Intelligent Diplomacy & Intelligent Nonviolence

Daniel Larison on the nature of diplomacy:

Diplomacy is much closer to haggling and pazari than it is to rhetoric. In fact, a good diplomat doesn’t really care whether his opposite number has been persuaded by the virtue of his argument, but is most concerned to know that his opposite number is operating in good faith and will follow through on the bargain that has been reached. There are things that will be non-negotiable for other regimes, just as there are for our own, and part of the art of diplomacy is to make maximal gains towards that limit of the non-negotiable for your side. Or you can pretend that diplomacy has something to do with being nice and yielding to your rivals, as I assume Mr. Bush must believe for him to equate it with appeasement, which is almost the exact opposite of what proper diplomacy is.

Diplomacy, in other words, is purely functional and more or less treats whomever you’re engaged with as a means to an end. This might seem like a violation of the dictum that we should treat all people as ends in-and-of themselves, but I would argue that diplomacy actually fulfills that requirement in that, by definition, if you are engaged in diplomacy you are forgoing violence. This reading stands in stark contrast to the straw-man argument presented by Bush (and typical amongst the neocon crowd), in which diplomacy is all about the resolving of “misunderstandings” and the moral betterment of one’s adversary. The upshot of presenting this particular straw-man is that it paints just about anything short of violence as insufficiently realistic and hard-nosed.

Of course, this is nonsense. In the vast majority of cases, resorting to violence will actually make your situation worse, not in any abstract moral or spiritual sense, but in the very concrete sense that using violence runs a high risk of increasing both the number of your enemies and their determination to do to you what you’ve done to them.

Bush’s misconceptions about the nature of diplomacy also strike me as similar to general misconceptions about the nature of nonviolent resistance. People tend to assume that nonviolence is also all about winning over your enemies and oppressors – sticking flowers in the barrels of their guns and so forth. It is nothing of the sort. The decision to forgo violence is a purely internal one, made for reasons of internal principle alone. It may be that those principles reflect a concern for your enemies in the sense that you do not wish to inflict violence upon them, but it does not reflect concern for them in the sense that nonviolence may change their hearts or win their sympathies.

Nonviolence is actually very similar to a handicap in sports. It’s something of a personal challenge you set for yourself. For your own reasons, you take the option of violence off the table, and then you ask yourself, “Okay, with the options I have remaining to me, how do I get my enemies to do what I want?” As with diplomacy, the goals of nonviolent resistance in regards to your enemy are quite hard-nosed and unromantic. And like diplomacy, nonviolence acknowledges your enemy’s value as an end in themselves by its very definition, thus freeing you to treat your enemy (if you’re inclined to view it this way) as a means to your ends through your remaining options of engagement. The analogy to sports handicaps holds in another way as well – nonviolence forces you to become smarter and more creative by taking your most obvious solution off the table.

~ by Jeff on May 18, 2008.