ABSTRACT
Traditionally, diplomacy has been the realm of lawyers trained in international law. The reason for this is obvious. They are experts on the context (Æ glossary) in which diplomacy takes place. To this very day, law – especially international public law – is an important component of this context. It shapes what counts as appropriate standards in diplomacy and what does not. Yet law is not the only component of the context that guides diplomats for how to interact with other diplomats. Diplomats are also situated in deeper contexts that shape their interaction. These deeper layers of context provide clues for which kinds of solutions to which kinds of problems are conceivable and which ones are not, play a crucial role in processes through which actors become recognised as players on the diplomatic scene and provide repertoires of taken for granted ideas for making arguments and justifications in diplomatic encounters. To be sure, this chapter writes about contexts and not just a single context. Meaning – no matter whether it finds its expression in a legal document or not – is contested. In a global political system, this is very much to be expected. Some actors place more emphasis on some norms than others, for example. Or they interpret the same norm rather differently. Or they invoke different norms when addressing the same problem. Or, drawing from different contexts, they do not even come to agree on a phenomenon as constituting a problem to be addressed by the diplomatic community. Nevertheless, there is an ideational backbone that holds global diplomacy together. It is these convergences around some influential ideas that we address in this chapter. In what follows, we first focus on the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations: we briefly trace its making, provide an overview of its key stipulations and
discuss the issue of updating the 1961 Convention. Then, we switch to deeper backgrounds: we deal with overlaps between deeper backgrounds and international law, put under scrutiny how contending scholarly approaches (English School, Liberalism, Constructivism) make sense of deeper backgrounds and, finally, address the evolution of deeper backgrounds in the age of global diplomacy.
