(Para)Diplomatic Cultures: Old and New

Keynote paper presented at the International Workshop Alternative Cultures of Diplomacy, Diplomatic Cultures Research Network, An AHRC-funded Research Network, lead by Fiona McConnell & Jason Dittmer, UNPO/The Hague, Netherlands, November 2013.

(Para)Diplomatic Cultures: Old and New Noé Cornago

The notion of diplomatic culture is generally presented as something belonging exclusively to the semantic field of international relations, completely strange to the complexities of political life within the contours of specific states. In light of this, and against all empirical evidence, diplomatic studies tend to reproduce the fiction of the existence of a perfect and timeless political community – the state – as the foundational assumption that gives sense to the whole diplomatic system. The interplay between domestic complexity and diplomacy is occasionally examined but only to the extent that pluralism could acquire a critical manifestation in the form of intractable intercommunal or ethnic conflict or political violence, driving to secessionism, partition, ‘balkanization’, ethnic cleansing, and ultimately war (e.g. Campbell 1998). Otherwise, implications for diplomatic representation of domestic pluralism remain ignored. That inclination is even more salient amongst those studies focused on the problems surrounding diplomatic recognition of so-called ‘de facto’ states (Kingston and Spears 2004, Caspersen 2012). After all, visibility given to these cases is not the result of some intrinsic qualities of the affected territories. Quite the opposite, they only receive diplomatic attention to the extent that they serve as the ultimate pretext for the consequent deployment of a variety of ‘rituals of mediation’ by external powers with conflicting interests (cfr. Debrix and Weber 2003).

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Bearing these reflections in mind, this chapter aims to explore the possible implications of domestic pluralism and territorial politics – understood as the challenges posed by the distribution of power between territorial communities and governments within a given state – for a better understanding of the past, present and possible futures of diplomacy. More specifically, it will contend that the proliferation of ‘paradiplomatic’ interventions that we presently observe all over the world, in the hands of subnational governments, indigenous nations and other domestic constituencies, can be largely understood as the reverberation of old forms of political pluralism, whose re-emergence nowadays, far from being anachronic, tellingly shows some important functional adjustments and symbolic struggles to which the global diplomatic system has to respond in order to secure its own sustainability. The argument will be deployed in four stages. First, to justify the specificity of my approach, some brief conceptual clarifications on the notion of paradiplomacy will be made. Second, to show how agonistic accommodation of political and territorial pluralism within the political community was crucial in the formative process of diplomacy and remains crucial today, some recent contributions from diplomatic history will be discussed. Third, different theoretical approaches to ‘diplomatic culture’ will be examined in view of these arguments with the purpose of ascertaining their ability to grasp the mutual codetermination between transformations of diplomacy and the changing forms of domestic political order. Finally, as a way of concluding, I will advocate for a new understanding of diplomatic culture better equipped to address the implications for diplomacy of political pluralism.1

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An elusive concept

Despite various attempts to clarify its content (e.g. Duchacek 1990, Lecours 2002; Paquin 2004, Kuznetsov 2014), ‘paradiplomacy’ remains an elusive concept. Its validity has been frequently contested, and in spite of its wide diffusion in recent decades it remains ‘unstable and undecided’, thus constituting not a ‘core’ but a ‘sore’ political concept in the sense advanced by Terence Ball (1999). In other words, it is a concept more salient for the cognitive dissonances and occasional contestation it produces amongst scholars and practitioners than for its intrinsic value. In 1961 diplomatic historian Rohan Butler defined ‘paradiplomacy’ as the exercise of ‘personal and parallel diplomacy complementing or competing with the regular foreign policy of the government’ (1961: 13). Although excluding any form of governmental agency, this rather parsimonious definition nonetheless entails the connotations that make ‘paradiplomacy’ a controversial concept today. The consideration of paradiplomacy as a non-governmental alternative form of mediation, now significantly fostered by new media technologies, is also present in Der Derian’s occasional use of the word (1987: 202-203). In contrast with these precedents, Duchacek and Soldatos (1990) and others later (cfr. Aldecoa and Keating 1999, Paquin 2004, Kuznetsov 2014), apply the notion to diverse forms of political, economic and cultural intervention in the international realm of non-central governments. These valuable policy approaches to ‘paradiplomacy’ nonetheless fail to address what constitutes surely its most salient feature, namely, its ambivalence. In other words, the way in which both in practice and discursively ‘paradiplomacy’ suggests a desire to emulate official diplomacy whilst simultaneously affirming a distinctive will of political autonomy. More attentive to the complexities of diplomacy, McConnell, Moreau and Dittmer (2012: 812) convincingly

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affirm that by ‘collapsing conventional notions of the official and proper conduits of statecraft, these cases disrupt diplomatic performances of the state’, but also that rather ‘than calling for a dismantling of the state’ this appropriation paradoxically reinforces it. More importantly – they insightfully assert – although ‘diplomatic’ and ‘paradiplomatic’ interventions seem to take the form of seemingly ‘incommensurable worlds’, they are nevertheless folded in on, brushing up alongside and drawing representational power from one another…Together they form an assemblage of ‘diplomacy’ that must be considered in its totality (McConnell, Moreau and Dittmer 2012: 812).

Conceptual controversies surrounding the notion of ‘paradiplomacy’ reveal nonetheless a tension between those that consider the centralization of diplomacy as optimal –either in theoretical or practical terms (e.g. Barston 2006, Kleiner 2010, Berridge 2011)-, and those who conversely question it (Riordan 2006, Pigman 2010, Bjola and Kornprobst 2012) This would explain the ultimate rationale behind its acceptance (e.g. Aldecoa and Keating 1999, Paquin 2004, Kuznetsov 2014), as well as the motivation either for its refusal or replacement by other conceptual alternatives. The latter include ‘constituent diplomacy’, suggested by Kincaid (2002), and ‘multilayered diplomacy’ advocated by Hocking (1993), both of which tend to emphasize the consensual and inclusive dimensions of such diplomacy over its possible contentious aspects. However, as Constantinou and Der Derian (2010: 12) have pointed out, in the end ‘paradiplomacy’ remains ‘conceptually unsatisfactory’ because it leaves diplomacy as a simply an ‘inter-state affair’. For that reason it is worth examining the conditions under which so-called ‘paradiplomacy’ and ‘diplomacy’ may converge, not only in practice, as they already do, but also discursively. Such an endeavour requires a greater attention

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to the mutual co-determination in history between changing forms of diplomacy and the evolving configuration of political order within states than prevailing approaches to both diplomacy and paradiplomacy tend to cultivate. After all, careful consideration of political pluralism in diplomatic history reveals that those multiple intrusions in the diplomatic realm that we label today as ‘paradiplomatic’ are anything but new.

(Para)diplomatic history This section shows that the contention that official embassies are not always representative of the political community they are expected or intended to represent, and the consequent proliferation of alternative or parallel modes of representation, are enduring features of diplomacy from its foundational moments in antiquity to its current transformations in late modernity. This is something, however, that has remained forgotten for a long time. In his archaeology of Mediterranean diplomacy, Manuel Duran (2013) reminds us that the first available written text in the history of western diplomacy, namely Demosthenes’ De Falsa Legatione (see MacDowell 2000) deals more with paradiplomacy – parapresbeia in its original Greek form – than with diplomacy itself. The text concentrates on the mutual accusations of Demosthenes and Aeschines about how they respectively performed/betrayed their role as members of the Athenian delegation sent to Macedon to negotiate peace in 346 BC. Interestingly, careful examination of another outstanding document of ancient diplomatic history leads T.C. Brennan to similar conclusions with regard to the practice of Roman diplomacy almost fourteen centuries later: Constantine’s Excerpta De Legationibus quite vividly emphasizes how allpervasive were the agonistic attributes of conducting diplomacy, whether the 5

framework was provided by Greek-speaking polities, the Roman Senate, or Roman officials in the field…. no factor increased the general volatility of ancient diplomacy and contributed to its high failure rate as much as the prevalence of counter-embassies (Brennan 2009: 186) The notion of ‘counter-embassies’ – or competing ambassadorial missions claiming to represent the same political community – is certainly absent from the conventional grammars of contemporary diplomacy, but Brennan’s reflections on the ‘volatility’ and ‘high failure’ of diplomacy as the result of the ‘agonistic attribute of conducting diplomacy’ (2009: 186) in the Byzantine era helps us to understand some recurrent controversies in the history of diplomacy that remain observable nowadays. It can be argued, for instance, that those old controversies find echo today in current disputes over the legitimacy of successive ‘embassies’ and ‘counter-embassies’ that finally drove Ukraine to the critical situation experienced in 2014. In that case Ukraine’s official diplomatic representatives became increasingly alienated from their political constituencies, rapidly losing domestic and international credibility, and were finally replaced by other representatives, both at the state level and at the level of its diverse constituencies. This not only has implications for the interventionist moves of different foreign powers such as the Russian Federation, USA or the EU. It is also expressive of the unstable and agonistic nature of the political community that these successive and competing diplomatic delegations claim to represent, unexpectedly showing, in addition, the hidden link between two fields, namely those of democratic and diplomatic representation, which are frequently portrayed as separate domains of reality. However, tracing back the continuity between old and new forms of paradiplomacy also requires a more detailed account of the evolving contours of the relationship between domestic pluralism and diplomatic order. In what follows I briefly examine how that 6

relationship evolved from early to classical modernity, in a context in which a new centralization of power was taking form. The influential work of Mattingly (1973) was crucial in shaping the idea that the humanistic value of diplomacy as a way of mediating between diverse constituencies – which was characteristic of the Renaissance – was later displaced by its strategic role as a new bureaucratic and formalized institution, dedicated to intelligence gathering and knowledge management, and subordinated to the operational need of a new territorially bounded statecraft. According to this perspective, the advent of modern diplomacy was not only crucial for the shaping of the modern state system, but also for the territorialisation of politics within states themselves. This occurred through the consequent deployment of an ensemble of diplomatic, administrative and military dispositifs and organized ignorance for the purposes of what Foucault called governmentalité (2004). Although not without some merit (see Macmillan 2010, Wieland 2011), this view is nevertheless increasingly contested amongst historians, since the process of territorialisation referred above was neither immediate nor straightforward. Quite the opposite, according to Von Thiessen: The classical interpretation of diplomacy as one of the major engines of the statebuilding process demands revision…State-building process was not as straight, not as fast, not so much top-down process and by far not as effective as historiography used to see it (2010: 152) Consequently, against the influential narratives that portray Renaissance diplomacy as a moment of humanistic pluralism (e.g. Mattingly 1973) definitively displaced by a new diplomacy tailored to measure the rise of the nation-state (e.g. Anderson 1993), the new stream in diplomatic history emphasizes continuity more than rupture in the passing from pre-modern to early-modern diplomacy. This therefore provides a much wider space for the survival of pluralism in diplomacy (Watkins 2008, Carrió-Invernizzi 7

2013). As for the relationship between domestic political order and the diplomatic system, some new voices go even further in advocating for ‘dissolving artificial division between exterior and interior politics’, and shifting from ‘viewing the foreign policy of a nation as demarcated from the domestic policy’, towards a more ‘holistic view of the closely connected nature of government’ (Adams and Cox 2008: 8). In this vein, Christian Windler, one of the most active voices in this field, places a new emphasis on the quotidian work of diplomatic and consular intermediaries, their practices of communication and ‘their experiences of otherness’, rather than on negotiation outcomes themselves. According to Windler, early modern diplomatic contacts were characterized not by the principle of equality amongst states but by a hierarchical order in which both Princes and the representatives of diverse allegiances – cultural, merchant, religious or territorial – were inserted in a sort of ‘agonistic fashion’ which facilitated a mutual process of symbolic and pragmatic learning, and crystallized in highly ritualized modes of diplomatic communication and protocol (Windler 2010: 254). The notion of ‘composite monarchies’ formulated by Koenigsberger (1978) and later developed by John H. Elliot (1992) convincingly describes the Ottoman and Spanish Empires and other European monarchies as a cluster of political units all formally subject to one monarch but differentiated in terms of their territorial jurisdiction, political institutions and legal systems. Constitutional asymmetries between the territories created both opportunities for coexistence and risks of rupture. This composite solution, with its combination of vertical and horizontal arrangements, and the overlapping of both territorial and non-territorial jurisdictions, aptly characterizes the prevailing mode of political organization from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The negotiated or quasi-diplomatic character of some of these arrangements, 8

such as that represented by the Union between Scotland and England in 1707, remain recognizable today in what has been called a post-sovereign European political landscape (Keating 2009). The ‘composite monarchies’ model also contributed to the demolition of the myth of Westphalia as the cornerstone of the modern notion of state sovereignty (Osiander 1994, Teschke 2003). The Treaties of Munster and Osnabruck, which closed the era of the wars of religion in Europe, did not create in 1648 a new state system based on the mutual recognition of territorial sovereignty and equality of a concert of states, but rather a system in which the universal ambitions of some monarchies were conciliated with religious differences, constitutional asymmetries and territorial autonomy of literally hundreds of small political units. For instance, constituent units of the German Empire even won their autonomy in the conduction of diplomatic relations. Treatymaking power – under the inter se et cum exteris fodera principle – was indeed granted to them, as far as it were not oriented against the Emperor’s interest (Ochoa-Brun 2012: 149). According to Krischer (2013): Early modern foreign relations were not only dominated by sovereign rulers (usually referred to as Kings) and their ambassadors, but also and in fact predominantly by actors whose political status was ambiguous and unclear … 17th and 18th century diplomacy saw diplomats from all sorts of princes: electors, prince-bishops, even prince-abbesses, landgraves, dukes and also free imperial cities. Among these actors, sovereigns and their ambassadors were the (WesternEuropean) exception, not the rule. Early modern diplomacy was a field of practice very different from the state-centred, international system of the 19th and 20th century (2013:2)

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The diplomatic implications of the composite form of the Ottoman Empire have been also recently re-examined through a similar prism (Kárman 2013). Diplomacy with foreign independent powers such as France or England was for centuries compatible with the diplomatic interventions of the tributary constituencies of the Ottoman Empire, such as those deployed by the Republic of Ragusan or the Principalities of Transylvania and Wallachia, who carefully cultivated either with ad hoc envoys or with permanent residents their own diplomatic contacts with the suzerain Sultanate. These diplomatic contacts decline at the end of the Seventeenth century but they show the ‘subtly refined character of early modern political realities’ (Kárman 2013: 185). Similar developments were also common for centuries in the Chinese tributary system and survive the Opium War in 1839. The growing power and influence of Western powers during the nineteenth century forced the Chinese empire to adopt radical transformations in its diplomatic culture, but for half a century the dynasty tried to maintain a dual system in which the traditional tributary diplomatic practices of neighbouring countries such a Korea or Vietnam paralleled to China’s adaptation to the patterns of Western diplomacy (Hexiu 2008). More importantly, Chinese resistance to establish direct diplomatic contacts with non-tributary foreign powers explain the important role that provincial governors and other local official played initially during that period of intensification of China’s diplomatic contacts with Western powers. Although the Qing dynasty tried to adapt itself to the new imperatives: There was … no post of professional diplomatic official within the Qing government. This was the inevitable consequence of the localized manner of diplomacy as administered under Qing Dynasty traditional foreign policy. Nontributary foreign affairs were handled locally, either by regional governors or

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Imperial Commissioners that had been especially appointed by the emperor, at the port of Guangzhou (Xiaomin and Chunfeng 2007: 417) That complex (para)diplomatic network disappeared in 1912 when the late Qing dynasty fell and China became a republic, and remained absent from 1949 to 1978 during the early stages of People’s Republic of China, but since then, in the context of its cautious transition to capitalism Chinese authorities have significantly encourage a new era international activism for the Chinese provinces ( Cheung and Tang 2001) The connection between domestic political order and diplomacy acquired however a new profile in the age of modern revolutions. The American and French revolutions, and the subsequent reactions of European monarchies exemplified by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, significantly, albeit not immediately, reduced that early modern diplomatic pluralism. In his exploration of the genealogy of diplomacy, Der Derian (1987) asserts that diplomacy only acquired its modern meaning at a critical juncture in world history when the prevailing proto-diplomatic system was under serious attack. As he aptly observes: ‘Diplomacy comes of age, both ontologically and etymologically when it confronts the first major threat to its fledgling existence, the French Revolution’ (1987:107). In other words, it was only under the radical challenge of modern revolution that old diplomacy realized its ultimate rationale, being forced to define both its institutional recognizability and its formal content. In support of this vision it can be argued that it was only after the revision and regulation of existing diplomatic practices and institutions during the Congress of Vienna, in the light of the decisive impact of both the American and French Revolutions throughout the world, that modern and secularized diplomacy was born in 1815 (see Belissa and Ferragu 2007). Furthermore, some authors contend that the Treaty of Versailles represented a similar counterrevolutionary move a century later (e.g. Mayer 1967; Bisley 2004). 11

Whilst initial revolutionary attempts to transform diplomacy did not bring the radical changes they announced, they did at least allow for reformulating the connection between domestic political order and diplomatic systems in some unexpected ways (Armstrong 1993). Stinchcombe (1994), for instance, argues that Haiti's diplomatic isolation in the Americas after its revolution and independence in 1804 was due to its problematic place, as an antislavery black republic, in the symbolic system of domestic politics in the United States. Moreover, in spite of Haitian support for the independence movements of many Latin American countries, the republic of former slaves was excluded from the hemisphere's first regional meeting of independent nations held in Panama in 1826, and was not recognized by the U.S. until 1862, after the start of the Civil War. Not in vain, during the Civil War the eleven Southern states intensively sought international support and diplomatic recognition for their cause from European states. However European anti-slavery sentiments significantly complicated that task, conversely facilitating the Union’s efforts to prevent European states from recognizing the Confederacy as a legitimate nation and from getting involved in the Civil War (Brauer 1977). These historical precedents remained highly relevant a century later. Renee Romano offers a telling illustration of this in the course of her historical research on the connection between the racial discrimination experienced in the early years of the Cold War by African diplomats accredited in Washington D.C. and New York, and the advancement of the cause of racial equality in the United States, which would later crystallize in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She concludes: Just as African diplomats arriving in Washington, D.C., quickly discovered that they would have no diplomatic immunity from antiblack racism, so did the State Department find that its focus on foreign policy could not be used as an excuse for ignoring domestic affairs. (Romano 2000: 579)

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However, the American Revolution had, of course, many other important implications that remain observable today. One in particular deserves special attention in the context of the present work. As the first modern constitution the U.S. settled an influential standard for the distribution of powers in federal states in the domain of foreign affairs. In common with many other federal systems, it soon became clear that the position that acquired prevalence reserved that power for the federal government (cfr. Beaulieu 1892, Donot 1912). In 1931, for instance, after a careful examination of federal systems existing across the world at that time, Harold W. Stoke reduced the available options in constitutional regulation of this problem to two models: Generally speaking, two types of federations may be distinguished with reference to the conduct of foreign relations--those which allow a degree of international intercourse to members of the union, and those which deny all such intercourse. The federations of the latter type are much more numerous than those of the former. (1931: 46) However the formalization of the most restrictive version represented by the U.S. constitution was neither unambiguous nor particularly clear. Constitutional lawyer Glenn S. McRoberts elegantly summarizes the final outcome in words that laity may easily understand: Generally speaking, the Framers of the Constitution created the federal government to perform those functions which the states alone were incompetent to perform. While defining those functions was the source of much debate, there was general agreement that one such function was the conduct of foreign affairs. Unfortunately, this sentiment did not find its way into the specific language of the Constitution. (1989: 640-41)

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In view of this, and as happens across the world, constitutional discussions on the role of U.S. states in foreign affairs tend to adopt, in the voices of the custodians of constitutional loyalty, restrictive interpretative grammars, under which ‘states are precluded from usurping or unduly interfering with the federal government’s power to conduct foreign affairs’ (McRoberts 1989: 643). The so-called Massachusetts’ Burma Law case is very illustrative however of the scope and limits of these restrictive views. In 1996 the legislature of Massachusetts enacted a law prohibiting state entities from buying goods and services from companies doing business with Myanmar as a form of boycott to that country because of severe human rights violations committed by its government. The National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) filed suit against it arguing that this law infringed upon the federal government's foreign affairs and foreign commerce powers, and that it was already pre-empted by a federal act establishing sanctions against that country. In 2000, the Supreme Court of the U.S. nullified the law, reasoning that the Massachusetts’ Burma Law undermined U.S. Congress’ delegation of effective discretion to the President to control and limit economic sanctions against Burma solely to U.S. persons and new investment, as well as its mandate to the President to proceed ‘diplomatically in developing a comprehensive, multilateral strategy towards Burma’ (Crosby vs. NFTC 2000: III.3). Notwithstanding the formal value of that court ruling for setting the limits for U.S. states’ interventions in the international realm (Stumberg and Porterfield 2001), the fact remains that since then they have been even more active in that field than ever before (see Schaefer 2011, Macmillan 2012). Looking back to the past again, the complex and enduring interplay between domestic pluralism and diplomatic order that this section aims to examine acquired an even more intricate profile in the context of the rise and decline of the Spanish American Empire.

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Although frequently ignored in favour of the prevailing place of war and coercive conquest in the colonization process, diplomatic dealings also permeated early colonial encounters. Resistance to conquest produced frequent and violent upheavals amongst indigenous peoples against the conquerors. The Spanish defeat in the important Battle of Curalaba of 1598 in Chile convinced the Spanish Crown of the need to combine coercion with dialogue that became known as ‘peaceful conquest’. Although diplomatic dealings with indigenous peoples never displaced blood and fire as the main form of Spanish conquest, it would be a mistake to underestimate its part in facilitating a more active role of the indigenous in the shaping of a hybrid colonial order. Historical research demonstrates that important cultural, legal and political dimensions were frequently negotiated, securing for the indigenous peoples some forms of autonomy and self-rule (Cunill 2012). Moreover, Spain actively sought to establish channels of diplomatic communication with native nations’ representatives whenever they found it convenient and functional (Lacoste 2010). These practices, initially conceived of as a way of managing the contentious relationship between indigenous nations and the Spaniards, were two centuries later crucial in securing indigenous support for Spanish efforts to hinder the advancement of English ambitions in the subcontinent. But they also facilitated colonial emancipation and the consolidation of the new sovereign republics in the nineteenth century. General San Martin, the leader of both the Argentine and Chilean independence movements, was able, for instance, to gain support from indigenous nations against the Spanish army in the Revolutionary wars (see Lacoste 2010, Levaggi 1993). In that particular Latin American context, an interesting and largely forgotten phenomenon took a form which historian Gutierrez-Ardila aptly calls ‘constituent diplomacy’. From 1810 and 1816, between the deposition of the Spanish viceroyalty

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authorities and the full independence of the new American republics, the revolutionaries of Nueva Granada – a territory that broadly corresponds today to Venezuela, Colombia and Panama–rejected the idea of a ‘single and indivisible’ republic and instead created a dozen sovereign and independent entities. At the same time, conscious of the dangers that threatened these entities, these revolutionaries sought a confederacy so as to repel foreign invasions and impede the arising of a new tyrant (cfr. Gutierrez-Ardila 2009:4). Although not fully diplomatic in ambition the resulting horizontal negotiations amongst those provincial governments – such as Antioquia, Cundinamarca, Neiva or Tunja, amongst others – as well as their respective systems of mutual representation, were inspired by the notion of ius gentium (law of peoples). This was the same notion that in Europe was at that very precise moment on the way to be replaced by a new one – ius inter gentes – tailored to measure the needs of European rising nation–states through the modern grammars of international law now understood as law amongst states (Lechner 2006). In the words of Gutierrez-Ardila: The main objective of this provincial or constitutive diplomacy was to remedy the dissolution of their wider unity and to re-establish the social ties that had been crushed with the deposition of the viceroyalty authorities (2009: 4). Similar developments were underway at the same time in the Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata – the territories that now belong to Argentina, Chile and Paraguay – in the context of their respective processes of independence. While some provinces – such as Cordoba, Mendoza, Salta and Tucuman – remained obedient to Buenos Aires, others such as Santa Fe, Corrientes and Entre Rios, along with other constituencies that now belong to Chile or Paraguay, reclaimed sovereignty and the right to create their own systems of diplomatic representation (Gutierrez-Ardila 2009: 5). Although with less intensity, such attempts to assert territorial identity and contacts across borders, and to 16

secure autonomy in front of a new centralism, were also registered in Concepcion and Iquique, at the southern and northern extremes of Chile, respectively (Cartes-Montory 2010, Ovando and Gonzalez 2014). The history of modern Brazil after the demise of monarchy also allows for a paradiplomatic reading of the formative processes of both its federal system and its distinctive approach to diplomacy, confirming the mutual co-determination between the evolving forms of domestic political order and state participation in the wider diplomatic realm. Recent research (Bessa and Sombra 2012) on the early stages of the Brazilian republic – Republica Velha from 1890 to 1930 – reveal that under the close monitoring of the central government Brazilian constituent units were extremely active in international capital markets, being crucial in shaping the integration of the new Brazil into the nascent global economy. That era of paradiplomatic activism, particularly salient in the fields of foreign trade and external borrowing, came to an end with the 1930 Revolution, which opened a new era of centralization that culminated with the Estado Novo dictatorship, which lasts from 1937 to 1945 (Bessa and Sombra 2012). Democratization processes at the end of the century facilitated the recovery of those old paradiplomatic practices, helping to forge one of the most distinctive elements of twenty-first century Brazilian federalism (e.g. Vigevani 2006). What is interesting to highlight in these historical precedents is that, rather than a demand for secession or separatism, these paradiplomatic initiatives reveal quite the opposite. They highlight the importance of the assertion of political subjectivity and agency in the paradiplomatic field as a precondition for shaping a subsequent fair and horizontal negotiation of a new form of shared sovereignty under the federation or wider state, namely Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia or Mexico. This is not to say that the new Latin American republics were immune to secessionist movements, as 17

Yucatan’s repeated attempts to secede from Mexico reveal (e.g. Williams 1929), but its very exceptional character shows us the historical learning of political coexistence through a ‘strange multiplicity’ of institutional mediations achieved through the endless combination of both diplomatic and paradiplomatic deals.2 Similar developments, albeit with their own distinctive tones, were also registered in the British Commonwealth. Diplomatic historian Lorna Lloyd (2001) aptly summarizes her important research on how many British dominions were able to despatch and receive diplomatic missions long before they became fully independent and sovereign states: The traditional prerequisite for the despatch of diplomatic missions – sovereign statehood – was absent when, towards the end of the nineteenth century, governments of the Commonwealth began to send and receive representatives. As a result, the Commonwealth developed a distinctive way of conducting relations and their envoys were given a non-diplomatic title. This remained true even after the self-governing dominions began to appear on the international scene and then, in 1931, were allowed to opt for sovereignty. This was because Britain was anxious to play down what had happened, and the dominions were not immediately insistent on the full trappings of sovereign status. (2001: 9) This singular system, which only disappeared in the 1970s in view of its complicated accommodation with the previsions of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, operated even within the dominions themselves, since both Australian and Canadian constituencies were able to maintain their own separate provincial delegates for a long time after both territories became federalized (Lloyd 2007: 14). These and other similar precedents may help us to understand what Michael Collins has recently called the ‘Federal Moment’ in the post-1945 decolonisation age (2013): 18

namely that historical and genuinely transnational moment in which both old colonial rulers, such as Great Britain, France or the Netherlands, and local national elites, seemed to find in the promotion of federalism as an alternative to abrupt cessation of colonial ties and networks of interests. Although the special case of South Africa illustrates the ambivalences and perils of such an idea, a wider sample of federal experiments in the past century offer a compelling demonstration of the external and internal complexities that any attempt to build a middle-ground between composite empires and the nation-state form unavoidably entails. In sum, participation of these diverse constituencies in foreign trade, management of resources, cultural exchanges, or political negotiations beyond the contours of their hosting states – or empires – has been a durable and widespread feature of diplomacy across history. More importantly, those old constituent diplomacies were not only a common practice in the past: they were crucial in the shaping a modern system of sovereign states adapted to their own domestic complexity and pluralism. The long process of centralization that followed the functional and normative imperatives that served to consolidate the modern nation-states was nonetheless a highly contentious one. Formalization of diplomacy as state privilege was never complete and the old plurality of voices and practices that we find in history reappeared, once and again periodically, in the most unexpected places.

(Para)diplomatic culture?

The consideration of states as non-problematic entities that exist in mere interaction in the diplomatic realm (e.g. Barston 2009, Berridge 2011) constitutes an interesting case

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of scholarly resistance to some of the most compelling and repeated criticisms that international relations scholarship has received in decades (cfr. Walker 1993, Murphy 1998). That resistance is even more disconcerting in view of the many innovations that – more or less reluctantly – diplomatic services all over the world are increasingly adopting to cope with the implications of social and political pluralism for diplomatic practice as they realize the risk of becoming otherwise obsolete. Paradoxically, experienced diplomats themselves – as the careful observers they tend to be – are generally far more inclined than scholars to accept the necessity of a new diplomatic culture (e.g. Riordan 2006, Heine 2006, Bolewski 2007, Roberts 2009). They see such a new diplomatic culture as not only valid to operate –in both pragmatic and symbolic modes – in diplomatic contacts amongst states and other international bodies, but one able to trespass – both within and across states – the territorial assumptions through which chanceries from all over the world have, in the last two centuries, formulated their mutual diplomatic relationships. The need for greater attention to diplomatic practices within states, in order to better capture the current transformations of diplomatic culture, has also been emphasized by authors who are correspondingly experienced practitioners (e.g. Neumann 2002, Heine 2006, Roberts 2009). German diplomat and scholar Wilfried Bolewski, for instance, aptly describes what he calls the ‘internalization of diplomacy or internationalization of domestic policy’ as one of the distinctive features of diplomatic culture today (2007: 27-30). To embrace that analytical perspective requires nonetheless avoiding some influential approaches that tend to conflate the formal dimensions of diplomacy with its actual and changing morphologies. Alan James’ restrictive reflections illustrate very well how that conflation operates:

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The existence of a State is a logical pre-condition for the establishment of diplomatic relations. And by ‘State’ is meant the type of territorial entity which in official international parlance, is termed ‘sovereign.’ At this level, sovereignty connotes constitutional independence – the existence of a domestic constitution which is not a formal part of any wider constitutional arrangement. Thus Australia is a sovereign State, and as such is eligible to establish diplomatic relations with other such States. But the constituent Australian State of New South Wales is not sovereign (in the officially-accepted international sense), and therefore cannot establish the sort of relations which are termed diplomatic. It may establish offices abroad, as it has done, for example, in London. And it may be that, as there, the host State will as a matter of courtesy accord the office limited privileges and immunities. But such offices will not have the status of diplomatic missions, and will therefore not benefit from the provisions of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (James 1992: 352) Other authoritative and inquisitive authors as Berridge, Keens-Soper and Otter solemnly declare in one of their works a sharp separation between the internal and external spheres, placing diplomacy exclusively in the latter one: In orchestrating and moderating the dialogue between states, diplomacy thus serves as a bulwark against international chaos; in this way it may be understood as a more fragile counterpart, operating within a system based upon states, to the domestic order or `political system' of the state itself (2001: 12)

Against all empirical evidence, such scholars therefore reproduce the fiction of the existence of a perfect, stable and timeless political community – the state – as the

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foundational assumption that gives sense to the whole diplomatic system. Hedley Bull’s influential notion of ‘diplomatic culture’ is particularly illustrative of the problem we are dealing with. He defined it as ‘the common stock of ideas and values possessed by the official representatives of states’ (Bull 1977: 171-2). In so doing he avoids any problematization of what the principle of official diplomatic representation may entail in terms of its contentious relations with the complexities of the domestic political sphere, such as those related to class, gender, nation or race (e.g. Shaffer 1998). James Der Derian’s distinctive understanding of diplomacy as a mediation of ‘horizontal’ estrangement avoids nonetheless direct confrontation with the issue of domestic political pluralism or territorial complexity, although his theoretical approach offers the tools for such an approach. In his genealogy of diplomacy he convincingly examines how ‘diplomatic culture was formed and transformed, and how its power of normalization in a Leviathan-less world has been reproduced’ (Der Derian 1987: 4). Later in the same work he defines diplomatic culture as ‘the mediation of estrangement by symbolic power and social constrains’ (ibid: 42). He thus does not place the inception of modern diplomacy under the logic of power politics nor subordinate it to the rise of the nation-state (cf. Anderson 1993), but in the gradual realization of the limitations confronted by even the most powerful state in front of alienated powers that escaped its control either by persuasion or force. But despite his fruitful heuristics, Der Derian seems to keep modern political community encapsulated within the contours of specific states, since he later presents the ‘recognition of the difference between alienated domestic politics and alienated international relations’ as ‘realistic’ (1987: 208). He suggests that only the latter would be the proper subject of ‘horizontal’ diplomatic mediation whilst the former should be better approached through the idea of ‘antidiplomacy’, as the proper dominion for the ‘vertical’ mediation of the universal

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alienation of humankind (ibid). In so doing, Der Derian seems to renounce too soon the possible virtues of extending diplomatic culture to that middle ground constituted by the management of domestic pluralism both within and across states. For it happens that domestic pluralism cannot be addressed adequately with merely legal or intergovernmental mechanisms of control, mutual consultation or coordination, nor through the recourse to a new ‘permanent’ revolution. Rather, mediating the internal estrangement that is at the core of virtually all states – as a result of the increasing demands for recognition of plurality in social life – requires the adoption of a new diplomatic culture within states themselves. More than estrangement among states, paradiplomatic cultures reveal the often-unexplored process of mutual estrangement within states (Feldman 2005). This estrangement takes form both horizontally among different constituent units within a single or various states, and vertically in terms of the relationship of these constituent units with the central authority, adopting diverse profiles in different historical stages. In sum, in all their variety, these forms of estrangement can be read as a form of political contestation, albeit not necessarily a secessionist one, exposing the central government’s pretension to truly and completely represent the national community in the diplomatic realm.

Paradiplomacy as agonistic respect

Mainstream diplomatic studies tend to consider the political communities that diplomats represent as more or less complex, but also necessarily as ones confined within the boundaries of the state of which those diplomats are official representatives (e.g. Barston 2009, Kleiner 2010). To that extent it can be argued that any possible ‘necessity to trespass’ these boundaries – either in form of ‘paradiplomatic’ guise or political 23

uprising – falls largely outside of their scope (Anderson 2012). It is in line with the understanding of that problem that it is fruitful to reconsider ‘diplomatic culture’ through the conceptual lenses provided by contemporary discussions on the politics of ‘agonistic pluralism’. As Glover has aptly summarized: Agonistic pluralism…vaporizes adversarial engagement and recognizes the marginalizing tendencies implicit in drives to consensus and stability, offering perhaps the best means for cultivating virtues necessary to revitalize a contentious democratic politics which also fosters receptivity to pluralism and difference. (2012: 81) Noting the impossibility of a definitive resolution to the many estrangements observable within and across states through the exclusive means and ends of diplomacy amongst states, paradiplomatic culture may serve, and historically has actually served, to mediate some of them through its distinctive practices, institutions and discourses (see Mamadouh and Van der Wusten 2016). For, paraphrasing Sharp’s thoughts on ‘diplomacy’, we can say that ‘paradiplomacy’ is also ‘a human practice, constituted by the explicit construction, representation, negotiation and manipulation of ambiguous identities’ (Sharp 1999: 33). The most salient difference would be, however, that in the case of paradiplomacy the negotiation and manipulation of ambiguous identities that Sharp identifies as the core of diplomatic culture, takes place not only amongst states but also within and across them. Hopefully this new understanding of diplomacy as intrinsically linked to the changing forms of domestic political order will allow us to consider the competing legitimacies and the complex institutional mediations which today compound the global diplomatic realm. Highlighting the role of domestic political pluralism vis-à-vis the articulation of

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diplomatic culture has implications not only for the practicalities of global policymaking, but also for our understanding of the contemporary conditions in which the emergence of new diplomacies which trespass the contours of territorial sovereignty may be able to democratize the global political sphere. Although rarely spectacular either in form of content, paradiplomacy, in sum, can be read – in spite of its many limitations – as the herald of a new understanding of diplomacy as ‘agonistic respect’, in which difficult conflicts and disagreements are considered not as forms of nonconformity to be suppressed but as expressions of a dynamic political agency. This agency drives the inevitable but extremely complex move towards a new – albeit surely still imperfect – democratic polis and transnational citizenry (see Honig 1993, Connolly 2005, Schaap 2006). If diplomatic services across the world are unable to deal with the challenge of pluralism within the contours of the specific political community they respectively and officially represent, how they will be able to manage the challenge of political pluralism at a global scale?

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1

This chapter draws in part on, and expands on, some arguments previously advanced in Cornago, Noe (2013) Plural Diplomacies:

Normative Predicaments and Functional Imperatives (Leiden: Brill Publishers). 2

The idea of ‘strange multiplicity’ owes to James Tully (1995), who uses that beautiful formula as a way of characterizing the

growing complexity of constitutional law in face of social and political pluralism.

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