ABSTRACT
In 1937, Harold Nicolson, still the best-known modern writer on diplomacy, wrote a slim volume with the title The Evolution of Diplomatic Method. In 2011, Keith Hamilton and Richard Langhorne released the second edition of their book The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory, and Administration. The last century has seen a series of books, essays, and even blog spots on diplomacy that advertise themselves as somehow evolutionary. However, almost all of them use the concept of evolution in the everyday sense of emergence. 2 They do not make reference to evolutionary theory, and they do not try to understand diplomacy as an institution evolved by the species. On the contrary, pre-Darwin style, they tend either to place the beginnings of history with writing or, following Hegel, with the emergence of what they refer to as states. Either way, they tend to treat diplomacy as something evolved not by the species in general, but by specific states or by diplomacy itself. As a result, 70 years after Nicolson the standard thing to do in the general literature is still to place the beginnings of diplomacy in ancient Greece (Kurizaki 2011; Nicolson 1939).
