What Is Sociability in Diplomacy?

diplomatica 1 (2019) 56-72 brill.com/dipl What is Sociability in Diplomacy? Naoko Shimazu Yale-nus College, Singapore [email protected] Abstract The Bandung Conference of 1955 illustrates several important points about the exer- cise of contemporary diplomacy, with its careful mixing of cultural symbolism, Cold War politics, anti-colonialism, and the cultivation of “sociability” among the diplomats and leaders present. Among those points is the difficulty in drawing a distinction between the informal and formal aspects of social engineering in this instance, with ev- eryone – especially diplomatic wives – playing significant roles. Keywords Bandung – diplomatic conference – sociability – Afro-Asian movement – Cold War What is sociability in diplomacy and why should it be important for us who work in the history of diplomacy? Until recently, diplomacy as a field of intellectual enquiry has largely ignored the cultural and social dimensions of diplomacy, primarily because the field had been dominated for decades by scholars with a particular set of methodological priorities. Although such methodological imperatives produced many ground breaking works and emi- nent scholars, at the same time, the orthodoxy made the field narrow, and spe- cialized, to the exclusion of alternative possibilities which could enrich and broaden the field of enquiry. As the cultural historian Peter Burke in his influ- ential What is Cultural History? remarked, New Cultural History and its adher- ents could turn its attention usefully to the cultural history of politics, and a potential for an ethnographical approach to the “modern diplomatic corps and its rituals.”1 Fortunately, this is no longer the case as we have started the process 1 Burke, Peter. What is Cultural History? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 106. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/25891774-00101009Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:39:02PM via free access <UN> What Is Sociability In Diplomacy? 57 of a paradigmatic change in the way diplomacy is being conceived intellectu- ally. This movement to broadening diplomacy as an academic field of enquiry is not restricted to historians, but extends wider afield to political scientists, international relations, literary and theater scholars, sociologists, and anthro- pologists, as the latter have begun to develop a sub-field of the anthropology of diplomacy. The surge of interest emanating from a variety of disciplines makes diplomacy an ideal area for interdisciplinarity. As historiography embraces in- creasingly the intellectual agenda of interpreting the intangible, moving away from the positivist obsession of having to come up with the quantifiable, the concrete, the “results,” cultural historians of diplomacy are well positioned to offer thought-provoking interventions which aim to engage with internal meanings and emotions, for instance. In this study, I will argue that “sociability” can be usefully employed as a conceptual category to examine and to intellectualize informal diplomacy. It may be helpful to start with what Simmel had to say: “Sociability is the art or play form of association, related to the content and purposes of association in the same way as art is related to reality.”2 In the world of diplomacy, diplomats need to “practice” sociability in order to create a space of association with other diplomats, the kind of association which needs to be conducive to communication. This association is usually aimed at forging a cordial, and congenial, atmosphere. Hence, sociability is important to diplomats precisely because it lays out a “constructed space” which enables and, moreover, facili- tates, exchanges of information. What I propose here is broader than Simmel’s definition as he states that there should not be any sense of intentionality for achieving tangible interest or having any content to the association other than associating for associating’s sake. My proposition is that sociability in diplomacy does have an implicit underlying objective of creating a congenial association in order to exchange information. For much of the time, however, the association engineered operates as if it exists for the sake of association alone – hence, in this sense, superficially veering closer to Simmel’s notion. Moreover, sociability can be visible, that is, the association is seen by others. The fact of being seen is what gives a performative character to sociability, because it helps to make explicit the sense of group identity to those outside of the association. In the rest of the study, I will be referring to the Bandung Conference of 1955 to draw some examples from in elaborating my discussions of sociability in diplomacy. I have been working on the framework of “diplomacy as theater” in order to ruminate on the importance of the symbolic at the Bandung 2 Simmel, Georg. “The Sociology of Sociability.” American Journal of Sociology 55 (3) (1949), 254. diplomatica 1 (2019) 56-72 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:39:02PM via free access <UN> 58 Shimazu Conference.3 Very briefly, the Bandung Conference was a major international conference convened for one week in April 1955 in the West Javanese city of Bandung. It was sponsored by the Colombo Powers (namely Ceylon, India, Pakistan, Burma, and Indonesia) who had invited twenty-five newly inde- pendent Asian and African states, representing in all some 1.4 billion people worldwide. It was a global media event as hundreds of journalists gathered in Bandung, leaving out the uninvited Western states, which anxiously watched the unfolding of events. It had a particular hold on the global imagination, mainly due to the charismatic leaders who attended the conference, such as Sukarno, Nehru, Zhou Enlai, and Nasser. It put the configuration of newly in- dependent states, known collectively as “Afro-Asia” on the map – and made post-colonial Asian-African diplomacy “sexy.”4 Why was sociability so important at Bandung? What made the Bandung ex- perience so poignant was the novelty of being on the stage of international diplomacy for some of the Asian and African statesmen, as new diplomatic actors. Granted some of them were highly experienced in international net- working already as part of anti-colonial networks that operated under the age of empires, such as the League against Imperialism which was notable for its meeting in Brussels in 1927.5 Zhou Enlai, Nehru, and Ali Sastroamijoyo (the prime minister of Indonesia) had lived respectively in Tokyo, Paris, London, and Leiden, and came across each other as young revolutionaries and nation- alists. However, Sukarno did not have his first chance for a substantial foreign visit till November 1943 when he turned up in Tokyo with fellow Indonesian leaders under the Japanese wartime occupation, miffed at their exclusion from the Greater East Asia Conference which had just taken place a day or two before. Similarly, Nasser was a homegrown revolutionary and his suc- cessful performance at Bandung marked his first overseas venture. This made Bandung an intriguing space of sociability: on the one hand, there were those who felt comfortable in their role as international statesmen at these international gatherings; whilst on the other hand, there were those who possessed charismatic aura from their nationally-based revolutionary credentials, but 3 Shimazu, Naoko.“Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955.” Modern Asian Studies 48 (1) (2014), 225–52. 4 For instance, Lee, Christopher J., ed. Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2010); Tan, Seng and Amitav Acharya, eds. Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for Interna- tional Order (Singapore: nus Press, 2008). 5 See Goebel, Michael. Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). diplomaticaDownloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 1 (2019) 56-72 05:39:02PM via free access <UN> What Is Sociability In Diplomacy? 59 who were not necessarily well practiced in the art of international diplomacy, particularly in the role as a significant diplomatic actor. Needless to say, there were a myriad of others, be they delegates, journalists, or local townspeople, who were present at the conference either officially or unofficially. In this com- plex multi-layered conference space, “sociability” worked like a social glue that brought people together and generated a semblance of a collective identity. A timely revival of scholarly interest in the anthropological literature on hospitality can provide historians with some useful conceptual tools for our investigation on sociability.6 In particular, the literature on how social interac- tion can generate certain moods – “social heat” – between hosts and guest, is helpful.7 In this light, hospitality is a powerful instrument which can set the “tone” in which favorable social contexts can be created.8 In any case, one of the most fruitful ideas to be gleaned for our purpose is that “The creation of mood or the affective component of hospitality” can turn “hospitality an area for social dramas.”9 Moreover, Herzfeld notes that hospitality possesses “pe- culiar scalar properties” – that is hospitality extended at a micro-level is often scaled up to imply national characteristics of the host country.10 Let us sup- pose that Nehru’s hospitality extended over an intimate dinner to a handful of top statesmen at Bandung might be taken to represent the character of “In- dian hospitality” as though it were a reified national form, in much the same way as the statesman would often be regarded as the personification of the state which s/he represented. In other words, Nehru’s hospitality personified Indian hospitality generally. Seeing from this light, hospitality is a powerful instrument for the host, as a means of creating favorable impressions of their country. Moreover, in many cases, women play a prominent role in hospitality, and this is also reflected in the gender-specific nature of the way diplomatic wives and consorts are considered to play an integral part of diplomacy, also at Bandung.

Load more