11 - Greedy company diplomacy

Summary

Rogue states, while arguably aberrant phenomena whose character is in great part generated by the demands and preoccupations of domestic politics, belong to a world closely associated with diplomacy. Greedy companies, in contrast, belong to a world from which diplomacy is conventionally understood to have been exiled, the world of economic production, distribution and exchange. What are we to do about companies which exploit people, damage the environment and use up the natural resources of the planet in order to get rich by presiding over the creation of a stock of wealth from which nearly everybody wants what they see as their fair share, and what might the diplomatic tradition of international thought have to tell us about the debates surrounding these questions? From just about every point of the intellectual compass including, until relatively recently, diplomats themselves and those who study them, the received opinion was “not a lot.” In their priorities, in their ways of understanding the world and in their characteristic modes of thought and inquiry, diplomacy and economics, indeed diplomats and economists, have been presented in opposition to one another. And they have been so in a way that reflects poorly on diplomacy. Thus, we see diplomacy existing because of human weaknesses and imperfections: the predisposition to sacrifice the dictates of reason to the cupidities of willfulness; the desire to obtain what has not been earned; the urge to use force when other means have failed or even before, and, above all, the need to fudge that all this is, in fact, the case in order to manage its consequences.