Noe Cornago

Perforated Sovereignties, Agonistic Pluralism and the Durability of (Para)Diplomacy

The origins of diplomacy can be traced back to the multiple practices of communication among different social groups and political entities existing since time immemorial. These diplomatic practices underwent different transformations in history until their formalization and convenient representation as an exclusive attribute, a sort of monopoly, of modern sovereign nation states. This long process of centralization, which followed the functional and normative imperatives that shaped the modern system of states, was nonetheless a highly contentious one. The territorialization of diplomatic relations was largely achieved at the price of silencing the diversity of voices and practices that constituted a wider understanding of diplomacy as the experience of encountering and dealing with otherness. The result of these developments has been that the conventional meaning of diplomacy was emptied of any relevant social or non-technical content, treated as if it were nothing more than a formalized and rigid element of sovereign state’s machine-ries of foreign policy. Thus it became isolated from the everyday experience of a variety of social actors and individuals, and deprived of any conceptual relevance in understanding their relations. This was conspicuously expressed in the progressive codification of diplomatic law, not as a form of ius gentium, but as an exclusive brand of international law among states. Yet the formalization of diplomacy as state privilege was never complete and the old plurality of voices and practices reappeared periodically, sometimes forcefully.

Schaeffer, Boulez, and the Everyday Diplomacies of French Decolonization

This chapter examines the international influence of Pierre Boulez and Pierre Schaeffer, two outstanding figures of French contemporary culture, from a rather unexplored prism, namely, that of their respective roles in the decolonization of French diplomacy during the central decades of the past century. More specifically, it aims to ascertain to what extent, if any, Boulez and Schaeffer’s possible contributions to the decolonization of French diplomacy and culture may be explained—beyond their personal views and intellectual dispositions—in terms of their interaction with the various institutional contexts and material infrastructures and artifacts in which they were involved over the course of their long professional careers. In so doing, this study contends that diplomacy operates through countless practices, observable not only at ministerial headquarters and embassies or international governmental summits but also in a variety of sites, including radio stations and concert halls. The argument this chapter aims to put forth is that the variety of infrastructures and artifacts in which the activities of these two singular personalities were embedded had an additional political effect that reverberates in the wider cultural and political context, facilitating either the continuity of the existing power relations or conversely creating the basis for its subsequent contestation. Despite the participation of Boulez in some important mobilizations in favor of Algerian independence, his combination of sharp modernism as composer and his careful cultivation of European classical music tradition in his role as conductor may be understood as a supreme form of Western cultural rationalism perfectly compatible with a merely superficial reformulation of colonial mentality in comfortable continuity with its corresponding diplomatic inertia. Conversely, Schaeffer’s radical attempt to redefine the frontiers between music and sound, combined with his involvement in different professional capacities—including colonial administration—as an expert in the politics of broadcasting, worldwide and more specifically in Africa, entailed a somewhat paternalistic but real engagement with the course of events that finally were conducive to the decolonization of French diplomacy.

Beyond Self-Determination: Norms Contestation, Constituent Diplomacies and the Co-Production of Sovereignty

The idea of a perfect national political community, entirely confined within the contours of a corresponding state, is one of the foundational fictions of global modernity. Its formal crystallization in the legal grammars of the right to self-determination has been however, particularly in the post-colonial era, highly problematic and full of ambiguities. Drawing on this background, this article contends that diplomacy offers frequently a more promising venue for dealing with the challenge of political pluralism than appealing to either the unstable grammars of the right to self-determination or a reified understanding of the principle of territorial integrity of states. For so doing, firstly, the right to self-determination is critically examined. Instead of attempting to articulate its formal content, the malleability of its legal grammars and political realities, will be emphasized. Secondly, based on the discussion of a variety of historical cases, the notion of ‘constituent diplomacies’ will be advanced, aiming to show how the agonistic accommodation of political and territorial pluralism through diplomacy was crucial not only in the formative processes of modern sovereign states but also nowadays. Finally, this relational understanding of the historical forms of governance of political pluralism within and beyond state boundaries will be re-examined, beyond its ethnopolitical dimensions, through the prism of the complex interplay between the material and ideational conditions for the co-production of sovereignty in the context of new global capitalism.