Global Governance and Diplomacy: Worlds Apart? (Studies in by Andrew F. Cooper, Brian Hocking, William Maley

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The people who were sent on the drawn-out expeditions which went by the name of embassies, however, were not specifically trained to deal with foreign kings. They were the same people that the king used to deal with his nobles. There was no such thing as foreign policy personnel whatsoever, for the simple reason that there was no division between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ policy (Neumann, 2007). The same went for the pope’s missi: these messengers were used for dealing with people of power regardless of where these people fit into spatial organisation (Der Derian, 1987).

Political organization is territorial when the legal reach of public authority is coterminous with certain spatial boundaries’ (Caporaso, 2000: 10). Globalisation can be understood as deterritorialisation – ‘a reconfiguration of geography, so that social space is no longer wholly mapped in terms of territorial places, territorial distances and territorial borders’ (Scholte, 2000: 16). The notion of non-territorial space is alien to our traditional way of thinking about political geography. In our maps, material as well as mental, territorial states hold centre stage.

During the Thatcher years, the Foreign Office was able to play favourites with the journalists, and often denied access to overtly critical journalists to its daily briefings. Still, the trend remains clear and ubiquitous; the level of access for journalists which is considered ‘normal’ by all parties is rising. All this happens in the name of transparency. This norm is part and parcel of the state-society model that is presently spreading across the globe, which means that as long as ministries and politicians do not take active measures to halt or reverse the trend, it is set to continue.