Topic: diplomacy

“Past performance is no indicator of future success” is a warning attached to many financial products that are hawked in the Street. Few people pay any attention to the warning. In fact, “past performance” is the basis of meritocracy. The (predictable) outcome is the Peter Principle. The Peter Principle is a proposition stating that the members of an organization where promotion...

Records of an international relations system go back to the mid-fourteenth century BC.[1] At that time already, treaties were signed. Brides were exchanged. Relations between extractive elites focused on the balance of “vital interests” – power relations.

International relations today are not so much about power relations as...

For two thousand years, we have read the Greek classics. We have done so in a peculiar fashion. Their gods were central to their worldview. We discarded their gods, which we despised as mere idols. In doing so, we’ve lost much of the deeper meaning that attached to the gods. We have misread the Greeks. What did the Greeks mean with this ongoing interference of the gods from on high?

The vagueness of the concept

If you want to be a public intellectual in the US, find the catchy turn of phrase and then beat the chicken-mint peas-mashed potatoes circuit with it, writing op-eds in the NYTimes on week-ends to uplifting effect. The “catchy phrase” best be vague and fuzzy: empty vessels resonate best. Like patent medicine it guarantees...

159 member states are about to select the new WTO Director General. I’ve attended a beauty contest among some of the candidates. Their personalities are impressive. But what about the policies they should implement in the organization?

An impressive success for the treaty system

The WTO treaty system is all about reducing barriers to trade – intended and...

I closed 206 by saying that “diplomacy is where there are no rules”[1]. Here is a situation, which would fit a “use” definition of diplomacy. (A “use” definition is one that describes what one does, rather than what one is).

It’s a dark and stormy night; the rain pours so hard, the car lights reflect the rain and you...

In my http://wp.me/p81We-zo I mused that we are just beginning to understand the complexity of social realities and of history. Sounds clever, but what do I really mean? As luck would have it, I’ve been reading recently on the origins of the American Revolution. This historical period has been studied so much, and in such detail, that one can use the...

(just a fairy tale?)

We love to anchor history to events – kings and battles or revolutions. Savvy historians tell us that this reflects our need for retrospective coherence – and not reality (which is mostly chaotic). History, they (rightly) argue, has no beginning[1] – we emerged somehow...

Popular belief long held that one could steal a person’s soul (and hold him/her in one’s power) by casting a spell over something that belonged to the victim. Witchcraft the world over is predicated on such stealing of hair, nails, or making a puppet resembling the person. It is the powerless’ dream of ultimate power as well as projection of his fear of the infinite forces that hold him...

Pity, in a way, China’s Emperor Qianlong[1]. The “Lord of the Civilized Word” (this was his title) personally supervised an extensive bureaucracy reporting to him either by the “open” or the “confidential” channel. He read all correspondence and marked it: “Noted”, “What’s all this stuff?” or roundly abused the mandarin: “...

A fact is a fact is a fact – we all know that. But what is a “social fact”?

“Social facts” – according to John SEARLE who has spent most of his life studying them – “are only facts by common agreement”[1].

As a “brute fact” a stamp is an insignificant-looking little square, often fancily...

As the new Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party is inaugurated in Beijing, terms like “harmony” and “stability” are buzz-words describing the vision of the China Communist Country for the country. The West tends to scoff at these terms, and tends to put them down as slogans. Multi-party democracy is best when achieving sustainable “stability”, it is argued.

In theory...

Cohesion within a group of monkeys is maintained through reciprocal grooming. Studies of captive monkeys have shown that grooming makes them more relaxed, reducing their heart rate as well as other external signs of stress. They sometimes become so relaxed that they fall asleep. In fact, we now know that grooming stimulates the production of the body’s natural opiates, the endorphins; in...

I’ve asked a US diplomat friend of mine what his experience had been with Facebook as a tool in diplomacy. Here is his answer: “we had good results with Facebook outreach to Palestinians and Israeli Arabs on business, economic, social and technology issues.”

There are a few interesting lessons to glean from this short statement.

The most important one in my view is that it...

More than specific technologies it is our “habits of thought” – our “mentality” – which allows societies to advance in understanding reality of a broad front. Around 1250 such a change in mentality took hold in Europe. We never looked back. What happened?

One view is that: “Western Europeans evolved a new way, more purely visual and quantitative than the old, of perceiving...

Thomas C. SCHELLING won the 2005 “Nobel” Prize in Economics for his “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis”. In fact, much of his work found immediate application in arms control planning, in particular the use of nuclear weapons as deterrent. Unsurprisingly, his Lecture deals with 60 years of living with strategic and...

Our hunter/gatherer ancestors had say 300 SKU (stock keeping units) – the managerial term for kinds of worldly goods. In New York City alone the SKU is well over 10 billion nowadays[1]. If you think nature is multifarious, think again: we have probably created more cultural objects in 10’000 years than nature has created...

When I first mentioned to a diplomatic friend my intention of writing a blog entry on “diplomats without borders” I was met with incredulity. “Diplomats are the peacetime gate keepers at the border! You can’t have diplomats without borders.”

Are borders “vital”? An interesting question – and one which is worth a short visit to Africa and its history, for Africa emerged from its...

In blog entry 178 I have provided an example of how we fail to see what’s obvious, if it does not fit our preconceived ideas. Before I move to ideologies currently at work in shaping what one may call the Zeitgeist – the spirit of our time – let me cast a look on the opposite process:...