My understanding of diplomacy today

As I have seen during the lectures and seminars, diplomacy has been changing throughout history. However, my understanding of diplomacy before starting this module was very limited to a few elements of what diplomacy is about, such as embassies, ambassadors, negotiations and visas. Moreover, as I wrote in my “first impressions” in the first lecture, I could understand, for the title of the module, that there were two types of diplomacy. What the title module says, new diplomacy, and what I could imagine, old diplomacy.

Nevertheless, during this course I have been able to acquire a better understanding of what diplomacy is and the differences of the new and the old diplomacies. And, even though with the names of new and old diplomacy we can imagine that they are completely opposed and different, today I can say that they “coexist peacefully” in the contemporary world politics. The old diplomacy has not disappeared, and the new diplomacy has taken lots of elements from the old one such as secrecy and bilateral negotiation, among many others. Furthermore, the old diplomacy is not as old as the name says, and the new diplomacy is not as new as the name says, as well.

Diplomacy today is more opened to new types of actors and new channels of communication which were completely unexpected twenty years ago. NGOs are playing an important role in the conduct of multilateral negotiations regarding environment, for example. International Organizations, at the same time, are more taken into account by governments and diplomats than twenty years ago. So, the nature of diplomacy as it was after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, has changed.

Moreover, the integration of technology in diplomacy has been a key element in the recent years. Besides, the possibilities of being in a negotiation through videoconference, and the limitations that it has, can have a profound impact in the near future. Nevertheless, diplomacy, nowadays, is facing new challenges at the same time. Wikileaks revealed confidential information between the US Department of State and its diplomats around the world. Thus, we do not know yet how it is going to affect diplomacy, if it is going to affect, but governments will probably try to keep their information safer from the newspapers.