Introduction. Diplomatic departures: negotiating Britain’s international outreach in the contemporary world

KEYWORDS:

• Diplomacy
• Foreign Office
• embassies
• soft power
• Brexit

Diplomacy is the classic example of the Spanish proverb, ‘Traveller, there are no roads. Roads are made by walking’. We need to keep flexible and innovative and be less worried about strategic priorities which may need to be displaced at short notice or added to with no

commensurate additional resources¹

In an article published in 2019, three years after a slim majority of the electorate in the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, Piers Ludlow wrote: ‘It will be in the manner of its departure, that the UK will do most to show how incomplete had been its political and cultural integration into the system throughout its four and a half decades of membership’.² Or as Tom Fletcher, formerly Britain’s ambassador to the Lebanon (2011–2015) put it: ‘[t]he UK’s role in the twenty-first century will not be defined by the EU referendum itself, but how the British respond to it’.³ To a large extent, the reflections on diplomatic departures presented in this special issue find their origin in two major questions that arose from the result of 23 June 2016. For Sir Peter Ricketts, who retired as Britain’s ambassador to France in 2016, the Brexit vote ‘was a moment of profound disruption in the established pattern of Britain’s international relations and it cried out for strategic thinking’.⁴ Discussing the period which immediately followed the referendum, Sir Ivan Rogers, Britain’s Permanent Representative to the European Union until 2017, gave a measured, rational assessment of the steps which were necessary for Britain to manage its departure from the European Union: ‘what we needed to do very early on was to recognise the complexity and inevitable longevity of the exit process, work out our viable options, achieve real clarity about where we wanted to land, having worked honestly through the very tough choices we faced—and still do face—and reconcile ourselves to a serious period of transition’.⁵ Given the importance of domestic factors in explaining both the decision to hold a referendum and its result, to what extent was Brexit also the consequence of shifts in Britain’s strategic priorities and diplomatic networks? And, perhaps as importantly, do Britain’s current diplomatic network and its historical experience of managing diplomatic change give it any added advantage in managing the consequences—or even the fallout—of Brexit?

In the wake of the referendum, and in conjunction with the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy published in March 2021, three major decisions were taken by the Conservative government. First, the Department for International Development (DfID), given cabinet representation in 1997 under New Labour, was merged with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), in what is now the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office. Coupled with the decision to increase Britain’s nuclear stockpile and to end the British commitment to spend 0.7% of the gross national income on development assistance (first made by Tony Blair and first achieved in 2013 under David Cameron), this raised concerns among a wide range of actors. As Sir Peter Ricketts put it, Britain’s ‘development programme was not only a major soft-power asset enhancing Britain’s power to persuade, but a hard-headed contribution to international stability, thereby reducing the likelihood of military interventions, which are far more expensive’.⁶ So while he admits that there is scope for the new FCDO to be ‘the powerhouse of a coherent international policy preserving the best of both previous departments’ and ‘be a real benefit for post-Brexit Britain’, such positive outcomes will be dependent on careful management, particularly given the fact that the budget of DFID was virtually four times that of the FCO.⁷ For Baroness Anelay of St John’s, the chair of the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Select Committee, the Integrated Review essentially ‘overpromises and under-delivers’.⁸ This is partly because it fails to define what ‘Global Britain’, a term which gained currency in the Conservative Party after 2016, really means. To what extent does it echo, overlap with or simply replicate earlier phrases, from the Greater Britain of the imperial age to ‘the projection of Britain’ coined by Sir Stephen Tallents when discussing the shift from cultural propaganda to cultural relations? As Robert Saunders has argued persuasively, equating ‘Global Britain’ with an Empire 2.0 or with nostalgia for the empire can be a facile and misleading exercise.⁹

What the Integrated Review does give the historian, however, are several lines of enquiry to interrogate the novelty, ambition and feasibility of the proposals, and which this special issue picks up on. Britain’s ‘future prosperity’, the Review states, ‘will be enhanced by deepening our economic connections with dynamic parts of the world such as the Indo-Pacific, Africa and the Gulf, as well as trade with Europe. The precondition for Global Britain is the safety of our citizens at home and the security of the Euro-Atlantic region, where the bulk of the UK’s security focus will remain’.¹⁰ How does this map of strategic and economic interests fit in with the history of Britain’s diplomatic network since the Second World War? The Review also states that the interests of the British people, whose protection and promotion is the government’s ‘first and overriding priority’, are sovereignty, security and prosperity.¹¹ How constant have these priorities been in the past, and when challenged or shifting, how responsive have Britain’s diplomatic tools and actors proved to be? In other words, by studying some past instances of ‘diplomatic departures’, this special issue hopes to shed some light on how policy-makers and decision-makers have made sense, with varying degrees of success, of reconfigurations in the diplomatic network—in crisis or more routine situations, given the malleability of the map of British overseas missions or posts.¹² This special issue does not propose any special set of tools to decision or policy makers, nor does it treat history as events which should or should not be repeated. As bodies like History & Policy demonstrate consistently well, the reality is always much more complex than any facile transposition might suggest, but trends and patterns do matter. Considering diplomatic departures in a variety of regional settings and periods and assessing style against substance can contribute to a better understanding of the definition of British interests, of the means and channels used to secure them, and of the factors which caused particular ambitions to succeed, or fail.

In recent years, it is perhaps the expansion of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office network into new countries—rather than any diplomatic departure—that has generated increasing interest in the role of the places and spaces where diplomacy is made, in the international outreach of the United Kingdom and in the interactions between state and non-state actors in delivering foreign policy objectives. As a recently appointed Foreign Secretary under the coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, William Hague declared in 2012: 'Our diplomatic network is the essential infrastructure of Britain’s influence in the world. […] having an Embassy or post flying the British flag really matters, and creates an effect that can never be replicated by a diplomat with a laptop however hard they work.'¹³ Pledging to reverse the closures that had occurred during the Labour years, his ambition was ‘to signal that where Britain was retreating, it is now advancing’^14. – seemingly in line with trends in British society, with 56% of the general public believing in 2012 that the UK should aspire to be ‘a great power’.^15. Much of the expansion was envisaged in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the public advised that expansion would have to come at the cost of savings in Britain’s European network (including by withdrawing from subordinate posts). The European External Action Service and its own network, he warned, ‘is not and will never be any substitute for a strong British diplomatic service that advances the interests of the United Kingdom’.^16. In the long-term debate on the shape of the British diplomatic network, the contributions collected here show the importance of giving more sustained attention to the impact of diplomatic departures on the rethinking of Britain’s influence and power (hard, soft and smart—i.e. ‘the successful combination of hard and soft power resources into effective strategy’).^17.

Traditionally, a ‘diplomatic departure’ occurs when an ambassador or a member of a diplomatic mission departs from their country of posting: both diplomatic departures and arrivals, as codified by the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, are based upon a principle of mutual consent, with diplomatic missions representing the interests of their home country abroad and providing a reliable channel of communication between the two countries.^18. The most severe diplomatic departures occur at times of crisis, when heads of mission resign, are expelled or reposted under pressure from the host government, or are removed by the home government.^19. As argued in Harold Nicolson’s seminal study of diplomacy, such ruptures may be due to ‘several causes, only some of which are agreeable’: an objectionable envoy, the termination of the existence of state, war and a state’s decision to break relations ‘as a means of expressing profound moral indignation’.^20. Susan Gitelson’s analysis of why small states break diplomatic relations includes Nigeria’s decision to expel the French ambassador after the third nuclear test in the Sahara in December 1960, at a time when Ghana had already recalled its ambassador in Paris, while both Ghana and the Congo broke relations with Belgium over the civil war in the Congo in 1960.^21. In her typology, she outlines that relations can be broken over domestic factors, after a change of regime for instance, perhaps in order ‘to satisfy critical domestic groups, usually students, intellectuals, and trade unionists’, or in reaction to another state ‘threaten[ing] [a country’s] possibilities for independence or development, or both’.^22. The impetus for breaking relations may also be the result of a regional influence or decision, ‘from a collective desire to further the security, prestige, and development of the area as a whole, and to enhance the group’s diplomatic, ideological, racial, or cultural identity’.^23. As ‘instruments of global politics’, embassies are, as Rogelia Pastor-Castro and Martin Thomas have argued in their recent edited volume, ‘often at the cutting edge of political violence and revolutionary changes of regime’.^24. Closing an embassy when relations are severed is significant, given that overseas posts perform at least three functions: they are ‘integral to international diplomacy’, from ensuring dialogue to guaranteeing the safety of nationals abroad and trade promotion; they are ‘discrete political spaces with particular codes of conduct and a host of rules and conventions’; and they ‘have enormous symbolic power’.^25.. There are also, in cases of conflict or persistent political tensions, varying degrees of retaliation, below a full break in relations. US Ambassador George Kennan, for instance, was declared persona non grata by the USSR in 1952, after he compared the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany during a trip abroad.^26. And in more recent times, Uzbekistan demanded the replacement of British Ambassador Craig Murray, after he denounced the use of torture in the country in 2004. What matters, however, is that the end of diplomatic relations does not ‘ipso facto involve the severance of consular relations’ which can be established—and therefore maintained—regardless of formal diplomatic relations.^27.

Departures, in policy and style, also occur in less dramatic circumstances, when a mission is relocated within the same country, or when British offices are expanded. Perhaps more than embassies, consulates have been moved to suit the domestic requirements of host governments, with diplomats discussing the role of their premises and their own relation to local politics. Similarly, the expansion of the British Council network, in both former British and other territories, constitutes a transfer of expertise as much as it reflects the increasing interpenetration of domestic and foreign affairs in the cultural realm. While there has been growing scholarship on the post-independence careers of colonial civil servants, with many administrators looking for employment in the newly independent states, particularly in the fields of education and development,²⁸ the geographical and policy trajectories of British representatives, and the expertise gained on each ‘departure’, deserves further study. While some of the articles presented here reflect on individual diplomatic trajectories before and after critical departures, there is much scope for further research on how individual experience shapes diplomatic crisis (and is shaped by crises) and can help, in some instances, to build bridges.

Departure is also, to some extent, about new diplomatic actors, beyond the state itself. An increasing number of British NGOs, particularly in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, have thus played a role in altering more traditional representations of the state abroad, proposing their own vision of Britain—sometimes being instrumental in promoting a new British ‘brand’, in lieu of or alongside state actors. Examining diplomatic relations means therefore exploring a complex set of interactions between states, governments and individuals, with dual relations and potential tensions between diplomatic representatives and both the host and home governments. This is particularly true during the Cold War decades, when the issue of departure, as expulsion or as defection, took on particular importance. As Simon Smith has put it, ‘[t]here is no iron code of practice laid down in London that stipulates the precise extent and nature of support, if any, that British diplomatic missions should give to oppositions or governments in times of domestic political crisis’.²⁹ In his memoirs, Robin Renwick remembers a young Soviet defector seeking refuge at the British High Commission in India and being taken to Britain, after ‘an icy encounter with the Soviet Ambassador’ and much persuasion of the Indian government.³⁰ Sir Brian Barder also describes how one year The Queen’s Birthday Party organised at the British Embassy in Warsaw was the occasion for the head of the Western Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to converse with the spokesman of the Solidarity movement.³¹

A departure of sorts can also be said to occur when multilateral missions are established, or when diplomatic representation is pooled—subsuming or redeploying specifically national offices. Diplomatic missions can hardly be separated from the socio-economic and geopolitical dynamics of the country where they are located, nor from the financial means and political directions defined by the Foreign Office. While the Commonwealth seat no longer exists at the United Nations, the expansion of the European External Action Service from 2010 has seen the rise of EU diplomatic missions abroad, notably in Africa. The House of Lords Select Committee on the EU’s European External Action Service found in 2013 that there were ‘benefits for both the EEAS and the UK in high quality British diplomats working in the EEAS’ and that the EEAS ‘could be used to the UK’s advantage in terms of saving costs, or increasing influence at no additional cost’.³² Within the EU, Britain and France cooperated, formally and informally, on Africa, for instance through the Committee on Development Cooperation, the Africa Working Group and the Africa-EU Panel on Democratic Governance and Human Rights. So did Germany and Britain in Ethiopia in the 1980s, with the EU providing a less structured but nonetheless vital connection.³³ In 2017, several former British diplomats in the Caribbean acknowledged that structured meetings between EU heads of mission were extremely useful.³⁴ The EU experiment remains, thus far, mixed. What makes it innovative also means that it is not always understood outside Brussels.³⁵ And as Tony Chafer and Gordon Cumming have pointed out, it is at the UN that ‘informal and institutional links between Britain and France are most closely intertwined’³⁶ – as permanent members of the Security Council and, with the United States, of the ‘P3’, launched in 1997 and whose effectiveness, particularly when it benefited from good personal relations between representatives in New York, has been acknowledged by British officials. Additionally, the positive assessment of the House of Lords Select Committee was based on the understanding that the EEAS would ‘not seek to project its own foreign policy’, and that ‘the scrutiny role of the European Parliament should not go beyond its current level, as foreign policy is primarily inter-governmental and scrutiny should therefore be performed at the national parliamentary level’.³⁷ The new British embassies which opened in Mali in 2001 and Guinea in 2003 were not pooled or shared with other members, such as France which already had posts there.³⁸ More generally, cooperation has been limited by a persisting sense of competition, by divergent views on the relative role and influence of African organisations (the African Union and ECOWAS in particular) and of NATO,³⁹ and by a wide variety of views within the European Commission.⁴⁰ In her recent study of European diplomacy, Laurence Badel underlines the double challenge posed by the need to train professional diplomats and socialise them, with the question of loyalty from the national to the European level,⁴¹ while in his preface to her volume, former French Ambassador Pierre Sellal also acknowledges that the inability to use force has a clear bearing on what foreign policy the EU can formulate and implement.⁴² In the context of the current debates on the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, the significance and use of such multilateral missions in expanding national interests abroad deserves further scrutiny (both before and after 2016) as do processes of diplomatic socialisation in national and international, bilateral and multilateral contexts. In surveying the web of information and personal contacts in and out of overseas posts during various departures, this special issue therefore also reconsiders the place of London as a diplomatic centre and the impromptu ways in which diplomatic training and valuable experience can also occur.

Finally, diplomatic departures are also intrinsically linked to style and tradition, to display and show, and such elements are central to the study of diplomatic adaptations. Until 2006, the age-old Foreign Office tradition of valedictory despatches meant that ambassadors could write freely about their posting in a final telegram home, thus expressing their personal impressions about the host country or even broader Foreign Office policy-making. While some of the most remarkable or controversial extracts were given publicity by Matthew Parris and Andrew Bryson in 2010–2012, there is now also an extensive autobiographical literature published by former diplomats. Active representatives have also taken to blogging and social media with a variety of outcomes, resurrecting to some extent the valedictory despatch—with the digital age bringing its own set of constraints and freedoms for diplomatic actors.

One of the overarching themes of this special issue is that of the continuity of some diplomatic activities during and after a break in diplomatic relations. The more obvious and immediate one is, often, the protection of nationals and allies,⁴³ which tests the influence, logistical ability and military assets of a state—as well as its international reputation and trust in specific governments, as recent events in Afghanistan have demonstrated. In a crisis, writes former British ambassador Jane Marriott, what matters is the safety of the staff, the information held on the premises and the diplomats’ skills in ‘scenario planning’, i.e. having ‘the ability to be pessimistic (it is all going to go wrong); optimistic (so how do we get out of it); strategic (what are the likely moves of the key actors) and detail-obsessed’.⁴⁴ But, as several of the articles investigate, what also matters in less dangerous settings—or once immediate risks have been dealt with—is the ways in which in the absence of official diplomatic relations, British interests can still be managed satisfactorily. The cases of Algeria in 1965–68 and Burma in the 1960s show that two of the main functions of diplomacy, representation and negotiation,^45. were pursued through trade and cultural activities, which persisted or, when they had been partly interrupted, resumed ahead of full diplomatic links and helped mend fences. The importance of back channels in moments and areas of diplomatic conflict is not, as Bent Boel demonstrates in relation to British relations with dissidents in the Soviet bloc, limited to breaks. As James Mayall has argued, ‘[o]ne of [diplomacy’s] most important roles is passive, “keeping the show on the road” when the diplomatic weather turns foul’.^46. In this respect, the special issue pays specific attention to the role played by a variety of intermediaries and to the importance of social contact which, as a former Australian ambassador to Washington put it, is the ‘logical way to begin—the only graceful way, in fact’ in what he calls the ‘diplomatic game’.^47. Diplomatic styles—including the ‘couch diplomacy’ and ‘coffee diplomacy’ outlined by Barbara Keys —matter.⁴⁸ But this does not mean that substance no longer does, or that it matters less. This becomes particularly important if one considers with Jamie Gaskarth that ‘[t]he roles [that] states adopt in international relations are shaped by domestic self-identities and political pressures as well as the expectations of other states and actors globally’.⁴⁹ In the years when Britain had to relinquish formal sovereignty over most of the empire, the so-called process of decolonisation was in effect a redirection of influence in other parts of the world or, in the words of historian John Darwin, a ‘partial retraction, redeployment and redistribution of British and European influences in the regions of the extra-European world’.⁵⁰ For several departments in Whitehall, cultural missions were a way to ensure continuity and maintain preferential links with former colonies, and ‘counterbalance a decline in international influence’.⁵¹ This was particularly true in the growing Commonwealth, as the Commonwealth University Interchange Scheme illustrates, with some of the academics posted abroad working to enhance the attractivity of Britain’s image.⁵² As Joseph Nye has argued, ‘[i]f soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction, aspects of civil society can produce attraction even when policies of Government may be running in the wrong direction’.⁵³ Soft power is thus based on a country’s ‘culture (in places where it is attractive to others), its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when others see them as legitimate and having moral authority)’.⁵⁴ This means that ‘narratives’ form an important part of the equation and that ‘[t]he mix of direct government information to long-term cultural relationships varies with three concentric circles or stages of public diplomacy’: ‘daily communications’, ‘strategic communication’ which is developed over a longer period and, over a longer period still, ‘lasting relationship with key individuals’.⁵⁵ For Robin Niblett of Chatham House, a British exit from the EU was a threat because it would inflict damage on its soft power and its attraction, largely derived in his eyes from the fact that Britain ‘remain[ed] one of the most networked countries in the world’.⁵⁶ The challenge, in the words of Nye, is therefore one of ‘[p]ower conversion’, i.e. ‘getting from resources to behavioural outcomes’,⁵⁷ and ‘distributed leadership’, i.e. ‘not just the ability to say something or give an order [but] getting others to pick up your agenda’.⁵⁸ Yet the means available in the end-of-empire context have lost some of their usefulness while even at the time of the transfers of power, ‘the promotion of corporate imperialism—imperialism promoted via British-based companies –’⁵⁹ made the projection of British influence a fraught task, constantly flirting (at best) with neocolonial practices and ambitions. As Gary D. Rawnsley argues, it is important to recognise that ‘soft power is a resource first, and an instrument second’, meaning that ‘how governments and other agencies can generate soft power’ is at least as important as how they use it.⁶⁰ In its evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee on the role and future of the Commonwealth in January 2012, the (now closed) Commonwealth Advisory Bureau argued that there were ‘some internal contradictions between UK domestic government policies and the promotion of “soft power” and a positive image overseas’ – citing restricted freedom of movement for Commonwealth citizens (including overseas students), the closure of several high commissions in smaller member states and a downsizing of the BBC World Service.⁶¹ The implication, as the Bureau told MPs, was that if the Commonwealth was to be a vector for British influence then a number of British domestic policies would have to be altered. How to square perceptions overseas and ‘opinion’ at home remains an ever-complex task—a YouGov survey in 2012, for instance, showed that a majority of the British public favoured ‘continuing membership of a less integrated EU, more akin to a free trade area’ and that, unlike ‘opinion-formers’, it also favoured hard over soft power, and thought overseas aid should be reduced.⁶²

Simultaneously, this special issue contributes to the connected study of embassies as places of policy-making and socialisation and of the actors of diplomacy—from ambassadors to the variety of unofficial contacts at home and in host countries.⁶³ In part, this follows the interest of Martin Thomas, Rogelia Pastor-Castro and their co-authors for an embassy’s ‘working practices, its capabilities or its internal culture’⁶⁴ and its role as ‘a vital cog in the diplomatic machinery’,⁶⁵ something which Pastor-Castro also developed with John Young and others in their volume on the Hôtel de Charost, the British embassy in Paris, and its successive ambassadors between 1944 and 1979, showing ‘the significance of the permanent mission to diplomatic practice’.⁶⁶ It also follows the work of scholars such as Michael J. Hughes and Roger H. Platt, who have argued that ‘policy-making and policy-execution processes [are] often less clear in practice than in constitutional theory’ and that ‘[s]enior members of the diplomatic establishment played a significant role in shaping decisions on foreign policy, whether through direct advice to ministers or by determining the flow of information in a way that structured perceptions of the international landscape among political decision-makers in London’.⁶⁷ While according to Robin Renwick, diplomacy can also ‘consist of going through the motions, of making statements that are essentially meaningless, about crises no one has any intention of doing much about’,⁶⁸ the political role of representatives, particularly in the way they select and present information for use by politicians back in London,⁶⁹ cannot be underestimated. More broadly, the volume offers some case-study reflections on Sir Ivor Roberts’ characterisation of the diplomat’s ‘Sisyphean task in which, as (s)he attempts to grapple with one conflict, another breaks out. We manage or contain disputes; very rarely do we deliver a quantifiable solution’.⁷⁰ In recent years, diplomatic careers seem to have followed more diverse paths, with more diplomats leaving mid-career. But as Fletcher points out, this is both a positive development, ‘increasing the pool of diplomats who have tried other professions, and who are flexible and marketable enough to adapt, learn and return’, and problematic, because it ‘will undermine the sense of diplomats as a cadre, and blur the lines of accountability further’.⁷¹ Women have also started to occupy some of the higher echelons of diplomacy,⁷² but very slowly—only in 2017 was a woman, Karen Pierce, appointed as UK Permanent Representative to the United Nations, and her subsequent ambassadorship to Washington in 2020 was also a first. The role of Daphne Park (who would become known as ‘Queen of Spies’ and allegedly admitted being involved in the murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961⁷³) in Vietnam, as analysed by Lori Maguire in this volume, is significant in this respect, at a time when women first started to be appointed heads of mission and when the removal of the marriage bar to diplomatic service was finally lifted in 1972.⁷⁴ Taken together, the articles reflect on what makes ‘diplomatic tradecraft’,⁷⁵ in terms of both the resources offered by Britain and the skills possessed by British diplomats in post, particularly to help ‘guard against future misunderstandings, mitigate conflicts, and aid negotiations’.⁷⁶

A final theme is the significance and evolution of Franco-British relations in Britain’s diplomatic network—of posts, of information and partnerships. Writing in 2016, Sir Emyr Jones-Parry, the former UK Permanent Representative on the North Atlantic Council (2001–2003) and to the United Nations (2003–2007), argued that ‘increased cooperation’ between the United Kingdom and France, ‘especially in hard military issues, is even more important as we confront global challenges and economic realities’.⁷⁷ From a different perspective, French scholar François Gaulme concluded that ‘the relationship between French and British officials and politicians was rather positive on the military cooperation side, above average in strategic, foreign affairs matters, and very poor on development assistance issues’.⁷⁸ As Amelia Hadfield, Christian Turner and Thibaud Harrois show, France-British relations are crucial in the management of Britain’s departure from the European Union—in style and in substance, at the bilateral and multilateral levels and, to a large extent, in domestic and foreign affairs. The French factor in British diplomatic decisions also appears (without seeking to draw any linear trajectories or conclusions) in Mélanie Torrent’s study of Anglo-Algerian relations and Bent Boel’s article on Eastern bloc dissidents and, perhaps more implicitly, in assessments of British Council work, with French cultural diplomacy serving as a model for Britain’s own endeavours in its early years. With Sir Peter Ricketts considering that the current ‘tilt to the Indo-Pacific is a slogan [and] does not match closely enough the pattern of Britain’s vital interests to become the basis for a durable national strategy’,⁷⁹ the case studies also offer a broad range of regional settings over several decades to put current ambitions in perspective—from North Africa to Asia, Europe and the Pacific itself, with Adrien Rodd’s contribution on Britain’s ever-shifting network in a distant region and the pitfalls in building structured cooperation. The ambition is thus to provide non-deterministic connections across regions and periods since the Second World War by looking at instances of diplomatic departures, their causes and resolutions.

The volume opens on the importance of cultural activities and trade in the pursuit of various diplomatic goals, to increase influence abroad in the interwar period, refashion diplomatic relations in the transition out of empire and manage tensions and conflicts of varying degrees. Alice Byrne considers the ambiguity around the British Council’s initial objectives of ‘projecting Britain’ (i.e. serving national goals) in the interwar period and of conducting an internationalist agenda (i.e. encouraging international understanding). Although the British Council embraced ‘cultural internationalism’ and the promotion of cultural exchange between countries after the war, key extracts from the Council’s publication Britain To-day show how British interests were in fact conflated with the goals of liberal internationalists, and how British values were increasingly hailed as internationalist ideals. Byrne also traces the ‘imperial internationalism’ in the British Council’s so-called internationalist thinking, rooted in imperialism and ambitions of world influence. By the late 1950s, the British Council’s mission still aimed to ‘civilise’ developing nations through English language classes and the promotion of British culture, based on a long-standing belief in the hierarchy of national cultures. These issues are explored by Lauriane Simony in the specific case of Burma, after its independence from Britain in 1948. She shows how the British Council became instrumental in preserving the British heritage and the English language in the country after independence, particularly by encouraging social encounters between Burmese and British elites outside of the political field. However, General Ne Win’s coup in 1962 marked both the rapid unravelling of Britain’s cultural legacy and the end of most British Council activities in Burma, as the Revolutionary Council targeted foreign cultural influences in the country. Reflecting on the role of a military coup in precipitating a diplomatic departure and on the ability of British policymakers and staff to assert their diplomatic presence in an authoritarian context in other ways, Simony considers what options are left for diplomats when their presence and their actions in a country are threatened. Looking at diplomatic protection and the nature of official and non-official diplomatic status in a crisis, she analyses the impact of the British Council’s departure on the redirection of Britain’s influence on the international stage, at a time when Britain’s world power was decreasing because of decolonisation and the emergence of more important international actors. Challenges to British power and influence in the long ends of empire is also a core issue in Mélanie Torrent’s analysis of Algeria’s decision to break relations with Britain over London’s refusal to use force against the white government of Ian Smith in Rhodesia in 1965. Analysing the circuits of information between Labour MPs and Algerian diplomats based in, or passing through London, Torrent shows that while friendship and contacts developed during the war of Algerian independence do not explain why formal Anglo-Algerian relations were resumed in 1968, they certainly made the process easier and even quicker for both sides. To some extent, they also influenced British assessments of Algerian interests and intentions, alongside reports from both the British section which had remained in Algiers and French contacts in Europe and North Africa. Divisions within the Labour party on the means available to pursue objectives, as well as on the objectives themselves—in Rhodesia as much as in Algeria—limited the influence that Britain could hope to exert. While the Algerian government had wanted Britain to ‘do a de Gaulle’ in Rhodesia, British politicians and diplomats never perceived France as a possible or viable model for Britain in relation to its settler colonies. This was not just because of the specificities of Rhodesia but because of the uniqueness of de Gaulle’s anti-Americanism, which they saw as a more important factor in his prestige after 1965 than his policies of the early 1960s.

The influence of the American alliance and Cold War dynamics also runs through the following two articles. Lori Maguire examines the valedictory despatches of three British consuls in Hanoi (Daphne Park, T.J. Everard and J.H. Fawcett), at the time of the Vietnam War. Written towards the end of the conflict, they each represent a very personal insight into the war and into the daily life of the consulate (later embassy). Maguire analyses the criticism (sometimes expressed in very colourful language) against the communist regime in North Vietnam, and the weight of dogma and ideology which made all official diplomatic encounters difficult. Taken together, the valedictory despatches show the difficult progression of the British consulate from an MI6 outpost to an embassy, within the wider evolution of British strategic interests in North Vietnam and Anglo-Vietnamese diplomatic relations. The social, physical settings of the making of diplomacy are also central to the article by Bent Boel, who analyses the use of British embassies as a meeting ground with dissidents in the Eastern bloc in the 1970s, a practice which was continued and amplified in the early 1980s, even when diplomats faced expulsion. Looking at a wide range of actors from British Prime Ministers to journalists, Boel shows how ‘para-contacts’, political contacts and diplomatic contacts all combined to provide multilayered relationships with opponents of the communist regimes in the Soviet bloc. Competition and emulation in managing contacts with dissidents between the Western European powers—and particularly between France under President François Mitterrand and Britain under Margaret Thatcher—influenced options and decisions. But Boel argues that while fear of being expelled did limit the extent to which diplomats were prepared to be in contact with dissidents, obstacles were ultimately either ignored or became easier to overcome, as the geopolitical and national scenes evolved.

Looking at the period beyond the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ending of the Cold War and the reshaping of great power politics in the twenty-first century, the last three articles consider the international implications of the rejection by a majority of British voters of the EU, in a bid to reclaim sovereignty—or ‘take back control’ as the campaign slogans put it—over supranational organisations. Adrien Rodd examines the impact of Brexit on Britain’s possible diplomatic and economic re-engagement in the Pacific region in the coming years, after a long absence from the region. He argues that, although the Brexit rhetoric of ‘Global Britain’ has led many Brexiteers to advocate a revival of old partnerships, in particular with Commonwealth countries, the small developing island states of the Pacific which once belonged to the British empire are, in fact, not very high up on Britain’s list of post-Brexit priorities. Rodd shows that Britain will need more than the current strategy of free trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand and the re-opening of diplomatic posts in several small Pacific islands, as the rhetoric of Britain’s re-engagement in the Pacific does not take into account conflicting British and Australian interests, in light for instance of British support for the environmental concerns of small Pacific islands. Amelia Hadfield and Christian Turner argue that Brexit is ‘both a major blow to the system of Western statecraft, and a permanent rupture to the architecture of continued UK-France cooperation within the structures of the EU’. They analyse the extent to which the Lancaster House Treaties have given Britain the ability to cushion the changes, consider whether they are likely to survive beyond the current period and assess how they can serve Britain’s interests in the post-Brexit period. Hadfield and Turner give particular importance to the implications of Britain’s decision for the E3, which they see as ‘one of the most intriguing ad-hoc formats to emerge this century’, and one of the forums for cooperation that Brexit may in fact have strengthened. Their reflections shed light on the evolution of Britain’s involvement in the European Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), as does the article by Thibaud Harrois. Harrois shows that in the past decades, Britain did influence certain EU foreign and security policies, as long as the issues were not politicised—something which the debate over Brexit changed, both because of the EU’s desire to demonstrate that ambitious developments in security cooperation were possible in spite of the UK’s departure and because of the pledge of successive British governments that the UK would not be formally involved in the EU’s future foreign and security initiatives. Ultimately, Harrois shows that the degree of politicisation of foreign and security policies explains why they were left out of the December 2020 treaty on future UK-EU relations. Here again, the authors consider the interaction between diplomatic style and substance in the making of foreign policy and shed light on long-term continuities—of partners, of audiences and of interests—in decision-making processes and in their mediatisation and projection.

‘A genuinely strategic approach to foreign policy-making’, Jamie Gaskarth has written, ‘requires policy-makers to ask: what kind of actor does the United Kingdom want to be in international politics?’⁸⁰ What this volume considers is what makes a ‘networked’ actor—a quality which Britain claimed and continues to claim—and where Britain stands in this regard. If one follows Peter Ricketts’ assessment that ‘it is just as unhelpful to good policymaking to overrate Britain’s weight in the world as it is to get trapped in a gloomy foreboding of inevitable decline’,⁸¹ then historical forays into experiences of diplomatic departures can suggest means of ensuring the continuity of cooperation. They also show that—to return to Sir Ivor Roberts’ opening statement on the need for a realistic assessment of resources by committed and flexible actors, and innovative thinking—departures are, in a number of cases, reversible, or at the very least redeemable.

Acknowledgment

The editors of the special issue would like to thank the institutions which contributed to a conference held on 2 October 2020 and from which several of the articles included here are derived – the Institut universitaire de France, CORPUS (UR UPJV 4295) at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne and CREW (UR 4399) at Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Roberts, ‘Valedictory Despatch’, 4.

2. Ludlow, ‘Brexit Negotiations’, 95.

3. Fletcher, The Naked Diplomat, xvii. Fletcher noted that Brexit is, ‘depending on where you stand, either Independence Day, a “quiet revolution”, or a suicide note’, ibid.

4. Ricketts, Hard Choices, 136. Before taking up the ambassadorship in Paris in 2012, Sir Peter Ricketts served as Britain’s first National Security Adviser and was also Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Head of Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service in 2006–2010.

5. Rogers, 9 Lessons in Brexit.

6. Ricketts, Hard Choices, 161.

7. Ibid., 160.

8. Baroness Anelay of St John’s, ‘The UK’s Integrated Review overpromises and under-delivers’.

9. Saunders, ‘Brexit and Empire’.

10. H.M. Government, Integrated Review, 14.

11. Ibid., 13.

12. Marriott, ‘Embassies responding to crisis’, 246.

13. Hague, ‘Our diplomatic network’. In some countries however, the United Kingdom (and the United States) have ‘virtual embassies’, as in Iran, see Fletcher, The Naked Diplomat, 82.

14. Hague, ‘Future Diplomatic Network’, c. 1166–1167.

15. Knight, Niblett and Raines, Hard Choices, 18.

16. Hague, ‘Future Diplomatic Network’, c. 1166–1167. See also Bell, ‘Soft Power’, 83.

17. Nye, ‘Soft power’, 205; see also Nye, ‘Hard, soft, smart power’, 565.

18. Lloyd, Diplomacy with a Difference, 6.

19. See for instance Sanderson, Perfide Albion?.

20. Nicolson, Diplomacy, 191.

21. Gitelson, ‘Why small states break’, 469–470.

22. Ibid., 454.

23. Ibid.

24. Pastor-Castro and Thomas, Embassies in Crisis, 1.

25. Ibid., 1.

26. In Keys, ‘The diplomat’s two minds’, 14.

27. Wouters, Duquet and Meuwissen, ‘The Vienna Conventions’, 511.

28. The Overseas Resettlement Bureau was created in 1957 with the goal of helping former colonial civil servants relocate within public administration. See Kirk-Greene, On Crown Service.

29. Smith, ‘Crisis response’, 222.

30. Renwick, Not Quite the Diplomat, 11.

31. Barder, What Diplomats Do, 104.

32. House of Lords, ‘The EU’s External Action Service’, 50.

33. Barder, What Diplomats Do, 204.

34. See Derek F. Milton, High Commissioner to Jamaica (1989–1995), and Gordon Baker, High Commissioner to Belize (1995–1998) and Barbados (1998–2001), in Onslow and Kandiah, 30–31, 38.

35. Pastor-Castro and Thomas, Embassies in Crisis, 10.

36. Chafer and Cumming, ‘New Forms of Engagement’, 174.

37. House of Lords, ‘The EU’s External Action Service’, 10, 31.

38. Chafer and Cumming, ‘New Forms of Engagement’, 176.

39. Cumming, Chafer and Callan, ‘Conclusion’. The authors also note that cooperation can be noticeably more difficult with states where one of the former colonial powers remains a dominant partner.

40. Chafer and Cumming, ‘New Forms of Engagement’, 179.

41. Badel, Diplomaties européennes, 367.

42. Sellal, ‘Préface’, 10.

43. As Hague had put it, a wider diplomatic network would ‘mean that our reach when British companies need assistance or British nationals are in danger will go further and be stronger’. Hague, ‘Future Diplomatic Network’, c. 1167.

44. Marriott, ‘Embassies responding to crisis’, 232–233.

45. Balzacq, Charillon and Ramel, ‘Introduction’, 16.

46. Mayall, ‘Inroduction’, 6.

47. In Keys, ‘The diplomat’s two minds’, 11.

48. Ibid., 1.

49. Gaskarth, ‘Strategizing Britain’s role’, 561.

50. Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation, 7.

51. Tournès and Scott-Smith, ‘Introduction: A Word of Exchanges’, 7.

52. Byrne, ‘The Commonwealth University Interchange Scheme’, 67, 73ac.

53. Nye, ‘Evidence’, 5.

54. Nye, ‘Hard, soft, smart power’, 566.

55. Ibid., 571.

56. Niblett, ‘Written evidence’, 739.

57. Nye, ‘Soft power’, 198.

58. Nye, ‘Evidence’, 13. On soft power, see also House of Lords, Select Committee on Soft Power and the UK’s Influence, Persuasion and Power.

59. Bell, ‘Soft power’, 77.

60. Rawnsley, ‘British approaches to soft power’, 8.

61. Commonwealth Advisory Bureau, ‘Written Evidence’, Ev. 63.

62. Knight, Niblett and Raines, Hard Choices Ahead, viii.

63. See the long collection of volumes published by the historians of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office—focusing on British embassies (Beijing and Paris for instance) and high commissions (New Delhi, Canberra and the Caribbean) but also on particular crises (Grenada in 1983) or moments of negotiations (the Vietnam War, Lancaster House in 1979, or 1989).

64. Pastor-Castro and Thomas, Embassies in Crisis, 7.

65. Ibid., 16.

66. Young, ‘Introduction’, 1. On the importance of embassies, see also Hopkins, Kelly and Young.

67. Hughes and Platt, ‘Career structure’, 266–267.

68. Renwick, Not Quite the Diplomat, x.

69. Kessler, Les ambassadeurs, 177.

70. Roberts, ‘Valedictory Despatch’, 4.

71. Fletcher, The Naked Diplomat, 39.

72. In 1996, Pauline Neville-Jones resigned when the Paris ambassadorship was given to a man with less diplomatic experience. FCO Historians, ‘Women and the Foreign Office’, 25.

73. McCarthy, Women of the World, 259.

74. Britain’s first women to become head of mission were Eleanor Emery in 1973 (as High Commissioner to Botswana) and Anne Warburton (as Ambassador to Denmark) in 1976; only in 1987 did a married woman reach the position—Veronica Sutherland, appointed to the Ivory Coast. McCarthy notes that an ambassadorship (to Israel) was first offered to a (single) woman in 1962: the chosen diplomat, Barbara Salt, was unable to take up the job due to illness—and no other proposal was made to a woman before 1976; McCarthy, Women of the World, 296–297 ; see also FCO Historians, ‘Women and the Foreign Office’, 21.

75. Talking about ‘diplomatic tradecraft’, Hague emphasised that the expansion of Britain’s diplomatic network needed new resources in London itself, including a new language centre (with an emphasis on Arabic, Mandarin and Latin American Spanish and Portuguese) and a new ‘Expertise Fund’ (focusing on both ‘thematic and geographical policy’). Hague, ‘Our diplomatic network’.

76. Keys, ‘The diplomat’s two minds’, 11.

77. Jones-Parry, ‘A UK perspective’.

78. Gaulme, ‘A French perspective’.

79. Ricketts, Hard Choices, 161.

80. Gaskarth, ‘Strategizing Britain’s role’, 560.

81. Ricketts, Hard Choices, p. 146.