Brian White on diplomacy and seminar reflection

Brian White on diplomacy: Having read White’s chapter for seminar 2, what are the most important issues he raises concerning the nature and development of diplomacy?
This is my first reflective blog on The New Diplomacy module. There I will highlight Brian Wite`s raised concerns on the nature and development of diplomacy. Also I will respond to some statements made on Seminar group B.
Brian White sees diplomacy as key concept in world politics. According to him this is the process of communication and negotiation between states and other international actors. At this point I definitely agree with his view on this concept. But at the seminar we had a student who argued that such thing as diplomacy does not exist at all. From my point of view this is wrong statement.
If we try to understand who international actors are, we see that event international student is an international actor, to some extent. So what happens if that student, for example, gets killed in car accident? The answer is: that country’s (accident place) appropriate institution contacts student`s country embassy, and informs that such accident happened. Then embassy contacting student`s relatives in his home country. So the point when institution contacted foreign embassy is the process of communication between states as well. That is carried out by people who serve diplomatic duty at embassies consular section. This is the first and less complex way of communication between states. Therefore this is a fact that diplomacy exist. At other stages it gets more complex, but still exists, and this is good, because we will have change to discuss about that in future seminars.

White argues that the end of cold war brought new mood to diplomacy. Just after cold war was seen optimism in diplomacy that everything could be resolved through it, but latter on everyone realised that now emerged many new player and international relation are more complicated than before. Therefore I think that this is the point when real new diplomacy started. Of course it was changing all the time in parallel with world. The statement when new diplomacy started is very debatable, but this depends from what angle we looking at world and diplomacy. I think this is most important think that we are able to identify changes in diplomacy in such areas as information gathering, policy advice, representation, negotiation and consular services.
I would like to give quick example from life to those people, who argued that new diplomacy does not exist. For example car makers such BMW every five years introducing new model for instance BMW calss 3, from the very old one model to the latest it has its strain and it continues though years. You are able to identify that this is BMW but it has many new features inside. So this is the same diplomacy has its core which was build long time ago, and have its strain, and through the time getting new features and roles.
So the fact is that diplomacy exist, as well as new diplomacy.