Diplomacy’s Value A volume in the series Cornell Studies in Security Affairs edited by Robert J. Art, Robert Jervis, and Stephen M. Walt A list of titles in this series is available at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Diplomacy’s Value Creating Security in 1920s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East Brian C. Rathbun Cornell University Press Ithaca and London Copyright © 2014 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 2014 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2014 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rathbun, Brian C., 1973– author. Diplomacy’s value : creating security in 1920s Europe and the contemporary Middle East / Brian C. Rathbun. pages cm — (Cornell studies in security affairs) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8014-5318-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8014-7990-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Diplomacy. 2. Europe—History—1918–1945. 3. Arab-Israeli confl ict—1993— Peace. I. Title. II. Series: Cornell studies in security affairs. JZ1405.R37 2014 327.4009'042—dc23 2014013178 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 Cover illustration: “He looks to the left, he looks to the right, he will save me.” Chancellor Gustav Stresemann in the guise of a guardian angel leads Germany to peace. Cover of Simplicissimus 28, no. 7, 14 May 1923. To Beth, Rose, and Charli for being so kind to me when I was less than diplomatic. Contents Preface and Acknowledgments ix 1. The Value and Values of Diplomacy 1 2. Creating Value: A Psychological Theory of Diplomacy 22 3 . Tabling the Issue: Two Franco-British Negotiations 58 4. Setting the Table: German Reassurance, British Brokering, and French Understanding 87 5. Getting to the Table: The Diplomatic Perils of the Exchange of Notes 117 6. Cards on the Table: The Treaty of Mutual Guarantee and the “Spirit of Locarno” 137 7. Turning the Tables: Reparations, Early Evacuation, and the Hague Conference 162 8. Additional Value: The Rise and Fall of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process 188 9. Searching for Stresemann: The Lessons of the 1920s for Diplomacy and the Middle East Peace Process 236 References 247 Index 263 [vii] Preface and Acknowledgments This book has a very personal beginning. After my wife and I fi nished graduate school, she was hired to work as a diplomat for the U.S. State Department. After the initial excitement that accompanies one’s fi rst grown-up job (better said, vicarious excitement, because I was unem- ployed, having been beat out for that very same job by this wonderful woman I had married), I realized that I had absolutely no earthly idea what Nina would be doing. She was similarly clueless, having received the same apparently inadequate Ph.D. education I had. How could it be that after six years of graduate school at Berkeley we had no real under- standing of what comprises most of interstate relations—communicating via diplomacy? I noted this as a future research topic. Ten years later, this is the result. When I fi nally started looking into diplomacy as a concept and a phe- nomenon, I felt better. No one else seemed to have any idea either. I found a half-dozen reviews of the literature on diplomacy, all complain- ing that no one had studied it and no one knew how it worked. They provided a few requisite quotes from diplomats who claimed that their brilliant skill was simply intuitive and inexplicable and then went onto a list of the various functions of the diplomat—smiling at cocktail parties, acting pretentious, and so on. Yet, frustratingly, none of these works re- ally did anything about this enormous gap in our scholarly knowledge. To make progress, I fi rst had to understand that diplomacy was, at least conceptually, very different from foreign policy. Diplomacy is not the for- mulation of foreign policy interests; it is the pursuit of them without re- course to force. This can be done in different ways. State leaders can engage in coercive bargaining, pragmatic statecraft, or reasoned dialogue. There are different diplomatic styles used to pursue the same goals. [ix] Preface and Acknowledgments I had the perfect laboratory to test these arguments—1920s Europe. I had been interested since graduate school in this somewhat neglected period in great power politics. After I published my fi rst book, I turned back to it, hoping to make the case again that parties defi ned the national interest differently. In hindsight, this would have been a mistake, a mere retread of my fi rst book. And it would not have worked in any case. The defi nition of the national interest was not in dispute in the domestic poli- tics of France, Britain, and Germany between the wars. This had frus- trated me when I fi rst took up the topic, but when I reopened it, I saw that this fact served my new theoretical purposes. Foreign policy goals were not contested, but diplomatic style was. It indicated, yet again, that important elements of state behavior are not structurally determined. Diplomacy is the exercise of agency. Those with different diplomatic styles take the same interests and go about achieving them in very different ways. Indeed, it is hard to think about diplomacy in any meaningful way if it is simply endogenous to attri- butes of the environment such as the position of a state in the distribu- tion of power. If the powerful always get what they want, then the neglect of diplomacy in the international relations literature is forgivable. Yet they don’t, and it isn’t. It is not enough, however, simply to show that diplomacy matters. I wanted to say something about what diplomatic styles we could expect states to pursue. Here I drew again on psychological attributes of deci- sion makers, in particular social and epistemic motivations. These two factors combine to produce a number of diplomatic styles that we fi nd implied in different schools of international relations theory. In other words, not only do we have realist and liberal scholars, we also have realist and liberal practitioners, and we can predict who they are likely to be. Scholarly debates are replicated in the real world with real consequences. I envision this book as the last in a triptych of books that one might think of as neo-idealist in character. They are idealist in that a major take- away from all of them is that we are not destined to a competitive world of power politics; leaders exercise considerable agency in their foreign policy choices. In Partisan Interventions, I contend that states often inter- vene with military force for humanitarian purposes. In Trust in Interna- tional Cooperation, I show they are capable of trusting other states to effectively create multilateral security institutions. And in this book, Di- plomacy’s Value , I demonstrate that liberal and realist diplomacy enables states to reach win-win outcomes that they would otherwise not have achieved through coercive bargaining. The books are neo, however, in the sense that they are neither naïve nor normative. All three are based on rigorous objective analysis with a careful research design. The last [x] Preface and Acknowledgments two make the case that decision makers can reach cooperative outcomes even when motivated primarily by egoistic ends. But also, always, there are opponents of humanitarian intervention, multilateralism, and rea- soned diplomacy. These outcomes are by no means predetermined. Par- ticular political parties favor them, while others do not. I do not think that we are on a long march to a liberal paradise. I was fortunate enough to be put through the fi re by Iain Johnston, Todd Sechser, Wayne Sandholtz, Jacques Hymans, Mark Haas, Jon Mer- cer, David Welch, Vincent Pouliot, Robert Trager, Paul Sharp, Jennifer Mitzen, Marcus Holmes, Mark Trachtenberg, Jordan Branch, Arthur Stein, Andrew Moravcsik, Burcu Bayram, Aaron Rapport, Mai’a Davis Cross, and audiences at Princeton University, the University of Texas– Austin, UCLA, and McGill University. Any remaining mistakes I blame on them for not catching. Heather McKibben helped me immensely in situating my argument against the alternatives and showing how they are often more comple- mentary than competitive. Dustin Tingley greatly infl uenced my thinking about case selection. Ron Krebs was instrumental in helping me distin- guish foreign policy from diplomacy. Andrew Moravcsik made me deal with the role of interests and beliefs in isolating the causal importance of diplomatic style. Nina brought me down to size repeatedly by saying, “Yes, of course,” to every insight I thought I had generated about the dip- lomatic process, as diplomats will do. Robert Jervis was one of the review- ers for Cornell University Press. His endorsement was one of the highest points of my professional career. Another anonymous reviewer was also superb. Anyone who has worked with Roger Haydon at the press knows how he combines humor with professionalism to make publishing a book painless.