Totalitarian regimes

Diplomacy was equally affected by the advent of totalitarian regimes with strong ideologies; more often than not, these regimes honoured established diplomatic rules only when it suited them, and they generally eschewed negotiation and compromise. The government of the Soviet Union, for example, viewed all capitalist states as enemies. Especially under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, it used each concession it won as a basis to press for another, and it viewed diplomacy as war, not as a process of mutual compromise. Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler was equally indifferent to accommodation and Western opinion once it achieved rearmament; Hitler signed treaties with the intention of keeping them only as long as the terms suited him, regarded with contempt those who tried to accommodate him, and cowed foreign leaders with tantrums and threats.

Summit diplomacy

After a lull the tensions of the 1930s revived conference diplomacy, which continued during World War II. Thereafter, summit meetings between heads of government became the norm as technology again quickened the tempo of diplomacy. In the 1930s statesmen began to telephone each other, a practice that was epitomized in the 1960s by the Soviet-American “hot line.” Similarly, the flights of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to Germany in 1938, which resulted in the Munich agreement that allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia, started a trend in diplomacy. With airplanes at their disposal, leaders met often in the postwar world. As Kojo Debrah, a Ghanaian diplomat, later remarked, “Radio enables people to hear all evil, television enables them to see all evil, and the jet plane enables them to go off and do all evil.”

Decolonization and the beginnings of the Cold War

After World War II the world divided into two tight blocs, one dominated by the United States and one by the Soviet Union, with a fragile nonaligned movement (mostly of newly independent countries) lying precariously in between. The Cold War took place under the threat of nuclear catastrophe and gave rise to two major alliances—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, led by the United States, and the Warsaw Pact, led by the Soviet Union—along with a conventional and nuclear arms race, endless disarmament negotiations, much conference diplomacy, many summits, and periodic crisis management, a form of negotiation aimed at living with a problem, not solving it. As a result, a premium was placed on the diplomatic art of continuing to talk until a crisis ceased to boil.

World War I had produced a few new states as eastern European empires crumbled. World War II sounded the death knell for global empires. The immediate postwar period saw the reemergence into full independence of several great civilizations that the age of imperialism had placed under generations of European tutelage. These reborn countries had taken to heart the doctrines of European diplomacy. With the zeal of new converts, they were, in many ways, more insistent on the concepts of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and noninterference in internal affairs than their former colonial masters now were.

After a long struggle for independence, Indians formed two proudly assertive but mutually antagonistic states, India and Pakistan. China's century-long humiliation at the hands of the West exploded in a series of violent revolutions seeking to restore the country to wealth, power, and a place of dignity internationally. In 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed that, with the founding of his People's Republic of China, the Chinese people had once again “stood up”; but, with U.S. support, Mao's defeated rival in the Chinese civil war, Chiang Kai-shek, continued for two decades to speak for China in the United Nations (UN). The question of China's international representation became one of the great diplomatic issues of the 1950s and '60s. The states and principalities of the Arab world resumed their independence and then insisted, over the objections of their former colonial masters, on exercising full sovereignty throughout their own territories, as Egypt did with respect to the Suez Canal. Anti-imperialist sentiment soon made colonialism globally unacceptable. By the late 1950s and '60s, new states, mainly in Africa, were being established on an almost monthly basis.