Traditional diplomacy: What are your impressions of the 'old' diplomacy? Has it become outmoded?

In the definition of “old” diplomacy it is strongly linked to the use of embassies, conduct of bilateral diplomacy, ceremonies or protocols and secrecy. All of which are still very much in use today. Though the role of embassies have changed. They are now not the only or not even the most frequent way to conduct negotiations as they were before. Its role has gone from dealing with high politics to low politics, to bilateral soft-power purposes.

However multilateral diplomacy is now a must, especially since the decolonisation period and the increase of actors, not to forget NGO's. Its a matter of speed. And even though summits or conferences give opportunity for less formal negotiations on the side, but perhaps also more secretive persuasions, the actual meetings usually keep to the “old” diplomacy style according to protocol.

Concerning protocols, old way of signing treaties in alphabetical order or sitting in alphabetical order at ex. NATO meetings, are as you understand still practised, though in new forums. In mid February this year the French President Nicolas Sarkozy refused to go with these traditional way of diplomacy while cameras where on during the NATO meeting, but agreed to follow protocol while cameras were off since it wouldn't effect his prestige then.

Perhaps it hadn't effected his prestige, if this hadn't leaked to the press, which tell us that “total”diplomatic secrecy is long gone. It is now more than ever before hard to control the flow of information, as it is so happily referred to after the introduction of the internet and other ICT's. Though constant flow from people to people can easily give upraise to wrong information being spread. Since globalisation the issues we need to deal with have increased and therefore specialisation to different fields have occurred. Which makes today's diplomats better adapt to analyse information in their field and area so that states can get more reliable information.

According to Brian Hockings investigations diplomats and foreign offices today see them self as networking agencies. Connected not only with the homeland missions but as a group together with all foreign offices and diplomats- as some sort of global agents working for world integration. By this we can draw that the emergence of globalisation have been the big weight on the scale for tipping over to a new view on diplomacy.

The goals for new diplomacy after World War One were that it was going to become more publicly scrutinised and controlled. While though the public have more insight to what goes on in foreign affairs and have some more influence through NGO's it is still questionable how open it is for citizens to participate or influence. If “new” diplomacy has not reached all its goals and old structures are still in use, it gets hard to state that there really has been a fundamental paradigm shift in diplomacy.