Diplomacy: Theory and Practice, 6th ed. – Online updating pages
Chapter 11: Conferences
p. 180, mid-page, ‘… during the great conflict of 1914-1918 (Hankey: 14)’: A little over a century later it is strikingly illustrated by the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a.k.a. the Ramstein Group. This has over 50 member states and was formed in April 2022 to coordinate – at monthly meetings – the supply of military aid to Ukraine.
p. 181, line 10 down, bilateral diplomacy: Giving evidence to the Foreign Affairs Ctee of the House of Commons, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, formerly perm rep of Jordan at the UN, said that ‘in my experiences at the UN, out of 193 ambassadors and their Ministers, only about 30 worked for the whole, chaired meetings, put forward initiatives and basically kept the machinery running; 160 were just doing bilateral work in a multilateral forum, exacting what they could out of it and paying little in.’ p. 20, n. 102.
pp. 188-9, Box 11.3: Simon McDonald, the top civil servant in the UK foreign ministry from 2015 until 2020, has some interesting ideas on Security Council reform in his Beyond Britannia, pp. 57-8.
p. 193, bottom para. and Box 11.4 over page: The Foreign Affairs Committee of the British House of Commons condemned ‘the creeping capture of [multilateral] organisations by China’ while seeing no inconsistency in this attitude with its demand that the UK should strive to use them in pursuit of its own foreign policies, see pp. 3, 9-10 etc. of this report.
pp. 195-6, The ‘New Multilateralism’: Since I drafted this short section, the international order, which turned greatly on multilateral diplomacy centred on the United Nations and was already creaking, has been very seriously buffeted. Never mind the challenge presented by the ‘new multilateralism’ I talked about here. It is now a commonplace observation that the far more serious threat to ‘the rules-based international order’* is the unmistakeable evidence of a disposition on the part of the major powers to shrug off the constraints of international organizations and basically do what they want. Putin’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine and Trump’s bombing of Iran and extra-judicial attacks on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, for example. The important question is: Is this development fatal to the international order or will it recover with the passing of the psychopath in the Kremlin and the vainglorious idiot in the White House? Opinion seems divided on this question, although I am sanguine. This is because the looming threats to the planet are so great that I believe that a rejuvenation of international cooperation will be impossible to avoid.
*The term ‘rules-based international order’ is a pleonasm since an ‘order’ of any sort is rules-based by definition, though this formula does have the advantage of advertising the fact.
Topics for Seminar Discussion or Essays
8. What is the most serious threat to the old multilateralism? Explain your answer.
9. Is the world doomed to a return to the nineteenth century system of international power politics?
10. To what extent is the UN Security Council’s ‘penholder’ arrangement a good idea?
Further reading
Borger, Julian, ‘Zelenskiy says only way to ensure peace is fundamental UN reform’, The Guardian, 20 September 2023
Brown, Gordon, ‘The “new world order” of the past 35 years is being demolished before our eyes. This is how we must proceed’, The Guardian, 12 April 2025
Clarke, Ken, Kind of Blue: A political memoir (Macmillan, 2016), Ch. 21
Foreign Affairs Committee (House of Commons), ‘In the room: the UK’s role in multilateral diplomacy’, 8 June 2021
McDonald, Simon, Beyond Britannia: Reshaping UK foreign policy (Haus, 2023)
Michel, Leo G., ‘NATO decision-making: The ‘consensus rule’ endures despite challenges’, in Mayer, S. (ed.), NATO’s Post-Cold War Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
NATO, ‘Consensus decision-making at NATO’, 30 June 2023 [It’s interesting that this page is available in English, French, Russian and Ukrainian.]
Nicolson, Harold, The Congress of Vienna. A study in Allied Unity: 1812–1822 (Constable: London, 1946), Chs. 8 and 9. Ch. 9 on ‘The problem of procedure’ is particularly interesting. I must have read my copy years ago because there are faint pencil lines here and there but I had quite forgotten about it.
Patrick, Stewart, ‘The Death of the World America Made: Donald Trump’s war on multilateralism is misguided and dangerous’, Emissary (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), 19 February 2025
Tocci, Nathalie, ‘Multilateralism is broken’, Politico, 10 October 2023
Tocci, Nathalie, ‘Multilateralism is on life support – but does the G7 any longer have the power to revive it?’, The Guardian, 21 June 2024
‘UN Security Council Reform: What the World Thinks’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 28 June 2023
Wachowiak, Jannike, and Peter Jurkovic, ‘The European Political Community: Explainer’, UK in a Changing Europe, 18 July 2024
Wellesley, Victor, Diplomacy in Fetters (Hutchinson: London, 1944), Ch. 3 – succinct and spot on. Certainly still worth reading, and freely available here.