To Be a Diplomat IVER B. NEUMANN Norwegian Institute of International Affairs How do diplomats experience the world? Drawing mainly on fieldwork in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I argue that being a dip- lomat involves juggling three scripts of self against one another. The bureaucratic script tells the diplomat to focus squarely on quotidian concerns and to follow previously established routines. The heroic script tells him or her to focus squarely on a specific task in order to make a difference in the world, or at least to rove about the world, preferably involved in trouble-shooting. A third script is the self-effacing one of ‘‘the mediator,’’ of the diplomat as a specialist in making what happens at the outside of a political entity seem to dovetail as smoothly as possible with what happens at its inside. These scripts cannot be reconciled, only juggled. The uncertain predicament in which this places the diplomat is aggravated not only by tensions between professional and private life but also by the nomadic lifestyle of trekking between a home base in the ministry and sundry postings abroad. I conclude that being a diplomat is a never-ending and self-effacing technique of self, in the sense that the end product of diplomatic work is to let processes that are already in motion either go on or to have them stopped. Keywords: diplomacy, bureaucracy, identity When tracking down the self, an anthropologist is bound to be a philosopher too. (Hollis, 1985:232). What does it mean to be a diplomat? Historically, diplomatic discourse emerged from and is hence embedded in overall Western discourse. It is a ‘‘third culture’’ in the sense that it is a locus for mediation between political entities with diverse cultures, and it is true that it is forever changing as this diversity increases. Like other cultures, diplomacy does not stand still for its portrait (see Clifford, 1986:10, Der Derian 1996 ). Still, it is also true that it carries with it the memory of its history, and that history is a Western history. When I begin by associating diplomacy with ‘‘the West,’’ it is not only because the site of my work is the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that Norway is known as a Western country, but because di- plomacy has a Western history. One place to begin unpacking what it is to be a diplomat is, therefore, to begin at a highly aggregated level and ask what it is to be a Westerner. I begin by looking at discourse as a set of preconditions for the for- mation of statements about the self. Believing with my fellow social anthropologists that no analysis of social interaction is complete if it does not incorporate the meanings that permeate people’s actions, I then draw on concrete interaction gar- Author’s note: Previous drafts of this paper were presented at the Department for Social Anthropology, Oslo University, January 21, 2004, at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, March 18, 2004 in Montreal, and at Georgetown University, March 22, 2004. In addition to the participants at these occasions and the ISP referees, I would like to thank Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Daniel Nexon, Knut Nustad, Vincent Pouliot, and Geoffrey Wiseman for useful comments. r 2005 International Studies Association. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK International Studies Perspectives (2005) 6, 72–93.