ABSTRACT
States are committed to diplomacy by the nature of the world in which they exist. In times and places where there are several separate states and their actions affect one another, they cannot function in a vacuum of isolation, with each community considering only how to manage its internal affairs. Each state is obliged, by the very desire to control its own destiny as far as possible, to take account of the neighbours who impinge on its interests and those of its citizens, whatever it considers those interests to be. In more formal terms, members of a group of independent states are obliged to manage the consequences of the fact that they enjoy their independences not absolutely and in isolation but in a setting of interdependence. When a group of states forms a closely knit system, the involvement of many self-willed political actors imposes upon each state a continuous awareness that the others have interests and purposes distinct from its own, and that the things other states do or may do limit and partly determine its own policies. JeanJacques Rousseau expressed this succinctly in the late eighteenth century when the states system he knew was a European affair. ‘The body politic,’ as he called the state, ‘is forced to look outside itself in order to know itself; it depends on its whole environment and has to take an interest in everything that happens.’ So today every state in our global system depends not merely on itself but on its whole worldwide environment.
