Emotional Diplomacy: Official Emotion on the International Stage

By Todd H. Hall

Emotional Diplomacy explores the politics of expressed emotion on the international stage, looking at the ways state actors strategically deploy emotional behavior to manipulate the perceptions of others. By examining diverse instances of emotional behavior, Todd H. Hall reveals that official emotional displays play an integral role in the strategies and interactions of state actors. Emotional diplomacy is more than rhetoric; as this book demonstrates, its implications extend to the provision of economic and military aid, great-power cooperation, and the use of armed force.

Hall investigates three strands of emotional diplomacy: those rooted in anger, sympathy, and guilt. His research, drawn on sources and interviews in five different languages, provides new insights into the 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, the post-9/11 reactions of China and Russia, and relations between West Germany and Israel after World War II. Emotional Diplomacy offers a unique take on the intersection of strategic action and emotional display, a means for understanding why states behave emotionally. Hall provides the theoretical tools necessary for understanding the nature and significance of state-level emotional behavior through new observations of how states seek reconciliation, strategically respond to unforeseen crises, and demonstrate resolve in the face of perceived provocations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Nov 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781501701122

Book preview

EMOTIONAL DIPLOMACY

Official Emotion on the International Stage

Todd H. Hall

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS    ITHACA AND LONDON

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1.  Emotional Diplomacy

What Is Emotional Diplomacy?

Emotional Diplomacy and the Emotions in International Relations

Official Emotion as Emotional Labor

Emotional Diplomacy as a Team Performance

The Consequences of Engaging in Emotional Diplomacy

Variation in Emotional Diplomacy

Empirical Investigations

2.  The Diplomacy of Anger

Explaining the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait Crisis from the Traditional Perspective

The Diplomacy of Anger

Empirical Investigations

Looking at the Crisis as an Episode of Coercion vs. Official Anger

3.  The Diplomacy of Sympathy

Explaining the RF and PRC Responses in Terms of Traditional Statecraft

The Diplomacy of Sympathy

Empirical Investigations

Looking at RF and PRC Responses as Official Sympathy

4.  The Diplomacy of Guilt

Explaining FRG-Israeli Relations from the Traditional Perspective

The Diplomacy of Guilt

Empirical Investigations

The Luxembourg Agreement

Bullets Instead of Ambassadors: FRG Weapons for Israel

The Path to Normalization

Subsequent Years

5.  Further Studies in Emotional Diplomacy

The Diplomacy of Anger

The Diplomacy of Sympathy

The Diplomacy of Guilt

Conclusion

Additional Strains

Quotidian and Signature Forms of Emotional Diplomacy

Official Emotion, Popular Emotion, and Stickiness

Notes

References

Index

Preface

It has been over a decade since an offhand discussion about the politics of the Olympics first sparked my interest in the intersection of emotions and international relations. Somehow the conversation gravitated to the puzzling observation that emotions seemed ubiquitous in the everyday language used to describe state behavior, yet absent from our theories of international relations. What is more, this language actually appeared to capture something about how states act and react on the international stage. But how could this be? States are collective, institutionalized actors—why would we speak as if such entities evinced emotions?

In seeking to answer this question, my first intuition was that we were indeed observing states acting in an emotional fashion, and that this was a function of popular and elite emotions infiltrating state decision-making processes and coloring state behavior. More precisely, I hypothesized a process whereby (1) people within a state experienced a shared emotional reaction in response to an external event or actor, and (2) this reaction then became translated into an emotional display on the state level. I even came up with what I thought to be a snappy neologism to describe this phenomenon: the emotionalization of foreign policy.

What I rapidly discovered when researching actual state behavior, however, was a much, much messier reality. Emotions do influence foreign policy, but the process is far from straightforward. Emotions mix, mingle, and compete with numerous other factors and considerations in any given foreign policy decision making process, frequently leading to outcomes that in themselves do not appear particularly emotional. Moreover, the emotions of those involved are usually quite diverse and variable. Not only do emotions vary widely across policymakers and members of their constituencies, the emotions within individuals also can shift very quickly. It was often difficult to pinpoint one specific, commonly shared emotional reaction that had an impact on state behavior. And on top of all this, I ironically found it quite common for the strongest emotions officials exhibited during foreign policy making processes to be directed not at external events or actors but rather at their own domestic rivals.

At the same time, I also encountered evidence of intentional policies by state actors to display a particular emotional stance or demeanor in their official interactions with other states. State actors did deliberately seek to project the image of particular emotions with their words and deeds. The appearance of states acting emotional was therefore not an illusion. But—given the contrast between the premeditated nature of these policies and the sheer messiness of actual emotional reactions—it was difficult to claim such behavior was the product of processes that conformed to my pet hypothesis of emotionalization. In short, I came to realize there existed a significant disconnect between emotions as experienced by policymakers and publics on the one hand, and explicit, state-level displays of emotional behavior on the other. Quite simply, they were two separate classes of phenomena.

In the years since my interest in emotions was first kindled, there has been an explosion of work on the implications of the former class of phenomena for the study of international relations, with scholars offering various theories of how felt emotional and affective responses impact international politics. In fact, I myself have been an active contributor to this trend, publishing on such topics as the role of feelings in leaders’ sincerity judgments and the affective politics that ensued in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

What has remained lacking, however, is an accounting of the latter class of phenomena: states appearing to act emotional. This book seeks to remedy that gap. Specifically, this is a book about how, why, and with what consequences state actors intentionally adopt the language and conduct associated with certain emotions in their interactions with other states. In doing so this book analyzes a heretofore unexplored form of strategic action on the international stage: emotional diplomacy. Emotional diplomacy entails the official deployment of emotional displays at the international level for political ends.

A key claim of this book is that states pursue emotional diplomacy with the goal of realizing political outcomes the traditionally theorized tools of diplomacy—bargaining, persuasion, coercion—would have difficulty achieving. These include, for instance, reforming the image of a state through official displays of remorse or bettering relations after a tragedy with expressions of sympathy. Importantly, the choice to engage in emotional diplomacy can have quite surprising consequences, for projecting an emotional image in many cases requires behaving as if the standard dictates of calculating, self-interested politics do not apply. Emotional diplomacy is quite common as a practice within international politics; this book, however, constitutes the first scholarly endeavor to make its workings explicit.

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This book would not have come into being without the assistance, support, comments, and advice of many different people who contributed at various stages of its development. These include Emanuel Adler, Steven Bernstein, Allen Carlson, Ja Ian Chong, Christopher Cochrane, Victor Falkenheim, Rosemary Foot, Taylor Fravel, Lee Ann Fujii, Lilach Gilady, Avery Goldstein, Steven Goldstein, Xavier Guillaume, Vaidya Gundlupet, Seva Gunitsky, Anne Harrington, Kai He, Matthew Hoffmann, Anne Holthoefer, Kristina Johnson, Jennifer Jordan, Scott Kastner, Andrew Kennedy, William Kirby, Mareike Kleine, David Leheny, Matthew Light, Michael McKoy, Jonathan Mercer, Michelle Murray, Takayuki Nishi, Louis Pauly, Andrew Ross, Robert Ross, Keven Ruby, John Schuessler, Duncan Snidal, Janice Stein, Lora Viola, Alan Wachman, Haibin Wang, Lynn White, Matthew White, William Wohlforth, Wendy Wong, Keren Yarhi-Milo, and participants at the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security at the University of Chicago, the International Relations Research Colloquium at the Free University of Berlin, and the China and the World Program seminars at Princeton and Harvard Universities. Olga Kesarchuk provided much appreciated research assistance for chapter 3. Roger Malcolm Haydon was all one could ask for in an editor, and I thank him for all his time, support, and attention. And although anonymous, reviewers for Political Science Quarterly, Security Studies, and Cornell University Press supplied invaluable feedback.

I am also grateful to the German Academic Exchange Association (DAAD) and the University of Chicago Mellon-Dissertation Fellowship for financial support while researching this project, and to the Blakemore-Freeman fellowship for providing me the chance to build up the language skills I needed for the cases that appear in chapters 2, 3, and 5.

I particularly want to thank Thomas Risse of the Free University of Berlin and Chen Qi of Tsinghua University for supervising my stays as a visiting scholar at their respective institutions while conducting research for this book.

A very special note of appreciation also goes to Thomas Christensen and Alastair Iain Johnston for giving me the opportunity to devote my full attention to this project as a fellow in the China and the World Program at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, respectively. The China and the World Program offered an amazing experience, and I am extraordinarily grateful for all the support they showed to me while I was working on this manuscript.

I cannot express enough thanks to Jennifer Mitzen, Ronald Suny, and Lisa Wedeen, and Alexander Wendt. I am indebted to them for all their attention, encouragement, and feedback during my time at the University of Chicago as I plied them with multiple (and much lengthier) versions of this project.

Last but not least, my gratitude goes to my partner through this all, Chigusa Yamaura. What a long, strange trip it has been; thank you for your patience, support, and humor throughout this journey.

This book is dedicated to my parents, who inspired me to go out and see the world for myself.

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Portions of chapter 2 were published as We Will Not Swallow This Bitter Fruit: Theorizing a Diplomacy of Anger, in Security Studies, 20(4): 521–55. Portions of chapter 3 were published as Sympathetic States: Explaining the Russian and Chinese Responses to September 11, in Political Science Quarterly, Fall 2012: 369–400. All translations from foreign-language texts appearing in the bibliography are mine, as are all errors.

Introduction

What strategies do state actors employ in pursuit of their goals? How do we explain the outcomes of interactions between states? These are among the most basic questions driving scholarship in international relations. State actors apply coercive pressure, they bargain, they bribe, and they appeal to common interests. Such are the traditionally theorized tools of statecraft, and approaches that focus on these tools play an important role in answering key questions motivating the study of international politics.

However, state actors do much more than just this, even when significant interests are at stake. During the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait Crisis, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) responded to a perceived provocation with outrage and explosive, even excessive, vehemence instead of proportionally escalating in a manner standard theories of coercion would have led us to expect. Following the 9/11 attacks, Russian Federation (RF) and PRC officials immediately conveyed their condolences to and solidarity with the United States. Subsequently, they did not just acquiesce to a U.S. military presence in their own regional backyard without haggling or seeking reciprocal payoffs, they actively assisted it. And for decades the government of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) proclaimed remorse for the Holocaust as it adopted unilateral policies of diplomatic, economic, and military support for Israel that complicated its pursuit of key political and economic interests in the Middle East.

The goals behind these actions were relatively straightforward. The PRC government was seeking to prevent further violations of its interests pertaining to Taiwan. Russian and PRC officials were aiming to use 9/11 as an opportunity to reboot their relations with the United States and reframe their own domestic struggles as part of a larger battle against terrorism. And the FRG was engaged in an effort to rehabilitate its international image in the aftermath of World War II. These are all goals associated with tangible political benefits.

But the forms of statecraft these state actors employed to pursue these goals entailed anything but politics as usual from the perspective of international relations scholarship. They did not apply coercive pressure, wrangle for advantage, or seek to use payoffs in the traditional ways the field of international relations would anticipate. In each case, the state actors involved deployed emotional rhetoric, engaged in emotional gestures, and invoked emotions as the motives for their policy choices. They explicitly inserted expressions of emotion into their dealings with other states and, moreover, backed up these expressions with substantive actions.

Emotional behavior is an essential part of how we as human beings communicate what matters to us, even what type of individual we are. A central claim I make in this book is that emotional behavior can also play this role in relations between states, with important consequences for the strategies state actors adopt and the manner in which they interact with their counterparts. That said, while emotional behavior may be a ubiquitous part of human social interactions, transposing this observation from interpersonal to international relations is not so simple. Scaling up to the level of international relations requires a new theoretical approach, for despite common tendencies to anthropomorphize, states are not people.

This book offers such an approach. It presents a theoretical framework for understanding the nature, significance, and consequences of state-level emotional behavior on the international stage. In doing so, it also provides scholars with new theoretical tools for making sense of what would otherwise be puzzling state behavior within international relations.

Key to the arguments presented in this book is a concept new to the field of international relations, that of emotional diplomacy. Emotional diplomacy is coordinated state-level behavior that explicitly and officially projects the image of a particular emotional response toward other states. Concisely, when state actors engage in emotional diplomacy, the emotions being conveyed are official, and official emotion is a completely different animal from personal emotion. As I shall elaborate, official emotion entails what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes as emotional labor—the display of mandated emotions as part of one’s professional role.¹ Because it occurs at the level of the state, it also involves what sociologist Erving Goffman has labeled a team performance—a collection of individuals working in concert to project a particular image.² Emotional diplomacy consists of state actors—spanning top leaders to low-ranked officials—synchronizing their behavior to project a specific emotion through their language, symbolic gestures, and substantive actions. Emotional diplomacy is by its nature intentional and collaborative.

At the interpersonal level, emotional displays convey values and attitudes and can shape how interactions unfold. At the international level, state actors engage in emotional diplomacy when they want to enlist these properties of emotional displays to frame issues, to maintain or alter their state’s image, or even to transform the character of specific relationships. Emotional diplomacy—like other state efforts to shape images—is strategic, in the sense that it seeks to shape the perceptions and behaviors of others in order to achieve particular ends. This does not rule out the possibility that policymakers may also sincerely feel emotions consonant with the official emotional images they are presenting on the international stage; rather, it means that when the representatives of a state collectively and explicitly engage in a display of official emotion it is the product of a strategic choice. And emotional diplomacy is not simply rhetoric; it is a form of foreign policy behavior that can incorporate very substantive gestures with—as subsequent chapters demonstrate—real and important consequences, including how state actors use force, provide military aid, or even respond to major strategic shifts.

In short, the focus of this book is the politics of officially expressed emotion on the international stage. Emotional diplomacy is distinct in that it intentionally injects displays of emotional behavior into interstate relations in order to shift such interactions outside the realm of standardly understood political practice. If international politics has traditionally been theorized as the dirty business of achieving interests through negotiating relations of relative power, what makes emotional diplomacy special is that it seeks to harness the social meaning attributed to emotional displays to create alternative political possibilities. One cannot, for instance, bring conventional power resources to bear—either through bribing or threatening—to convince a target audience that one is a repentant and reformed actor. But this is where the language and behavior associated with guilt and remorse can play an important role. Indeed, what separates reparations from straightforward grants of aid is the fact that the former is couched in and justified by an official rhetoric of remorse. In fact this, as I shall argue in chapter 4, constituted the postwar strategy of the FRG vis-à-vis Israel.

Emotional diplomacy comes in many diverse forms. Only the range of human emotion limits the potential different variations of emotional diplomacy. That said, for the purposes of this book I have chosen to concentrate on three specific, ideal-typical strains: the diplomacy of anger, the diplomacy of sympathy, and the diplomacy of guilt. There are important reasons behind the choice to begin an exploration of emotional diplomacy with a focus on these three strains as opposed to other possible candidates, such as joy or disdain. For one, all three constitute responses to significant negative situations, be they the violation of interests and values, the suffering of another, or even being a source of injury. For better or worse, such situations have a greater potential for conflict or harm. All else equal, the stakes involved in such situations are likely to be higher. Moreover, all three evoke expectations for accompanying concrete actions such as retribution, assistance, or reparations. Therefore all have clear implications for substantive state behavior that allow us to look for deviations from traditional notions of statecraft. These provide important points of comparison to evaluate the analytical purchase of viewing behavior through the lens of emotional diplomacy.

Despite these similarities, each strain is distinct in terms of the specific combination of expressive and substantive gestures required for its enactment, its exact strategic implications and significance, and its corresponding equation of costs and benefits as pertaining to achieving particular ends. For that reason, it is important to delineate the characteristics of each strain separately.

The diplomacy of anger consists of an immediate, vehement, and overt state-level display in response to a perceived offense. It invokes the discourse of outrage and threatens precipitous escalation—even violence—in the face of further violations. The diplomacy of anger is therefore risky, although it can be alleviated by reconciliatory gestures and will subside over time absent new provocations. It works to construct particular issues as sensitive and volatile, and thus outside the realm of standard cost-benefit calculations. The diplomacy of anger serves state actors in conveying that a normatively significant boundary has been crossed and consequently is a means of constituting red lines within a relationship.

The diplomacy of sympathy is a response to other states having suffered a perceived tragedy. It involves symbolic displays of solidarity and condolence coupled with offers of assistance free from clear demands for compensation. By enacting the diplomacy of sympathy, state actors convey that they harbor a benign attitude toward the victim. The diplomacy of sympathy is therefore a means to reinforce existing bonds or, alternatively, to reframe previously hostile or neutral relations in a more positive light. While it is relatively easy to employ the discourse of sympathy, maintaining an image of sincerity may also require costly displays of substantive support. Conversely, refraining from even cheap statements of sympathy in the face of others’ suffering can project an apathetic, even hostile image.

The diplomacy of guilt is a response to being perceived as responsible for earlier wrongdoing. The diplomacy of guilt couples a discourse of guilt and apology with symbolic displays meant to reinforce an image of penance and responsibility. It also can involve substantive gestures of compensation that entail significant costs. The diplomacy of guilt seeks to convey remorse and make amends for past actions, thereby mitigating the harmful effects of past behavior on a state’s relations with others.

Broadly speaking, each strain shares in the fact that it deploys emotional behavior to achieve political goals and is shaped by a performative logic that necessitates presenting an outwardly sincere image. All constitute possible means for states to change how others view their intentions, frame the meanings of particular behaviors or issues, and even alter the trajectory of interactions; therein lies their strategic value. And all entail actions and interactions we would not anticipate given the standard expectations for statecraft described above. Bluntly, emotional diplomacy encompasses a variety of strategies available to state actors—of which this book only explores three—that international relations scholarship has largely overlooked.

To be clear, emotional diplomacy as a practice is not new when it comes to the conduct of international politics. In press reports, historical accounts, and even everyday discussions of current events, one frequently encounters emotional language being employed to describe the behavior of states. One need but look to the daily papers or evening news to see emotional diplomacy in action. But the concept of emotional diplomacy is new to the study of international relations.

Although this book may be the first to explicitly explore emotional diplomacy as an intentional policy to officially display a specific emotion at the international level, my arguments are indebted to prior insights provided by both rationalist and constructivist approaches in the field of international relations, as well as work on emotions. Correspondingly, instead of seeking to pit these different approaches against one another, the arguments presented here aim to improve our understanding of international relations by weaving together a theoretical framework that draws upon insights from all three. In the end, the goal is to explain state behavior, not maintain artificial boundaries between schools of thought in the field.

I am indebted to rationalist approaches for their insights into the strategic nature of political actors, the role of signals in communicating intentions, and the interactive dimensions of international politics.³ From a rationalist perspective, state behavior is ends-directed: states strategically select the course of action that, given what they believe about their environment and the likely choices of their counterparts, will realize the best possible subjective outcome. Rationalist approaches direct our attention to the instrumental and strategic elements of state behavior. The arguments of this book incorporate this focus, theorizing emotional diplomacy as a primarily instrumental form of behavior, a strategy by which state actors seek to achieve certain ends. This is so because by its very nature emotional diplomacy is the product of a deliberate, coordinated policy choice to project a particular image.

Furthermore, some of the most influential rationalist works have been those that have emphasized the significance of signaling.⁴ Given that state actors make choices on the basis of what they believe about their counterparts, scholars in the rationalist tradition have been keenly interested in how states convey credible information to one another about their intentions, beliefs, and likely courses of action. Emotional diplomacy, by seeking to project a certain type of image about state intentions and attitudes, can also be viewed as a form of signaling. And for a strategy of emotional diplomacy to have any hope of being effective, it must to some extent seem sincere. Rationalist scholars have directed awareness to the ways in which states need to employ costly signals to convince others that they are not bluffing. I draw on this insight to posit that state actors can in certain circumstances find themselves having to employ substantial material resources—to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak—in order to convey their sincerity. That said, as I discuss in chapter 1, the notion of sincere emotional diplomacy is much less straightforward than rationalist understandings of state types, such as status quo or revisionist.

Finally, rationalist models have pointed out how outcomes cannot be derived simply from the preferences of the actors involved; one has to look at the dynamics of the interaction, to examine how the choices of one party will shape the strategic options and calculations of its counterpart. Accordingly, I treat emotional diplomacy not just as a unilateral strategy state actors deploy, but also a policy choice that shapes the strategic responses of its targets and generates unique interactive characteristics. Indeed, certain strategies become available to a target only by virtue of the fact that its opposite has initiated a round of emotional diplomacy. For example, a target may choose to challenge the sincerity of an emotional display to either discredit it or elicit further substantive action, or alternatively embrace it in order to entrap its authors. In chapter 4, I argue that these were among the strategic options facing the State of Israel as the FRG sought to convey that it was a remorseful actor by offering Israel reparations. In short, emotional diplomacy can engender novel interactive strategic dynamics.

Simultaneously, I am also indebted to the insights of constructivist scholars concerning the intersubjective constitution of socially meaningful behavior. Constructivists have long noted how the significance of actions, displays, or objects is not intrinsic; it is a function of the shared structures of meaning within which they are embedded.⁵ Heeding this observation, I pay attention to the ways emotional discourse and symbolic gestures importantly have the ability to constitute accompanying actions with specific meanings. For example, the official discourse of outrage (entailed by the diplomacy of anger) can frame concurrent military exercises as expressions of anger and thus dangerous but likely to subside absent further provocations—this is a phenomenon I examine in chapter 2 in the context of the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait Crisis.

Such a relationship is not self-evident, but rather reflects the existence of a basic, shared background knowledge within the realm of international politics pertaining to what constitutes emotional behavior, the significance attached to it, and the criteria for when and how it is displayed in a sincere manner. Indeed, given the social meanings attached to certain emotional displays, state actors may in some cases find it imperative to perform certain symbolic and substantive emotional gestures to maintain a desired image. To wit, for state actors not to express sympathy in the face of suffering by another party would be to send a quite malevolent message about their intentions, particularly when such expressions entail few costs. In chapters 3 and 5, I argue that we can observe this logic at work in the responses of various states to the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

The concept of emotional diplomacy thus straddles what have been termed the logic of consequences and the logic of appropriateness, integrating elements of both.⁶ On the one hand, emotional diplomacy is goal-oriented and strategic, and thus on the surface appears to adhere to the consequentialist logic embraced by rationalist approaches. But on the other hand, emotional diplomacy draws upon a foundation of social expectations and meanings associated with emotional behavior. The empirical existence of emotional diplomacy indicates a basic, shared background knowledge within the realm of international politics pertaining to the meanings attached to emotional behavior as well as criteria for when and how it should be displayed in a sincere manner. It is a form of socially thick strategic action.⁷

But emotional diplomacy is also more than this, for it also reflects the significance emotions have within lived human experience. In the field of international relations there has been a growing interest in the role of affect and emotions in shaping behavior on the international stage.⁸ This work has tapped into what the fields of psychology and sociology, not to mention the humanities, have long known: that emotions are a key element of human thought and behavior. We see and experience emotions as natural and meaningful in everyday life, and the ways we seek to understand both ourselves and others reveal this. The work on emotions in international relations has sought to move beyond the quotidian and personal to further trace out the ways in which emotional reactions and experience can influence international political outcomes, and in the process has brought to the fore the emotional dimensions of political actorhood within international relations.

I am indebted here as well, for emotional diplomacy only makes sense in a world populated by emotions-capable human actors. Without the subjective and social experience of emotions at the human level—which existing work in international relations has rightly stressed—there would be no basis for state-level emotional displays on the international stage. Human beings do not divest themselves of emotional experience by becoming policymakers, and it is as emotions-capable actors that policymakers are able to think through how their state as a whole should be responding in terms of emotional expressions and gestures to convey a particular image. To be clear, such judgments need not necessarily be accompanied by in the moment emotional reactions, just the ability to reason based on previous experience of emotions. So even if state actors do not need to personally feel the emotions they display when performing emotional diplomacy, the broader existence of emotions as an element of human social life is still necessary for this story.

That said, while having incurred debts, I also offer new contributions to each in return. For those working in the rationalist tradition, this book develops a new domain of strategic signaling: the official display of emotional behavior. Certainly, within classic rationalist works, the idea that appearing emotional could serve instrumental purposes is not entirely alien. Thomas Schelling, for example, famously discussed the benefits of appearing mad in order to convey unpredictability and to convince others of the credibility of one’s threats.⁹ But for the most part, these arguments have remained underdeveloped or implicit. The idea that there exist different forms of emotional types a state can signal—such as angry, sympathetic, or remorseful—does present an original contribution.

More importantly, theorizing emotional diplomacy requires—like Schelling’s madman theory itself—that we allow the possibility that players involved may conceive of their counterparts as acting out of emotion, or at the very least that those projecting the emotional display believe it possible their targets will not discount their behavior as strictly instrumental. Put differently, the phenomenon of emotional diplomacy points to the intersection of strategic action with shared perceptions of a world inhabited by emotions-capable actors. Accordingly, this book opens up the question of what new games might exist if we allow actors to believe emotions belong to the repertoire of imaginable—even expected—responses. These include, for instance, the ways in which actors may seek to assuage angry counterparts or take advantage of sympathy proffered, the subjects of chapters 2 and 3 respectively.

For those of the constructivist tradition, the arguments in this book serve to further flesh out what we know about the social realm in which states operate. Constructivists have done much work on the norms that shape and constitute state behavior, classic examples being those that pertain to sovereignty, human rights, and warfare.¹⁰ The findings of this book point to a further set of assumptions and expectations concerning state actors on the international stage. These are the intersubjective understandings of emotional behavior that are at work within the international realm, especially those pertaining to state-level displays of anger, sympathy, and guilt. Significantly, each strain of emotional behavior follows a logic that diverges from traditional notions of statecraft; being emotional requires acting as if political calculations are suspended. If one wants to engage in the diplomacy of sympathy or of guilt, for instance, one has to avoid the appearance of expecting something in return. And more basically, the existence of emotional diplomacy suggests the ways in which understandings of lived human experience can spill over into and shape the social framework of international interactions. For even if states as collective actors cannot experience emotions, it is the human experience of emotions that informs expectations that it makes sense for states to act as if they do.

Finally, this book also has much to offer those who research emotions in international relations. As noted above, work by scholars in this vein has sought to demonstrate how emotions shape the choices and behavior of international actors. Some have examined the effects of specific emotions, such as revenge or humiliation.¹¹ Others have sought to challenge the very way we conceptualize what motivates rational actorhood.¹² While this work has been important in demonstrating emotions matter, little has been done however to consider the second-order implications of integrating emotion into our understandings of international relations.¹³

Emotional diplomacy is one such implication. For if emotions exist, so too does the possibility of displaying emotional behavior for strategic purposes. In seeking to emphasize the importance of emotions, we must not lose sight of the fact policymakers and state officials are in most—albeit not all—cases sophisticated political actors. Moreover, states as collective, institutional actors do not exhibit the same spontaneity of expression that individuals do. Behind any individual display of emotion is a human being capable of an unpremeditated emotional response. Behind the state-level expression of emotion, however, is a set institutionalized decision-making practices that work to process diverse considerations, policy inputs, and policymaker positions to generate