But current concepts and practices of diplomacy are increasingly failing us. How do we govern in an age where digital advances are upending established notions of sovereignty, space and authority? In the face of global challenges that require thoughtful collective action, traditional Westphalian models of international politics are increasingly inadequate. We need to fully grasp that diplomacy is a phenomenon that far exceeds its everyday meaning for citizens as a remote realm of foreign policy and distant decisions about war and peace. Instead, it is the most vital vector for humans’ individual and collective growth and progress. It makes and breaks human and planetary flourishing; it brokers knowledge exchange and trade, and the spread of philosophies, religions, sciences and technologies that can enable better and more fulfilling lives for the greatest possible amount of people.
We need a new compass for human and planetary flourishing. We cannot flourish without a new diplomatics that empowers us to re-connect to ourselves, each other and the rich diversity of social, political and educational institutions that variously mediate people’s life in different regions of the world.
Diplomatics (or “diplomatic” in British English) is different from diplomacy. It is an academic field whose original remit was ascertaining the creation, form and authenticity of charters and diplomas issued by royal and papal chanceries in early modern Europe. Inspired by this traditional field and its emphasis on diplomatic trustworthiness, we should create a new academic field of diplomatics as a tool designed to support human and planetary flourishing. Diplomatics should create new global knowledge that draws on fields ranging from history to political science, neuroscience to philosophy, psychology and economics, and anthropology and sociology to studies of the world’s major regions.
Our new diplomatics deploys three vectors for research and impact. First, formulating a theory of diplomatic intelligence, which extends a person’s analytic and logical skills to include other social and emotional talents that humans and societies require to flourish — such as effective emotional self-regulation and self-awareness, interpersonal communication skills, stress and conflict resilience, complex decision-making, leadership skills, and, most of all, pursuit of values that serve the common good. Second, gathering historical wisdom on the best strategies furthering human flourishing from the histories of the world’s societies in deep time and space and the rich diversity of diplomatic concepts and practices they have developed and tested over millennia. And third, designing strategies for renewing trust in the people, institutions and media that connect us locally, regionally and globally — a pressing task in the age of fake news, cyberwarfare and the deeply fragmented and polarised social realities we currently inhabit.
Diplomatic intelligence requires people to rise from the individual and interpersonal level to value-based actions that serve communities, societies and even states. It has deep philosophical anchoring in what humans do best, rooted in our species’s gregarious nature as the Aristotelian “social animal” (ζῷον πολιτικόν), the Confucian “superior person” (junzi 君子) or the “perfected human being” (al-insān al-kāmil الإنسان الكامل) in Islam. All of these embrace “serving the common good” as part of “individual fulfillment” — and are at odds with the idealised “rational agent”, supposedly acting autonomously only out of self-interest and independently of any relational considerations, which is still assumed by most scholars in economics, political science or sociology.
Training humans’ diplomatic intelligence takes time and effort, for sure. It requires individual effort and the efforts of surrounding communities and institutions. However, leaving them untrained results in self-centred “rational agents” who will ultimately be unable to fully flourish as humans, along with many other species, on this planet.
A central skill of diplomatic intelligence is projecting and building trust, often across difficult borders. Legal documents are necessary but not sufficient. A new diplomatics will uncover new global knowledge about the strategies developed by people in various cultures and time periods which furthered peace-brokering, enhanced knowledge exchange (rather than just trade) and encouraged productive symbiosis. Philologists, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, economists and in particular experts in the history of diplomacy, and in knowledge fields such as law, science, art, religion, literature and music need to join hands to create a repository of successful practices of diplomacy and human interaction from world history that can transform the inefficient treaties-and-law-based models that reign our current world.
Consider East Asia’s Sinitic world: for more than two millennia Korea, Vietnam and Japan participated in a system of tribute missions to each others’ courts, while also paying obeisance to the Chinese emperor. These in-person visits, involving hundreds of participants, provided ample opportunity for paying respect and building trust, with the envoys respectfully delivering state letters on highly scripted ritual occasions. But most of the lengthy missions were spent exchanging cutting-edge knowledge across a broad variety of scientific fields, meeting “foreign” people along the road, sharing meals and banquets — and writing poetry for each other.
The envoys couldn’t communicate in a shared spoken language but conversed in “brush talk”, writing back and forth in East Asia’s lingua franca of classical Chinese. Consider one of the ten of thousands of poems composed on these occasions, this one from a “good-will” mission in 1719 that Chosŏn Korea sent to Japan to celebrate the accession of a new shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune. A Korean embassy member had written a poem on a beautiful fan as a gift for their Japanese host, a local official hosting the banquet. The host, Wada Masatane, graciously replied:
豈惟詩句秀 How amazing, your lines of poetry!
運筆墨痕明 So brilliant your calligraphy, as you wield your brush.
賴對雞林客 Sitting across our guests from [Korea],
初聞大雅聲 we first hear the sounds of their “Great Odes”.
This is not a work of literary genius, but it is a brilliant deployment of diplomatic intelligence for the benefit of peaceful relations. You generously praise the other for something they care about — here it is good Chinese-style poetry and calligraphy. You paint a scene of togetherness: sitting together at a banquet, sharing a meal and drinks. You show respect and understanding of their history and culture, evoking an age-old name of their country. You evoke a shared past, thereby projecting a shared future: the “Great Odes” are a section of the Chinese Classic of Poetry (ca. 600 BCE), which here project shared values of Confucian statecraft and civilisation. The overall effect is to cast Japan and Korea as being in happy regional symbiosis under Chinese (Zhou) leadership.
This is diplomatic intelligence in action, just as we need it today: creating visions of a shared future in the midst of challenging realities. The nomination document for a corpus of texts and paintings from the missions between Japan and Korea between the 17th and 19th centuries explicitly argues that this form of diplomatic interaction, cemented by trust-building through shared meals, time, knowledge, painting and poetry, secured an unusually long peace between Japan and Korea during this period.
Even if simplistic causal relations are hard to draw, these are the kinds of strategies we need to unearth from our records of human experience in deep time and space. The MIT Global Humanities Initiative is now prototyping a new diplomatics with strategic partners such as GESDA through the Comparative Diplomacies for Global Governance project. This project seeks to revitalise diplomacy by integrating historical insights with innovative practices, creating a more adaptive and inclusive approach to global governance. We aim to diversify diplomatic practices for the 21st century, shaping actionable frameworks for policy-makers to promote sustainable strategies that address the challenges of global interdependence, rampant protectionisms and transactional relations.
By engaging academic, political and diplomatic stakeholders we aim to bridge gaps between established political frameworks and emerging global needs. The goal is to foster equitable collaboration, inform policy-making and leadership training, and empower individuals and communities to actively participate in solving today’s pressing challenges. Ultimately, by promoting the power of diplomatic intelligence and developing accessible tools, we hope to reduce public cynicism, inspire trust in diplomatic processes and empower individuals and communities to engage with and address today’s grand challenges.
