Conference diplomacy and the impact of democratization

After three decades Europe reverted to conference diplomacy at the foreign ministerial level. The Congress of Paris of 1856 not only ended the Crimean War but also resulted in the codification of a significant amount of international law. As European powers extended their sway throughout the world, colonies and spheres of influence in areas remote from Europe came increasingly to preoccupy their diplomacy. Conferences in Berlin in 1878 and 1884–85 prevented conflagrations over the so-called “Eastern” and “African” questions—euphemisms, respectively, for intervention on behalf of Christian interests in the decaying Ottoman Empire and the carving up of Africa into European-ruled colonies. Furthermore, multilateral diplomacy was institutionalized in a permanent form. The Paris Congress created an International Commission of the Danube to match Vienna's 1815 Commission of the Rhine and established the Universal Telegraph Union (later the International Telecommunication Union). In 1874 the General Postal Union (later the Universal Postal Union) was established. Afterward, specialized agencies like these proliferated. The peace conferences at The Hague (1899–1907), which resulted in conventions aimed at codifying the laws of war and encouraging disarmament, were harbingers of the future.

During the 19th century the world underwent a series of political transformations, and diplomacy changed with it. In Europe power shifted from royal courts to cabinets. Kings were replaced by ministers at international meetings, and foreign policy became a matter of increasingly democratized politics. This, plus mass literacy and the advent of inexpensive newspapers, made foreign policy and diplomacy concerns of public opinion. Domestic politics thus gained increasing influence over European foreign policy making.

Meanwhile, European culture and its diplomatic norms spread throughout the world. Most Latin American colonies became independent, which increased the number of sovereign states. With their European heritage, Latin American countries adopted the existing system without question, as the United States had done earlier. The British Empire, through the East India Company, gnawed away at the Mughal dynasty and India's many independent states and principalities and then united all of the subcontinent for the first time under a single sovereignty. In the middle of the 19th century, an American naval flotilla forced Japan to open its society to the rest of the world. Afterward, Japan embarked on a rapid program of modernization based on the wholesale adoption of Western norms of political and economic behaviour, including European notions of sovereignty and diplomatic practice.

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