high status profession in fact when you handle a meeting when you
Speaker A
handle your personal relations when you handle almost any aspect of your life you'll often use the same skills that you'd see a diplomat use [Music]
Topics:diplomacyinternational relationsforeign policyVienna Conventionspublic diplomacyaudience receptiondiplomatic historypolitical communitiesstatecraftUniversity of London
