Back to the Future: The Origins of Diplomacy

ICAR Professor Dan Druckman, and Professor Kevin Avruch of the George Mason Department of Sociology and Anthropology, participated in the Bellagio Conference on the Origins of Diplomacy, held at the Rockefeller Foundation's Villa Serbelloni, September 16-20. This interdisciplinary conference was attended by I 8 scholars with backgrounds in such fields as ancient near eastern civilizations, Egyptology, philology, international relations, anthropology, and social psychology. The purpose of the conference was to analyze the 382 letters sent among kingdoms during the Bronze Age--known also as the Amarna Period (1400 B.C.). These messages, written originally in Akkadian on clay tablets, were first discovered in 1887 in El-Amarna, a plain on the east bank of the Nile about 190 miles south of Cairo. They were translated first into French (Lettre d'El-Amarna, appearing in 1987) and then into English by William Moran whose book, The Amarna Letters, were published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1992. The letters provide valuable information about diplomatic relations among the kingdoms of the period, including the Egyptian, Assyrian, Mittanian, Babylonian, and Hittite kingdoms.

The conference organizers, Professor Raymond Westbrooke of Johns Hopkins University and Professor Raymond Cohen of Hebrew University, asked participants to interpret the letters in terms of contemporary theories of international relations or related fields. In his paper with former ICAR visiting fellow, Serdar Guner of Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, Professor Druckman analyzed the letters from the perspectives of social psychology and strategic-choice analysis. They conclude that the kings functioned as unitary actors who played a competitive game for status conferred by the kinds of exchanges made between theirs and other kingdoms and by wealth accumulated and displayed. Despite the "brotherhood" rhetoric used by the kings, it was clear that they were not acting as part of a communal system where each king tried to secure the welfare and security of the other kingdoms. Rather, they operated as if they held views of international relations consonant with a realpolitik frainework. This conclusion derived from an appraisal of the situation in terms of the emphasis on competing interests rather than shared values, the role played by partisan biases in evaluating the equivalence (or reciprocity) of exchanges, strategic decisions that produced equilibrium solutions that invariably favored the hegemonic actor, Egypt, and the frequent use of tactics designed to manage impressions in order to preserve or enhance one's status in the system.

Some modem scholars would argue that not much has changed in international relations; others contend that there is a noticeable shift among nations away from jockeying for competitive advantage toward attempts to solve common problems cooperatively. Lively discussions of these issues were interspersed with discussions of proper analytical frameworks for capturing the interactions (realism or constructivism), the deeper linguistic meaning of the communications, the way that the kings signaled their intentions, the extent to which diplomatic relations were "primitive" compared to the modem system, and the role of intelligence in ancient diplomacy. A particularly interesting analysis of the metaphorical meaning of the Amama Letters was presented by Avruch. The papers will appear in an edited volume published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in fall 1997.