World Revolution and International Diplomacy, 1900–39

Abstract

World Revolution and International Diplomacy, 1900–39 Jan Hennings Alastair Kocho-Williams, Russian and Soviet Diplomacy, 1900–39 xii + 215 pp. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ISBN-13 978-0230252646. $100.00. Key to the participation of a state in international diplomacy is its recognition by foreign powers. Recognition, however, cannot be imposed on others by brute force. Successful negotiation requires membership in a group of states with shared norms, practices, and procedures. Diplomats have to master the “structure, grammar, and rules of a common language; … the rules and understandings underlying the practice of international politics.”1 Revolutionaries have always faced difficulties in communicating to the world the legitimacy of their new state. The English Civil War and the French Revolution are cases in point. The leaders of social revolutions often vacillated between sweeping efforts at replacing the symbolic sphere of monarchs with the insignia of a new ideology, on the one hand, and the alignment of new political practices with the old international order, on the other.2 But one need not hark back to the early modern period to see this dynamic: the same [End Page 204] principle holds true for the Soviet case. Alastair Kocho-Williams has written an insightful monograph about the tensions between traditional diplomacy, inherited from the Russian Empire, and Soviet foreign relations. A central concern of his book is whether diplomacy was shaped by developments external to the course of events in Russia and the Soviet Union, or whether diplomatic practice evolved from national political ideology and domestic politics. Recently, diplomatic history has emerged from the shadows that the proverbial “great men” continued to cast over the discipline while cultural and social historians were shedding light on many unexplored areas of the past. Historians of international relations have since called for an opening up of their field by turning to “culture” broadly conceived.3 Meanwhile, the cultural turn has embraced high politics, top-level decision making, and foreign policy, resulting in numerous studies of the sociocultural conditions and symbolic dimensions of the political process across domestic and international domains.4 The convergence of politics and culture set the stage for the emergence of a field that, labeled as the “new diplomatic history,” has been bringing together scholars of diverse methodological backgrounds, different periods, and varied geographical expertise, including Russian and Soviet history.5 Their interests range from traditional subjects such as the European states-system, diplomatic institutions, recruitment and staff [End Page 205] organization, to nonstate actors, go-betweens, language, ritual, norms, and behavior of diplomatic practice, cultural encounter, and network analysis, as well as broader literary, legal, and intellectual contexts. Although Kocho-Williams does not explicitly situate his work within this historiographic landscape, his original, multiarchival research is an important contribution to the rejuvenated field of diplomatic history, especially since he covers a period, and a world region, that because of both linguistic barriers and a predominant focus on more recent eras tends to be underrepresented. Kocho-Williams’s analysis focuses on the changes wrought upon Russian diplomacy by the revolutions during the transition from the late tsarist empire to the new Soviet state. Drawing on source materials from archives in Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the author combines a prosopographic analysis of Russian foreign policy institutions with a study of diplomatic norms, behavior, ceremony, and conceptions of prestige. For the latter, he makes moderate use of Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital, although, in general, he gives significantly more room to solid institutional history and biographical case studies than to the cultural unpacking of revolutionary diplomacy.6 The book proceeds in strict chronological order. It covers 40 years of Russian and Soviet foreign policy from the beginning of the 20th century to the eve of World War II, tracing the internal friction between international diplomatic culture and socialist dogma in four stages. Taking 1900 as his starting point, Kocho-Williams emphasizes continuity in the period up to 1917. Until then, the institutional culture and the composition of the diplomatic corps were shaped by the administrative instrument of the tsar’s foreign policy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministerstvo inostrannykh del, MID). Despite reforms resulting from the 1905 revolution, the...