[MUSIC] Well, I suppose the standard definition would have to be the execution of foreign policy and the management of international affairs, which is what you would get in a textbook. But that doesn't tell us everything we need to know. I think it's often forgotten, perhaps, how dull a lot diplomacy actually is, pushing paper left and right, writing reports, attending long functions that you probably don't want to be at. So I think there's a variety of different levels there. There's the sort of the high end peace conferences and sort of the gold standard diplomacy that we might think of. But it's very easy to forget the sort of the lower ranks, the lower divisions of diplomacy and the less interesting stuff. So if I was to define diplomacy, I think it's some sort of balance between the two. >> I think of diplomacy in fairly expansive terms. I try not to delimit it so much as to provide room for diplomacy. So I think of it in the broadest terms as any sort of interactions between people or things in which those people or things are representative in some way of a broader kind of category or polity. >> Well, it's a very good question, Simon. I think the word or the expression I like the most is actually from the Vienna Conventions, which is creating friendly relations between countries. And I think it's quite sort of a gentle term, friendly relations, but there's quite a lot loaded in there. So overall, I would say that the purpose of diplomacy is about developing some form of appreciation, understanding, and friendly relations with countries. Of course, achieving that is far harder than setting it out as your purpose. >> It's actually quite a complicated process. In that, when I first studied, when I was a student 30 years ago, I very much understood diplomacy as something which was almost purely high politics. Involved statesmen, decision makers, very much along the lines of foreign policy analysis. And that was probably because my background was all in international relations. And then I became a historian, and over my career as a historian I began to wonder whether one could understand diplomacy in ways which were more expansive than what I had learned as a student. And so recently, I've actually been working on this idea of making the study of diplomacy as a more interactive process. And when I mean interactive, I don't just mean the interaction between, obviously, statesmen, diplomats and the people in the realm of high politics. But what I'm very interested in is the interaction between the diplomat statesmen, the kind of people who are seen to be the primary performers of diplomacy with the public. So I'm very interested in the kind of what's called audience or reception of diplomacy. And how the diplomatic process can actually be affected by this interaction that goes on between the high politics type of performers and the audience or the local population. So maybe they're are looking at diplomatic events and others who are involved in diplomacy in a much wider sense of the word. >> We could definitely go historical. We won't go historical. I'd say attempt to stick with sort of a, well I said I wouldn't go historical but I'll go historical. A Harold Nicholson type cut of sort of the mediated or negotiated relations between representatives, but I wouldn't get stuck at representatives of states. So in a sense, the easiest definition, the one that I use to teach generally tends to be mediated or negotiated relations between representatives of polities, in the sense of political communities. So you can speak of a diplomacy of the European Union or diplomacy of the United States. But you can also speak of a diplomacy of a city, a region, like the diplomacy of Quebec for instance, is a fourth. >> Well diplomacy is, on one level, diplomacy's something we do every day. So even though it's become this kind of high status profession, in fact when you handle a meeting, when you handle your personal relations, when you handle almost any aspect of your life, you'll often use the same skills that you'd see a diplomat use. [MUSIC]