Inside a European Foreign Ministry

At Home with the Diplomats EXPERTI S E CULTURES AND TECHNOLOGIES OF KNOWLEDGE edited by dominic boyer A list of titles in this series is available at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. At Home with the Diplomats Inside a European Foreign Ministry Iver B. Neumann Cornell University Press Ithaca and London Copyright © 2012 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2012 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2012 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Neumann, Iver B. At home with the diplomats : inside a European foreign ministry / Iver B. Neumann. p. cm. — (Expertise) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-4993-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8014-7765-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Diplomatic and consular service, European. 2. Diplomatic and consular service, Norwegian. 3. Diplomats—Europe. 4. Diplomats— Norway. 5. Europe—Foreign relations. 6. Norway—Foreign relations. 7. Neumann, Iver B. I. Title. II. Series: Expertise (Ithaca, N.Y.) JZ1570.A59N48 2012 327.4—dc23 2011022560 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fi bers. For further information, visit our website at www. cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Cecilie, the most fl eeting of foreign ministry occupants The social science that we want to concern ourselves with is a science of actuality. We want to understand in its particularity the encompassing actuality of the life in which we are placed—on one hand, the coherence and cultural signifi cance of individual occurrences in their contemporary confi guration, and on the other hand, the reasons for those occurrences being historically so and not otherwise. Max Weber Contents Preface ix Introduction: Who Are They and Where Do They Come From? 1 1. Abroad: The Emergence of Permanent Diplomacy 18 2. At Home: The Emergence of the Foreign Ministry 34 3. The Bureaucratic Mode of Knowledge Production 63 4. To Be a Diplomat 94 5. Diplomats Gendered and Classed 129 Conclusion: Diplomatic Knowledge 169 References 191 Index 211 Preface My fi rst experience with the diplomatic world came in 1980, when, at the ripe age of nineteen, I had just fi nished as a draftee at the Army Lan- guage School and set off to serve my last six months of service as a guard and interpreter at the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Moscow. I then took up work at a think tank where social and professional contact with diplomats was frequent. In 1995 I arrived at the European University Institute with a postdoc project in political science on the European Union’s main internal diplomatic institution, COREPER (the Committees of Permanent Representatives of the EU’s member states). I discovered that the lack of studies of diplomacy could not be overcome by drawing on the methods at my disposal as a political scientist. My reaction was to retrain as an an- thropologist, and to work in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for three and a half years, fi rst as a planner (1997–99), and then as a senior adviser on European politics (2001–3), on the explicit understanding that I was to write on diplomacy. I then went on to write the archival-based centenary history of the ministry for its 2005 centenary (the result is available x Preface as Neumann and Leira 2005). This work builds on fi eld data and archival data collected throughout these experiences. I thank Morten Andersen, Matti Bunzl, Benjamin de Carvalho, Costas Constantinou, James Der Derian, Bud Duvall, Nora Eggen, Thomas Hyl- land Eriksen, Anette Fagertun, Ulla Gudmundson, Ole Dahl Gulliksen, Hege Haaland, Martin Hall, Helga Hernes, Patrick T. Jackson, Fuat Kay- man, Mark Laffey, Halvard Leira, Daniel Nexon, Cecilie Basberg Neu- mann, Knut Nustad, Vincent Pouliot, Bahar Rumelili, Niels Nagelshus Schia, James C. Scott, Ole Jacob Sending, Paul Sharp, May-Len Skilbrei, Inger Skjelsbæk, Jorun Solheim, Inger Lise Teig, Henrik Thune, Ann Towns, Torunn Tryggestad, and Geoffrey Wiseman for conversations and written comments. Ulf Hannerz, Knut Nustad, and Cris Shore read the entire manuscript and were very encouraging. Douglas Holmes steered me in Dominic Boyer’s direction. Thanks Dominic, and please forward my thanks to your anonymous referees. And thanks to Roger Haydon for the most thorough editing I have ever experienced. What is now chapter 3 draws on two previous publications; “On Gener- ating State Voice,” State Formation: Anthropological Explorations, ed. Knut Nustad and Christin Krohn-Hansen (London: Pluto, 2005), 195–211, used here with the permission of Pluto Press; and “ ‘A Speech That the Entire Ministry May Stand for,’ or: Why Diplomats Never Produce Anything New,” International Political Sociology 1 (2) (2007): 183–200, used here with the permission of Wiley-Blackwell. Half-length versions of chapters 4 and 5 have been published previously. Material from “To Be a Diplomat,” In- ternational Studies Perspectives 6 (1) (2005): 72–93, is used with the permission of Wiley-Blackwell; and material from “The Body of the Diplomat,” European Journal of International Relations 14 (4) (2008): 671–94, is used with the permission of SAGE journals. At Home with the Diplomats Introduction Who Are They and Where Do They Come From? Handbooks are a fascinating source for social inquiry. They tell us how things should be. If enough people use them, what began as a recipe may become a social reality. In 1917, Sir Ernest Satow, a naturalized British citizen born in Sweden to an English mother and a German father, who had enjoyed a distinguished diplomatic career in East Asia, published a Guide to Diplomatic Practice. Satow defi ned diplomacy as “the conduct of offi cial relations between the governments of independent states.” All six subsequent editions, the latest of which appeared in 2009, retain that defi - nition. “Satow” remains a key authority in the world’s foreign ministries, many of whose practices have evolved along the lines described in the book (Otte 2001). To those unfamiliar with the inner workings of diplomacy, modern diplomacy may look like what Satow wanted it to be. Prescription has become description. This book is to Satow what the meal is to the recipe. It is a historically informed ethnography of diplomacy, in which I ask what diplomats do and how they came to do it. Diplomacy is an integrating mechanism for 2 Introduction what is now emerging as a global polity. It is, I believe, just as signifi cant as trade and war. We need to understand what diplomats and diplomacy do and what they believe they are doing. The Need for Ethnography Handbooks give us a sense of how things should be, but they do not nec- essarily tell us how things are. Those who have a lived experience of diplomacy know the difference between the prescriptions of the handbook and the way state diplomats represent what they are doing to the out- side world, on the one hand, and actual diplomatic practices, on the other. There are inevitable frictions between prescription and description, for guides to practice and practices themselves are different things. First, state diplomacy is not continuously fi xated on state-to-state relations, but works through all sorts of channels. From his own life as a practicing diplomat, Satow knew full well that diplomacy was only ideally a state-to-state affair. Satow (1843–1929) was, after all, a contemporary of the likes of Mata Hari (1876–1917), the courtesan who peddled vital information between France, Germany, and other warring parties during the First World War. Second, diplomats may end up working in all kinds of social locales, not only in foreign capitals. They may work as consuls in major cities that are not capitals, in state delegations to international organizations (IOs), in IOs themselves, or on secondment from an international organization. In fact, for the greater part of their careers they are not even posted to another country but work “at home,” by which they mean in the ministry of foreign affairs (MFA) of the state of their employ—which for the last couple of hundred years has been the state of which they are citizens. There are still remnants of a time when this was not so, however, and here we have a third friction between prescription and description; a number of microstates routinely hire foreign nationals to be their diplomats. Before the age of nationalism, this was a widespread practice. To mention but one example, the Dutch- man Hugo Grotius, a founder of international law, served as Sweden’s am- bassador to the French court from 1634 to 1644. A direct parallel may be drawn to the world of the soldier. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Prus- sian soldier Carl von Clausewitz spent a year in Russian employ without being considered a mercenary the way he would have been if he had taken Who Are They and Where Do They Come From? 3 up foreign employ some years later (cf. Thomson 1994). 1 Fourth, and this is where diplomacy as a set of practices begins to detach itself from states, other actors such as transnational companies (TNCs), counties, nongov- ernmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly hiring their own diplomats (cf.

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