Diplomatic Negotiation

42 Diplomatic Negotiation
school’, which views negotiation as a staged process, with the actions at each stage then
explaining the final outcome of the negotiation process. Zartman himself employs a mixed
approach (Zartman, 2013: 212). He characterizes ‘negotiation as a choice of partners, as
an establishment of relations, as a contest of alternatives, as a confrontation of power
[...], as a process of elimination, or as problem-solving’. In the context of this treatise, one
could add to his view: ‘as an instrument in diplomacy’, be it as a governance tool in day-today
ongoing processes about non-violent issues, or as war by peaceful means in ad-hoc
negotiations in situations of violent conflict.
In Conclusion
This introductory chapter has looked at the architecture of, and the approaches to,
international – and thereby diplomatic – negotiation processes. It noted that a cleavage
exists between practitioners, researches and trainers in the field, creating disconnectedness
that cannot easily be resolved. The main components of international negotiation were
considered: parties and their positions, the process and power involved, and the tension
between bashing and bargaining – in other words between competition and cooperation.
Negotiation was seen as an instrument to be used in situations where competition and
cooperation are both immanent. If competition is dominant, distributive negotiation
can be expected; where cooperation is the dominating mode, however, integrative
negotiation can be implemented. If the cooperative mode is excluded, negotiation will not
be applicable. The parties might use force, or freeze, or flight as instruments in dealing
with the conflict at hand. Where the competitive mode is absent, negotiation will not be
needed. Parties can discuss how to cooperate or not to cooperate, but a give-and-take
process will not – or will hardly – be applied.
Approaches to international/diplomatic negotiation are manifold. The main lines
of thought and research are qualitative and/or quantitative. In qualitative approaches,
situations are analyzed through case studies on the basis of more-or-less consensus among
negotiation academics on dimensions such as ripeness–unripeness, inclusion–exclusion,
assured–unassured outcomes, etc. Although the formulation of these dimensions is still
in progress, some kind of common understanding can be observed. It took academics
half a century to reach this plateau. With a broader view, pondering on the meaning
and effectiveness of negotiation can be stretched back to the seventeenth century or
even earlier. According to the qualitative approach, negotiation is too complex and too
situational to be put in a single model, or to be open for overall mathematical analysis.
Richelieu already observed that ‘different circumstances require different approaches’
(Berridge et al., 2001: 77). This book approaches the process of international negotiation
and its subset of inter-state – that is, diplomatic – negotiation through the qualitative
holistic path. From that perspective, the quantitative approach is a very useful addition to
the qualitative method. It provides valuable insights into those elements of the negotiation
realm that are calculable. A combination of both approaches helps us best to understand
the negotiation phenomenon, in the sense that the quantitative method is an addendum
to the qualitative approach. However, this is only part of the problem.