MONAVIA’S HANDBOOK FOR ROLEPLAYING DIPLOMACY
THIRD EDITION (2019)
PREFACE
THIRD EDITION (2019)
PREFACE
The NationStates “universe” plays host to what may arguably be the vastest array of fictional civilizations, cultures, and countries ever dreamed up by roleplayers who share a common interest in statecraft. Though most NS roleplayers focus on writing political fiction, their unique characters, settings, and story plots form a body of fiction that encompasses numerous genres and themes. Unless you confine your NS experience to answering issues and telegrams, raiding and defending regions, WA shenanigans, or forum lurking, your virtual nation will interact with others like it the moment you start roleplaying on this forum. Since diplomacy between fictional countries and organizations tends to follow the same basic logical principles as it does between real-life countries and organizations, it helps to have a handy guide you can use to walk yourself through the process of making diplomacy happen in a way that you and your fellow roleplayers will hopefully enjoy for years to come.
THE STATE OF MONAVIA
July 2017
July 2017
INTRODUCTION
Multiple NS users have already written guides for roleplaying diplomacy since NationStates was founded in 2002. While these guides have been effective at teaching new players some elementary principles for roleplaying diplomacy, they tend to fall short on a number of accounts. Most of them narrowly focus on specialized aspects of roleplaying diplomacy (such as writing communiqués and organizing embassies) to the exclusion of other subjects and the few guides that try to offer a “big picture” view have omitted a number of critical topics and suffer from a tendency to avoid addressing any of their topics in depth. For all of their merits, both the narrow, specialized guides and the broad, general ones spend some time describing the norms we follow in roleplaying diplomacy, but often do little to explain why people adhere to those norms. Most critically of all, older diplomacy roleplay guides often lack the concrete examples and demonstrations they need to illustrate their key points in an effective manner.
In an attempt to build upon the foundations laid by the authors of earlier guides on this subject, I have designed this document to serve as a comprehensive, one-stop advice handbook for roleplaying a broad range of diplomatic activities. I have taken care to include numerous NS and real-life examples that you can use as starting points for developing your own roleplaying style and paid special attention to defining and explaining important terminology (which you will find set in boldface type). More importantly, I have designed this guide to complement the threads that others have posted on this subject instead of superseding them. As imperfect as older guides have proven to be, they have benefited countless members of our roleplaying community and improved their understanding of the means by which governments and organizations interact through both official and unofficial channels. This document therefore stands not as an instrument for overshadowing their work and accomplishments, but as a monument to their example. It is in honor of their contributions that I dedicate this text.
The Structure of This Text
Each chapter of this text explains how you can roleplay a particular facet of diplomacy within the NS environment. They are arranged as follows:
In an attempt to build upon the foundations laid by the authors of earlier guides on this subject, I have designed this document to serve as a comprehensive, one-stop advice handbook for roleplaying a broad range of diplomatic activities. I have taken care to include numerous NS and real-life examples that you can use as starting points for developing your own roleplaying style and paid special attention to defining and explaining important terminology (which you will find set in boldface type). More importantly, I have designed this guide to complement the threads that others have posted on this subject instead of superseding them. As imperfect as older guides have proven to be, they have benefited countless members of our roleplaying community and improved their understanding of the means by which governments and organizations interact through both official and unofficial channels. This document therefore stands not as an instrument for overshadowing their work and accomplishments, but as a monument to their example. It is in honor of their contributions that I dedicate this text.
The Structure of This Text
Each chapter of this text explains how you can roleplay a particular facet of diplomacy within the NS environment. They are arranged as follows:
- Chapter 1: The Diplomat’s Environment introduces the entities that perform diplomacy and the reasons they do so.
- Chapter 2: Diplomatic Personnel describes the process of inventing characters for diplomatic roleplay threads and covers topics like education and training, and specialization.
- Chapter 3: Diplomatic Missions and Facilities explains what a mission is, what the different types of facilities are, and how extraterritoriality and diplomatic immunity work.
- Chapter 4: Exchanging Diplomats covers the nuts and bolts of setting up and managing an exchange program, and organizing and deploying missions.
- Chapter 5: Diplomatic Law explains how diplomatic immunity and asylum work.
- Chapter 6: Diplomatic Protocol, Gifts, and Insignia explains the international norms governing diplomatic interactions, gifts, and the insignia diplomats use in the field.
- Chapter 7: Conferences and Summits describes the OOC and IC mechanics of organizing, conducting, and securing both bilateral and multilateral diplomatic conferences.
- Chapter 8: Official Correspondence lays out basic principles for writing, formatting, and addressing fictional official documents and furnishes readers with detailed examples.
- Chapter 9: Negotiating and Writing Treaties describes the different types of treaties countries create and the OOC and IC mechanics of negotiating, writing, formatting, and ratifying treaties.
- Chapter 10: Coercive Diplomacy explains the concepts of compellence and deterrence, the function and execution of sanctions, ultimatums, and declarations of war.
- Chapter 11: Miscellaneous Topics covers miscellaneous forms of diplomacy and schools of foreign policy.
- Chapter 12: Suggestions for Further Reading provides readers with directions for locating additional resources on this general subject.
CHAPTER 1
The Diplomat’s Environment
The Diplomat’s Environment
Entities that Perform Diplomacy
Most new roleplayers assume that independent sovereign states are the only entities that engage in diplomatic intercourse, usually because that is all they see happening in NS roleplay. In fact, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), such as the World Assembly (WA), IC treaty organizations, and supranational unions can send and receive diplomats the same way countries do. Likewise, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as charity and disaster relief agencies, religious bodies, and various political, scientific, and cultural programs can send and receive official representatives who will often receive the same courtesies, rights, and protections as regular diplomats under select circumstances. With these facts in mind, here follows a brief overview of the characteristics that define each group.
Independent sovereign states are what we often colloquially refer to as countries. A state is a self-governing entity that is fully entitled to act autonomously in charting its own destiny. An independent country is a state, but its internal administrative subdivisions (e.g. cities, counties, etc.) are not states. States have two basic attributes:
A country can either be a nation-state, which is a state created from a single nation (i.e. an ethnically homogenous population), or an empire, which is a state containing multiple nations. Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia are real-life nation-states. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was a de facto empire. The various Native American nations were nation-states back when they had sovereignty over their own territory. Now they are merely ethnic components of the United States, Canada, and Mexico, which are de facto empires containing loads of distinct ethnic groups. China, Russia, Brazil, and India are de facto empires, even if they do not call themselves such. Real-life nation-states include Japan (Nipponese ethnicity), France (Gallic ethnicity), Iran (Persian ethnicity), Germany (Teutonic ethnicity), and Israel (Judaism, since the Jews view their nation in religious rather than genetic terms).
An intergovernmental organization (IGO) is a legal entity created by collaborative agreements between two or more governments. An IGO can be bilateral, such as a joint border-control agency, or multilateral, like the WA and various IC treaty coalitions. IGOs are oftentimes sponsored by different governments and usually receive a lot of the privileges that governments extend to one another. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are generally private not-for-profit entities that function a lot like multinational corporations and oftentimes must comply with the same rules that businesses and religious bodies are bound to obey. While IGOs and NGOs are “self-governing” in the sense that they are administratively capable of managing their own operations, they are neither sovereign nor independent. Both must obey the laws that different governments impose on them (except for exceptions carved out by treaties) and neither can raise funds by levying taxes, maintain security forces without government permission, or otherwise act like countries.
The Reason Diplomacy Happens
Having taken a moment to explain who performs diplomacy, it is prudent to spend a moment explaining why diplomacy even happens at all. No population inhabits a vacuum—either in NationStates or the real world. Humanity is psychologically hardwired for exploration and travel just as it is for acquisition and reproduction. People have a natural desire for new material resources with which to raise their standard of living and additional territory in which to raise new families. Whenever a group of people grows large enough to establish a division of labor, the group’s members begin to specialize in different economic tasks and thus create a diversified economy that raises its standard of living, accelerates its technological progress, and enables faster territorial expansion. At some point or another, this process of exploration and expansion inevitably leads people from one society to encounter people from another (even if they originated on opposite sides of the globe, they will meet each other if given sufficient time). When that happens, they begin exchanging knowledge, technology, and resources in order to improve their own material positions (this is how international trade happens and globalization began).
A society will typically develop a complex culture and infrastructure by the time it is materially advanced enough to engage in long-distance trade. Someone has to have power to resolve internal disputes, enforce property rights, and otherwise establish a climate of law and order is society is to progress further, so society creates the public entity we call government to perform these administrative tasks. In ancient times, governments were the only entities with enough funds and manpower to protect traders from brigands who lurked in the countryside and pirates who prowled the high seas, so ancient civilizations often ended up using their armed forces to secure their frontiers. Whenever two civilizations expanded to the point where their territorial claims met and started overlapping, their governments had to formally agree on the position of their border to avoid the expensive and ruinous prospect of armed conflict. Thus it was that governments developed the habit of appointing official representatives to conduct business with one another in a legally binding fashion. These agents came to be called diplomats because the documents that granted them authority to engage in negotiations were traditionally folded in half (the word diplomat came from diploma, a Greek word which means “folded paper”).
With that brief overview of diplomacy’s origins now out of the way, we can turn from discussing why diplomacy happens to how diplomacy happens. Governments appoint emissaries to travel around marketing their country’s values, ideas, culture, and political opinions the same way companies appoint sales agents to travel around marketing products and services to potential customers. In fact, both of these processes simultaneously occur whenever two countries choose to interact with one another—their governments interact on an official level while their citizens interact on a private level. These interactions can be formal or informal, bilateral or multilateral, and solicited or unsolicited. For instance, Country A’s leader invites Country B’s leader to a private ball (informal, bilateral, and unsolicited by the recipient), while in another case, Country C’s leader hosts a region-wide conference to form an mutual defense coalition at the request of other countries in the region (formal, multilateral, and solicited by the others).
Most new roleplayers assume that independent sovereign states are the only entities that engage in diplomatic intercourse, usually because that is all they see happening in NS roleplay. In fact, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), such as the World Assembly (WA), IC treaty organizations, and supranational unions can send and receive diplomats the same way countries do. Likewise, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as charity and disaster relief agencies, religious bodies, and various political, scientific, and cultural programs can send and receive official representatives who will often receive the same courtesies, rights, and protections as regular diplomats under select circumstances. With these facts in mind, here follows a brief overview of the characteristics that define each group.
Independent sovereign states are what we often colloquially refer to as countries. A state is a self-governing entity that is fully entitled to act autonomously in charting its own destiny. An independent country is a state, but its internal administrative subdivisions (e.g. cities, counties, etc.) are not states. States have two basic attributes:
- Sovereignty: In most cases, a state is sovereign (i.e. it completely governs itself and does not answer to any superior legal or political authority). If members of a commonwealth or supranational union can act as they please with only token or symbolic interference from above, they are sovereign. If their actions have to be ratified by some external superior authority to remain valid, they are only partially sovereign. If a supranational union or commonwealth directly controls a majority of what happens within their member states, then the union is sovereign and the member states are not. Only sovereign states have the ability to enter into contractual agreements (i.e. treaties) with other countries, so national governments tend to get upset when one of their internal subdivisions tries to negotiate an agreement with a foreign state (e.g. California trying to ratify the Paris Climate Agreement) as if it is its own country.
- Independence: A state is independent if it can govern and economically support itself without going bankrupt or needing to be placed into receivership by the international community. A country that can make its own laws, make treaties with other countries, send and receive diplomats, engage in trade, enforce its vital interests, and raise and maintain armed forces to ensure its own security is independent. A country that has to be occupied and “babysat” by other countries to sustain its basic internal functions may still be sovereign, but it is not independent—on the contrary, it is dependent.
A country can either be a nation-state, which is a state created from a single nation (i.e. an ethnically homogenous population), or an empire, which is a state containing multiple nations. Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia are real-life nation-states. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was a de facto empire. The various Native American nations were nation-states back when they had sovereignty over their own territory. Now they are merely ethnic components of the United States, Canada, and Mexico, which are de facto empires containing loads of distinct ethnic groups. China, Russia, Brazil, and India are de facto empires, even if they do not call themselves such. Real-life nation-states include Japan (Nipponese ethnicity), France (Gallic ethnicity), Iran (Persian ethnicity), Germany (Teutonic ethnicity), and Israel (Judaism, since the Jews view their nation in religious rather than genetic terms).
An intergovernmental organization (IGO) is a legal entity created by collaborative agreements between two or more governments. An IGO can be bilateral, such as a joint border-control agency, or multilateral, like the WA and various IC treaty coalitions. IGOs are oftentimes sponsored by different governments and usually receive a lot of the privileges that governments extend to one another. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are generally private not-for-profit entities that function a lot like multinational corporations and oftentimes must comply with the same rules that businesses and religious bodies are bound to obey. While IGOs and NGOs are “self-governing” in the sense that they are administratively capable of managing their own operations, they are neither sovereign nor independent. Both must obey the laws that different governments impose on them (except for exceptions carved out by treaties) and neither can raise funds by levying taxes, maintain security forces without government permission, or otherwise act like countries.
The Reason Diplomacy Happens
Having taken a moment to explain who performs diplomacy, it is prudent to spend a moment explaining why diplomacy even happens at all. No population inhabits a vacuum—either in NationStates or the real world. Humanity is psychologically hardwired for exploration and travel just as it is for acquisition and reproduction. People have a natural desire for new material resources with which to raise their standard of living and additional territory in which to raise new families. Whenever a group of people grows large enough to establish a division of labor, the group’s members begin to specialize in different economic tasks and thus create a diversified economy that raises its standard of living, accelerates its technological progress, and enables faster territorial expansion. At some point or another, this process of exploration and expansion inevitably leads people from one society to encounter people from another (even if they originated on opposite sides of the globe, they will meet each other if given sufficient time). When that happens, they begin exchanging knowledge, technology, and resources in order to improve their own material positions (this is how international trade happens and globalization began).
A society will typically develop a complex culture and infrastructure by the time it is materially advanced enough to engage in long-distance trade. Someone has to have power to resolve internal disputes, enforce property rights, and otherwise establish a climate of law and order is society is to progress further, so society creates the public entity we call government to perform these administrative tasks. In ancient times, governments were the only entities with enough funds and manpower to protect traders from brigands who lurked in the countryside and pirates who prowled the high seas, so ancient civilizations often ended up using their armed forces to secure their frontiers. Whenever two civilizations expanded to the point where their territorial claims met and started overlapping, their governments had to formally agree on the position of their border to avoid the expensive and ruinous prospect of armed conflict. Thus it was that governments developed the habit of appointing official representatives to conduct business with one another in a legally binding fashion. These agents came to be called diplomats because the documents that granted them authority to engage in negotiations were traditionally folded in half (the word diplomat came from diploma, a Greek word which means “folded paper”).
With that brief overview of diplomacy’s origins now out of the way, we can turn from discussing why diplomacy happens to how diplomacy happens. Governments appoint emissaries to travel around marketing their country’s values, ideas, culture, and political opinions the same way companies appoint sales agents to travel around marketing products and services to potential customers. In fact, both of these processes simultaneously occur whenever two countries choose to interact with one another—their governments interact on an official level while their citizens interact on a private level. These interactions can be formal or informal, bilateral or multilateral, and solicited or unsolicited. For instance, Country A’s leader invites Country B’s leader to a private ball (informal, bilateral, and unsolicited by the recipient), while in another case, Country C’s leader hosts a region-wide conference to form an mutual defense coalition at the request of other countries in the region (formal, multilateral, and solicited by the others).
CHAPTER 2
Diplomatic Personnel
Diplomatic Personnel
Character Creation
If the first chapter of this treatise addresses the settings in which your country’s diplomatic sagas transpire, then this chapter is dedicated to explaining the basics of creating the characters you need to make your roleplay threads come alive. Diplomacy is one of the most heavily character-driven aspects of NS roleplay. While you can reliably roleplay trade and war in terms of sending a trainload of coal to one country or a carrier flotilla to another, the art of roleplaying diplomacy depends a lot more on the actions of individual characters. Put another way, it is simply difficult and awkward to roleplay diplomacy if you have no characters to populate your stories. Of course, it goes without saying that this information is also applicable to the general business of character creation throughout fiction writing.
While there are many different ways you can start creating these characters, if you are new to NS you will have the easiest time starting this process imagining what sort of personality traits you want them to have. Is your latest trusty emissary an introvert or an extrovert? Is she a hoarder or a neat freak? Does he have any unique quirks and idiosyncrasies that can play a role in the plot of a future roleplay thread? After you have sketched a mental picture of the sort of person you want a new character to be, you can brainstorm a background story that complements your new character’s personality. Ask yourself how your characters became diplomats in the first place—did your country’s leader make Dr. Trustworthy a diplomat because she was a lawyer who can write a treaty or because she was a corporate executive who knows how to make a trade deal?
The work of inventing a new character should ideally include dreaming up details that enable readers to know what he or she looks and sounds like in a given story (e.g. physical appearance, voice, and taste in fashion) and details that explain his or her behavior. For example, ask if you want the diplomat in your new roleplay thread to be a rookie or a veteran. Whenever you dive into the exciting business of creating these characters, you will also need to think about the ways your character’s personality, prejudices, and professional experience might affect his or her interactions with foreigners out in the field. Again, your goal in roleplaying diplomacy (and anything else on NS) is to make things happen by writing a story about it!
Education, Training, and Appointment
Your country’s diplomats need a broad set of talents to conduct productive business with their foreign counterparts—for instance, they must be capable of traveling, learn respect for the customs and etiquette of their hosts, make efforts to understand their host country’s culture, and in most cases, they must fluently speak their host country’s language. Specialized academies and training programs can teach new ambassadors how to manage an embassy’s budget, process and file paperwork, or observe security clearances, but cannot teach them things that they can only learn by observation and experience. The best diplomats possess high degrees of social intelligence in a variety of fields, and social intelligence, much like tact, charm, and other personality traits, is not something your characters can learn from a textbook. In some cases, experience proves to be the best teacher, such as the incident where U.S. Ambassador to the UN Warren R. Austin asked the Arabs and Jews to “settle this problem in a true Christian spirit” in 1948.
When dreaming up your characters’ educational backgrounds, your consular staff, clerical secretaries, and the like will realistically need undergraduate degrees in their areas of specialization and related fields to qualify for admission to a diplomatic academy. A legal attaché will have a law degree and perhaps even a doctorate in jurisprudence. A trade attaché will typically be either a professional economist or a professor of economics. A military attaché will always be a commissioned military officer while an embassy’s security chief will probably be a former senior noncommissioned officer with some past command experience. A full ambassador may either have one or more doctorates in fields ranging from international relations to political science, though nothing says you cannot roleplay your country as a place where the head of state hands out diplomatic posts to his biggest re-election donors. This actually happens in real life!
When a country’s leader appoints someone to a diplomatic position, he or she issues the newly-minted emissary a diplomatic commission and a letter of credence, examples of which can be found in Chapter 11. The commission is the certificate that makes somebody a diplomat the same way a military commission makes someone an officer. The letter of credence, which is also known as the diplomat’s credentials, is the piece of paper that assigns him or her to a specific post. Whenever a diplomat arrives at a new post for the first time, the first thing he or she does is present a sealed copy of this letter to the receiving country’s leader (specifically the head of state in countries where ceremonial and administrative leader ship are segregated between separate heads of state and government). A country’s head of state will often give an incoming consul a document called an exequatur that recognizes his or her consular rights and guarantees that they will be protected.
In the event that a government feels it necessary to recall (i.e. withdraw) a diplomat from a specific post, it will send a letter of recall to the government of the diplomat’s host country (or organization) to announce his or her withdrawal. Governments typically recall their diplomats to reassign them to new posts where their talents and expertise can be put to better use, but sometime they will recall diplomats as an act of protest against actions taken by the host country’s government.
Diplomatic Ranks and Titles
Unless you roleplay as an NS nation with a radical egalitarian society, your country’s diplomatic corps will contain an internal hierarchy. In most RL countries, the head of state makes ambassadorial appointments while leaving the head of his or her foreign relations department in charge of hiring and firing the officials who administer diplomatic academies, provide diplomatic security services, process embassy permits, and so on. Both your NS country’s foreign relations department and the teams of emissaries it sends out should contain some form of internal organization, a division of responsibilities, and a clear understanding of who answers to whom if it is to function effectively.
Diplomatic hierarchies have a long history in the real world, where the present system established by the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations largely represents a re-codification of the Western system that emerged following the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818. The old system had four ranks: ambassadors, legates, and nuncios occupied the top rank, envoys and ministers occupied the second rank, ministers resident occupied the third rank, and chargés d’affaires occupied the bottom rank. The current real-life system has three ranks: ambassadors, ministers (partially obsolete in practice), and chargés d’affaires. Although you are perfectly free to devise and roleplay your own unique system of diplomatic ranks, titles, and positions as you see fit, you will serve yourself well if you spend some time studying the three modern ranks:
An entity’s chief official representative in a given jurisdiction will not always bear one of the titles named in the preceding paragraphs. While an emissary between one country and another is called an ambassador, an emissary sent from a government to an IGO like the WA is called a permanent representative. Conversely, an emissary sent from an IGO or NGO to a country’s government is called a resident representative. Both are the ranked equivalent of ambassadors but typically have inferior seniority.
Roleplayers who decide to roleplay as any number of NS equivalents to the Holy See have a few special rules to play by. The first is the use of special terminology—papal ambassadors are called Apostolic Nuncios, papal envoys are called Apostolic Internuncios, and the Pope’s personal representatives are called Apostolic legates. A Nuncio’s office is called a nunciature. If you want to properly roleplay the Roman Catholic faith as your NS nation’s state religion, then you need to grant Apostolic Nuncios automatic seniority over other countries’ ambassadors (as in RL). Wikipedia’s article on Nuncios offers more detail on this subject if you want to read more.
Specialization
Every team of diplomats has specific missions to complete, purposes to fulfill, and objectives to achieve. A team sent to negotiate a peace settlement will be composed of different people than a team created to negotiate a trade treaty. Delegates to a conference on scientific collaboration between governments will probably be scientists while delegates to a global summit on copyright laws are likely to be patent and trademark lawyers. In any case, think about the context in which you are roleplaying a diplomatic activity as you go about deciding which characters to put into your stories.
If the first chapter of this treatise addresses the settings in which your country’s diplomatic sagas transpire, then this chapter is dedicated to explaining the basics of creating the characters you need to make your roleplay threads come alive. Diplomacy is one of the most heavily character-driven aspects of NS roleplay. While you can reliably roleplay trade and war in terms of sending a trainload of coal to one country or a carrier flotilla to another, the art of roleplaying diplomacy depends a lot more on the actions of individual characters. Put another way, it is simply difficult and awkward to roleplay diplomacy if you have no characters to populate your stories. Of course, it goes without saying that this information is also applicable to the general business of character creation throughout fiction writing.
While there are many different ways you can start creating these characters, if you are new to NS you will have the easiest time starting this process imagining what sort of personality traits you want them to have. Is your latest trusty emissary an introvert or an extrovert? Is she a hoarder or a neat freak? Does he have any unique quirks and idiosyncrasies that can play a role in the plot of a future roleplay thread? After you have sketched a mental picture of the sort of person you want a new character to be, you can brainstorm a background story that complements your new character’s personality. Ask yourself how your characters became diplomats in the first place—did your country’s leader make Dr. Trustworthy a diplomat because she was a lawyer who can write a treaty or because she was a corporate executive who knows how to make a trade deal?
The work of inventing a new character should ideally include dreaming up details that enable readers to know what he or she looks and sounds like in a given story (e.g. physical appearance, voice, and taste in fashion) and details that explain his or her behavior. For example, ask if you want the diplomat in your new roleplay thread to be a rookie or a veteran. Whenever you dive into the exciting business of creating these characters, you will also need to think about the ways your character’s personality, prejudices, and professional experience might affect his or her interactions with foreigners out in the field. Again, your goal in roleplaying diplomacy (and anything else on NS) is to make things happen by writing a story about it!
Education, Training, and Appointment
Your country’s diplomats need a broad set of talents to conduct productive business with their foreign counterparts—for instance, they must be capable of traveling, learn respect for the customs and etiquette of their hosts, make efforts to understand their host country’s culture, and in most cases, they must fluently speak their host country’s language. Specialized academies and training programs can teach new ambassadors how to manage an embassy’s budget, process and file paperwork, or observe security clearances, but cannot teach them things that they can only learn by observation and experience. The best diplomats possess high degrees of social intelligence in a variety of fields, and social intelligence, much like tact, charm, and other personality traits, is not something your characters can learn from a textbook. In some cases, experience proves to be the best teacher, such as the incident where U.S. Ambassador to the UN Warren R. Austin asked the Arabs and Jews to “settle this problem in a true Christian spirit” in 1948.
When dreaming up your characters’ educational backgrounds, your consular staff, clerical secretaries, and the like will realistically need undergraduate degrees in their areas of specialization and related fields to qualify for admission to a diplomatic academy. A legal attaché will have a law degree and perhaps even a doctorate in jurisprudence. A trade attaché will typically be either a professional economist or a professor of economics. A military attaché will always be a commissioned military officer while an embassy’s security chief will probably be a former senior noncommissioned officer with some past command experience. A full ambassador may either have one or more doctorates in fields ranging from international relations to political science, though nothing says you cannot roleplay your country as a place where the head of state hands out diplomatic posts to his biggest re-election donors. This actually happens in real life!
When a country’s leader appoints someone to a diplomatic position, he or she issues the newly-minted emissary a diplomatic commission and a letter of credence, examples of which can be found in Chapter 11. The commission is the certificate that makes somebody a diplomat the same way a military commission makes someone an officer. The letter of credence, which is also known as the diplomat’s credentials, is the piece of paper that assigns him or her to a specific post. Whenever a diplomat arrives at a new post for the first time, the first thing he or she does is present a sealed copy of this letter to the receiving country’s leader (specifically the head of state in countries where ceremonial and administrative leader ship are segregated between separate heads of state and government). A country’s head of state will often give an incoming consul a document called an exequatur that recognizes his or her consular rights and guarantees that they will be protected.
In the event that a government feels it necessary to recall (i.e. withdraw) a diplomat from a specific post, it will send a letter of recall to the government of the diplomat’s host country (or organization) to announce his or her withdrawal. Governments typically recall their diplomats to reassign them to new posts where their talents and expertise can be put to better use, but sometime they will recall diplomats as an act of protest against actions taken by the host country’s government.
Diplomatic Ranks and Titles
Unless you roleplay as an NS nation with a radical egalitarian society, your country’s diplomatic corps will contain an internal hierarchy. In most RL countries, the head of state makes ambassadorial appointments while leaving the head of his or her foreign relations department in charge of hiring and firing the officials who administer diplomatic academies, provide diplomatic security services, process embassy permits, and so on. Both your NS country’s foreign relations department and the teams of emissaries it sends out should contain some form of internal organization, a division of responsibilities, and a clear understanding of who answers to whom if it is to function effectively.
Diplomatic hierarchies have a long history in the real world, where the present system established by the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations largely represents a re-codification of the Western system that emerged following the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818. The old system had four ranks: ambassadors, legates, and nuncios occupied the top rank, envoys and ministers occupied the second rank, ministers resident occupied the third rank, and chargés d’affaires occupied the bottom rank. The current real-life system has three ranks: ambassadors, ministers (partially obsolete in practice), and chargés d’affaires. Although you are perfectly free to devise and roleplay your own unique system of diplomatic ranks, titles, and positions as you see fit, you will serve yourself well if you spend some time studying the three modern ranks:
- An ambassador is an emissary that a country’s leader appoints to represent the sending country before the government of another country and is almost always more properly known as an ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary. The term plenipotentiary comes from the Latin words plenus (full) and potentias (powers) and refers to the fact that a plenipotentiary representative has the authority to negotiate on behalf of his or her country’s head of government (traditionally the sovereign). Prior to the 1961 Vienna Convention countries sometimes had “ordinary” ambassadors with limited powers who were issued temporary assignments but these have pretty much disappeared in RL and I have never seen them in NS. An ambassador who is appointed to represent his or her country before multiple countries is called an ambassador-at-large. Ambassadors will sometimes come in various grades of seniority within their own diplomatic corps or may be limited in number within a given diplomatic corps (e.g. the Italian government only allows about thirty of their plenipotentiaries to have the title of “Ambassador”).
- A minister (more properly known as an envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary and often simply called an envoy) is an official who is assigned to serve as the sending country’s chief official representative whenever the receiving country was “not important enough” to deserve an ambassador. Envoys were oftentimes referred to as “ministers” (e.g. United States Minister to France) in the years between 1815 and 1961. During the late 1960s, many countries replaced their envoys with ambassadors, partly as an affirmation of sovereign equality between independent states and partly (in my own opinion) to avoid confusion with cabinet ministers. This rank is not totally obsolete, however, as it lives on in the form of the special envoy. A special envoy is a diplomat appointed by one country to address a specific task, problem, situation, or challenge. For example, a diplomat appointed by Country A’s leader to settle a dispute between Country B and Country C will usually be granted the title of special envoy.
- A chargé d’affaires (the female equivalent is chargée d’affaires) is an official who heads a diplomatic mission but has a lower rank than an envoy. A chargé d’affaires can either be a permanent head of mission (en pied, as between two countries that have not agreed to exchange ambassadors or have poor relations) or a temporary head of mission (ad interim) who takes over for an ambassador. The term literally means “charged with [handling] matters.” A chargé d’affaires en pied is permanently assigned and therefore always outranks a chargé d’affaires ad interim, who is only a placeholder for a permanent head of mission. In addition, a chargé d’affaires en pied is typically accredited by his country’s foreign minister rather than his country’s leader and a country’s leader can demonstrate displeasure towards another country by replacing his ambassador there with a chargé d’affaires en pied.
An entity’s chief official representative in a given jurisdiction will not always bear one of the titles named in the preceding paragraphs. While an emissary between one country and another is called an ambassador, an emissary sent from a government to an IGO like the WA is called a permanent representative. Conversely, an emissary sent from an IGO or NGO to a country’s government is called a resident representative. Both are the ranked equivalent of ambassadors but typically have inferior seniority.
Roleplayers who decide to roleplay as any number of NS equivalents to the Holy See have a few special rules to play by. The first is the use of special terminology—papal ambassadors are called Apostolic Nuncios, papal envoys are called Apostolic Internuncios, and the Pope’s personal representatives are called Apostolic legates. A Nuncio’s office is called a nunciature. If you want to properly roleplay the Roman Catholic faith as your NS nation’s state religion, then you need to grant Apostolic Nuncios automatic seniority over other countries’ ambassadors (as in RL). Wikipedia’s article on Nuncios offers more detail on this subject if you want to read more.
Specialization
Every team of diplomats has specific missions to complete, purposes to fulfill, and objectives to achieve. A team sent to negotiate a peace settlement will be composed of different people than a team created to negotiate a trade treaty. Delegates to a conference on scientific collaboration between governments will probably be scientists while delegates to a global summit on copyright laws are likely to be patent and trademark lawyers. In any case, think about the context in which you are roleplaying a diplomatic activity as you go about deciding which characters to put into your stories.
CHAPTER 3
Diplomatic Missions and Facilities
Diplomatic Missions and Facilities
Introduction
A diplomatic mission is a team of emissaries that a country’s leaders organize and send out to represent their interests when meeting foreigners. A mission can represent a country (e.g. the Monavian Empire), its sovereign (e.g. the Monavian Crown), an IGO (e.g. the World Assembly or the Fegosian Union) or an NGO (e.g. the Monavian Orthodox Church). If Country A permanently stations a diplomatic mission in Country B’s seat of government, Country A’s leaders will assign their diplomatic mission a number of objectives, such as building friendly relations with Country B’s leaders, negotiating trade agreements with Country B’s government, or simply keeping an official finger on the pulse of Country B’s political scene.
Different Types of Missions and Facilities
Missions can assume a number of forms. A mission can be temporary or permanent. It is called an embassy if it is headed by an ambassador or a legation if it is headed by an envoy. If a mission is permanently stationed in the receiving country, it is called a resident mission, but if it is only stationed there temporarily, it is termed a non-resident mission. Though NS roleplayers have always been at liberty to devise any new type of mission they desire, they almost universally stick to sending and receiving permanent resident embassies. If you are lucky enough to encounter someone who sends or receives legations, give him or her a virtual cookie.
When a country receives diplomats from another country, the receiving country’s government will typically allow the sending country’s government to rent or purchase one or more pieces of real estate in which to house its diplomats for the duration of their posting. Generally speaking, this real estate is called a chancery if it houses an embassy or legation, and a consulate if it houses a consul and his or her staff.
A chancery will typically house the sending country’s ambassador and subordinate emissaries, the ambassador’s close family, and appropriate managerial, security, support, and miscellaneous staff. Depending on the nature and significance of the relationship between the sending and receiving countries, the sending country’s chancery might also house relatives of the subordinate diplomats, personal domestic servants, computer technicians, mechanics, gardeners, and other professionals that keep the chancery’s buildings, grounds, equipment, and vehicles in working order. Consulates are simpler since they frequently contain no living quarters at all and the entire consular staff lives in property purchased or rented from citizens of their host country. In many respects, consulates function as a chancery’s “branch offices” in its host country by representing it remotely.
The scale, funding, complexity, and composition of a diplomatic mission and the facilities it occupies will depend on the nature of the relationship between the sending country and the receiving country. In general, a country will invest a lot of resources in a diplomatic mission if it has major interests in the country where it is stationing its mission. Conversely, your NS nation’s leaders are not going to build an artificial city in some impoverished backwater country where their influence is not welcomed. New Hayesalia’s exquisite guide on missions illustrates my point far better than I can:
Realistically speaking, you are very likely to roleplay more with your region mates than anyone else and thus your fictional leaders will pay closer attention to their immediate neighbors than they will to some country on the other side of the globe. Put another way, if you roleplay your NS nation sharing a border with another NS nation, chances are that your neighbor will be a major trading partner since different populations have a natural propensity to trade most with the neighboring populations closest to them. Either way, your NS nation will generally need to maintain a more significant presence in countries you roleplay with a lot than it will elsewhere.
Internal Structure of Missions
Regardless of whatever form a mission takes, its personnel will be organized into a distinct hierarchy. The head-of-mission (or chief of mission) serves as the mission’s administrator and is responsible for managing its internal operations. Most missions also have a deputy head or deputy chief tasked with assisting the ambassador, envoy, or other mission chief in various ways. Both the head and deputy head will usually have one or more private assistants, secretaries, and similar employees who help them perform their professional duties and may or may not employ private servants separately from the mission’s service staff. Depending on the customs and regulations of the sending country, a mission’s chain of command may contain one or more additional ranks of senior administrators below the deputy head-of-mission.
Diplomatic officials are oftentimes organized into functional departments which enjoy some degree of autonomy and are managed by semi-independent department heads who usually hold senior diplomatic ranks and titles such as counselor, secretary, etc. Departments will oftentimes contain their own internal hierarchies and divisions of labor as needed. Generic examples include:
Every mission will typically contain different variations of these departments and might refer to them as sections or units or divisions. Some missions might not have all of these internal divisions while others may have more, especially if they have specific needs to meet. In any case, these departments can prove highly useful in roleplaying a story by giving your ambassadors and ministers something to do other than conduct every last piece of political business happening between two countries.
Functions of Diplomatic Missions
The primary function of any diplomatic mission is to represent its native country’s interests and opinions in the presence of its host country’s government. In more concrete terms, Country A’s leaders sends diplomats to Country B to keep Country B’s leaders informed of Country A’s (material) interests in Country B’s sphere of influence. As I stated at the end of Chapter 1, diplomacy is how one country’s leaders persuasively “sell” their bargaining position to another country’s leaders as often as needed.
A diplomatic mission plays its role as a communications interface in both directions. Its members not only share information with their host country’s government; they also function as their native country’s eyes and ears within the host country. Your NS nation’s emissaries will both conduct negotiations with their host government and provide their superiors with a steady flow of news and intelligence. The interface role also encompasses logistical and administrative functions such as arranging meetings between officials from both countries and helping organize state visits.
In addition to negotiating international agreements, exchanging information, and arranging meetings, missions also provide valuable services to individual persons traveling between countries. An embassy or legation will can usually:
Consulates often provide a variety of specialized services to your nationals while they are in the host country. Consulates serve as information centers from which the host country’s citizens can obtain information about traveling to and doing business with the consul’s home country. A consulate’s staff will help people obtain passports, process applications for them, and replace them when they are lost or stolen. Consular staff will notarize vital records (e.g. birth, marriage, and death certificates) for their country’s nationals in the host country; offer their nationals assistance with finding counsel when accused of crimes in the host country, and assist in processing paperwork by which their nationals change their citizenship. Like embassy and legation staff, consular staff can sometimes assist with disaster-related evacuations and provide other emergency services. In short, they can make a multitude of different things happen.
Extraterritoriality
When a diplomatic mission occupies a piece of real estate, the host government having jurisdiction over the property will typically grant it extraterritoriality, a status in which the host country’s laws do not apply so that the laws of the mission’s country can apply there instead. Put another way, if a piece of property has extraterritoriality, it acts as if it is the territory of the country posting its mission there without actually ceasing to be the territory of the host country. A diplomatic mission’s host government will typically bestow this status on the mission’s official facilities (i.e. chanceries and consulates) and any private residences that the sending country’s ambassador owns in the host country. All diplomatic missions must pay utility fees and either purchase or pay rent on any properties they occupy regardless of their legal status. While most countries will extend this legal privilege to a mission’s vehicle fleet, it usually only applies to the ones used by the mission head and other senior officials and not to vehicles used by security and support staff.
There are limits to how far extraterritoriality can be honored. No country is technically required to grant diplomatic facilities extraterritorial status unless it either promises to do so in treaty with the mission’s government or signs an international convention requiring it to do so. Even in these instances, host countries retain substantial rights and can usually revoke a facility’s extraterritorial status in cases of flagrant abuse (e.g. nationals from the mission’s country use the facility to attack the host country). Most roleplayers make a point of covering this subject in the rules for their mission exchange programs (for example, TurtleShroom has very detailed extraterritoriality regulations). There are also rare cases in which NS countries do not allow extraterritoriality at all (the most famous example is Holy Marsh, a theocratic civilization that regards the act of waiving its laws within part of its own territory as tantamount to ceding sovereignty over the territory in which the laws are waived).
A diplomatic mission is a team of emissaries that a country’s leaders organize and send out to represent their interests when meeting foreigners. A mission can represent a country (e.g. the Monavian Empire), its sovereign (e.g. the Monavian Crown), an IGO (e.g. the World Assembly or the Fegosian Union) or an NGO (e.g. the Monavian Orthodox Church). If Country A permanently stations a diplomatic mission in Country B’s seat of government, Country A’s leaders will assign their diplomatic mission a number of objectives, such as building friendly relations with Country B’s leaders, negotiating trade agreements with Country B’s government, or simply keeping an official finger on the pulse of Country B’s political scene.
Different Types of Missions and Facilities
Missions can assume a number of forms. A mission can be temporary or permanent. It is called an embassy if it is headed by an ambassador or a legation if it is headed by an envoy. If a mission is permanently stationed in the receiving country, it is called a resident mission, but if it is only stationed there temporarily, it is termed a non-resident mission. Though NS roleplayers have always been at liberty to devise any new type of mission they desire, they almost universally stick to sending and receiving permanent resident embassies. If you are lucky enough to encounter someone who sends or receives legations, give him or her a virtual cookie.
When a country receives diplomats from another country, the receiving country’s government will typically allow the sending country’s government to rent or purchase one or more pieces of real estate in which to house its diplomats for the duration of their posting. Generally speaking, this real estate is called a chancery if it houses an embassy or legation, and a consulate if it houses a consul and his or her staff.
A chancery will typically house the sending country’s ambassador and subordinate emissaries, the ambassador’s close family, and appropriate managerial, security, support, and miscellaneous staff. Depending on the nature and significance of the relationship between the sending and receiving countries, the sending country’s chancery might also house relatives of the subordinate diplomats, personal domestic servants, computer technicians, mechanics, gardeners, and other professionals that keep the chancery’s buildings, grounds, equipment, and vehicles in working order. Consulates are simpler since they frequently contain no living quarters at all and the entire consular staff lives in property purchased or rented from citizens of their host country. In many respects, consulates function as a chancery’s “branch offices” in its host country by representing it remotely.
The scale, funding, complexity, and composition of a diplomatic mission and the facilities it occupies will depend on the nature of the relationship between the sending country and the receiving country. In general, a country will invest a lot of resources in a diplomatic mission if it has major interests in the country where it is stationing its mission. Conversely, your NS nation’s leaders are not going to build an artificial city in some impoverished backwater country where their influence is not welcomed. New Hayesalia’s exquisite guide on missions illustrates my point far better than I can:
The largest Embassy ever created in real life was the Embassy of the United States in Baghdad, Iraq, which had a diplomatic staff of around 2,000 people and a total staff (including contractors) of over 16,000 people. The Embassy is the size of the entire Vatican City, and has it's [sic] own power generation, military barracks, apartments, Olympic size swimming pools, and so on and so forth. Put in perspective, this 1994 article humorously observes that in Minsk, Belarus, the UK and German embassies to the country shared one building. The Germans had the kitchen and, unironically, the living space; and the sole British diplomatic representative to Belarus had one room lit by candles.
Realistically speaking, you are very likely to roleplay more with your region mates than anyone else and thus your fictional leaders will pay closer attention to their immediate neighbors than they will to some country on the other side of the globe. Put another way, if you roleplay your NS nation sharing a border with another NS nation, chances are that your neighbor will be a major trading partner since different populations have a natural propensity to trade most with the neighboring populations closest to them. Either way, your NS nation will generally need to maintain a more significant presence in countries you roleplay with a lot than it will elsewhere.
Internal Structure of Missions
Regardless of whatever form a mission takes, its personnel will be organized into a distinct hierarchy. The head-of-mission (or chief of mission) serves as the mission’s administrator and is responsible for managing its internal operations. Most missions also have a deputy head or deputy chief tasked with assisting the ambassador, envoy, or other mission chief in various ways. Both the head and deputy head will usually have one or more private assistants, secretaries, and similar employees who help them perform their professional duties and may or may not employ private servants separately from the mission’s service staff. Depending on the customs and regulations of the sending country, a mission’s chain of command may contain one or more additional ranks of senior administrators below the deputy head-of-mission.
Diplomatic officials are oftentimes organized into functional departments which enjoy some degree of autonomy and are managed by semi-independent department heads who usually hold senior diplomatic ranks and titles such as counselor, secretary, etc. Departments will oftentimes contain their own internal hierarchies and divisions of labor as needed. Generic examples include:
- Administrative department: manages the internal functioning of the mission (e.g. accounting, employee recruitment and training, information storage, maintenance, transportation).
- Communications and press department: manages a mission’s Web site and social media presence, sends and receives messages, interfaces with local journalists, issues announcements and official statements.
- Cultural department: provides the host country’s citizens with information about the sending country’s culture and language.
- Economic and Trade department: represents the sending country’s economic interests in the host country.
- Legal department: the mission’s lawyers and paralegal staff are tasked with tracking developments in international law and the laws of the host country, provide the mission with legal advice, and may even provide consular services.
- Political department: keeps the mission’s leaders informed of all political changes in the host country and the host country’s officials informed of changes in the sending country’s policies and laws.
- Security department: institutes security procedures, manages and trains security staff.
Every mission will typically contain different variations of these departments and might refer to them as sections or units or divisions. Some missions might not have all of these internal divisions while others may have more, especially if they have specific needs to meet. In any case, these departments can prove highly useful in roleplaying a story by giving your ambassadors and ministers something to do other than conduct every last piece of political business happening between two countries.
Functions of Diplomatic Missions
The primary function of any diplomatic mission is to represent its native country’s interests and opinions in the presence of its host country’s government. In more concrete terms, Country A’s leaders sends diplomats to Country B to keep Country B’s leaders informed of Country A’s (material) interests in Country B’s sphere of influence. As I stated at the end of Chapter 1, diplomacy is how one country’s leaders persuasively “sell” their bargaining position to another country’s leaders as often as needed.
A diplomatic mission plays its role as a communications interface in both directions. Its members not only share information with their host country’s government; they also function as their native country’s eyes and ears within the host country. Your NS nation’s emissaries will both conduct negotiations with their host government and provide their superiors with a steady flow of news and intelligence. The interface role also encompasses logistical and administrative functions such as arranging meetings between officials from both countries and helping organize state visits.
In addition to negotiating international agreements, exchanging information, and arranging meetings, missions also provide valuable services to individual persons traveling between countries. An embassy or legation will can usually:
- Assist citizens of your nation with securing travel visa access.
- Help your citizens replace lost passports and travel documents in the host country.
- Offer your citizens and nationals protection in the event of local unrest and domestic violence.
- Help evacuate your country’s citizens from a disaster site in the host country.
- Help your own nationals and persons affiliated with third parties gain asylum.
- Process travel and citizenship paperwork.
- Host intelligence officers (i.e. spies) assigned to operate in the host country.
Consulates often provide a variety of specialized services to your nationals while they are in the host country. Consulates serve as information centers from which the host country’s citizens can obtain information about traveling to and doing business with the consul’s home country. A consulate’s staff will help people obtain passports, process applications for them, and replace them when they are lost or stolen. Consular staff will notarize vital records (e.g. birth, marriage, and death certificates) for their country’s nationals in the host country; offer their nationals assistance with finding counsel when accused of crimes in the host country, and assist in processing paperwork by which their nationals change their citizenship. Like embassy and legation staff, consular staff can sometimes assist with disaster-related evacuations and provide other emergency services. In short, they can make a multitude of different things happen.
Extraterritoriality
When a diplomatic mission occupies a piece of real estate, the host government having jurisdiction over the property will typically grant it extraterritoriality, a status in which the host country’s laws do not apply so that the laws of the mission’s country can apply there instead. Put another way, if a piece of property has extraterritoriality, it acts as if it is the territory of the country posting its mission there without actually ceasing to be the territory of the host country. A diplomatic mission’s host government will typically bestow this status on the mission’s official facilities (i.e. chanceries and consulates) and any private residences that the sending country’s ambassador owns in the host country. All diplomatic missions must pay utility fees and either purchase or pay rent on any properties they occupy regardless of their legal status. While most countries will extend this legal privilege to a mission’s vehicle fleet, it usually only applies to the ones used by the mission head and other senior officials and not to vehicles used by security and support staff.
There are limits to how far extraterritoriality can be honored. No country is technically required to grant diplomatic facilities extraterritorial status unless it either promises to do so in treaty with the mission’s government or signs an international convention requiring it to do so. Even in these instances, host countries retain substantial rights and can usually revoke a facility’s extraterritorial status in cases of flagrant abuse (e.g. nationals from the mission’s country use the facility to attack the host country). Most roleplayers make a point of covering this subject in the rules for their mission exchange programs (for example, TurtleShroom has very detailed extraterritoriality regulations). There are also rare cases in which NS countries do not allow extraterritoriality at all (the most famous example is Holy Marsh, a theocratic civilization that regards the act of waiving its laws within part of its own territory as tantamount to ceding sovereignty over the territory in which the laws are waived).
CHAPTER 4
Exchanging Diplomats
Exchanging Diplomats
Setting up an Exchange Program
There is nothing inherently difficult about roleplaying diplomatic tours and deployments, but there inevitably comes a point where so many roleplayers want to send embassies to your nation that keeping track of them all becomes a hassle. You can easily overcome this hurdle by creating a centralized diplomatic exchange thread in which other players can roleplay sending embassies to your country’s seat of government and you can roleplay the process of receiving them. Remember, diplomatic exchange threads are in-character threads, so treat them accordingly. The process of creating an exchange requires just as much preparation as any other multilateral RP, but as with other RPs around here, the effort you put into creating your exchange thread will influence others to put in a similar amount of effort when posting replies.
The first step in creating a diplomatic exchange program is to write the opening post of the thread in a word processor that has a spellchecker. If your thread contains a lot of spelling and grammar errors, visitors might not take you seriously and decide to move on without posting anything. In my personal opinion, your opening post should start with an OOC disclaimer warning visitors to keep posts in character and avoid spamming your thread with OOC chatter, though I will not think less of you if you decide such a note is not necessary. The remainder of your post should contain these items:
I began setting up my own Diplomatic Exchange Program by looking at the most popular and well-organized “embassy threads” that other roleplayers had posted in the past and consulting The New Guide to Embassies and Consulates to aid myself in brainstorming various formatting and content ideas and coming up with the most thorough code of regulations I could. I learned a lot of valuable concepts from studying what others had done well in the past, such as what subjects a code of regulations had to cover and what sort of items should be featured in an application form. Once I was done cherry-picking the best ideas I could find around the community, I made a point of giving credit where it was due in my OOC disclaimer and avoided hiding these acknowledgements inside a spoiler. My introductory section provides a brief overview of what the Imperial Federation is like and my roster of available and occupied locations relies on tables to keep everything organized efficiently.
Remember to save the file and back it up! Nothing sucks more than spending three hours writing a post in your Web browser only to watch it get eaten so you have to start over from the beginning—nothing, that is except losing your factbooks and mission-critical embassy rosters because your nation account got deleted by Moderation for repeated trolling in NS General.
Managing Your Exchange Program
After you have posted and opened your exchange program, you will eventually begin receiving facility applications from other players. Responding to applications can be a lot of work if your exchange thread becomes highly popular, so my number one tip is to create form letter templates on a word processor and save them somewhere. This way, every time you accept or reject an application you only have to rewrite a few parts of the letters between your characters. You will still need to invest some effort in the rest of your writing, however. If an applicant takes the time to write out a good roleplay post, it is polite for you to write out an equivalent post in reply, even if it takes you a while. Applicants will appreciate the time you spent developing stories in your thread (again, exchange threads are IC) and might even enjoy your writing enough to plan a new roleplay thread with you later.
My other tips in this area include:
Organizing and Deploying Missions
If you have identified an NS nation in which you would like to have a permanent mission, find out if the player behind the account has set up an exchange program thread and take some time to read it if one exists. Before posting an application, ask yourself if you have any intention of roleplaying with the owner of the exchange program in the future. If the answer is no and you are simply a let’s-exchange-embassies-and-call-it-a-day fellow, please move on and refraining from claiming spaces that other players will actually roleplay with in the future.
Assuming that you are interested in roleplaying an exchange of missions, take some time to read their rules, find the application form template, and fill it out completely. Be sure to ask for a vacant lot and try not to flout regulations just to be cheeky. Most importantly, never display immaturity when submitting an application unless you want to receive this type of response. In determining what to say on your application form, ask yourself these types of questions:
When determining what security measures are appropriate, remember that while ambassadors and envoys are very important people who need to be protected so they can perform their official duties, they are not heads of state. Likewise, while you do not want to see any of your chanceries and consulates suffer deliberate mishaps, you do not need an armored division to secure a diplomatic facility unless you just converted it into a command post for an invasion force. Some NS countries (e.g. Monavia and Alfegos) actually publish explicit prohibitions against designing facilities to resist military assaults, so full-perimeter fortifications, moats, landmines, and machine gun emplacements are not smart ideas. Please consult New Hayesalia’s detailed post on this topic for more in-depth information.
Generally speaking, a small cadre of armed guards will keep your facilities perfectly safe using little more than small arms (e.g. handguns, carbines, rifles, SMGs) and the occasional can of pepper spray or police baton. Most real-life countries have a national department, bureau, or agency that handles diplomatic security (e.g. the U.S. has its Diplomatic Security Service, the British have Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection, and the Russians have their Federal Protective Service). Regardless of whether you prefer to rely on soldiers, marines, gendarmes, specialized diplomatic security agents, or a combination of each, your guards need to meet stringent security clearance requirements since they will be responsible for destroying sensitive documents in the event of a major security breach. Diplomatic facility guards must also undergo special training in protocol since they may be called upon to perform ceremonial duties.
There are few ruder things you can do to someone who spent hours setting up a mission exchange than ignore the owner’s instructions and submit an invalid form on purpose. You end up wasting the other person’s time and clog up a thread that might be filled with other player requests. For example, back in the Jolt era, I posted an exchange program that contained only forty lots but some Hell-themed nation didn’t bother reading anything and simply submitted an ersatz application form requesting lot number 666. Upon informing him of his invalid submission, he simply ignored me.
If your facility application is approved, congratulations! The next step in the process is to roleplay your mission’s arrival in the host country. In many cases, you can simply make a single arrival post in the exchange thread and call it a day. In other cases, such as this one in which I got to roleplay a first contact scenario with another user who later joined my region, you can gain access to an excellent roleplaying opportunity.
There is nothing inherently difficult about roleplaying diplomatic tours and deployments, but there inevitably comes a point where so many roleplayers want to send embassies to your nation that keeping track of them all becomes a hassle. You can easily overcome this hurdle by creating a centralized diplomatic exchange thread in which other players can roleplay sending embassies to your country’s seat of government and you can roleplay the process of receiving them. Remember, diplomatic exchange threads are in-character threads, so treat them accordingly. The process of creating an exchange requires just as much preparation as any other multilateral RP, but as with other RPs around here, the effort you put into creating your exchange thread will influence others to put in a similar amount of effort when posting replies.
The first step in creating a diplomatic exchange program is to write the opening post of the thread in a word processor that has a spellchecker. If your thread contains a lot of spelling and grammar errors, visitors might not take you seriously and decide to move on without posting anything. In my personal opinion, your opening post should start with an OOC disclaimer warning visitors to keep posts in character and avoid spamming your thread with OOC chatter, though I will not think less of you if you decide such a note is not necessary. The remainder of your post should contain these items:
- An in-character introduction below the title
- A list of locations where foreign diplomats can open chanceries and consulates (group these by city if you allow them in multiple cities)
- The rules and regulations foreign diplomats must follow when setting up facilities and using them
- Travel and customs regulations
- A facility application form and instructions for submitting it
I began setting up my own Diplomatic Exchange Program by looking at the most popular and well-organized “embassy threads” that other roleplayers had posted in the past and consulting The New Guide to Embassies and Consulates to aid myself in brainstorming various formatting and content ideas and coming up with the most thorough code of regulations I could. I learned a lot of valuable concepts from studying what others had done well in the past, such as what subjects a code of regulations had to cover and what sort of items should be featured in an application form. Once I was done cherry-picking the best ideas I could find around the community, I made a point of giving credit where it was due in my OOC disclaimer and avoided hiding these acknowledgements inside a spoiler. My introductory section provides a brief overview of what the Imperial Federation is like and my roster of available and occupied locations relies on tables to keep everything organized efficiently.
Remember to save the file and back it up! Nothing sucks more than spending three hours writing a post in your Web browser only to watch it get eaten so you have to start over from the beginning—nothing, that is except losing your factbooks and mission-critical embassy rosters because your nation account got deleted by Moderation for repeated trolling in NS General.
Managing Your Exchange Program
After you have posted and opened your exchange program, you will eventually begin receiving facility applications from other players. Responding to applications can be a lot of work if your exchange thread becomes highly popular, so my number one tip is to create form letter templates on a word processor and save them somewhere. This way, every time you accept or reject an application you only have to rewrite a few parts of the letters between your characters. You will still need to invest some effort in the rest of your writing, however. If an applicant takes the time to write out a good roleplay post, it is polite for you to write out an equivalent post in reply, even if it takes you a while. Applicants will appreciate the time you spent developing stories in your thread (again, exchange threads are IC) and might even enjoy your writing enough to plan a new roleplay thread with you later.
My other tips in this area include:
- Process applications promptly when possible. Applicants will appreciate good treatment.
- Process multiple applications in one post whenever possible. This will minimize the number of posts that accumulate in a thread and reduce page count creep.
- When rejecting an application, clearly state the reasons for rejection so that the applicant can make appropriate corrections. This is especially true in cases where an applicant files an incomplete form or simply fails to read your rules and tries to apply for a facility containing a large helicopter squadron, tank battalion, or missile silo complex.
- In the event that your exchange breaks down or becomes inactive for long periods of time, consider launching a new exchange thread. Just be sure to import all of your existing facility date (i.e. who you approved and what spaces they claimed) into your new exchange thread and post a link to the previous one.
Organizing and Deploying Missions
If you have identified an NS nation in which you would like to have a permanent mission, find out if the player behind the account has set up an exchange program thread and take some time to read it if one exists. Before posting an application, ask yourself if you have any intention of roleplaying with the owner of the exchange program in the future. If the answer is no and you are simply a let’s-exchange-embassies-and-call-it-a-day fellow, please move on and refraining from claiming spaces that other players will actually roleplay with in the future.
Assuming that you are interested in roleplaying an exchange of missions, take some time to read their rules, find the application form template, and fill it out completely. Be sure to ask for a vacant lot and try not to flout regulations just to be cheeky. Most importantly, never display immaturity when submitting an application unless you want to receive this type of response. In determining what to say on your application form, ask yourself these types of questions:
- How important will this nation be to my canon? In other words, how much time do I want to invest in creating new characters and posting in this thread?
- How many people would my NS nation’s leaders want to send and who would they prefer to appoint based on what the host country is like in character?
- What sort of IC relationship do I expect my NS nation to have with the host nation?
- Does it make sense for my characters to hire locally?
- How many attachés should I send?
- How many vehicles will my personnel need?
- Based on how safe the host country is, what security measures do my characters need?
When determining what security measures are appropriate, remember that while ambassadors and envoys are very important people who need to be protected so they can perform their official duties, they are not heads of state. Likewise, while you do not want to see any of your chanceries and consulates suffer deliberate mishaps, you do not need an armored division to secure a diplomatic facility unless you just converted it into a command post for an invasion force. Some NS countries (e.g. Monavia and Alfegos) actually publish explicit prohibitions against designing facilities to resist military assaults, so full-perimeter fortifications, moats, landmines, and machine gun emplacements are not smart ideas. Please consult New Hayesalia’s detailed post on this topic for more in-depth information.
Generally speaking, a small cadre of armed guards will keep your facilities perfectly safe using little more than small arms (e.g. handguns, carbines, rifles, SMGs) and the occasional can of pepper spray or police baton. Most real-life countries have a national department, bureau, or agency that handles diplomatic security (e.g. the U.S. has its Diplomatic Security Service, the British have Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection, and the Russians have their Federal Protective Service). Regardless of whether you prefer to rely on soldiers, marines, gendarmes, specialized diplomatic security agents, or a combination of each, your guards need to meet stringent security clearance requirements since they will be responsible for destroying sensitive documents in the event of a major security breach. Diplomatic facility guards must also undergo special training in protocol since they may be called upon to perform ceremonial duties.
There are few ruder things you can do to someone who spent hours setting up a mission exchange than ignore the owner’s instructions and submit an invalid form on purpose. You end up wasting the other person’s time and clog up a thread that might be filled with other player requests. For example, back in the Jolt era, I posted an exchange program that contained only forty lots but some Hell-themed nation didn’t bother reading anything and simply submitted an ersatz application form requesting lot number 666. Upon informing him of his invalid submission, he simply ignored me.
If your facility application is approved, congratulations! The next step in the process is to roleplay your mission’s arrival in the host country. In many cases, you can simply make a single arrival post in the exchange thread and call it a day. In other cases, such as this one in which I got to roleplay a first contact scenario with another user who later joined my region, you can gain access to an excellent roleplaying opportunity.
CHAPTER 5
Diplomatic Law
Diplomatic Law
Overview
Diplomatic law comes from a variety of sources. As I previously wrote in Chapter 2, real-life diplomatic law is principally derived from the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Other major sources of diplomatic law include customary international law and country-specific legislation created to bestow appropriate legal status on foreign emissaries. Customary international law largely consists of norms and practices (such as the laws and customs of war or the sanctity of diplomatic personnel and visiting heads of state) that cultures throughout the world have traditionally honored for much of their respective histories. Diplomatic immunity and diplomatic asylum are two of the most hallowed legal principles that countries have created treaties to codify.
Diplomatic Immunity
Whenever one country sends emissaries to another country, the host country will typically grant the emissaries and their staff varying degrees of diplomatic immunity, which the U.S. Department of State defines as “a principle of international law by which certain foreign government officials are not subject to the jurisdiction of local courts and other authorities for both their official and, to a large extent, their personal activities.” In other words, it is a legal privilege which shields diplomats and their staff from detention, arrest, prosecution, civil liability, and a variety of other legal consequences for violating their host country’s laws and regulations.
Diplomatic immunity is an ancient legal concept rooted in the traditions of Greek city-states and the Roman Republic. The Mongols held the privileges of emissaries so sacrosanct that officials found guilty of mistreating foreign diplomats were severely punished and foreigners who mistreated Mongol diplomats found themselves gruesomely executed in response. As our friends at the State Department further explain, “In 1708, the British Parliament formally recognized diplomatic immunity and banned the arrest of foreign envoys. In 1790, the United States passed similar legislation that provided absolute immunity for diplomats and their families and servants, as well as for lower ranking diplomatic mission personnel.” Today most real-life countries abide by the immunity rules laid down by the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
While every NS nation has its own diplomatic immunity rules, many abide by the WA’s Diplomatic Protection Act (2008). In most countries, the head of a mission (i.e. an ambassador, envoy, or chargé d’affaires) and his or her spouse will be granted “full” immunity while emissaries of inferior rank, their close relatives, and diplomatic staffers will receive any number of inferior grades of immunity. For example, we have the Monavian government’s diplomatic immunity code:
Diplomatic immunity does not exist to provide diplomats with a license to flout laws and regulations or escape liability for the consequences of improper behavior, but rather exists to ensure that diplomats are free to perform the work their governments assign to them without having to worry about unnecessary interference from host country governments. Nonetheless, diplomatic immunity can be abused to the point that a host government will expel a rogue diplomat from its territory and declare him or her persona non grata (Lat. “person not appreciated,” i.e. banned from returning).
If a foreign diplomat performs a criminal act in his or her host country, the host country’s government can ask the sending country’s government to waive the offender’s immunity so that he or she can be prosecuted. Officials tend to be cautious about making such requests so that their own diplomats are not treated harshly in event of criminal misbehavior. Even if the sending country rejects a waiver request, the host country’s government can still cancel the offender’s visa.
Diplomatic Asylum
Real-life international law does not recognize a right to claim or enjoy asylum by entering diplomatic facilities. Having made this point, it is useful to note that customary international law does contain a principle known as non-refoulement “which forbids a country receiving asylum seekers from returning them to a country in which they would be in likely danger of persecution” (Wikipedia). While every country has its own asylum laws, it is generally accepted that a country cannot forcibly remove an asylum-seeker from an extraterritorial facility if the diplomatic mission domiciled there chooses to grant asylum. For some real-life examples, consult the 1954 OAS Convention on Diplomatic Asylum.
Diplomatic law comes from a variety of sources. As I previously wrote in Chapter 2, real-life diplomatic law is principally derived from the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Other major sources of diplomatic law include customary international law and country-specific legislation created to bestow appropriate legal status on foreign emissaries. Customary international law largely consists of norms and practices (such as the laws and customs of war or the sanctity of diplomatic personnel and visiting heads of state) that cultures throughout the world have traditionally honored for much of their respective histories. Diplomatic immunity and diplomatic asylum are two of the most hallowed legal principles that countries have created treaties to codify.
Diplomatic Immunity
Whenever one country sends emissaries to another country, the host country will typically grant the emissaries and their staff varying degrees of diplomatic immunity, which the U.S. Department of State defines as “a principle of international law by which certain foreign government officials are not subject to the jurisdiction of local courts and other authorities for both their official and, to a large extent, their personal activities.” In other words, it is a legal privilege which shields diplomats and their staff from detention, arrest, prosecution, civil liability, and a variety of other legal consequences for violating their host country’s laws and regulations.
Diplomatic immunity is an ancient legal concept rooted in the traditions of Greek city-states and the Roman Republic. The Mongols held the privileges of emissaries so sacrosanct that officials found guilty of mistreating foreign diplomats were severely punished and foreigners who mistreated Mongol diplomats found themselves gruesomely executed in response. As our friends at the State Department further explain, “In 1708, the British Parliament formally recognized diplomatic immunity and banned the arrest of foreign envoys. In 1790, the United States passed similar legislation that provided absolute immunity for diplomats and their families and servants, as well as for lower ranking diplomatic mission personnel.” Today most real-life countries abide by the immunity rules laid down by the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
While every NS nation has its own diplomatic immunity rules, many abide by the WA’s Diplomatic Protection Act (2008). In most countries, the head of a mission (i.e. an ambassador, envoy, or chargé d’affaires) and his or her spouse will be granted “full” immunity while emissaries of inferior rank, their close relatives, and diplomatic staffers will receive any number of inferior grades of immunity. For example, we have the Monavian government’s diplomatic immunity code:
§1: Eligibility: Ambassadors of all ranks, envoys, consuls, attachés, consular officers, honorary diplomatic officers, and foreign nationals employed at diplomatic facilities are eligible for diplomatic immunity. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs reserves the right to grant diplomatic immunity to other persons at its discretion. All eligible persons are free to invoke diplomatic immunity in connection with official actions not taking the form of violent crimes or actions calculated to injure the interests of the Monavian state.
§2. Grades of Immunity: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has established three grades of diplomatic immunity (full, partial, and limited). Ambassadors of all ranks, envoys, and consuls shall enjoy full immunity. Attachés, consular officers, honorary consuls, and administrative staff shall enjoy partial immunity. Consular staff, service staff, and security staff shall enjoy limited immunity.
A. Full immunity shall consist of freedom from detention apart from traffic stops, freedom from arrest, freedom from search of person and property, freedom from compulsion to testify in court, and immunity from prosecution for misdemeanors.
B. Partial immunity shall consist of freedom from detention apart from traffic stops, freedom from arrest, freedom from search of person and property, and freedom from compulsion to testify in court.
C. Limited immunity shall consist of freedom from detention apart from traffic stops, freedom from arrest, and freedom from search of person and property.
§3. Restrictions on Prohibited Persons: All persons who meet any of the criteria listed in this section shall be automatically declared persona non grata and deported no less than five days after exhausting all permitted appeals or choosing not to pursue appeals further.
A. Any foreign national who is convicted of a felony by a Monavian court.
B. Any foreign national who is deemed to represent a security threat to the Monavian Empire or its territories.
C. Any foreign national who is found to have been previously convicted of felonies in his or her home country and has not been pardoned (political crimes excepted).
§4. Traffic Laws: All diplomatic, support, and security personnel and their vehicles shall be subject to Monavian traffic laws. Pursuant to current Ministry of Transportation regulations, no local jurisdiction shall renew the registration of any diplomatic vehicle for which traffic violation fines remain unpaid. All jurisdictions that issue driving licenses can suspend or revoke the licensure of any person convicted of repeatedly violating traffic laws.
Diplomatic immunity does not exist to provide diplomats with a license to flout laws and regulations or escape liability for the consequences of improper behavior, but rather exists to ensure that diplomats are free to perform the work their governments assign to them without having to worry about unnecessary interference from host country governments. Nonetheless, diplomatic immunity can be abused to the point that a host government will expel a rogue diplomat from its territory and declare him or her persona non grata (Lat. “person not appreciated,” i.e. banned from returning).
If a foreign diplomat performs a criminal act in his or her host country, the host country’s government can ask the sending country’s government to waive the offender’s immunity so that he or she can be prosecuted. Officials tend to be cautious about making such requests so that their own diplomats are not treated harshly in event of criminal misbehavior. Even if the sending country rejects a waiver request, the host country’s government can still cancel the offender’s visa.
Diplomatic Asylum
Real-life international law does not recognize a right to claim or enjoy asylum by entering diplomatic facilities. Having made this point, it is useful to note that customary international law does contain a principle known as non-refoulement “which forbids a country receiving asylum seekers from returning them to a country in which they would be in likely danger of persecution” (Wikipedia). While every country has its own asylum laws, it is generally accepted that a country cannot forcibly remove an asylum-seeker from an extraterritorial facility if the diplomatic mission domiciled there chooses to grant asylum. For some real-life examples, consult the 1954 OAS Convention on Diplomatic Asylum.
![[ National Flag ]](https://i.imgur.com/7vADKOP.png){kind=link}
