Twentieth-Century Diplomacy: A Case Study of British Practice 1963–1976 (review)

The practice of diplomacy is usually studied in the context of the issues with which it happens to be dealing. John Young takes a different approach. “The means by which diplomacy is executed,” he writes, “are not some piece of background scenery framing the main event, but an integral part of the way that event unfolds” (p. 228). This may sound like a truism—scarcely any book on international history neglects the diplomacy that shaped or failed to shape a particular outcome—but he has a valuable contribution to make in looking more closely at the principles and machinery of diplomacy and how they have changed in the modern world (or not changed, as he shows with apt quotations from Confucius, Shakespeare, Richelieu, and others).

Young has chosen as a case study one short period in the history of one country—Britain from 1963 to 1976—a time of rapid adjustment when Britain was moving from lingering imperial commitments to membership of the European Community. The book is organized thematically around sections on, for instance, the diplomatic machine, resident ambassadors, bilateral summits, multilateral diplomacy, and the criteria for recognizing or ceasing to recognize a particular regime. This makes for some repetitive chronology, and Young often skates superficially over events, but this is difficult to avoid in a study that aims to examine the methodology of diplomacy rather than the historical events in which it played a part.

The British foreign service in the days covered by Young’s study was an elite entity recruited mostly from the brightest graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. Many of these ranked the foreign service at the top of their list of aspirations until the financial rewards of banking began to compete. Abroad they generally enjoyed high esteem. In a remarkable episode, not mentioned by Young, the U.S. national security adviser Henry Kissinger even secretly engaged a senior British diplomat, Sir Thomas Brimelow, to draft the U.S.-Soviet Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War without the knowledge of the U.S. State Department. Yet British diplomats never escaped criticism at home: “I’ve got nothing against men wearing striped pants and black jackets if they want to. . . . It’s the wearing of striped pants in the soul I object to, and having a homburg hat where your heart ought to be” (p. 24). That was the vivid, if anatomically puzzling, verdict of George Brown, a controversial Labour foreign secretary from 1966 to 1968.

More serious threats to traditional diplomacy came from financial stringency, reviews by outside bodies, the growing influence of political advisors, easier air travel by political leaders, and a rapid increase in the number of independent states and international organizations. Young examines summit meetings of all kinds, their successes, failures, perils, and limitations. He argues that “special envoys, bilateral summits and multilateral conferences could all grow in number and still leave plenty of room for more traditional forms of diplomatic contact to flourish. They were not competitors but mutual winners in the expansion of diplomatic activity” (p. 227). Some marginalized ambassadors disagreed, but it is clearly right to emphasise the continuing importance of the basic skills and machinery of diplomacy.

Young investigates how this machinery evolved in structure and function in Britain during the period under review, with the gradual and sometimes painful merger of the Colonial Office, the Commonwealth Relations Office and the Foreign Office into today’s single Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). He also deals well with the three main reports that were intended to modernize the diplomatic service: Plowden in 1964, Duncan in 1969, and Berrill in 1977. The last of these, which put forward nearly 300 recommendations, was so radical that it was largely ignored, having offended many people with, among many other things, the unfortunate remark that too much work was being done “to an unjustifiably high standard” (p. 51).

Of continuing interest is the section on the principles of diplomatic recognition, an issue on...