The New Diplomacy
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Book Review The New Diplomacy Shaun Riordan Polity Press, Oxford, 2003, ISBN: 0-7456-2790-0. Acta Politica (2003) 38, 289–291. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500023 The current state of international affairs has challenged the traditional role and purpose of diplomacy. In this context, Shaun Riordan’s insights from his personal experience in the British foreign service provide a unique background for the understanding and explanation of the future of foreign policy formulation. Thus, The New Diplomacy, as the title intuits, calls for the transformation of the culture and structures of diplomatic service to the tune of the needs and requirements of the ‘post-modern world’ (p. 129). Failure to do so, the author insists, risks exacerbating the tendencies of insecurity. Riordan propounds a simultaneous reorganization of the conceptualization and, thence, practice of diplomacy. His premise is, that current diplomatic service reflects the 19th-century circumstances rather than the environment and challenges of the 21st century. In order to drive his point home, Riordan looks at (what he defines as) the three dominant models of diplomatic service: the (North) American, the British and the French (or European). The argument is that all three maintain the raison d’eˆtre of Realpolitik and as a result perpetuate its drawbacks. For Riordan, the crucial inadequacy of current diplomacy is its inability to account for the causes and long-term implications of both unilateral and multilateral attempts to deal with the divergent challenges to international order. Therefore, he outlines a sort of boomerang effect, through which similar posers continue to haunt international relations, albeit with a different (usually heightened) degree of poignancy. Riordan’s explanation for such recurrent inability of traditional diplomacy to deal with challenges to international order is its short-term, reactive and limited approach to these issues. Riordan’s recommendation is his framework for a new diplomacy. The suggestion is that diplomacy is to be viewed not merely as a process for conducting international relations, but also as a set of mechanisms through which these processes are enacted. Therefore, the ‘questions are by whom diplomacy will be carried out, at what level, how and to what ends’ (p. 130). In other words, Riordan encourages a sociological reconsideration of foreign policy formulation that accounts for the normative structures and cultural background of international actors. He affiliates himself with the view that it is no longer sufficient to examine only how a state behaves internationally;
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instead such analysis should also take into account the state’s domestic practices and beliefs. Thus, The New Diplomacy taps into current discourses of state identity and the formulation of inter-subjective meanings in the process of international interaction. Riordan’s inkling is that it is impossible to promote a Western liberal context through norm- and rule-imposition without the engagement of domestic actors in a discussio
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