Diplomatic blunders and achievements

The subject of the course is the role of diplomacy in crisis management and conflict settlements. In substantive terms, the course aims at making students understand the specificities of, as well as the linkages between, diplomatic history and political science analyses of international relations. Through analysing four crucial episodes of high level diplomacy throughout 200 years of European history, the course will address the long waves organising and destabilising the international system. In methodological terms, the course introduces the case study method, especially causal process tracing and related research techniques such as mobilising documentary evidence, reconstructing causal chains and their ‘critical junctures’. In a second step, classic cases of diplomatic achievements and blunders will be analysed through presentations from seminar participants: The Vienna Congress of 1815, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919/20, the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the diplomatic efforts that rendered possible the peaceful ending of the Cold War and German reunification in 1989/90. With the support of invited experts, the final section of the course addresses the structural conditions and the role of strategy building – or the absence of it – in the current war-driven European crisis.

This course is for 2nd year MIA, MPP and MDS students only.