To Be a Diplomat

Abstract

How do diplomats experience the world? Drawing mainly on fieldwork in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I argue that being a diplomat involves juggling three scripts of self against one another. The bureaucratic script tells the diplomat to focus squarely on quotidian concerns and to follow previously established routines. The heroic script tells him or her to focus squarely on a specific task in order to make a difference in the world, or at least to rove about the world, preferably involved in trouble-shooting. A third script is the self-effacing one of “the mediator,” of the diplomat as a specialist in making what happens at the outside of a political entity seem to dovetail as smoothly as possible with what happens at its inside. These scripts cannot be reconciled, only juggled. The uncertain predicament in which this places the diplomat is aggravated not only by tensions between professional and private life but also by the nomadic lifestyle of trekking between a home base in the ministry and sundry postings abroad. I conclude that being a diplomat is a never-ending and self-effacing technique of self, in the sense that the end product of diplomatic work is to let processes that are already in motion either go on or to have them stopped.

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