Abstract
Reviewed by: Catherine Arnold, Yale University, USA
Modern diplomacy emerged in early modern Europe. Between 1550 and 1715, a diplomatic system of sovereign states, in which conflict was resolved through bilateral and multilateral negotiation, gradually replaced the late medieval system, in which the pope mediated among Christian princes. Ellen Welch argues that the performing arts played a significant and hitherto unrecognized role in the formation of this new diplomatic system. Welch develops this broader argument through a study of early modern French diplomacy. Using an impressive range of visual, manuscript and printed sources, she reconstructs French diplomatic entertainments which illustrate ‘major evolutions in the theory and practice of diplomacy and court spectacle’ (9).
By investigating the use of theatrical entertainments in early modern French diplomacy, Welch contributes to our understanding of both court spectacles and international relations. Scholars have characterized these performances as strategies for domestic governance, intended to impress the French monarchy’s own subjects. Welch convincingly demonstrates that they were meant to represent France’s power to an international audience. Moreover, she shows that attending to the diplomatic uses of court spectacles can offer fresh insight into the history of early modern diplomacy. Building on the work of the English school of international relations theory, Welch argues that the performing arts contributed to the formation of a new international order in post-Reformation Europe by providing a social and cultural ‘foundation for diplomatic interactions’ (6).
In the book’s first chapter, Welch traces how sixteenth-century Valois masques and other court spectacles enabled European diplomats to reconstitute international society in the wake of the Reformation. These performances transformed aristocratic values and practices – which European ambassadors, who were generally drawn from the nobility, shared – into international norms, which governed how diplomats socialized with one another. In post-Reformation Europe, Welch suggests, these shared norms and practices enabled European diplomats to negotiate directly with one another, without the pope’s mediation and despite their religious differences. In a later chapter, on the end of the Thirty Years War, Welch posits that court spectacles could even unite hostile diplomats into a ‘European’ community, whose bonds were based on feeling and symbolism, rather than on existing political and legal structures. By staging and participating in masques and court ballets, Welch suggests, diplomats and statesmen developed a new social framework for diplomacy.
Welch stresses that court spectacles did more than create the social preconditions for early modern diplomacy. In the book’s five central chapters, she argues that theatrical entertainments actually empowered seventeenth-century statesmen and diplomats to revise and re-imagine the developing international order. In the early seventeenth century, Welch shows, court spectacles became a diplomatic practice. Statesmen and ambassadors ‘read’ the protocol and ceremonial of diplomatic entertainments – including who was invited and where they were seated – as indicators of status within the diplomatic order. By disputing the protocol of these events, statesmen and ambassadors could reconfigure the current diplomatic order. Diplomatic entertainments only grew more important after the end of the Thirty Years’ War, when attending a state’s theatrical entertainments was seen as a way of recognizing its sovereignty. Seventeenth-century court ballets also enabled diplomats and statesmen to reflect on the nature of international society in the abstract. Welch demonstrates that seventeenth-century French ballets reflected new theories of international relations, by authors like Grotius and Gentili. These ballets portrayed international society as a community of states – represented onstage by national characters – rather than one of monarchs. In the first half of the seventeenth century, Welch contends, the practice of staging court spectacles contributed to the development of modern international relations, in both theory and practice.
In the book’s final chapters, Welch suggests that theatrical entertainments’ power to create an international society was specific to the aristocratic milieu of early modern European diplomacy. In Chapter 7, on African, Asian and Ottoman embassies to Louis XIV’s court, Welch argues that court entertainments given for non-European diplomats did not foster a ‘stronger form of diplomatic sociability’ as they had done in early modern Europe, even though French officials believed that non-European states could participate in diplomatic society (183). In Chapter 8, she contends that once professional diplomats replaced aristocrats as ambassadors in the early eighteenth century, diplomatic entertainments also lost their centrality to European diplomacy. Ballets no longer produced international norms of sociability, since diplomats no longer shared the aristocratic values which these performances affirmed. Instead, diplomatic entertainments, like ballets, were increasingly used to burnish France’s image with ‘the public’ in Europe.
Welch convincingly argues that the performing arts provide a new lens for investigating how states form international societies. Yet, in the Conclusion, she reiterates that theatrical entertainments’ role in manufacturing international order was specific to early modern Europe and reflects only briefly on how her conclusions might re-shape the broader history of international relations. This is a missed opportunity, since Welch’s findings can potentially illuminate other cases in which new states entered international society. For instance, historians have shown that when the young United States sought diplomatic recognition from European states, American diplomatic entertainments smoothed the way by affirming and reinforcing international norms of sociability, much as early modern court spectacles had done. One wonders whether diplomatic entertainments played a similar role in relations between European powers and other states that wished to enter ‘the family of nations’ in the nineteenth century. Still, as these comments demonstrate, Welch’s deeply-researched study opens new directions for research in the history of international relations.