Iver Neumann - Diplomatic Sites: A Critical Enquiry

A Series of the Centre of International Studies, and the

Centre for Rising Powers, University of Cambridge

Edited by Professor Brendan Simms and Dr Amrita Narlikar

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IVER B. NEUMANN

Diplomatic Sites: A Critical Enquiry

(p.iv)

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• Neumann, Iver B.
• Diplomatic sites : a critical enquiry / Iver B. Neumann.
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• 1. Diplomacy. 2. Globalization. I. Title.

When I worked in the Norwegian embassy to Moscow in 1980, it was very clear to me that the work was specifically sited, not least because important business always had to be carried out in the streets, where the noisy traffic was supposed to drown out the spoken word before it reached the ears of locals listening in. When I went on to work at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), a think tank, I constantly found myself on the way to some specific kind of site where diplomacy was on display, such as the press conference or the lunch table.

I joined the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) as a planner in 1997 and got stuck in the revolving door between the MFA and NUPI. I went back to the MFA as a senior adviser in the European department, and then again to write its centenary history. During this period, my awareness of the importance of sites to diplomacy grew and I started writing on the topic. It was a bit of an uphill struggle, for diplomats themselves denied the importance of sites and most scholars of diplomacy concurred with the diplomats. Builders work on building sites. Most press photographers work on-site. When it is worthy of mention that, in certain cities, dentists work in the streets, it is because the people who do the mentioning expect to find them in one site only, namely in the office, next to the chair. Diplomats, on the other hand, are supposed to be above such a mundane thing as sites. To a social scientist, this rather peculiar notion is itself an analytical challenge and one that will be discussed in this book.

I should like to thank my steady interlocutors: Costas Constantinou, James Der Derian, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Andreas Gaarder, Halvard (p.viii) Leira, Cecilie Basberg Neumann, Vincent Pouliot, Ole Jacob Sending, Paul Sharp, Johan Vibe and Geoffrey Wiseman. Next, let me express my gratitude to my M.Phil. students at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and to my exemplary reader, who insisted that I should make the discussions of diplomacys sitedness more explicit. Thanks also to Morten Skumsrud Andersen, Malin Gjerdsbakk Audsen, Ingvild Johnsen and Einar Wigen for research assistance and to Susan Hivik for fruitful exchanges about the importance of language. Thanks to Kristin Haugevik, Knut Nustad, Bjrnar Sverdrup-Thygeson and Einar Wigen for comments on a previous draft. A special word of thanks goes to Sissel Aaraas of the Norwegian MFA. Whereas most of the book was written at NUPI, an invitation from the University of Queenslands School of Political Science and International Studies to come to Brisbane in the autumn of 2011 as a Visiting Fellow proved decisive in enabling me to put the manuscript together. Many thanks.

Chapter is an expanded version of Peace and Reconciliation Efforts as Systems-Maintaining Diplomacy, International Journal, 66, 3 (2011), pp. 563579, reprinted by permission. The introduction includes some material from my chapter Globalisation and Diplomacy, pp. 1528 in Andrew F. Cooper, Brian Hocking & William Maley (eds) Global Governance and Diplomacy (2008), reprinted by permission from Palgrave.

Sites and Globalisation

When I was about fifteen years old, I asked my godfather, a palaeontologist, whether he thought global warming was a human-made or natural phenomenon. He replied that however substantive the changes wrought by human beings might be, there was no way we could have substantially affected the cycle of global warming covering the billions of years over which the earth had existed. When I pointed out that the time span I had in mind was the less than 20,000 years during which human societies had been sedentary, he remarked that such periods were simply too short to be of interest to a palaeontologist. That was the end of the discussion.

This book is not about tectonic shifts. It is about possible changes in diplomacy as a result of general incremental changes in the global social environment within which diplomacy functions. The idea is to look at general debates about changebe that the debate about Euro-centrism, the way we think about the commensality of eating and drinking or the importance of popular culture for our understanding of social stuffand ask how these changes influence diplomatic practices. It follows the call for social scientists to study culture by exploring connections, parallels, and contrasts among a variety of often seemingly incommensurate sites (