The regulation of diplomatic practice: the beginnings to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, 1961

Abstract

Diplomats, whose historical reputation in earlier times has so often been unsavoury, have more recently been highly regarded, except perhaps in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, for which catastrophe they were held by some to be to blame. The privations of the Cold War and the occasional severe maltreatments endured in unsettled states have from time to time since 1945 made them heroes. The change of status has, particularly since the nineteenth century, been associated with a rising sense of belonging to a recognizable and separate profession, with its own body of knowledge and skill, for which suitable candidates could be trained. This development was slow in gestation and its first signs cannot be reliably identified until the seventeenth century with the appearance of the first clutch of semi-professional manuals. From that time, a potential semantic confusion has existed arising out of the use of the adjective ‘diplomatic’ sometimes to describe the process of international political argument and its eventual success or failure in reaching agreement, and sometimes to describe the administrative mechanism of diplomacy itself. it was this latter aspect of diplomacy, seen separately from the content of policy, which from the mid nineteenth century began to attract a new kind of attention, driven particularly by international lawyers, to the point where it was beginning to seem desirable to attain a general international agreement as to what were the rules of the game.