Diplomacy, trade, and human civilization

When Venetian traders Marco Polo and his family travelled to China in the years following 1260 and exchanged gifts and messages from Roman Catholic Pope Gregory of Piacenza with Emperor Kubilai Khan, they conducted the first diplomatic exchange between Europeans and Kubilai Khan (Polo 1958, pp. vii– xxxix, 1– 14). Trade and diplomacy are amongst the oldest practices of how we as humans have engaged and interacted with others who are unfamiliar, who are outside our family or tribal group, who are farther away than next door. Trade and diplomacy have evolved together over thousands of years of developing human civilization. As international trade has become more important relative to overall global economic activity, a specialized focus on trade has emerged within the practice of diplomacy. Today, new technologies and new forms of trade have created a need for new approaches to diplomacy and to trade diplomacy in particular.

Over the seven decades since the end of the Second World War, the international trading system and the diplomacy that has facilitated it is widely credited with fuelling an era of unprecedented global economic growth and development. But as the foregoing chapters have suggested, both the trading system and global economic growth face new and daunting challenges. The international system has experienced significant technological transformations in how diplomacy is done, which have affected the core diplomatic processes of representation and communication, the ways in which diplomats negotiate agreements and resolve disputes and crises. The rise of digital diplomacy (see below) is a prime example.

The relative power of different types of actors in diplomacy has changed, as non-state actors such as multilateral institutions, large civil society organizations, and global firms have emerged alongside the governments of states in the diplomatic arena. Place branding, the promotion of states and regions as destinations for international trade, investment, and tourism by governments, often in partnership with private actors, has been recognized as a diplomatic activity in itself, even as migration, the cross-border movement of human labour, has become a more contentious issue with which diplomats must contend.