Diplomacy has effectively its own language, and the sum total of that language is, in theory at least, the sum total of possible interactions between states in peacetime.
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world”
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Author: Worlledge
I doubt if Ludwig Wittgenstein was thinking of international politics when he famously declared in Proposition 5,6 of the Tractatus that “The limits of my language signify the limits of my world.” Specialists have been debating exactly what he meany by that ever since, and I don’t propose to trespass on such dangerous territory myself. I think, nonetheless, that his Proposition provides a useful point of departure for discussing the relationship between the language that is available to political leaders today, usually inherited or even imposed on them, and the consequent limits on what they can think, and for that matter how they can act. Like a lot of similarly important issues in practical international politics, I get the impression that its existence has hardly even been acknowledged, let alone studied. Professionals don’t really think about it; linguists and analytical philosophers don’t seem interested. Let’s have a go at it then, noting in passing that I am not going to deal with Linguistic Relativism or the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, for all that, in its weaker form it will seem common sense to anyone who has had to live and work in at least two language systems, especially non-European ones.
I started thinking about this subject while skimming (I confess to not usually reading in detail) the tweets of Donald Trump, with their profanity-laden, semi-literate expression, and asking myself where I had come across this sort of drivel before. Some have pointed to Trump’s background in property speculation in New York, and perhaps any property speculators in my readership might like to comment on that. Others have compared his Presidency to the reign of an organised crime family, which perhaps gives us a clue, but traditionally, such families were led by grey, low-profile figures who, in the Italian tradition, were often stern patriarchs and assiduous church-goers. No, Trump’s language, with its boasting, its vulgarity, its obscenity and its obsession with himself, resembles much more the “lyrics” of a genre like gangster rap, which in turn reflects the values (if you can call them that) of the society that produces and hero-worships such gangsters. These values include self-glorification and self-promotion, conspicuous displays of power and money, and the banalisation and glorification of violence. They are not limited to gangster rappers of course, since they are probably as old as history, but that example can stand for many others.
But this isn’t just an academic question of a coincidence of speech (since one assumes there isn’t a causative connection.) It also implies that an individual and a group used to speaking like this to the outside world (heaven alone knows how they express themselves privately) are limited in the options they can consider, or at the very least limited in the ways they can put them into effect. Just imagine Mr Trump spontaneously saying “the recent talks with the Iranians were useful and productive and if both sides are able to show some flexibility, progress should be possible.” You can’t. The words themselves are not especially difficult or Mandarin, but Mr Trump is incapable of expressing himself in those terms, which rules out, effectively, any practical developments except escalation, violence, and capitulation by the other side. Yes, this is obviously in part personality-related, yes, it has to do with his origins and career, but it’s mostly about the limits of his world, which are themselves determined by the limits of his language. (Perhaps we could translate Sprache here by “way of speaking” or “discourse.”)
All of us absorb ways of speaking from our society, our environment and our experience, and this discourse both reflects and reinforces our understanding of the world, and how to react to it. To some extent, Mr Trump’s vulgar blustering is just the ultimate caricature of recent American political speech generally, especially as it involves other nations. This speech implicitly divides the world into friends and enemies: friends to be told what to do, enemies to be destroyed. In neither cases do any adverse consequences flow from this way of thinking and speaking: until now, anyway. In effect, US politicians have inherited an entire discourse which excludes all subtlety and nuance, and which is almost entirely domestic, in the sense that it is overwhelmingly intended to impress other players in Washington with how tough and extreme you are. The practical effect on countries you may be threatening or giving instructions to is not considered relevant: until now, anyway. The question of which is the cart and which is the horse has become largely theoretical: after several generations, it has become impossible to speak, and therefore to act, in Washington, except in this discourse of violence and intimidation. Moreover, if part of the only discourse you have available is that the US military is the most wonderfulest in history, and can easily defeat any opponent, then that helps to determine the limits of your world, and the limits of what you think is possible. Which is a problem when things start to go badly wrong, and you encounter events for which your discourse has no words.
Of course, here we are talking about the wider political class, which generally has little direct investment in the realities it talks about, and rarely suffers consequences when things go wrong. Other parts of the system, often with a more direct investment in reality, have inherited different discourses, and therefore different and more extensive possibilities for acting. The State Department—as professional as any foreign service in the world in my experience—largely adopts the traditional discourse of diplomacy, and if you read its recent output, it can make even Mr Trump’s outbursts sound reasonable. But this is what the traditional discourse of diplomacy is actually for: it is a tool to enable reasonable people, representing reasonable governments, to arrive at reasonable solutions. Where these solutions are not possible, it allows the parties to each present their points of view in a reasonable fashion, and so preserve the possibility of a resolution later. The Iranians are, by and large, sticking to this traditional discourse of diplomacy in their dealings with the US. Partly, no doubt, this is for wider international political reasons, but partly also it both contributes to and also reflects their preference for certain types of overt, public behaviour, rather than others. Here, it’s interesting to see the contrast with the public rhetoric used by the IRGC, which has generally been the arm of the state involved in deniable activities such as assassinations and assistance to foreign terrorist groups. The IRGC has traditionally kept a low international profile, and its current inflammatory public rhetoric, and the higher-profile role it is now playing, are good indications of how actual Iranian behaviour is likely to develop over the next few months, since generally discourse comes before deeds.
One reason why Mr Trump’s own discourse shocks so many people is that it conflicts directly with the traditional norms of diplomatic speech, and consequently undermines norms of diplomatic behaviour. Now it could be argued, I suppose, that there is nothing sacred about such norms: they reflect the world-view and education of eighteenth-century aristocrats, belonging to an international caste, speaking several languages, knowing each other’s countries, and having more in common with each other than with the workers on their various estates. Nor, of course, did these norms of discourse stop nations behaving violently, whether in formal wars or otherwise. But they did provide a coherent set of rules, which went beyond surface politeness to the creation of conventions for restraint in discourse and action that ultimately benefited everyone, and indeed have parallels in other cultures, from the civilisations of the late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean, to the states of pre-colonial West Africa. It’s not obvious that a model of discourse, and thus action, which recalls threats and violence by rival gangs linked to football teams is necessarily superior.
The language of diplomacy as a discourse has never really been properly studied, which is a shame. Yet its major characteristic is that it emphasises agreement and downgrades conflict. It makes appeal to precedents, to legal frameworks and to statements by others, and generally tries to appear reasonable and rational at all times. It also tends to be very precise when that is helpful (“building on the provisions of paragraph 5(a) of the agreement reached by the G34 in New York on 25 February”) and very vague when it is not (“we will seek to continue bilateral exchanges with the aim of resolving outstanding points of difficulty.”) Because so much of the actual work of international politics revolves round the preparation of agreed documents, its dynamic pretty much obliges people to work together, and look for areas of agreement.
Which is not to say that diplomatic discourse is unproblematic, and I’ve drawn attention to its limitations many times. In particular, the search for consensus may mean blurring or disguising disagreements, or under certain circumstances just leaving problematic issues out altogether: a classic example is the absence of any direct reference to Israel in Lebanon or to nuclear issues in the recent US/Iran MoU, because the problems were simply too difficult, and there was no chance of finding an acceptable compromise form of words. This can give the impression that a problem has been solved when in fact it has just been put to one side. And in many cases, because diplomats notoriously tend to regard any agreement as better than none, fundamental differences can be disguised by carefully-drafted but meaningless language, covering them with the equivalent of a thick coat of snow. So it’s not uncommon for states to interpret agreed texts in sharply different ways when decisions actually have to be taken.
Nonetheless, diplomacy, as I’ve suggested, has effectively its own language, and the sum total of that language is, in theory at least, the sum total of possible interactions between states in peacetime. (You may remember that Wittgenstein declared, at the very start of the Tractatus that “the world is a totality of facts, not of things,” and that these “facts in logical space are the world.” A fact is a proposition in logical space that is true, and the totality of such facts is also a complete description of the world. I’ll come back to this point later.)
There are even dictionaries that interpret diplomatic speech into everyday language. Much of that diplomatic language has its origin in French (the language of diplomacy until 1919) and in some cases French terms are still used. A démarche, for example, is a formal process by which a representative of one government calls on another with a specific request to do or not do something. It often involves leaving an accompanying written document of some kind. Contrariwise, a bout de papier is an entirely informal document without heading or attribution, handed over as an indication without commitment of what a government thinks or would like to say. In certain cases, states may also hand over “non-papers,” which are unofficial documents, often written out of personal initiative, intended to test the water and evoke reaction to certain points of view or possibilities. There are even, if you can believe it, “non-maps,” which are informal ideas for territorial boundaries, for example, designed to test reactions. (I sometimes think that much of the media, and especially the alt-media, would benefit from an afternoon leafing through the kind of dictionary I have linked to. It would certainly help them to make fools of themselves less frequently.)
Now perhaps this all sounds a bit precious and old-fashioned, and redolent of country houses and elite universities. Maybe it does, but its total effect is the creation of a rational discourse for managing international problems and trying to resolve them as peacefully as possible. It has to be better, surely, than a discourse derived from business negotiations, involving bullying phone calls and inflammatory and often mendacious public statements. (The word “deal” has come from nowhere in the last few years to be the default term for an agreement of any kind. “Dealing” of course, is what drug vendors do. There’s a thought.) It’s not an accident that the increasing violence and arrogance of western security policy since the end of the Cold War has been preceded at each stage by a vulgarisation of language and discourse, which has made previously dubious behaviour seem progressively more acceptable, to the point where western leaders can now threaten foreign countries in the discourse of mafia bosses.
Separate, but closely related, is the influence of dominant academic discourses, notably that of Realist and Neo-realist schools of international relations. This is particularly a feature of the US, whose commentators and influencers overwhelmingly have this intellectual background. To give just one example, it’s common to describe the relationship between the US and China as one of “competition” or even “rivalry.” Indeed, it’s become so common, in the West at least, that governments act as though this is actually the case. Following this way of thinking, competition and rivalry are automatically assumed to become progressively more serious, and lead ultimately to the threat of open warfare, although there is actually no reason for the two countries to fight each other. This is largely a feature of the discourse employed, not the underlying realities of the situation, and as far as I know, the Chinese express themselves differently.
This discourse of competition and conflict both reflects and reinforces the way the US political system works, with its endless power-struggles and its insistence on winning at any cost. Again, it’s hard to say which is the cart and which is the horse. But importantly, this world-view is essentially a zero-sum phenomenon. For every winner there is necessarily a loser, and the loser has to do what the winner wants. The idea that a situation or an agreement can suit both sides in different ways is only found in real life.
Likewise, the exclusive focus of such theories on the discourse of power and domination means that it is impossible to envisage a relationship of equals or near-equals, still less the kinds of complex and multi-faceted relationships that exist in the world as it actually is. This has reached caricatural form in attempts to describe the relationship between the United States and Israel. Since only the vocabulary of dominance and submission is available, it requires one side to argue that Israel completely dominates the US, and the other side to argue that Israel is no more than a puppet of Washington. This is intellectually crude and silly (the world is not like that) and it simply ignores the enormous complexity of the relationship, and its historical development. (Saudi Arabia seems to be shuffled from one category to another and back again, by journalistic agreement, in the same news cycle.) Likewise, traditional and alt-media compete with each other to find the most sneering and dismissive terms possible to characterise those countries who cooperate with the US to any degree. It clearly does not cross their minds that Saudi Arabia, for example, or most European states, could see their objective security interests as at least partly aligned with those of the US, and indeed may even have originated the policies the US is pursuing. The result is confusion and ignorance, and a world that stubbornly refuses to behave according to the limits that language has imposed on it, and so to obey the arid assumptions of purely materialist and realist concepts of international politics.
Now of course competition itself is a feature of the international system. Countries compete for influence internationally and within organisations, they try to put their nationals in high-profile positions, they try to get themselves elected to various UN bodies, notably the Security Council, and to host important negotiations and play important roles. But this is a game, not a set of preparations for war. There are also genuine attempts to overthrow existing relationships, such as the recent Russian effort to evict France from its traditional influential role in Africa, and of course the Iranian attempt to establish themselves as the dominant power in the Gulf. But these are relatively special, and nothing is more misleading than the widely-shared assumption that international politics consists of endless conflicts, attempted coups, “colour revolutions”, proxy wars and what have you. As I’ve pointed out many times, there’s a large measure of pragmatic cooperation in international relations, and if there were not the system would fall apart. Of course, nations will nonetheless quietly support opposition parties or discreetly fund dissident movements if they think they can thereby increase their influence in a region. (The somewhat obscure relationship between Algeria and the Tuareg separatists in Northern Mali is an example. Here, it may be that the Algerians are simply trying to keep other states from having influence there themselves.)
The reality is that trying to increase your influence regionally and globally is something that rising powers do, and always have done, and China’s increasing influence in Latin America, the Gulf and Africa is in fact just what one would expect of the behaviour of perhaps the single greatest economic power in the world, going through a period of growth and expansion. This increasing influence is not always managed with tact and delicacy, and in any event the Chinese system is just too big and too complex to be controlled by any master-plan. But looking at translations, at least, of Chinese statements and speeches, it is clear that the discourse that controls their view of the world and their consequent behaviour is essentially a multilateral one. It is clear that they resent their historic weaknesses, but equally clear that their language, and so their world, doesn’t include the kind of dominant-submissive demands now common in the West. As is often the case in Asia and with Asian languages, much is not said, much can be interpreted in different ways, and much is for the weaker or disadvantaged power to work out for itself. This has historically created obvious problems for Asian countries with the United States, where a punch in the face is regarded as an example of subtlety. But it remains true that there is no reason for a conflict between China and the US unless the latter actually sets out to provoke one.
So far, I have spoken, if you like, of the form of international relations, of the way things are done, as determined by the language in which dealings between states are conceptualised, and of the world that results. But of course such dealings are not free of content: they involve specific issues, and these issues, in turn, tend to be handled according to assumptions derived from languages or discourses of their own. Sometimes this is highly formalised and historians can study the results from published documents : the catastrophic errors made by Stalin in understanding Hitler’s Germany were the result of a ritualised system of thinking and speaking where only certain ideas could be entertained and expressed, and these formed the totality of the acknowledged world in Moscow. We can see the same problems more recently in the documents published about the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, for example.
The problem was less severe in the West historically, because whilst certain discourses (anti-Communism, for example, or anti-Americanism) were powerful in specific contexts, and determined to some extent how people behaved, there was no one discourse that was hegemonic. This changed with the rise of the foreign policy wing of the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) which we have to be careful to distinguish from those who are actually involved professionally in managing foreign policy issues of different kinds. Here, I include rather politicians, journalists, pundits, NGO workers, “community leaders” and the like. Let me take three examples, in each of which the PMC manoeuvres with great difficulty in the very limited reality which its vocabulary and discourse enable it to inhabit. And here, I have in mind primarily the PMC in its international, and especially European, manifestation. The creation of this international, intellectually monolithic class, strong on ideology but weak on practical experience, has been a feature of the last generation or so, and it has increasingly taken control of the elite discourse on all international issues, and thus helped to imprison this elite in a little world of its own creation.
For example, international PMC elites have a very simple view of immigration, limited to three propositions, which constitute their entire world. (1) Immigration is a good thing. (2) If you don’t believe that you must hate immigrants. (3) If you hate immigrants you are a fascist. That’s it. Now if you recall, Wittgenstein said that a world consisting only of facts was made up of propositions that had been tested against reality, and he assumed that reality meant, well, reality. Thus “the totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world.”(3,01). So, “rain falls from the sky onto the ground” is a valid proposition and a true thought because it can be tested against reality. But “rain falls from the ground onto the sky” is not a valid proposition, though it has the external form of one. Which is fine so long as your definition of reality is limited to those things that can be empirically proved.
But that’s no longer the case. For most of the PMC, and for reasons which I’ve gone into a number of times, reality is now essentially normative, not pragmatic. Facts, as Althusser said, are concepts of an ideological nature, and, though few of the PMC have fought their way through his turgid prose, the idea that normative theory comes before banal reality is widely, if mostly unconsciously, accepted today. Thus, international PMC thinking on a subject like immigration consists of a set of normative ethical propositions within which it is necessary to remain to find an answer to any question, because the three propositions above represent the limits of their world. (“You’re a fascist” is often regarded as a satisfactory answer, for this value of “answer.”) You can compare their situation to that of a composer obliged to write a new piece of music every week, using only the same three randomly chosen notes from the chromatic scale. Even Bach might have found that a challenge. It follows that any real-life problems linked to immigration—housing, crime, education—cannot be taken account of, because they exceed the limits of PMC language and thus the limits of their world. In a very real sense, they do not exist. This is why conventional politicians are caught like deer in the headlights of an oncoming car when practical immigration issues arise. Whilst it’s fine to use their impoverished language to condemn others, it’s more difficult when a problem arises that cannot simply be wished away and requires a real answer, as has been the case in the last few days with Spain and Morocco.
A similar situation exists with the discourse of “Empire” and “hegemony” which has become more and more powerful in recent years as, ironically, the actual power of the United States has been revealed to be less and less imposing. The term “Empire” seems to have originated in popular culture with the Jefferson Airplane/Starship in 1970, and was taken up in a rather different form by Philip K Dick in his novel VALIS published in 1981. As appropriated by the nascent PMC of the time, it can also be reduced to three propositions (1) The US is an all-powerful hegemon (2) the US is always right (3) any nation that challenges either of these propositions can and should be destroyed. These statements represent the limits of the PMC world, and every international issue, no matter how complex, must be Procrusteaned into them somehow. It’s worth pointing out that the alt-media operates in a similarly bounded world consisting of three slightly different propositions (1) The US is an all-powerful hegemony (2) the US is always wrong (3) any nation that challenges the US will be destroyed. In either case, non-adherence to these propositions will mean the end of your career, even if they are contradicted by observable reality.
Of course, for all the thought-policing that goes on, neither set of propositions can really describe the world accurately, and in recent years (let’s say since Afghanistan in 2021) this difference has become too flagrant to ignore. But both supporters and critics of Mr Trump are nevertheless constrained by the limits of their language into more and more tortured and distorted versions of these propositions, simply because they constitute the limits of their world. Thus, critics of Mr Trump claimed that the US/Iran MoU Iran was just to gain time to prepare an overwhelming attack to destroy Iran, whereas Mr Trump himself seems to have assumed that an overwhelming attack to destroy Iran was indeed possible. But of course there was never going to be an overwhelming attack, because the means to conduct it did not exist. Indeed—terrifying thought—they never did exist outside Hollywood movies. You and I know that, but those whose world is bounded by the kind of propositions set out above are incapable ever of understanding it. And so perhaps the biggest obstacle to a resolution of the Iran crisis is that both the PMC and their critics have first to escape from their mental prisons, without sustaining unbearable psychic damage in the process.
The last example I want to take is that of Ukraine, about which I have already written extensively. From the beginning of the crisis, I have stressed that it is impossible to explain western, and especially European, behaviour through conventional materialist and realist interpretations. And as time has passed, my impression is that even those without intellectual alternatives to fall back on, have largely given up the attempt to do so. But what is going on? Well, some cling, out of nostalgia and desperation, to the interpretation of the world I have just discussed: US hegemony means that the US must automatically be in control of the development of the Ukraine crisis as it lurches from bad to worse, even if that makes no sense in the real world.
But since the beginning, I have pointed to the ideological nature of the conflict, to the idea of Russia as the Anti-Europe or at least the Anti-Brussels, ostentatiously turning its back on the PMC ideology and stubbornly clinging to culture, history, society, patriotism and even religion. As time has passed, this has become more and more evident: Europe (and to some extent the US) sees itself engaged in a Holy War which must finish in the destruction of one side or the other, whatever the costs. And because it is a Holy War then, as I suggested last week, it cannot go on forever, and Russia will lose and thereby the fundamental moral order of the world will be restored. This kind of thinking, of course, is inevitable if your world is essentially limited to three normative ideological propositions: (1) The Brussels ideology is Right (2) all states should be brought to accept it (3) a state that refuses to accept it is an enemy that we can and should destroy. As always with such arguments, reality, in the form of economic and military strength, is not counted as a factor. And for as long as Europe (and to some extent the US) is condemned to manoeuvre within these three ideological propositions that constitute its world, it is by definition impossible for the conflict to be resolved. By extension, anyone who suggests that the solution might lie outside this rigid logical space must be a Russian agent.
I think that’s enough examples to make my point. I’d just add in conclusion that this kind of thinking isn’t limited to states and institutions. A lot of us, if we are honest, would recognise that we are trapped in similar personal worlds, constructed from different propositions that we find emotionally congenial, even if we can’t necessarily fit them together very well. How else, for example, to explain the refusal of people to wear masks during the Covid pandemic to avoid infecting their families, friends and colleagues? There are no doubt sociopaths for whom personal comfort and convenience come before the lives of others, but one hopes there are not that many of them. In fact, the majority seemed to themselves be prisoners of a private world incorporating elements of fear and distrust of government, a willingness to embrace exciting conspiracy theories, and an undue fetishisation of “my freedom” in all contexts, and over everything else. Thus, it’s OK for me to breath germs over other people, because anything contrary to that cannot be made coherent with the self-imposed propositions that make up my world. For the sake of completeness, we should also mention examples of the opposite delusion, such as that some all-powerful international conspiracy wanted to kill as large a proportion of the world as possible, to enable its resources to last longer, and so both originated the disease and funded and promoted anti-masking movements. Either way, there’s nothing worse than being a prisoner of abstract, normative propositions.
Wittgenstein, of course, thought he was purifying philosophy, and dismantling much of it because it was not so much false as “senseless.” But then he was a mystic who thought that knowledge of really important things could not be transmitted through words. It’s an interesting, if depressing, exercise to subject political speech and political writing to the same kind of analytical process : much of it simply vanishes on examination, like the froth from a Chai Tea Ginseng Soy Skinny Latte. But unfortunately, empty phrases, confused thinking, non-sequiturs, simple mistakes and downright lies continue to dominate our political culture. We take from them different ideas and propositions that we find emotionally satisfying, and then try to crush them together, with the result that, at all levels from the state down to the individual, we risk finding ourselves in ideological prisons of our own construction.
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