DRAFT
New histories and international relations
Social closure and the rise of the new diplomacy
Edward Keene
Christ Church
Oxford University
This paper is intended as a contribution to the project of going beyond traditional
approaches to the historical development of modern international relations with a view to
developing ‘a social history of international law and diplomacy’ as opposed to the ‘legal
and diplomatic history of international society’ that still dominates much of mainstream
international relations theory (Keene 2008). Because the paper is only a small element of
this much larger agenda, it covers one particular topic: the transition from the old to the
new diplomacy, and how it relates to the conceptualization of international society,
particularly in terms of ideas about stratification and social closure, and so on to major
themes such as the relationship between order and justice in world politics (elsewhere, in
Keene 2009, I have developed some parallel lines of enquiry into the sociological profile
of early modern international lawyers).
The current essay attempts to provide a perspective on the dialogue between
history and international relations theory not so much by way of abstract reflection on the
two fields of enquiry, but rather by offering a practical example of how students of
international relations can draw upon -- and also, one hopes, inform -- the work of
historians. I more or less take it for granted that any idea of a very stark divide between
the two disciplines would be mistaken, and the distinction is to a very large extent an
artifical one (raising questions, thankfully beyond the scope of this paper, about whether
‘dialogue’ is the best way of framing the relationship). There have been significant moves
by historians in the direction of an engagement with the social and cultural dimensions of
international relations in recent work, often in ways that are sharply critical of traditional
historiography (for example: Koskenniemi 2002 and Craven, Fitzmaurice and Vogiatzi
eds. 2007 on international law; Clavin 2005 and Calvin and Wessels 2005 on
transnational history and international institutions; and, on the cultural history of
diplomacy, Mosslang and Riotte eds. 2008). Where this work stops being ‘history’ and
becomes ‘international relations theory’ is very difficult to say, and it is probably not
1
worth the effort trying to do so. I will draw freely on this and related literature from the
‘new diplomatic history’ (which is no longer as ‘new’ as it once was, since it is now at
least some forty years old). However, in an effort to show that international relations is
not entirely redundant, as part of the framework of the analysis I will also employ
elements of tradtional English school thinking, and, most importantly, social theories
from a Weberian perspective, in an attempt to add some broader sociological and
normative depth to the historical discussion.
Perspectives on the ‘new diplomacy’
At the beginning of Diplomatic Investigations, Butterfield and Wight say that they and
other members of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics adopted
as their ‘frame of reference...not the limits and uses of international theory, nor the
formulation of foreign policy, but the diplomatic community itself, international society,
the states-system’; their primary goal was to investigate ‘the nature and distinguishing
marks of the diplomatic community, the way it functions, the obligations of its members,
its tested and established principles of political intercourse’ (Butterfield & Wight 1966,
12). My purpose in this paper is very similar: to examine the nature of the diplomatic
community, how it functions and the principles according to which its members interact
with one another. But to do this much more from the perspective of social theory, and
drawing upon the new approaches to diplomatic history inspired by a more social
historical kind of approach.
More specifically, I will attempt to interpret the significance of the shift from the
‘old’ diplomacy of the nineteenth century to the ‘new’ diplomacy of the twentieth. To the
advocates of the new diplomacy, the most important dimension of this change was the
belief that diplomatic interaction should become less secretive and more accountable to
the public: in brief, more democratic (for example, Ponsonby 1915). This was bound up
with the growing prominence of ‘conference diplomacy’, both at the League of Nations
and in the frequent high profile, if not always productive, gatherings of world leaders that
marked the end of WW1 and the inter-war period (Hankey 1946). Here, however, I want
to concentrate on another, not unrelated, aspect of the emergence of the new diplomacy:
the changing social composition of the diplomatic community. This particular issue has
received a great deal of attention from diplomatic historians (Anderson 1993 is a good
overview), and the main thrust of the change can be summed up quite simply: between
the early nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, say from about 1815 to 1920, the
diplomatic community was transformed from an ‘aristocratic international’ dominated by
2
a small clique of European nobility and gentry, into a larger and more varied society that
included significant numbers of non-European and bourgeois diplomats.
International relations theorists have often interpreted this development as a
deterioration in the cosmopolitan environment of the nineteenth century, and hence as a
contributory factor to the emergence of the more divided and conflictual international
society (if that term can even still be used) of the early twentieth century. This position
has its roots in much of the writing on diplomacy that was done by more conservativeminded members of the profession, who bemoaned what they saw as the coarsening of
diplomatic interaction in the 1920s and 1930s -- Harold Nicolson’s influential work
Diplomacy is perhaps the best-known example (as well as Nicolson 1939, see Kennedy
1922; Huddleston 1954; and Webster 1962) -- and the theme runs, in a more muted form,
through several of the more recent diplomatic histories (see, for example, Lauren 1976,
28; Anderson 1993, 121-22). A very similar point of view, expressed in more general
theoretical terms, is evident in Hans Morgenthau’s contention that, as a result of the
decline of the old diplomacy,
‘The place of the one international society to which all members of the
different governing groups belonged and which provided a common
framework for the different national societies had been taken by the
national societies themselves. The national societies now gave to their
representatives on the international scene the standards of conduct which
the international society had formerly supplied.... When the international
society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was destroyed, it
became obvious that there was nothing to take the place of that unifying
and restraining element which had been a real society superimposed
upon the national societies’ (Morgenthau 1959, 227-28).
Much the same line of argument can be found in the work of the English school.
According to Hedley Bull, for example, ‘The solidarity of the diplomatic profession has
declined since the mid-nineteenth century, when diplomatists of different countries were
united by a common aristocratic culture, and often by ties of blood and marriage’ (Bull
1977, 183, see also 316-17). Adam Watson claimed that the pragmatic, cynical
cosmopolitanism of aristocratic diplomats, which he saw as a vital ingredient of the
‘compromises and political deals of the Concert’, was now eclipsed by ‘the middle ranks
of society’, whose world-view (he claims) was coloured by a more nationalistic
‘suspicion of foreigners’ (Watson 1982, 110-11; see also Butterfield 1966, 182).
3
This interpretation makes some sense if we think of the diplomatic community in
terms of the function of maintaining order in world politics, and, indeed, scholars such as
Bull do define diplomacy in functionalist terms (Bull 1977, 170-73; see also Watson
1982, 17-18). From that perspective, it is inevitable that qualities such as solidarity or
cosmopolitanism come to the fore; and, of course, even if one might doubt that middle
class Europeans were all as xenophobic as Watson appears to suggest, it is unarguable
that the nineteenth-century diplomatic corps was very cohesive because so many of its
members shared an aristocratic identity. However, rather than ask how stable or peaceful
the resulting international order was, we might instead ask what kind of order was being
maintained here. Nineteenth-century diplomacy may have been good at generating
international solidarity, but it is obvious that it did so by means of a rigid hierarchy where
non-aristocrats were either relegated to subordinate roles within the diplomatic corps, or
excluded from participation altogether; if it was a cosmopolis, it was one that allowed
entry only to a very particular type of ‘world-citizen’, and not many of them at that. Of
course, this did not just happen by accident: rather than emphasise the positive way in
which the diplomatic culture of the late nineteenth century acted as a ‘unifying and
restraining’ influence on the conduct of international relations, we might instead
concentrate on the ways in which social power was used to create and reproduce a
hierarchically structured international society. And, to pursue this line of argument
further, the rise of the new diplomacy could then be interpreted not as a deterioration in
the solidarity of the corps or the stability of international order, but as a change in the
principles of international social stratification.
Before we can understand the changing nature of the diplomatic community in
this way, we need a conceptual framework that will allow us to think about international
society in terms of hierarchy, stratification, and the unequal exercise of social power,
rather than nationalism and cosmopolitanism or (to use the terminology of Bull 1966)
pluralism and solidarism. I will outline such a framework in the first section of the paper,
drawing on Weberian ideas about different types of stratification and mechanisms of
social closure. This provides a scheme for comparing the old nineteenth-century
diplomatic community with its twentieth-century incarnation, which is what I will
attempt to do in the second section of the paper. My central contention here is that the
new diplomacy was a more bureaucratic and individualistic kind of international society
than its predecessor, chiefly because of the increasing importance of credentialism as a
way of controlling access to the diplomatic corps. The ‘aristocratic international’ of the
old diplomatic community, by contrast, may be described as a charismatic status society
built upon a collectivist form of social closure that rested above all on a stereotypical
ideal of the ‘gentlemanly diplomat’ as a product of breeding and upbringing rather than
4
formal training. In the final section of the paper, I will explore the consequences of this
‘diplomatic investigation’ for two central elements of the English school’s research
programme: the comparative-historical analysis of international order; and the normative
analysis of the relationship between order and justice in international relations.
Stratification and social closure in international society
When patterns of inequality persist over time and give rise to the formation of
differentiated groups occupying super- and subordinate positions, it becomes possible to
talk about a society in terms of stratification and hierarchy (see Bottero 2005 for a good
overview of the sociological literature on this theme). In the context of international
relations this may seem to be ruled out by the widespread belief that international systems
are, by definition, organized around the principle of anarchy, but many theories of
international relations invoke the concept of hierarchy (although less often, as far as I am
aware, stratification) as a way of understanding how international systems work. This is
reasonable since patterns of inequality in international relations do persist over time,
making it possible to describe the world in terms that mark clear distinctions between
different groups, often in ways with hierarchical implications: the first, second and third
worlds, for example (labels chosen to echo the estates of ancien regime France); the
distinction between the ‘family of civilized nations’ and ‘barbarous peoples’; great
powers and lesser ones; and so on. Rather than discuss different theories about why these
hierarchies emerge, here I want to focus on how we might categorize the different types
of hierarchy that could potentially exist in international relations.
Conceptualizing international hierarchy
Before outlining my approach, it is worth contrasting it with the recent typological
studies of international hierarchy produced by David Lake and Jack Donnelly (Lake 1996
and 2003; Donnelly 2005).1 Lake’s scheme is based on two considerations: how much
does the hierarchy restrict the freedom of actors within it; and what is the issue-area
within which it operates? Thus, for example, he distinguishes different kinds of
hierarchical security system, ranging from a loose alliance to a more tightly binding
1
This is emphatically not to say that these are the only ways of thinking about international
hierarchy, or even that they are demonstrably superior to, say, realist or post-structuralist approaches. The
conceptual framework I will outline below, while not perfectly suited to all these different approaches is at
least not intended to exclude any of them. Nor, although Lake’s and Donnelly’s are the most explicitly
typological analyses, should one overlook the relevance of studies such as Onuf 1989, Doty 1996, Reus-Smit
1999, Crawford 2002, Teschke 2003, or Hobson and Sharman 2005.
5
empire, from different kinds of hierarchical economic system, in this case ranging from a
flexible market relationship to a fully-fledged economic union (Lake 2003, 312). This
conceptual framework fits in with his theoretical perspective, which explains the
emergence of hierarchical systems in terms of states’ willingness to sacrifice some of
their sovereign independence in return for more effective institutional arrangements;
Lake’s scheme is an attempt to identify the range of possible trade-offs on a variety of
issues so as to map these choices.
Donnelly’s typology comes from a different perspective, aligned more closely
with constructivist or English school thinking. Thus far, it looks at different types of
security system, ranging from ones that are based on a multiplicity of independent actors
but which may still involve some elements of hierarchy -- such as the balance of power, a
protection arrangement or a concert system -- to more fully hierarchical ones, of which
Donnelly identifies three types: hegemony, dominion and empire. (His scheme also
includes transnational security communities, but I will not discuss those here.) Like Lake,
the principal axis along which this scheme works is the question of how binding the
various systems are. Yet Donnelly also attempts to identify four further distinguishing
characteristics of hierarchical security systems: dominant actors, constitutive rules,
behavioural patterns and primary institutions. So, for example, he is able to distinguish a
hegemonic system, based on the constitutive rule of hegemonic leadership and where the
primary institution is a hegemonic alliance, from a dominion, defined by a rule of semiautonomy and an institution of ritual subservience, from an empire, where centralized
decision-making and formal imperial government apply.
One feature that these conceptual schemes share is that both think of international
hierarchies primarily in terms of a distribution of authority, often basing the analysis on
the various ways in which sovereignty is divided or compromised in such systems (see
also Hobson and Sharman 2005); they are, in effect, typologies of different structures of
global governance, depending on the degree to which decision-making authority is
centralized within the international system. Lake, for instance, starts out by defining
hierarchy in terms of rights to make decisions and control resources, although he makes
clear that this does not only refer to de jure or formal arrangements (Lake 1996, 7); more
significantly, his classificatory scheme is couched in a discussion about sovereignty and
authority, with the result that it explicitly deals with ‘hierarchical authority relationships’
(Lake 2003, 311). Donnelly defines hierarchy more broadly in terms of superordination
and differentiation (Donnelly 2005, 141). That leaves open the possibility that hierarchy
will not be expressed in terms of differentiated rights and authority, as in Lake’s
definition, and indeed, Donnelly’s scheme does attempt to capture a somewhat richer
6
variety of informal hierarchical arrangements, and more communal or social aspects of
international hierarchy, such as the institution of ritual subservience in a dominion.
Nevertheless, authority keeps creeping back in to the centre of his definition: for
example, to build his typological scheme he begins by charting the relationship between
polarity and authority, and he consistently talks of hierarchy in terms of the existence of
superordinate authorities within a system; as with Lake, a major part of his analysis is the
consideration of how unequal forms of sovereignty might be constituted (Donnelly 2005,
143).
Of course, the distribution of authority is an important dimension of any
hierarchy, and I have no intention of dispensing with it, but there are two problems with
defining the concept in these terms alone. First, it narrows our focus to a political
dimension, and therefore does not help us to understand more economic and social or
communal aspects of hierarchy. For example, neither Lake’s nor even Donnelly’s scheme
pays much attention to how status or prestige work within international relations (see, for
instance, Morgenthau 1959, ch. 6; or Galtung 1964 and Wallace 1973). If we take as an
example the nineteenth-century distinction in international law between ‘civilized’ states
and ‘barbarous’ peoples, it is not the case that the former were in a position of
superordinate authority over the latter. Several civilized states lacked colonies or, later,
officially recognised positions as ‘trustees’, but they still enjoyed a superior position in
international society in terms of the privileges they received from other ‘civilized’ states
in treaties, for example, and it is conceptually speaking rather a blunt instrument to think
of this in terms of the doctrine of recognition in international law. What we need is a
conceptual framework for thinking about hierarchy that will include authority as one of
its dimensions, but will also allow us to capture other ways in which social stratification
might be expressed, such as status.
The second, and related, problem is that, by building up their accounts of
hierarchy from a discussion of unequal or divided sovereignties, these conceptual
schemes focus our attention on how organized political communities fit into hierarchical
systems. Of course, one can see the justification for this in terms of the international
focus of the enquiry, but even then it leaves out what many theorists of international
relations would consider to be the most salient aspects of social stratification, such as
divisions along the lines of class, gender and race (for instance, Rosenberg 1994; Tickner
1992; Doty 1996). Lake’s and Donnelly’s schemes could perhaps capture how entire
states -- lesser powers, outlaw states, barbarous peoples, etc. -- are pushed to the margins
of international society or have their freedom of action constrained, but it is difficult to
use them to see how international arrangements might be organized to ensure the
7
subordination of, say, the proletariat or women within states. Again, part of the problem
here is the political nature of conceptual schemes that concentrate on the distribution of
authority, and which do not also see hierarchy as a more general social phenomenon.
A further issue, although not concerned with the issue of conceptualizing
hierarchy in terms of a distribution of authority as such, is that the relative centralization
of authority is not the only, nor, I would suggest, the most interesting aspect of a political
hierarchy; of at least equal interest is the question of how the distribution of authority is
legitimated. Here Lake’s conceptual framework is restricted by his basic theoretical
assumption that hierarchical systems are products of contractual bargaining (Lake 1996),
which seems to imply a certain voluntaristic element in the formation of hierarchy;
whether or not that is the case, Lake does not include different ways of legitimating
authority in his scheme, and does not appear to be interested in exploring the question of
whether alternative forms of legitimation might change how international hierarchies
work in practice. Donnelly does, at least to the extent that he is interested in identifying
the constitutive rules of international hierarchies, and here he acknowledges that they
may rest on different organizing principles, even if these are not always normative in
character. Nevertheless, although he does draw attention to this dimension of hierarchy,
he does not categorize systems according to the principles on which they are legitimized;
he distinguishes them, in much the same way as Lake, on the basis of the relative
centralization of authority, and only then asks how the various systems are legitimized.
That is quite different from a conceptual scheme that places methods of legitimation at its
centre, and uses it as the basis for marking off the distinctions between different types of
hierarchy. This may seem like a pedantic objection, but the important question here is
whether the relative bindingness of a hierarchy is a more significant concern than the
grounds upon which the hierarchy is legitimated. If one lives, for example, under a
benevolent despot, should one be glad that he is benevolent, or worry that he is a despot?
Similarly, with any hierarchy, it is not irrelevant to take account of how tightly
subordinate actors are constrained; but it is also worthwhile paying attention to who is
doing the constraining, and on what grounds they claim that privilege, not least because
that might have consequences for how the hierarchy develops in the future.
Stratification and social closure: a Weberian approach
Weberian social theory offers a more comprehensive scheme for thinking about social
stratification as well as political hierarchy in international relations. Weber described the
distribution of social power as operating along three axes, captured by the formula, ‘class,
status, party’ (Weber 1968, ii. 926-40; Scott 1996 is a good recent commentary and
8
analysis, which I will follow closely here). Unlike the Marxist concept of class, which is
based on relations of production, Weber’s definition is interested in the distribution of
property, and, to be precise, situations where ‘the kind of chance in the market is the
decisive moment which presents a common condition for the individual’s fate’ (Weber
1968, ii. 928). This formulation is intended to capture ‘the most elemental economic fact
that the way in which the disposition over material property is distributed among a
plurality of people, meeting competitively in the market for the purpose of exchange, in
itself creates specific life chances’ (Weber 1968, ii. 927). This can include a more
Marxist view of class, since only the wealthy have a realistic opportunity to convert their
possessions into capital, in the sense of ownership of the means of production, but the
crucial point is that Weber does not want us to see the potential for ownership of capital
as the only way in which wealth confers power on its holders. The rich, for example, have
greater freedom to pick and choose when to engage in market exchange, and which goods
to buy or sell, and thus have greater power in the ‘price struggle’ than those who ‘have
nothing to offer but their labour or the resulting products’ (Weber 1968, ii. 927).
The second major axis of stratification is status, which for Weber is defined by
‘every typical component of the life of men that is determined by a specific, positive or
negative, social estimation of honour’ (Weber 1968, ii. 932, emphasis original). Weber
acknowledges that this is not divorced from the distribution of property and class
situation, in the sense that property requirements function as a qualification for
membership of a status group ‘with extraordinary regularity’ (Weber 1968, ii. 932).
Nevertheless, it would be a cardinal error to reduce status honour to a mere function of
social class, and, indeed, status ‘normally stands in sharp opposition to the pretensions of
mere property’ (Weber 1968, ii. 932). As one pithy formulation puts it, status is
characterised not by the quantity of one’s income, so much as how one spends it: ‘classes
are stratified according to their relations to the production and acquisition of goods;
whereas status groups are stratified according to the principles of their consumption of
goods as represented by special styles of life’ (Weber 1968, ii. 937; see also Runciman
1969). Highlighting a shared lifestyle is a way of creating ‘distance and exclusiveness’,
the necessary foundations of status honour (Weber 1968, ii. 935), which often become the
basis for monopolizing various privileges and opportunities, and so hindering the free
operation of the market, the use of purely economic power and the formation of classbased relationships.
The concepts of class and status are used by Weber to describe the ways in which
a society may be stratified, but unlike, say, Marxism, he is wary about treating either
classes or (to a lesser extent) status groups as coherent entities that act within a society in
9
order to achieve distinct interests; his terminology more often refers to class and status as
situations which have a greater or lesser determining effect on an individual’s fate
depending on how the society as a whole is structured, the extent of the marketisation of
social relations, how closed status groups are, and so on. Thus, if one’s life chances
happen to be determined by one’s position within the market, one may be said to be
operating within a class situation; if the granting or refusal of social honour is of
determinate importance, then it is a status situation. Of course, Weber recognises that
these situations can be bases for social action, but for this he prefers to employ the
concept of ‘party’, in the sense of an association of people for the purpose of acquiring
social power as a means to ‘influencing social action no matter what its content may be’
(Weber 1968, ii. 938). Whether a society is stratified by status or by class will be
important in shaping how a party operates, the kinds of interests it aims to represent,
whence it draws recruits and so on, but the most important factor determining how
‘parties’ evolve, Weber argues, is ‘the structure of domination’, for the simple reason that
parties are always formed in order to influence social action and that, for Weber, is an
exercise in domination.
Weber himself developed this idea with reference to the various ways in which
domination may be legitimated, identifying three types of authority to which parties as
power-seeking associations lay claim. First, there is ‘charismatic’ authority, which is
rooted in ‘devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an
individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him’
(Weber 1968, i. 215). Because of its focus on a unique individual, such authority is
unstable, but it can be routinised and thus made more sustainable, although at the price of
an inevitable loss in the mystique that attached to the original bearer: the warlord and his
companions become the more mundane state; the prophet and his disciples, the church;
and so on (Weber 1968, iii. 1121). Secondly, there is ‘traditional authority’ based on ‘an
established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions’ (Weber 1968, i. 215), which is
most commonly expressed through patriarchalism and patrimonialism, where subordinate
actors are under the personal subjugation of their ruler-as-master, whose authority is
justified, and sometimes limited, by the appeal to tradition rather than other normative
bases. And thirdly, there is ‘legal authority’, which depends on a belief in a ‘consistent
system of abstract rules which have normally been intentionally established’, to which
the holder of authority is subject in the same way as his subordinates, and where
obedience is owed to the system of rules as such rather than as personal loyalty to the
authority-holder as an individual (Weber 1968, i. 217). This, Weber argues, is
characteristic of modern societies, and is reflected in bureaucracy; here, parties become
associations formed with a view either to shape the legal order as a whole through
10
representation in a legislature, to command the bureaucracy through possession of
executive ministerial positions, or to insert themselves more or less directly into the
official decision-making process as interest groups.
It is often argued, I think with good reason, that it is a mistake to limit the
concept of ‘party’ to associations based on class or status (or both) that operate within
these structures of domination to acquire power and shape social action; and also that it
may be excessively cautious on Weber’s part to limit the possibilities for actual group
formation and concerted, associative action to parties alone, while denying it to classes or
status groups. What this misses, as John Scott argues, is that we might treat authority by
itself as another important axis of stratification, such that we could identify people ‘who
occupy similar advantaged [or disadvantaged] command situations in the social
distribution of authority’ (Scott 1996, 42), which it might be preferable to call ‘command
groups’, ‘blocs’ or ‘elites’ rather than parties. Such authority may be buttressed by wealth
or status, but does not need to be, and thus independently creates possibilities for the
formation of social strata in its own right: a bureaucratic functionary, for example, may
have considerable authority within a particular sphere, and yet still be poorly paid and illregarded.
One of the attractions of this simple tripartite model is that it allows us to
combine together several of the different approaches to thinking about stratification that
have been adopted in international relations (and, as Scott 1996 points out, social theory
in general). For instance, we are not forced to treat hierarchy as a function of either
material capabilities and interests or representational practices and identities. We are also
freed from the classic Marxist dilemma about the precise nature of the relationship
between base and superstructure; or, at the other end of the spectrum, from attempts such
as Ralf Dahrendorf’s to reconceptualise all forms of stratification and group formation in
terms of a single dimension of authority relations (Dahrendorf 1959). It allows us to
develop categories of social stratification that are simultaneously material and ideational;
and which are sometimes driven by inequalities in the economic realm, sometimes the
political, and sometimes -- as in the case of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘cultural capital’
(Bourdieu 1984), for example -- communal or social. Although, as I will note later, there
are some distinctively Weberian theories about how social stratification works, and
especially the forms of stratification that typify modern societies, the conceptual
framework in itself is remarkably accommodating to a wide range of different theoretical
perspectives; nor does it exclude the typological schema employed by Lake or Donnelly,
which may be helpful tools for thinking about the different types of ‘command situation’
that could exist in international relations.
11
The crucial issue now becomes the historical question of which mode of
stratification dominates at any particular time. Sometimes, class situation -- i.e., one’s
prospects in the market -- will be the most important, and we may describe a society as a
class society if status and opportunities to exercise authority seem to be aligned with
social class and to reinforce class situations. Capitalist systems, at least in theory, will
approximate to this category. On the other hand, there may be societies where prestige
and honour have primary importance, and wealth and authority flow to them: a status
society, in other words, such as a caste system. Finally, there may be societies -- the
party-state system of Soviet Communism being the obvious example -- where positions
of authority are the determining factor. In this case, membership of the party apparatus
brings with it both status and (albeit limited) opportunities to gain wealth; in the world of
the nomenklatura authority is a more important attribute than money or prestige. Heavily
bureaucratized societies generally may possess this characteristic.
Translating this conceptual scheme onto international society raises a number of
questions. Class has previously been defined as ‘market situation’, and related to the
distribution of property and income. Obviously, these are not irrelevant issues to
international relations, and it is possible to argue that relative economic strength is the
most important underlying consideration for a state’s power (for example, Kennedy
1981). However, we might expand the definition of ‘class’ here from the economic
distribution of property to the wider distribution of material capabilities. The ‘great
powers’ then, although possessing elements of both status and authority, might be seen as
a class within international society, since their position is overwhelmingly defined by
their material resources. The concept of status also needs some minor revision, but the
idea of a group forming on the basis of a shared way of life is readily applicable to
international relations. As we will see later, and in tune with the Marxist insight that
stratification may cut across state boundaries, status is, like class, applicable to
international relations in terms of transnational status groups, of which the European
aristocracy is a prominent example (Weber explicitly recognises the transnational
dimension of stratification in Weber 1968 ii. 939). Yet even if we are interested in
cataloguing hierarchies of states, shared ways of life, national cultures and so forth may
still provide evidence of the importance of status to international relations. The concept
of ‘civilized states’ that was mentioned earlier is a good example: these were not all
powerful states, since some very small polities qualified as ‘civilized’ in the terms of
nineteenth-century international law. However, all enjoyed a level of prestige and honour
that guaranteed them favourable treatment. ‘Civilized’ states were not a class, since they
occupied very different positions within the distribution of material capabilities, although
12
one might say that the ‘family of civilized nations’ was internally stratified in class terms
because of the distinction between greater and lesser powers that was operative in
institutions such as the Concert of Europe; they were a status-group that possessed a
similar way of life on the basis of which they could mount an effective claim to prestige
and esteem. The distribution of authority, as captured by the notion of a party, elite or
command group, is much closer to the hierarchical schemes developed by Lake and
Donnelly regarding empires and other institutional arrangements for global governance.
One crucial idea that the Weberian framework adds to these is a typology of hierarchical
authority relationships based on different ways of legitimating domination. Rather than
tell us how restrictive the hierarchy is, this helps us to identify whether the kind of
authority being exercised is charismatic, traditional or legal.
To complete this conceptual framework it is necessary to introduce another
Weberian idea, which has also been expanded by ‘neo-Weberian’ scholars: the concept of
‘social closure’ (Parkin 1979; Murphy 1988). The essence of social closure is the attempt
to restrict access to social power to a particular group, whether a class, a status group or
an elite. According to Frank Parkin, there are two basic kinds: exclusion, which is
employed by currently superior actors to keep their inferiors down; and usurpation, which
is a more radical strategy employed by inferior actors to improve their position (Parkin
1979). Exclusion is usually much more prominent, and usurpationary strategies (such as
the unionisation of labour or strike action) must often operate on the edge of legality.
Each may, in principle, take many forms, and may be directed at different characteristics
of social groups. Thus, for example, exclusion may be organised along racial lines, as for
example in the apartheid system; or it may be organised on the basis of kinship, as in
systems where blood and lineage are seen as important determinants of social position.
Closure may operate between social classes -- for which Marxist theories offer copious
examples -- or it may operate within a class, as for example in attempts by working
classes to restrict rights of immigrant labour.
In modern societies, Parkin argues, the most typical forms of exclusionary
closure are property ownership and credentialism. The purpose of the former is ‘to
prevent general access to the means of production and its fruits’ (Parkin 1979, 48), and is
thus generally associated with societies stratified along class lines. Credentialism
involves ‘the inflated use of educational certificates as a means of monitoring entry to
key positions in the division of labour’ (Parkin 1979, 54; see also Collins 1979). Of
course, appropriate training for specific positions may be important to guaranteeing
efficiency, and thus is explicable in functionalist terms (Davis and Moore 1945 is the
classic account). But in many cases, as Weber observed, ‘this concern for efficient
13
performance recedes behind the interest in limiting the supply of candidates for the
benefices and honours of a given occupation’ (cited in Parkin 1979, 55). It is telling, to
take just one example, that few professions insist on re-testing their members’
competence after initial entry into the field.
One of the key points of interest in these two typically modern forms of
exclusionary closure is the difficulty they present for the dominant class in terms of
passing on its advantageous social position to subsequent generations. It is not, of course,
impossible. Many societies, despite claims to meritocracy, continue to allow property to
be handed on through inheritance and permit private education to persist as a way of
creating structural advantages for children from wealthy families to gain the credentials
that are necessary for well paid, high status or authoritative careers. Nevertheless, both
property and credentialism are relatively individualistic forms of social exclusion, and
provide fewer guarantees for the success of one’s descendants than systems based less
equivocally on family connections. By the same token, it is much harder to exclude
talented members of lower classes from rising within such systems of social closure, and
in general the society is likely to be more fluid, in the sense of easier mobility between
social strata, and the strata themselves are consequently likely to be more fragmented and
segmented in terms of their internal composition. The point, as Parkin observes, is that
the system is not designed to protect the privileges of a particular group of people as
such; it is ‘more dedicated to the perpetuation of bourgeois values than bourgeois blood’,
as, mutatis mutandis, is also the case in theocracies or communist party systems where
ideological zeal is prized above biological descent (Parkin 1979, 63).
This points to the contrast between collectivist and individualist forms of closure,
and the tension between them that is characteristic of many social hierarchies.
Collectivist exclusion discriminates on the basis of group characteristics, often in terms
of highly visible markers such as race, gender and, in some cases, religion. Its tendency is
to create ‘a subordinate group of a communal character -- that is, one defined in terms of
an all-encompassing negative status’ (Parkin 1979, 68). Although, as this suggests,
collectivist exclusion is typical of status societies, it can extend to class-stratified
societies as well: one might point here to nineteenth-century European societies where
members of the working classes (often, revealingly, referred to as lower orders) suffered
from ‘wholesale exclusion from civil society’, in the sense that ‘[t]he badge of proletarian
status carried with it the kinds of stigmata commonly associated with subordinate racial
and ethnic groups. It was a total condition which permitted little leeway for the
cultivation of those small part-time identities that bring temporary release from the
humilities of servile status’ (Parkin 1979, 68). Individualist forms of social closure, by
14
contrast, create ‘a subordinate group marked by intense social fragmentation and
inchoateness’ (Parkin 1979, 68). Among other things, this undermines systems of
deference, which ‘can only operate effectively when the status of strangers can accurately
be judged, and the information required for this is difficult to come by without the aid of
a collectivist stereotype’ (Parkin 1979, 69).
To sum up thus far, the Weberian model of social stratification gives us a
conceptual framework for thinking about two key issues. First, it helps us to categorise
and compare different kinds of stratification, depending on the importance of the
distributions of property, honour and authority within a society. We can not only
distinguish these various elements of stratification within societies for the purpose of
seeing how they overlap and mutually reinforce or conflict with one another, but we can
also identify different ideal types of society depending on whether class, status or party is
the dominant axis of stratification. Secondly, it helps us to identify mechanisms of social
closure, through which actually existing patterns of social stratification are maintained.
Here, in particular, we can see the difference between collectivist exclusion, with its
tendency to immerse all members of a group in a particular identity, and individualist
exclusion, out of which arise more fluid societies, but where social progress may demand
that individuals accept and remodel their personalities around a particular value system
and way of life.
Of course, social stratification is not a straightforward or uncontroversial topic, to
put it mildly, and the above brief survey has opened up several controversial points where
further discussion might be fruitful. It is, however, enough to be going on with for now. It
gives us a picture of three different possible types of stratification (class, estate or bloc);
it provides us with three different ways in which a hierarchical distribution of authority
might be legitimated (charismatic, traditional and legal); and it gives us a handful of
different types of social closure through which particular systems of stratification are
maintained (especially the collectivist/individualist distinction). Let us now turn to an
examination of the changing composition of the diplomatic community and see how these
categories help us to identify salient features of the old and new diplomacies.
Stratification, hierarchy and social closure in the diplomatic community
During the second half of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the
twentieth, the character of the diplomatic community changed dramatically. More and
more bourgeois candidates were gaining entrance to the major European diplomatic
services, with several making it to the top ambassadorial posts that had previously been
15
the almost exclusive preserve of the aristocracy: the celebrated Cambon brothers are
perhaps the best examples, but not the only ones.2 In addition, the growing significance
of economic questions in international affairs helped to weaken the divide between the
diplomatic and consular services, and increased the demand for, and prestige of,
diplomats with a background in commerce or finance. Superior communications meant
that Foreign Offices were able to exert greater control over their representatives abroad,
creating new opportunities for bureaucrats and politicians to usurp the authority of
ambassadors and other diplomats. There were also more embassies and legations than
ever before, especially as American and Asian diplomats, by definition outsiders from the
European aristocratic ‘family’, became an increasing influence in international affairs;
their importance in further undermining the shared identity of the old regime diplomatic
corps should not be discounted.
There were many reasons for these changes. As noted above, economic and
technological developments were important. So too were shifts in the global distribution
of capabilities that were impossible to ignore: the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905, for
example, precipitated decisions by Britain, France and Germany to upgrade their
legations in Tokyo to embassies, and was thus an important driving force behind the
expansion of diplomatic services (Anderson 1993, 109). Political activism by groups such
as the Union of Democratic Control in Britain, or by republican politicians in France, also
had an impact. Here, I will not spend time trying to identify which of these was the most
important causal factor, but instead attempt to understand their outcomes in terms of the
changing mechanisms through which the character of each kind of diplomatic community
was created and maintained. Of course, as is the case with any stratified society, both the
old and the new diplomatic communities rested on a combination of several types of
social closure. In its nineteenth-century form, dominated by European aristocracy and
gentry, it was centred on two principles of exclusion: family and property. Credentialism
was much less important, and where it existed it could be circumvented by applicants
with the ‘right’ social background; moreover, even having the right credentials was
insufficient to guarantee either entry into the diplomatic service or progress up the career
ladder. Later in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, this began to change.
Family connections lost most of their importance; property qualifications were often
waived, although they always continued to exercise a considerable influence; credentials,
2
Paul Cambon was French Ambassador to London from 1898 to 1920 (and before that had been
Ambassador to Constantinople); his younger brother Jules’ most important posting before 1914 was as
Ambassador to Berlin. They were the sons of a successful tanner. For an overview of their careers and
importance, see Villate 2002. It is worth noting that, in their attitude towards how diplomacy should be
conducted, if not in their social background, they were exemplary representatives of the old diplomacy.
16
however, assumed a new primacy as part of a more professionalized and bureaucratized
diplomatic corps (Lauren 1976).
Stratification in the old diplomatic community, c. 1815-1880: property and family
How were aristocrats able to exercise such a tight grip on the diplomatic community
during at least the first half of the nineteenth century, and in some cases until the early
twentieth century as well? Three complementary answers are often given this question,
relating to the peculiarities of the appointment process; the importance of property
qualifications; and the belief that only members of high society possessed the necessary
attributes to be successful diplomats. I will argue that the last of these was decisive, and
served to establish a stereotypical ideal of the ‘gentlemanly diplomat’ that barred nonaristocrats from participation in the diplomatic corps.
First, it is often contended (not always with compelling evidence) that the middle
and working classes did not interest themselves in diplomacy; consequently, their views
could safely be ignored. As Nicolson put it, ‘To a diplomatist of the old school such as
Metternich the very idea that the public should have any knowledge of, or opinion upon,
foreign affairs appeared both dangerous and fantastic’ (Nicolson 1939, 73). Of course,
this is a suspiciously convenient argument, and to a large extent it ignores or dismisses
radical dissent about not only the broad direction of foreign policy but also its
management by politicians and diplomats (Taylor 1957). It also underplays the fact that
deliberate efforts were made to conduct diplomatic business in secret, or at least not to
publicise names of officials, and that Foreign Offices often reacted with dismay
whenever outsiders did try to enquire into their activities and personnel (Anderson 1993,
114).
Nevertheless, diplomats were often well insulated from popular scrutiny, in part
because their appointments were usually controlled by the executive branch of
government, and in many cases was under the personal control of the monarch, so that
even in countries where popular or parliamentary criticism was a serious possibility, such
as Britain, this could be used to present an obstacle to certain appointments, or as an
added incentive for others. The importance that already attached to the executive’s right
of appointment was enhanced by the restricted size of the nineteenth-century diplomatic
community. Throughout most of the nineteenth century there were very few embassies,
and therefore very few opportunities to reach the top level within the diplomatic service.
Britain, and this is not an unusual case, had only seven full embassies up to the late
1880s, and by WW1 only the United States (1889) and Japan (1905) had been added to
17
the list; by way of contrast, at present Britain maintains no fewer than 107 embassies and
46 high commissions overseas.
The second key point concerns property as a means of social exclusion. A
diplomatic career was nearly always poorly rewarded in terms of salary and pensions, and
often imposed high costs in entertainment, travel and so on. Speaking of Britain, Charles
Middleton observes that ‘Serving in the diplomatic corps more often than not was
expensive and this fact explains in great part why the diplomatic service remained until
the twentieth century an almost exclusive preserve of the aristocracy and landed gentry’
(Middleton 1977, 215). Sometimes this was a de facto consideration that would have
frightened off potential candidates for the service, but it was not uncommonly codified in
formal property qualifications for applicants in terms of a minimum income requirement:
in the German service, for example, by 1900 candidates had to demonstrate that they had
an annual income of at least 10,000 marks (Cecil 1976, 39). Even though the formal
requirement was abolished in 1908, candidates still had to provide a statement of their
finances. ‘By 1912, the Wilhelmstrasse reckoned the minimum private fortune requisite
for a diplomatic career to be 15,000 marks, and it seems to have insisted that candidates
provide assurances that they possessed this degree of wealth’ (Cecil 1976, 41). Similar
requirements were in place in other services, including Britain, Austria-Hungary, Russia
and Italy (Cecil 1976, 39; see also Jones 1983).
It is worth noting that decision-makers within diplomatic services chose, often
quite deliberately, not to address this issue by improving the salaries or expenses
associated with diplomatic postings. Particularly at the lower end of the scale, new
entrants into the service, who might be posted as attaches or similar low-level positions,
were often expected to work without a salary at all, making it next to impossible for
anyone lacking independent means to wait until promotion to a paid position. In Britain,
parliamentary attempts to alter this situation in the early 1860s were met by opposition
from within the service itself, with Edmund Hammond (the permanent under-secretary)
taking the view that not only was the lack of payment for new officials in effect a
property qualification for entrants, but that it was ‘desirable that it should be so’ (cited in
Jones 1983, 105).
The need for a considerable amount of personal wealth as a pre-requisite for a
diplomatic career excluded most elements of society from the service. Nevertheless,
wealth alone was neither the only nor, in some respects, the final decisive criteria:
Middleton’s claim, for example, ignores the fact that, by the middle of the nineteenth
century, wealth was not the exclusive preserve of the aristocracy and the landed gentry,
18
but was increasingly shared with an emerging commercial and industrial bourgeoisie. The
continuing grip of the aristocracy on diplomatic appointments thus raises a question as to
why wealthy members of the bourgeoisie still found it difficult (although, as Jones 1983
shows, not impossible) to penetrate the diplomatic community, especially in those cases
where the individuals concerned had not translated their wealth into landed forms or used
it to acquire entry into the appropriate social circles through the various opportunities
such as purchasing titles and landed estates, securing educations for their children at
recognised establishments, marrying into noble families and so forth. Of course, these
latter strategies could be followed, and could form the basis for successful diplomatic
careers. The British service recruited very heavily from Eton, and sons of bourgeois
families who were educated there could thus be translated into suitable material for the
Foreign Office and diplomatic service (Steiner 1969). Even in the rather stiffer, but by no
means totally inflexible, social environment of Germany, this could be a path to a
diplomatic career. Considering the candidacy of Martin Rücker-Jenish -- a wealthy
commoner who already possessed excellent family connections at the Wilhelmstrasse –
Herbert von Bismarck suggested it would still be worthwhile for him to acquire a title as
well (Cecil 1976, 60).
The opposition to nouveaux riches breaking into the service points towards the
third, and in some ways most crucial, argument that was made on behalf of the
aristocratic diplomat: that only he had the social graces necessary to fill the role.
Diplomacy, in this view, was an art that required highly personal qualities to be
conducted effectively (Nicolson 1939 is a classic statement). Could these skills be
acquired through education or training? To a degree, yes, through educational institutions
such as the English public school, as noted above, although even there distinctions would
be made between better or worse institutions, and candidates from minor public schools
by no means had an easy time of it (see Tilley and Gaselee 1933). In particular,
opponents of competitive examination as a means of entry into the service took the view
that the preparation provided by special ‘crammars’ was defective: ‘The crammars can
teach most things but they cannot teach manners’ (cited in Steiner 1969, 8).
In view of its presumed character as a society with relatively minimal status
stratification, it is interesting to note that a version of this particular argument can be seen
in early American attempts to develop a better diplomatic service in the middle of the
nineteenth century, which reflect a strong appreciation of the importance of social
attributes. As Warren Ilchman points out, the reform movement in the US in the 1860s
and 1870s was dominated by people who were ‘independently wealthy, upper middle
class and largely of English descent’ (Ilchman 1961, 43). In calling for
19
‘professionalization’, the reformers were objecting to appointment on the basis of
political connections or wealth, and one of their chief goals was to prevent the service
from being opened up to newly wealthy capitalist families who were, as The Nation put it
in 1867, ‘to say the least not attractive in mind and manners’ (cited in Ilchman 1961, 4445). Thus, alongside intellectual abilities, the reformers stressed the need for social
attributes: ‘the person appointed should be a gentleman, that is, acquainted with the ways
of the world and the usages and manners of the best society in each capital’ (Eugene
Schuyler, cited in Ilchman 1961, 44).
As that suggests, the claim for the unique qualities of the aristocratic diplomat
was reinforced by the somewhat circular argument that, because the diplomatic
community as a whole was so dominated by members of a particular social group,
members of that group had a built-in advantage in operating successfully within it. As
Webster put it, for example, the members of the nineteenth-century British service ‘had
of course the outlook of their class, but they understood very well the minds of their
opposite numbers in the Foreign Offices of Europe, men for the most part with a similar
background to themselves’ (Webster 1961, 39). Republican France was in much the same
position, and as Hayne observes, despite republican antipathies towards aristocrats in
domestic politics, ‘In foreign courts, especially St. Petersburg, which Paris was at pains
to impress, aristocratic envoys were at a premium. There was often hostile condescension
shown to bourgeois diplomats’ (Hayne 1993, 24). Like Russia, the Austrian court was
also notorious for its snobbish attachment to courtly etiquette, making it almost
impossible for any commoner to represent his country there; as one German diplomat
remarked, ‘here humanity begins with counts’ (cited in Cecil 1976, 69; see also Fraser
1911). The sensitivity to diplomatic pedigree shown by foreign courts was echoed within
the diplomatic services of more open-minded regimes: rituals such as the ‘the de cinq
heures’ at the Quai d’Orsay, or the British tradition of the ‘family embassy’, kept alive
the sense that only people from a certain social background belonged (see Hayne 1993
and Jones 1983, ch. 3).
Although both insulation from other branches of public affairs and the financial
demands of a diplomatic career undoubtedly contributed to the aristocratic character of
the nineteenth-century corps, the decisive mechanism of social closure was this ideal of
the ‘gentlemanly diplomat’, which rested on a stereotypical notion of the unique manners
that the upper classes possessed by virtue of their supposedly superior breeding and upbringing. In some cases, it was possible for wealthy members of the bourgeoisie to
penetrate this social circle through attendance at elite educational establishments or by
purchasing titles of nobility, while a well-chosen marriage was always a possible
20
strategy. These were, however, not only slow ways of overcoming the social barriers,
perhaps taking one or two generations to be effective, but they also required assimilation
into the existing diplomatic culture rather than its transformation. Descendants of
bourgeois families might eventually flourish within the diplomatic corps, but typically by
acquiring or aping aristocratic manners and sensibilities in order to belong.
The transition to the new diplomacy: credentialism and usurpation
In terms of the social composition of the diplomatic corps, there were two main ways in
which the ‘new’ diplomacy was engineered. First, recruitment and promotion procedures
were changed, with the most important development here the rise of credentialism.
Examinations were already in place for most diplomatic services by the 1870s, but they
were often relatively easy and could usually be circumvented by an applicant with the
right social connections. In Germany, this was made a deliberate article of policy, where
Otto von Bismarck only accepted the principle of competitive examination with the
proviso that he had a completely free hand in deciding on appointments, and he ‘did not
hesitate to take men into the Foreign Office who had been disqualified for other branches
of the bureaucracy because of their failure on examinations’ (Cecil 1976, 33).
Examinations under these circumstances served as a convenient way to block out
unsuitable candidates: their most important provision, not unreasonably, was linguistic
ability, and it was frequently argued that this necessitated not only a good education at
one of the leading public schools, but also prolonged periods living overseas. Obviously,
only certain social sectors had such an opportunity. However, even those who failed the
examinations could be parachuted into the service, while even success in examinations
was no guarantee against the snobbery of Boards of Selection (Tilley and Gaselee 1933,
86).
During the first two decades of the twentieth century there was a consistent and
wide-ranging effort to make the qualifying exams more stringent, and to attach more
weight to them as a determining factor within the appointment process. By the end of the
1920s, credentials had become more significant than social background or even property
in determining entry into and success within the diplomatic community. In France a
sequence of decrees between 1900 and 1920 ‘demanded that officials in the Ministry and
members of the overseas missions possess advanced knowledge or specialized technical
skills’ (Lauren 1976, 100). By 1920, candidates needed a degree, and they were subject to
a gruelling examination that covered, in addition to language skills, knowledge of world
affairs (rather than just European history) and -- perhaps most importantly from the point
of view of the rising bourgeois -- commercial and legal questions. Clear grades, with
21
promotion based on professional merit (judged by panels of senior diplomats), rather than
length of service, were introduced into the service; these provided the basis for a
revamped, and more generous, salary scale intended ‘to attract and maintain this high
standard of professional talent’ (Lauren 1976, 102). This did mark a radical change in
personnel: between 1899 and 1936, no fewer than 249 out of 284 new recruits to the Quai
d’Orsay had been through the Ecole libre des Sciences politiques, creating what Hayne
calls, ‘a new Republican bourgeois elite’, even though it still remained possible for
aristocrats to progress within the service (Hayne 1993, 28).
Much the same was happening elsewhere. In the Weimar republic, personnel
reforms ‘abolished the former prerequisite for a statement of financial worth and
instituted an elaborate battery of more objective, specialized examinations’ (Lauren 1976,
139; see also Holborn 1953). As in France, new candidates who passed these
examinations then embarked on a probationary period, and their subsequent retention and
promotion was tied to professional merit, assessed by superior officers within the service.
Higher salaries were also introduced to broaden the pool of potential applicants. In
Britain, the examinations were toughened up within a roughly similar time-frame (Jones
1983). Of course, as has already been pointed out, although the introduction of more
rigorous competitive examinations was universally touted as an efficiency measure, it is
seldom as simple as that. The demand for credentials is as much about controlling access
to professional occupations as it is to do with guaranteeing a skilled, well trained work
force. One does not have to say that all the appeals for increased efficiency were
misguided or hypocritical to also note that, in most cases, the end result was the creation
of a new cadre of diplomats, sharing similar expertise and often with similar training, but
drawn more from the bourgeoisie than had hitherto been the case (and still, in every case,
even that of the Soviet Union, with a considerable leavening of aristocrats and gentry: for
the remarkable example of the survival of noble diplomats in the USSR, see Uldricks
1979).
The second major change can be classed as a form of usurpation: from the
Versailles Conference on, traditional diplomats were increasingly bypassed by politicians
and bureaucrats within Foreign Offices or other government departments. The pattern of
negotiation adopted at the Versailles Conference was a harbinger of the new style. Here,
famously or notoriously depending on your point of view, Lloyd George, Wilson and
Clemenceau dispensed with their diplomatic services and took on the principal decisionmaking and bargaining roles themselves, with special assistants to provide support, such
as Wilson’s aide Colonel House, or Lloyd George’s Private Secretary Philip Kerr, who in
turn took on unprecedented responsibilities. After Versailles, the pattern was continued in
22
a series of international conferences, such as the Genoa conference of 1922, at which, as
Gordon Craig puts it, ‘professional diplomats did not bulk large in their councils, if,
indeed, they were invited at all’ (Craig 1953, 28).
Whereas the credentialist reforms had often begun before WW1, this latter
change was greatly facilitated by the war because of the general loosening of traditional
constitutional mechanisms that it caused, with cataclysmic effect in Germany and Russia.
In the case of Britain, for example, the old cabinet system had been replaced during the
war by the streamlined War Cabinet, of which the Foreign Secretary was not even a
member (Craig 1953, 18). Despite some return to normality after the war, it was hardly
the case that politicians would relinquish this usurped authority back to the diplomats. It
was also, as has often been noted, helped by the communications revolution, which made
close, day-by-day control of diplomatic activities by central offices a more realistic
possibility; although it may also, as Matthew Anderson observes, have had the contrary
effect of reducing the length and detail of individual diplomatic instructions (Anderson
1993, 119). Finally, the diplomatic services were being increasingly assimilated to other
elements of government bureaucracies. In Britain, for example, although for a long time
the diplomatic service had notoriously lower academic standards than the Foreign Office,
and although even as late as 1914 the MacDonnell Commission still ‘accepted the
Foreign Office view that a diplomat should possess certain qualities which could not be
revealed by success in an open examination’, there was nevertheless a genuine effort to
place the service on the same footing as other branches of the civil service, with
competitive examination as the key to entry and professional achievement essential to
promotion once inside the service (Jones 1983, 170). In part, this was also a consequence
of the growing importance of commercial business, which not only increased the
importance of consular staffs, but also reduced some of the barriers that had previously
existed between them and diplomats. More and more, it was essential for diplomats to
have some understanding of commercial and financial issues, and Foreign Offices were
increasingly devoting their resources to the creation of new departments to cover such
matters (Anderson 1993, 134).
The crucial point here is that the new diplomacy, for all its ‘democratic’
credentials, still involved stratification and social closure; it simply took a different form
from that assumed by the old diplomatic community of the mid-nineteenth century. It is
tempting to describe this in terms of a change from an ‘aristocratic international’ to a
bourgeois one, but a more accurate description, using the conceptual framework outlined
earlier in the paper, would be to characterise it as a shift from a situation where a
particular status-group monopolised authority through a claim to charismatic personal
23
qualities based on a collectivist stereotype, to a society stratified more along authoritarian
and rational-legal lines -- a bureaucratized diplomatic community, in other words -- with
a shift towards a more individualistic type of social closure embodied in the new
credentialism. The old ideal of the ‘gentlemanly diplomat’ was replaced by a new idea of
the diplomatic professional; the old notion that the diplomatic service should be drawn
from and reflect a particular status group endowed with a set of social graces that allowed
them to practice the ‘art’ of diplomacy to perfection was replaced by the idea of the
diplomat as a bureaucrat whose role was defined in terms of a clearly graded position
within the hierarchy of officialdom, held on the basis of expertise proved by winning the
appropriate credentials.
Theoretical implications: types of order, types of justice
In the introduction to the paper I noted the popular belief that the old diplomacy
represented a relatively cosmopolitan and solidarist kind of international society, which
served as a ‘unifying and restraining influence’ on international actors, and that the
‘destruction’ (as Morgenthau put it) of this international society was at least a
contributory factor in the general deterioration and breakdown of international order in
the first half of the twentieth century. My argument in this paper is not intended as an
attempt to disprove this thesis, but rather to show how a different conceptual framework
for thinking about international society might lead to a different interpretation of the
significance of the change from the old to the new diplomacy. Rather than see it as a
dysfunctional moment in international order, we could see it instead as a change in the
principles according to which international social stratification operated.
Reconceptualizing what was happening in the change from the old to the new
diplomacy does not in itself provide an explanation of the development; the purpose of
developing a new conceptual framework is to open up new questions for theoretical and
historical analysis. We might, for example, ask why the mechanisms of social closure
upon which the ‘aristocratic international’ had depended broke down during the second
half of the nineteenth century? Of course, there are a number of factors one could point to
here, not least the internal changes going on within European societies through this
period as aristocracies saw their privileges and status being eaten away. International
society was not insulated from these developments, and in this context, as, in parallel,
with many Marxist approaches (Rosenberg 1994; Teschke 2003), the conceptual
framework outlined in this paper helps us to think about the intersection between change
in the structure of international order and social change in a broader sense. Although I
have not had the space to develop them here, the Weberian model of social stratification I
24
have outlined comes with a number of associated hypotheses about, for example, the
centrality of processes of rationalization and bureaucratization to the development of
modern societies. As James Der Derian puts it, the emergence of ‘techno-diplomacy’ is
intelligible in terms of ‘principles which modernity, in the name and sanctity of science,
could render neutral, and which could still perform the global functions of normalization’
(Der Derian 1987, 204). One could say much the same for the focus on
professionalization and bureaucratization that marked the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century diplomatic community (see also Lauren 1976).
In this context, one of the remarkable things about the old diplomacy is the
degree to which it represents the survival of charismatic forms of authority and a status
society well into what would normally be taken to be the ‘modern’ era. Of course, this
may in part be the product of a tendency to exaggerate the speed and transformative
impact of modernization processes in general during the nineteenth century, and
Raymond Jones has shown that the social composition of at least the British diplomatic
service was not dissimilar to that of the political elite in general (Jones 1983; see also
Mayer 1981 and Lieven 1992). But, in any case, it is striking that when viewed through
the lens of a Weberian approach to thinking about social stratification, the modernization
of international society appears to be very much a product of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, and it is only a very narrow understanding of ‘modernity’ in terms of
the political emergence of the territorially sovereign state that permits us to place its
origins as far back as the mid-seventeenth century. We might perhaps, view this as a
modern states-system existing within a pre-modern international society; another peculiar
phenomenon that demands explanation (see Osiander 2001 for a similar point).
Very much in keeping with the English school’s original research programme,
this line of enquiry could be extended through a wider ranging comparative-historical
analysis of yet more types of hierarchical order in world politics. The conceptual
framework outlined here could be used as a basis for comparing the sociological
characteristics of different kinds of international order, not in terms of where they fit on a
spectrum from pure anarchy to imperialist centralization (Watson 1992), but instead in
terms of a much more flexible scheme that allows us to identify different kinds of
stratification and mechanisms of social closure at work. One might also ask how the
change in international social stratification that I have described here connected with
other developments in international society during the twentieth century. As we have
seen, the growing importance of credentialism within diplomatic services made it harder
than before to exclude members of the bourgeoisie who could obtain the necessary
training. But it would be worth exploring how this was associated with the increasing
25
difficulty in keeping out other groups who had been excluded during the nineteenth
century, such as, most obviously, non-European peoples who had previously suffered
under the equally steretotypical identity of ‘barbarians’. The point that we have observed
here is that collectivist forms of social closure were under attack, not necessarily from
advocates of a more global international society, but from other groups, often more
privileged ones, who were also trying to overcome their exclusion. As the principles of
social closure changed with respect to one group, so it became harder to maintain
collectivist forms of social closure with respect to others. Members of the English school
have made similar points with regard to the affinities between decolonisation and the
civil rights movement (Vincent 1984), and one can see similar analyses of the impact of
ethical argument upon international norms in constructivist work (Crawford 2002).
This also points towards the normative question of how we should understand the
relationship between order and justice in international relations. In terms of English
school ideas, one thinks here of Bull’s claims about the priority of order over justice, and
his distinction between human justice, framed in terms of the rights of individuals, and
international justice, framed in terms of the rights of states (Bull 1977). None of these
conceptual distinctions, however, is useful for helping us think about the implications of
a shift from a society based on collectivist forms of closure to one with a more
individualist character, and hence a tendency towards a more fluid, open, perhaps more
meritocratic structure. I would hesitate to call it a more just society, but it is one which
comes closer to approximating liberal ideas about justice as something that ensures
rewards are distributed on the basis of merit and fairness, rather than accidents of birth or
arbitrary forms of stereotypical discrimination against entire groups defined in racial,
gender or other terms. Rethinking the order/justice dichotomy in terms of how rewards
and privileges are distributed in different international hierarchies would help us to
understand the otherwise paradoxical case of a ‘cosmopolitan’ international society that
excluded so many people and peoples. Although the ‘middle ranks of society’ may have
been more prone to nationalism and xenophobia, as Watson suggests, their rise within the
diplomatic community was rapidly followed by the a dramatic expansion in the scope of
international society to cover the entire world. The puzzle is solved if we consider that,
while lacking the transnational class solidarity that the aristocrats had in abundance, and
which socialists were desperately trying to stir up among the workers of the world, the
new bourgeois diplomats nevertheless believed in a society, and an international society,
where one’s prospects were not automatically defined by birth or blood.
26
References
Anderson, Matthew Smith. 1993. The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1450-1919. London:
Longman.
Bottero, Wendy. 2005. Stratification: Social Division and Inequality. London: Routledge.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London:
Routledge.
Bull, Hedley. 1966. The Grotian Conception of International Society, in Herbert
Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays on the
Theory of International Politics, pp. 51-73. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Bull, Hedley. 1977. The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. London:
Macmillan.
Butterfield, Herbert. 1966. The New Diplomacy and Historical Diplomacy, in Butterfield
and Martin Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays on the Theory of
International Politics, pp. 181-92. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Butterfield, Herbert and Wight, Martin. 1966. Preface, in Butterfield and Wight (eds.),
Diplomatic Investigations: Essays on the Theory of International Politics.
London: George Allen and Unwin.
Buzan, Barry. 2004. From International to World Society? English School Theory and
the Social Structure of Globalisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cecil, Lamar. 1976. The German Diplomatic Service, 1871-1914. Princeton University
Press.
Clavin, Patricia. 2005. Defining Transnationalism. Contemporary European History, Vol.
14, No. 4, pp. 421-39.
Clavin, Patricia and Wessels, Jean-Wilhelm. 2005. Transnationalism and the League of
Nations: Understanding the Work of its Economic and Financial Organisation.
Contemporary European History, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 465-92.
Collins, Randall. 1979. The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and
Stratification. New York: Academic Press.
Craig, Gordon A. 1953. The British Foreign Office from Grey to Austen Chamberlain, in
Craig and Felix Gilbert (eds.), The Diplomats, 1919-1939, pp. 15-48. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Crawford, Neta. 2002. Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization
and Humanitarian Intervention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davis, Kingsley and Moore, Wilbert E. 1945. Some Principles of Stratification. American
Sociological Review, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 242-49.
Der Derian, James. 1987. On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Donnelly, Jack. 2005. Sovereign Inequalities and Hierarchy in Anarchy: American Power
and International Society. European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 12,
No. 2, pp. 139-70.
Doty, Roxanne Lynn. 1996. Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in
North-South Relations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press.
Fraser, Mrs. Hugh. 1911. A Diplomatist’s Wife in Many Lands. New York, NY: Dodd,
Mead & Co. 2 vols.
27
Galtung, Johan. 1964. A Structural Theory of Aggression. Journal of Peace Research,
Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 95-119,
Gilpin, Robert. 1981. War and Change in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hankey, Maurice. 1946. Diplomacy by Conference: Studies in Public Affairs, 1920-1946.
New York: Putnam.
Hayne, M.B. 1993. The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War,
1898-1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hobson, John M. and Sharman, J.C. 2005. The Enduring Place of Hierarchy in World
Politics: Tracing the Social Logics of Hierarchy and Political Change. European
Journal of International Relations, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 63-98.
Holborn, Hajo. 1953. Diplomats and Diplomacy in the Early Weimar Republic, in
Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert (eds.), The Diplomats, 1919-1939, pp. 123-71.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Huddleston, Sisley. 1954. Popular Diplomacy and War. Rindge: Richard R. Smith.
Ilchman, Warren Frederick. 1961. Professional Diplomacy in the United States, 17791939: A Study in Administrative History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jones, Raymond A. 1983. The British Diplomatic Service, 1815-1914. Ontario: Wilfrid
Laurier University Press.
Keene, Edward. 2008. The English School and British Historians. Millennium, Vol. 37,
No. 3, pp. 381-93.
Keene, Edward. 2009. The Age of Grotius, in David Armstrong ed., The Routledge
Handbook of International Law, pp. 126-40. London: Routledge.
Kennedy, A.L. 1922. Old Diplomacy and New, 1876-1922: From Salisbury to LloydGeorge. London: John Murray.
Koskenniemi, Martti. 2002. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of
International Law, 1870-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lake, David. 1996. Anarchy, Hierarchy and the Variety of International Relations.
International Organization, Vol. 50, No. 1, pp. 1-33
Lake, David. 2003. The New Sovereignty in International Relations. International
Studies Review, Vol. 5, pp. 303-23.
Lauren, Paul Gordon. 1976. Diplomats and Bureaucrats: The First Institutional
Responses to Twentieth-Century Diplomacy in France and Germany. Stanford,
CA: Hoover Institution Press.
Lesaffer, Randall. 2007. International Law and its History: A Story of Unrequited Love,
in Matthew Craven et al. eds., Time, History and International Law, pp. 27-43.
Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff.
Lieven, Dominic. 1992. The Aristocracy in Europe, 1815-1914. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Mayer, Arno. 1981. The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War. New
York: Pantheon Books.
Middleton, Charles. 1977. The Administration of British Foreign Policy, 1782-1846.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Morgenthau, Hans. 1959. Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace.
Second Edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
28
Mosslang, Markus and Riotte, Torsten. 2008. Introduction: The Diplomats’ World, in
Mosslang and Riotte, The Diplomats’ World: A Cultural History of Diplomacy,
1815-1914, pp. 1-20. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Murphy, Raymond. 1988. Social Closure: The Theory of Monopolization and Exclusion.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Nicolson, Harold. 1939. Diplomacy. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Onuf, Nicholas. 1989. World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and
International Relations. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Osiander, Andreas. 2001. Before Sovereignty: Society and Politics in Ancien Régime
Europe. Review of International Studies. Vol. 27, pp. 119-45.
Otte, T.G. 2004. Old Diplomacy: Reflections on the Foreign Office before 1914.
Contemporary British History, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 31-52.
Parkin, Frank. 1979. Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Ponsonby, Arthur. 1915. Democracy and Diplomacy: A Plea for Popular Control of
Foreign Policy. London: Methuen.
Rosenberg, Justin. 1994. The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of
International Relations. London: Verso.
Runciman, W.G. 1969. Social Science and Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Scott, John. 1996. Stratification and Power: Structures of Class, Status and Command.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Steiner, Zara. 1969. The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1898-1914. Cambridge
University Press, 1969.
Taylor, A.J.P. 1957. The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Teschke, Benno. 2003. The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern
International Relations. London: Verso.
Tickner, J. Ann. 1992. Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on
Achieving Global Security. New York: Columbia University Press.
Tilley, John and Gaselee, Stephen. 1933. The Foreign Office. London: G.P. Putnam.
Uldricks, Teddy J. 1979. Diplomacy and Ideology : The Origins of Soviet Foreign
Relations, 1917-1930. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Villate, Laurent. 2002. La république des diplomates: Paul et Jules Cambon, 1843-1935.
Paris: Science Infuse.
Vincent, R.J. 1984. Racial Equality, in Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds.), The
Expansion of International Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Wallace, Michael D. 1973. War and Rank among Nations. Lexington: Lexington Books.
Watson, Adam. 1982. Diplomacy: The Dialogue Between States. London: Eyre Methuen.
Watson, Adam. 1992. The Evolution of International Society. London: Routledge.
Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by
Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. 3 vols. New York: Bedminster Press.
Webster, Charles. 1962. The Art and Practice of Diplomacy. New York: Barnes and
Noble.
29