The Legitimacy of Conference Diplomacy: A Historian’s View

Historians approach the topic of conference diplomacy with a certain amount of ambivalence. What kind of historical analysis are they able to contribute to an agenda set by International Relations specialists with their own systematic and generalizing perspectives? In several Western countries, diplomatic history and also a broadly conceived ‘international history’ are slow to recover from the loss of prestige they suffered at the hands of social and cultural historians. Historians of society, themselves swallowed up in the maelstrom of trends and turns and challenged by an upstart ‘global history’, ignored international relations altogether; cultural historians cared for little else but the symbolism and performativity displayed in diplomatic settings. Categories of a residual realism, such as ‘power’, ‘strategy’, or ‘interest’, have all but disappeared from work on pomp and ceremony in international encounters.