The ongoing information revolution is perceived as a profound organizational challenge for foreign ministries. Yet there is only scant empirical evidence on the nature of the change dynamics. Anchored in new institutionalist approaches in political science, this book reconceptualizes diplomacy as an institution of the modern state order and identifies its key organizing principles maintained by the global group of foreign ministries. With this conceptualization as a point of departure, the book provides a comparative analysis of information technology effects in the foreign ministries of Canada, Norway and Slovakia. The result is a comprehensive assessment of the magnitude and the direction of change in the organizational machinery of diplomacy in early 21st Century.

Anchored in new institutionalist approaches in political science, this book reconceptualizes diplomacy as an institution of the modern state order and identifies its key organizing principles maintained by the global group of foreign ministries. With this conceptualization as a point of departure, the book provides a comparative analysis of information technology effects in the foreign ministries of Canada, Norway and Slovakia.

The Cultural Revolution, which occurred between 1966 and 1976, was a major unforgettable event in modern Chinese history. For more than thirty years, the prevalent view of the Cultural Revolution in the Chinese Foreign Ministry has been that the rebels controlled the Foreign Ministry in August 1967 and caused the many excesses in foreign affairs such as the burning of the British mission in Beijing which isolated China from the rest of the world. The author of this book challenges this point of view. The book gives a factual account of the course of the ten-year Cultural Revolution in the Foreign Ministry, based on documents issued during the Cultural Revolution, talks by Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi, and the manuscripts of the people concerned, as well as interviews with Foreign Ministry staff members who personally took part in the events.

This book provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the multidimensional influences of technological development on contemporary international relations. The contributions here are drawn from different disciplines, including political science, international relations, sociology, economy, law, biochemistry and bioethics, as well as from different locations, including Poland, the US, Brazil and Israel. This variety allows the complexity of the issues, challenges and implications of technological changes on the structure, functioning and substantive scope of international relations to be fully presented and explored. This collection represents essential reading for anyone with an interest in the dynamic interplay between modern technologies and the transformation of the contemporary international system, and especially for international relations scholars and students.

First published in 1998. In this study what is proposed here is first of all to examine the effect it had on the very functioning of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and how the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, of which the country had become a victim, spilled over to this highly elitist and prestigious Ministry. In summary, it focuses on the chaos that engulfed the institution.

In The Ideas and Practices of the European Union’s Structural Antidiplomacy, Steffen Bay Rasmussen offers a comprehensive analysis of EU diplomacy that goes beyond the functioning of the European External Action Service and discusses the sui generis nature of the EU as a diplomatic actor, the forms of bilateral and multilateral representation as well as the actor identity, founding ideas and meta-practices of EU diplomacy. The book employs a novel theoretical approach that distinguishes the social structures of diplomacy from the practices and meta-practices of diplomacy. Comparing EU diplomacy to the two theoretically constructed ideal types of Westphalian diplomacy and utopian antidiplomacy, Steffen Bay Rasmussen concludes that the EU’s international agency constitutes a new form of diplomacy called structural antidiplomacy.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the current international practice of diplomacy. Armed with over 30 years of experience in the German Foreign Service, the author explains the workings of the different actors on the diplomatic stage. The book provides a detailed coverage of various diplomatic agencies as well as the functions of diplomats and consuls, explaining the methods and protocols of the art of diplomacy. It will serve as a good reference source for students and scholars of diplomacy, diplomats in foreign ministries and diplomatic and consular missions.