by Kenneth Weisbrode

After sharing an essay I recently wrote about diplomatic memoirs, I heard from a reader who pointed out that I had written explicitly about setting but not so about place. He was right. I had emphasized that diplomats are accustomed to thinking and working in multiple time zones, but not that the nature of their imagination and their consciousness may be more tied to place (and space) than time.

Some years ago I gave a talk on the subject of the diplomatic cable. The people in the audience knew that the language of most cables is a dual language meant to relate one set of conditions to another – classic mediation, in other words. But it did not seem to occur to them that diplomats represent as they mediate, and mediation does more than relate. It also interprets, in the literal sense. Mediation elicits and evokes meaning as well as significance, belief, and sometimes affection in familiar terms. The best-written diplomatic cables do all that. They prize accuracy in representation but they also aim, perhaps more implicitly than they represent, to persuade the reader ‘back home’ to perceive subjects in the way the diplomat depicts them. So, the stamps on diplomatic cables may represent different time zones, but the operative term is ‘zone’, not ‘time’. Diplomatic communication does not always compel the mind in terms of the past, present, and future; but it almost always summons different places at roughly the same time.

How do diplomats think in place? Does it differ from the way that other people do? If so, how?

Answering those questions need not require the training of a neuroscientist but it may benefit from scholarship in psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography, literature, philosophy, and a few other disciplines. (Do economists think much about place? Paul Krugman was one who did before he became a popular polemicist, and he was then considered an outlier for not assuming that transportation costs remain constant.)

Richard Neustadt and Ernest May co-authored a useful book about policy-making called Thinking in Time, which is popular among social scientists. In it the authors offer a few case studies in historical thinking, from the perspective of policymakers; or, as it suggests, ‘placing’ oneself in their shoes in and over time. It would be fair to say that many of the people who read this book use it to learn practical lessons. Yet, as the authors note, it is also useful, perhaps even more useful to historians for revising their own thinking about the best ways to reconstruct the mental worlds of historical actors. Understanding how these actors think in time requires not only a high degree of empathy but also a method that interprets the influence of biography, memory, and individual as well as collective experience on the biases and judgments that enter into policy choices and decisions.

Doing all this for place is difficult. Place is an emotional, a spiritual, a romantic, and for some a sacred concept. Most people feel rather than think in place. Diplomats, like other transnational actors (migrants, expatriates, tourists, journalists), can sound detached or even cynical about people and their surroundings, but they are rarely this way about places per se. Places are sites of curiosity and sometimes of mastery and dominance. They are sensed and perceived intuitively, organically. Their meaning and significance derive from sacred beliefs and ceremonies as much as, or usually more than, physical and material necessities. So, they pre-exist and, to an extent, exist apart from the social structures and political systems that define them. Those include the diplomatic profession, which is rare in requiring its practitioners to master multiple place-identities in public.

Yet, for some diplomats, there is no one spiritual place or homeland. Like Thomas Mann’s character, Tonio Kröger, they may feel ‘out of place’ no matter where they go, or how far they go to overcome or escape that feeling. For others, feeling at home, even in exile, is more of a choice. A diplomat who lived most of his life overseas once told me that he feared going home to the USA because, he said, ‘once I do that I’ll shut the door forever’. (He did.)

This is to say that diplomats learn to interpret and portray the ways of various places disinterestedly as they also learn to live in them. Thinking in place, therefore, is their primary vocation and not the means to an independent end, but at the same time it can also be their avocation. However, in contrast to setting, character, plot, and theme as I described them in my essay on diplomatic memoirs, place is not used by diplomats to invert their histories in quite the same way. Rather, they depict and reflect upon it internally as well as externally, but always right side up.

How might a scholar reconstruct such thinking? It may be said to exist generally on three levels:

• The macro: The mental maps of diplomats and of their political masters, and the diplomats’ professional and personal formation (Arabists, China-hands, etc.)
• The micro: The settings of diplomatic activity: ministry, residence, diplomatic quarter, embassy row, etc.
• The interstitial: The multilateral organizations and the sites of diplomatic negotiations

The task of the diplomat is to translate the thinking of one place (or set of places) to another, and across all three levels, as much as it is to persuade counterparts to move from one sphere, of non-collaboration, to another, of accord. This is different from the task of the policy-maker who thinks in time. The latter individual (or government) transposes the axioms from a choice or decision taken in the past onto a current problem. Translation is not the same thing as transposition. That is not to say that diplomats don’t also transpose, or, better put, transform both terms into near synonyms. Diplomacy’s great twentieth-century achievement was to transpose progressive ideology onto international relations by substituting administration for politics, and to translate territorial ‘questions’ into temporal ‘challenges’ that are more peaceably managed. (The historian John Lukacs helpfully reminds us that both ‘nostalgia’ and ‘progress’ mainly applied to place before they applied to time.)

Describing diplomatic place and time in this way raises the subject of determinism. Does thinking in terms of past axioms and other generalities determine behavior more or less powerfully than thinking in multiple places at once? Place names are of course historical, and the historian must conclude (sic) that geographical consciousness depends on particular circumstances; there are no hard behavioral rules here, just as there is no universal answer to the question that asks which of the three levels of place-thinking named above matters the most. However, diplomacy tends to blur the lines between causal and conditional factors in history more than many other activities and professions do. This point is not academic so much as it is commonsensical. Someone living on a mountaintop sees, thinks, feels, and therefore, acts, differently than someone who lives in a tropical jungle. You don’t have to be an environmental determinist to say so. My view has long been that diplomats, their institutions, and their practices at once reflect their inner sense of place, and define and prescribe that sense backward and forward, reciprocally, in time. Diplomats are not unique in having this capacity, but they are special in devoting their lives to perfecting it.

Thinking and feeling about place are inseparable but distinct activities. A good diplomat must report, represent, and mediate between them as well, taking as much care not to ‘go native’ as to master the native mind as adroitly as possible. The historian who reconstructs thoughts and feelings about place must do the same, but in reverse, through the eyes of the diplomat-subject but also with the historian’s own self-appointed senses of historical objectivity and geographic sensibility. Just as a military historian ought to spend time seeing and feeling the contours of a battlefield, the diplomatic historian can’t entirely rely on virtual travel to reconstruct the diplomatic imagination. Diplomacy itself is a cultural landscape. It also needs empathetic and well-trained surveyors, cartographers, geographers, and historians.

Sources:

Richard Cobb, A Sense of Place, London, 1975; Laurence Durrell, Spirit of Place, London, 1969; Alan K. Henrikson, “The Geography of Diplomacy,” in Colin Flint, ed., The Geography of War and Peace, Oxford, 2005; Barbara Keys, “The Diplomat’s Two Minds: Deconstructing a Foreign Policy Myth,” Diplomatic History, January 2020; Ian Klinke, Life, Earth, Colony, Ann Arbor, 2023; Paul Krugman, Geography and Trade, Cambridge, MA, 1991; John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness, New York, 1968; Jeff Malpas, ed., The Intelligence of Place, London, 2015; Fiona McConnell, “Rethinking the Geographies of Diplomacy,” Diplomatica, April 2019; Iver B. Neumann, At Home with the Diplomats, Ithaca, NY, 2012; and Diplomatic Sites, London, 2013; Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time, New York, 1986; David Paull Nickles, Under the Wire, Cambridge, MA, 2003; Giles Scott-Smith, “Some Notes on Mobility,” Diplomatic History, June 2021; Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place, Minneapolis, 1977; Herman van der Wusten and Virginie Mamadouh, “The Geography of Diplomacy,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, Oxford, 2010; Ramy Youssef, Die Anerkennung von Grenzen, Frankfurt, 2020.