The Naked Diplomat: Understanding Power and Politics in the Digital Age

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Diplomacy was increasingly the arena in which to play out wider competition for respect, with failure to observe basic courtesies taken as great insults to a monarch’s dignity. When the Spanish ambassador to the English court of James I refused to dip his colours to his host in the early seventeenth century, the ensuing diplomatic furore nearly triggered a second armada.

Most European envoys sent east had a more commercial brief. British diplomat Anthony Jenkinson, having recovered from his undignified exit from Persia, reported back to Elizabeth I that his 1557 Christmas dinner with Tsar Ivan IV Vasilyevich had laid the foundations for a potentially lucrative trading relationship. Clearly there was no Elizabethan human rights lobby to suggest that emperors who called themselves ‘Terrible’ and had been executing rivals since the age of thirteen might not be appropriate commercial partners. Another envoy, Thomas Roe, recorded having avoided offending the Mogul of India by accepting an attractive female concubine for the duration of his stay, ‘in order to comply with custom’ (an excuse that probably would not work today). Competition between these early European merchant envoys was fierce and the penalties severe – the Dutch tortured eighteen British traders to death in the East Indies in 1623.

Yet, necessary concubines aside, the job of Elizabethan envoys was in many ways recognisable. Sir Jeremy Bowes was the ambassador sent by Elizabeth I to the court of Ivan the Terrible following Jenkinson’s convivial, and clearly successful, Christmas lunch. Apart from staying alive, he had three jobs: to assert the authority of his queen as the equal of the tsar, to obtain important commercial contracts for British merchants, and to establish a commercial office in Vologda. His successors in Moscow today are working on similar projects. Bowes also had to free a British widow whose Dutch husband had been roasted to death, a consular case that is happily less likely to arise in today’s embassy.

The first pioneering diplomats were not setting out across continents on some kind of grand tour or glorified gap year, but to seek new resources and trading opportunities. In the age of maritime diplomacy, consuls would mediate between ships from their countries and port authorities to ensure market advantage. Schoolchildren still learn that ‘trade follows the flag’. But diplomatic history also suggests that the flag often follows trade – the business lobby needed a British embassy in Constantinople in the sixteenth century, and so the Levant Company funded it, an association that continued until the early nineteenth century.

Diplomacy has always had a strong mercantile core, although in recent decades commercial work has tended to come in and out of diplomatic fashion. It was placed at the centre of the British Foreign Office’s priorities after the First World War and in the 1970s. The British post credited with making the best commercial effort in the 1970s was Tehran. They responded to instructions to focus embassy time and resources on supporting business links with Iran. This came at a cost: they were late to spot the warning signs of the overthrow of the shah.

Diplomats tend to enjoy trade promotion because it is more tangible than other elements of their roles. It is hard to measure warm bilateral relations, or the extent to which lobbying on climate change shifts a host government’s position. But a contract with numbers stands out.

So what do businesses want from diplomats? They want hard and relevant political analysis, a good contact book, and the willingness to use it. Businesses know that diplomats can get the right people around the table.

But there are also risks. Diplomats can lose their objectivity about where the national interest lies, and the balance between commercial priorities and our wider equities. This particularly applies to diplomats who would like to make some money themselves at some point, as many will increasingly need to do. Traditionally, the revolving door was more of an exit door. Senior diplomats left their foreign ministries to get highly paid jobs on the boards of oil companies, banks and arms manufacturers.

Increasingly that model will change – diplomats will more often leave in mid career, harassed by spouses angry at the impact of regular moves on family life; needing a financial cushion; and seeking new experiences and oxygen. This is healthy, increasing the pool of diplomats who have tried other professions, and who are flexible and marketable enough to adapt, learn and return. The downside is that it will undermine the sense of diplomats as a cadre, and blur the lines of accountability further. As austerity bites and diplomats get paid less, they risk becoming more reliant on business to keep the ship afloat. This is not easy for modern diplomats, any more than it would have been for the British consul in sixteenth-century Constantinople.

An awkward but unavoidable question for diplomats will be the extent to which we sell our services. The British Foreign Office already hires out ambassadors for commercial events. I’ve made speeches on subjects ranging from ceramic water filters to ornamental garden gnomes. It is a small jump from this system to one where we offer a commercial service for our insights. None of us would want to see diplomacy become too mercantilist or commercial, but the economic realities may dictate that there is no choice.

Diplomats gradually developed a sense of their own craft. As diplomacy took root as a profession, it was codified, analysed and described, mainly by French diplomats. In 1603, Jean Hotman de Villiers (1552–1632), an Oxford professor who led diplomatic missions for Henri IV, produced a guidebook for ambassadors, De la Charge et Dignité de l’Ambassadeur. Abraham de Wicquefort (1598–1682) was a Dutch envoy and spy who, after playing a central role in producing the Treaty of Westphalia, was found guilty of treason. Imprisoned in the water castle of Loevestein, he wrote the huge L’Ambassadeur et ses Fonctions in 1681. This became the handbook for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century diplomacy, and was based on real-world examples of his craft. Much of it stands the test of the time, including his advice that ambassadors need to combine the theatre of their public role with the discretion and often secrecy of their private negotiations. Loevestein was clearly a good place to think big. Another political prisoner was Hugo Grotius, often seen as the father of modern international law. More notable, for diplomats anyway, he went on to become Swedish ambassador to France. François de Callières (1645–1717), a diplomat for Louis XIV, analysed European diplomacy in his 1716 book De la Manière de Négocier avec les Souverains. He agreed with de Wicquefort that the ambassador had to be a good actor.

Diplomats also needed to stay in closer contact with their capitals. When envoys began to create too much information to pass by hand or official messenger, they instigated a mail service for handwritten correspondence, and a Postal Convention (of 1674) to try to protect confidentiality. Documents began to be transported by the more formal system still in use today, the diplomatic bag. This was meant to guarantee that messages between an embassy and its capital could not be interfered with by the curious or hostile. Naturally, this was usually ignored in the atmosphere of intrigue and mistrust surrounding the wars of religion.

The diplomatic bag still exists virtually unchanged today.

The bag has always been dogged by controversy. It is meant to be sealed and inviolate, but that has rarely been the case. Cardinal Wolsey, an adviser to Henry VIII, was a serial violator of its confidentiality, in order to supervise the intrigues of the increasing number of foreign envoys appointed to London. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, the ambassador Lord Curzon exploded with fury when the Turks searched his bags, ‘and condemned them to a thousand hells of eternal fire’. In 1964, Italian authorities violated an Egyptian bag, having heard moans from inside it, to discover a kidnapped Israeli. In the early twenty-first century, British minister Peter Hain described the violation of the bag by Robert Mugabe’s officials in Zimbabwe as ‘not the actions of a civilised country’. (In fact, opening a diplomatic bag was probably one of the more civilised actions undertaken by Mugabe.) I was involved in another African drama when a diplomatic bag seeping blood was found to be carrying bush meat, meant to arrive in London in advance of the visit of a head of state. He was clearly no fan of British cuisine.

With electronic communications more secure, there can be few items that really 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.* (#ulink_c15661e2-5919-5c73-b4c7-85b290827c05)

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 to you gentlemen in Whitehall.

This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from Her Majesty’s Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties. I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both. Is it 1) To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of accountants and copyboys in London, or perchance 2) To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain?5 (#litres_trial_promo)

The answer from the copyboys is not recorded.

* (#ulink_874afc1e-2ea2-5c5e-9685-cc1460d5b06e) I recently found letters from my nineteenth-century predecessor in Beirut, George Wood, demonstrating the way that envoys, like Jefferson’s in Madrid, took advantage of this distance from the capital to freelance. Wood consulted his Foreign Secretary about arming the local Druze sect, and had done so with gusto by the time the terse reply reached him telling him not to proceed under any circumstances, so as not to annoy the Turks. By then the 1860 civil war was over. Every modern ambassador to whom I have told this story longs wistfully for the days when diplomacy was less burdened by swift communication with the centre.

3

Diplomacy’s Finest Century (#u3b300cf6-c529-5e0a-a3e6-bad96a3209b0)

The nation state … is not a quaint and anachronistic holdover but a compromise written in blood that just about managed in the second half of the last century to bind the demons that attend power to a peaceful and progressive policy.

Chris Patten, What Next? Surviving the Twenty-First Century (2008)

Wellington might have been exasperated by the bureaucratic and penny-pinching procedures of the Foreign Service. But the hundred years that followed the Congress of Vienna of 1815, while ending in the diplomatic failure of the First World War, were European diplomacy’s finest century.

Only with the continent at peace could European powers expand their global reach and build their empires. Armies provided the blood that established the era of the nation state. Diplomats provided the compromises. Less of a sacrifice, but no less important.

As ever, technological innovation spurred diplomatic changes. A Frenchman, Claude Chappe, had invented the semaphore in 1791. In 1819, the first steamship crossed the Atlantic. In 1837, Brits William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone invented the telegraph (using just twenty letters, which must have been awkward for diplomats in Quebec or Yugoslavia). All were to play their part in the evolution of statecraft.

This was the period in which the word ‘diplomacy’, from the Greek term for a twice-folded document, began to be used more frequently. This reminds us that there was a sense of purpose to diplomacy. It was not just about a discussion, relationship management or information-gathering, but about an outcome – the ‘diploma’ on which an agreement was written, or what we now often call the ‘deliverable’. Diplomacy had a point.

When backed up by force, diplomacy could deliver even quicker results than in the past – the British government could ‘change the balance of the Eastern question by sending a few frigates to Besika Bay’.1 (#litres_trial_promo) Foreign Secretary Viscount Palmerston ordered the British fleet to blockade a Greek port in 1850 because a British subject, Don Pacifico, had been insufficiently compensated for his imprisonment. Defending his actions in Parliament, Palmerston claimed that ‘a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong’.2 (#litres_trial_promo) Modern consular support is less dramatic, and our resources less intimidating, but the principle still applies.

This willingness to project power helped Europe become the centre of international gravity in this period. Diplomatic procedures and standards were developed and exported. Negotiation became more constant, not just based on a division of the spoils after each war. The habits of diplomacy – more frequent conferences and summits, more exchanges of envoys – took root. The great powers used statecraft and diplomatic craft as they jostled for mastery in Europe.

Political change once again increased the need for new rules to govern diplomats and diplomatic interactions. Diplomats started to take themselves even more seriously, and grant themselves new titles.

Diplomacy has retained many of the titles of this era. I frequently observed the frisson which some fellow Ambassadors Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary (to give them their full title, as some prefer to do) felt when addressed as ‘Your Excellency’. Very few who rely so heavily on the title are particularly excellent. Indeed, my standard rule is that the more a colleague tells people of their excellence, the less excellent they are likely to be. When in Downing Street, I dropped the practice of including the full titles of ambassadors (e.g. Sir Crispian Penfold-Thwaite-Penfold GCMG* (#ulink_bce8ea5f-a558-52be-ad50-f93e070c9ca9)) on standard records and minutes of meetings, halving the length of the average distribution list but pricking the vanity of some grander and more impressively titled colleagues.

The Civil Service still retains more confusing job titles from the nineteenth century than most. Hence the mix-up over my role as the prime minister’s intimate typist. I once tried to explain the title ‘Permanent Undersecretary’, the head of the Foreign Office, when introducing the last incumbent, Sir Simon Fraser, to a reception in Beirut. It was the least accurate title I could imagine – Simon was neither permanent, nor under anyone, nor indeed a secretary. Increasingly, we will discover that overdoing the titles acts as a further barrier to communication with those we represent, and therefore to our continued usefulness and relevance.

Once again, Yes, Minister’s Sir Humphrey bursts the balloon when explaining to his new minister the job titles in his ministry: ‘Briefly, sir, I am the Permanent Undersecretary of State, known as the Permanent Secretary. Woolley here is your Principal Private Secretary. I, too, have a Principal Private Secretary, and he is the Principal Private Secretary to the Permanent Secretary. Directly responsible to me are ten Deputy Secretaries, eighty-seven Undersecretaries and two hundred and nineteen assistant secretaries. Directly responsible to the Principal Private Secretaries are Plain Private Secretaries, and the Prime Minister will be appointing two Parliamentary Undersecretaries and you will be appointing your own Parliamentary Private Secretary.’ ‘Can they all type?’ asks his mystified minister. ‘None of us can type, Minister,’ replies Sir Humphrey, ‘Mrs McKay types – she is your secretary.’

The demands of nineteenth-century diplomacy also meant that protocol was further codified, and treaties became longer. Rules were even needed to keep the diplomats apart. Foreign Secretary George Canning duelled with his Cabinet rival Lord Castlereagh in 1809, making today’s National Security Council debates seem somewhat tame. A gifted poet, songwriter and speechwriter, Canning had also shown himself an accomplished warmaker, whose belief that ‘we are hated throughout Europe, and that hate must be cured by fear’ would gladden the hearts of many modern Eurosceptics.3 (#litres_trial_promo) Napoleon had also been happy to ignore the gentlemanly codes of diplomatic immunity and throw British envoys in jail for espionage. But after his fall, the Congress of Vienna of 1815 established a more robust system, for the first time regulating a profession of diplomacy that was distinct from politics and statecraft.

The congress took place against an inauspicious backdrop. Russian Cossacks were on the Champs-Élysées, trying to prevent Napoleon from making another comeback. His reckless ambitions had shattered borders and destroyed institutions. Europe was threatened by decades of conflict and uncertainty, so the powers that had defeated him – Russia, Great Britain, Austria and Prussia – invited the other states of Europe to send their representatives to Vienna. All despatched heavyweight statesmen, the titan diplomats of their age who had spent, or were to spend, decades at the top of the international system.

Austria fielded Prince Klemens von Metternich, a former ambassador to Prussia and France. By this stage diplomacy was firmly established as a sound profession for the upwardly mobile nobility – Metternich’s father and son were also in the family business. Metternich’s relationship with Napoleon must have been complex – he had arranged Napoleon’s marriage to an Austrian princess, but also made the career-threatening mistake of publicly arguing with him at Napoleon’s thirty-ninth birthday party. He also numbered Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat among his numerous lovers, their trysts taking place in what is now the British ambassador’s Residence in Paris, then home of her more scandalous sister Pauline.† (#ulink_8ecd31e9-062e-51cb-88e3-f868ce53cead) Metternich had previously entered a bizarre agreement barring him from diplomacy while his father-in-law was alive. I suspect this is unique among pre-nuptial deals. Like many diplomats of the age, he spoke better French than his native language, and left illegitimate offspring in most of the capitals in which he served.

Britain sent Lord Castlereagh (who had wounded Canning in the thigh in their duel, but escaped unscathed himself). His destructive tendencies were not limited to Cabinet colleagues – he would slice his own throat several years later, after suffering from a mental breakdown and gout. Castlereagh was a principal architect of the system of rolling congresses agreed at Vienna. He divided people in death as in life, prompting Lord Byron to pen the poisonous epitaph ‘Posterity will ne’er survey, A nobler grave than this: Here lie the bones of Castlereagh, Stop, traveller, and piss.’

Prussia sent Karl August von Hardenberg, a former chancellor, more austere perhaps than some of the other rogues around the table, and seen by his contemporaries as too regularly outfoxed by Metternich. Tsar Alexander I, a manipulative autocrat who had succeeded his assassinated father at the age of twenty-three, represented Russia himself, not trusting anyone else to defend his corner. Like George W. Bush almost 200 years later, he would hold prayer meetings with his foreign policy advisers before taking key decisions.

France, the defeated power, sent Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who was to be the star of the show. A former bishop with a justified reputation as a womaniser, he had been prevented from taking his family birthright because of the social embarrassment of a deformed leg. Instead he turned his restless talents to statecraft, with zeal. He had managed by hook or by crook to serve Napoleon and the regime he had deposed, making him ideally suited to the intrigue and drama of the congress. At Vienna, through diplomatic cunning, he prevented the partition of France and repositioned himself in French politics as the saviour of his country.

Talleyrand also saw commercial and personal opportunity – he demanded payment from other states for his services, employed the celebrity chefs of his day, and ate and drank prodigiously. He used to hold meetings in his bedroom so that he could press the advantage of his warm bed over his cold, standing interlocutors. Through guile and skill he turned a weak hand into an advantage. When the king of Saxony challenged France as ‘one of those who have betrayed the cause of Europe’, Talleyrand countered with panache, ‘That, sire, is a question of dates.’

This eclectic array of characters gathered at the end of summer 1814 to reorganise the internal boundaries of Europe, and establish a common position on the abolition of the slave trade, the role of royal families across the continent, navigation of rivers and a new German confederation. A massive agenda, by any standards. There cannot ever have been such a colourful and scandalous cast list at any international conference in history, until perhaps the Big Three summits that Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt bestrode at the end of the Second World War. Few could have survived the media spotlight of the twenty-first century. They make modern diplomatic events seem particularly lame, austere and genteel.

There is no collective noun for diplomats, though people might think up a few when cities are clogged by motorcades, or in Vienna’s case cavalcades. Inevitably, matters of diplomatic precedence and protocol featured heavily in their deliberations. Seating plans alone were feverishly contested, as the leaders competed for influence and power. Hundreds of representatives, and a supporting cast of mistresses and flunkies, were lavishly entertained for months in the capital. To complicate their task, Napoleon escaped from his exile in spring 1815 to retake the French throne, and the powers had to break off their deliberations in order to defeat him again and despatch the vanquished autocrat to distant St Helena.

The negotiations were tortuous. The British wanted to retain the ‘balance of power’ of the preceding century, to ensure future Napoleons could not disturb the equilibrium, and to protect their domination of the seas. Prussia wanted more territory. Austria needed to play off the allies against each other, in order to contain the Russian threat. Russia wanted to use religion to bolster the positions of the continent’s monarchs and to keep the Turkish sultan in check.

Coming to decisions in this context was hard work. Voting was out of the question, given the belief of most royal participants that they had a divine right to be there, and that there could be no question of sharing sovereignty. In reality, as with so many conferences, the key players had stitched up the process in advance. Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia agreed to form an inner circle of negotiations, with other players consulted when necessary, and ideally not at all. Talleyrand saw the danger, and put himself vociferously at the head of those excluded, managing to delay the start of the conference with his histrionic protests of injustice. All four of the big players calculated that they could use France as a counterbalance to their opponents within the inner circle, and so expanded their core group to include the wily Frenchman. Once in the gang, Talleyrand dropped all his demands for issues to be tackled in a larger group, and converted elegantly to the concept of a great-powers deal. This was realpolitik at its most brazen and effective.

Recognising the advantage of being pen-holder, much treasured to this day in the British and French missions to the United Nations and European Union, Castlereagh drafted the most important clause, a mutual-support pact in the face of revolution. Through a conference that lasted months, a new European order was born, with key business now to be managed by the five great powers – Great Britain, Russia, France, Prussia and Austria. This big-power stitch-up was the forefather of the modern United Nations Security Council, where China and the United States have replaced Prussia and Austria.

Unlike previous peace conferences, the architects of the 1815 congress were less concerned with punishing the transgressor – in this case France – than setting in place structures to manage the status quo and reduce the potential for further military conflict. It was a recognition by the monarchies of Europe, shocked by the French Revolution and the insurgent rise of Napoleon, that united they stood, divided they would fall. It was also a response to Napoleon’s abuse of the existing and unnecessarily complex diplomatic procedures to filibuster the Congress of Prague a year earlier.

In many ways the outcomes of the Congress of Vienna were backward-looking – the shoring up of a status quo of elites, reactionary regimes and monarchs. But the diplomatic process that underpinned the decisions was ingenious and creative, and created a system of interdependence that prevented continent-wide conflict for a century. Given its context, it was a supreme act of diplomacy.

The congress also laid the basis for the fastest expansion of diplomacy in history. At the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837, she had permanent ambassadors only in Paris, Constantinople and St Petersburg; by the end, she had almost a hundred.

This was the era of aristocratic diplomacy, ‘outdoor relief for the upper classes’.4 (#litres_trial_promo) Looking back in the second edition of his guide to diplomacy in 1922, Ernest Satow wrote that ‘a good diplomat must in short be an English gentleman. The higher the grade the greater the need for private income.’5 (#litres_trial_promo) Some of those gentlemen, such as Sir Richard Burton, would disappear for months on end, charging around unexplored territories on camel or horseback. Their snug-trousered portraits stare down disapprovingly from the Foreign Office’s walls at today’s diplomats as they complete their risk assessments.

To add to the theatre, diplomatic uniforms were adopted – Lord Curzon later gave meticulous thought to the outfit in which he would call on the emir of Afghanistan, including wellingtons, fake medals, spurs, a cocked hat, and, deliciously, ‘the most gigantic and swashbuckling sword I could find’. He would not have got through the door of today’s diplomatic assessment and recruitment centres, which tend to frown on swashbuckling swords. But such swaggering Flashman diplomats set out to study, adventure and conquer.

The Industrial Revolution was the engine for this Western expansion, giving Europe another surge forward. British entrepreneurs unleashed the power of steam and coal. Factories and gunboats, then later computers and nukes, allowed them to build economic muscle, project power and influence, and strike out.

In 1500, Europe’s future imperial powers – Britain, France, Spain, Portugal – controlled 10% of the world’s territories and generated just over 40% of its wealth. By 1913, at the height of empire, the West controlled almost 60% of the territories, which generated almost 80% of the wealth. While competition and scientific and technological advantage were key to success, the diplomats of the nineteenth century would have added another reason: the ability to spot opportunities, to negotiate a profitable peace, and to hold it together. They knew how to take that technology and turn it into raw power.

The job was still not of course without its dangers. British diplomat Alexander Burnes, a Hindi- and Persian-speaking Scot with a roving eye, was hacked to death by a mob of jealous husbands in Afghanistan in 1841. His colleague Charles Stoddart was imprisoned and executed for spying in Bukhara in 1842, following a failed mission to persuade the emir to free Russian slaves. Bertie Mitford, the grandfather of the famous sisters, was made to watch ritual disembowelment on arrival in Japan as ambassador in 1868 (perhaps it was this that prompted his granddaughter Nancy to ascribe to a character in one of her novels the opinion that ‘abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends’,6 (#litres_trial_promo) a view shared by her father David – and some modern politicians). The entire diplomatic corps was placed under siege during the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. Diplomatic papers record seventeen deaths among the English ‘King’s Messengers’, who transported the diplomatic bag, in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century.

The expectation of diplomatic hospitality also created its own challenges – 14,000 Persian merchants took up uninvited residence at the British legation in Tehran in 1906 as part of their effort to secure constitutional reform. Earlier, 300 of the shah’s wives and eunuchs had made a similar request for sanctuary. Sir Mortimer Durand, the British representative, was, he reported to London, ‘somewhat staggered’.

New rules gave a sense of greater purpose and historical context to diplomats, who could now make war as well as peace at the stroke of a pen. The Prussian chancellor Bismarck famously edited out the diplomatic niceties from a telegram from his emperor Wilhelm I to Napoleon III, thereby leaving its recipient furious, and triggering the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Future diplomats who could spend days negotiating the positioning of a comma in the Maastricht Treaty would have cooed with admiration at Bismarck’s later drafting success, following days of negotiation, in establishing his master as ‘German emperor’ rather than Wilhelm’s preferred ‘emperor of Germany’.

Diplomats and their masters also began to have to take much greater account of public opinion. Advisers started to offer judgements to their leaders as to which of their mistakes the public could accept, and which were unforgivable. These were not always well received by capitals. In 1919, Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon responded furiously to one such missive from his ambassador to Paris, saying, ‘I have always known you to be a cad, I now know you to be a liar.’7 (#litres_trial_promo) It has never been easy for envoys to speak truth unto power.

By the end of the nineteenth century, there was a new and increasingly influential player on the block. America began investing heavily in innovative naval technology. Steam-powered battleships with powerful armaments bought real-world diplomatic clout. They could also drag the new nation into war. When its battleship the USS Maine exploded for undetermined reasons in the harbour of Havana, the American press stoked war fever and blamed Spain. This gave a pretext for America to replace Spain as the dominant power in its own backyard, in countries such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam. America had arrived as a global power to rival the European states that had entrenched their positions at the Congress of Vienna.

Yet America’s ambitions remained opaque. As president, Thomas Jefferson wanted it both ways, to ‘enjoy the fruits of power without falling victim to the normal consequences of its exercise’.8 (#litres_trial_promo) Or as John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State in 1821, put it, America ‘goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.’9 (#litres_trial_promo) This dilemma at the heart of American foreign policy continues to this day.

The diplomatic system in 1815 – constructed with such care and swagger – looked robust enough on the eve of the First World War. Surveying regional tensions, diplomats assessed that there would need to be some accommodations to acknowledge shifts in power, but did not anticipate that conflict would shatter the genteel assumptions that underpinned their interactions. European diplomacy had got fat, entitled, and complacent.

So the British ambassador in Berlin continued his yachting expedition with the German kaiser even after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, triggering the Great War. The ambassador visited key ministers after the outbreak of conflict, and dined as usual that evening at his Residence in Berlin. When his meal was briefly disrupted by pesky protesters, his staff judged that the German emperor’s apology for the inconvenience was tardy. Having not arrived until ten the next morning, it ‘served to show what we had thought, that the emperor was not a gentleman’.10 (#litres_trial_promo)

After diplomacy’s finest century it was one thing to declare war, but quite another to misjudge diplomatic etiquette.

* (#ulink_d33b91d2-cd87-5fc3-8201-1c7e0d4b7d27) Within the FCO, the honour of CMG is known as ‘Call Me God’, and KCMG is ‘Kindly Call Me God’. GCMG is of course ‘God Calls Me God’.

† (#ulink_5f284937-a7f0-577d-8675-13395478d8b4) Pauline’s breast cup, in which she offered drinks to suitors, is still on display in the ambassador’s Residence, thus prompting many an awkward silence at drinks receptions.