require such an elaborate means of despatch. (I suspect the modern diplomatic bag is normally filled with orders of DVD box sets.) The diplomatic bag has an important history. But it can be replaced by an email.
Meanwhile, diplomats from the great European states also developed a continental system of rules and processes to match the new confidence and structures of their states. The Treaty of Westphalia, hammered out in Münster and Osnabrück between the Habsburgs, French, Spanish, Swedish and Dutch in 1648, ended the Thirty Years War and explicitly recognised the existence of separate sovereignties. Diplomats and aristocrats – most were still both – from 140 imperial states took part. The treaty drew the new boundaries of Europe, allowed for freedom of worship, and established the principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other states.
Not everyone was happy with a system that prioritised national over transnational rights, especially those who derived their authority from other sources of power – in full flow, Pope Innocent X called the treaty ‘null, void, iniquitous, invalid, unjust, invaluable, reprobate, damnable, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time’. Diplomacy was never meant to be easy or uncontroversial.
Gradually, like all good bureaucrats, envoys involved in such negotiations built up entourages and embassies. And, to manage the networks of egos and prima donnas, capitals had to expand the foreign ministries from Richelieu’s dingy back offices into grander and more impressive buildings. The beginnings of empire brought their own demands. In 1660, Britain established a Council of Foreign Plantations, which grew in the eighteenth century into the Colonial Office. Ernest Satow’s massive Guide to Diplomatic Practice, first published against the undiplomatic backdrop of 1917, traces the first uses of the word diplomacy to mid-eighteenth-century Vienna, and in England in the 1787 Annual Register. But an English satire, The Chinese Spy, was unimpressed by these stirrings of activity: ‘The diplomatic body, as it is called, was at this ball, but without distinguishing itself to any great advantage.’
Nevertheless, the British Foreign Office was established in 1782, the year that the steam engine was invented, one of the building blocks of the British empire. Charles James Fox, the first Foreign Secretary, was backed up by a staff of twelve: ‘nine male clerks, two chamber keepers and a “necessary woman”’. This is roughly the size of the current Foreign Secretary’s Private Office, although the gender balance is now improved.
Dating from this period, many ministries of foreign affairs insist that formal communication between the ambassador and the host government is by a verbose letter covered in stamps and seals: the note verbale. A typical one might run: ‘The embassy of Tajikistan presents its esteemed compliments to the Foreign Ministry of Mali. The embassy respectfully requests that the ambassador be permitted to park his official vehicle in the main courtyard of the esteemed foreign ministry on his next visit. The embassy of Tajikistan takes this opportunity to share its respect and warmest regards with the distinguished ministry.’
Mostly, a note verbale is these days sent by fax, and therefore disappears without trace. An embassy will normally spend a great deal of time on the telephone, checking whether they have arrived and when a reply is likely. The average embassy is also expected to send such a note when the ambassador leaves the country, even temporarily. Many ambassadors even convey such earth-shattering news to their fellow diplomatic colleagues. In Beirut, I regularly received faxes telling me that ambassadors I had never met would be out of the country for three days.
Clearly this is all bonkers. The note verbale can be replaced by a text message.
The US was not far behind Britain. A Cabinet-level Department of Foreign Affairs was created in 1789 by the First Congress. It was later renamed the Department of State and changed the title of its top job from Secretary for Foreign Affairs to Secretary of State. Thomas Jefferson returned from a France in the grip of revolutionary fervour, where he had planted American sweet potatoes and corn on the Champs-Élysées, to take the position. Jefferson would have been staggered by the pace of modern communication, finding it harder to keep his diplomats on a short leash: ‘For two years we have not heard from our ambassador in Spain; if we again do not hear from him this year, we should write him a letter.’ At this point, the US foreign service had just two diplomatic posts and ten consular posts, so the silence of their envoy to Madrid must have been deafening.*
Gunboat diplomacy could be pretty ambitious, and remained high risk. Not everyone took envoys as seriously as they themselves had started to do. In 1793, Lord George Macartney led a doomed mission of 700 British diplomats and businessmen to try to establish permanent diplomatic relations with the Chinese emperor Qianlong. He failed because Qianlong could not accept the idea of diplomatic relations with a representative rather than the monarch himself. George III’s gifts were accepted merely as tribute, and Macartney was sent home with his tail between his stockinged legs.
Some decided that the whole business was too fraught with peril to be worthwhile. In his 1796 farewell message, US president George Washington counselled his successors against European entanglements: ‘hence therefore it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships, or enmities. Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course.’ Many current US politicians make the same argument for disengagement and splendid isolation.
Some American diplomats struck out nonetheless. Benjamin Franklin challenged protocol in his own way, shocking contemporary society by being the first diplomat to attend the king without a hat when he was received by Louis XVI at Versailles in 1778. He also invented bifocals in order to lip-read the asides and intrigues of his French interlocutors. But Washington’s instincts about dastardly Europeans were also proved right in 1798, when the French demanded that American diplomats pay huge bribes in order to see their foreign minister. The Americans rejected this preposterous offer, and have been making European statesmen pay ever since.
The French had more success elsewhere. In the eighteenth century, French took over from Latin as the language of diplomacy, a position it held until the Second World War. Much traditional diplomatic language is still in French – for example, démarche, chargé d’affaires and entente. The French also seemed to particularly enjoy the physical trappings of diplomacy more than most. Lord Gower, the British ambassador in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century, lamented the local requirement to bow three times to fellow ambassadors and twice to a chargé d’affaires. (Extraordinarily, in some southern European foreign ministries the practice of bowing to colleagues of ambassadorial rank continues to this day.)
Of course, bureaucracies feed themselves, and foreign ministries gradually expanded their back offices. The Duke of Wellington lamented the consequences. In 1812, while commanding the British army against Napoleon in Spain, he sent an exasperated note, loaded with sarcasm, back to the Foreign Office. It would strike a chord with many modern diplomats:
I have dispatched reports on the character, wit and spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence. Unfortunately the sum of one shilling and nine pence remains unaccounted for in one battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain.
This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstance, since we are at war with France, a fact that may come as a bit of a surprise
