The Embassador and His Functions

"We need professional diplomats (‘diplomatists’ in an older and better language) for the same reason that we need trained doctors: diplomacy, like medicine, is a specialised activity with a store of complex knowledge, well-tried procedures, and a distinctive lexicon. It is certainly true that paradiplomats, like paramedics, are valuable but diplomacy can well do without rank amateurs in the same way that medicine can do without snake-oil merchants. Abraham de Wicquefort was a diplomatist and ‘intelligencer’ for hire. He spent most of his career in Paris but eventually returned to his native Holland, where he was found guilty of selling state secrets and imprisoned in the Castle of Loevestein. This is where, entirely from memory, he wrote his massive L’Ambassadeur et Ses Fonctions, which was first published in 1681 and translated most ably into English by Lord Digby in 1716. (The English version is 570 foolscap pages long, and printed in two columns in a small font, so I recommend reading the extracts printed in my book Diplomatic Classics.) An admirer of Machiavelli, Wicquefort wrote about what diplomatists actually do rather than what they ought to do, hitherto the usual pattern. In consequence, The Embassador and His Functions book became the most highly regarded manual of diplomacy of the 18th century. Unlike Sir Ernest Satow’s dry Guide to Diplomatic Practice (1917), which eventually replaced it, The Embassador and His Functions is a rich and often lively book with some striking phrases. I believe so. The chief purpose of diplomacy has always been to enable states to secure the objectives of their foreign policies without resort to force, propaganda, or law – in short, by lobbying and negotiation. These methods require confidential communication between protected representatives in continuous contact with receiving governments, and always will. We hear a lot today about ‘public diplomacy’, as if this alleged invention had changed the whole game. This is complete nonsense. Public diplomacy is just the name we give to our own propaganda."