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This article discusses Romania’s burgeoning development aid policy to the post-colonial space. By leveraging its expertise in petroleum extraction to forge a strategic relationship with India in th...

The discovery of a dozen ‘new’ documents in Marvell’s hand from the Carlisle embassy discloses much about his role in Sweden and Denmark late in 1664. The forms and contents of the letters themselves, and the further diplomatic correspondence with which they are bound, confirm how the demands first of language (owing to a preference for diplomacy in native tongues in Muscovy and Sweden) and then of secrecy (owing to extremes of caution in Denmark) worked against Marvell having more of a part in the negotiations in those countries. Even so, the documents show him in service as diplomatic secretary on matters great and small. They also shed new light on Marvell’s ventriloquial function, whether it is Carlisle speaking in Marvell’s writing or whether the secretary more nearly writes in his own person. When we find Carlisle, ship-bound with his secretary for a week off Elsinore, writing his friends for the sake of writing, and curveting rhetorically as never before, we sense something nearer minds melding at the end of their 18 months abroad together. Marvell learned a lot from hearing Carlisle speak and from speaking for Carlisle.

A World of Paper: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State, by John C. Rule and Ben S. Trotter. Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014. xvii, 829 pp. $49.95 CAD (cloth). A welcome addition to the growing corpus of books on the history of information in early modern Europe, A World of Paper by the late John Rule and his former student Ben Trotter elegantly expands our understanding of diplomacy during the reign of the Sun King. The authors ask new questions of documents in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and draw on a vast amount of scholarship on bureaucracy. Rule and Trotter use the methods of scholars like Eric Ash, James Cortada, Jacob Soli, and Cornelia Vismann to bring the study of information within the purview of diplomacy. Questioning just what is "modern" about bureaucracy with the help of contingency theory, the authors analyze Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy's foreign affairs department during the latter part of Louis XIV's reign to show both that this ministry was highly specialized and organized by 1715 and that this system is not so different from bureaucracies of our time. The idea of strict barriers between patrimonial and bureaucratic systems already questioned by many scholars (esp. Peter Burke) is shown to be even more problematic in this close study of one of Louis XIV's major ministries. Moving away from Weber's idea of bureaucracy as a machine, the authors emphasize complex human activity and changeable, but sometimes routinized task-based work, as the driving forces in Torcy's department. Throughout the work the authors embrace contingency theory, which posits that organizational effectiveness reaches its pinnacle when structures are specialized to match the needs and size of the organization. They adopt this theory as a means of introducing flexibility in bureaucracy studies so as to avoid using evidence about the period between 1661 and 1715 as "an index of modernity" (p. 30). The book is a long one, and almost half of the printed pages are dedicated to comprehensive notes. The text could have been split into multiple monographs (a biography of Torcy, a prosopography of the commis, and a study of the foreign ministry's portfolio) yet as a whole it is a testament to the life work of Rule. It is premised on the idea that administrative history should not judge the past by a Weberian "idealized rationality" but rather focus on the "actual workings of power" (p. 32). For Rule (1929-2013), the book is the culmination of decades of work, but it is also a publication that reflects Trotter's contributions and research (pp. xiv-xv). Rule and Trotter carefully map out the history of the foreign office under Louis XIV as a bureaucracy in motion, one that depended on unique, skilled individuals as much as it was shaped by the institutional, social, and economic structures of the regime. The title of the book refers to the great waves of paperwork that streamed into and out of the foreign secretary's chambers at Versailles, or later in Paris at Torcy's private residence. Discussion of the ministry's materiality and its inner workings animate this book even more so than the professional biographies of the clerks or ambassadors working under Torcy or his father Croissy. The "things" of ministers, clerks, and diplomats--their mail, horses, pens, gifts, and residences--open up a new appreciation for just how an ancien regime ministry functioned from day to day. Things move, and so Rule and Trotter describe the movements inherent in diplomacy, explaining the importance of equerries and the relais de poste, not to mention the complications of a mobile court. …

Students of European integration have produced an enormous amount of literature on the intergovernmental negotiations that led to the establishment of such organizations as the OEEC, the EEC and EFTA. However, only a few have devoted substantial attention to the international contacts between companies that attempted to undermine the integration process by building private trade barriers that would replace those that governments had agreed to remove. The paper producers began to build such barriers soon after EFTA and the EEC had been set up. Although these attempts were not always successful, the industrialists did manage to create arrangements that were substantially more extensive in their geographical and product scope than those that had existed before. The British government and the EEC were reluctant to challenge these arrangements, and in some cases even actively promoted them. The interwar decades are widely considered to be the ‘golden era’ for international cartels; but for the paper cartels, the ‘golden era’ began in the 1960s, when previous bilateral links were replaced with multilateral ones.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Life & Pontificate of Pope Pius XII: Between History & Controversy . By Frank J. Coppa . Washington, D.C. : The Catholic University Press of America , 2013. xxix + 306 pp. $29.95 paper.Book Reviews and NotesFrank Coppa's insightful biography of Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII (1939-1958), is a welcome contribution to ongoing debates about the controversial pontiff whose policy of appeasement during World War II continues to fuel the so-called "Pius Wars." The pope's actions are not in dispute but scholars disagree "in their assessment of the motivation for and the consequences" of Pacelli's conduct during the war and the Holocaust (247). In his own analysis, Coppa places considerable emphasis on the Vatican's entrenched diplomatic policy of impartiality that, he argues, largely drove the pope's wartime actions.The Vatican's relative recent opening of papers of the pontificates of Benedict XV (1914-1922) and Pius XI (1922-1939) has allowed scholars to also gain fresh insights into the young Eugenio Pacelli's life. Using these sources, Coppa makes a strong case that Pacelli learned crucial lessons in diplomacy during World War I that "provided the rationale" for his "public silence during the latter war and the Holocaust" (54). At the time, the future pontiff was part of the Vatican's diplomatic corps, where, under the tutelage of Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri, his career advanced rapidly. The author argues that Gasparri's importance to Pacelli's life and legacy went far beyond his mentorship because the cardinal was also the architect of the Vatican's policy of impartiality during World War I. Impartiality differed from neutrality in that it allowed Pope Benedict XV "to denounce principles and even policies in general, without naming particular parties or embroiling the Church in partisan politics or favoring one side over another in conflicts" (53). It also enabled the Holy See to act as a neutral broker of peace.Eugenio Pacelli's personality was well suited to Benedict's cautious diplomacy. From early on, Pacelli "pragmatically sought to avoid fights that might prove detrimental to his career and interests" (49). Coppa is an astute biographer who sketched an intriguing portrait of Pacelli that goes beyond his well-known reticence and highlights the future pontiff's strong will, his seeming inability to admit mistakes, and his marked sense of entitlement. For instance, on a papal peace mission to Germany in 1917, Pacelli's extravagant travel arrangements included a whole train compartment "holding some sixty cases of groceries to sooth his sensitive stomach" that resulted in excessive transportation costs at a time when many Germans were starving during the war (63). When the mission failed, Pacelli convinced himself that others were to blame.After the war, when it became clear that Benedict XV's policy of impartiality had proved a failure overall, Pacelli and most members of the curia still saw no reason to abandon it. The confrontational Pope Pius XI (1922-1939), who did not believe that Hitler could be reasoned with, clashed with this ingrained Vatican culture of appeasement. …

Grigorii N. Trubetskoi was a unique and contradictory figure in the first three decades of the twentieth century He was a leading liberal -- often scathing -- critic of autocracy, yet was perhaps most influential in pushing the regime toward an aggressive annexationist stand in the Balkans. Personally deeply religious and idealistic about his faith, he became the proponent of deep reforms of Orthodoxy and pragmatic solutions to the divisions between the church that remained in the Soviet Unio...

Review, Aethiopica, Vol 16 (2013)

The twelve essays in this volume underscore the similarities between Chinese and American approaches to bilateral diplomacy and between their perceptions of each other's policy-making motivations. Much of the literature on U.S.-China relations posits that each side was motivated either by ideologically informed interests or by ideological assumptions about its counterpart. But as these contributors emphasise, newly accessible archives suggest rather that both Beijing and Washington developed a responsive and tactically adaptable foreign policy. Each then adjusted this policy in response to changing international circumstances and changing assessments of its counterpart's policies. Motivated less by ideology than by pragmatic national security concerns, each assumed that the other faced similar considerations.

In 1643, ten crew members of the Dutch yacht "Breskens" were lured ashore at Nambu in northern Japan. Once out of view of their ship, the men were bound and taken to the shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, in Edo, where they remained imprisoned for four months. Later the Japanese government forced the Dutch East India Company representative in Nagasaki to acknowledge that the sailors had in fact been saved from shipwreck and that official recognition of the rescue was in order. "Prisoners from Nambu" provides a narrative of this relatively obscure incident, while casting light on the history of the period as a whole. Constructing his tale from primary sources, the author examines relations between the Dutch East India Company and the shogunal government immediately following the promulgation of the "seclusion laws" (sakokurei) and anti-Christian campaigns.

Part 1 Sino-Russian Competition Over Outer Mongolia: China's "New Administration" in Mongolia, Lan Meihua Russian Merchants in Mongolia - the 1910 Moscow Trade Expedition, Elizabeth Endicott Russian Diplomats and Mongol Independence, 1911-1915, Nakami Tatsuo The Buriat Alphabet of Agvan Dorzhiev, Yeshen-Khorlo Dugarova-Montgomery and Robert Montgomery. Part 2 International Diplomacy Concerning Outer Mongolia: Aspects of Soviet-Mongolian Relations, 1929-1939, Elena Boikova The Final Consolidation of the USSR's Sphere of Interest in Outer Mongolia, Bruce A. Elleman Sino-Soviet Diplomacy and the Second Partition of Mongolia, 1945-1946, Christopher P. Atwood Mongolia and Japan in 1945-1995 - a Half Century Reconsidered, Ts. Batbayar. Part 3 Mongolia Today: A Survey of the Mongols in Present-Day China - Perspectives on Demography and Culture Change, A. Hurelbaatar Mobility, Technology and Decollectivization of Pastoralism in Mongolia, David Sneath The 800th Anniversary of Chingis Khan - the Revival and Suppression of Mongolian National Consciousness, J. Boldbaatar Nationalism, Elites and Mongolia's Rapid Transformation, Tom Ginsburg Epilogue - Mongolia's Foreign Policy Revisited - Relations with Russia and the PRC into the 1990s, G. Tunurchulunn.

The conflict between secrecy and publicity is one of the most delicate issues in foreign policy. Not long ago, absolute monarchs were able to conduct diplomacy that was really secret and could make war and peace - not to mention less cardinal decisions-without explanation. However, in the age of mass armies and of total wars, public opinion has to be mobilized and the issues of foreign policy need to be elaborated, justified and defended, even by non-democratic governments. On the other hand, professional diplomats continue to claim that secrecy is often a crucial prerequisite for successful foreign policy. Modern international relations have thus posed a seemingly insoluble dilemma that will probably haunt governments in the future: negotiations can be flexible and successful only if they are kept secret, but they will be barren without popular consent.

In the first half of 2019 Australian foreign policy was tumultuous, marked by the federal election on 18 May 2019. The election was won, somewhat unexpectedly, by the Coalition and returned Scott Morrison as Prime Minister. The initial moves of the Prime Minister, new Foreign Minister Marise Payne and new Defence Minister Senator Linda Reynolds in the diplomatic sphere were conducted against the backdrop of intense debates about “strategic competition” between China and the United States of America in our region.1 As 2019 began, many volatile events lay on the immediate horizon for Australian foreign policy, but due focus on these events was interrupted by the election. This chronicle considers how nimble Australian diplomacy was able to be during the first half of 2019, with some broader implications for the transitional nature of Australian foreign policy. When the then foreign minister, Julie Bishop, commissioned the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper, she noted it was designed to help Australian diplomacy be more proactive. She said: “[…] it's about looking at the kind of framework that needs to be in place so that we're not reacting to events, we're strategically positioned to manage, maybe even shape, events”.