was necessary to find a way of explaining how a true popular Marxist
revolution could, nevertheless, be deemed to have occurred. With the fall of
communist governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and the
acceptance of pluralism, any remaining supporters of the concept have been
marginalized. Communist parties in most other countries have long had to
drop the idea in order to compete in democratic elections.
Diplomacy
The idea of ‘diplomacy’ is used in a variety of rather vague ways in political
language, all deriving from the techniques and styles developed by European
foreign affairs representatives during the 18th century, though, of course,
diplomacy as behaviour and political strategy is as old as politics. Technically
the diplomatic corps consists of all the men and women professionally engaged
in representing the interests of their countries abroad. This activity varies from
the gathering of information and evaluation of the politics of the host country,
via the direct protection of the legal interests of any fellow nationals who are in
trouble in that country (the consular function) to international negotiations
and the delivery of special messages to the host government. Diplomacy has
come to mean something slightly apart from this, however. It has come to
describe an entire method of resolving international conflicts which, though
very often referred to in the media, is rather hard precisely to define. At a
simple level diplomacy covers anything short of military action, and indeed it is
often alleged that ‘diplomacy’ has failed when countries do engage in outright
fighting. The broadness of the concept is demonstrated by some of the ways in
which subcategories of diplomacy have had to be invented to describe more
precisely what goes on when diplomacy is resorted to. Thus one reads of
‘personal diplomacy’, when a particular national leader tries to sort out an
international problem on the basis of their own personal relations with, and
understanding of, other national leaders. A subcategory even of this is the
notion of ‘shuttle’ diplomacy, engaged in almost exclusively by the USA when
an influential or important foreign affairs spokesman will travel backwards and
forwards between hostile states trying to find grounds for compromise between
opponents on the basis of building up a personal connection and understanding
with both sides.
Alternatively one reads of ‘diplomatic channels’, for the delivery of ideas or
the collection of information, which essentially means using the diplomatic
corps for its proper function, and indeed actually stands in contrast to the
amateurishness involved in ‘personal’diplomacy. In as much as there is a further
real content to the notion of ‘diplomacy’per seit comes from the idea that
diplomats are professional experts in negotiation and information transmission
in the international arena. Here it is felt that particular techniques and training
Diplomacy