CHOOSING BETWEEN DIPLOMACY AND WAR

As we outlined initially, in conflict situations, state policy-makers may have recourse to norms and practices of diplomacy, war or a combination of the two institutions. Reliance on law and adjudication, an alternative mode of conflict resolution domestically, is a rare option in international relations.

One obvious answer is that the choice is a result of a rational calculus. The transaction costs of war are vastly greater than those of diplomacy. In comparison to mobilizing armies, the costs of engaging diplomats are negligible. Only when the parties perceive (rightly or wrongly) that the conflict of interest is so deep that it cannot be resolved either by unilateral retreat or by compromise will they resort to war (cf. Snyder and Diesing, 1977: 502). Yet, there might be other, less tangible factors influencing their preferences.

Trust

To rely on diplomacy, policy-makers must have trust in the institution and in diplomats as agents of conflict resolution. This cannot be taken for granted but has varied among states and over time. For instance, the United States distrusted the diplomatic system fashioned and developed in European courts well into the twentieth century. Condemning European power politics and secret diplomacy, the United States minimized its involvement in the diplomatic world. Still, in 1906, there were only nine US embassies abroad, the rest being legations, and up to the end of World War II, fewer than half of the heads of mission were career diplomats (Eban, 1983: 343). Only after World War II did the idea of diplomacy as a valuable institution and an honorable profession rather than a disagreeable necessity take root in the United States. Similarly, after the Russian revolution in 1917, the Soviet government wanted to distance itself from bourgeois diplomacy.

Generally, the level of trust in diplomacy was at a low level after World War I, when the secretiveness of the “old” diplomacy came under heavy criticism, and the entire diplomatic system was held responsible for the failure to prevent the outbreak of war. In the harsh judgment of one observer, “what we now know as diplomacy is nothing more than a convicted fraud, a swindler of mankind, and a traitorous assassin of the morality and progress of the human race” (Hayward, 1916: 255). While much less virulent, lacking trust in diplomacy is discernible in various parts of the world today as well.

Worldview

Whether or not diplomacy is preferred also has to do with the worldview of policy­makers. Fundamentalist, absolutist outlooks tend to preclude diplomacy, which pre­sumes pragmatic, relativist attitudes. For instance, the sixteenth-century religious wars

nearly destroyed the European institution of diplomacy. European diplomacy had served what was, in effect, one society with com­mon upper class and dynasty standards and attitudes. The dynastic power struggles were then reduced to a kind of family quarrel within a ruling aristocracy. The intensification of religious strife in the 1560s was a catastrophic interruption, entailing mutual suspicions that the other's embassies were centers of hostile and subversive ideas. In short, whereas suc­cessful diplomacy requires that the parties can imagine a mutually satisfactory settlement, a clash of ideological opposites leaves little room for diplomacy (cf. Mattingly, 1955: 195-6).

This negative correlation between abso­lutist worldviews and reliance on diplomatic means of conflict resolution recurs in more recent history. At the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union perceived each other as conspiracies disguised as states to be fought globally as well as at home. “Communism was a virus, a social sickness, a disease of the body politic. Capitalism, bourgeois culture, was a source of contamination, cancer, rot” (Barnet, 1977: 73).

Similar tendencies are observable in the new millennium, when the “war on terror” rules out diplomatic dialog not only between states and organizations labeled as terrorists, but also between states with leaders express­ing fundamentalist, absolutist outlooks, such as US President George W. Bush and Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Anathema­tizing each other, they rule out diplomatic dialog as an alternative.

Political will

Political willingness is a key factor in explain­ing why policy-makers prefer diplomacy or not. In recent years, growing concerns over humanitarian catastrophes, collapsing states and gross human rights abuses have resulted in a number of policy reports, which focus on how diplomatic practices may be refined and conflicts prevented and resolved. Most of them share the concern that there has to exist a political willingness to achieve effective preventive diplomacy. For instance, the independent international commission on intervention and state sovereignty, which concluded its report in 2001 on the right of humanitarian intervention and respon­sibility to protect, stressed the necessity of international political will in order to implement their policy recommendations. However, as demonstrated in the case of Darfur, a humanitarian catastrophe can be widely recognized, and yet the interna­tional community lacks a political will to act.

According to Dean Pruitt (1997: 239-40), the motivation and cooperative behavior of political leaders are to a large extent determined by the goal of achieving mutual cooperation. Yet, optimism about the other parties' reciprocity is equally important and determines the extent to which this goal will affect behavior. Optimism about a jointly negotiated outcome is necessary since the danger of unilateral conciliatory efforts might be exploited by the opponent and viewed as weak or even treasonous by one's supporter. The turbulent and yet so astonishing transition of South Africa illustrates well the importance of combining diplomatic leadership and political willingness when pursuing conflict resolution. F.W. de Klerk shocked the world by announcing the release of Nelson Mandela and his intention to negotiate in good faith the end of apartheid. Mandela responded with courage by calling for national reconciliation and embracing white leaders with no sign of bitterness (Sisk, 2001: 107).