[MUSIC]. Hello. I'm joined by Jason Dittmar of the University College London. Jason, think about your experience. How do you conceive diplomacy? What do you think it is? >> I think of diplomacy in fairly expansive terms. I try not to delimit it so much, as to provide room for diplomacy. So. So,I think of it in the broadest terms as any sort of interactions between people or things, in which those people or things are representative in some way of a broader kind of category or polity. >> Okay. And thinking about that, what does it look like when it's successful? How do you know diplomacys been successful? [SOUND] I mean, absent any specific context of diplomacy, I would say that really, to me, diplomacy has occurred and has gone well if both parties, or however many parties there are, have been changed in some way by the experience. Whether it's really minuscule stuff or whether its obviously a big agreement or something like that. >> What sort of temporal dimension do you see in regards to the success of diplomacy? >> That's an interesting question. I sort of think of diplomacy as occurring in a very sort of grounded empirical sense, right? So they're the specific encounters or interactions. Which obviously may be part of a longer process of trying to sort of enmesh polities together, or peoples, or whatever. But I would mostly foreground those kind of immediate counters, the sort of immediacy of it, the short-termness of it. >> And conversely, if you're thinking about perhaps the failure of diplomacy, how do we know when diplomacy hasn't worked? What are the sort of key markers in that regard. >> I mean, I would say, in a way it's the converse of my earlier statement. So, in other words, if the parties come away, either, less inclined to each other or less than meshed with one another, less understanding of one another. That would be a negative outcome. >> In thinking about your work on diplomacy, where else, or how you conceive your diplomacy, in what sort of forms of walks of life and what relationships between what sort of entities do you see diplomacy happening? >> Well, I think I see it everywhere which is why I like studying it. My specific sort of case studies have been both of what we might think of as conventional diplomacy state to state foreign ministry type. For and red carpets, but equally I like to look for diplomacy in areas where we don't traditionally describe it as diplomacy. So Intelligence cooperation. Military relations. The enmeshing of computer networks and databases. I think of those as diplomatic, equally as ambassadors shaking hands and doing that kind of a thing. We have this term, protocol in traditional diplomacy, which is this sort of rituals and performance of getting how you interact. A very rigid set of rules in which kind of ambassadors and heads of state meet. And it's interesting to look at all the other places where you see the term protocol pop up. So, for instance, in Internet networking where, again, a protocol is what enables computers to link up. And so I think we can think very broadly about the ways in which things come to be connected together and transformed in that process. >> So in that light, what do you think of the good characteristics of a diplomat. >> I find myself persuaded by William Connely's description of a seer >> And a seer for him is someone who has highly attuned sensibilities. So they both understand the really micro scaled nuance of the room in which the diplomatic encounter is occurring and the atmosphere, the circulation of affect. And equally they understand >> The macro scale forces that are sort of outside of the room, and yet which are shaping the events in that room. So economic developments, voter preferences, when the next election is occurring for the person in the room, they can understand all of that stuff. >> And combine it in a way that allows them to know exactly when to make a push or a nudge that takes an encounter from being unsuccessful diplomacy to being successful. Right? To transformative moments. That to me, is a good diplomat. >> So in that life. Who do you think of as a good diplomat? Who's an example of someone who admire in that regard? >> I think an example that comes to mind, and he's someone the audience will have heard of, is General Eisenhower, who prior to becoming president of the United States, was >> A well known [LAUGH] war hero in World War II, and what's interesting is he was the first supreme commander of NATO. And a couple of months before he took up that job, so after NATO had been created, but before he was officially in position. He went on a speaking tour, or a listening tour of >> European capitals, and after that he realized that there was this incredible anxiety in the air, about whether NATO could hang together, right? That this was a transformative moment, in terms of the creation of collective security across Western Europe and the North Atlantic region. But that is an act of faith. Right. These countries have to put their faith in each other. And he recognized that there was a great deal of anxiety about that and there was a moment in which it could break. That people would realize or think they would have to go their own way and would make decisions as such. And the moment would be lost. And so he made a real push. For this kind of more material form of diplomacy that I introduced earlier. Around the concept of interoperability. So he wanted to start standardizing all the weapons in NATO. So that they could fight together. So that there would be active steps people could take now to show that they were sort of enmeshing their militaries. Making them capable of fighting together. Against an imagined Soviet invasion. And so, it's both diplomatic in terms of bringing people to the table, and realizing how important that is in that moment. But it's also about the objects that constitute the states, the militaries, that by changing some of the fittings for gas tanks or the kinds of bullets that people use. That you could actually cement a relationship. And lock that in. Right? Which we see to this day, NATO has survived the Soviet threat and continues to exist in part because of that in meshing that Eisenhower set in train. >> Okay, thank you very much. >> Thank you. [MUSIC]
