Diplomatic imaginations: mediating estrangement in world society

Abstract

This article is an inquiry into the relationship between diplomacy and public imagination in world politics. Neither the conventional conceptions of diplomacy as the art or practice of negotiations among groups or states, nor more critical meditations on the mediation of conflictual narratives, it is argued, can adequately explain the very subjective foundations of diplomacy as a normative practice in world politics. This glaring oversight is in large part due to the lack of engagement with the varied contours of historical meaning and memory that condition human thoughts and relations in world society. Diplomacy, I argue, is very much implicated in the normative dictates of public imagination: namely, the public understanding of history which arises from the exclusionary—and hence often conflicting—cultural narratives about nationhood, justice, language, rights, personhood, et cetera that remain the perennial facts of human relations in world society. As such, the practice of diplomacy can be reconceived as a paradox: an intervention into, and an enabler of, exclusivist narrations of public imagination in world society.

Notes

¹ As evidenced by numerous successful diplomatic efforts resulting in hostage releases, resumption of talks and negotiations, and peace treaties, from the Balkans to Beirut to Tehran to Islamabad, Pyongyang and beyond.

² For a sampling of the most important treatments of public imagination in comparative literature, history, comparative politics and IR, to just mention a few disciplines, see Anderson (1983), Auerbach (1968), Hobsbawm (1990), Mayall (1990), Nussbaum (1995) and Said (1994).

³ As Anderson explains, ‘The nation is imagined as limited because … no nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind … [and] it is imagined as sovereign because … nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state’ (1983, 6).

⁴ As Schmitt notes, ‘The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.’

⁵ Hence, from the point of view of my argument, the debates surrounding particular ‘cultures of anarchy’ misapprehend the issues at stake because the questions raised by the historicity and multiplicity of meaning do not stand or fall on empirical claims about the integrity of particular ‘cultures’. This is why I use the phrases ‘public imagination’ and ‘social imaginary’, instead of ‘culture’, to discuss the agents' deliberative situation in society. For a recent critique of the kind of Schmittian notions of ‘the political’ (as regards the politics of recognition), see Seyla Benhabib'sThe claims of culture (2002); although I agree with much of her critique, the solution she proposes—a constructivist approach to historical meaning married to a deliberative universalism—leaves out some of the nuances of public imagination which I am theorizing here.

⁶ For a critical discussion of Bull's writings on diplomatic culture see James Der Derian's essay ‘Hedley Bull and the idea of diplomatic culture’ (1996).

⁷ Quoted by Der Derian (1996, 89). This excerpt is from a paper presented by Bull at the Seminar on World Society in the Department of International Relations, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, which is among his collected papers now housed at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

⁸ It must be noted, however, that, as Nicholas J Cull (2006) has shown, Guillon did not first coin the phrase. In fact, it was first used more than a century earlier in 1856 in the British newspaper The Times, where ‘It was [sic] used merely as a synonym for civility in a piece criticizing the posturing of President Franklin Pierce.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hussein Banai

Hussein Banai is an Assistant Professor in Diplomacy and World Affairs at Occidental College and Research Affiliate at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.