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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Brill. I am Emily Tankin, and this week we will be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. I'm speaking today with Giles Stott Smith, a professor of diplomatic history at Leiden. Giles Stott Smith is one of the co-editors of a brand new journal on diplomacy, diplomatic.
Dr. Stott Smith, how are you today? Very well, thank you. Good to hear you loud and clear.
Good to hear you too. So to start out, you have this new journal on diplomacy, on diplomatic history. It's coming out at a time that we have leaders who, like here in the United States, Donald Trump, like in the United Kingdom, now Boris Johnson, who are sort of hailed for being undiplomatic, who are praised for telling it like it is and not putting it diplomatically. How do you see diplomacy as being impacted by the rise of populism or sort of undiplomatic leaders in the Western world?
Yeah, I mean, that is a very important question, I think. Certainly the pressures on diplomacy and diplomats have increased in recent years, precisely because of the reasons that you mentioned that we're now in an era where we have leaders in power who are looking for, sometimes the quick fix, they're always looking for powerful soundbite. They are in some cases looking to directly engage with other leaders or peoples through their own social media. And this in many ways is increasing the pressure on traditional diplomacy and also in some ways, one might say reducing its space for operation.
I mean, if the leaders of today are occupying such a dominant place in international politics, what possibly can diplomats do? And I think it's important to balance that image with the sense that one might say leaders come and go, but diplomacy is always there. And we are talking about an institution that is highly attuned to maintaining daily relations between nation states. The people who occupy those positions in embassies and ministries and departments across the world have a tremendous amount of experience in doing so.
And they're also used to doing a lot of what they do behind the scenes so that we have become accustomed to leaders being very vocal, very visible, and expressing themselves, sometimes with no limits, as if that is what diplomacy has become. And of course, it hasn't. The traditional diplomatic networks are still functioning. They're changing, obviously, but they're still functioning and they're still maintaining those relations as they have done for a long time.
But we've been speaking about social media, diplomacy, populist leaders. One side effect of all this, of the rise of leaders who people see as speaking more freely, is that people themselves have sort of felt comfortable speaking more freely. One side effect of which has been the rise of xenophobia expressed on social media. I mean, that's not the only reason that it's there shortly and this is not a podcast on technology, but I did want to ask if you see diplomacy as having a role in, how to say, countering the rise of quite open hateful speech, not just in the political class, but on social media and amidst the public.
Can diplomacy kind of be back that time? Yeah, that's very interesting. I mean, I think if we're talking about diplomacy as a profession, as a body of diplomats who have the role of conducting diplomacy and maintaining these relations, I think, yes, of course, they do have a role. I think at the same time, they need to stay apart from a lot of craziness that takes place on social media.
And I think it's important to reflect on how it's important for diplomats and ministers and departments around the world to be able to maintain control of what diplomacy is supposed to do. Because I think we are in an area with social media and with leaders, as we said, who acquired adept at communicating their views immediately regardless of what their closest advisors may think, that it can seem as if diplomacy is desiring out of control. And that is not the case. That is purely what may happen occasionally on social media, but that's not happening in the context of the happening in the diplomatic world on a day basis.
So I think it's important for diplomats, for ministries to be able to say, look, social media will never go away. We even participate in it. But when it comes down to the nitty gritty of negotiating the national interest in an international setting, we are the ones who can do that. And I think that is really the challenge for the 21st century progressives, I think, and social media is posing that challenge.
Well said. Giles Scott Smith, thank you so much for speaking with me today about your new journal, Dibamaka. Thank you very much. Real pleasure.