The Evolution of Diplomacy
Walter R. Roberts
The conduct of diplomacy has changed significantly over the past sixty years.
Prior to World War II, diplomacy was essentially a government-to-government
relationship. Since the war, it has broadened to include a government-
to – foreign people connection, now called public diplomacy.1
I
The word diplomacy has its roots in Greek and was later used by the French
(diplomatie) to refer to the work of a negotiator on behalf of a sovereign. There
is a long history of diplomatic activity going back at least two millennia. Sovereigns
sent envoys to other sovereigns for various reasons: to prevent wars,
to cease hostilities, or merely to continue peaceful relations and further economic
exchanges. The first foreign ministry was created in Paris by Cardinal
Richelieu in 1626. Other European countries followed the French example.
As absolute monarchs gave way to constitutional monarchies and republics,
embassies and legations became more institutionalized all over Europe, and
by the end of the nineteenth century European-style diplomacy had been
adopted throughout the world.
Mediterranean Quarterly 17:3  DOI 10.1215/10474552-2006-015
Copyright 2006 by Mediterranean Affairs, Inc.
1. I have witnessed this evolution of diplomacy both as a citizen and as a diplomat. As the latter,
I discussed this development on several occasions with George F. Kennan, one of America’s top
diplomats and a scholar of diplomacy, who was ambassador in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, from 1961 to
1963 while I was the senior public diplomat at the embassy.
Walter R. Roberts is a co-founder of the Public Diplomacy Institute of George Washington University,
where he taught a course on public diplomacy for ten years. His government career included
service as associate director of the US Information Agency and appointment by Presidents George
H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton to the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.
56   Mediterranean Quarterly: Summer 2006
Large countries had embassies in other large countries and legations in
smaller states. Embassies were headed by ambassadors and legations by
ministers. Embassies and legations were strictly limited in their contacts with
the ordinary citizens of the receiving state. These limitations were codified
in the Havana Convention of 1927, which under the heading “Duties of Diplomatic
Officers” stated that these officers must not interfere in the internal
affairs of the receiving state and must confine their relations to the foreign
ministry of the host state. Thus, in their host country, diplomatic personnel
from abroad had no relations with the public at large. National day celebrations
at an embassy or legation were attended (aside from other diplomats)
by locally resident citizens from that country and, for protocol reasons, by
officials of the foreign ministry of the receiving state. What a difference from
today, when our Fourth of July celebrations overseas are heavily attended by
citizens — prominent or otherwise — from the host country.
II
I was born in Austria. My father was a reasonably well-known personality in
Vienna — a former professor, later the editor in chief of a respected economic
weekly, and a playwright. My parents were socially quite active. Never once
did I hear them say that they had been invited to an embassy or legation, or
that they had met an ambassador or minister of a foreign country. My father
once observed that there were two American envoys in Vienna — the minister
(the United States had a legation in Vienna at that time) and the resident New
York Times correspondent. He was acquainted with the latter but apparently
did not know the former.
I, who was interested in international affairs, never visited a legation in
Vienna — except when I needed a visa. I remember once calling the American
legation because I wanted to write a letter to a man from Chicago whom
I had met on a vacation and inquired whether they had a Chicago telephone
book. No, they did not, but they told me they had one from New York.
Upon leaving Austria, I studied in Cambridge, England. I do not re­member
a single instance when an ambassador or embassy officer accredited
to the Court of St. James’s came to Cambridge for a conference, a speech,
Roberts: The Evolution of Diplomacy   57
or a debate during my years there. That was simply not done prior to World
War II.
If we were not exposed to foreign propaganda — and my interpretation of
that word is totally benign — by embassies and legations, were there other
foreign influences that we felt in our daily lives? Radio, invented late in the
nineteenth century, gave one state the means to reach the people of another
country without immigration and customs controls and without involving local
diplomatic missions. However, it was initially used for that purpose only by
two totalitarian regimes: the Soviet and later the Nazi governments.
At that time, broadcasts were generally transmitted only in the local languages
with no intention of their being heard in other countries. The Soviet
and Nazi radio organizations violated that principle and broadcast in languages
other than their own. But everyone — on whatever political side the
listener stood — knew the Soviet and Nazi intentions. Only when Nazi broadcasts
became too meddlesome did Western countries begin to broadcast in
languages other than their own — with the British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC) leading the way in the last years before the outbreak of World War II.
The funds for those broadcasts were provided by the British Foreign Office.
That office likewise furnished resources for the British Council, an organization
also created before World War II to further British cultural relations with
foreign countries. Both the BBC External Service and the British Council still
exist today. Radio broadcasts to, and cultural relations with, foreign countries
are very much part of British public diplomacy, financed by (although not
located in) the Foreign Office.
Nazi propaganda (here my interpretation of the word is by no means
benign), particularly in Latin America, had an impact also on the United
States. As a counter-measure, President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938 established
an Inter-Departmental Committee for Scientific and Cultural Cooperation,
and the State Department created a Division of Cultural Relations. It
also began in the late thirties, as an antidote to Nazi efforts, to send information
materials to American missions abroad with the intention of having them
distributed not only to officials of the host country and to diplomats but also
to press organizations.
In 1940, after the Nazis occupied France and the Low Countries, a new
58   Mediterranean Quarterly: Summer 2006
agency was established, later known as the Coordinator of Inter-American
Affairs under Nelson Rockefeller. Its mission was to further hemispheric solidarity,
including cultural relations with Latin American states. The targets
were not only the governments but also opinion leaders and the populations
at large through the establishment of American and binational libraries. Also
at that time, the State Department decided to create press attaché positions, at
first in three US missions in Latin America: Brazil, Peru, and Mexico. Parallel
discussion took place in the State Department regarding creating cultural
attaché posts, but Assistant Secretary of State George Messersmith voiced
doubts since the term had acquired “a certain amount of odium.” Prior to his
post as assistant secretary, Messersmith was American minister in Vienna.
From that vantage point he could observe how the German government had
recruited Nazi party propagandists for cultural attaché posts in its embassies
and legations. (Cultural relations officers — that was their title then — were
finally appointed in 1941 at several US missions in Latin America and subsequently
at other American embassies and legations).
The Second World War had not yet engulfed the United States, but peace
no longer dominated the atmosphere in America; hence the restrictions on
diplomacy were loosened. Government-to-people activities that previously
were acceptable only in wartime were allowed. There is a long history of
such activities during hostilities, often called psychological warfare or morale
operations, going back to the ancient Greek states when it was common for
one country to try to break the will of the people of an enemy state during
war. Homer described soldiers carving messages in stone in an attempt to
persuade enemy fighters to abandon resistance.
A couple of weeks after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941,
Roosevelt created the Coordinator of Information, which was largely an intelligence
agency, headed by Col. “Wild Bill” Donovan. But it also contained a
Foreign Information Service (FIS) under playwright Robert Sherwood, who,
among other activities, reorganized the dispatch of information materials to
US missions abroad. By that time, however, their reach was limited due to
wartime conditions almost everywhere in the world. Within a few months,
Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States itself was at war.
In 1942, three years after immigrating to the United States, I joined
what later became the Voice of America, a radio organization established
Roberts: The Evolution of Diplomacy   59
a few weeks after Pearl Harbor within Sherwood’s FIS, through which the
American government attempted, via shortwave, to reach the people of many
countries.
III
When the Second World War ended, an amazing development occurred.
Diplomacy was reestablished, but the government-to-people programs, previously
confined to wartime, continued. There are several theories as to why
this happened. The two most often cited are that the war had speeded up
the information revolution, which now dominated practically the entire globe,
and that the world was basically divided into Western and Soviet orbits, with
both trying to extend their influence.
Particularly in the defeated countries, the victorious powers launched large
information and cultural programs to steer these countries in the direction of
the occupying states. Such programs were instituted not only in Germany,
Austria, and Japan but also in other countries, whether friendly, neutral, or
not so friendly. The positions of press and cultural attachés, which had been
the subject of intense deliberations only a few years previously, were added
to embassy staffs as a matter of course. Nobody talked about the Havana
Convention. In fact, in my professional career I never heard it referred to by
either the United States or foreign sides.
While it was normal before World War II to expect an embassy to confine
its relations to the host government, it was suddenly perfectly acceptable
to add an embassy-to-people element in the mission’s staffing. Also, it
had become customary that countries around the world would broadcast on
shortwave to other countries, not only in the sending country’s language but
also in other languages, which, under the Havana Convention, would have
been regarded as interference in a country’s internal affairs. Thus, the Voice
of America, a wartime creation, stayed in operation after World War II end-
ed — and is still today an important American public diplomacy tool.
When Austria reopened its legation in Washington in 1946, a curious
event occurred: the Austrian government sent the press attaché to advance
the effort, not the administrative officer or the political officer. Obviously,
Austria believed its most important task in Washington was to further its
60   Mediterranean Quarterly: Summer 2006
image, which had been so badly damaged before and during the Second
World War.
IV
As embassies and legations around the world expanded their information and
cultural activities aimed at the people of the host countries, an interesting
phenomenon became apparent: the Soviet Union and its satellites became
avid supporters of the objectives of the old Havana Convention. Press and
cultural attachés, they said, were perfectly acceptable at embassies and legations
but they had to confine their activities to officials of the host country.
And they had to be diplomats, that is, members of the foreign office of the
sending country. That became a problem when the US Information Agency
(USIA) was created in 1953 and information activities were transferred from
the State Department to USIA. The Soviets refused to grant USIA officers
diplomatic status, resulting in the ridiculous situation where USIA officers
appointed to serve in the American embassy in Moscow had to be transferred
literally to the State Department payroll in order to be assigned to the Soviet
capital.
During my tour in Yugoslavia in the 1960s, I encountered similar restrictive
problems. Even though Yugoslavia had been expelled from the Soviet
bloc in 1948, it continued to have a communist regime. I was called to the
foreign office several times and told that I had overstepped my diplomatic
status when I had invited a Yugoslav journalist to lunch or spoken to a theater
director about putting on an American play. Foreign office officials would
tell me that I was in violation of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic
Relations. There is nothing in the text of that convention that would exclude
public diplomacy functions of a diplomat. As a matter of fact, a paragraph of
the convention states that a diplomat’s function included “promoting friendly
relations between the sending State and the receiving State, and developing
their economic, cultural and scientific relations.” Surprisingly, this paragraph
was proposed by the Yugoslav delegation to the Vienna conference. Had the
Yugoslavs done their homework and had they quoted to me the 1927 Havana
Convention, they would have been on much firmer ground.
Roberts: The Evolution of Diplomacy   61
In 1961, the Yugoslav attitude toward public diplomacy activities of foreign
embassies in Belgrade manifested itself in the passage of a press law
that restricted diplomatic personnel from any relationship with the Yugoslav
public at large. Under that law, diplomats were prohibited from communicating
with the Yugoslav people. A diplomat’s function was to speak to the
Yugoslav foreign office. All information and cultural programs directed at the
Yugoslav people were to be conducted by nondiplomats. That essentially put
the public diplomacy activities of the United States out of business. The British
programs, however, were allowed because the British Council representative
was not a member of the British diplomatic service. The country most
affected was the United States. When we protested the law, Yugoslav officials
told us that it was enacted because the Soviet embassy interfered in Yugoslav
internal affairs. (I am quite certain that the Yugoslavs told the Russians that
the law was directed at us).
It was at that time that George Kennan arrived in Belgrade as President
John Kennedy’s ambassador. Kennan, who had joined the US Foreign Service
in the mid-1920s immediately after graduating from Princeton University,
still believed in the old interpretation of diplomacy, namely, that it was confined
to a government-to-government relationship. After all, prior to coming to
Belgrade, he had not been exposed to the information revolution in his diplomatic
career. After World War II, he had served twice in Moscow — a highly
restrictive atmosphere — the second time as ambassador, and left the Foreign
Service in 1953 to join the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
In Belgrade he found himself in charge of an embassy organization the
likes of which he had never encountered before: a relatively large information
and cultural program with several USIA officers integrated into his embassy.
I do not think he believed initially that they ought to be diplomats. He most
likely sympathized with the British system in which the British Council conducted
the cultural program overseas outside the embassies. As far as the
press was concerned, Kennan was truly the traditional diplomat. He did not
think that the press ought to be privy to diplomatic exchanges. He kept away
from the American press and was bemused by our relations with the Yugoslav
press. Initially, he did not think that diplomats ought to engage in these
kinds of activities, but he was rather proud that his embassy conducted cul-
62   Mediterranean Quarterly: Summer 2006
tural and information programs. He soon realized that diplomacy had fundamentally
changed since the twenties and thirties when he was a rising star in
the US Foreign Service.
Kennan’s reaction to the Yugoslav press law promulgated shortly before
his arrival in Belgrade was curious. I have always believed that at first he
actually agreed with the law’s objective. But since this was a direct challenge
to his embassy, he effectively supported the public diplomacy staff and its
directorate in Washington and was most helpful in assisting us in formulating
a “Balkan solution,” which allowed us to continue to operate, albeit under
different organizational provisions.
In his own mind, Kennan split his personality between Kennan the diplomat
and Kennan the historian and scholar. One day he mentioned to me
that the Yugoslavs had so far failed to recognize him as a scholar. Why, he
asked, had Belgrade University not invited him to speak there? I replied that
to the Yugoslavs he was the ambassador of the United States and his relations
were with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or, if necessary, with Tito, the
chief of state, personally. But, I added, if he wanted an invitation, it probably
could be arranged. And so it was. Kennan gave two brilliant lectures (in
Serbo-Croatian, albeit with a Russian accent — he was completely fluent in
Russian) that were later published as a book. He compared the visits of two
Frenchmen in the nineteenth century, one to the United States (Tocqueville)
and the other to Russia (Marquis de Custine) and their impressions as contained
in their respective books. Kennan rationalized that he did not lecture
as ambassador but as a professor of the Institute for Advanced Study.
V
After the Second World War, when it became acceptable, in peacetime, for
one government to try to influence the people of another country and to do
this from an embassy, the nature of diplomacy had fundamentally changed.
The programs that were used for this government-to-people relationship were
originally called “information and cultural programs.” But within a relatively
short time, professionals of the information and cultural activities realized
that these programs were an integral part of diplomacy and hence began to
call them cultural diplomacy. Soon, however, it became apparent that this
Roberts: The Evolution of Diplomacy   63
was too narrow a term because it did not seem to include international broadcasting
and the policy information (press attaché) functions. By the late sixties,
the broader term public diplomacy was accepted by more and more professionals.
Indeed, a major study in 1975 on the future of the US information
and cultural programs chaired by Frank Stanton (former president of CBS),
with me as project director, used the term public diplomacy for these activities.
When two years later the House International Relations Subcommittee
under the chairmanship of Congressman Dante Fascell (Democrat of Florida)
conducted hearings on the subject, they were called “Public Diplomacy and
the Future.” However, not until the tragic events of 9/11 was the term public
diplomacy accepted by the American press and, indeed, within the US government.
Now it has become a household word.
If public diplomacy is an integral part of diplomacy, it is logical that the
“old” (that is, traditional) diplomacy had to undergo a change, too. And
indeed it has. For example, the role of an ambassador has changed enormously.
Whereas before World War II embassies and legations were almost
exclusively staffed by State Department employees, in today’s embassies only
a minority of employees are State officers. The majority is now made up of
employees of other departments, including Treasury, Defense, Justice, Commerce,
Labor, and Agriculture as well as staff from the Central Intelligence
Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation. The ambassador has become
the manager of diverse components of US government employees.
The information revolution has shifted the negotiating role from the embassies
to Washington and turned the secretary of state into the principal negotiator.
He or she can travel at the spur of the moment to any crisis center in
hours; he or she can pick up the telephone and talk on secure lines to his or
her counterpart, or even interact through a videoconference.
Because public diplomacy now plays such an important role in every
embassy’s activities, the ambassador’s public outreach role has expanded.
While the traditional objective of maintaining a good relationship with the
host foreign office continues, in today’s environment an ambassador also
strives to achieve a friendly press and to be accepted by the cultural community
of the host country.
In each capital of the world the inclusion of public diplomacy in the concept
of diplomacy has had its repercussions. As far as this country is con-
64   Mediterranean Quarterly: Summer 2006
cerned, many learned papers have been written by governmental and nongovernmental
organizations strongly suggesting that the antiquated culture of
the State Department has to change. While some progress is noticeable, a lot
of work is still ahead.
Diplomacy has been defined as one of several means by which countries
pursue their foreign policy objectives. Its history is full of successes as well
as failures. All the diplomacy in the world could not prevent World War I or
World War II. On the other hand, diplomacy (including public diplomacy)
was successful in keeping the Cold War from escalating into a hot war, with
the Cuban missile crisis as a prime example.
American diplomacy’s newest challenges are terrorism and anti-Americanism.
Traditional diplomacy is hard at work to prevent terrorism, and public
diplomacy invests a great deal of effort to reduce anti-Americanism. Much
has been said recently that anti-Americanism abroad is due to the failure of
public diplomacy. This, of course, is nonsense — as is the proposition that
public diplomacy can eradicate anti-Americanism. Research has shown that
the causes of anti-Americanism are varied but mostly policy related. If sufficiently
financed and properly executed, public diplomacy can dampen these
sentiments by attempting to deal with the causes of anti-Americanism.
The United States is, of course, not going to change its policies just because
other peoples do not like them. But in formulating and articulating our policies,
we can keep the views of others in mind. Indeed, we have always done
so as far as the opinions of foreign governments are concerned. In today’s
information age, however, we must also consider the views of foreign peoples,
because of their rising influence upon their governments, even in autocratic
countries. Skillfully conducted and adequately resourced, this “new
diplomacy” — of which public diplomacy has become an integral part — will
continue to contribute toward a safer and more peaceful world.