Keynote paper presented at the International Workshop Alternative Cultures of Diplomacy, Diplomatic

Cultures Research Network, An AHRC-funded Research Network, lead by Fiona McConnell & Jason
Dittmer, UNPO/The Hague, Netherlands, November 2013.

(Para)Diplomatic Cultures: Old and New

Noé Cornago

The notion of diplomatic culture is generally presented as something belonging

exclusively to the semantic field of international relations, completely strange to the

complexities of political life within the contours of specific states. In light of this, and

against all empirical evidence, diplomatic studies tend to reproduce the fiction of the

existence of a perfect and timeless political community – the state – as the foundational

assumption that gives sense to the whole diplomatic system. The interplay between

domestic complexity and diplomacy is occasionally examined but only to the extent that

pluralism could acquire a critical manifestation in the form of intractable inter-

communal or ethnic conflict or political violence, driving to secessionism, partition,

‘balkanization’, ethnic cleansing, and ultimately war (e.g. Campbell 1998). Otherwise,

implications for diplomatic representation of domestic pluralism remain ignored. That

inclination is even more salient amongst those studies focused on the problems

surrounding diplomatic recognition of so-called ‘de facto’ states (Kingston and Spears

2004, Caspersen 2012). After all, visibility given to these cases is not the result of some

intrinsic qualities of the affected territories. Quite the opposite, they only receive

diplomatic attention to the extent that they serve as the ultimate pretext for the

consequent deployment of a variety of ‘rituals of mediation’ by external powers with

conflicting interests (cfr. Debrix and Weber 2003).

1
Bearing these reflections in mind, this chapter aims to explore the possible implications

of domestic pluralism and territorial politics – understood as the challenges posed by the

distribution of power between territorial communities and governments within a given

state – for a better understanding of the past, present and possible futures of diplomacy.

More specifically, it will contend that the proliferation of ‘paradiplomatic’ interventions

that we presently observe all over the world, in the hands of subnational governments,

indigenous nations and other domestic constituencies, can be largely understood as the

reverberation of old forms of political pluralism, whose re-emergence nowadays, far

from being anachronic, tellingly shows some important functional adjustments and

symbolic struggles to which the global diplomatic system has to respond in order to

secure its own sustainability. The argument will be deployed in four stages. First, to

justify the specificity of my approach, some brief conceptual clarifications on the notion

of paradiplomacy will be made. Second, to show how agonistic accommodation of

political and territorial pluralism within the political community was crucial in the

formative process of diplomacy and remains crucial today, some recent contributions

from diplomatic history will be discussed. Third, different theoretical approaches to

‘diplomatic culture’ will be examined in view of these arguments with the purpose of

ascertaining their ability to grasp the mutual codetermination between transformations

of diplomacy and the changing forms of domestic political order. Finally, as a way of

concluding, I will advocate for a new understanding of diplomatic culture better

equipped to address the implications for diplomacy of political pluralism.1

2
An elusive concept

Despite various attempts to clarify its content (e.g. Duchacek 1990, Lecours 2002;

Paquin 2004, Kuznetsov 2014), ‘paradiplomacy’ remains an elusive concept. Its validity

has been frequently contested, and in spite of its wide diffusion in recent decades it

remains ‘unstable and undecided’, thus constituting not a ‘core’ but a ‘sore’ political

concept in the sense advanced by Terence Ball (1999). In other words, it is a concept

more salient for the cognitive dissonances and occasional contestation it produces

amongst scholars and practitioners than for its intrinsic value. In 1961 diplomatic

historian Rohan Butler defined ‘paradiplomacy’ as the exercise of ‘personal and parallel

diplomacy complementing or competing with the regular foreign policy of the

government’ (1961: 13). Although excluding any form of governmental agency, this

rather parsimonious definition nonetheless entails the connotations that make

‘paradiplomacy’ a controversial concept today. The consideration of paradiplomacy as a

non-governmental alternative form of mediation, now significantly fostered by new

media technologies, is also present in Der Derian’s occasional use of the word (1987:

202-203). In contrast with these precedents, Duchacek and Soldatos (1990) and others

later (cfr. Aldecoa and Keating 1999, Paquin 2004, Kuznetsov 2014), apply the notion

to diverse forms of political, economic and cultural intervention in the international

realm of non-central governments. These valuable policy approaches to

‘paradiplomacy’ nonetheless fail to address what constitutes surely its most salient

feature, namely, its ambivalence. In other words, the way in which both in practice and

discursively ‘paradiplomacy’ suggests a desire to emulate official diplomacy whilst

simultaneously affirming a distinctive will of political autonomy. More attentive to the

complexities of diplomacy, McConnell, Moreau and Dittmer (2012: 812) convincingly

3
affirm that by ‘collapsing conventional notions of the official and proper conduits of

statecraft, these cases disrupt diplomatic performances of the state’, but also that rather

‘than calling for a dismantling of the state’ this appropriation paradoxically reinforces it.

More importantly – they insightfully assert – although ‘diplomatic’ and

‘paradiplomatic’ interventions seem to take the form of seemingly ‘incommensurable

worlds’, they are nevertheless folded in on, brushing up alongside and drawing

representational power from one another…Together they form an assemblage of

‘diplomacy’ that must be considered in its totality (McConnell, Moreau and Dittmer

2012: 812).

Conceptual controversies surrounding the notion of ‘paradiplomacy’ reveal nonetheless

a tension between those that consider the centralization of diplomacy as optimal –either

in theoretical or practical terms (e.g. Barston 2006, Kleiner 2010, Berridge 2011)-, and

those who conversely question it (Riordan 2006, Pigman 2010, Bjola and Kornprobst

2012) This would explain the ultimate rationale behind its acceptance (e.g. Aldecoa and

Keating 1999, Paquin 2004, Kuznetsov 2014), as well as the motivation either for its

refusal or replacement by other conceptual alternatives. The latter include ‘constituent

diplomacy’, suggested by Kincaid (2002), and ‘multilayered diplomacy’ advocated by

Hocking (1993), both of which tend to emphasize the consensual and inclusive

dimensions of such diplomacy over its possible contentious aspects.

However, as Constantinou and Der Derian (2010: 12) have pointed out, in the end

‘paradiplomacy’ remains ‘conceptually unsatisfactory’ because it leaves diplomacy as a

simply an ‘inter-state affair’. For that reason it is worth examining the conditions under

which so-called ‘paradiplomacy’ and ‘diplomacy’ may converge, not only in practice,

as they already do, but also discursively. Such an endeavour requires a greater attention

4
to the mutual co-determination in history between changing forms of diplomacy and the

evolving configuration of political order within states than prevailing approaches to

both diplomacy and paradiplomacy tend to cultivate. After all, careful consideration of

political pluralism in diplomatic history reveals that those multiple intrusions in the

diplomatic realm that we label today as ‘paradiplomatic’ are anything but new.

(Para)diplomatic history

This section shows that the contention that official embassies are not always

representative of the political community they are expected or intended to represent, and

the consequent proliferation of alternative or parallel modes of representation, are

enduring features of diplomacy from its foundational moments in antiquity to its current

transformations in late modernity. This is something, however, that has remained

forgotten for a long time. In his archaeology of Mediterranean diplomacy, Manuel

Duran (2013) reminds us that the first available written text in the history of western

diplomacy, namely Demosthenes’ De Falsa Legatione (see MacDowell 2000) deals

more with paradiplomacy – parapresbeia in its original Greek form – than with

diplomacy itself. The text concentrates on the mutual accusations of Demosthenes and

Aeschines about how they respectively performed/betrayed their role as members of the

Athenian delegation sent to Macedon to negotiate peace in 346 BC. Interestingly,

careful examination of another outstanding document of ancient diplomatic history

leads T.C. Brennan to similar conclusions with regard to the practice of Roman

diplomacy almost fourteen centuries later:

Constantine’s Excerpta De Legationibus quite vividly emphasizes how all-

pervasive were the agonistic attributes of conducting diplomacy, whether the

5
 framework was provided by Greek-speaking polities, the Roman Senate, or

Roman officials in the field…. no factor increased the general volatility of ancient

diplomacy and contributed to its high failure rate as much as the prevalence of

counter-embassies (Brennan 2009: 186)

The notion of ‘counter-embassies’ – or competing ambassadorial missions claiming to

represent the same political community – is certainly absent from the conventional

grammars of contemporary diplomacy, but Brennan’s reflections on the ‘volatility’ and

‘high failure’ of diplomacy as the result of the ‘agonistic attribute of conducting

diplomacy’ (2009: 186) in the Byzantine era helps us to understand some recurrent

controversies in the history of diplomacy that remain observable nowadays. It can be

argued, for instance, that those old controversies find echo today in current disputes

over the legitimacy of successive ‘embassies’ and ‘counter-embassies’ that finally drove

Ukraine to the critical situation experienced in 2014. In that case Ukraine’s official

diplomatic representatives became increasingly alienated from their political

constituencies, rapidly losing domestic and international credibility, and were finally

replaced by other representatives, both at the state level and at the level of its diverse

constituencies. This not only has implications for the interventionist moves of different

foreign powers such as the Russian Federation, USA or the EU. It is also expressive of

the unstable and agonistic nature of the political community that these successive and

competing diplomatic delegations claim to represent, unexpectedly showing, in

addition, the hidden link between two fields, namely those of democratic and

diplomatic representation, which are frequently portrayed as separate domains of reality.

However, tracing back the continuity between old and new forms of paradiplomacy also

requires a more detailed account of the evolving contours of the relationship between

domestic pluralism and diplomatic order. In what follows I briefly examine how that

6
relationship evolved from early to classical modernity, in a context in which a new

centralization of power was taking form. The influential work of Mattingly (1973) was

crucial in shaping the idea that the humanistic value of diplomacy as a way of mediating

between diverse constituencies – which was characteristic of the Renaissance – was

later displaced by its strategic role as a new bureaucratic and formalized institution,

dedicated to intelligence gathering and knowledge management, and subordinated to the

operational need of a new territorially bounded statecraft. According to this perspective,

the advent of modern diplomacy was not only crucial for the shaping of the modern

state system, but also for the territorialisation of politics within states themselves. This

occurred through the consequent deployment of an ensemble of diplomatic,

administrative and military dispositifs and organized ignorance for the purposes of what

Foucault called governmentalité (2004). Although not without some merit (see

Macmillan 2010, Wieland 2011), this view is nevertheless increasingly contested

amongst historians, since the process of territorialisation referred above was neither

immediate nor straightforward. Quite the opposite, according to Von Thiessen:

The classical interpretation of diplomacy as one of the major engines of the state-

building process demands revision…State-building process was not as straight,

not as fast, not so much top-down process and by far not as effective as

historiography used to see it (2010: 152)

Consequently, against the influential narratives that portray Renaissance diplomacy as a

moment of humanistic pluralism (e.g. Mattingly 1973) definitively displaced by a new

diplomacy tailored to measure the rise of the nation-state (e.g. Anderson 1993), the new

stream in diplomatic history emphasizes continuity more than rupture in the passing

from pre-modern to early-modern diplomacy. This therefore provides a much wider

space for the survival of pluralism in diplomacy (Watkins 2008, Carrió-Invernizzi

7
2013). As for the relationship between domestic political order and the diplomatic

system, some new voices go even further in advocating for ‘dissolving artificial division

between exterior and interior politics’, and shifting from ‘viewing the foreign policy of

a nation as demarcated from the domestic policy’, towards a more ‘holistic view of the

closely connected nature of government’ (Adams and Cox 2008: 8).

In this vein, Christian Windler, one of the most active voices in this field, places a new

emphasis on the quotidian work of diplomatic and consular intermediaries, their

practices of communication and ‘their experiences of otherness’, rather than on

negotiation outcomes themselves. According to Windler, early modern diplomatic

contacts were characterized not by the principle of equality amongst states but by a

hierarchical order in which both Princes and the representatives of diverse allegiances –

cultural, merchant, religious or territorial – were inserted in a sort of ‘agonistic fashion’

which facilitated a mutual process of symbolic and pragmatic learning, and crystallized

in highly ritualized modes of diplomatic communication and protocol (Windler 2010:

254).

The notion of ‘composite monarchies’ formulated by Koenigsberger (1978) and later

developed by John H. Elliot (1992) convincingly describes the Ottoman and Spanish

Empires and other European monarchies as a cluster of political units all formally

subject to one monarch but differentiated in terms of their territorial jurisdiction,

political institutions and legal systems. Constitutional asymmetries between the

territories created both opportunities for coexistence and risks of rupture. This

composite solution, with its combination of vertical and horizontal arrangements, and

the overlapping of both territorial and non-territorial jurisdictions, aptly characterizes

the prevailing mode of political organization from the fifteenth to the nineteenth

centuries. The negotiated or quasi-diplomatic character of some of these arrangements,

8
such as that represented by the Union between Scotland and England in 1707, remain

recognizable today in what has been called a post-sovereign European political

landscape (Keating 2009).

The ‘composite monarchies’ model also contributed to the demolition of the myth of

Westphalia as the cornerstone of the modern notion of state sovereignty (Osiander 1994,

Teschke 2003). The Treaties of Munster and Osnabruck, which closed the era of the

wars of religion in Europe, did not create in 1648 a new state system based on the

mutual recognition of territorial sovereignty and equality of a concert of states, but

rather a system in which the universal ambitions of some monarchies were conciliated

with religious differences, constitutional asymmetries and territorial autonomy of

literally hundreds of small political units. For instance, constituent units of the German

Empire even won their autonomy in the conduction of diplomatic relations. Treaty-

making power – under the inter se et cum exteris fodera principle – was indeed granted

to them, as far as it were not oriented against the Emperor’s interest (Ochoa-Brun 2012:

149). According to Krischer (2013):

Early modern foreign relations were not only dominated by sovereign rulers

(usually referred to as Kings) and their ambassadors, but also and in fact

predominantly by actors whose political status was ambiguous and unclear …

17th and 18th century diplomacy saw diplomats from all sorts of princes: electors,

prince-bishops, even prince-abbesses, landgraves, dukes and also free imperial

cities. Among these actors, sovereigns and their ambassadors were the (Western-

European) exception, not the rule. Early modern diplomacy was a field of practice

very different from the state-centred, international system of the 19th and 20th

century (2013:2)

9
The diplomatic implications of the composite form of the Ottoman Empire have been

also recently re-examined through a similar prism (Kárman 2013). Diplomacy with

foreign independent powers such as France or England was for centuries compatible

with the diplomatic interventions of the tributary constituencies of the Ottoman Empire,

such as those deployed by the Republic of Ragusan or the Principalities of Transylvania

and Wallachia, who carefully cultivated either with ad hoc envoys or with permanent

residents their own diplomatic contacts with the suzerain Sultanate. These diplomatic

contacts decline at the end of the Seventeenth century but they show the ‘subtly refined

character of early modern political realities’ (Kárman 2013: 185).

Similar developments were also common for centuries in the Chinese tributary system

and survive the Opium War in 1839. The growing power and influence of Western

powers during the nineteenth century forced the Chinese empire to adopt radical

transformations in its diplomatic culture, but for half a century the dynasty tried to

maintain a dual system in which the traditional tributary diplomatic practices of

neighbouring countries such a Korea or Vietnam paralleled to China’s adaptation to the

patterns of Western diplomacy (Hexiu 2008). More importantly, Chinese resistance to

establish direct diplomatic contacts with non-tributary foreign powers explain the

important role that provincial governors and other local official played initially during

that period of intensification of China’s diplomatic contacts with Western powers.

Although the Qing dynasty tried to adapt itself to the new imperatives:

There was … no post of professional diplomatic official within the Qing

government. This was the inevitable consequence of the localized manner of

diplomacy as administered under Qing Dynasty traditional foreign policy. Non-

tributary foreign affairs were handled locally, either by regional governors or

10
 Imperial Commissioners that had been especially appointed by the emperor, at the

port of Guangzhou (Xiaomin and Chunfeng 2007: 417)

That complex (para)diplomatic network disappeared in 1912 when the late Qing

dynasty fell and China became a republic, and remained absent from 1949 to 1978

during the early stages of People’s Republic of China, but since then, in the context of

its cautious transition to capitalism Chinese authorities have significantly encourage a

new era international activism for the Chinese provinces ( Cheung and Tang 2001)

The connection between domestic political order and diplomacy acquired however a

new profile in the age of modern revolutions. The American and French revolutions,

and the subsequent reactions of European monarchies exemplified by the Congress of

Vienna in 1815, significantly, albeit not immediately, reduced that early modern

diplomatic pluralism. In his exploration of the genealogy of diplomacy, Der Derian

(1987) asserts that diplomacy only acquired its modern meaning at a critical juncture in

world history when the prevailing proto-diplomatic system was under serious attack. As

he aptly observes: ‘Diplomacy comes of age, both ontologically and etymologically

when it confronts the first major threat to its fledgling existence, the French Revolution’

(1987:107). In other words, it was only under the radical challenge of modern

revolution that old diplomacy realized its ultimate rationale, being forced to define both

its institutional recognizability and its formal content. In support of this vision it can be

argued that it was only after the revision and regulation of existing diplomatic practices

and institutions during the Congress of Vienna, in the light of the decisive impact of

both the American and French Revolutions throughout the world, that modern and

secularized diplomacy was born in 1815 (see Belissa and Ferragu 2007). Furthermore,

some authors contend that the Treaty of Versailles represented a similar counter-

revolutionary move a century later (e.g. Mayer 1967; Bisley 2004).

11
Whilst initial revolutionary attempts to transform diplomacy did not bring the radical

changes they announced, they did at least allow for reformulating the connection

between domestic political order and diplomatic systems in some unexpected ways

(Armstrong 1993). Stinchcombe (1994), for instance, argues that Haiti's diplomatic

isolation in the Americas after its revolution and independence in 1804 was due to its

problematic place, as an antislavery black republic, in the symbolic system of domestic

politics in the United States. Moreover, in spite of Haitian support for the independence

movements of many Latin American countries, the republic of former slaves was

excluded from the hemisphere's first regional meeting of independent nations held in

Panama in 1826, and was not recognized by the U.S. until 1862, after the start of the

Civil War. Not in vain, during the Civil War the eleven Southern states intensively

sought international support and diplomatic recognition for their cause from European

states. However European anti-slavery sentiments significantly complicated that task,

conversely facilitating the Union’s efforts to prevent European states from recognizing

the Confederacy as a legitimate nation and from getting involved in the Civil War

(Brauer 1977). These historical precedents remained highly relevant a century later.

Renee Romano offers a telling illustration of this in the course of her historical research

on the connection between the racial discrimination experienced in the early years of the

Cold War by African diplomats accredited in Washington D.C. and New York, and the

advancement of the cause of racial equality in the United States, which would later

crystallize in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She concludes:

Just as African diplomats arriving in Washington, D.C., quickly discovered that

they would have no diplomatic immunity from antiblack racism, so did the State

Department find that its focus on foreign policy could not be used as an excuse for

ignoring domestic affairs. (Romano 2000: 579)

12
However, the American Revolution had, of course, many other important implications

that remain observable today. One in particular deserves special attention in the context

of the present work. As the first modern constitution the U.S. settled an influential

standard for the distribution of powers in federal states in the domain of foreign affairs.

In common with many other federal systems, it soon became clear that the position that

acquired prevalence reserved that power for the federal government (cfr. Beaulieu 1892,

Donot 1912). In 1931, for instance, after a careful examination of federal systems

existing across the world at that time, Harold W. Stoke reduced the available options in

constitutional regulation of this problem to two models:

Generally speaking, two types of federations may be distinguished with reference

to the conduct of foreign relations--those which allow a degree of international

intercourse to members of the union, and those which deny all such intercourse.

The federations of the latter type are much more numerous than those of the

former. (1931: 46)

However the formalization of the most restrictive version represented by the U.S.

constitution was neither unambiguous nor particularly clear. Constitutional lawyer

Glenn S. McRoberts elegantly summarizes the final outcome in words that laity may

easily understand:

Generally speaking, the Framers of the Constitution created the federal

government to perform those functions which the states alone were incompetent

to perform. While defining those functions was the source of much debate, there

was general agreement that one such function was the conduct of foreign affairs.

Unfortunately, this sentiment did not find its way into the specific language of the

Constitution. (1989: 640-41)

13
In view of this, and as happens across the world, constitutional discussions on the role

of U.S. states in foreign affairs tend to adopt, in the voices of the custodians of

constitutional loyalty, restrictive interpretative grammars, under which ‘states are

precluded from usurping or unduly interfering with the federal government’s power to

conduct foreign affairs’ (McRoberts 1989: 643). The so-called Massachusetts’ Burma

Law case is very illustrative however of the scope and limits of these restrictive views.

In 1996 the legislature of Massachusetts enacted a law prohibiting state entities from

buying goods and services from companies doing business with Myanmar as a form of

boycott to that country because of severe human rights violations committed by its

government. The National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) filed suit against it arguing

that this law infringed upon the federal government's foreign affairs and foreign

commerce powers, and that it was already pre-empted by a federal act establishing

sanctions against that country. In 2000, the Supreme Court of the U.S. nullified the law,

reasoning that the Massachusetts’ Burma Law undermined U.S. Congress’ delegation of

effective discretion to the President to control and limit economic sanctions against

Burma solely to U.S. persons and new investment, as well as its mandate to the

President to proceed ‘diplomatically in developing a comprehensive, multilateral

strategy towards Burma’ (Crosby vs. NFTC 2000: III.3). Notwithstanding the formal

value of that court ruling for setting the limits for U.S. states’ interventions in the

international realm (Stumberg and Porterfield 2001), the fact remains that since then

they have been even more active in that field than ever before (see Schaefer 2011,

Macmillan 2012).

Looking back to the past again, the complex and enduring interplay between domestic

pluralism and diplomatic order that this section aims to examine acquired an even more

intricate profile in the context of the rise and decline of the Spanish American Empire.

14
Although frequently ignored in favour of the prevailing place of war and coercive

conquest in the colonization process, diplomatic dealings also permeated early colonial

encounters. Resistance to conquest produced frequent and violent upheavals amongst

indigenous peoples against the conquerors. The Spanish defeat in the important Battle

of Curalaba of 1598 in Chile convinced the Spanish Crown of the need to combine

coercion with dialogue that became known as ‘peaceful conquest’. Although diplomatic

dealings with indigenous peoples never displaced blood and fire as the main form of

Spanish conquest, it would be a mistake to underestimate its part in facilitating a more

active role of the indigenous in the shaping of a hybrid colonial order. Historical

research demonstrates that important cultural, legal and political dimensions were

frequently negotiated, securing for the indigenous peoples some forms of autonomy and

self-rule (Cunill 2012). Moreover, Spain actively sought to establish channels of

diplomatic communication with native nations’ representatives whenever they found it

convenient and functional (Lacoste 2010). These practices, initially conceived of as a

way of managing the contentious relationship between indigenous nations and the

Spaniards, were two centuries later crucial in securing indigenous support for Spanish

efforts to hinder the advancement of English ambitions in the subcontinent. But they

also facilitated colonial emancipation and the consolidation of the new sovereign

republics in the nineteenth century. General San Martin, the leader of both the

Argentine and Chilean independence movements, was able, for instance, to gain support

from indigenous nations against the Spanish army in the Revolutionary wars (see

Lacoste 2010, Levaggi 1993).

In that particular Latin American context, an interesting and largely forgotten

phenomenon took a form which historian Gutierrez-Ardila aptly calls ‘constituent

diplomacy’. From 1810 and 1816, between the deposition of the Spanish viceroyalty

15
authorities and the full independence of the new American republics, the revolutionaries

of Nueva Granada – a territory that broadly corresponds today to Venezuela, Colombia

and Panama–rejected the idea of a ‘single and indivisible’ republic and instead created a

dozen sovereign and independent entities. At the same time, conscious of the dangers

that threatened these entities, these revolutionaries sought a confederacy so as to repel

foreign invasions and impede the arising of a new tyrant (cfr. Gutierrez-Ardila 2009:4).

Although not fully diplomatic in ambition the resulting horizontal negotiations amongst

those provincial governments – such as Antioquia, Cundinamarca, Neiva or Tunja,

amongst others – as well as their respective systems of mutual representation, were

inspired by the notion of ius gentium (law of peoples). This was the same notion that in

Europe was at that very precise moment on the way to be replaced by a new one – ius

inter gentes – tailored to measure the needs of European rising nation–states through the

modern grammars of international law now understood as law amongst states (Lechner

2006). In the words of Gutierrez-Ardila:

The main objective of this provincial or constitutive diplomacy was to remedy the

dissolution of their wider unity and to re-establish the social ties that had been

crushed with the deposition of the viceroyalty authorities (2009: 4).

Similar developments were underway at the same time in the Viceroyalty of Rio de la

Plata – the territories that now belong to Argentina, Chile and Paraguay – in the context

of their respective processes of independence. While some provinces – such as

Cordoba, Mendoza, Salta and Tucuman – remained obedient to Buenos Aires, others

such as Santa Fe, Corrientes and Entre Rios, along with other constituencies that now

belong to Chile or Paraguay, reclaimed sovereignty and the right to create their own

systems of diplomatic representation (Gutierrez-Ardila 2009: 5). Although with less

intensity, such attempts to assert territorial identity and contacts across borders, and to

16
secure autonomy in front of a new centralism, were also registered in Concepcion and

Iquique, at the southern and northern extremes of Chile, respectively (Cartes-Montory

2010, Ovando and Gonzalez 2014).

The history of modern Brazil after the demise of monarchy also allows for a

paradiplomatic reading of the formative processes of both its federal system and its

distinctive approach to diplomacy, confirming the mutual co-determination between the

evolving forms of domestic political order and state participation in the wider

diplomatic realm. Recent research (Bessa and Sombra 2012) on the early stages of the

Brazilian republic – Republica Velha from 1890 to 1930 – reveal that under the close

monitoring of the central government Brazilian constituent units were extremely active

in international capital markets, being crucial in shaping the integration of the new

Brazil into the nascent global economy. That era of paradiplomatic activism,

particularly salient in the fields of foreign trade and external borrowing, came to an end

with the 1930 Revolution, which opened a new era of centralization that culminated

with the Estado Novo dictatorship, which lasts from 1937 to 1945 (Bessa and Sombra

2012). Democratization processes at the end of the century facilitated the recovery of

those old paradiplomatic practices, helping to forge one of the most distinctive elements

of twenty-first century Brazilian federalism (e.g. Vigevani 2006).

What is interesting to highlight in these historical precedents is that, rather than a

demand for secession or separatism, these paradiplomatic initiatives reveal quite the

opposite. They highlight the importance of the assertion of political subjectivity and

agency in the paradiplomatic field as a precondition for shaping a subsequent fair and

horizontal negotiation of a new form of shared sovereignty under the federation or

wider state, namely Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia or Mexico. This is not to say

that the new Latin American republics were immune to secessionist movements, as

17
Yucatan’s repeated attempts to secede from Mexico reveal (e.g. Williams 1929), but its

very exceptional character shows us the historical learning of political coexistence

through a ‘strange multiplicity’ of institutional mediations achieved through the endless

combination of both diplomatic and paradiplomatic deals.2

Similar developments, albeit with their own distinctive tones, were also registered in the

British Commonwealth. Diplomatic historian Lorna Lloyd (2001) aptly summarizes her

important research on how many British dominions were able to despatch and receive

diplomatic missions long before they became fully independent and sovereign states:

The traditional prerequisite for the despatch of diplomatic missions – sovereign

statehood – was absent when, towards the end of the nineteenth century,

governments of the Commonwealth began to send and receive representatives. As

a result, the Commonwealth developed a distinctive way of conducting relations

and their envoys were given a non-diplomatic title. This remained true even after

the self-governing dominions began to appear on the international scene and then,

in 1931, were allowed to opt for sovereignty. This was because Britain was

anxious to play down what had happened, and the dominions were not

immediately insistent on the full trappings of sovereign status. (2001: 9)

This singular system, which only disappeared in the 1970s in view of its complicated

accommodation with the previsions of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic

Relations, operated even within the dominions themselves, since both Australian and

Canadian constituencies were able to maintain their own separate provincial delegates

for a long time after both territories became federalized (Lloyd 2007: 14).

These and other similar precedents may help us to understand what Michael Collins has

recently called the ‘Federal Moment’ in the post-1945 decolonisation age (2013):

18
namely that historical and genuinely transnational moment in which both old colonial

rulers, such as Great Britain, France or the Netherlands, and local national elites,

seemed to find in the promotion of federalism as an alternative to abrupt cessation of

colonial ties and networks of interests. Although the special case of South Africa

illustrates the ambivalences and perils of such an idea, a wider sample of federal

experiments in the past century offer a compelling demonstration of the external and

internal complexities that any attempt to build a middle-ground between composite

empires and the nation-state form unavoidably entails.

In sum, participation of these diverse constituencies in foreign trade, management of

resources, cultural exchanges, or political negotiations beyond the contours of their

hosting states – or empires – has been a durable and widespread feature of diplomacy

across history. More importantly, those old constituent diplomacies were not only a

common practice in the past: they were crucial in the shaping a modern system of

sovereign states adapted to their own domestic complexity and pluralism. The long

process of centralization that followed the functional and normative imperatives that

served to consolidate the modern nation-states was nonetheless a highly contentious

one. Formalization of diplomacy as state privilege was never complete and the old

plurality of voices and practices that we find in history reappeared, once and again

periodically, in the most unexpected places.

(Para)diplomatic culture?

The consideration of states as non-problematic entities that exist in mere interaction in

the diplomatic realm (e.g. Barston 2009, Berridge 2011) constitutes an interesting case

19
of scholarly resistance to some of the most compelling and repeated criticisms that

international relations scholarship has received in decades (cfr. Walker 1993, Murphy

1998). That resistance is even more disconcerting in view of the many innovations that

– more or less reluctantly – diplomatic services all over the world are increasingly

adopting to cope with the implications of social and political pluralism for diplomatic

practice as they realize the risk of becoming otherwise obsolete. Paradoxically,

experienced diplomats themselves – as the careful observers they tend to be – are

generally far more inclined than scholars to accept the necessity of a new diplomatic

culture (e.g. Riordan 2006, Heine 2006, Bolewski 2007, Roberts 2009). They see such a

new diplomatic culture as not only valid to operate –in both pragmatic and symbolic

modes – in diplomatic contacts amongst states and other international bodies, but one

able to trespass – both within and across states – the territorial assumptions through

which chanceries from all over the world have, in the last two centuries, formulated

their mutual diplomatic relationships. The need for greater attention to diplomatic

practices within states, in order to better capture the current transformations of

diplomatic culture, has also been emphasized by authors who are correspondingly

experienced practitioners (e.g. Neumann 2002, Heine 2006, Roberts 2009). German

diplomat and scholar Wilfried Bolewski, for instance, aptly describes what he calls the

‘internalization of diplomacy or internationalization of domestic policy’ as one of the

distinctive features of diplomatic culture today (2007: 27-30). To embrace that

analytical perspective requires nonetheless avoiding some influential approaches that

tend to conflate the formal dimensions of diplomacy with its actual and changing

morphologies. Alan James’ restrictive reflections illustrate very well how that

conflation operates:

20
 The existence of a State is a logical pre-condition for the establishment of

diplomatic relations. And by ‘State’ is meant the type of territorial entity which in

official international parlance, is termed ‘sovereign.’ At this level, sovereignty

connotes constitutional independence – the existence of a domestic constitution

which is not a formal part of any wider constitutional arrangement. Thus Australia

is a sovereign State, and as such is eligible to establish diplomatic relations with

other such States. But the constituent Australian State of New South Wales is not

sovereign (in the officially-accepted international sense), and therefore cannot

establish the sort of relations which are termed diplomatic. It may establish offices

abroad, as it has done, for example, in London. And it may be that, as there, the

host State will as a matter of courtesy accord the office limited privileges and

immunities. But such offices will not have the status of diplomatic missions, and

will therefore not benefit from the provisions of the Vienna Convention on

Diplomatic Relations (James 1992: 352)

Other authoritative and inquisitive authors as Berridge, Keens-Soper and Otter solemnly

declare in one of their works a sharp separation between the internal and external

spheres, placing diplomacy exclusively in the latter one:

In orchestrating and moderating the dialogue between states, diplomacy thus

serves as a bulwark against international chaos; in this way it may be understood

as a more fragile counterpart, operating within a system based upon states, to the

domestic order or `political system' of the state itself (2001: 12)

Against all empirical evidence, such scholars therefore reproduce the fiction of the

existence of a perfect, stable and timeless political community – the state – as the

21
foundational assumption that gives sense to the whole diplomatic system. Hedley Bull’s

influential notion of ‘diplomatic culture’ is particularly illustrative of the problem we

are dealing with. He defined it as ‘the common stock of ideas and values possessed by

the official representatives of states’ (Bull 1977: 171-2). In so doing he avoids any

problematization of what the principle of official diplomatic representation may entail

in terms of its contentious relations with the complexities of the domestic political

sphere, such as those related to class, gender, nation or race (e.g. Shaffer 1998).

James Der Derian’s distinctive understanding of diplomacy as a mediation of

‘horizontal’ estrangement avoids nonetheless direct confrontation with the issue of

domestic political pluralism or territorial complexity, although his theoretical approach

offers the tools for such an approach. In his genealogy of diplomacy he convincingly

examines how ‘diplomatic culture was formed and transformed, and how its power of

normalization in a Leviathan-less world has been reproduced’ (Der Derian 1987: 4).

Later in the same work he defines diplomatic culture as ‘the mediation of estrangement

by symbolic power and social constrains’ (ibid: 42). He thus does not place the

inception of modern diplomacy under the logic of power politics nor subordinate it to

the rise of the nation-state (cf. Anderson 1993), but in the gradual realization of the

limitations confronted by even the most powerful state in front of alienated powers that

escaped its control either by persuasion or force. But despite his fruitful heuristics, Der

Derian seems to keep modern political community encapsulated within the contours of

specific states, since he later presents the ‘recognition of the difference between

alienated domestic politics and alienated international relations’ as ‘realistic’ (1987:

208). He suggests that only the latter would be the proper subject of ‘horizontal’

diplomatic mediation whilst the former should be better approached through the idea of

‘antidiplomacy’, as the proper dominion for the ‘vertical’ mediation of the universal

22
alienation of humankind (ibid). In so doing, Der Derian seems to renounce too soon the

possible virtues of extending diplomatic culture to that middle ground constituted by the

management of domestic pluralism both within and across states. For it happens that

domestic pluralism cannot be addressed adequately with merely legal or

intergovernmental mechanisms of control, mutual consultation or coordination, nor

through the recourse to a new ‘permanent’ revolution. Rather, mediating the internal

estrangement that is at the core of virtually all states – as a result of the increasing

demands for recognition of plurality in social life – requires the adoption of a new

diplomatic culture within states themselves. More than estrangement among states,

paradiplomatic cultures reveal the often-unexplored process of mutual estrangement

within states (Feldman 2005). This estrangement takes form both horizontally among

different constituent units within a single or various states, and vertically in terms of the

relationship of these constituent units with the central authority, adopting diverse

profiles in different historical stages. In sum, in all their variety, these forms of

estrangement can be read as a form of political contestation, albeit not necessarily a

secessionist one, exposing the central government’s pretension to truly and completely

represent the national community in the diplomatic realm.

Paradiplomacy as agonistic respect

Mainstream diplomatic studies tend to consider the political communities that diplomats

represent as more or less complex, but also necessarily as ones confined within the

boundaries of the state of which those diplomats are official representatives (e.g.

Barston 2009, Kleiner 2010). To that extent it can be argued that any possible ‘necessity

to trespass’ these boundaries – either in form of ‘paradiplomatic’ guise or political

23
uprising – falls largely outside of their scope (Anderson 2012). It is in line with the

understanding of that problem that it is fruitful to reconsider ‘diplomatic culture’

through the conceptual lenses provided by contemporary discussions on the politics of

‘agonistic pluralism’. As Glover has aptly summarized:

Agonistic pluralism…vaporizes adversarial engagement and recognizes the

marginalizing tendencies implicit in drives to consensus and stability, offering

perhaps the best means for cultivating virtues necessary to revitalize a contentious

democratic politics which also fosters receptivity to pluralism and difference.

(2012: 81)

Noting the impossibility of a definitive resolution to the many estrangements observable

within and across states through the exclusive means and ends of diplomacy amongst

states, paradiplomatic culture may serve, and historically has actually served, to mediate

some of them through its distinctive practices, institutions and discourses (see

Mamadouh and Van der Wusten 2016). For, paraphrasing Sharp’s thoughts on

‘diplomacy’, we can say that ‘paradiplomacy’ is also ‘a human practice, constituted by

the explicit construction, representation, negotiation and manipulation of ambiguous

identities’ (Sharp 1999: 33). The most salient difference would be, however, that in the

case of paradiplomacy the negotiation and manipulation of ambiguous identities that

Sharp identifies as the core of diplomatic culture, takes place not only amongst states

but also within and across them. Hopefully this new understanding of diplomacy as

intrinsically linked to the changing forms of domestic political order will allow us to

consider the competing legitimacies and the complex institutional mediations which

today compound the global diplomatic realm.

Highlighting the role of domestic political pluralism vis-à-vis the articulation of

24
diplomatic culture has implications not only for the practicalities of global policy-

making, but also for our understanding of the contemporary conditions in which the

emergence of new diplomacies which trespass the contours of territorial sovereignty

may be able to democratize the global political sphere. Although rarely spectacular

either in form of content, paradiplomacy, in sum, can be read – in spite of its many

limitations – as the herald of a new understanding of diplomacy as ‘agonistic respect’,

in which difficult conflicts and disagreements are considered not as forms of

nonconformity to be suppressed but as expressions of a dynamic political agency. This

agency drives the inevitable but extremely complex move towards a new – albeit surely

still imperfect – democratic polis and transnational citizenry (see Honig 1993, Connolly

2005, Schaap 2006). If diplomatic services across the world are unable to deal with the

challenge of pluralism within the contours of the specific political community they

respectively and officially represent, how they will be able to manage the challenge of

political pluralism at a global scale?

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1
This chapter draws in part on, and expands on, some arguments previously advanced in Cornago, Noe (2013) Plural Diplomacies:

Normative Predicaments and Functional Imperatives (Leiden: Brill Publishers).

2
The idea of ‘strange multiplicity’ owes to James Tully (1995), who uses that beautiful formula as a way of characterizing the

growing complexity of constitutional law in face of social and political pluralism.

34