Ambassador at Large: Diplomat Extraordinary Ambassador at Large: Diplomat Extraordinary
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AMBASSADOR AT LARGE: DIPLOMAT EXTRAORDINARY AMBASSADOR AT LARGE: DIPLOMAT EXTRAORDINARY by LEE H. BURKE MARTINUS NI]HOFF• I THE HAGUE I I972 © I972 by Martinus Nijholl, The Hague, Netherlands All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form ISBN 978-94-015-0008-1 ISBN 978-94-015-0466-9 (eBook) DOl 10.1007/978-94-015-0466-9 FOREWORD A mbassador at Large: Diplomat Extraordinary is a welcome contri bution to the literature on contemporary diplomacy, and is especially relevant to the conduct of United States foreign relations. Concomitant with pressures to escalate the level of diplomatic representation and negotiation, the Ambassador at Large, a recent innovation in the American diplomatic hierarchy, may play an increasingly important role. Should other governments follow the American lead by creating similar offices, a new, flexible layer of diplomatic relations may be added to the four which currently are most widely used, namely, the summit, the ministerial, the traditional professional, and the technical strata. Diplomacy may be defined as the international political process whereby political entities - mostly the recognized members of the fami ly of nations, but also emergent states, international and supranational organizations, and a few special entities like the Vatican - conduct their official relations with one another in the international environ ment. Like other human and societal processes, it is astatic and in the course of time experiences significant changes. It has expanded to meet the needs of a rapidly proliferating community of nations and it has been adapted to the growing complex of international concerns and interactions. Scientific and technological changes have created new problems and revolutionized methods of diplomatic communication and transportation. These developments have both intensified the needs and enriched the potentialities of the diplomatic process. Throughout history doubtless each major, permeative modification in diplomatic practice has produced a so-called "new diplomacy." In The Evolution of Diplomatic Method (I954), Sir Harold Nicolson dis tinguishes sequentially among the Greek, Roman, Italian (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), French (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries), VI FOREWORD and American (twentieth century) basic systems of diplomacy. The last of these - the American method - he avows, is characterized by in creased parliamentary diplomacy in the international organization, open diplomacy as espoused by Woodrow Wilson, and personal di plomacy involving the active participation of political principals. While none of these qualities was entirely new at the time of World War I, at least not to the United States, they have come to be far more widely employed and institutionally more highly sophisticated. Since the British diplomatist addressed himself to the subject, the new diplomacy has taken on additional qualities, and some of its chief characteristics have been refined. Thus, "personal" has needed to be distinguished from "personalized" diplomacy, in many ways the diplo matic process has become more democratic, ministerial and summit diplomacy have come to be relied on more frequently and in an in creasing variety of forms and forums, and the personnel of the diplo matic profession has undergone modification. One such change, re sulting in an important, innovated type of diplomatic emissary is de scribed, assessed, and related to other categories of diplomats in this volume on the A mbassador at Large: Diplomat Extraordinary. Interest in, and English language literature on, diplomatic relations expanded both quantitatively and qualitatively to a remarkable degree following World War II. As was to be anticipated, however, the nature of such growth and the directions of its emphases were neither broadly planned nor systematically executed. Supplementing a modest library of standard, broad-scale textual materials, hundreds of monographic studies and essays have focused more particularly on a small number of central functional issues or key agents and institutions in the foreign relations process - such as the Presidency, the Secretary and De partment of State, the Foreign Service, policy-making, and top-level interagency coordination (including the operation of the National Se curity Council system). Equally generous literary attention has been devoted to the roles in the external affairs arena played by decision-making, the information media and public opinion, elites and pressure groups, the military, and the intelligence community. These have complemented some of the older areas of concentration, such as treaty-making and the diplomatic contribution to peace-making and the amicable settlement of inter national disputes. The last of these, however, has come to be refocused as "problem solving," "conflict resolution," and "crisis management" - which are evoking their own emergent literature. FOREWORD VII Despite such developments, however, in the United States the princi pal literary expansion since 1945 has centered upon three types of ma terials. The first of these, understandably attractive to both authors and readers, concerns the making and substantive nature of foreign policy, with primary emphasis on policy essence rather than diplomatic practitioners and techniques of implementation. Second, also of wide spread interest is that literature which simply chronicles the concerns of the United States with particular foreign relations developments, both areal and functional. This category of literature - often in the guise of diplomatic history - also embraces several hundred volumes which may be loosely described as "case studies" of American policy and action in selected sets of international circumstances. The third category consists of the rich reservoir of autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, and commentaries by and about Presidents, Secretaries of State, diplomats, consuls, and other officials engaged in foreign affairs. It goes without saying that much of this literature contributes sub stantially to understanding the complex relations of states and certain aspects of the manner in which they deal with one another. N everthe less, literature emphasizing and analyzing diplomacy per se as the process whereby governments mutually conduct their official relations, studies applying the "diplomatic" rather than some other perspective (such as the historical, personal, administrative, partisan, or personnel service approaches) to foreign relations matters, and studies of varying types of diplomatic agents have, by comparison, been largely neglected. Admittedly, in the past the literature has been enriched by the writings of such eminent European diplomatists as Fran<;oise de Callieres, Jules M. Cambon, Lord Maurice P. Hanky, Jules Jusserand, Otto Krauske, Paul L. E. Pradier-Fodere, Sir Harold Nicolson, Sir Ernest M. Satow, Lord Robert G. Vansittart, and many others. Aside from the analysis of policy-making and the substance of foreign policy, together with the "I-Was-There-When" type of memoir, as al ready noted, the broad-scale study of diplomacy as a profession is rela tively rare in contemporary American literature. To be sure, since World War II several writers have concentrated on the principal prac titioners, including, for example, James Aldridge (The Diplomat, 1950), Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert (The Diplomats, I9I9-I939, 1953), Charles W. Thayer (Diplomat, 1959), E. Wilder Spaulding (Ambassa dors Ordinary and Extraordinary, 1961), and John Ensor Harr (The Professional Diplomat, 1969). A few have written descriptively, analyti cally, conceptualistically, and normatively about diplomacy as an insti- VIII FOREWORD tution or function, illustrated by the contributions of Stephen D. Kertesz (American Diplomacy in a New Era, 1961), Graham H. Stuart (American Diplomatic and Consular Practice, 2nd ed., 1952), Kenneth W. Thompson (American Diplomacy and Emergent Patterns, 1962), and Henry M. Wriston (Diplomacy in a Democracy, 1956). Still others have written on negotiation and negotiating style, international conferencing, privileges and immunities, and other more restricted aspects of the diplomatic process. Similarly, systematic studies of particular categories of United States ranking diplomats and other officials engaged in foreign relations ac tivities are equally rare. While E. Wilder Spaulding draws some dis tinctions among various types of ambassadors, ranging from the "old masters" to "the female of the species," and from academicians and "men of letters" to "the pros," he tends to be more attentive to dis tinguishing emissaries on the basis of their background than of their pragmatic functioning. A number of other writers have chosen to ad dress themselves to several limited categories of emissaries. For ex ample, Charles O. Paullin describes the Diplomatic Negotiations of American Naval Officers (1912), Henry M. Wriston deals with Executive Agents in American Foreign Relations (1929), Maurice Waters surveys the activities of The Ad Hoc Diplomat (1963), and Alfred Vagts reviews the functions of The Military Attache (1967). The first three of these are concerned largely with American usage, whereas Vagts does not delimit himself to United States practice. This relatively meager English-language literary fare suggests the urgent need for planned augmentation for the comprehensive under standing of the diplomatic process today. Serious studies of a good many additional