‘As I shook his [Omar al-Bashir's] hand… [I reminded] myself not to smile…’ – US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on meeting the Sudanese President in Khartoum in July 2005, during the Darfur genocide.Footnote 1
‘We… debated whether we would shake hands’ – the recollection of one of the American negotiators on how to approach Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, when they met in Belgrade during the Bosnian War in September 1995.Footnote 2 In the end, some shook hands; others did not.Footnote 3
When leadersFootnote 4 meet with each other, they perform a wide range of what the sociologist Erving Goffman calls ‘interaction rituals’.Footnote 5 As in interpersonal contact in other realms of life – in business, romance, friendships, and so on – they dress up (or down) for an occasion, greet each other and shake hands, exchange pleasantries and gifts, arrive at the meeting venue at an agreed time and have themselves seated according to protocol, take pains to ensure that an exchange – however vacuous or unproductive – is properly brought to a close before they physically depart, and so on. Civility – although not always, as I explain in this paper – is the modus operandi of diplomacy. This is true even among adversaries. Take, for instance, the ‘really awkward’ handshake (in the words of one observer) between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Economic Leaders' meeting in Beijing in November 2014. The two leaders held on to each other's hand for seconds. They looked, however, reluctant.Footnote 6
What do leaders make of the performance of such rituals? In International Relations (IR) theory, the ‘cheap talk’ paradigm of neorealism and rationalism has tended to dismiss the explanatory relevance of face-to-face diplomacy. Since leaders may say whatever they wish, they are not able to, nor should they normatively speaking, make much of what others claim. Face-to-face diplomacy, which by definition occurs mostly in a private setting and is therefore beyond public scrutiny, would be the ‘cheapest’ of all channels of communication.Footnote 7 If what leaders say carries little weight, presumably then, they cannot care less how others behave, including their performance of rituals.
However, leaders meet and negotiate with each other all the time. How can the ‘cheap talk’ paradigm explain the commonplace of face-to-face diplomacy?
Building on Jürgen Habermas' theory of communicative action, some constructivists argue that when leaders gather and ‘talk’, they use words to persuade and argue,Footnote 8 or even rhetorically ‘coerce’ and ‘entrap’ others into compliance.Footnote 9 Words are meaningful. Other scholars have focused on the psychological dynamics of interpersonal contact. When humans, leaders included, are in each other's presence, they exude behavioral cues – in their voice, face and body – that inform others of their intentions.Footnote 10
Their contribution notwithstanding, these two streams of research have overlooked the fact that people exchange not only words and behavioral cues; they also perform rituals. Failure to account for the latter has rendered them inadequate to explain why face-to-face diplomacy is indeed sui generis.Footnote 11 After all, words and cues – positive ones such as trust and sympathy or negative ones like anger and hatred – can also be expressed on the telephone, in writing, through emails, videoconferencing, and even holographically (albeit attenuated in intensity and their authenticity less certain because of the lack of physical intimacy). In contrast, a handshake, walking down a red carpet, the exchange of gifts, the symbolism that comes with a particular seating arrangement, and so on, can only occur when leaders engage each other in person. ‘Ritual’, as Collins puts it, ‘is essentially a bodily process’.Footnote 12 Without also an explanation for why and how leaders perform rituals and their impact on a relationship, the extant literature on face-to-face diplomacy is incomplete.
Finally, a body of literature has recently emerged in the constructivist tradition that ontologically privileges the role of diplomatic practices, among them interaction rituals, as explanation for international politics.Footnote 13 Practices, Pouliot explains, are ‘socially meaningful and organized patterns of activities’. In lay parlance, they are ‘ways of doing things’.Footnote 14 Interaction rituals, as practices, are the routinized behavior that leaders perform in each other's presence that constitutes the very reality of a relationship. As Pouliot notes: ‘Insofar as they are meaningful, organized and repeated, practices convey a degree of mutual intelligibility that allows people to develop social relations over time.’ A handshake, for instance, ‘sticks as a greeting practice’ because ‘it allows its practitioners to go on with the rest of their interaction’.Footnote 15
Practice theory is a welcoming development because it has disabused IR of what Pouliot calls its ‘representational bias’ – the tendency not only among proponents of the ‘cheap talk’ paradigm but also those of more ‘traditional’ constructivist approaches to ‘focus on what agents think about (reflexive and conscious knowledge) at the expense of what they think from (the background know-how that informs practice in an inarticulate fashion)’.Footnote 16 But for the same reason, it has also been noted for its rather circumscribed view of human agency. As Holmes and Traven put it, practice theory and its associated logic of habit ‘call for explicitly de-emphasizing the role of conscious rationality’. These studies imply that ‘individuals do not act on conscious reasoning or choice, but rather they act on embodied practices and unthinking habits’. As such, ‘they rest on a view of agency that is at once too structural and insufficiently cognitive to be used to understanding how individuals make decisions…’. Since ‘the body and the brain’ are considered ‘reflections of practices and structures’, they cannot shed light on the ‘individual sources of action in world politics’. In reality, individuals do have ‘the capacity to consciously reflect on their social practices and habits and to alter them accordingly’.Footnote 17 In the opening quotations, the American negotiators considered long and hard – they ‘debated’ – on whether to shake hands with the Bosnian Serb leaders. Similarly, Rice had to ‘remind’ herself not to smile when she shook hands with al-Bashir.
In this paper, I argue that interaction rituals are neither ‘cheap’ with nothing important that leaders are able to learn from their performance; nor are they ‘mere’ routinized behavior whose purpose is to facilitate an interaction. Instead, leaders often take advantage of or outright flout what the sociologist Erving Goffman calls the prevailing ‘ceremonial idiom’Footnote 18 – that is, the intersubjective understanding that parties to an interaction share on what rituals to perform and how to perform them – to achieve a number of political or personal objectives. They manipulate their performance of a ritual, or in more extreme cases, refuse to perform it altogether. The ‘ceremonial idiom’ is deliberately transgressed and a counterpart's ‘face’ threatened – overtly but more often subtly – to achieve what are commonly known as ‘one-upmanship’ and ‘putdowns’ in interpersonal contact. To paraphrase Goffman, interaction rituals can be used aggressively.Footnote 19
I present my argument in four sections. First, I explain the aggressive use of rituals based on a close reading of Goffman's microsociology. Second, I argue that interaction rituals – aggressively performed or not – have larger structural implications. As practices, they are constitutive of the international relationship (bilateral or multilateral) that leaders to an interaction embody. Third, I elaborate on leaders' motives for aggression. They may be political (i.e. to impose a preferred understanding of one's international relationship with a counterpart, or to register one's position on some disputed issue), or – as recent research suggests – personal (to boost one's ego) but nevertheless have political consequences. Fourth, I demonstrate my argument with over two dozen empirical episodes across six categories of rituals: the identity of leaders, gestural, spatial–physical, task-embedded, linguistic, and communication rules. In the conclusion, I outline several directions for future research.
Rituals as aggression in face-to-face diplomacy
What are interaction rituals? According to Goffman, they are, in the context of interpersonal contact, acts or events ‘through whose symbolic component the actor shows how worthy he is of respect or how worthy he feels others are of it’.Footnote 20 Rituals are performed as part of the interlocutors' ‘facework’. By inclination, people have both ‘a defensive orientation toward saving his own face and a protective orientation toward saving the others’ face’.Footnote 21 ‘[W]henever the individual is in the presence of others’, Goffman argues, ‘he is pledged to maintain a ceremonial order by means of interpersonal rituals’. He is obliged ‘to ensure that the expressive implications of all local events are compatible with the status that he and the others present possess…’.Footnote 22 Save for the most hostile relationship (in which case the individuals in question would presumably have shunned any opportunity for direct personal contact), this would require the interlocutors to behave politely and courteously, through the performance of a repertoire of rituals, on what Goffman calls the ‘front stage’ of an interaction.Footnote 23
Moreover, most rituals are performed ‘merely’ for their ceremonial function. They serve no substantive purpose. Consider again the handshake, or the exchange of gifts. Such rituals ‘have secondary or even no significance in their own right’; instead, they are ‘conventionalized means of communication by which the individual expresses his character or conveys his appreciation of the other participants in the situation’.Footnote 24 They convey basic respect in interpersonal contact. This is true among friends and foes alike: compliance with what Goffman calls the prevailing ‘ceremonial idiom’Footnote 25 – that is, the intersubjective understanding that interlocutors share on what rituals they are expected to perform and how to perform them – does not necessarily mean that they are in good terms.Footnote 26 Their true feelings about each other can be kept and sequestered in the ‘back stage’. As the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev reportedly said in a Politburo meeting (i.e. his ‘back stage’) in preparation for his confrontation with US President John F. Kennedy over their dispute on Berlin in the Vienna summit (i.e. their joint ‘front stage’) in June 1961: ‘Gifts can even be made before a war’.Footnote 27
Diplomacy is replete with interaction rituals.Footnote 28 Leaders ‘are highly attentive to the social etiquette of communication’.Footnote 29 They often go to great lengths to prevent any undue loss of ‘face’, again even among adversaries.Footnote 30 As Richard Holbrooke attests, ‘the normal pattern in international diplomacy [is] of outward cordiality masking animosity’.Footnote 31 Hence, the adjective – to be ‘diplomatic’ – in one's words and deeds. Politeness and courtesy are the modus operandi. Moreover, diplomacy is a ‘highly symbolized world where any word, action, or relation can be seen as symbolic, as something that contains a wrapped meaning’. That is according to the diplomat and scholar Alisher Faizullaev.Footnote 32 In tandem, the heightened need for ‘face maintenance’ and respect and the fact that some meaning can be read symbolically into nearly every aspect of an interaction would suggest that leaders are always watchful of how they behave and sensitive to the behavior of others, sometimes to the extreme.
Take, for instance, the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945. In preparation for their first meeting, American, Soviet, British diplomats could not agree on their leaders' order of entrance into the venue because of the symbolism of relative standing an order – however arranged – would inevitably imply. To ensure that no one lost ‘face’ and was disrespected, they chose a venue with three separate doors. At 5 p.m. sharp on July 17, Truman, Stalin, and Churchill arrived simultaneously.Footnote 33 Deference was duly paid; embarrassment minimized.
In Goffman's dramaturgical analysis, individuals are often portrayed as more concerned with sustaining an interaction order than disrupting it. Instead of treating interlocutors as ‘calculative manipulators seeking personal gain’, they are assumed to be ‘guardians of face-to-face situations’.Footnote 34 However they feel in their ‘back stage’, they engage in a ‘tacit cooperation’ to uphold each other's ‘face’ on the ‘front stage’.Footnote 35 In the case that one's ‘face’ is threatened, various ‘avoidance’ (such as a change of subjects) and ‘corrective’ (such as an apology) moves may be made to restore the ‘equilibrium’.Footnote 36 Face-to-face interactions therefore have the power to bind together – at least temporarily – even interlocutors who otherwise have conflicting interests, in situ. As Turner puts it, they create ‘an emergent “we” feeling of solidarity and flow of feeling’.Footnote 37
The extant literature in IR tends to support such sanguine reading of Goffman.Footnote 38 In a recent study, Nair notes: ‘As every social interaction carries with it the latent risk of embarrassment, the chief social contract of the interactional world is a tacit quid pro quo: that I will not embarrass you as long as you do not embarrass me’. ‘The effect of face-saving’ is therefore ‘a profoundly constitutive one: it serves as the chief interactional material producing and reproducing social order in everyday life’.Footnote 39 ‘[F]ace-saving practices geared to avoid embarrassment are micro-level mechanisms that produce international institutions like diplomacy’.Footnote 40 Using Goffman's framework to explain covert military operations between countries, even among adversaries, Carson contends that ‘[i]nstead of a lonely and selfish exercise, social interaction involves a “general conspiracy to save face so that social situations can also be saved”’.Footnote 41 Pouliot, meanwhile, argues that Goffman's microsociology cannot adequately make sense of diplomatic practices because he ‘and his followers did not insist enough on the processes of struggle – that is, the never-ending politics – that sustain interaction orders’.Footnote 42 As such, my reliance on Goffman to illuminate how leaders get the better of each other through face-to-face interactions might appear, at first glance, to be a misfit.
But throughout his writings, particularly those produced from the 1960s onward,Footnote 43 Goffman also demonstrated a shift in emphasis on the metaphor of the theater as a way to understand interaction order to that of a game.Footnote 44 The strategic impulse of individuals became more apparent.Footnote 45 ‘Whenever students of the human scene have considered the dealings individuals have with one another, the question of calculation has arisen’, Goffman writes in the opening sentence of his essay, Strategic Interaction.Footnote 46 Rules constrain behavior, but they are also to be ‘taken into consideration’ – hence, active deliberation is expected – ‘whether as something to follow or to carefully circumvent’.Footnote 47 As Turner explains, for Goffman, it is ‘[o]n the basis of their location in a sociocultural system’ that individuals ‘make strategic assessments, deliberate on situational expectations, and decide how to present self’.Footnote 48 Calculated self-interest goes hand-in-hand with social conformity as motives for behavior on the ‘front stage’. Machiavelli figures as prominently as Durkheim in Goffman's microsociology.
Hence, individuals always have the flexibility to ‘transgress’ the prevailing ‘ceremonial idiom’. Whether they have the motive to do so, however, is an empirical question. To understand why ‘acts or events’ of ‘ceremonial transgressions’ are permissible – if not widespread – in social life generally but perhaps particularly in diplomacy would require first the realization that the ‘maintenance of face is a condition of interaction, not its objective’.Footnote 49 People may ‘go along’ with an interaction order ‘for a wide variety of reasons, and one cannot read from their apparent tacit support of an arrangement that they would… resent or resist its change’.Footnote 50 The ‘mutual acceptance’ of the need for ‘face maintenance’ may be ‘a basic structural feature’ of interactions. Goffman caveats, however, that it is ‘typically a “working” acceptance, not a “real” one, since it tends to be based not on the agreement of candidly expressed heartfelt evaluations’.Footnote 51 Hence, the apparent civility that leaders normally show in each other's presence – or for that matter, in our everyday life – may only be a façade. To borrow Stephen Krasner's words, there is always an element of ‘organized hypocrisy’ in diplomacy.Footnote 52
Instead, people enter into and sustain an interaction order with a variety of objectives in mind. Most are innocuous and mundane. A customer and a cashier may perform the ritual of a simple greeting (‘Hi’, ‘How are you today?’, and so on) or a nod or smile at the checkout of a supermarket to initiate a transaction; vows may be exchanged as a ritual to bring about a marriage; and so on. Other relationships, however, are more contentious. ‘Very often behind community and consensus’, Goffman asserts, ‘are mixed motive games’. It may not be in an ‘individual's interests… to personally uphold the niceties’.Footnote 53 Diplomatic relationships – certainly between foes but sometimes between friends as well – would belong more to the latter category. Instead of seeking to bond with a counterpart – as is often assumed in the aforementioned literature on face-to-face diplomacyFootnote 54 – a leader may set out to dominate a relationship.Footnote 55 As I elaborate below, their motives may be anything but benign.Footnote 56
In such relationships, an interaction becomes ‘less a scene of mutual considerateness than an arena in which a contest or match is held’. A leader is concerned with ‘scoring as many points as possible against one's adversaries and making as many gains as possible for oneself’.Footnote 57 He achieves what are commonly known as ‘one-upmanship’ and ‘putdowns’ by manipulating his performance of a ritual, or refusing to perform it altogether. Rice's treatment of al-Bashir would be an example of the former: she shook hands with the Sudanese President, but did not smile. The American negotiators' refusal to even shake hands with the Bosnian Serbs in Belgrade exemplifies the latter. In both cases, the leaders transgressed the prevailing ‘ceremonial idiom’ and threatened the ‘face’ of their counterpart.
Fundamentally, leaders may resort to such ‘aggressive use’ of ‘facework’Footnote 58 because they have the capacity to deliberate on how to perform – or at all – a ritual, bearing in mind the symbolism that invariably comes with it and is communicated to a counterpart.Footnote 59 Agency is exercised, but it is not freewheeling. The repertoire of rituals a leader may ‘consider’ to manipulate or violate goes only as far as what the guiding ‘ceremonial idiom’ prescribes. Interactions are always embedded in social structure. ‘The idiom through which modes of proper ceremonial conduct are established necessarily creates ideally effective forms of desecration, for it is only in reference to specified proprieties that one can learn to appreciate what will be the worst possible form of behavior’, Goffman explains. In reference to the religious origins of rituals (and to Durkheim), he proclaims: ‘Profanations are to be expected, for every religious ceremony creates the possibility of a black mass’.Footnote 60
To offer one recent example from international politics, when US President Barack Obama arrived at Hangzhou, China, for the G20 summit in September 2016, the Chinese did not provide him with a red-carpeted rolling staircase. He was forced to exit – unceremoniously – from the rear of Air Force One. Some Western diplomats considered Obama's (mis)treatment ‘a calculated diplomatic snub’ by the Chinese ‘to make the Americans look diminished and weak’ amidst growing frictions between the two countries.Footnote 61 It was against the backdrop of the guiding ‘ceremonial idiom’ – that is, a leader of Obama’ stature deserved the ‘red-carpet treatment’ and nothing less – that made any deviation from or transgression of it meaningful.Footnote 62
It should be noted, however, that such acts or events of ‘ceremonial transgression’ do not necessarily jeopardize an interaction order. They can be blatantly and overtly ‘face-threatening’, as in some of the episodes discussed in this paper. But more often, ‘transgressions’ are delivered under the cover of civility. A successful act or event, as Collins explains in his reading of Goffman, is one that is embedded within the flow of an interaction order, ‘inserting double meanings so that on one level it remains appropriate’.Footnote 63 To preview an example I detail below, Khrushchev offered as a gift the model of a Soviet spacecraft to US President Dwight D. Eisenhower when he visited the White House in 1959. His attempt to demonstrate Soviet superiority in space through a gift – gracious and ‘face-giving’ on the surface – was not lost on the Americans. In situations like this, the target is confronted with three options: he returns the veiled transgression with one of his own, takes it in and therefore acquiesces to whatever message the leader has intended to send with his aggressive use of the ritual, or shatters the veneer of civility and severs the relationship (say, with a retort or even walking out). Save for the most extreme scenario, leaders rarely go for the final option. ‘Put-downs and one-upmanship’ are accomplished, Collins notes, ‘when the onus for breaking the smooth playing out of the interaction goes to the recipient…’. However contentious a relationship, gains are subtly achieved (or in Goffman's language, points are scored) by ‘manipulating’ – rather than jettisoning altogether – ‘the normal rituals of solidarity, deference, and situational propriety’. Such is the ‘model of conflict’ in Goffman's microsociology.Footnote 64
The international implications of interaction rituals
Why does it matter at all to our understanding of international politics that leader perform rituals, aggressively or not? In this section, I argue that as diplomatic practices, rituals are constitutive of the international relationship – bilateral or multilateral – that leaders to an interaction embody.Footnote 65 They are not just ‘noise’ whose explanatory significance dissipates as relations move ‘up’ from the interpersonal to the international. They have larger, structural implications.
Conventionally in IR, scholars have tended to think otherwise. The role of leaders and what they do to each other in diplomacy is often seen as epiphenomenal. Whatever impact an interaction between two leaders has on their international relationship is to a significant extent predetermined by the structural forces – material (their balance of power, interests, and so on) or ideational (intersubjective identities, shared norms, relative status, and so on) – in operation. Diplomatic outcomes do not depend much on how it is practiced, or who practices it. Such ‘macro approach to diplomacy’, as Faizullaev puts it, has led to the ‘de-personification of diplomatic activity’.Footnote 66 There is little room for agency to make a difference.
But as Solomon and Steele note recently, ‘there is continuing broad dissatisfaction with grand or structural theory's value without “going down” to “lower levels” of analysis’. This is because it is only through interactions at ‘lower levels’ of analysis that structures are ‘enacted and contested’.Footnote 67 Structural imperatives are always ‘filtered through concrete practices’.Footnote 68 As Wendt notes, it is ‘impossible for structures to have effects apart from the attributes and interactions of agents’.Footnote 69 Structure ‘exists, has effects, and evolves only because of agents and their practices. All structure… is instantiated only in process’.Footnote 70
On the one hand, structure may be ‘enacted’ through, among other processes, the performance of rituals at the interpersonal level. In the previous example at Potsdam, Truman, Stalin, and Churchill represented the three Allied countries of roughly equal standing, however structurally defined and intersubjectively understood (their relative power parity, shared identity as victors against fascism, legal status as sovereign states, contributions to the war effort, and so on). The simultaneous entrance of the three leaders into their meeting room was simply the symbolic enactment of – in this case – a relatively clear and uncontested understanding of their trilateral relationship. In doing so, to paraphrase Goffman, they ‘celebrated’ and ‘confirmed’ their relations to each other.Footnote 71
Similarly, the USA might have been displeased with Sudan on Darfur, and with its overwhelming power, had the wherewithal to compel a change of behavior in the latter. But power does not ‘speak for itself’, as neorealism often assumes.Footnote 72 Their leaders still needed to ‘enact’ such understanding of the US’ position intersubjectively when they came into personal contact. Counterfactually, had Rice embraced al-Bashir with an unreserved handshake and smile in their first meeting, or worse, an obsequious demeanor, the US position would have been construed very differently. Its relations with Sudan would probably have gone down a different path as well.
For sure, structural imperatives constrain what leaders may or may not do in their performance of rituals. By virtue of their disparity in power, the leader of the USA can – for any of the motives I discuss below – afford to refuse shaking hands with, say, the leader of Nauru (or Sudan, or the Bosnian Serbs), but much less so the other way around. To offer one recent example, at one point during the NATO summit meeting in Brussels in May 2017, the leaders were proceeding ceremoniously – side-by-side in a line, slowly – to a photo op. US President Donald Trump brusquely shove aside his Montenegrin counterpart, Duško Marković, and charged to the front. With his transgression of the ‘ceremonial idiom’ of summitry diplomacy, he might have hoped to express – symbolically – who was really in charge, that the USA and Montenegro (and other NATO members) were anything but equal. (Or, as I explain below, he might just be inclined by disposition to dominate others as individuals, rather than as representatives of their respective state.) He contested the symbol of equality among NATO leaders that their ongoing performance of the ritual – that is, proceeding side-by-side in a line, slowly, to the photo op – would otherwise have implied and supplanted it with one that enacted US preponderance. He could afford to transgress the ‘ceremonial idiom’, but only because the US was indeed powerful. As the leader of a much weaker country, Marković could only shrug off the incident.Footnote 73
But even if structure constrains agency, leaders' performance of rituals is not predetermined. On the contrary, an aggression could give an international relationship a new meaning. Counterfactually, had any of the ‘Big Three’ leaders at Potsdam sought to contest their intersubjective understanding of equality, and insisted on a different arrangement for their entrance into meeting room that implied hierarchy – and even more so, had the other two leaders vehemently opposed, or in the other extreme, meekly caved in to it – their trilateral relationship would have be redefined there and then. How leaders behave in person, including their performance of rituals, matters to international politics. They possess the power to ‘make relations’.Footnote 74
Motives for aggression
International structure may be ‘enacted’ or ‘contested’ through the performance of rituals at the interpersonal level. But to begin with, why would leaders be inclined to transgress, instead of dutifully observe, the prevailing ‘ceremonial idiom’? I suggest that they are often driven by one or some combination of three motives. Two of them are political in nature; the remaining one is more personal, but nevertheless have political consequences.
To advance a particular understanding of one's international relationship
First, as is implied above, transgressions would be more likely when leaders' mutual understanding of their international relationship is unclear or incompatible. As such, they may be tempted to impose one's preferred understanding of it on one's counterpart – through rituals. As Sharp notes, diplomacy is in essence ‘a discrete human practice constituted by the explicit construction, representation, negotiation, and manipulation of necessarily ambiguous identities’.Footnote 75 And ‘[t]he less obvious or “natural” the identities of the agents appear and the thinner the social context in which they operate’, he posits, ‘the more diplomacy is needed’.Footnote 76 For instance, in some of the episodes I discuss in this paper, extending (or refusing) a handshake, establishing (or not) eye contact, and even the careful design of the shape and size of a meeting table have been used aggressively to signify recognition (or not) of a counterpart – and, by extension, the country he represents – as a legitimate player.
Moreover, structural implications for a relationship – material or ideational – are often indeterminate. Scholars coming from diverse theoretical perspectives would agree. For instance, in whose favor is the balance of power between two adversaries – a central concept in realist theory – can be ‘elusive’.Footnote 77 It would be up to the leaders in question to establish intersubjectively. The aggressive use of interaction rituals constitutes one such mechanism. Khrushchev's repeated attempts to insinuate at recent breakthroughs in Soviet space technology through his thought-out choice of gifts to his American counterparts, which I briefly discussed and shall elaborate below, is a case in point. In essence, he was striving to promote the understanding that the Soviet Union had ‘caught up’ in power and therefore to redefine intersubjectively the relationship of the two countries as one of power parity.
Similarly, constructivists and more recent studies informed by research in social psychology have highlighted how misalignment between one's self-identity and those prescribed by others can be a source of conflict.Footnote 78 The ‘local’ performance of interaction rituals would enable any misalignment to manifest, leading to its resolution, or conversely, the realization that a resolution is in fact unattainable.
An archetype of the latter would be the famous first encounter between George Macartney, Britain's first envoy to China, and the Qianlong Emperor on 14 September 1793. Chinese officials had expected Macartney, like other ‘barbarians’ who came to the Middle Kingdom, to kowtow before the Emperor. The ritual – longstanding and routine in the Chinese ‘ceremonial idiom’ – would be an acknowledgement of the Emperor's supreme status as the Son of Heaven. Macartney, however, believed that Britain was by then the world's foremost power. As a representative of his sovereign, George III, he would not behave in any way that implied British inferiority. He also refused to label the ‘gifts’ he brought along as ‘tributes’, as the Chinese had insisted. After weeks of communication and negotiation on how the ritual was to be performed – at times contentious, with proposals and counterproposals offered and rejected – a compromise was reached: instead of a kowtow, Maccartney would genuflect with one knee on the ground before the Emperor, as he would before his own sovereign at home.Footnote 79 It was a misalignment between the two powers' subjective understanding of their own identity vis-à-vis others – their standing and status in the world – that led to their conflict over something as seemingly trivial as how to ceremoniously begin a meeting. But it was also as a result of experiencing this conflict in person that the leaders on both sides came to realize intersubjectively how misaligned their self-identities indeed were.Footnote 80
To register one's position
Leaders may also resort to the aggressive use of rituals when they wish to communicate a position on some disputed issue. The aforementioned episodes between Rice and al-Bashir (on Darfur) – and in some of the episodes discussed below, between Eisenhower and Khrushchev (on the American spy plane incident in May 1961), and between US President Bill Clinton and his Israeli and Palestinian counterparts (on a number of issues in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict) – would belong more to this second category of motive. The protagonists' objective remains political, because in the final analysis they are performing a transgression on behalf of their state (rather than themselves). Such aggressive use of rituals is possible, I argue, because it is ‘costly’ to a leader at both personal and interpersonal (dyadic) levels.
To begin with, to deny a counterpart the respect due to him threatens not only his ‘face’, but also a leader's ‘image’ in the eyes of others.Footnote 81 In Goffman's words, demeanor refers to ‘that element of the individual's ceremonial behavior… which serves to express… that he is a person of certain desirable or undesirable qualities’.Footnote 82 A leader who refuses to shake hands, walks out of meetings, interrupts others in the middle of a speech or commits other lesser or graver ‘misdemeanors’ may be seen as rude and impolite. He who frequently violated the norms of proper diplomatic conduct may even find his ability to register a position curtailed because others would attribute his current act of ritualistic aggression more to his disposition than to his view on the disputed issue.Footnote 83
Moreover, the aggressive use of rituals always carries the risk of ‘retaliation’ from one's counterpart, or worse, mutual ‘escalation’ to the point where, to paraphrase Holbrooke, outward cordiality turns into open animosity or even severance of the relationship in question. It is thus ‘costly’ as well at the interpersonal (dyadic) level. In rationalist language, then, it is a leader's readiness to incur ‘costs’ to his personal ‘image’ and jeopardize the relationship with his aggressive use of rituals that makes his message – that is, the position he wishes to convey – ‘credible’.
To boost one's ego
Finally, the discussion thus far has assumed that leaders are mere agents of their country, with limited room for personal feelings and character to influence conduct. ‘Professional diplomats’, as Jönsson and Hall note, ‘experience the dilemma of having at least two personae: their own and that of the state that employs them’.Footnote 84 Leaders do (descriptively speaking) and should (normatively) think exclusively in the latter as representatives of their state. That is indeed a view – explicit or not – held across a wide range of academic fields: IR theory, diplomatic studies, diplomatic history, writings by practitioners themselves, and so on.Footnote 85 If a leader engages in an act of ritualistic aggression (for the motives outlined above), he does so exclusively in the interest of his polity, much like how a lawyer is supposed to act impersonally on behalf of his client. Conversely, if he becomes the target of aggression, it is not him per se who is being disrespected, or even humiliated, but his official capacity as a diplomat. Maccartney refused to perform the kowtow not because he considered the ritual an affront to him, but to his sovereign. The denial of the red-carpet treatment to Obama was scandalous, but only because he was then the President of the USA rather than a private citizen; and so on. As the saying goes, ‘it's nothing personal’.
Recent research, however, is skeptical. Leaders, the argument goes, are not ‘selfless vessels of the national interest’.Footnote 86 Like this rest of us, they possess ‘emotions, temperament, character, dispositions, prejudices, and other attributes of a human being’.Footnote 87 They may be sensitive to the aggressive use of rituals by others targeted at their country (and occasionally engage in acts of aggression themselves on behalf of it). But as in other face-to-face contacts in life, diplomacy is also an occasion where leaders may be motivated – for egoistic reasons I outline shortly – to perform acts of ‘personal (dis)respect’ on others, and on the receiving end, find themselves vulnerable to them.Footnote 88
Moreover, the two – political and personal motives for aggression – are often conflated. This is because leaders cannot insulate their persona of the state from that as an individual. Keys has labeled the view that they can the ‘two-mind fallacy’. It is more an academic assumption – ‘untested and unproven’ – than an empirically accurate portrayal of how leaders' minds operate, of their motives in their treatment of each other.Footnote 89 An act of (dis)respect directed at a leader in his official capacity might as well be felt as directed at him personally. As the historian Frank Costigliola notes: ‘It remains impossible to isolate what the precise impact of the “personal” would be on a hypothesized, wholly impersonal “political” interaction – not that such could ever occur among human beings’.Footnote 90
Hence, instead of being able to just leave their experience of personal (dis)respect (to oneself or others) ‘at the door’ as they carry out the business of their state, leaders admit it as a marker for the latter. As David Reynolds concludes in his study of summit diplomacy, ‘most leaders find it hard to disentangle their country's national interests from their personal goals’.Footnote 91 Personal motives and feelings ‘substantially influence’ how national interests are ‘defined and pursued’.Footnote 92 Leaders who have developed a personal bond through their collaborative performance of interaction ritualsFootnote 93 would be inclined to consider an improvement in their international relationship natural and desirable. On the contrary, personal fallout from frequent ritualistic aggressions may dispose them to see their international relationship as antagonistic. The interpersonal becomes the international.Footnote 94 Personal motives for transgression therefore have political consequences.
What, then, account for such personal motives? Certain personality traits, by nature or nurture, may explain why some leaders are more inclined than others to engage in ritualistic aggressions, and conversely, to perceive acts by others as such. For instance, research in psychology has demonstrated that individuals vary in traits such as social dominance against out-groups,Footnote 95 narcissism,Footnote 96 need for power,Footnote 97 self-esteem instability,Footnote 98 and self-monitoring.Footnote 99 It may be hypothesized that leaders who score high on some of these traits are more likely to behave aggressively for egoistic reasons, such as to elevate one's status and esteem, to project a certain desired character (being resolute, in control, intelligent, and so on), to dominate, subjugate, or imply a counterpart to possess certain undesirable attributes (being irresolute, inexperienced, and so on).
Anecdotally, some of the ‘worst’ transgressors in face-to-face diplomacy would support such hypothesis. Trump would be an example of a leader who exhibits some of these traits, according to psychologists who have observed and studied himFootnote 100 and his followersFootnote 101 recently. His aggressive behavior toward other leaders may be driven more by the need to boost his ego than to advance US interests. Another case in point is Khrushchev. A report on his character produced by the CIA in 1961 concluded that the Soviet leader ‘is endowed on occasion with considerable personal dignity’. He is ‘sensitive to slights – real or imagined, direct or inferred – to himself, his political faith, or his nation, all of which he views more or less interchangeably’.Footnote 102 Taubman, in his biography of Khrushchev, suggests that such trait of his – and as a result, his aggressive behavior in international summits – may be explained by the ‘inferiority complex’ he felt not only because of the Soviet Union's relative backwardness but also his humble peasant background.Footnote 103 How leaders with different personality traits interact to produce divergent outcomes is in fact ‘[o]ne of the crucial questions’ that is currently ‘undertheorized’ in the study of face-to-face diplomacy.Footnote 104 Future research may address it.
The repertoire of interaction rituals
Because of their inherent symbolism, nearly all that transpire in an interaction – from what one wears and says to the shape of the room and the table around which the leaders meet – can become a site of aggression.Footnote 105 As Goffman puts it, in interpersonal contact, the ‘acts or events, that is, the sign-vehicles or tokens which carry ceremonial messages, are remarkably various in character’.Footnote 106 Building loosely on his framework, I discuss in this section six broad categories of interaction rituals: the identity of leaders, gestural, spatial–physical, task-embedded, linguistic, and communication rules.Footnote 107 Along the way, I provide examples to demonstrate empirically their aggressive use in face-to-face diplomacy.
Identity of leaders
The first category of rituals that leaders may manipulate is whom to admit as parties to an interaction. As what Goffman calls a ‘token’, an individual can ‘serve as a source of information which others can use in arriving at their assessment of the situation’.Footnote 108 By virtue of what an individual symbolizes (given his rank, status, role, gender, and so on) or even what his outfit signifies (whether he has properly dressed up or down for an occasion, in his official uniform or casually, and so on), his inclusion or exclusion can be taken advantage of to communicate a desired position or understanding of a relationship.Footnote 109 Moreover, diplomatic protocol dictates that parties to an interaction be composed of members with status and rank commensurate with their relative standing. That, also, can be part of a leader's ritualistic ‘resource’.
Take, for instance, the ‘tit-for-tat’ that occurred at the Paris summit in May 1960. In the run-up to the summit, the Americans got wind of Khrushchev's plan to bring along his Minister of Defense, Rodion Malinovsky. According to Sherman Kent, then a US intelligence officer, the Americans suspected that Khrushchev was hoping to present a hardline position ahead of possible negotiations (especially after the recent capture of an American U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory) – symbolically – through the inclusion of a defense minister, donned in his military uniform, in what was otherwise a peace summit. The move, in Goffman's terms, was ‘face-threatening’. Not to be humiliated, Eisenhower decided in the final moment to take with him Thomas Gates, his Secretary of Defense, who was not part of the original American delegation.Footnote 110
Moreover, it is not only whom a leader ‘brings to the table’ on his side that yields symbolic meaning, but also whom, from the other party, he ‘grants’ an audience. In July 2004, as the US National Security Advisor, Rice met with Chinese State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan, the country's most senior official responsible for foreign affairs. Rice found his tirade over US policy overbearing and offensive. So when she became the Secretary of State (and hence Tang's direct American counterpart) 8 months later and was planning her first visit to China in that capacity, she scheduled a meeting with Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing but deliberately held off confirming her intention to see Tang. Meeting Li but not Tang would threaten the latter's ‘face’, because Li was lower in the Chinese government hierarchy. After checking into her hotel in Beijing, Rice unexpectedly received a smorgasbord of Chinese delicacies – from Tang. According to US officials privy to the incident, confident that her suite was bugged, she mused out loud to her aides: ‘What do you think?…Should I see him?’ A meeting was finally scheduled, and Tang ‘turned out to be extremely solicitous and eager to hear Rice's view’.Footnote 111 The decision on whom a leader engages given what their identities signify can be exploited to gain an upper hand in a relationship.
Gestural
Once leaders are in each other's physical presence, they have not ‘officially’ entered into an interaction until they perform the requisite rituals. They perform gestures such as a handshake, nod, or even simply the exchange of a direct, sustained eye contact. In doing so, they ‘accredit each other as legitimate participants’. When such process of ‘reciprocal ratification’ has occurred, Goffman notes, the individuals are now ‘in what might be called a state of talk – that is, they have declared themselves officially open to one another for purposes of spoken communication and guarantee together to maintain a flow of words’.Footnote 112
But a leader's decision to ‘ratify’ an interaction is as meaningful as when he decides not to. When two individuals are only steps away, they ‘are admirably placed to share a joint focus of attention, perceive that they do so, and perceive this perceiving’.Footnote 113 As such, they must act and react to each other one way or the other, with some meaning bound to be communicated.Footnote 114 An individual ‘cannot decide to disdain the play or postpone it’, Goffman explains, because ‘his doing nothing itself becomes, in effect, a choice and a course of action’.Footnote 115 He who ‘does nothing’ is in essence refusing to ‘accredit’ his counterpart. The latter is not ‘recognized’; he is a ‘nobody’.Footnote 116
There are plenty of examples in international politics in which leaders consciously abstain from ‘accrediting’ a counterpart in order to make a point about their relationship. Famously, the Chinese considered US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' refusal to shake hands with Zhou Enlai (or even to acknowledge the latter's presence) when the two were just feet apart at the 1954 Geneva Conference a deliberate snub. He was letting it known that he refused to recognize the Chinese leader, and by extension, the communist regime he represented.Footnote 117 More recently, US Vice President Mike Pence and Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, were only an arm's length from each other at the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. They could not deny knowledge of their co-presence, yet they behaved as if the other was nonexistent. That there was no contact whatsoever – not even a flash of eye contact – was interpreted at the time that a direct contact between the two countries was not forthcoming.Footnote 118
Furthermore, the meaning of a handshake, nod, eye contact, and other gestures is not binary. Even if a gesture is ritualistically performed, leaders may still manipulate the manner in which it is delivered – its concomitant bodily, facial and verbal content – to project a more nuanced understanding of a situation.Footnote 119 The ‘awkward handshake’ between Xi and Abe discussed earlier is illustrative. The ritual was nominally performed. But with their deadpan faces, avoidance of eye contact, and reticence, it was clear that neither was prepared for a thaw in their relationship. Rice's treatment of al-Bashir discussed above is another example.
Or, on the contrary, an interaction can be ‘ratified’ through the performance of other gestures, but a handshake – arguably the most basic of all ‘accreditation rituals’, in diplomacy or other more formal encounters – is conspicuously absent. In addition to the refusal by some members of the American team to shake hands with the Bosnian Serbs in Belgrade discussed earlier, consider Khrushchev's treatment of Eisenhower at the aforementioned Paris summit. Khrushchev was already in the room when Eisenhower entered for their first meeting. Khrushchev's foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, recalled how, in an effort to protest over the U-2 spy plane incident, the Soviet leader deliberately gave Eisenhower an ‘icy stare’ but did not reach out for his hand.Footnote 120 Khrushchev ‘accredited’ the President, but not in a positive sense.
Moreover, the calculated use of gestures occurs not only among adversaries, but also among alleged friends and allies. Consider the first meeting between Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron in Brussels in May 2017. At the time, the two countries were mired in tensions over Trump's decision to suspend talks on a US–EU trade agreement and to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change. The two leaders shook hands for 6 seconds. ‘Their knuckles turned white, their jaws clenched and their faces tightened’, according to one reporter. ‘Trump reached in first, but then he tried to release, twice, but Macron kept his grip until letting go’.Footnote 121 Macron's behavior was intentional, perhaps having learned from Trump's overpowering handshake with AbeFootnote 122 and his refusal to perform the ritual with German Chancellor Angela Merkel even upon her requestFootnote 123 just 3 and 2 months earlier respectively. Macron later explained: ‘My handshake with him, it's not innocent’. It was ‘a moment of truth… We must show that we will not make small concessions, even symbolic’.Footnote 124 In short, such gestures are not ‘mere’ routine to initiate an interaction or void of meaning. However subtle, they are often employed by leaders to cast themselves in an advantageous position at the outset of an interaction. As Goffman argues, ‘[t]he gestures which we sometimes call empty are perhaps in fact the fullest things of all’.Footnote 125
Spatial–physical
Leaders may also take advantage of how the venue of an interaction is spatially and physically set up.Footnote 126 As discussed, the ritualistic entrance of the ‘Big Three’ leaders into a room with three doors simultaneously at Potsdam was so arranged because it symbolized equality among the parties.
Consider also a spatial–physical feature of an interaction as seemingly trivial as the size and shape of the negotiation table.Footnote 127 The ritual of how leaders assemble, have themselves seated, and face each other can be highly contentious because of the understanding of a relationship it symbolizes. The status of a party can be conferred, denied, or simply implied as a result. For instance, the Paris peace talk in 1973 to end the Vietnam War was initially stalled because the belligerents disagreed on how to set up their first meeting. The South Vietnamese refused to share the same table with their northern counterparts because in their mind, doing so would confer them undue legitimacy. To overcome the impasse, the US delegation spent weeks sketching various table designs, with creative geometric proposals and counterproposals put forth by various parties, ranging from a broken parallelogram to a flattened eclipse.Footnote 128
A table may also be customized to establish symbolically who has the right to speak, hence admitting certain parties to the interaction whereas discrediting others. Take as an example what US diplomat Christopher Hill dubbed the ‘trick of the table’ at the signing of the Agreed Basic Principle during the Bosnian War, on 8 September 1995. Before the meeting, US chief negotiator Richard Holbrooke dictated the exact size and shape of the table so that it could only accommodate the five Contact Group representatives (USA, UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia), a European Union negotiator, and the foreign ministers of Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia. The Bosnian Serb leaders would have to sit on the periphery. Holbrooke ‘did not want any delegation to feel they had room to bring a second person to the table’, Hill explained. Specifically, he wanted to deny the Bosnian Serb leaders a voice and have the Serbs to speak for them instead.Footnote 129
Leaders may also bring in cultural considerations in their aggressive intent. At the beginning of the armistice negotiations in Kaesong to end the Korean War in July 1951, the United Nations team ‘deliberately took the chairs on the north side’ because they were aware of the Chinese tradition that ‘the honored seats in a meeting are those that face south’, that ‘military victors sit in the northern chairs facing south and the vanquished in those facing north’. In doing so, a member of the UN team reminisced, ‘the Americans felt they visibly discomforted the communists’.Footnote 130 They were hoping to define their relationship to their advantage by manipulating even the smallest and seemingly insignificant details of the interaction, before negotiations had even begun.
Task-embedded
The aggressive use of interaction rituals is also manifested through the performance of various tasks that are part of the interlocutors' ‘facework’. Take, for instance, the exchange of gifts. Gifts are pregnant with meaning, generally in life but perhaps particularly in diplomacy.Footnote 131 In preparation for a meeting, leaders often put much thought into what they give each other. They are always mindful of what a gift symbolizes, and how it can be used to advance one's cause. As Thomas Fletcher concludes from his experience as a senior British diplomat, gifts ‘have always been an essential element of statecraft’.Footnote 132
Khrushchev's repeated effort to insinuate at Soviet power through gifts in his summits with American leaders is a case in point. As mentioned, he visited the USA in the fall of 1959. According to Oleg Troyanovsky, his foreign policy aide, Khrushchev wanted to present Eisenhower a model of the Lunik II upon arrival at Andrews Air Force Base on 19 September. Just 2 days earlier, the Soviet spacecraft was the first man-made object to land on the moon, beating the Americans. Khrushchev ‘relished the thought of demonstrating’ how ‘the Soviet Union had outstripped the United States in space’, Troyanovsky reminisced. The other Soviet leaders, however, were more cautious and ‘protested that it would be a tactless gesture’. So after a ‘lengthy discussion’, a ‘compromise’ was reached: Khrushchev would present the model during his first meeting with the President at the White House. The ‘transgression’, however subtle, was obvious to the Americans. The President ‘received the small sphere with a sour look on his face’, Troyanovsky remembered.Footnote 133 Privately, Eisenhower remarked to his son sarcastically, ‘the fellow might have been sincere’.Footnote 134
Kennedy attempted the same ploy when it was his turn to meet with Khrushchev in the aforementioned Vienna summit in June 1961. He decided to present the Soviet leader a replica of the USS Constitution. He explained to his lifelong friend, Lem Billings, that he wanted a gift that was ‘meaningful’. The ship, he thought, represented the US in 1812, ‘a young republic, strong, youthful, in love with freedom – exactly the kind of message I want to send Russia’.Footnote 135
Khrushchev, meanwhile, had another plan in store. Months after the summit, the Kennedys received a dog in the White House. ‘How did this dog get here?’, the President asked his wife. Jacqueline Kennedy replied that during the state banquet on the first evening of Vienna, she inquired with Khrushchev about the status of Strelka, the first dog to be shot into space by the Soviets and safely returned to Earth less than a year ago. She said that perhaps she could be given one of its puppies, because, she explained to Kennedy, she ‘was just running out of things to say’. To which Kennedy replied, ‘You played right into his hands’, because Khrushchev had always wanted to remind them of Soviet advantage in space technology.Footnote 136 In a letter that accompanied the dog, Khrushchev wrote to the Kennedys: ‘“Pushinka”, a direct offspring of the well known cosmos-traveler “Strelka”’.Footnote 137
Linguistic
The expectation that leaders conduct themselves in ways that sustain each other's ‘face’ – again, under normal circumstances – applies as much to how they behave as to what they say. In a ritualistic fashion, they exchange greetings, pleasantries, compliments, and other kinds of ‘small talk’ – even if they are anything but sincere.Footnote 138 Such expressions serve a practical purpose. As Goffman explains in the case of greetings between acquaintances, friends and foes alike, they are uttered to show that ‘a relationship is still what it was at the termination of the previous coparticipation’ and typically, that this relationship involves ‘sufficient suppression of hostility for the participants temporarily to drop their guards and talk’.Footnote 139 Between strangers, ‘small talk’ eases the transition from the absence to the establishment of contact; it ‘jump-starts’ an interaction and ‘lubricates’ it thereafter.Footnote 140
However, such linguistic rituals can also be used for aggressive purposes. To begin with, much like how leaders can disregard the ritual of shaking hands upon contact, they can also decline to observe the ‘ceremonial idiom’ of either initiating or reciprocating an instance of ‘small talk’.
Take, for instance, the following meeting between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David in September 1978. US President Jimmy Carter remembered how after some heated exchange, Begin alleged nevertheless that he had ‘complete confidence’ in Sadat. However, Carter wrote in his memoir, ‘it was quite conspicuous that Sadat did not make a similar statement in response’.Footnote 141 Sadat's non-response was ‘conspicuous’ – and therefore meaningful – not because he would have necessarily meant it had he also expressed confidence in Begin. Begin himself might not have been sincere to begin with. But a ‘transgression’ (against Begin's ‘face’) was committed because Sadat had refused to perform what was in essence an ‘obligation’ in any interpersonal – let alone diplomatic – contact, that is, to return a compliment. The ritual was initiated, but not consummated.
Moreover, greetings, pleasantries, and compliments may be good-natured on the surface. But like gifts, they can be performed for more sinister reasons. As Goffman notes, when two individuals are in talk with each other, there often exists in parallel ‘an unofficial line of communication’ – particularly through the use of what linguists call implicatures, innuendos and other forms of indirect speechFootnote 142 – to achieve, in Goffman's words, ‘self-elevation’ and ‘other-derogation’. ‘One upmanship’ is achieved in a face-to-face interaction when one party is able to ‘subtly… put itself in a favorable light’ and subtly put the other party ‘in an unfavorable one’, often under ‘the cover of verbal courtesies’ that are nevertheless understood by all to be ‘point[ing] in the other direction’.Footnote 143 A jibe, dig, or insult may be delivered in disguise.Footnote 144
Consider, again, the exchange between Kennedy and Khrushchev at Vienna. When the two leaders first greeted each other, they exchanged ‘badinage’Footnote 145 on how they once crossed paths during Khrushchev's 1959 tour of the USA. Khrushchev said he remembered meeting Kennedy, a senator then, but bantered that he had ‘no opportunity to say much except hello and good-bye’ because Kennedy had arrived late. He also remembered him as ‘a young and rising man in politics’, and joked that he would ‘be happy to share his years with the President or change places with him’.Footnote 146 Over lunch, Khrushchev also proposed a toast ‘to the President's health and said that he envied the President because he was so young’.Footnote 147 The subject of Kennedy's age was again raised in their second day of meetings. Khrushchev, as Reynolds put it, was ‘jabbing away right up to the end’.Footnote 148
Khrushchev's references to Kennedy's youth, congenial on the surface, were in fact implicatures that he lacked gravitas, and the Americans knew it. Dean Rusk, Kennedy's Secretary of State, remarked in his memoir that ‘[s]everal times… he [Khrushchev] referred to Kennedy's youth, and he never meant it as a compliment’.Footnote 149 When Kennedy returned to the American embassy after their first day of meetings – hence, in Goffman's language, back to his ‘back stage’ – he paced around his room ‘cursing at Khrushchev and at himself’, and complained how Khrushchev had treated him ‘like a little boy’.Footnote 150 Kennedy's intuition was correct. According to Khrushchev's interpreter, his comments to Kennedy were an attempt ‘to put the “whippersnapper” in his place’.Footnote 151
Communication rules
Finally, in interpersonal contact, people normally follow a number of ground rules that govern the flow of their conversation – who may speak (and speak first), be given the attention as the speaker, to speak for how long, and so on – and the way in which an interaction may be properly brought to a conclusion.Footnote 152 Such rules exist so that a conversation may proceed in a polite and orderly manner. They can be formal, as in the case of multilateral conferences and forums, where parties are allocated in advance a fixed amount of time to speak in a prescribed order and agendas are set beforehand.Footnote 153
Or, these rules can be informal (as in our everyday conversations) and depend on the cultural context (such as the practice of deferring to the elders to speak first in more patriarchal societies). In such cases, a conversation is ‘regulated’, and ‘faces’ maintained, through the ritualistic performance of various ‘clearance cues’. For instance, the question, ‘I wonder what you think about the issue?’, is partly rhetorical because it serves not only to communicate, literally, that its speaker is curious about his interlocutor's thought on an issue, but also to indicate, politely, that he is ready to ‘yield the floor’ and pass the ‘right’ to speak on to the latter. Similarly, the expressions, ‘I cannot agree with you more…’ or ‘Sorry, but I will have to disagree…’, may literally mean agreement or disagreement. But they are also conventionalized ways to politely indicate one's intention to chime in on a subject and be given the ‘right’ to speak. Interlocutors may also perform concomitantly various gestures, such as to raise one's hand slightly as others are speaking to show that one wishes to speak next, or to direct one's visual attention to an interlocutor as an ‘invitation’ to pick up on a conversation. As such, Goffman explains, ‘[i]nterruptions and lulls’ are minimized ‘so as not to disrupt the flow’ and a ‘particular ethos or emotional atmosphere is allowed to prevail. A polite accord is typically maintained’.Footnote 154
But like the other categories of interaction rituals discussed, such ground rules can be intentionally violated. As in our everyday experience, a leader may occasionally interrupt a counterpart to communicate a stance more forcefully, or refuse to carry on with a conversation temporarily – hence, creating a lull (or in colloquial terms, an ‘awkward silence’) – as a sign of protest.Footnote 155 In Goffman's language, he has disrupted the flow of an interaction. Again, it is the fact that such transgressions are more the exception than the norm that makes their occurrences now and then remarkable.
The aggressive use of such ‘clearance cues’ need not be blatant and overt, as is the case with an interruption or a lull. Instead, they may be taken advantage of subtly, again under the cover of civility. For example, during Henry Kissinger's historic secret visit to China in July 1971, Chinese leader Zhou Enlai insisted in their first meeting that Kissinger speak first because, he claimed, it was ‘Chinese custom’ to defer to the guest. However, the Americans in attendance suspected that Zhou was using it as a pretext to put Kissinger on the defensive, as the latter would be obliged to reveal American positions first and have them subject to discussion and challenge, whereas Zhou may – as the saying goes – keep his cards close to his chest.Footnote 156
Consider, last, what may be called the ‘withdrawal ritual’. A face-to-face interaction is what Goffman calls a ‘naturally bounded unit’.Footnote 157 It begins ‘when individuals recognize that they have moved into one another's immediate presence’ and ends when there is ‘an appreciated withdrawal from mutual participation’.Footnote 158 As in other realms of life, leaders are by default expected to bring an interaction to a close in an appropriate manner. Again, civility is the baseline: ‘Once individuals enter a conversation they are obliged to continue it until they have the kind of basis for withdrawing that will neutralize the potentially offensive implications of taking leave of others’.Footnote 159
The ‘withdrawal rituals’ individuals may perform to properly communicate one's intention to take leave may be verbal, ranging from the casual (‘In any case, it has been nice talking to you…’, ‘Well, let's touch base again when you change your mind…’) to the formal (‘I hereby declare this meeting adjourned’). They may also be expressed in combination with certain behavior whose meanings are universally understood, such as taking out one's car key or packing up.Footnote 160 In their aggressive use, however, ‘withdrawal rituals’ may be exploited to advance the understanding that a leader is ready to break off an interaction, even in the absence of an agreement (say, in a negotiation). He is not so desperate.
As the chief US negotiator, Richard Holbrooke attempted such a gambit (but failed) at the Dayton Accords negotiation in November 1995. Toward the end of it, Holbrooke instructed his team to gather their packed luggage and place them at the parking lot where all parties could see. He later asked the US Air Force to put them on a truck. He did so to create the impression that the Americans, as host, were ready to shut down the negotiations. It would be in the interest of the contending parties to make the necessary concessions and sign onto an agreement, or risk leaving without any. However, Holbrooke wrote later, ‘[e]veryone saw through our bluff; nobody else made the slightest effort to prepare for departure’. The negotiations continued on.Footnote 161
In more extreme scenarios, ‘withdrawal rituals’ may be deliberately flouted. ‘Walking out’ – or simply a threat to walk out – by definition refers to the abrupt end of an interaction without the performance of any ritual. When a leader does that, he forces ‘others into a ritually unsatisfactory state, leaving them to flounder in an interchange that cannot readily be completed’.Footnote 162 He creates what Goffman (and in everyday language) calls a ‘scene’, that is when ‘an individual acts in such a way as to destroy or seriously threaten the polite appearance of consensus’. To show that he ‘can no longer play the game of polite interaction’, or that he ‘no longer wants to do so’, he ‘confronts’ his counterpart with a behavior that they both know is ‘unacceptable’.Footnote 163 The behavior is overtly ‘face-threatening’, perhaps the most disruptive of all of the transgressions discussed so far because it directly severs (or threatens to sever) an interaction, if not the larger relationship. Such behavior is in fact rather common in international negotiations.Footnote 164 As US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright wrote, ‘[n]egotiations inevitably lead to some playacting. Sometimes… walking out is useful’.Footnote 165
US President Bill Clinton exemplifies such aggressive use of withdrawal rituals. At one point during the negotiations over the Wye River Memorandum in October 1998, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a demand to his Palestinian counterpart, Yasser Arafat, that was flagrantly unacceptable (he asked that Arafat ‘take care of’ – i.e. execute – one prominent Palestinian and arrest many others in exchange for his concessions). That caused Clinton, as the mediator, to ‘explode’. The President ‘got up and stormed out, saying, ‘This is outrageous. This is despicable. This is just chicken shit; I am not going to put up with this kind of bullshit’’.Footnote 166
Clinton attempted the same gambit 2 years later at the Camp David summit in July 2000, again between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, but with the latter being his target this time round. At one point, the President ‘blew up’ at Palestinian negotiator Abu Ala ‘for not showing any flexibility on the question of borders’. ‘Having made his point’, Albright recalled, ‘he motioned to me and we strode dramatically out – at precisely the moment a downpour began. It was either get wet or forfeit the drama of our exit, so we went and got drenched’.Footnote 167 He succeeded in both cases: Netanyahu and Abu Ala relented.
Conclusion and next steps
In summary, I argue that when leaders meet in person, they often consider whether or not to perform a repertoire of interaction rituals and how to perform them in a manner that is more strategic, calculated and contentious than extant theories of IR, particularly practice theory, generally assume. Their performance of such rituals can also be informative about intentions. That, I contend, runs contrary to what is implied under the ‘cheap talk’ paradigm. Furthermore, the explanation I have developed to make sense of the aggressive use of interaction rituals – based largely on the microsociological theory of Erving Goffman – is a timely complement to the literature on the theories of communicative action/rhetorical coercion and more recent studies that focus on the role of behavioral cues in face-to-face diplomacy. Leaders resort to the aggressive use of rituals to realize a number of objectives, political and personal, with larger international consequences. I have offered over two dozen episodes across six categories of rituals to substantiate my argument.
That said, the current research may be advanced in several directions. I have already mentioned one, and that is the need to better understand how certain personality traits of leaders influence their proclivity for ritualistic aggression. To conclude, I outline two more.
First, as mentioned, the study of rituals has been criticized for being ‘overgeneralized’ in its definition of the term. Rituals ‘are held to be omnipresent; but if everything is a ritual, what isn't?’ Collins asks. He ‘confesses’ to be ‘one of the worst sinners, proposing to see rituals almost everywhere’.Footnote 168 But clearly, not every ‘act or event’ that transpires between two leaders (for instance, when they jointly use a stapler or breathe in the same air in a room) has a ‘symbolic component’ (in Goffman's definition) or produces ‘mutually focused emotion and attention’ (Collins'), and may therefore be considered ritualistic. Where, then, do rituals begin and where they end? Perhaps more interestingly, what happens when leaders to an interaction interpret rituals or even consider what counts as a ritual differently?
Consider this last episode: US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met for the first time in Geneva in November 1985. When Reagan moved outside of his lakeside chateau to greet his guest, Gorbachev was wrapped around in his coat, hat and scarf. Reagan, in contrast, wore a dark navy suit, which almost made him appeared to the ‘the younger man’, as Reynolds puts it.Footnote 169 According to Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the USA, Gorbachev did not like the symbolism contained in their contrasting outfits. He was furious at what he thought was Reagan's public relations coup.Footnote 170 In his account of the incident, however, Reagan's Chief of Staff Donald Regan noted that the move was innocuous. The President simply ‘hated overcoats’.Footnote 171 If that was indeed the case, then offence was taken when none was intended. What counts as a ritual and the symbolism it contains may therefore very much be ‘in the eye of the beholder’, depending on, say, a leader's socio-cultural or personal background, rather than universal.
This brings me to the final point. Scholars have in recent years produced a number of fascinating case studies on face-to-face diplomacy. However, particular attention has been given to a handful of high-profile cases (perhaps because of the relative availability of primary and secondary sources): the interactions between British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Hitler in 1938, between Gorbachev and his American counterparts in the late-1980s, and between other American and Soviet leaders during the Cold War.Footnote 172 This paper has presented historical and contemporary episodes from across geographical and cultural settings, and as such, broaden the literature's ‘coverage’. But with a few exceptions, these episodes are still predominately derived from Western (particularly American) experience. There is no reason to believe that interaction rituals between leaders are any less impactful on international relations in other parts of the world.Footnote 173 It should not be assumed, however, that they matter to the same degree and in the same way across cultures, or between leaders from different backgrounds. These would be interesting topics to study moving forward.
Acknowledgment
I am grateful to Joseph MacKay, Kai Hebel, Barbara Keys, Charles Fung, Joe Wong, Tanja Aalberts, Anna Leander, and other participants at the 2018 European Workshops in International Studies for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. This paper was completed in part with the financial support of the Early Career Scheme (Project Number: 24602217), Research Grants Council, Hong Kong.
