Diplomacy and the Study of International Relations/Part 1/Chapter 1

by D. P. Heatley

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DIPLOMACY AND THE CONDUCT OF FOREIGN POLICY

 

I

 

Mr. Freeman, who had the keen interest of a politician and partisan in questions of foreign policy in his own day, as well as the profound knowledge of the historian, once described an experience he had as a magistrate in petty sessions.^[1] He had to examine two witnesses, each of whom was required to give an account of a certain conversation. One of them presented his view of what passed in the words, ‘They all began to talk politics, putting questions to me that I could not answer’. The other witness, describing the same conversation, said, ‘They began to talk about the rise of the world, and Adam and Eve’. Mr. Freeman remarked that the definition of politics implied in the second of these statements had often come before his mind since the words were spoken. He thought that the man who looked upon a discussion about ‘the rise of the world, and Adam and Eve’ as coming under the head ‘politics’ showed an acute sense of what politics really are. ‘A conversation about the rise of the world would be very apt to pass into theological discussion, and theological discussion is very apt to pass into more strictly political discussion. . . . Every political question is a question of our duty as a nation; it is, therefore, a moral question.’ Mr. Freeman thought he took this view of politics himself during the two years of storm and stress in the history of the Eastern Question from 1876 to 1878, when, like many others, he was charged with making ‘political capital’ (as it was termed) out of the evil deeds of the Turks and the sufferings of Christians. In a speech he made in 1876 he blamed both Palmerston and Russell; and no Liberal, he said, objected to his censure. But, the moment he began to blame Lord Derby, a Tory shouted, ‘No politics’. Worst of all, Mr. Freeman had to submit to being called by the enemy ‘philanthropist’, whereas he was only ‘talking politics’ and putting questions they could not answer.^[2]

It was about the same time that another historian—Professor Seeley—who held, like Mr. Freeman, that history is the training-ground for both citizenship and statesmanship, was addressing a working-men's club in London; and in the discussion that followed his lecture a remark was made which he often recalled, especially when he tried to measure the competence of the great mass of men for judging of large national issues. ‘I don't know how you feel,’ said a working-man, turning to the gathering of working-men, ‘and I don't know how it is, but whenever I hear the Russians mentioned, I feel the blood tingling all over me.’ The lecturer was alarmed at this way of handling the question before the meeting. Many, however, in the audience seemed to be surprised at the impression which was made upon him by the assumption of this speaker, that a mere instinctive feeling might quite fairly be taken as a guide to the proper steps for determining policy towards an important issue in international affairs.^[3] Seeley's lecture was given about ten years after Robert Lowe had uttered his deduction from the passing of the Second Reform Bill—that now we ‘must educate our masters’. Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff^[4] very dutifully and trustingly experimented with that task. And certainly it is wiser to prevent somnambulism in politics by salutary ministration than to try to cure it by sudden shock. But we shall cure where we have not been able to prevent, only if we resolutely face the facts. The most sternly effective encounter for the somnambulist of the day-time in politics—and he is ever with us—would, we may be sure, be a meeting with Machiavelli. But we are anticipating.

The chief and never-ending task of the political historian is the study and estimate of policy and of the instruments for the conduct of policy the study and estimate of statesmanship. By ‘policy’ we mean a reasoned line of action taken in relation to conditions as present, and as seen and understood, with a view to improving them. It is the application of mind and means to conditions for an object, immediate or distant, or both. Both the immediate means and the immediate object may at times seem to conflict with a larger and ultimate object, and yet be sound and necessary: we do not appraise by the same standard the Tudor body politic and modern parliamentarianism. We must never separate the study of policy whether it be the statesman's study of policy in prospect, or the historian's in retrospect from the appreciation of the instruments on the understanding and the use of which success depends; and we must test the character of the instruments by the work they have to do. A constitution, and the whole equipment, personal and impersonal, of government, must be judged not in themselves alone—for in themselves they have no meaning—but according to the people whose constitution and equipment they are, and according to the problems in politics that have to be grappled with at the time, and by the measure of suitability of the constitution and its organs for dealing with these problems successfully. We can never evade circumstance—that unspiritual god—in politics. Intellectually possible, no doubt, it is, and an exercise of high intellect it can become, to study politics, if politics it then be, apart from conditions in fact and circumstance: possible it is to construct a scheme of politics, or a system of thought on polity, that shall not be shaped and determined by realities and by what is practicable—to write at large of ‘the’ State without ever having clearly observed a State, and compared one State at work with others, both in their methods and in their achievements. There is a philosophy of politics that starts from an inspiration or an assumption, builds on principles, and leads up, it hopes, to Truth. Students of history and observers of politics, in their mundane view, do not aspire to that freedom of movement, nor, it may be, to the glory of the non-terrestrial vision, even while they do not interpret the real in history as the merely material, even while they allow for psychological and ethical factors in the life and politics of a people, and are not unmindful of the City of God of St. Augustine and of the De Monarchia of Dante, nor are scornful of the Utopias of politics. The politics with which they have to do start from conditions in time and place, with the tyranny, it may be, of circumstance, build on policy, and lead, it is hoped, to success. That success may approximate to intellectual certitude and philosophic truth where a wise policy has touched with tolerance and skill problems of the mind and conscience the sphere of liberty for mind and conscience. But more often the success of policy is seen merely in an improvement of the material conditions of life, in greater and better-distributed wealth, in a higher social well-being, and in the welding of the parts of a society into something like a harmonious community—the integrity of the body politic. Twice happy the statesman who not only has a high conception of end in his politics, but can point to great practical achievement in striving to attain the goal; and thrice happy that statesman who, in thus achieving, has not made any unworthy sacrifice of right in the means he has taken for the ends he has had before him.

The relation of means to end is a consideration paramount in the study of history and politics. In the study of history we must always be dispassionate, and in estimate severely just. The Muse is false to her calling if she becomes generous. To be just in estimate is what we are all concerned with in study and writing and teaching: not otherwise can lessons be drawn from the past for the present. But we should be unjust generous or too severe if we did not know the conditions the situation, we do well to call it with which policy, or the men of action, had to deal; and if, knowing the situation, we did not allow for it equitably in the estimate that we form. We must not equate principles or ideal and conditions or fact.^[5] Therefore, we cannot accept the standpoint of that school of history, or of moral philosophers busying themselves with the records and deeds and men of the past—a school of which Lord Acton was a conspicuous example in our own generation—that would lay down an absolute and binding canon in the sphere of right and wrong, and require that no plea of over-mastering and tyrannous conditions can condone deviation from the moral law in the use of means by the politician for the gaining of an end desirable in the interest of the State the living and developing body politic. Such a rule would, assuredly, be a very simple and very clear rule to apply. We need not go, in its stead, to the opposite extreme. We need not say that everything is relative: that that is the only doctrine and rule that is absolute. But the simple, clear, rigid rule of moral estimate is one which even those who almost make of politics a ‘religion may righteously refuse to accept. Its enforcement would result in the doing of gross injustice to the men whose part it has been sternly to achieve by grasping that ‘stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life’, and not merely to think and hope and have visions. But, inasmuch as we repudiate the absolute canon of the moralist in historical estimate, for judgement that shall be just, we have the more need to be scrupulous in our search for historical conditions, in the measure of allowance we make for them, in our scrutiny both of the end that is sought and of the means that are used.

These considerations bear with especial force upon questions of foreign and international policy, owing to the complexity of the conditions that are essentially involved. An ambassador—we have all heard from Sir Henry Wotton and his interpreter, Izaak Walton is ‘an honest man who is sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’.^[6] Well: much depends upon conditions, and upon one’s country upon the ‘salutary prejudice’ called one’s country (it is of good omen, with Priam, to fight for her), upon what she has been, and is, and stands for, and has to stand against. ‘Remember in all that you do that you are in an enemy country’, a recent German Ambassador is said to have remarked in words of advice to a junior who was proceeding to London: it would not be necessary to add, ‘But so conduct yourself as though you are a friend’. Assuredly we may all agree that no representative of his country abroad should drink of the potion described in poetic fiction that made men forget their country; and, so, it is a wise recommendation that members of the diplomatic service should fortify themselves against such insinuating influence by periodic visits to the land they represent.^[7]

There is much in the point of view in estimates of the diplomatic service. Some there have been, and there may still be some, who think of the head of a legation as the giver of very good dinners; and in the evidence forthcoming before the Select Committee, appointed by the House of Commons, in 1861, to inquire into the constitution and efficiency of the diplomatic service of this country, it was declared that the giving of good dinners is a quite necessary and very valuable part of the function of a diplomatist: ‘a good dinner goes a great way in diplomacy’^[8] was the celebrated opinion twice^[9] sworn to by Sir Hamilton Seymour, who had over forty years’ experience of diplomacy. The Head of the Foreign Office, again, may sometimes think of a diplomatist as one who is specially solicitous for his health. ‘You will be struck’, said Palmerston to a successor at the Foreign Office, in 1852, ‘with a very curious circumstance, that no climate agrees with an English diplomatist excepting that of Paris, Florence, or Naples’.^[10] The schoolmaster, yet again, looking to the interest of his pupil as a hopeful attaché would emphasize the importance of handwriting—’a good bold hand with distinctly formed letters’,^[11] and of having a command of excellent French: in recent years German was added as a second obligatory language for candidates in this country. The schoolmaster would have the support of Sovereigns and Ambassadors.

The ‘Foreign Office hand’ in England was a legacy of Canning and Palmerston. Canning laid down the rule that not more than ten lines should be put into one page of foolscap. Palmerston advised Lord Malmesbury, when he assumed the charge of the Foreign Office, to insist on all official correspondence being written in a plain hand and with proper intervals between the lines; and he named some Ministers ‘whose writing was quite illegible’.^[12]

Neither French nor any other language now holds the place of privilege from which French had supplanted Latin before the middle of the eighteenth century as the usual, though not universal, language of treaties and of diplomatic instruments for European States.^[13] But a ready command of French, to be spoken with that ‘easy elegance’ which a polite ambassador ascribed to the speech of our Queen Elizabeth in Latin,^[14] has long been and still is a desirable part of the equipment of both the junior and the senior members of the diplomatic service. Hamilton Seymour declared in 1861 that ‘by far the most important point for those who enter the profession, is that of learning French’: he agreed that the society of ladies was the society in which it could be most quickly learnt for conversational purposes.^[15] He had seen men even in the higher spheres of diplomacy placed in ridiculous situations, and openly laughed at, as a consequence of their want of familiarity with the French language. ‘Would you’, the Earl of Clarendon was asked in 1861, ‘attach supreme importance to a complete familiarity with the French language?’—‘The greatest importance; I consider that a sine qua non.’ ‘Does not the dignity, and almost the respectability, of a foreign minister a great deal depend upon his being able to communicate with his colleagues, and society, in the French language, and in a manner that should not excite either remark or ridicule?’—‘Clearly so; but I also think that he should speak the language of the Court to which he is accredited.’^[16]

According to the scheme of examination for unpaid attachéships, instituted in December 1855 when Lord Clarendon was at the head of the Foreign Office and approved by Lord John Russell in 1859, but no longer in force, History was of the kind, candidates themselves said, that they could ‘get up’ in three months, and get rid of in a week.^[17] And no wonder: ‘for the convenience of candidates’ it had been settled that, ‘as regards modern history generally’, they were to be examined in ‘so much of Heeren’s Historical Manual of the Political System of Europe and its Colonies^[18] as treats of history since 1789’, and in the fourth volume of Russell’s Modern Europe; and, as regards any particular country to which they might be about to proceed, they were to be examined in ‘so much of McCulloch’s Geographical Dictionary as relates to that country’. But, at least, it was a background to the international system and the public international law of the candidates’ own day.^[19] For that it would not be quite useless.

1. Thompson, Public Opinion and Lord Beaconsfield (1886), ii. 39-40, quoting from Mr. Freeman's letter, ‘No Politics’, in the Daily News, September 28, 1876.
2. ‘By those who were opposed to Freeman's views on this question, he was denounced as “an itinerant demagogue”, “an agitator”, “an hysterical screamer”, “a philanthropic enthusiast”, “a sentimental, unpractical politician”, and the like. . . . He replied to the charge of being a sentimental and unpractical politician by retorting it upon his adversaries’ (see ‘Sentimental and Practical Politics’, Princeton Review, March 1879). ‘The really unpractical men were those who took no account of national sentiment, which was one of the strongest factors in national life. In the wise words of Guizot, “the instinct of nations sees further than the negotiations of diplomatists”. {{… It will be noticed that in this, as in all other political controversies, Freeman brought every question to the touchstone of morals. He did not ask in the first instance whether any proposed course of action was likely to promote British interests and power, but whether it was honourable, straightforward, and just.’ Stephens, [[Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman (1895), ii. 119-120, 121. On December 9, 1876, Freeman spoke with Gladstone and others at St. James's Hall, London, in protest against Turkish oppression and against Britain interfering with the work of emancipation, whether that of Russia or of any other Power. Dealing with the argument that the interests of this country, and in particular her dominion in India, would be imperilled, if a Russian ship of war should enter the Mediterranean, he said, ‘Well, if it be so, let duty come first and interest second, and perish the interests of England, perish our dominion in India, rather than that we should strike one blow or speak one word on behalf of the wrong against the right.’ Freeman was at pains to refute the assertion that he had said ‘Perish India’. See Stephens, op. cit., ii. 113, and Thompson, op. cit., i. 361, note, ii. 129-36, especially 133, 135.
3. Seeley, Macmillan's Magazine, September 1880.
4. As Member of Parliament for the Elgin Burghs, 1857–81. In 1860 he gave the first in a long succession of annual speeches to his constituents, intended to survey the field of current politics, and especially that of international affairs. See his Elgin Speeches (1871). Everything may be left in part to the hazards of the unforeseen everything except the fate of nations. That, in the language of Emilio Castelar (Grant Duff, Miscellanies, Political and Literary (1878), 214–87), may be taken as the foundation and motive of the effort of the Member for the Elgin Burghs. ‘I think there is no man in Scotland who has tried more carefully to keep his constituents acquainted with what he thought upon all great matters, by submitting his thoughts to them at these annual gatherings.’—Miscellanies, 314. He deplored the evil, that ‘few English politicians find it worth their while to make a specialty of the study of foreign questions.’— ‘Foreign Policy’ in Practical Politics (1881), 81. ‘Much of the good, however, that might result from the increased knowledge of statesmen about foreign affairs will be lost, if they do not take more pains to spread their own knowledge and ideas amongst their countrymen. If they do not do so, their hands may be forced at any moment, and they may be driven into courses which will be equally disagreeable to sane Liberals and sane Conservatives, by some sudden enthusiasm, which would never have taken hold on the popular mind if men in the front rank of politics had been wise in time, and had kept their countrymen a little more au courant of their thoughts.’—Ibid. 87. Further, ‘in dealing with a democracy you must not only be right, but seem right.’—Ibid. 79.
5. ‘It is not by attending to the dry, strict, abstract principles of a point, that a just conclusion is to be arrived at in political subjects. They are not to be determined by mathematical accuracy. Wisdom is to be gained in politics, not by any one rigid principle, but by examining a number of incidents; by looking attentively at causes, and reflecting on the effects they have produced; by comparing a number of events together, and by taking, as it were, an average of human affairs.’—Pitt, April 7, 1794, Speeches (1806), ii. 190.
6. The ‘hinge upon which the conceit was to turn’ is found in the use of the word ‘lieger’ or ‘lieger ambassador’, one who was appointed to remain or ‘lie’ at a foreign court, a resident ambassador, as distinct from the temporary ambassador who was sent on a special and limited mission, the latter only being at first and for a long time permitted. Wotton’s ‘pleasant definition’—a ‘merriment’ he termed it to James I in self-defence—was given in Latin, and in Latin that does not furnish the hinge of the conceit. Walton (‘The Life of Sir Henry Wotton ‘, in his Lives, ed. 1825, 122–4) gives the following account: ‘At his first going Ambassador into Italy, as he passed through Germany, he stayed some days at Augusta [Augsburg]; where, having been in his former travels well known by many of the best note for learning and ingeniousness,—those that are esteemed the virtuosi of that nation,—with whom he passing an evening in merriments, was requested by Christopher Flecamore to write some sentence in his Albo;—a book of white paper, which for that purpose many of the German gentry usually carry about them: and Sir Henry Wotton consenting to the motion, took an occasion, from some accidental discourse of the present company, to write a pleasant definition of an Ambassador in these very words:
   “Legatus est vir bonus, peregrè missus ad mentiendum Reipublicae causâ”
   which Sir Henry Wotton could have been content should have been thus Englished:
   “An ambassador is an honest man, sent to lie abroad for the good of his country”.
   But the word for lie—being the hinge upon which the conceit was to turn—was not so expressed in Latin, as would admit—in the hands of an enemy especially—so fair a construction as Sir Henry thought in English.’ Later in the ‘Life’ (ibid. 138–9), Walton writes that ‘a friend of Sir Henry Wotton’s being designed for the employment of an Ambassador, came to Eton’ (of which Wotton was Provost) ‘and requested from him some experimental rules for his prudent and safe carriage in his negociations; to whom he smilingly gave this for an infallible aphorism: That to be in safety himself, and serviceable to his country, he should always, and upon all occasions, speak the truth,—it seems a State paradox—for, says Sir Henry Wotton, you shall never be believed; and by this means your truth will secure yourself, if you shall ever be called to any account; and it will also put your adversaries—who will still hunt counter—to a loss in all their disquisitions and undertakings.’
7. See the very instructive and valuable Report from the Select Committee on Diplomatic Service (with Proceedings, Minutes of Evidence), 1861: 197 (Sir G. H. Seymour: ‘A man should not be left in a foreign country long enough to become a German or a Spaniard, but . . . should fortify himself every now and then by coming to England’); 458 (Sir T. Wyse, writing from Athens to Lord John Russell: ‘British ministers abroad should be encouraged from time to time to return to their own country with the view of keeping up to the level of political knowledge of which England is the centre, and bracing themselves anew, in the atmosphere of our free institutions and existence, to that English spirit and bearing which is the best guarantee for legitimate success with other nations, and which I trust will always be the distinction of English diplomacy in every part of the world.’ Similarly, Grant Duff, who was a member of the Committee which reported in 1861, writing on ‘Foreign Policy’ in Practical Politics (1881), 85–6: ‘Diplomatists should not be quite so much “up in a balloon” as they often are . . . it is a real misfortune that they are not oftener enabled . . . to come into contact with our home political life. They greatly need se retremper from time to time in its boisterous but health-bestowing currents; there should be, if possible, more frequent exchanges from parliamentary to diplomatic, and from diplomatic to parliamentary activity. That a man should be at once a member of the House of Commons and a representative of his Sovereign abroad, as was the case, for example, with Philip Stanhope, was no doubt an anomaly, but it was an anomaly which had its advantages.’ (See Chesterfield’s Letters.}
8. Report, supra, 207. Cf., on fêtes and entertainments, 123, 128, 166 (They ‘promote the efficiency of his political relations’—Stratford de Redcliffe), 232 (‘There can be no doubt that the more a man entertains the better his position becomes’—Lord Cowley).
9. In 1850 as well as in 1861.
10. Malmesbury, Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, under date March 11, 1852.
11. ‘Regulations for the Examination of Unpaid Attachés, before the Civil Service Commissioners, as approved by Lord J. Russell, August 1859.’ Report, supra, 477.
12. Memoirs, as above: ‘On a very badly written despatch he [Palmerston] wrote: “Tell Mr. W., in a ‘Separate’, that the person who copies out his despatches should form his letters by connecting his slanting down strokes by visible lines at top or bottom according to the letters which he intends his parallel lines to represent.—P. 18/4/51.” On another badly written despatch from one of H. M.’s consuls he wrote: “A Despatch must contain much valuable matter to reward one for deciphering such handwriting as this—which can only be compared to Iron Railings leaning out of the perpendicular.—P. 23/12/57.” Of another despatch he wrote: “Reading Mr. R.’s handwriting is like running Penknives into one’s Eyes. P. 21/4/64.”—Sir Edward Hertslet, Recollections of the Old Foreign Office (1901), 78–9.
13. See Satow, Diplomatic Practice (2 vols. 1917), i. 58–61, and Martens, Guide diplomatique, i. 251–4, ed. 1838; ii. 6–9, ed. 1851.
14. Of Elizabeth’s speech to an Ambassador from Sigismund III, King of Poland, in 1597, Robert Cecil wrote to the Earl of Essex: ‘I sweare by the living God, that her Ma^tie made one of the best aunswers ex tempore, in Latin, that ever I heard, being much mooved to be so challenged in publick. The wordes of her beginning were these: “Expectavi Legationem, mihi vero Querelam adduxisti”’—Ellis, Original Letters (1824), iii. 44. ‘It was upon this occasion, to use the words of Speed, that the Queen, lion-like rising, daunted the malapert Orator’—rather a Herald than an Ambassador, she described him in her speech—‘no less with her stately port and majestical departure, than with the tartness of her princely checks: and turning to the Traine of her Attendants, thus said: “God’s death, my Lords” (for that was her oath ever in anger) “I have been enforced this day to secure up my old Latin that hath lain long in rusting.”’—Ibid. iii. 41.
15. Report, 201, 205; cf. 212, 238. The Regulations of 1859 required that all candidates for promotion from unpaid to paid attachéships should be able to speak and write the languages of the several countries in which they had resided since their first appointment as unpaid attachés. Candidates who had resided only in France or the United States were required to show proficiency in one other language besides French.
16. Report, 103. In Germany the substitution of German for French, in the conduct of her diplomacy, was begun under Bismarck’s predecessor, Bernstorff, who retired, at a ministerial crisis, from the office of Foreign Minister of Prussia in October 1862. Before that time most of the secretaries in the Foreign Office had belonged to the French colony; the register of dispatches was kept in French; the Ambassadors usually reported in French. Bismarck extended the use of German, making its use the rule, in the diplomatic correspondence of Germany. He claimed even to have ‘introduced’ German—‘only, however, with Cabinets whose language is understood in our own Foreign Office. England, Italy, also Spain—even Spanish can be read in case of need. Not with Russia, as I am the only one’ (January 17, 1871) ‘in the Foreign Office who understands Russian. Also not with Holland, Denmark, and Sweden—people do not learn those languages as a rule. They write in French and we reply in the same language.’—Busch, Bismarck (1898), i. 213, 477. It was one of Bismarck’s foibles to distrust an Englishman who speaks French with a correct accent. That advice had been given to him, and he had generally found it true. But, he added, ‘I must make an exception in favour of Odo Russell’.—Ibid. i. 420.
17. ‘I have heard those who have been crammed use this expression: That they were three months learning history, and a week in forgetting it again.’—Lord Malmesbury, Report, 184.
18. A translation of Heeren’s work from the fifth German edition (1830) had been made in 1834 (Oxford: Talboys). The work was first published in 1809. It was translated into several languages, including Swedish and Polish, before appearing in English.
19. Candidates for promotion to paid attachéships were required to ‘draw up a report on the general commercial and political relations of the several countries in which they may have resided; on the internal polity, and the administration and social institutions of such countries, and on the character of their people’, without reference to ‘current political affairs’. Further, candidates were required to show that they possessed ‘such a knowledge of international law as can be acquired from Wheaton’s Elements of International Law and Wheaton’s History of International Law’: no mean requirement, and no mean accession of strength to the candidates’ ‘History’.