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Presents the thinking of Japanese officials on constitutional reform. Convinced that the Potsdam Declaration had left the matter to the Japanese, Irie Toshio, chief of the cabinet's Legislation Bureau, argued in two memoranda in September and October 1945, that democracy could best be achieved by strengthening the Diet and guaranteeing basic human rights. The government sought advice on constitutional reform from scholars Miyazawa Toshiyoshi and Yabe Teiji. The Foreign Ministry then follow up with tentative proposals, by Tatsuki Keiichi, to reduce the influence of the military and make the Diet fully responsible to the people. However, both Irie and Tatsuki wished to preserve imperial sovereignty and the autonomy of the imperial household. In early October, a new cabinet under Shidehara Kijūrō appointed Matsumoto Jōji to head a committee to study constitutional reform.

This chapter details the author's experiences as a rookie in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). He first arrived at the Norwegian MFA to work as a planner, and was expected to pick up the skill of writing in the bureaucratic mode with no delay. Since the ministry produces a large number of speeches for its ministers, its state secretaries, and also its senior civil servants, it was no coincidence that his first assignment was as a speechwriter. The author describes how, through no fault of any one individual, a bureaucracy left to its own devices will produce texts that resemble their predecessors and one another. The main reasons are that texts are the result of teamwork; that the model for teamwork is previous texts; and that the process of producing the text is inner-driven, so that little or no heed is paid to audience, circumstances of delivery, political effects, and other matters external to the ministry itself.

This chapter discusses the emergence of the foreign ministry, using the history of the Norwegian foreign service as an example. It first details how the Danish conglomerate state evolved a separate foreign ministry in 1772. It then introduces the Swedish–Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in its capacity as the main point of departure for the foundation of the Norwegian MFA in 1905. Norway is typical of the great majority of the world's 203 states in having gained its sovereignty and formed a foreign ministry only in the twentieth century. Thus, the genealogy of the Norwegian MFA should also throw light on the general emergence of foreign ministries and the effects on the conduct of diplomacy.

This chapter outlines the nature of the common strategic agenda around which strategic players have been recruited to the European Union (EU) network. It provides a historical overview of the formation of the two networks (UK and Ireland) and how they have expanded over time in response to the intermittent growth of EU competence. Having mapped the network as a whole and its ‘core’, the chapter then examines the codes of conduct that govern formal interaction between players: that is, their formally defined roles and responsibilities, their function and location within the network, and the informal norms and procedures which govern strategic networking. The chapter is concerned primarily with those core players (or network ‘managers’) responsible for managing and coordinating EU national policy (the prime minister's/cabinet offices, foreign ministry, permanent representation, finance department and legal advisers). It also briefly reflects on the changing role of sub-national players over the past decade.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book is a historically informed ethnography of diplomacy which asks what diplomats do and how they came to do it. It demonstrates that today's organization of diplomacy, centered as it is on foreign ministries with staff usually numbered in the thousands, is a very recent and historically specific phenomenon. It also complements the sparse extant literature by bringing anthropology and international relations to bear on the quotidian work of diplomats. The remainder of the chapter discusses how the field of diplomacy radically differs from the widespread stereotypes that shape newspaper reports, popular culture, and the opinions of social scientists who have no personal experience with diplomats and diplomacy. It further describes some of the author's experiences as a diplomat.

China’s foreign policy must rely on opaque and behind-the-scenes coordination organs to work through a large number of bureaucratic agencies of the state, party, and military, whose primary roles are information gathering and the implementation and recommendation of policy. In addition, some new players, such as think tanks, media, local governments, and transnational corporations, have played a variety of roles to influence China’s foreign policy. This chapter examines the evolving role of the paramount leader, the foreign policy coordination and elaboration organs, the bureaucracies, and the new players in the making and transformation of China’s foreign policy. Providing a historical overview, it also observes how President Xi Jinping has centralized and personalized foreign policy making power in the name of strengthening a unified party leadership.

China declared war on Japan only after Pearl Harbor, while Japan never followed suit. Tsuchido Akio demonstrates that contrary to generally held opinion, China did not decline to declare war on Japan after 1937 because it feared triggering the provisions of the USA’s neutrality laws. Domestic political factors were far more important. By discussing the debates about this contentious issue within Chinese politics, ‘Declaring War’ provides important insight into the making of Nationalist foreign policy, demonstrating that Chiang Kaishek regularly listened and accepted the advice of his foreign policy advisors and Chinese diplomats.

The chapter maps the impact of European integration on policy-making in the Czech Republic. In particular, it focuses on the institutional dimension of transformation of Czech policy-making which included power shift towards executive branch at the expense of Czech parliament as well as the struggle between the ministry of foreign affairs and the prime minister’s office for leadership in the Europeanised policy-making in the Czech Republic. Furthermore, the chapter covers major events that influenced the Europeanization of Czech policy-making, such as the 1998-2002 accession talks, the Convention for Future of Europe in years 200-2002, Czech Presidency in 2009 or Eurozone crisis in years 2010-2012.