Sublime diplomacy: Byzantine, early modern, contemporary

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 865-888

  Neumann, Iver B ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OSLO   (Norway)

^b NORWEGIAN INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS NUPI   (Norway)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33748942807     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298060340030201     Document Type: Article

References (74)

1. D.A. Russell, 'Introduction', ix-1', in Longinus, Peri hupsus [On the Sublime] (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), xxv.
2. See, for example, Russell, 'Introduction' (1964), ix.
3. D.A. Russell, 'Introduction', ix-xvii in Longinus, On Sublimity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), xiii.
4. Ibid., 14-15 (10.2-10-3).
5. Ibid., 9-10 (9.3).
6. Ibid., 7 (7.1).
7. Ibid., 8 (7.4).
8. Evangelos Chrysos, 'Legal Concepts and Patterns for the Barbarians' Settlement on Roman Soil', in Evangelos K. Chrysos and Andreas Schwarcz (eds.), Das Reich und die Barbaren (Vienna: Böhlau, 1989), 12-23.
9. Evangelos Chrysos, 'Byzantine Diplomacy, A.D. 300-800: Means and End', in Byzantine Diplomacy: Papers from the Twenty-Fourth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Cambridge, March 1990, eds. Jonathan Shepard and Simon Frankling (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992), 25-39, at 35.
10. They could be titled basileus, even archibasileus, and be ranked on a par with the emperor as his brother, as was the Persian shah, but the usual thing was for them to be represented as the emperor's sons. The Ethiopian negus and the sultan demonstrated that it was possible to go from being a son to being a brother; this also happened in times of crises between Persia and Byzantium. The best known example from the West is the presentation of the royal crown of Hungary (the crown of St Stephen) to Geza by Emperor Michael VII Ducas in the 1070s, making him part of the family of kings. See Alexander Kazhdan, 'The Notion of Byzantine Diplomacy' in Byzantine Diplomacy, 3-21, at 20.
11. For caveats, see Chrysos, 'Byzantine Diplomacy', 37.
12. John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Apogee (London: Viking, 1991), 169-170.
13. Note the use of the concept of the aura, which crops up again in Proust as that quality of a momentous event that makes it visible at a distance (for example a great military battle) and as a fully theorised concept in Benjamin ('the unique manifestation of a distance, however close at hand'). See, for example, Richard Shiff, 'Digitized Analogies', in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan (eds.), Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 63-70.
14. Norwich, Byzantium, 171.
15. Besides hupsos, Longinus also used megethos: size, and he did not clearly distinguish the two concepts. Russell ('Introduction' (1965), xvi), reports that he has used 'sublime' for both concepts.
16. Amongst the many who have not grasped the importance of this kind of diplomacy we find Harold Nicolson, who, in his The Evolution of Diplomatic Method (London: Constable, 1954), 26-27, stresses that Luitprand was not impressed. It is true that Luitprand was less taken aback and wrote more condescendingly about Byzantine diplomacy as well as of the emperor after his second visit, but since the possibility that familiarity may breed contempt is ever-present, this does not tell us anything specific about this diplomacy. A practice is different from a habit in that it may be done well or badly; by the same token, any practice may be more or less effective.
17. In the same vein, Arnold Toynbee wrote, 'Could even the most simple-minded barbarians have taken seriously the mechanical toys in the imperial throne-room that were set working for the edification of foreign ambassadors to whom the emperor was giving audience?' (Arnold J. Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus and his World (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 498.)
18. Well, we have more eyewitness accounts like Liudprand's, and the Byzantines kept embellishing the practice at considerable cost for a millennium. Why do so if they did not find the practice to be efficient? Finally, Byzantine diplomacy is hardly unique in kind in this respect, only in degree. We may find similar stabs at sublimity in Ottoman diplomacy (which took over a number of practices from Byzantine diplomacy) as well as in European renaissance diplomacy; see Garrett Mattingly Renaissance Diplomacy (London: Cape, 1955).
19. Russell, 'Introduction' (1964), xliii.
20. Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 32.
21. Russell, 'Introduction' (1964), xlv.
22. Although Longinus' ideas were not widely drawn upon after mid century, he kept being invoked as a legitimating authority, someone who secured a long, honourable and serious-minded history for the subject; see Neil Hertz, 'A Reading of Longinus', in The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1-20. As the very name 'renaissance' betrays, this is the key function which ancients and ancient texts played into the period of early modernity, so it is small wonder that it crops up here.
23. The Italian Renaissance probably had its own understanding of the sublime, as had the Middle Ages, and there may be others; we have no full genealogy of the sublime.
24. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1757] 1990).
25. Only 33 years separates it from Kant's work on the sublime, and so this periodisation may be open to question. I lean on the conceptual historians and others who have seen the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a transitional period (Sattelzeit) here; this will place Burke in the transition, and Kant in modernity (if only as its portal); see Geschichliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches lexicon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, eds. Otto Brunner, Reinhart Koselleck. and Werner Conze (Berlin: Klett, 1972-1997).
26. Burke, Enquiry, 53.
27. Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 16.
28. de Bolla, Discourse of the Sublime, 33.
29. Burke, Enquiry, 36; see also 119 passim.
30. In Hobbes, of course, but see also, for example, Bruce James Smith, Politics and Remembrance: Republican Themes in Machiavelli, Burke and Tocqueville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
31. Burke, Enquiry, 47.
32. Cf. the Greek concept of katharsis. Longinus and his followers did not link the sublime and catharsis. A typical genealogical point can be made here; these two concepts meet in Burke, but although they both existed in the same time, at the same place, centuries before, they were then treated as unrelated, just like the example of two of my great-great-grandmothers hailing from the same country and living at the same time who may never have met.
33. Burke, Enquiry, 54 passim.
34. Ibid., 43.
35. Ibid., 65.
36. de Bolla, Discourse of the Sublime, 61.
37. Burke, Enquiry, 59, 61.
38. de Bolla, Discourse of the Sublime, chap. 4, esp. 122-131.
39. See Michel Foucault, '"Omnes et Singulatim": Toward a Critique of Political Reason', 298-325,
40. and 'Governmentality', 201-222, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3: Power (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000),
41. and Gerhard Oestreich (eds. H.G. Koenigsberger and Brigitta Oestreich), Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
42. Christian Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 30.
43. For substantiation of this claim, see Iver B. Neumann, 'The English School on Diplomacy: Scholarly Potential Unfulfilled', International Relations 17, no. 3 (2003): 341-369.
44. Reus-Smit, Moral Purpose, 30.
45. Reus-Smit, Moral Purpose, 32.
46. Ibid., 94
47. Comp. Keith Hamilton and Richard Langhorne, The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory and Administration (London: Routledge, 1995), 68-69.
48. Reus-Smit, Moral Purpose, 107-9.
49. James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 114. Reus-Smit's error may stem from his being too eager to set old diplomacy apart from Renaissance diplomacy, which to him is the example of ritualistic diplomacy.
50. M.S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy 1450-1919 (London: Longman, 1993), 56.
51. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).
52. Where new rules empower new actors, there will always be exclusions. The broadening and deepening of European diplomacy happened in an imperialist age, where the colonial subalterns paid the price. They are excluded from agency and relegated to subjects both within the discourse of the sublime and in diplomatic practices. Again, one place to start an analysis of this would be Burke's writings; see Gibbons, Burke and Ireland, chap. 7.
53. Jean-François Lyotard, 'The Sublime and the Avant-Garde', in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 89-107.
54. This essay is, for example, the only work on the sublime amongst the 35 texts anthologised in the widely used Continental Aesthetics Reader, ed. Clive Cazeaux (London: Routledge, 2000).
55. Lyotard, 'The Sublime', 99.
56. Ibid., 105.
57. Ibid., 105-6.
58. Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 18.
59. Ibid., 28. As a Nietzschean, I take it that Lyotard would be the first to dedifferentiate his own binary opposition, for surely making someone feel something is doing something.
60. Ibid., 20.
61. This takes the form of an embrace of Merleau-Ponty and a critique of Lacan; ibid., esp. 10-11.
62. Ibid., 21.
63. Iver B. Neumann, 'To be a Diplomat', International Studies Perspectives 6, no. 1 (2005): 72-93.
64. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977), 181.
65. Jean Baudrillard, La guerre du golfe n'a pas eu lieu (Paris: Galilée, 1991).
66. Daniel Madar, 'Planners, Influence, and Bureaucracy', International Journal 30, no. 1 (Winter 1974-75, special issue Diplomatic Method), 57-79, on 79;
67. see also Robert L. Rothstein, Planning, Prediction, and Policymaking in Foreign Affairs (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1972).
68. Ernst W. Gohlert, 'Planning in German Foreign Policy, International Journal 32, no. 4 (1977, special issue Planning and Prediction): 769-90, on 789.
69. For a general discussion, see Roland Bleiker, 'The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory', Millennium 30, no. 3 (2001): 509-33,
70. and for diplomacy, Costas Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
71. See, respectively, G.R. Berridge, A Dictionary of Diplomacy (London: Palgrave, 2001), 25;
72. and Alan James, The Oxford Concise Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 126.
73. 'Introduction'
74. See note 17 above and Hertz, 'A Reading of Longinus'.