Table Of ContentSTUDIES IN DIPLOMACY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
GENERAL EDITORS: Donna Lee and Paul Sharp
FRINGE PLAYERS AND
THE DIPLOMATIC ORDER
The ‘New’ Heteronomy
Jozef Bátora and Nik Hynek
Studies in Diplomacy and International Relations
Series Editors: Donna Lee, Professor of International Political Economy &
Diplomacy, University of Kent, UK and Paul Sharp, Professor and Head of
Political Science, University of Minnesota Duluth, USA.
This series seeks to publish the best research and scholarship directed at
explaining and understanding how diplomacy contributes to the conduct of
relations between states, peoples, private enterprises, transnational lobbies and
anyone or any organisation which possesses the ability to act on the world
stage. To this end, the series invites proposals from all disciplines including
International Relations, History, Economics, Political Science, Gender Studies
and Philosophy which address the challenges facing contemporary diplomacy
and engage with the major intellectual debates in the field of contemporary
International Studies.
Titles include:
Jozef Bátora and Nik Hynek
FRINGE PLAYERS AND THE DIPLOMATIC ORDER
The ‘New’ Heteronomy
Andrew Williams
FRANCE, BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
1900–1940
A Reappraisal
Taryn Shepperd
SINO-US RELATIONS AND THE ROLE OF EMOTION IN STATE ACTION
Understanding Post-Cold War Crisis Interactions
R. S. Zaharna
BATTLES TO BRIDGES
US Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy after 9/11
Costas M. Constantinou and James Der Derian (editors)
SUSTAINABLE DIPLOMACIES
Andrew F. Cooper, Brian Hocking and William Maley (editors)
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AND DIPLOMACY
Worlds Apart?
Paul Sharp and Geoffrey Wiseman (editors)
THE DIPLOMATIC CORPS AS AN INSTITUTION OF INTERNATIONAL
SOCIETY
Jan Melissen
THE NEW PUBLIC DIPLOMACY
Soft Power in International Relations
Karl W. Schweizer and Paul Sharp (editors)
THE INTERNATIONAL THOUGHT OF HERBERT BUTTERFIELD
Mai’a Davis Cross
THE EUROPEAN DIPLOMATIC CORPS
Diplomats and International Cooperation from Westphalia to Maastricht
Donna Lee, Ian Taylor and Paul D. Williams
THE NEW MULTILATERALISM IN SOUTH AFRICAN DIPLOMACY
Studies in Diplomacy and International Relations
Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–71495–9
(outside North America only)
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order.
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Also by Jozef Bátora
FOREIGN MINISTRIES AND THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION: Going Virtual?
CULTURE AND EXTERNAL RELATIONS: Europe and Beyond ( co-editor )
THE GOVERNANCE OF SMALL STATES IN TURBULENT TIMES: The Exemplary
Cases of Norway and Slovakia ( co-editor )
Also by Nik Hynek
HUMAN SECURITY AS STATECRAFT: Structural Conditions, Articulations, and
Unintended Consequences
STATEBUILDING IN AFGHANISTAN: Multinational Contributions to
Reconstruction ( co-editor )
CRITICAL APPROACHES TO HUMAN SECURITY: Rethinking Emancipation and
Power in International Relations (c o-editor )
CANADA’S FOREIGN AND SECURITY POLICY: Soft and Hard Strategies of a
Middle Power ( co-editor )
Fringe Players and the
Diplomatic Order
The “New” Heteronomy
Jozef Bátora
Associate Professor, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia
and
Nik Hynek
Associate Professor, Metropolitan University and Charles University, Prague,
Czech Republic Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia
© Jozef Bátora and Nik Hynek 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-0-230-36393-9
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First published 2014 by
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Contents
Preface v i
Introduction 1
1 Social Scientific Conceptualizations of Diplomacy 19
2 Diplomacy as an Institution Embedded in Environments,
Structures and Practices 46
3 Studying Liminality and Fringe Players in the Modern
Diplomatic Order 66
4 The Holy See: Global Borderless Sovereignty and
Double-Hatted Diplomats 87
5 The Sovereign Military Order of Malta: Extraordinary
Resilience Meets Chance 112
6 The European Union: Bending the Rules to Fit in 1 38
7 Conclusion – Liminality, Co-existing Diplomatic Orders and
the “New” Diplomatic Heteronomy 158
Notes 179
References 1 87
Index 2 07
v
Preface
This is a book we wanted to write for a long time. Composing its preface
is a testament to its completion. Our initial comradely discussions, and
subsequently written versions, started to surface as early as in 2007.
What had begun as our general – and yes, hazy – dissatisfaction with IR
literature that was, almost invariably, depicting diplomacy as a feature of
a modern, Westphalian system ordered by the principle of sovereignty
turned into more complex debates and arguments. One of these was the
idea that IR is a social science and if diplomacy is a key institution of the
international political order it should be studied as such – using institu-
tionalist approaches to the study of political institutions.
Elsewhere, we argued that the Central European academic environ-
ment, including Slovakia and the Czech Republic where we have been
living, has been part of what we called an “IR barbaricum”. Distinct
from a periphery, barbaricum with its dual nature (i.e., being inside and
outside of the core simultaneously) presents numerous practical chal-
lenges for scholars but also offers opportunities for innovation and
unexpected and unusual – some might say peculiar – entries into the
core. One of the key intellectual breakthroughs which we recorded
in the process of writing this book took place at a garden café by the
Danube River in downtown Bratislava. It was here – on the other side
of what was once the Limes – that we laid out a series of theoretical
features and key arguments of the book. The inside/outside nature of
diplomacy as an institutionalized order embedded in environments,
structures and practices, imperfectly appropriated by the Westphalian
state-centred system. The modern diplomatic order being formed during
the late medieval period – not after 1648, defying the logic of a clean
structural break between the late medieval period and the early modern
one. To demonstrate those points on diplomacies of a set of actors that
never were discussed – individually or collectively – in a robustly theo-
retical fashion in IR. To show that the diplomatic order in its various
guises has always been of a composite nature. While stretched by new
non-sovereign actors, the system still being extraordinarily stable and
conservative. To show that fringe diplomatic players have been greatly
resilient and always juggled multiple strategies to stay inside the system
and still being able to operate at its outside. To their great gains. Just like
the inhabitants of the barbaricum.
vi
Preface vii
Throughout the years of working on the book, both of us enjoyed the
support of the Institute of European Studies and International Relations
at the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences at Comenius University.
Special thanks to the Dean of the Faculty, Silvia Miháliková, for supporting
us in all our endeavor. When finalizing the manuscript, Jozef benefited
greatly from the intellectual resources and the friendly atmosphere at
The Europe Center at Stanford University where he worked as Fulbright
visiting professor from July to December 2013. He is particularly grateful
to James G. March for inspiring and challenging debates which helped
in crystallizing some of the key arguments in the book. We are also
grateful to Johan P. Olsen and Iver B. Neumann who – each in their own
way – provided useful reflections on various aspects related to concepts
and ideas presented here. Funding for research and travel was gener-
ously provided by the Slovak Research and Development Agency (grant
no. APVV 0484–10), the Czech Science Foundation (grant no. P408/12/
P970), and the Charles University in Prague (PRVOUK system).
Finally, writing this book was possible thanks to intense support of our
families. Jozef would like to thank his wife Zuzana and his sons Adam
and Michal for bearing with him and letting him enjoy the pleasures
of their company. Nik would like to dedicate the book to his wonderful
company, namely his wife Zuzanka, son Bartoloměj and daughter
Simonka.
Bratislava and Prague, June 2014
Introduction
This book is an analysis of the nature of stability and change in the insti-
tutionalized order of modern diplomacy. It argues that to understand
such processes, it is useful to focus not on the central features and domi-
nant players of the diplomatic order, that is, states, but rather on what
we term the fringe players – non-state entities with diplomatic privileges
that are recognized as legitimate players within the diplomatic order on
a par with states. We combine two strands of social-scientific literature,
namely the literature on institutions and institutional change dynamics
with the literature on liminality, to develop an analytical framework
helpful in capturing the dynamic of stability and change in institution-
alized orders including in the modern diplomatic order. We then apply
this framework to analyze the embeddedness and adaptation of three
fringe players – the Holy See (HS), the Sovereign Military Order of Malta
(SMOM), and the European Union (EU) – and show how the institution-
alized order of modern diplomacy accommodates such actors. By most
accounts, these actors do not fit the dominant s tate-centric pattern char-
acterizing diplomacy since, in conventional interpretations, the Peace
of Westphalia. By doing that we show, first, that the modern diplomatic
order has hitherto consisted of multiple co-existing old and new diplo-
matic orders of different historical origin, retaining their relevance;
second, that the modern diplomatic order is less state-centric than
conventionally assumed and is instead better conceived of as a heter-
onomy – an order characterized by co-existence of units with structur-
ally and ontologically different principles of growth and operation; and
third, that this heteronomous character of the modern diplomatic order
renders it more robust and far less susceptible to change than much of
the proliferating literature on the changing nature of diplomacy would
have it.
1
2 Fringe Players and the Diplomatic Order
The book addresses several lacunae that characterize the IR literature
on diplomacy. First, we review the idea that diplomacy is an institution
and s hould be studied as such . Of course, the idea of diplomacy as an
institution is not new. Most of the classic studies of diplomacy attest to
its role as a set of rules, routines, formal and informal norms, symbolic
actions and rituals that regularize interactions among actors (Satow
1917; Numelin 1950; Nicholson 1954; Mattingly 1955; Queller 1967).
While in most of the classics the nature of diplomacy as an institution-
alized order was implicit, it was first in the works of the authors of the
English school in IR where it was rendered explicit (Bull 1977; Wight
1977; Watson 1982). Yet as Neumann (2002a) points out, the English
school remained quite void of any profound connections to social scien-
tific theorizing. Arguably, to this day, only a relatively few contribu-
tions to the study of diplomacy as an institution had actually taken this
notion seriously and applied social scientific theoretical approaches to
the study of institutions (for exceptions see Bátora 2005, 2008; Jönsson
and Hall 2005). In this book, we use organization theory-oriented new
institutionalist theory to conceptualize diplomacy as an institutional-
ized order formed in the interactions between environments, structures
and micro-level practices (cf. March and Olsen 1989).
Second, most of the studies on diplomacy as an institution of the
modern state order focus on the dominant state-centric pattern of that
order and do not analyze formally recognized legitimate players within
the order whose sovereignty and principles of political organization are
different from those of states. This includes the three players analyzed
here – the HS, SMOM and the EU. The existence and operation of such
players within the modern diplomatic order suggests that the nature of
this order is not necessarily as state-centric as conventional approaches
suggest. Moreover, it also suggests a broader theoretical point worth
exploring, namely that to study institutional orders, it is useful to
address the liminal actors and explore how liminality is accommodated
by an institutional order and how it contributes to generating endog-
enous change dynamics within orders.
Third, the book also suggests that a focus on change in the modern
diplomatic order should be complemented by equal attention to what
keeps the modern diplomatic order s table and how this stability is main-
tained. Academic contributions analyzing change in and of diplomacy
have been proliferating in recent years. Diplomacy has been seen as
being exposed to a highly dynamic global environment, new kinds of
diplomatic agendas and actors are seen as challenging the structures
and norms of diplomatic establishments. Non-state actors of all possible
