Diplomacy and its Double: The Political Languages of Antidiplomacy

Seeking a more critical understanding of the political languages of Diplomacy, this paper explores the conceptual history of ‘antidiplomacy’ from its early apparitions in the aftermath of the French Revolution to its current usage in on-line social networks. In contrast to the meanings of ‘diplomacy’, those attached to ‘antidiplomacy’ were from the very first moment distinctively modern. And, more interestingly, since its very inception, they seemed to escape from the conventional grammars of State sovereignty. Despite its ambivalences the conceptual history of ‘antidiplomacy’ illustrates, from the very beginning of modern diplomatic system, the existence of a variety of attempts to both stabilize and destabilize the new semantic field of ‘diplomacy’, understood as the domain of mutual relations amongst States. Rarely used as a self-description, the notion ‘antidiplomacy’ generally serves to negatively describe, in eloquent and simple terms, the position adopted by others as incompatible with all that ‘diplomacy’ supposedly means. Hence, apparently at least, the concept of ‘antidiplomacy’ and its counterpart ‘diplomacy’ qualify as ‘asymmetrical counter-concepts’ in Koselleck’s sense. In spite of their apparent antithetical character however, both notions frequently exchange – in their actual historical usages and doctrinal elaboration- their respective positions, even to the point of reversing their apparently distinctive connotations –negative and positive-, in a variety of inter-textual modalities. In fact, historical research reveals an interesting semantic fluidity between ‘diplomacy’ and ‘antidiplomacy’, since their modern inception until today. In view of this, this paper reflects not only on the semantics of this trend, but, more importantly, on its praxeological implications and political potentialities. For so doing, we examine some old and new incarnations of the ‘antidiplomatic’ will, that can be seen as revealing of a political unconscious in which utopian visions of hope mutate easily, albeit perhaps not necessarily, in dystopian projects of fear.