5 Diplomacy

Diplomacy is a pursuit amenable to scholarly inquiry. As J. D. B. Miller insisted, its ‘shape’ is something scholars can reasonably claim for study.¹ Harold Nicolson's liberal realist conception of diplomacy reflected his belief, one embedded in ancient Greek and Roman ethical and political theory, that diplomacy is essential to peaceful coexistence between nation‐states and a stable international society. Nicolson always followed the Oxford English Dictionary definition of diplomacy: ‘The management of international relations by negotiation; the method by which these relations are adjusted and managed by ambassadors and envoys; the business or art of the diplomatist’. He also invariably employed the term ‘diplomatist’ (‘one engaged in official diplomacy’) in preference to ‘diplomat’ (‘one employed or skilled in diplomacy’).²

Martin Wight characterized Nicolson's conception of diplomacy as a uniquely British one.³ Yet Nicolson acknowledged the possibility of wider meanings—‘that method of international procedure which commends itself to sensible persons of any given epoch, as the most “representative” and the most “efficient” for conducting negotiations between States’.⁴ Diplomacy was not ‘the art of conversation’ but ‘negotiation by the exchange of written documents’.⁵ Its core concern was the creation and expansion of confidence⁶ in preparing the ground for ‘an equable exchange of interests’ on a basis of mutual trust.⁷

Like Lord Strang, Harold Nicolson distinguished between foreign policy (substance) and diplomacy (negotiation).⁸ He did not believe in the indivisibility of foreign policy and diplomacy, and argued that ‘the general conception and rules of the art of negotiation emerged as something essentially different from (although always supplementary and even subservient to) state‐craft on the one hand and politics upon the other’.⁹ Nicolson never lost sight of the gap separating ‘the curative methods of diplomacy’ and ‘the surgical necessities of foreign policy’. He explained the nexus between foreign policy, diplomacy, and war in realist terms:

Foreign policy is based upon a general conception of national requirements; and this conception derives from the need of self‐preservation, the constantly changing shapes of economic and strategic advantage, and the condition of public opinion as affected at the time by such diverse factors as energy or exhaustion, prejudices or sympathies (whether ideological or humane), future ambition or past pride. Diplomacy, on the other hand, is not an end but a means; not a purpose but a method. It seeks, by the use of reason, conciliation and the exchange of interests, to prevent major conflicts arising between sovereign States. It is the agency through which foreign policy seeks to attain its purposes by agreement rather than by war. Thus when agreement becomes impossible diplomacy, which is the instrument of peace, becomes inoperative; and foreign policy, the final sanction of which is war, alone becomes operative.¹⁰

J. W. Burton and Henry Kissinger have questioned Nicolson's distinction between foreign policy and diplomacy. For them, the diplomat's work is determined more by political and administrative considerations than Nicolson conceded. Kissinger contended that ‘the effectiveness of diplomacy depends on elements transcending it; in part on the domestic structure of the states comprising the international order, in part on their power relationship’.¹¹ Burton regarded Nicolson's definitions as inadequate on the ground that ‘the making and execution of foreign policy were never entirely separate. In contemporary conditions of highly developed permanent civil services and improved communications the term diplomacy is best used to include the whole process of managing relations with other States and international institutions’. The enterprise was a circular and interactive one involving the perception of the environment, assessing interests, balancing internal and external pressures, and testing responses to proposed policies before their implementation.¹²

Michael Donelan's description of diplomacy and the context in which it functions is similar to Nicolson's. ‘First and last,’ he writes, ‘the true source of security in international relations is national power and military force, handled with true diplomacy. Diplomacy is the recognition and commun‐ ication of the facts of power. It is the peaceful enactment of otherwise violent conflict’.¹³ Diplomacy's principal purpose is to assist the process of securing ‘international stability’¹⁴ by gaining the most valuable commodity in international relations—the unguent of time¹⁵—which produces opportunities for the relaxation of tension.¹⁶ The essence of good diplomacy is to be found, not in scoring off your adversary, but in identifying areas of agreement.¹⁷ Diplomatic triumphs, which leave behind them only a feeling of resentment, should be avoided.¹⁸ The best outcomes in diplomacy are those where both parties believe they have secured a measure of success.¹⁹

‘Bluff and bluster’ and the diplomatic gamble should never be countenanced as legitimate negotiating methods.²⁰ ‘The aim of sound diplomacy’, Nicolson wrote, ‘is the maintenance of amicable relations between sovereign States. Once diplomacy is employed to provoke international animosity, it ceases to be diplomacy and becomes its opposite, namely war by another name’.²¹ Nicolson's liberal realism extended this classic view by identifying more clearly, through reliance on classical philosophy and history, the means diplomacy should employ and the ends it should serve. Diplomacy thus becomes not merely a device for securing objectives but a vehicle for shaping the character of diplomatic outcomes.

Diplomacy requires sound negotiation, adaptability in addressing the needs of a non‐static international society, truthfulness, directness, and concreteness in diplomatic dealings. These should be pursued for themselves, and in establishing a reputation for candour and reliability. Nicolson regarded diplomacy's capacity to reconcile conflicting interests and disentangle intricate issues by patient discussion and analysis as one of its greatest strengths. He thought that this form of interchange benefited both sides by delivering to neither all of its demands. Feelings of triumph or defeat were thereby tempered and friction reduced. Henry Kissinger has claimed that Nicolson overrated the influence of the negotiating process, diplomatic skill, and a willingness to reach agreement, and underrated the effects of external and internal policy factors.²² It would be more accurate to say that Nicolson was sometimes too optimistic about the successes achievable through traditional diplomacy. Nevertheless, he was a theorist whose experience had left him with few illusions about the difficulties of reconciling realism and idealism—nor did he underestimate the significance of foreign and domestic considerations.

For Nicolson, ‘the business of diplomacy, as that of sound commerce, is the patient establishment of credit, the inviolability of contract, and the exchange of advantages’.²³ As he stressed in 1925 when analysing British policy towards Europe, ‘If we are to contribute to general security, we must first establish certainty and conviction. It is far better to give restricted promises which Europe realises will inevitably be executed, than to enter into wide commitments, the ultimate execution of which would always allow of doubt. In order to carry such conviction we must base our policy, not on possible tendencies, but on generally recognisable facts. We must be direct, simple and explicit’.²⁴

A broad‐based conception of international society was at the heart of Nicolson's approach to diplomacy, a pursuit which did not possess ‘a detached identity of its own—parasitic, and not organic, to the living growth of the State’; rather, it was required to display ‘a constant, if not very immediate, process of adjustment to the shifting incidences of sovereignty’.²⁵ Indeed, ‘the history of diplomacy cannot be divorced from that of the state, its institutions, responsibilities and political and social dogmas’.²⁶ The distinction between the theory of diplomacy (normative questions of means and ends) and its practice (the pursuit and achievement of diplomatic objectives) was an important one to Nicolson.²⁷

His chief concern was not the history of the subject (David Jayne Hill),²⁸ or the minutiae, however significant, of its practice (Satow).²⁹ The biographer in Nicolson shared the seventeenth‐century Dutchman, Abraham de Wicquefort's ‘delight in the virtuosity of human conduct’ evident in his  L'Ambassadeur et ses Fonctions (1681).³⁰ However, he had most in common with, and greatest respect for, François de Callières, whose De la Manière de Négocier avec les Souverains (1716)³¹ Nicolson called ‘the best manual of diplomatic method ever written’.³² By concentrating on the political relationships between Europe's nation‐states and placing less emphasis on their necessary obeisance to the restraints of natural or positive law, Callières, if he did not exactly turn Western diplomatic theory on its head, certainly shook it up.³³ His work remains ‘the most important general analysis of diplomacy and its place in international society’.³⁴

As a theorist Nicolson's areas of interest were much wider than Callières's. He sought to understand interstate relations at a deeper theoretical level than his French predecessor, whose primary preoccupation was diplomacy. Nicolson defined ‘diplomatic theory’ as ‘a generally accepted idea of the principles and methods of international conduct and negotiation’.³⁵ ‘Diplomacy’ and ‘diplomatic’ signified neither foreign policy nor international law but ‘the art of negotiation’. The word ‘method’ encompassed both the diplomatic machinery and the general theory in accordance with which the machinery was used.³⁶

Nicolson was wary of the view that the steady historical improvement in diplomatic standards was due more to ‘the gradual approximation of public to private morality’ than to an increase in ‘the conception of a community of human interests’.³⁷ Though he believed that ‘ethical impulses’ had done much to advance diplomatic theory, he cautioned against the self‐righteousness, partisanship, and moral indignation that could result when the missionary spirit gained the ascendancy in diplomacy.³⁸ In 1939, Nicolson declared that his sympathies here were with the realists rather than the idealists. ‘Diplomacy is not a system of moral philosophy…The worst kind of diplomatists are missionaries, fanatics and lawyers; the best kind are the reasonable and humane sceptics. Thus it is not religion which has been the main formative influence in diplomatic theory; it is common sense’.³⁹

He identified two contrasting conceptions of diplomacy and argued that a compromise between them constituted the soundest approach to diplomatic intercourse. The first was the German ‘warrior or heroic’ theory, whose exponents perceived diplomacy as war by other means. The second was the British ‘mercantile or shop‐keeper’ theory, whereby diplomacy is seen as an aid to peaceful commerce based on the assumption that there exists a middle point at which the negotiators can reconcile their conflicting interests.⁴⁰ Abba Eban has suggested that Nicolson idealized British negotiating techniques and represented them as the norm from which all other diplomatic styles were mere deviations.⁴¹ It is more likely that he used them as a vehicle for examining other styles, British approaches being most familiar to him.

The warrior and mercantile conceptions rather than moral values, Nicolson asserted, had exercised a greater influence on the development of diplomatic theory. Both theories contained ‘idealism and realism’; however, the former was essentially a dynamic theory, reliant for its expression on diplomatic gambles and conquest, and the latter a static one dependent on calm, peace, and amity in international relations as a basis for furthering the interests of commerce.⁴² Nowhere was this better reflected (and nowhere were the advantages and disadvantages of each more apparent) than in actual ‘diplomatic practice’. This he defined as either the long‐standing habits deemed by diplomats to be the most efficient for the conduct of international business, or the principles of negotiation common to all international intercourse, which are independent of passing changes in governmental systems or foreign policy.⁴³ With these considerations in mind Nicolson declared that it was important neither to underestimate nor to overestimate the value of the diplomatic craft. ‘Diplomacy is always a tentative sort of affair…I believe in power [exercised] realistically in the common good. Let us be as tentative as possible in diplomacy and only present in the shape of policy something which is concrete, effective and right’.⁴⁴

Harold Nicolson well understood that ‘the diplomat is a paragon definable in terms of personal qualities’.⁴⁵ He believed that diplomacy's success or failure depended greatly on a diplomat's character and capacities. So, also, did Callières, who produced a compendium of these characteristics.⁴⁶ Nicolson compiled a similar list comprising sixteen qualities (of both the ideal diplomat and the ideal diplomacy): truth, accuracy, calm, patience, good temper, modesty, loyalty, intelligence, knowledge, discernment, prudence, hospitality, charm, industry, courage, and tact.⁴⁷ This thumbnail moral and practical primer has passed into Western diplomatic theory and practice as ‘“the Nicolson test”’.⁴⁸ These qualities were an amalgam of the Graeco‐Roman ethical values, the moral injunctions of the Enlightenment, and the characteristics of the English gentleman.⁴⁹ In Nicolson's opinion, they enhanced the diplomat's negotiating ability by fostering the growth of skills rarely found in other vocations.⁵⁰ They also helped the diplomat, as Nicolson's father put it, to develop and perfect those invaluable diplomatic talents of ‘reporting accurately, finding the true causes, noting certain symptoms, sifting information, calculating chances’.⁵¹

From his Oxford classical and historical studies Nicolson imbibed a respect for the ‘facts’ of any given situation.⁵² His twenty years in diplomacy strengthened Nicolson's certainty that in the end it was not the policies of a political party or a minister's speeches that had the greatest influence on foreign affairs and diplomacy but ‘the facts of the case’. He defined these as ‘the files, the previous papers, the figures, the precedents, above all the sharp distinction which exists in all administrative affairs between the desirable and the practicable’.⁵³ Nicolson developed considerable respect for the British Civil Service as a stable anchor in domestic governance and diplomacy. It constituted ‘the flywheel of the State’,⁵⁴ whose continuity and flexibility as an ‘organism’ rather than a ‘machine’ made it an immensely useful instrument.⁵⁵

The other important determinants of a diplomat's effectiveness were his capacity to represent his country's interests and his understanding of the host country.⁵⁶ The chain of representation was: Diplomat–Foreign Secretary–Cabinet–Parliamentary Majority–The Imprimatur of the Electorate.⁵⁷Nicolson insisted that the diplomat's role was not exclusively a representative one. Diplomats possessed (sometimes considerable) latitude in seeking expert knowledge and advice before forming and voicing their opinions. As the veteran French diplomat, Paul Cambon, observed: ‘An Ambassador is not a subaltern charged with the execution of a policy. He is a collaborator who must always, even at the risk of courting displeasure, speak freely’.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, the diplomat's lack of real power in comparison with that of the politician or the man on horseback often reduces his status to one of ‘“Pathetic Hero”’.⁵⁹

A diplomat abroad for too long could also lose touch with opinion at home.⁶⁰ ‘The diplomat is a stranger by dint of the very effort to be true to his mission. The advice that the great minds of diplomacy—de Callières, Satow and Nicolson—give to the ideal diplomat amounts to the concealment of his true nature, the repression of his emotions and the accommodation to all sorts of whims and tempers’.⁶¹ Nicolson understood this danger, pointing out that in extremis the diplomat could become ‘denationalized, internationalized, and therefore, an elegant empty husk’⁶²—little more than ‘a queer cosmopolitan’.⁶³ Diplomats may also succumb to ‘the occupational disease’ of their vocation—what Nicolson called ‘the cautionary sickness’—a reluctance to report on subjects or express views unwelcome to their superiors.⁶⁴

David Jayne Hill argued that an understanding of diplomacy's historical development is essential when analysing diplomatic practice and theory.⁶⁵ Nicolson acknowledged the advantages of Hill's historical method; however, he regarded diplomacy's evolution as linear in nature.⁶⁶ Nicolson's approach to diplomatic development accentuated ‘continuity’ rather than ‘sudden spurts and long retardations’.⁶⁷ As he put it, ‘There was Roman law and the memory of a world‐state capable of rendering it international. There was the Byzantine tradition of ingenuity. There was the imperial legacy of power‐politics leading to the conception of diplomacy as an adjunct to the military feudal caste. There was the papal idea of a world discipline resting upon religious sanctions’.

Woven ‘in and out of these glittering strands of development, ran the homely worsted of the mercantile conception of a diplomacy governed by the reasonable bargaining of man with man. Sound diplomacy was the invention of middle‐class citizens’. Law and commerce were the vehicles which enabled diplomatic theory to develop in an ascending, parallel pattern.⁶⁸ Nicolson regarded as an oversimplification R. B. Mowat's division (1935) of diplomacy into three distinct historical periods: 476 to 1475 (the absence of organized diplomacy), the Renaissance until the First World War (nation‐states and organized diplomacy), and the 1920s and 1930s (democratic or the ‘New Diplomacy’).⁶⁹

The significant contrasts between Hill, Nicolson, and Mowat have been brought into sharp focus by James Der Derian. Nicolson's diplomatic theory (and to some degree classical international theory), he asserts, by insisting on continuity and seeking evidence for it, creates a historical and a logical foundation for a stilted, evolutionary version of diplomatic development. This results in the attribution of uniformity to diplomacy's origins and history that distorts interpretations of its actual development. It also imposes a unitary body of theory on a reality which did not, and does not, exist. Der Derian cites as an example Nicolson's emphasis on common sense as the pivotal element in moulding diplomatic theory, pointing out that, during the Middle Ages, religious, social, ideological, and unconscious forces also shaped diplomacy's evolution.⁷⁰

The classic statement of the view that diplomacy had tribal origins remains Ragnar Numelin's The Beginnings of Diplomacy (1950). Numelin contended that the history of diplomacy predates European classical antiquity and the ancient Oriental, Indian, and Chinese civilizations to encompass the tribal peoples of Australia, Oceania, Asia, Africa, and North and South America—peoples without a written history.⁷¹ Adam Watson also dates diplomacy to the oral message‐carrying heralds of primitive times.⁷² Nicolson, when discussing diplomacy's origins, trod lightly, because of his belief that they ‘lie buried in the darkness preceding…“the dawn of history”’.⁷³ A relieved Nicolson told his readers, ‘When we pass from the mythological to the historical, we find ourselves upon surer and more reputable ground’.⁷⁴ Even when he was writing, however, there was clear evidence—the Amarna letters, for example (discovered in 1887)—of the existence of cuneiform diplomacy in the Ancient Near East.⁷⁵

Harold Nicolson's real starting point for discussing diplomatic theory was the ancient Greeks, who had developed ‘an elaborate system of diplomatic intercourse’.⁷⁶ Andrew Wolpert maintains that Nicolson's traditional view overestimates its complexity and underrates the effects on Greek diplomacy of differences between the various poleis regarding their respective strategic interests.⁷⁷ Nevertheless, by the fifth century, the Greeks had built a complex apparatus for interstate interchange. It included Amphictyonic Councils, leagues and alliances, principles governing the declaration of war, the conclusion of peace, the ratification of treaties, arbitration, neutrality, the exchange of ambassadors, and a consul's functions, as well as certain rules of war.⁷⁸ Nicolson's explanation for the failure of the Amphictyonic Councils— ‘something between a Church Congress, an Eisteddfod and a meeting of the League of Nations Assembly’—had instructive parallels for the 1930s: they were not universal—many important nation‐states never became members—and they possessed insufficient force to enable them to impose their decisions on the stronger Powers. However, the Councils did engender an awareness of common international interests.⁷⁹

The Greeks passed their diplomatic traditions and precepts to the Romans, who had little inclination or aptitude for negotiation. Their approach to diplomatic intercourse was more that of ‘the legionary and the road‐maker’ than that of the diplomat.⁸⁰ Rome's overwhelming power and capacity to impose her will through arms militated strongly against the evolution of a highly developed Roman diplomatic method.⁸¹ For the Romans, ‘might was right… a sharp sword in the hand of a disciplined soldier was the most persuasive argument in world diplomacy’.⁸² Among Rome's main contributions to diplomatic theory was ‘a theoretical respect for good‐faith, and an understanding of the purely practical importance of reliable contracts’.⁸³ Whether this produced ‘a distinctive procedure of diplomacy’ is debatable. Brian Campbell thinks it did; Nicolson thought not, seeing in Rome a juggernaut with little or no need to parley with her geopolitical inferiors.⁸⁴

With the end of Roman dominance there developed a new competitive spirit in diplomacy; ‘policy ceased to be stated in the sharp alternatives of obedience or revolt, but became a question of adjusting rival ambitions, or of fortifying national security, by the conciliation of enemies and the acquisition of allies. It was then that professional diplomacy…became one of the branches of statesmanship’.⁸⁵ Diplomacy was transformed during post‐medieval times by the influence of power politics, national prestige, status, precedence, and glamour, as well as by profit politics, appeasement, conciliation, compromise, and credit.⁸⁶ Nicolson's approaches to these aspects of diplomatic theory even now command widespread agreement. One that has always provoked criticism, and continues to do so, is his attitude to Byzantine and Venetian diplomacy. While conceding that the Emperors of Byzantium were the first to organize a special department of state to deal with external affairs, and to train professional negotiators to serve as their ambassadors to foreign courts, Nicolson regarded Venice as the birthplace of the first organized diplomatic system.⁸⁷ The discussion this view prompted was a whisper compared to the arguments generated by his devastating indictment of the Byzantine legacy:

There came under the Byzantine system a recrudescence of diplomacy in its most unconstructive form. Diplomacy became the stimulant rather than the antidote to the greed and folly of mankind. Instead of co‐operation, you had disintegration; instead of unity, disruption; instead of reason, you had astuteness; in the place of moral principles you had ingenuity. The Byzantine conception of diplomacy was directly transmitted to Venice, and, from those foetid lagoons, throughout the Italian peninsula. Diplomacy in the Middle Ages had a predominantly Italian, and indeed Byzantine, flavour. It is to this heredity that it owes, in modern Europe, so much of its disrepute.⁸⁸

An ‘intricate and unreasonable pattern’ characterized such diplomacy, one ‘that ignored the practical purposes of true negotiation, and introduced an abominable filigree of artifice into what ought always to be a simple machine’.⁸⁹

Nicolson made clear his preference for the diplomacy of antiquity over ‘the wolf‐like habits’ of the Renaissance Italians, who had been indoctrinated with the Byzantine or ‘oriental defects of duplicity and suspicion’.⁹⁰ Their methods were theoretically and practically unsound. In teaching that ‘international justice must always be subordinated to national expediency’ and ‘in inculcating the habits of deception, opportunism, and faithlessness’, the Italians did much to discredit the whole art of diplomacy.⁹¹ This was compounded by the harmful effect of their ‘ceaseless fiddlings’ with the balance of power, which were deducible from the political theory of Niccolò Machiavelli, whose writings (chiefly The Prince) had so many regrettable consequences for Western Europe. Nicolson conceded that the author of Il Principe was not creating ‘a permanent doctrine’ but ‘expounding la verità effettuale, the effective truth, as he experienced it in his own life‐time’. Nevertheless, Machiavelli's ‘general theory that the safety and interests of the State take precedence over all ethical considerations was, in after years, adopted and expanded… with…very unfortunate results’.⁹²

G. R. Berridge has referred to Nicolson's ‘elegant caricature of the “Italian method” of negotiation’.⁹³ Christian Reus‐Smit questions Nicolson's interpretation of Renaissance diplomacy on the ground that emphasizing ‘the irrational, highly ritualized, ornamental, and premodern character of Italian practices’ (as Nicolson does) results in a misconception of Italian diplomacy as ‘the antithesis of modern diplomatic practice…public not private, personalized not detached, affected not efficient, demonstrative not deliberative, ritualized not technocratic’. The outcome is an underestimation of Renaissance diplomacy, a downplaying of the power and effectiveness of Italian political elites (‘indulgent peacocks, beguiled by oriental extravagances’), and a misunderstanding of Renaissance diplomacy because it is being evaluated against the standards of latter‐day European diplomatic theory and practice.⁹⁴

Adda B. Bozeman also dismisses Nicolson's condemnation of Byzantine diplomacy (and its effect on that of the Venetians) on the basis that in the Nicolson analysis ‘Venetian diplomacy is being measured…in terms of its compliance or noncompliance with the standards of political behavior that have come to prevail in the diplomatic circles of the modern Western society of states’.⁹⁵ Other critics of Nicolson's strictures on Byzantine and Italian diplomacy have claimed that he distorts the character of both. According to Raymond A. Jones, for example, Nicolson's evolutionary conceptions are ‘teleological fantasies’, since Venetian diplomatic development was a Renaissance growth confined largely to the Italian peninsula, more particularly to newly emergent, independent nation‐states with their own diplomatic machines. Italian diplomatic practice, therefore, was not by nature primarily an imitative and pale offshoot of Byzantine diplomacy.⁹⁶ In the face of this barrage—the product of research conducted in archives opened years after Nicolson pronounced on Byzantine and Venetian diplomatic development—his interpretation of this subject is less persuasive than it was in 1939 (Diplomacy) and 1954 (The Evolution of Diplomatic Method). The Nicolson version of events, though evocatively rendered and supremely readable, derives largely from his intellectual prejudices, chiefly a readiness to debate the diplomacy of Byzantium and Renaissance Italy in terms of the dominant forms and values of the modern nation‐state.

Post‐medieval ‘classic diplomacy’ was exemplified in the diplomatic theory and practice nurtured and perfected by France's Chief Minister, Cardinal Richelieu.⁹⁷ In the 1600s and the eighteenth century, the French method, encapsulated in Callières's classic work, became ‘predominant and universal’.⁹⁸ Its influence has been enormous, and this ‘historical diplomacy’ continues to set the pattern for much Western and non‐Western diplomatic interchange.⁹⁹ It ushered in a ‘Golden Age of Diplomacy’ in which French diplomatic theory and practice reached their efflorescence between the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) and the First World War (1914–18).¹⁰⁰

Nicolson regarded the French system as ‘that best adapted to the conduct of relations between civilised States. It was courteous and dignified; it was continuous and gradual; it attached importance to knowledge and experience; it took account of the realities of existing power; and it defined good faith, lucidity and precision as the qualities essential to any sound negotiation’.¹⁰¹ More especially, he esteemed its emphasis on diplomatic negotiation as a permanent, unhurried activity, and its recognition of diplomacy as a continuous rather than an ad hoc process. Nicolson also shared the French perception that the interests of the State should (within certain defined ethical limits) rank above those of sentiment, ideology, or doctrine. He agreed, too, that in perilous times one's allies must be chosen primarily for their physical or geographical strengths and not for their ‘integrity or charm’.

The French axiom that ‘no policy could succeed unless it had national opinion behind it’ was one that Nicolson considered of universal value to politicians and diplomats. He also echoed Richelieu's conviction concerning the sanctity of treaties as instruments of statecraft, and, like the French, lauded the principle that certainty was the premier element of sound diplomacy. Nicolson subscribed to the diplomatic theory of the ‘realist’ Richelieu,¹⁰² while finding Machiavelli's political cynicism ‘repulsive’.¹⁰³ He stated in 1954 that, although the enormous changes in international society wrought by the First World War had required a reformed realism, pre‐1914 diplomacy was ‘infinitely more efficient than that which we employ today’.¹⁰⁴

The merits and demerits of the ‘Old Diplomacy’ and the ‘New Diplomacy’ have inspired much analysis. The term ‘New Diplomacy’ is traceable to 1793,¹⁰⁵ but the most notable changes in modern European diplomatic practice to warrant this description did not occur until after the First World War. The extent of these changes—indeed the question as to whether they deserve the appellation ‘New Diplomacy’ at all—has also prompted considerable discussion. Jules Cambon asserted in 1931 that ‘to talk about new and old diplomacy is to make a distinction without a difference. It is the outward appearance, or, if you like, the make‐up of diplomacy, that is gradually changing. The substance will remain’.¹⁰⁶ R. B. Mowat, writing in 1935, claimed that the immediate post‐war alterations in diplomatic method represented ‘not a “New Diplomacy”, but the old diplomacy going on, amplified, developed, but retaining continuity with its past’.¹⁰⁷ In 1988, Sasson Sofer described the distinction as ‘simplistic and inaccurate’, and insisted that ‘continuity and evolution’ rather than ‘revolution’ had characterized twentieth‐century diplomatic theory and practice.¹⁰⁸

In Peacemaking 1919(1933), Nicolson argued that ‘the contrast between the old and the new diplomacy is…not merely an exaggeration, but may prove harmful to the scientific study of international relations’.¹⁰⁹ The incidence of sovereignty, not the essential principles of sound diplomacy, had changed. A year later, he wrote: ‘It is the interaction between the need of exact “representation” and the impulse towards increased “efficiency” which has, since the fourteenth century, constituted the main influence formative of diplomatic practice: the conflict between the “old” and the “new” diplomacy is thus no sudden phenomenon, but a stage in this long process of adjustment’.¹¹⁰ In 1939, Nicolson stressed: ‘No sudden conversion has taken place; no sharp contrasts of principle or method can be recognized; all that has happened is that the art of negotiation has gradually adjusted itself to changes in political conditions’ such as ‘a growing sense of the community of nations; an increasing appreciation of the importance of public opinion; and the rapid increase in communications’.¹¹¹ However, in his last significant pronouncement on the subject (1954), Nicolson concluded that the transition had originated, not in increased colonial expansion, greater commercial competition, or improved communications, but in ‘the belief that it was possible to apply to the conduct of external affairs, the ideas and practices which, in the conduct of internalaffairs, had for generations been regarded as the essentials of liberal democracy’.¹¹²

Harold Nicolson was alert to the strengths and imperfections of the ‘Old’ and the ‘New’.¹¹³ The principal pillars of the ‘Old Diplomacy’ were ‘the conception of Europe as the centre of international gravity; the idea that the Great Powers, constituting the Concert of Europe, were more important and more responsible than the Small Powers; the existence in every country of a trained diplomatic service possessing common standards of professional conduct; and the assumption that negotiation must always be a process rather than an episode, and that at every stage it must remain confidential’.¹¹⁴

The four great advantages of the ‘Old Diplomacy’ were ‘knowledge of local conditions and feelings; no publicity; no public expectations; and no time‐pressure’.¹¹⁵ A ‘distinguished group’ of nine Ambassadors was accredited to the Court of St James's prior to the First World War. They represented France, Germany, Austro‐Hungary, Spain, Italy, Russia, the United States, Turkey, and Japan (the last three, Nicolson observed, played ‘subsidiary roles’). These envoys were ‘men of peace’; some were individuals of ‘outstanding ability’ who ‘represented all that was most wise, honourable and pacific in the Old Diplomacy’.¹¹⁶ During the 1912–14 crises occasioned by the Balkan Wars, they succeeded under the direction of Britain's Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, in establishing what amounted to a European Concert. The Ambassadors' Conference held in London in 1913 constituted a classic instance of joint intervention by the Concert of Europe in a dispute between Small Powers to prevent a Small Power crisis from escalating into a Great Power confrontation. As it happened, this proved to be ‘the last, as well as the best, example of the old diplomacy in action’.¹¹⁷

The ‘Old Diplomacy’ carried the blame for ‘the mistakes, the follies and the crimes’ of pre‐First World War European foreign policy.¹¹⁸ The conflict also transformed the diplomatic terrain in that it ‘destroyed the formula, or the convention, under which the old diplomatists fulfilled their functions’.¹¹⁹ The existing apparatus remained in place, though reformed by the addition of ‘open diplomacy’, the product of an idealist vision of diplomatic theory and practice introduced by the American President, Woodrow Wilson, at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. At a deeper level, too, interstate relations were under siege from economics and ideology. The USSR purported to represent the world's workers; Nazi Germany claimed to speak for the Aryan race; and the Western Powers saw themselves as the voice of the international community.¹²⁰ Hedley Bull questioned Nicolson's conviction that the decline of the ‘Old Diplomacy’ was ‘a deplorable development’, since the altered shape of international society made the ‘New Diplomacy’ ‘a necessary instrument of foreign policy for any state’. He cited two spheres in which this is evident—the role of public opinion in foreign relations and the disappearance of the Concert of Europe. However, it will become apparent that Nicolson did not dismiss the ‘New Diplomacy’ to the degree that this suggests.¹²¹

Nicolson defined post‐First World War ‘democratic diplomacy’ as ‘the execution of foreign policy, either by politicians themselves, or through the medium of untrained negotiators whom they have selected from among their own supporters or personal friends’.¹²² The supreme disadvantage of this form of diplomacy is that ‘its representatives are obliged to reduce the standards of their own thoughts to the level of other people's feelings’.¹²³ It also presents the problem ‘of adjusting the emotions of the masses to the thoughts of the rulers’.¹²⁴ He objected to ‘the unctuous inertia, the flood‐lit self‐righteousness, the timid imprecisions, the appalling amateurishness of democratic diplomacy’.¹²⁵ Nicolson stressed that ‘the main distinction…between the methods of the new and those of the old diplomacy is that the former aims at satisfying the immediate wishes of the electorate, whereas the latter was concerned only with the ultimate interests of the nation’. Of ‘democratic diplomacy’ Nicolson concluded, ‘In its desire to conciliate popular feeling it is apt to subordinate principle to expediency, to substitute the indefinite for the precise, to prefer in place of the central problem (which is often momentarily insoluble) subsidiary issues upon which immediate agreement, and therefore immediate popular approval, can be attained’.¹²⁶

In diplomacy, ‘the ideal to be achieved…is to differentiate between policy and negotiation…to combine…the confidential and expert handling of negotiation, with the maximum democratic control of policy in the form of ratification. Let agreements be negotiated between technicians working in privacy: and let these agreements, once reduced to precise and detailed form, be submitted to the open comment, criticism, rejection or consent of the parliaments and peoples whose interests are affected’.¹²⁷ To be avoided are the worst aspects of the ‘New Diplomacy’—insult and propaganda. These lead to controversy, competition, publicity, sensationalism, animosity between the negotiators, and feelings of anger or wounded pride among the public of the participating nation‐states.¹²⁸

In 1946, Nicolson observed, ‘It may be that in many ways the conventions of the old diplomacy were cumbrous, inscrutable and lethargic. Yet the slap‐dash diplomacy of our modern times, which leaves behind it such divergences of interpretation and so many imprecisions, cannot as yet claim to constitute an improvement. Assuredly it is quicker than the older method; but is it more comprehensible? Is it as conciliatory or exact?’¹²⁹ The following year (1947), he expressed the view that the ‘New Diplomacy’ had yet to find its own formula. Yet he was confident that it would do so.¹³⁰ In 1961, Nicolson acknowledged the impossibility of returning to the forms and practices of the ‘Old Diplomacy’. He held out hope, however, that the practitioners of the ‘New Diplomacy’ could benefit from the institutional experience and wisdom of their predecessors.¹³¹

Nicolson confessed to ‘a professional prejudice against sudden diplomacy’¹³²—the framing of diplomatic agreements by politicians or their nominees (usually foreign ministers), in an atmosphere of haste, improvisation, and imprecision. No practitioner of this ‘paradiplomacy’, defined by Rohan Butler as ‘a personal and parallel diplomacy, complementing or competing with the regular foreign policy of the [government]’, is prepared to bind him or herself openly and in advance to a precise policy.¹³³ The outcome is not precise ‘policy’ but imprecise ‘aspiration’; in diplomacy, ‘precision’ is ‘the very principle of action’.¹³⁴

He also objected to many aspects of ‘diplomacy by conference’, which politicians had taken to after the First World War ‘as wild geese to water’ (twenty‐three separate international conferences were held between January 1920 and December 1922).¹³⁵ On the atmosphere of conferences, he shared his contemporary, Lord Vansittart's view that ‘the pace of a troop was proverbially regulated by the slowest horse; the tone of a conference is set by its noisiest delegation’.¹³⁶ However, he did not subscribe to Sir David Kelly's belief that ‘open diplomacy is a contradiction in terms; if it is open it is not diplomacy’.¹³⁷ Nicolson hoped that ‘surely there must exist some mean between secret diplomacy and diplomacy by loud‐speaker’.¹³⁸ As he conceded in 1934, ‘Obviously there are occasions when international agreement can only be achieved by oral discussion between plenipotentiaries. There are occasions, also, when the issues are so vital and immediate that “policy” as well as “negotiation” is involved. On such occasions the negotiators must be identical with the framers of policy, and the resultant congresses and conferences must be attended by the Prime Ministers or Foreign Secretaries of the several Powers’.¹³⁹

A year later (1935) Nicolson repeated that he was not opposed totally to diplomacy by conference, since situations would arise in which those responsible to parliament for devising foreign policy had to be involved directly in its execution. Nevertheless, gratuitous personal contact between ‘ambulant politicians’ should be avoided,¹⁴⁰ as it tended to make the minister ‘not the master of his opportunity but the slave of an occasion’.¹⁴¹ In the words of a former US Secretary of State, ‘the course of wisdom lies in reducing the impact which accidents of personality have upon the relations among nations’.¹⁴²

Diplomacy via conference deprived diplomatic interchange of another valuable resource. ‘The diplomatic service acts as a filter in the turgid stream of international affairs. Direct contact between British and foreign statesmen dispenses with that filter’, Nicolson stated. ‘I admit that the rush of water is thereby rendered more potent and more immediate: yet the conduct of foreign policy requires no gush or rush; it requires deliberation, experience and detachment’.¹⁴³ The risks accompanying conference diplomacy made it ‘perhaps the most unfortunate diplomatic method ever conceived’.¹⁴⁴

Harold Nicolson believed that openness and publicity had prevented real negotiation from taking place at the 1946 Paris Peace Conference. He speculated that the best outcome of 1946 would have been a realization that conferences must begin with confidential negotiation before moving on to public consideration of the results of that negotiation.¹⁴⁵ While maintaining his belief that open diplomacy between ministers was sometimes necessary, Nicolson remained certain that ‘more misery has been caused to mankind by the hurried drafting of imprecise or meaningless documents than by all the alleged machinations of the cunning diplomatist’.¹⁴⁶

He also had reservations about the parliamentary diplomacy of the League of Nations and the United Nations. ‘These conferences…do much to diminish the utility of professional diplomatists and, in that they entail much publicity, many rumours, and wide speculation,—in that they tempt politicians to achieve quick, spectacular and often fictitious results,—they tend to promote rather than allay suspicion, and to create those very states of uncertainty which it is the purpose of good diplomatic method to prevent’. Nicolson described the United Nations Security Council and the General Assembly as ‘exercises in forensic propaganda’ that did not even purport to be ‘experiments in diplomatic method’.¹⁴⁷ In 1960, he observed that ‘the endeavour to establish “open diplomacy” has led delegates to make propaganda speeches in public and to conduct serious negotiations in the privacy of hotel bedrooms—which leads to waste of time and farce’.¹⁴⁸ In 1963, a former United Nations official acknowledged the accuracy of Nicolson's criticisms of its open assemblies. Yet he claimed that ‘corridor or office diplomacy’, whereby many issues were resolved satisfactorily in private, compensated for the disadvantages of this form of intercourse. Parliamentary diplomacy was, therefore, public and multilateral.¹⁴⁹

These perceptions of conference or ‘summit’ diplomacy were surely out of balance. Nicolson took fright at the mere idea of this supposed new development, whose workings he considered too much in thrall to public pressure. Yet summit diplomacy had a long history. The meetings of medieval and early modern sovereigns, and the periodic congresses of the seventeenth century, although not susceptible to the democratic pressure of later centuries, were not unaffected by the influences of political opinion and strategic necessity.¹⁵⁰ Other men of affairs and veterans of 1919 like Lord Hankey were proclaiming that ‘diplomacy by conference has come to stay’, and that its ‘judicious development’ offered the best hope of avoiding future wars. In no sense, Hankey made clear, did this presage a decline in the prestige or functions of diplomats.¹⁵¹ One of these, Sir William Hayter, was confident that ‘summitry’ still had a role to perform in concluding existing negotiations or initiating new ones.¹⁵² Johan Kaufmann also disputes Nicolson's conclusions regarding conference diplomacy, on the ground that ‘public intergovernmental conferences can very well provide the stage for the practice of “quiet diplomacy”’.¹⁵³

Nicolson had strong reservations about ‘personal diplomacy’. While King Edward VII was much praised for his contribution to the Entente Cordiale (1904), Sir Arthur Nicolson had generally found His Majesty to be lazy and without real knowledge of affairs. Nonetheless, the younger Nicolson conceded to Count Harry Kessler that ‘“He was somebody you could trot out on occasion” to captivate some victim’.¹⁵⁴ Harold Nicolson regarded good diplomacy as the preserve of professionals; too great an emphasis on the individual often led to problems.

Harold Nicolson was not alone in his belief, one shared (as we have seen) by experienced and reflective diplomats such as Henry Kissinger, that diplomatic success depended on an understanding of ‘national character’. British diplomacy's strengths derived from its reliance on ‘the sound business principles of moderation, fair‐dealing, reasonableness, credit, compromise, and a distrust of all surprises or sensational extremes’. Nicolson emphasized that he was not claiming any moral superiority for British diplomacy over that of other nation‐states, only that the high value its practitioners placed on reliability in negotiation had produced an enduring and successful style of diplomatic discourse. Its chief weakness was a tendency to become ‘too optimistic, confused, non‐committal, irrational and elastic’.¹⁵⁵

In contrast to the British, ‘the Germans are always inclined to envisage diplomacy as war by some other means, and to take actions that are essentially military actions such as ‘the “trial of strength”, or Kraftprobe, the surprise attack, the ambuscade, the encircling movement, the trench raid, the strategic withdrawal, the preliminary bombardment, and the mass attack’.¹⁵⁶ Building on the example of ‘the most Machiavellian of diplomatists’,¹⁵⁷ Frederick the Great, the nineteenth‐century Prussian titan, Otto von Bismarck, devised methods which ‘although effective when controlled by his own iron will, became disastrous when applied by men of lesser strength…His actual trickery degraded the hitherto accepted standards of political and diplomatic honesty…He convinced his people that the only standard of statesmanship was that of success; and at the same time he taught them methods in which only he could succeed’.¹⁵⁸

The diplomacy of France, for all its precision, was ‘tense, rigid and inelastic’. For French diplomats, ‘the interests of France loom so exclusively that the forefront is apt to become blocked. Moreover, their passion for logic, the legal temper of their minds, their extreme realism, their distrust of all political emotion, often blind them to the motives, the feelings and often the thoughts of other nations’. Consequently, French diplomacy, ‘with all its magnificent equipment and its fine principles is often ineffective’. A predictable unpredictability characterized ‘the mobile diplomacy of the Italians’, who had developed an opportunistic diplomatic method based on ‘incessant manoeuvre’. Their approach, which aimed to achieve, not ‘durable credit’ but ‘immediate advantage’, was the antithesis of the British method. Unlike the Germans, Italian foreign policy‐makers and diplomats based power on diplomacy, not diplomacy on power. The Italian system was also the complete opposite of that of the French in that its practitioners sought, not to secure permanent allies against an unchanging enemy, but assumed the interchangeability of ally and foe. Italy attempted ‘to acquire by negotiation an importance greater than can be supplied by her own physical strength’.¹⁵⁹

Nicolson's approach to the diplomatic theory and practice of the USSR (and her mendicant nation‐states) was similar to Lord Vansittart's—‘the total perfidy of Totalitaria’ and ‘the New Barbarians’¹⁶⁰—though his analysis of both was more measured.¹⁶¹ He accepted that the Russians were ‘resolute doubtless, intensely convinced, well versed in dialectics, ingenious in a way, indefatigable in the pursuit of their own projects—but assuredly not clever diplomatists according to any correct definition of those terms’.¹⁶² Many years would pass before the West could establish with the Russians ‘any community of thought, of principle, even of purpose’.¹⁶³ In words less strident than but as assured as Vansittart's, he proclaimed that the USSR had evolved no method of negotiation worthy of the description ‘diplomatic system’.¹⁶⁴ To the end of his life, Nicolson maintained the belief that ‘diplomacy is the art of establishing credit through reliability; Soviet diplomacy, which seeks to establish fear through being unpredictable, is not diplomacy but something else’.¹⁶⁵ Of America's diplomacy, Nicolson concluded that no identifiable diplomatic ‘formula’ derivative of her national character had yet emerged. The clearest such contribution was the distinction between the ‘Old’ and the ‘New’.¹⁶⁶

The conception of national character as a determinant of a nation‐state's foreign policy and diplomatic practice, far from being an antiquarian relic of European international thought, is still taken seriously by diplomats and scholars. Henry Kissinger, one of the twentieth century's leading scholar‐diplomats, emphasized its importance in the last volume of his memoirs, published at century's end. Writing of the 1970s, Kissinger reflected that ‘Franco‐American tensions were more the result of a cultural gap than of policy disagreement. British diplomats stressed partnership and practical solutions. French leaders emphasized theory and adopted an instructional, superior, often hectoring manner. Britain sought cooperation; France maneuvered to create the impression that Paris had somehow exacted what we might have been quite willing to offer’. Kissinger argued that this characteristic of French diplomacy was evident as early as the seventeenth century.¹⁶⁷ He also pointed out that the sometimes irritating French diplomatic style had been ‘aptly described’ by Nicolson.¹⁶⁸ The effect of a nation‐state's national character on its foreign policy and diplomacy is not easy to determine. Yet Nicolson and Kissinger never doubted its significance.

Although critical of the ‘New Diplomacy’, Nicolson favoured some of the experiments and developments it had spawned. Chief among these was the First World War inter‐allied strategic planning and materials distribution body. He described it as ‘a fundamental innovation in what until then had been the usual practice of international negotiation. In place of a national policy expressing itself by competitive and conflicting diplomacy, you had a common international interest imposing the need of international co‐operation’ through bodies such as the Allied Maritime Transport Council. Nicolson praised this ‘valuable innovation in international practice’, and complimented its practitioners on achieving ‘a more continuous standard of mutual confidence and co‐operation than professional diplomatists had ever managed to achieve’.¹⁶⁹ Admittedly, this had occurred in wartime when the national existence of all but one of the parties (the United States) was threatened, and the need to collaborate and reach agreement was paramount.

The American legislature's refusal to ratify the Treaty of Versailles (an instrument negotiated and signed by President Woodrow Wilson) was an early twentieth‐century reversal that dealt ‘a heavy blow to the sanctity of contract and the reliability of negotiation’.¹⁷⁰ As the century unfolded, Nicolson's anxiety about developments in diplomatic method (especially the excesses of open diplomacy) intensified. He reflected in 1950 that ‘the machinery of international negotiation has almost completely broken down … Once the principles are discarded, the methods, which were the servants of those principles, also go by the board … Our only course is for ourselves to maintain the old principles and the old methods in the face of every provocation. In the end they must prevail; since they are demonstrably correct’.¹⁷¹ He had difficulty in accepting that improvements in communications had diminished an Ambassador's essential responsibilities and altered the nature of many diplomatic tasks.¹⁷² Nicolson was also slow to understand that, while the contribution of diplomacy and its practitioners remained significant, diplomacy's complexity was increasing and its character changing.

However, his exact contemporary and 1919 Paris confrère, the diplomatic historian, Sir Charles Webster, did appreciate that ‘diplomacy has become to a very large extent not so much a relation between two states as a complex of relations inside groups of states and between different groups of states’.¹⁷³ The high number of twentieth‐century diplomatic negotiations was matched perhaps only by the variety of subjects discussed. In what might reasonably be called ‘the century of diplomacy’ the craft, rather than receding in importance, has continued to follow a path of ‘logical, requisite, historical change’.¹⁷⁴ Now, as in Nicolson's day, ‘the diplomatic system is the communications system of the international society. Without it there could be no international society … nor any functioning collectivity of states’.¹⁷⁵

Diplomacy's principal purpose, for Nicolson, was the maintenance of international stability.¹⁷⁶ The society of European nation‐states provided manifold opportunities for statesmen and diplomats to pursue this goal by adopting the principle of concert in practising diplomacy, framing alliances, adjusting the balance of power, offering and honouring guarantees, engaging in arbitration, and, when necessary, initiating wars.¹⁷⁷ Nicolson emphasized the importance of common sense to diplomatic theory and practice.¹⁷⁸ Martin Wight has argued that this common sense conception as enunciated by Nicolson is ‘the central or “classical” view of diplomacy’. It is also an explicitly Grotian one which, as an element of international thought, can be easily attached to the Grotian theory of the balance of power. The Rationalist‐Grotian approach is based on ‘a theory constructed in terms of tension, balanced opposites, political factors interpenetrated by moral ones, and power harnessed by purpose’.¹⁷⁹

Diplomatic theory was one of the two pillars of Nicolson's international thought, the other being international order. His conception of it mirrored A. J. P. Taylor's outlook on diplomatic history, a subject which for Taylor encompassed ‘the greatest of themes … the relations of States … peace and war … the existence and destruction of communities and civilisations’.¹⁸⁰ Nicolson's concern was wider than that of the diplomatic historian in that as an international theorist he sought to address questions of ends and means in the arenas of statecraft and diplomacy. In his view, ‘It is not … sufficient to possess a [diplomatic] machine; what is important is the purposes for which that machine is employed and the spirit in which it is operated’.¹⁸¹ Both liberal realist ends and diplomatic means become important.

The roots of liberal realism went back to the fifth‐century Athenians,¹⁸² more specifically, the Greeks' acknowledgement of ‘the existence of certain divinely ordained principles governing the conduct of international affairs’. These included the sanctity of treaties (the spiritual bailiwick of the God, Zeus Pistios), the prohibition on abandoning an ally in mid‐campaign, and the condemnation of surprise attacks on one's neighbours.¹⁸³

Harold Nicolson approached historical parallels with care.¹⁸⁴ Yet he did find instructive that between the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain's dealings with the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, in September–October 1938 over the future of the Sudeten Germans, and Demosthenes's accusations against Aeschines in a speech in 343 bc. Nicolson's criticisms related to Aeschines's and Chamberlain's dilatoriness and overreliance on their opponent's verbal assurances in negotiation, and, in the former case, to intentionally misleading the citizenry on his return. The speech's Greek title derives from a verb meaning to misconduct an embassy, but its Latin name (De Falsa Legatione), in which form it has passed to posterity, is the handiwork of Cicero. The exact charges were that Aeschines had been untruthful in his reports, disobedient to his instructions, dilatory (with treacherous intent), and corrupt.¹⁸⁵ Nicolson also disagreed with the view of politicians like Chamberlain that ‘the immense complexity of international affairs has in some manner become entangled in the skein of diplomatic professionalism and that the tangle can be suddenly unwound’ by themselves. This had led Chamberlain to confuse appeasement (giving way to others from fear and not from principle) with negotiation, conciliation, or compromise.¹⁸⁶ Chamberlain was criticized, too, for engaging in ‘dual diplomacy’ (one diplomatic approach in public, another in secret).¹⁸⁷

The liberal realist was not slow to invoke Aristotle, his classical ideal, in insisting on a measured approach to negotiation. In 1950, he wrote that ‘the main contention of [Aristotle's] Technique of Rhetoric remains to my mind indestructible’. Accordingly, if ‘the aim of oratory is to persuade; there can be no persuasion unless confidence is established; there can be no confidence unless the orator is a man of reliable character who speaks the truth. Momentary passions, transitory moods of conviction even, can be aroused or created by propaganda and polemics; yet those false methods are subject to the law of diminishing returns’.¹⁸⁸ For this reason, Nicolson abhorred Sir Henry Wotton's apophthegm (written in jest or not) describing an ambassador as an honest man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country.¹⁸⁹

Liberal realism also encapsulated classical approaches spelt out by Thucydides, who stressed the importance of ensuring that in negotiation ‘our actual strength is keeping pace with the language that we use’. In diplomacy, it was necessary to proceed with caution and to conduct oneself with honour and courage.¹⁹⁰ While exploring Hugo Grotius's writings¹⁹¹ on ‘the general theory of diplomacy and … the precepts that he advocated for the better conduct of international relations’ (based on a Law of Nature), Nicolson noted the Grotian insistence that (in Nicolson's words): ‘No just equilibrium could ever be secured unless the rulers of the world realised that there were certain principles other than national expediency that must govern their policies and their acts’. Harold Nicolson admired the ‘idealist’ Grotius, the distant progenitor of the League of (and the United) Nations, and ‘the first systematic philosopher to propose that some institution should be established whereby the Law of Nature could be administered and enforced’.¹⁹² For Grotius, a Law of Nations was deducible from this Law of Nature, the most important concrete diplomatic right deriving from it being that nation‐states should have ‘the right of legation’.¹⁹³

The classical emphasis on ethical conduct is strongly reflected in the works of Callières, Jules Cambon, and Nicolson. According to Callières, ‘a skilful negotiator ought never to found the success of his negotiations on false promises and on breach of faith’.¹⁹⁴ Jules Cambon insisted that ‘moral influence is the most essential qualification for a diplomatist’.¹⁹⁵ For Nicolson, reliability and ethics are the foundations of the best diplomacy, since diplomatic negotiation is ‘the art of discovering an equable exchange of interests between people who trust each other’.¹⁹⁶

Liberal realism has continuing value for diplomats and statesmen charged with resolving the dominant interstate issues of the twenty‐first century. It would assuredly serve the needs of international society more effectively than the dominant paradigm of realism has done. In 2003, a retired British diplomat, Shaun Riordan, called for an alternative to ‘short‐term and reactive’ realism, insisted that the liberal approach need not be confined to ‘“woolly‐minded” morality’, and concluded that ‘foreign policy [and diplomacy] which allows more room for the ethical and takes a greater interest in the nature of states may serve better the national interest in the medium term and may thus be more “realistic”’.¹⁹⁷ The tenets of liberal realism clearly endure in the discourse of international theory.