New styles of diplomacy

One result of the breakdown of old premises, mainly in new states, was that diplomatic immunity was breached, and diplomacy became a hazardous career. Disease was no longer the chief killer of diplomats, nor was overindulgence at court; the new hazards were murder, maiming, and kidnapping. Diplomats were a target because they represented states and symbolized privileged elites. Security precautions at embassies were doubled and redoubled but were never sufficient if host governments turned a blind eye to breaches of extraterritoriality. As the 20th century drew to a close, attacks on diplomatic missions and diplomats grew in scale and frequency. Terrorists succeeded in taking the staffs of some diplomatic missions hostage and in blowing up others, with great loss of life. Some embassies came to resemble fortresses.

Some new states also adopted the Soviet tactic of offensive behaviour as a tool of policy. The newest “new diplomacy” appealed, as the Soviets had done during the interwar period, over the heads of government to people in the opponent's camp; it tried to discredit governments by attributing ugly motives; and it sometimes trumpeted maximum demands in calculatedly offensive language as conditions for negotiation. Public diplomacy of this ilk was often noisy, bellicose, and self-righteous. The elaborate courtesy of sharply understated, unpublished notes wherein a government “viewed with concern” to convey strong objection was employed by only part of the diplomatic community. The use of derogatory terms such as war criminal, imperialist, neocolonialist, hegemon, racist, and mass murderer not surprisingly proved more likely to enrage than to conciliate those to whom these terms were applied.

As diplomacy raised its voice in public, propaganda, abetted by technology, became a key tool. Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America broadcast one message to the communist bloc; proselytizing Christian churches and so-called “national liberation movements” capitalized upon transistor radios to spread their messages to other areas. In cities, television became crucial, as images provided an immediacy that words alone could not convey. Statesmen lost no opportunity to be filmed, and ambassadors emerged from the shadows to appear on news programs or before legislative committees to expound their country's policy. Mass demonstrations were staged for the benefit of television and featured banners in English, which had become the most important international language. When the United States invaded Panama in 1989, the Soviet Union protested on the American-owned television company Cable News Network, which was watched by most foreign ministries and world leaders.

The disagreement on how to conduct diplomacy applied also to who should practice it. In the 1970s the United States, Australia, and some other industrialized democracies (as well as South Africa) broadened recruitment beyond the old elites and emphasized the development of foreign services representative of their populations' ethnic diversity. Others, such as Brazil, France, India, and Japan, continued to recruit self-consciously elite services. China and the Soviet Union continued to emphasize political criteria as well as intellectual skills. Overall, however, embassy positions, from the ambassadorial level down, increasingly were filled by professional diplomats. Only the United States and a handful of other countries continued the practice of appointing wealthy amateurs as ambassadors, treating the most senior diplomatic positions as political spoils to be conferred on financial contributors after each election.

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