Hello, I'm here with Naoko Shimazu from Birkbeck College. So, Naoko, in your experience in your research, what do you understand diplomacy to be? >> Well, it's actually quite a complicated process in that when I first studied, when I was a student 30 years ago, I very much understood diplomacy as something which was almost purely high politics. Involved statesmen, decision makers, the kind of, very much along the lines of foreign policy analysis. And that was probably because my background was all in international relations. And then I became a historian. And over my career as a historian, I began to wonder whether one could understand diplomacy in ways which were more expansive than what i had learned as a student. And so recently, I've actually been working on this idea of making the study of diplomacy as a more interactive process. And when I mean interactive, I don't just mean the interaction between, you know, obviously, statesmen, diplomats, and the people in the realm of high politics, but what I'm very interested in is the interaction between the diplomats, statesmen, the kind of people who are seen to be the primary performers of diplomacy with the public. So, I'm very interested in the kind of what's called audience or reception of diplomacy, and how the diplomatic process can actually be affected by this interaction that goes on between the high politics type of performance and the audience or the local populations who may be there, looking at diplomatic events. And others who are involved in diplomacy in a much wider sense of the word. >> Thanks. And in terms of your work in that line, in that evolution of your thinking, what do you see as the sort of key components of successful diplomacy? >> Well, I mean, what I'm particularly interested in now is in this reception of diplomacy by the public. So this actually puts quite a lot of emphasis on diplomatic events as performative events. So in other words, when diplomats or statesmen, whatever you see on television, news, or newspapers, that's the kind of diplomacy I'm interested in at the moment, not so much the behind the scenes, which is more of the traditional kind of diplomacy. And so if you look at the public face of diplomacy, then what really matters is actually how you convey your message as diplomat or as a statesman. And so the performance in front of the camera, in front of journalists, count enormously in the way that I study the interaction between diplomats and the audiences. >> And taking that one stage further, public diplomacy has gained a certain currency within the field of diplomatic studies. Is that something that you found a particular sort of historical resonance with, or is that more perhaps an indulgence of the terminology as you would see it? >> I think it's, I've been thinking about this. What's the difference between what I'm trying to do and public diplomacy? And public diplomacy is to me something which is officially initiated policy for public relations. So, there might be an arm within the foreign ministry. Within the State Department there is one. And I first became aware of all this when I was studying the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, because the American delegation was very much geared up for this kind of public relations kind of diplomacy. And they even appointed somebody called George Creel in order to head the special office set up for this. So Americans were very aware of this, particularly the end of the war, as very much a propaganda exercise in trying to get the American perspective on peace across to the audiences in the rest of the world, particularly in Europe. So there is obviously, even within the official realm, public diplomacy has been around for quite a while now. And who knows? In previous centuries that I'm not, I don't study those fields, but there might have been much earlier forms of this kind of awareness that whatever you convey in diplomacy to the general public is actually an important aspect of it. >> Thanks. So conversely, what would you see as the markers of failing diplomacy or failed diplomacy? How do we know when diplomacy's not worked? >> Well, I think this whole thing about whether or not diplomacy or a diplomatic act or event is successful depends entirely on the kind of perspective one takes. So for example, this work that I'm doing research on now, which is the Bandung Conference of 1955. There are two completely opposing views on this conference. One view basically says that it was a very symbolically successful conference, you know, that attracted global attention and that put Afro-Asia on the map in this immediate post-colonial period. But then the other side for decades during the Cold War period used to say that this conference was a failed political project, because it actually didn't lead to anything concrete. For example, there was no treaty negotiations, so no agreements on any new international organizations being set up as a result of the Bandung Conference. And so it depends on where you start. If you think that a certain diplomatic act has to end with a concrete objective, then of course that becomes the guiding principle. But if you think that diplomacy is something which is not just connected to immediate aims and objectives, which seem to be concrete, but generates this kind of continuous environment for interaction and kind of at least cordial relations between states, so that they can keep on talking to each other, then I'm not so sure whether one could say that something is definitively a failure or definitively a success. So I think it's, to me, it's sort of much more complicated than I initially thought. [LAUGH] >> Great, thanks very much. Again, in your studies, in your experience, and perhaps broadening it out from the sort of just the academic dimension, are there examples that you would point to of particularly successful individuals who conducted diplomacy, or groups of individuals, or ways that diplomacy can be identified as having had a particular impact? >> Well, I've been quite struck, through my current research of how successful the Chinese Premier of the time in 1955 Zhou Enlai was as a diplomat. I just think he was just absolutely amazing. Mainly because People's Republic of China was invited to the Bandung Conference and there was quite a lot of concern about the fact that Red China was going to be represented at Bandung. And Americans and the pro-Western allied states, there was quite a lot of tension surrounding Zhou's participation. But he managed to convince or persuade almost everybody, including the State Department behind the scenes, that actually PRC wasn't too bad after all, there is this kind of human face. It's not just the human face in Zhou's case, he was particularly this sort of this sophisticated, elegant, suave diplomat who could actually charm anybody, and sort of come across as being very reasonable. And so at the moment, I think he is probably my top number one successful [LAUGH] diplomat. >> So, Naoko, picking up on your understanding of public diplomacy there, how do you see that as having had an influence on the outcome of some of the work that you've been doing? >> Well, I see public diplomacy as something which has been going on for quite a while. Certainly, at least it goes back to 1919 Paris Peace Conference, when the American delegation to negotiate peace actually did have a special officer assigned to that task. And there was a little office within the American delegation to deal with public diplomacy issues. And the person in charge was this man called George Creel. And there are works written on this, and it's quite a famous case that the Americans, and sometimes it was a very early awareness that public diplomacy was also a very important instrument of diplomacy and it was not something that was incidental [LAUGH] or something that just happened to have good publicity. But I think what I'm trying to do, on the one hand, I completely understand this, obviously there is this thing called public diplomacy, but it's still very much a officially initiated thing. So it's a state policy, it's part of the foreign policy to have a public diplomacy aspect in its diplomatic conduct. But what I'm interested in is actually how statesmen conduct themselves when they are at diplomatic events with media attention, and what do the public see or understand diplomacy from what they see as a performance that's being enacted in front of them on the television. So sometimes it's quite unintentionally successful diplomacy, if you want to use this word, successful failure in diplomacy. But at other times, it's very much also to do with the charisma of a particular statesman. So some statesmen are just naturally more charismatic, and easier to approach and access people, and therefore, they create a special atmosphere, whereas others may not be that successful. So I think this kind of personal bonding is not just between the leaders or between the people who actually doing the negotiating, but it's also as a face of this kind of performative diplomacy. It's something that goes beyond the just the immediate confines of the diplomatic kind of realm, but it goes to the much more open to the public realm. >> Thank you very much. [MUSIC]
