Summit Diplomacy

Diplomacy at the Highest Level provides the first comprehensive analysis of the theory and practice of international summitry. The implications of the increased involvement of political leaders in international diplomacy is analyzed through case-studies of specific meetings and types of summit representing a broad historical, geographic and political spectrum. The volume also explains the development of high-level meetings from pre-modern times until the present day, the increase in summitry in the twentieth century and the advantages and disadvantages of summits for international politics and diplomacy.

This volume is a study on summit diplomacy (a meeting of high government officials for the purpose of conducting negotiations between nations) that is performed personally by the President of the United States. The author has outlined the history of presidential diplomacy but takes a closer view of the personal foreign relations efforts of Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower. In this country, individual Presidents have assumed varying degrees of personal participation in foreign affairs. Some have remained relatively aloof from relations with other countries, and their names rarely appear in the diplomatic records. Others are remembered for one or a few policy statements or international actions. A number of Presidents, and in certain cases, even Vice Presidents, have engaged in personal diplomacy of some consequence. To mention only a few, diplomatic history recounts the contributions of Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Polk, Cleveland, Truman, and Eisenhower. On the other hand, a few Presidents have played active if not decisive roles in diplomacy, occasionally virtually serving as their own Secretaries of State. Among these, in the present century, generally are included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

A study of the effectiveness of summitry as a means of diplomacy. Using the example of the 1945 Yalta conference between Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt, the author argues that heads of state make ineffective negotiators.

This work brings together a selection of articles written by Johan Kaufmann, which follows Kaufmann's career as a diplomat for the Netherlands, mainly involved in trade negotiations. Every article is prefaced by a brief introductory note, which sets out what the rationale is of including the article. The selection covers the following topics: International Negotiation Issues; the UN System; the NIEO and International Trade Policy. The work is an interesting collection of academically sound and interrelated pieces of work. The brief introductory notes to the essays are to the point and in Kaufmann's usual succinct style. The work is aimed at academics in the field of international law, international organizations and international relations.

This volume identifies and documents the summit meetings between Canadian Prime Ministers and US Presidents from 1923 to 1973. Cloaked in a rhetoric all their own, these meetings have become an integral part of the symbolic and decisional process between Canada and the United States. The editor has selected documents from these meetings that recreate not only the issues of concern to the two nations, but the atmosphere in which the meetings took place.

The proliferation of minilateral summits in the twenty-first century is reshaping how security-related diplomacy and international cooperation works, yet it remains an understudied and poorly understood phenomenon. In this groundbreaking work, Kjell Engelbrekt contrasts these relatively informal summits with the more formal UN Security Council to provide an authoritative assessment of their relative effectiveness, compatibility, and their impact on international security institutions.