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RelationsEuropean Journal of International

DOI: 10.1177/13540661080975572008; 14; 671European Journal of International Relations

Iver B. NeumannThe Body of the Diplomat

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The Body of the Diplomat1

IVER B. NEUMANNNorwegian Institute of International Affairs and Oslo University, Norway

Over the past two decades, the body has emerged as an increasinglyimportant focus of study in the social sciences generally, but little workhas been done on it in International Relations. Drawing on a disparate

yet voluminous literature on gender, as well as on Bourdieus analysis

of class, this article demonstrates the importance of gendered andclassed bodies within the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs(MFA). Part one, which is based on archival work and interviews, detailsthe emergence of women within the diplomatic service. In part two,

which is based on interviews and ethnographic data, I postulate the exis-tence of three masculinity scripts and three femininity scripts withinMFA discourse. I conclude that the gendering and classing of diplo-mats bodies is a constitutive factor of the MFA hierarchic order and sodifferentiates diplomats life chances. It follows that the body is of cru-cial importance to social life in at least one traditional site of IR study.

KEY WORDS diplomacy ethnography gender identity

profession

In order for the individual to appear in liberal theory as a universal figure, whorepresents anyone and everyone, the individual must be disembodied (CarolePateman, 1986: 8)

With very few exceptions (see esp. Saco, 1997 Weber, 1998), and despite its

status as a major locus of social theorizing, the body has yet to be made anobject of empirical study in International Relations. The body is the productof physiological, psychological and social forces (Mauss [1934] 1979). It fol-lows that any social science should attempt to account for how social forcesconstitute bodies, as well as for the social effects that constitution has.Drawing on the general literature of gender, extensive work in the archivesof the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and three and a half

European Journal of International RelationsCopyright 2008

SAGE Publications and ECPR-European Consortium for Political Research, Vol. 14(4): 671695

[DOI: 10.1177/1354066108097557]

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years of ethnographic study, this article aims to step into the breech by offer-ing a theory-driven and class-sensitive analysis of the production of mas-

culinities and femininities within a European diplomatic service.2

I identifynarratives or scripts about the body, discuss how they are appropriated andperformed by MFA diplomats, and conclude on the effects this has on theirlife chances. The hope is to inspire empirical research on how internationalrelations are necessarily embodied, and what differences that makes.

In 1905, the MFA of the newly sovereign Norwegian state had a handfulof recent female arrivals who were working as typists. A woman was firstlisted in the MFAs calendar in 1918. She was working as an archivist. By1960, of the 417 persons who were permanently employed, 124 were

women. However, only one of these was a diplomat, i.e. a permanentlyemployed civil servant in the foreign service with a duty to take up any postat home or abroad to which he (not she) was ordered. Today, the ratio ofmen to women is roughly 1:1, but the two are still quite unevenly distrib-uted throughout the organization, with women dominating as typists andmales as manual labourers. About one-third of the diplomats are women.

Two things are immediately clear: the Norwegian MFA is a genderedorganization, and that gendering has undergone interesting changes duringthe organizations centennial history. Furthermore, the gendering is not atyp-ical for a European country. The first female diplomat ever to head a foreignpost, Russias Aleksandra Kollontay, was appointed to Kristiania (now Oslo),Norway, in 1923 (Leira and Neumann, 2008). By World War II, women werebarred from serving as diplomats in a number of countries. The arrival offemale diplomats took place within living memory; as part of the research forthis article, I was indeed able to interview the third and fourth female diplo-mats in Norwegian history. Both were recently retired. Given this state ofaffairs, and given that the literature is very sparse indeed, I feel that any explo-ration of the gender of the diplomat should begin with the empirical questionWhere are the women? (Enloe, 1989). In our case, this means beginning

with an account of the break-down of diplomatic homosociality.3Songs are sung about the diplomat as hero (Sofer, 2000; Neumann,

2005). It has been observed time and again that the hero script is a genderedone. Consider, for example, Anne Campbells (1993: 30) argument that:

It is men, not women, who slay dragons and fight in defense of the innocent.The literary heroes of boys worlds are fearless worriers, flying aces, crimefighters. From Tom and Jerry to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, fromSuperman to Indiana Jones, it is males who both use and receive violence.

Where highly differentiated societies like the Norwegian one are concerned,discussions of gender which do not relate to matters of class have little pur-chase. Class involves questions of status, material inequality and group agency

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(Crompton, 1998: 1012). In a setting where the wage differential is fairlylow, as is class agency (the key trade union in the Norwegian MFA organizes

all employees, from the ambassador to the washerwoman), the emphasis fallson status.4 Within the MFA, class is important in at least two ways. First,being a foreign minister employee usually has a consolidating or furtheringeffect on ones social status in society at large. Civil servants in general, anddiplomats in particular, form a social elite. Traditionally, Europes ruling classruled among other things by dint of dominating top positions within thestate (the aristocracy until the mid-18th century, the bourgeoisies after-

wards). Inversely, reaching top positions within the state secured member-ship in the ruling class for those who did not start from there but reachedthat position as the result of class travel. For example, in the 18th century,people without rank routinely had nobility bestowed upon them as part ofreaching these positions. One may see a social remnant of this in how seniorcivil servants are routinely made commanders of the Norwegian State Order,St Olavs. To some degree, the nimbus of state occupation also rubbed offon non-professionals. In the case of Norway, employment in the central stateadministration has traditionally carried a social premium regardless of occu-pation. At least until the 1970s, being a chauffeur in the Foreign Ministry

was considered socially attractive within the confines of the working class,and being a typist in the Foreign Ministry was a socially acceptable career fora bourgeois woman where holding a similar job in a large private firm wouldnot have been. As these two examples suggest, the class narratives of employ-ment were highly gendered (there have been no female chauffeurs in the for-eign ministry and very few male typists). By the same token, the gendernarratives were highly classed. For example, to ask the question whether it

would be socially acceptable for a bourgeois male to work as a typist in theForeign Ministry is historically superfluous. Although men had manned thelower echelons of foreign ministries from their inception towards the end ofthe 19th century, in the early 20th century the idea that a male bourgeois

should hold such a position was moot.A second reason why class is key to a discussion of the gender of the diplo-

mat concerns the multiple and hierarchical nature of performing it. Researchon masculinities in modern and postmodern societies over the last couple ofdecades has highlighted how there is more than one way of being a man, andhow these ways are hierarchically ordered (the locus classicusis Pleck, 1981).Connell (1987: 183; 1995: 77) understands hegemonic masculinities as dis-cursively specific and idealized forms of masculinity. Research on femininitieshas had less to say about hierarchies in ethnically homogenous settings,

beyond stressing the general distinction between working and middleclass (but see Chowdhry and Nair, 2002). But this is enough to make thepoint here: In any organization of some size, where more than one class is

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represented, performance of gender (Butler, 1993) will be melded by ques-tions of class. Where diplomats are concerned, class becomes even more

interesting as a social marker in lieu of the lack of differentiation regardingability and, particularly since the 1970s, material wealth.5 Since the 1920s,nearly all hired diplomats have had academic training, and their life incomehas been roughly comparable (Neumann and Leira, 2005). In terms of dif-ferentiation, the result has been an historical weakening of the importance ofmaterial factors, with status becoming the more important as a differentiat-ing mechanism. To put the point more technically, as secondary socializationprocesses have become homogenized, the heterogeneous effect of primarysocialization in the family home and childhood neighbourhood and thehabitus it inscribes in the gendered body has become more important forsocial differentiation overall.

Social scientists often assume that in Scandinavia, class is of less importanceto social life than elsewhere. It is true that income differentials are low. If weturn to Bourdieu rather than to Marx for our understanding of class, how-ever, the point lies not in absolute but in relative difference, and in questionsof consumption as much as in questions of production. In the world ofdiplomacy, with its emphasis on etiquette, protocol and on how things aredone generally, the question of style pervades the social, the performance ofgender included. For Bourdieu (1984), questions of style and taste are notonly highly class-sensitive questions, but key factors in the constitution ofclass. The correlate is that as material discrepancies lose importance in theconstitution of class, habitus takes over.

I will start, then, by a historical presentation of the gendered hiring prac-tices of the MFA. I will then place these in their discursive context, before Igo on to discuss gendered life in the organization today.

The Arrival of Women: Wives, Typists, Diplomats

Before the 19th century and to a lesser degree afterwards, a number ofwomen tended to help their spouses in carrying out work which was sociallymarked as male. Diplomacy is no exception. In an age and a milieu where thesalonwas a key meeting place, diplomats wives played important roles asadministrators of events and facilitators of communication. To take but oneexample, when the Norwegian vice-consul to Kobe left town in 1906, a localEnglish-language newspaper wrote how:

Mr Koren was very popular in Kobe, and Mrs Koren had a very large circle ofadmirers and friends. A number of people came to Yokohama to see them off,

they having charmed every one by their quiet desire to please and warm appre-ciation. Mrs Koren is so unconsciously attractive that she is a natural help toher diplomat husband.6

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By the end of the 19th century, a few women worked as typists and onmenial chores. As elsewhere in working life (cf. Kessler-Harris, 1982), the

typewriter may stand as a symbol for an almost complete re-gendering of thelower writing ranks of the organization. As long as writing was an integralpart of diplomatic work, it was treated as handling of secrets, and women

were not let in on it. With the emerging practice of typewriting, which ledto a separation of the authorship of and the writing up of documents, at themargins of working life a new social space opened up for women. As a result,

when, in 1907, the Norwegian minister in Berlin petitioned the ForeignMinister for more hands, the Minister simply suggested that he turn to

women: This work power is cheap and has proven to be wholly satisfying.7

Note how this answer brings out the newness of having women in the organ-ization; the assessment is presented as an evaluation of a fresh phenomenon.It also led to something historically new, namely that typists which was tosay women came under a regime structurally similar to male employees,

where it was part of the legal job description to take up any post not only athome, but also abroad, to which she was ordered. Note that these werebourgeois women, often recruited by word of mouth, within closed and per-haps charmed social circles. They did not receive diplomatic training, how-ever. By 1960, of the 215 people permanently employed but with noobligation to move, 123 were women (Galtung and Ruge, 1965: 171). Atthe same time, of the 202 permanently employed with an obligation tomove, only one was a woman.

The immediate reason for this was legal. Norwegian women became legalpersons only in 1888 (Hernes, 1982: 16), hence could not be civil servantsbefore that. This was the normal European state of affairs. Formal laws needa specific rationality to be made and upheld. When parts of the discursiveorder are consecrated in formal laws, there exist deep-rooted and often moreor less explicit discursive elements on which legal rationality exists. Pateman(1989), Towns (2004) and others argue convincingly that by the 19th cen-

tury, woman and state were constituted in mutually exclusive terms:Nineteenth century woman thus consolidated as a being with characteristicsand capacities for action that were in direct opposition to those of the stateitself: as the state became one of reason and force, woman became entrenched

with emotion and weakness; as the state became one of science, woman becamefused with faith and religion; as the state turned self-interested, woman was castas selfless. In the bifurcation of rule of the 19th century depersonalizedrational-legal authority and coercive power woman became the object ofboth forms of rule. (Towns, 2004: 71)

The exclusion of women from the state was thus not only grounded in factorssuch as lack of training or general appropriateness, but in a metaphysics. Thishas significance for our argument, for discourses do not change in perfect

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synch with the legal orders they contain. When a law or set of laws ischanged, even if it happens as a result of erosion of the social and metaphys-

ical grounds upon which it rests, those grounds may still have a lingeringpresence in discourse and so remain a precondition for action even in lieu oflegal purchase. I will now demonstrate how the emergence of the femalediplomat may illustrate this.

The question of female civil servants was broached for the first time inParliament in 1891, and was kept on the agenda by womens organizations(Stendal, 2003: 548). The breakthrough came in 1912, as part of a whole-sale upgrading of womens rights (the following year, Norway became thefirst European country to introduce the womens vote). Whereas equality

was made the general principle for state employment, however, there werefive exceptions: members of the Kings council (i.e. ministers), parsons of thestate church, diplomatic and consulary positions, military positions and,finally, new areas that might be deemed sensitive. Of course, such exceptions

were ready targets for a continuation of the campaign for womens rights. Inthe MFA archive, one will find a number of letters from sundry organiza-tions.8A new breakthrough came in 1928, when the Norwegian WomensNational Council launched a campaign in favour of female ministers.

Whereas the target was the first of the five exceptions, the Ministry for Lawand Police topped their answer by conceding also on the third, finding thatit with no hesitations may take one more step . . . so that women may beallowed to be diplomatic and consulary civil servants.9 Once the case foundits way from Cabinet to the Norwegian parliament, however, it had becomea question of removing allthe exceptions to state employment. In a country

with a Protestant state church and a well-organized Christian lobby, theattempt to change the law became stranded on resistance not to female diplo-mats, but to female state-employed parsons. A comparative perspective bringsout the contingency of the religious factor, however, for in the same year(1934), a lawsuit on female diplomats passed in Denmark, and was narrowly

defeated in the UK. Decoupled from the question of female church minis-ters, Norwegian women became legally entitled to be diplomatic and con-sulary civil servants by law on 24 June 1938. In France, this had happenedin 1929; in Britain, it happened in the wake of World War II.10 During thefollowing decades, the legal barrier to female diplomats was done away withthroughout Europe.

Social resistance in and out of the MFA was another matter. In 1916, awomens organization complained to the MFA that No matter how clevershe may be, a woman cannot expect to wield influence on the outcome of a

case.11 The letter was distributed internally and made subject to ridiculingannotations. Why should she serve in the commission, then? read one, andanother had the answer: In order to be silent in the assembly. Individual

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women who questioned the MFA about the possibility of becoming diplomatswere told in no uncertain terms that chances were slim.12When the permanent

under-secretary was asked by a journalist whether any of his female employeeswere suited for a career as a diplomat, he answered in the negative.13

Female Diplomat No. 1

Once it was clear that the lawsuit would be carried, however, the ForeignMinister decided to act, and saw to it that one of the typists in the organ-ization was accepted into the diplomatic academy in the spring of 1938,

which gave her the rank of temporary secretary. There was immediate resist-ance from within the Ministry. In the 1930s, training was usually initiated

with a short stint abroad, where the new secretary served as an attach. TheForeign Minister turned to Norways Legation in Italy and asked whether ithad any objections.14As it turned out, the head of the Legation had five ofthem, one of which is of particular interest: As seen from Italy, it wouldappear utterly strange for a lady to be registered (anmeldt) as an attach.

Amongst the many hundred names in the Italian diplomatic list, there is nolady. . . . From an administrative point of view, it seems unfortunate to havea younger assistant outrank an elder at the same legation.15 The latter pointis of particular interest, for it draws on the discursive precondition that

female diplomats is an oxymoron, and also implies that it would be out ofplace, ill-advised and, ultimately, uncivilized (cf. Towns, 2004) to field sucha phenomenon. In a word, the point demonstrates general resistance tore-categorization.

The Foreign Minister accepted that it would seem foreign to Italians toreceive a female attach. Since this might cause problems for the Legations

work, he withdrew his suggestion.16 The first woman diplomat served herstint abroad in London instead. It emerges from her autobiography that theItaly incident was not an isolated one. For example, it was customary for the

new hands to be congratulated by the Permanent Undersecretary.Rather than being congratulated, she was given the cold shoulder: He wasan old bachelor, with no feel for new trends. He advertised in no uncertainterms that he found my budding career to be an abnormity (Rder,1975: 112).

As so many pioneer women, the first Norwegian female diplomat wastreated like matter out of place. She passed her exam in April 1939, andserved with distinction at the MFA in exile during World War II. She even-tually married a male Norwegian diplomat and left the service at the end of

the war. Her obituary details what follows:After the War, she became Norways hostess. First in Brussels, whereJ.G. Rder [her husband] became head of Legation in 1949, then in Madrid

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from 1953 on. As of 1958, she was the Permanent Undersecretarys wife hereat home [in Oslo], and from 1965 to 1973 she was the ambassadors wife[ambassadrise] in Rome.17

Norwegian female diplomat no. 1 eventually arrived in Rome, but as theambassadors wife, not as a diplomat or an ambassador in her own right.

Female Diplomat No. 2

From 1945 to 1958, the situation was the same as it had been before 1938:There were no Norwegian female diplomats. And once again, this changedas a result of political intervention, not as a result of any move taken from

within the MFA itself. In 1954, Labour MP and head of ParliamentsForeign Affairs Committee, Finn Moe, raised the issue in the Storting.

Although Moe did not get the backing of his Foreign Minister, pressuremounted. Once again, the diplomats resisted change. A journalist asked theHead of Administration why there were no female diplomats. He stated thathe was not opposed on principle (which would have been an untenable pos-ition, given that the possibility of female access was now the letter of thelaw), but gave the following answer:

A woman may leave a nice position and become her husbands wife, but what

man would give up his calling and become his wifes husband? TheAmericans have a woman career diplomat [in Oslo] today, Miss Willis. But mark this: MissWillis.18

The form seems dated, the problematique is not. A female diplomat who wasdoing quite well left the service in 2005 for the express reason that her part-ner did not want to accompany her abroad. Coming from her interview withthe admissions board, Kathrine, who was living with a foreigner, told me thatthey asked me if I would ditch my partner, I thought that rather cheeky.I asked Hattie, who also lived with a foreigner and had been up before the

board the year before, if she had been asked. First she said no, but then itturned out that they had indeed asked what her partner thought of herapplying. I have met a handful of foreign female diplomats posted to Oslothat have brought their husbands, a Canadian ambassador included. Withoutexception, the issue comes up in conversation and quite obviously makes fordifferent kinds of social complications.

The acceptance of woman no. 2, Kirsten Ohm, in 1958 followed a poli-tical campaign that was covered by the newspapers. Norwegian female diplo-mat no. 2 had a successful career, peaking as Norways first female

ambassador in 1975 (to the European Council in Strasbourg, a minorEuropean post).

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Female Diplomat No. 3, etc.

Following further pressure from politicians and newspapers, woman no. 3

was accepted by the diplomatic academy in 1963. She had a successful career,finishing as ambassador. There were complications, however. She got mar-ried in 1965, to a student, and had a child. Here was a three times new situ-ation: a married female diplomat, who was a mother, and a breadwinner.

When diplomats go on a new tour, they are entitled to a number of stan-dardized payments, all of which have since the 1970s been specified in adetailed agreement between the Norwegian state and the MFA employees.The drawing up of these rules has a long and thoroughly gendered history.Before 1919, neither diplomat salaries nor their reimbursements were stan-

dardized. When standardization began in that year, it was on the principle thatmarried diplomatic ministers should receive more than unmarried, and those

with children more than those without. This principle was contested through-out the interwar period, and the debates surrounding these questions give usa fairly detailed picture of a key aspect of the gendered male diplomat, namelythe breadwinner. In 1927, the argument in favour of paying the father more

was as follows:

Ministers with children have more mouths to feed, are in need of more space.The children should be fed, and as long as they are little, more servants are

needed. The situation becomes still more challenging as the children grow up.The minister will have to give his daughters an upbringing equivalent to hisposition, and doing this abroad usually means incurring high costs. When theyreach the age when it is time to be introduced as a debutante, money spent onclothes will increase significantly. Where the sons are concerned, the minister

will naturally wish to have them raised as good Norwegian citizens, whichmeans either hiring a Norwegian teacher or sending them to school in Norway.Either way, it costs good money.19

Norwegian female diplomat no. 3 faced a double challenge. First, the letter

of the laws and regulations. Whereas the social democratic welfare state paidits married male diplomats abroad money to pay for their wives keep andno questions asked, a married woman diplomat would only be paid if thehusband were unable to work for medical reasons. If the husband was able-bodied, the woman diplomat was to be treated legally as if she were a non-married woman. And being single meant not being entitled to a whole stringof extra payments. Norwegian female diplomat no. 3 petitioned a key femalesocial democrat MP about this. She proved to be no sister, answering baldlyafter three and a half months that it was fair enough that there was a speci-

fied foreign service payment for the wife, who has to move and take onextensive duties of representation. Perhaps it would be even harder getting

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more women employed in the foreign service, if we were to be totallyschematic in our approach to equality?20

A second problem was how the administration handled the case. Her sus-tained series of reminders and creative suggestions for how this could be han-dled notwithstanding, the administration did not make any effort tointerpret the regulations in a way that would be advantageous for the onemarried Norwegian female diplomat. It was only at the behest of the ForeignMinister, to whom she had successfully appealed, that she received the samepayments as other (i.e. male) married diplomats. Furthermore, once her hus-band ended his studies and gained employment, the administration promptlymoved to take away from her those payments that she had actually beengranted.21We may draw an historical line here, from the passive resistance ofmale diplomats to the idea of female diplomats, via the cold welcomeextended to the pioneer, to this lack of interest in making the homosocialrules and regulations fit the actually existing heterosocial situation.22 Thereis also a double break, however, for once the case became widely known, itled to a change in the rules in the direction of full equality between the sexesin this regard. Furthermore, a group of young diplomats backed the case andpetitioned the administrative department on her behalf. This is the firstinstance I have found of male diplomats making an effort to ease the struc-tural conditions for female diplomats. It was a rearguard action, limited topointing out that it would be unfair to deny her equal treatment given thatdecisions which constitute the principle of full equality in the service wereabout to get into force.23

The early 1970s mark the coming of female diplomats in earnest. It was asmall constitutive strand in the breakthrough for womens rights whichaccompanied the massive entry of female baby-boomers into the workforce.Female diplomat no. 4 was accepted into the academy in 1969, no. 5 in1971, and no. 6 in 1972. With the exception of no. 6, who quit soon after

joining, they all had successful careers, peaking as ambassadors. In 1974,

three women were accepted; all went on to brilliant careers peaking asambassadors and top home jobs. They sometimes had a cold coming of it,however. One of them told me how, while in the academy, the whole yearattended a conference. At the luncheon, there were empty chairs, and word

went out to the attachs that they should fill in (diplomats are sticklers forform; empty chairs at a meal are not done). When the three womenattempted to follow orders, however, they were held back with a not you.Once one of them arrived at her first posting, to Latin America, she was toldby the head of the legation that she would not be taken seriously, where-

upon she was, in her own words locked into my office for three months.In 1976, one woman was accepted into the academy, and then from 1977,

about one-third of the attachs in each academy year were women. From the

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early 1990s, about half were women, with women making up the majorityfor the first time in 2003. By then, there were almost 200 Norwegian female

diplomats, making up about one-third of the entire corps. During the lastcouple of years, the percentage of women becoming head of section has beenroughly the same as for men, and it has taken about the same time (1012

years). The number of heads of department has, however, been very lowindeed, and there has yet to be a female ambassador in a key posting. At regu-lar intervals, Parliament distributes letters to Norwegian Ministries about theimportance of female representation (with at least 40 percent being adeclared goal for each specific unit). The newspapers take up the call, pub-lishing articles about under-representation of women amongst Norwegianambassadors. At the time of writing, one-quarter (28 out of 108) of those

with ambassadorial rank are women.To sum up so far, changes have come due to the imbrication of the MFA in

general statesociety relations and has been regularly resisted by the apparatus.

The Rearguard Action of the Homosocial Diplomat

As women entered the world of diplomacy as wives, typists and diplomats,the homosocial male diplomat was enmeshed in an increasingly complex webof heterosocial relations. His reaction was to try to salvage as much as pos-

sible of the homosocial arena. Older males continue the hunt for homosocialspace to this day. In 2005, I was invited to present the findings of my centenaryhistory of the MFA to a lunch meeting of the so-called group of pensionersin the MFA. This group consists solely of people who reached the rank ofambassadors during their active service. Of the 30 people present, two were

women nos 3 and 4. I made an interview appointment. During the inter-view, a key theme was how they had felt socially isolated on their postingsabroad. Then no. 4 said:

So we had a weaker network, you were not automatically included, you did not

go out for a beer, no, then we were not there, it was nice enough, at officialfunctions, always, but never in a pub, then they wanted to be by themselves. After that luncheon thing, then there were people going out for a beer after-

wards, but we were not asked (men vi ble jo ikke spurt).Self: So the boys still do it like that?No. 4: the men stick together they meet with their spouses and I do

not have a spouse.24

It is widely known that ones academy year remains important to diplomatsthroughout their careers, until death do them apart. In the nomadic world

of diplomacy, where the group of people with whom you work is changingevery third year or so, the cohort of your academy year is your social home.It is a group on which you depend for information, rumours (very important

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in the world of diplomacy), social support and even support when you applyfor new postings. That early women diplomats were cut off from this vital

resource throughout their career as a result of homosocial rearguard action,is a key finding.As it turned out, however, their social exclusion does not seem to have

remained constant throughout their professional lives. Both underlined howthey had been taken well care of during their early years, not least by oldermale colleagues. What happened? I asked. Perhaps it was easier to relate tous when there were only a few of us. Once tokenism had given way to blockrecruitment of female diplomats, it seems, homosocial rearguard actionincreased.25

Three Masculinities

The model of maleness among male Norwegian diplomats at the outset ofthe 20th century was the standard European bourgeois one, with aspirationsto emulate the nobility (of the three key founders of the Norwegian MFA onthe diplomatic side, two were noble and the third was the son of HenrikIbsen, another solid source on this type of masculinity). The bodily com-portment should be relaxedly authoritative, hair should be short and slightlypomaded, the shirt should be white and rich in cotton, to be worn with a tieor a bow-tie, the shoes should be black and shining, the suit should be dark,

with optional pin-stripes. Social life was centred on the dinner party, the visit,and the outing; a masculine bourgeois was taught from boyhood how to per-form on these occasions. A key reason why the inheritor of this masculinityis still hegemonic in diplomacy, arguably more so than in many other con-temporary social settings, is that diplomatic social life is still formatted in this

way. A measured and easy use of the body at meals and during introductions,a measured dose of interest in topics under discussion and an ability to easethe flow of conversation were at a premium.

Nationalism in Norway took the shape of farmers demanding more parlia-mentary representation and better social positions, which meant that the civilservant families usually easily identifiable by their names, which were eitherforeign-sounding (like Tank) or well-known elite family names (like Galtung),came under attack. State personnel changed, beginning with the new class ofschool teachers which was basically of farmer stock and then spreading upthrough the ranks (Slagstad, 1998, Neumann, 2002).

With the coming of a social democratic government in the 1930s and thenation-building experience of World War II, this wave finally reached the apex

of the state structure, as a handful of men with a rural or working-class back-ground were accepted by the diplomatic academy. They embarked on a class

journey, but their habitus often continued to mark them as hierarchically

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subordinate, of which some were self-reflective. Consider this autobiographicalaccount of how one of the first arrived at his first post abroad in 1956:

My new boss told me during our first interview that you will address me asYou [the polite form of the pronoun, cf. French vous] or Minister26 I toldhim about myself and my experiences, among other things as a farmer and asailor, a background that was very foreign to him. A lot of what he consideredhis birthright and wholly natural, were things that I had to learn. After a whilehe nodded and said: So everything may be learnt! He took it as his task to teachme as much as possible, major things as well as minor ones. He usually did notdo it directly, but rather by telling a story. Once he lit my cigarette. I let himdo it, and thanked him. Then he told me a story from his posting in Cairo. Thelocal British governor had been in conversation with a young secretary. When

the secretary brought out a cigarette, the governor lit a match. But when thesecretary stooped to light up, the governor let go of the match, which fell tothe floor. Moral: When an older person of higher rank lights a match for you,

you should not let him light your cigarette, but rather take the match and lighthis! When I appeared at the office unshaven, he used the same pedagogicalmethod. (Svennevig, 1996: 356)

A diplomat from rural Western Norway, a part of the country that remainssocially distinct in terms of language and social mores like religion, told me that

when he entered the MFA in the mid-1960s, there was only one person frommy milieu there from before. He told me how, as late as in 1993, when theForeign Minister wanted the MFA to put on a populist face with a view to theupcoming referendum on the EU, the Foreign Minister had summoned himand three other senior dialect-speakers to his office, greeting them with the

words: and here come the peripheries (og her kommer distriktene). By then,however, the peripheries and other non-civil servant social locations were wellrepresented in the lower and middle echelons of the organization. One Mondayin the MFA I chanced upon three males in their early fifties in one of the cor-ridors, and joined them in conversation. They were all wearing coloured shirts.

One of the males recounted how he had spent a long weekend on his homefarm (p hjemgrden; it is a tell-tale diacriticon of the upwardly mobile thatthey are going home to farms which either have not been their home sincetheir teens or on which they have never lived but have spent summers fromchildhood due to their fathers having been born there). The other two recip-rocated with stories about their home farms. There we are, my colleagueBernhard said and looked at me, farmers all (Se der, bnder alle sammen).

The number of people with a non-upper middle class background whoentered Norwegian diplomacy began to increase in the mid-1960s, and

increased further in the 1970s, until by 2002, a round of interviews with theacademy cohort showed them to be in a clear majority. The best character-ization I have come across of these two masculinities, highly culturally specific

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and, in line with the point made earlier, highly implicit, was delivered by aNorwegian foreign policy journalist, who stated that people who were

accepted into the diplomatic academy were either rovers or the brightestyoung things from the Oslo west end.27 Rovers are senior boy scouts andguides who diligently keep on leading youngsters. The reference is to small-townish or suburban straight-lacedness and lack of frivolity, to the bookishbut multiple-talented from the middle layers. Oslo is sharply socially dividedbetween an east end of apartment blocks and small houses, and a west endof roomy apartments and villas.

If we follow Bourdieu, the habitusof the upwardly mobile class of whichthe rovers are clearly a part, and which he refers to as the petite bourgeoisie,is first of all characterized by a certain rigidity:

It is no accident that the adjective small (petit) or one of its synonyms can beapplied to everything the petit bourgeois says, thinks, does, has or is, even tohis morality, although that is his strong point: strong, and rigorous, its formal-ism and scruples always make it somewhat tense, susceptible and rigid. With hispetty cares and petty needs, the petit bourgeois is indeed a bourgeois writsmall. Even his bodily hexis, which expresses his whole objective relation tothe social world, is that of a man who has to make himself small to pass throughthe straight gate which leads to the bourgeoisie: strict and sober, discreet andsevere, in his dress, his speech, his gestures and his whole being, he always lacks

something in stature, breadth, substance, largesse. (Bourdieu, 1984: 338)

The upper middle class can take more for granted. Bourdieus class scriptsand Connells masculinity scripts paired up nicely in the MFA of the earlypost-war years, where the confluence between class and masculinity washigh. The hierarchy of class was also a hierarchy of masculinities. We mayspeculate how these scripts map onto the specific social world of diplomacy.Elsewhere (Neumann, 2005), I have argued that there are two hierarchicallyordered hero scripts at work in the world of diplomacy; the script of themediator (who stands out by doing something exemplary in exceptional cir-

cumstances) and the script of the bureaucrat (who stands out by doing some-thing exemplary again and again in everyday circumstances). It stands toreason that the upper middle class male will be drawn to and more effort-lessly live out the script of the mediator, whereas the rigidity of the upwardlymobile will go better with the script of the bureaucrat. It is, for example, notsurprising that the only permanent undersecretary who has reached the pos-ition as a result of a class voyage also stands out both in the series ofNorwegian permanent undersecretaries and in the series of European per-manent undersecretaries as being more bureaucratic.

As it happens, the hierarchy of the two masculinities has been somewhatdestabilized over the last quarter of a century by the arrival of a third mas-culinity to the MFA. In terms of Connells masculinity scripts, we have here

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a troublemaking masculinity, the baby boomers of the student movements ofthe 1960s what is known in Norwegian as a 68-er (the reference being

to the student revolt in Paris that year, an occurrence with which these peo-ple tried to associate). Understood as a masculinity, the 68-er had his pred-ecessors the beats of the 1950s and the cultural radicals of the interwarperiod, certain literaribefore World War I but in the context of the MFA,he was definitely new, and definitely trouble. As elsewhere in society, he hada destabilizing effect. First, they were a many-classed group. By embodyinga mix of the habitithat separated the other two masculinities, they broughtdisorder to the clear hierarchy of masculinities. For example, some usedcoloured shirts which were definitely not rich in cotton, but hailed from civilservant class families. As Alice, a librarian, reminisced to me about one ofthem: And the clotheshe was wearing! I dont think he ever washed them.Upon further questioning, it turned out that Alice, who had an upper mid-dle class background, was not troubled by the clothes as such, but by the factthat this particular man should have known better than to wear them in theMFA. To her, it was a case of letting the side down. To the analyst, it is a caseof hierarchy destabilization between classed masculinities.

To sum up, at present, three masculinities may be broadly identified withinthe Norwegian MFA. The dominating one is what we may refer to as tradi-tional civil servant masculinity. The subordinate one is the more rigidlybureaucratic of the upwardly mobile male (the rover). The third, poten-tially a trouble-making one, was pioneered by 68-ers and has, with the wan-ing of that cohort from the scene, transmuted into a more generalizedintellectual and many-classed masculinity. These masculinities basically sus-tain one another, with non-diplomatic masculinities playing a decidedlyminor role. Where the hierarchy of femininities is concerned, however, thisis very different.

Three FemininitiesAll the early Norwegian female diplomats shared an upper middle class back-ground, but once female diplomats entered in force from the latter half ofthe 1970s onwards, the class hierarchy within the MFA was already beingdedifferentiated. While class still seems to be an ordering principle of femi-ninities within the MFA, working in the same way as for masculinities, otherfactors seem to be equally if not more important. This may be due to how

womens class voyages in Europe in the 20th century have generally tendedto be significantly more frictionless than those of males (womens status

being traditionally derived from that of their male head of family; Ortner andWhitehead, 1984). My material points to two such factors in particular: thedegree in which women tend to pitch their imperative status as eitherwoman

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or diplomat, and relations between the three subject positions diplomat,spouse and typist.28 Regarding the former, consider the following clash

between two pensioned female Norwegian diplomats reminiscing abouttheir career. No. 3 is wearing cropped grey hair, a turtleneck, corduroys andsensible shoes. No. 4, who wears a bob, a necklace, a business suit, stockingsand pumps, has just introduced her experiences as ambassador to Moroccoin the early 1980s.

No. 4: Moroccans are really very hospitable and empathetic, and I had somerespect for how the gents (herrene) retreated after supper, so there I stood,fidgeting a bit and talking to my Nordics [my Nordic opposite numbers] andtried to get something out of the conversation, but then they, too, had to join

the gents and I thought once a lady, always a lady.No. 3 (frowning): Even as ambassador you had to join the ladies?No. 4 (throwing her hair to one side): Yes, but I did it a little out of respect

for the culture, like, and then I could meet ladies who said, Are you an ambas-sador? Then you must meet my husband who is a governor, and then theyfetched the governor and we were introduced

No. 3 (leaning forward): But if you had marched in on the men, what wouldhave happened then?

No 4: Well, then I think I would have turned many against me, and if youget the women against you, then you get the men against you as well.

No. 3 (clearly engaged): Really, you mean the spouses, these ambassadorswomen, then? (kvinnene til disse ambassadrene, da?)No. 4: Yes, I shouldnt, like, be with their men they have this man/woman

aspect.No. 3: But that is still rather hair-raising?[Pause (three seconds)]No. 3 (with finality): Your rank as ambassador wasnt respected at all.No. 4: Yes, but here we have to draw a line between when you are in con-

texts where you are clearly marked as ambassador, then of course you were withthe men, with your colleagues, but when it was a bit social (shooting herchest forward and bobbing her shoulders lightly from side to side) I bothbowed and curtseyed for the King, no problem there.

No. 3: But then it was Norway that bowed and curtseyed.No. 4: I thought why not curtsey, and then I added a little bow (chuckles

mutedly).No 3: As long as you did not do a full reverence, I suppose we will have to

let it pass (s fr det vre i orden).29

Here we have juxtaposed two different strategies. To no. 4, gender is a givenand imperative status: once a lady, always a lady. This goes not only for self,

but also for other. She privileges relations with other women and deem rela-tions with males to be derivative of those all-feminine relations: I wouldhave turned many against me, and if you get the women against you, then

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you get the men against you. This makes for a clear self-ascriptive role hier-archy: woman first, diplomat next. She pitches herself as a woman who hap-

pens to be a diplomat. Where no. 3 is concerned, all these points may bereversed. The main self-ascription is as a diplomat (more specifically, as anambassador), who relates to others first and foremost in their role of rankedfellow diplomats. Diplomat first, woman next. She pitches herself as a diplo-mat who happens to be a woman. The issue here is not whether these strat-egies are more or less professional or more or less gendered; both are aimedat getting the job done, and both are self-reflexively gendered. We have heretwo different femininities: the woman-first-diplomat-next and the diplomat-first-woman-next. The finding confirms Spike Petersons (1992) theoreticalargument that what appears at first to be simply adding women (as anempirical gesture) turns out to be more complicated.

Since there was an inherent tension between the statuses woman anddiplomat, the strategic choices made by individual women in the MFA wereover-determined: with no other choice than to privilege one status overanother.30We may therefore treat these strategies as scripts emanating fromdiscourse. Since the immediate circle of recognition (Ringmar, 1996) of the

woman-first-diplomat-next femininity is other women and its general circleof recognition is gendered persons generally, this is a script which ascribes alot of action to relations with non-diplomats like other diplomats wives andMFA typists. I worked with a woman-first-diplomat-next for two years. Sheused to call me into her office to show me particularly dramatic sunrises (inthe Oslo winter, they occur around commencement of work). Always smil-ing, her conversation was about her children, travels, shopping, stuff markedfeminine in general discourse. When she applied for a posting that she didnot get, she immediately ascribed it to her being a woman. I heard her dis-cuss this with our typist at length. It also came up during one luncheon,

when I was the only male present. My impression is that she discussed thiswith all her women acquaintances in the organization, and with males whom

she felt respected her as a woman.It is not surprising that a femininity premised on stuff marked feminine in

discourse will evoke reactions marked masculine in that same discourse. Onthe contrary, if these are mutually constitutive categories, this is a necessityfor discourse to have a certain permanence (and we know that it does). Itturns out that there may be hefty career costs to the femininity woman-first-diplomat-next. First, as seen from the exchange quoted above, it easilyevokes the ire of a competing femininity, the diplomat-first-woman-next,

who may see her actions as letting the side down, in casuby acting so that

ones diplomatic rank is bracketed. There is logic to this reaction, for by priv-ileging gender as her imperative social status, the woman-first-diplomat-nextnecessarily disprivileges not only her own professional status, but also the

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professional status of other women. When, for the first time in history, twoNorwegian female diplomats served at the same post abroad, one as an

ambassador, one being on her first post, something happened that wasunprecedented in the history of Norwegian diplomacy. The junior womansent a long and damning memo on her boss back to the MFA, and when thememo did not have the desired effect, she left in a huff. I asked the head ofadministration at the time how this could be, and he said, Youknow, women. One obvious reading of this is that it reproduced a male(and, arguably, a general) stereotype, namely that women will quarrel(cf. Kanter, 1977: 220).

A second cost of the woman-first-diplomat-next femininity concerns howit is premised on a fair amount of social recognition from non-diplomats inand out of the organization. The time and social capital used on gaining thesocial recognition of non-diplomats may not be relevant to gaining the socialand professional recognition of fellow diplomats, which is to say that thisbehaviour may be professionally wasted and even counterproductive. A thirdcost is that acting out a femininity premised on general social discourse ongender invites general social male reactions. Given that general social dis-course operates on a hierarchical principle with males being privileged, the

woman-first-diplomat-next confirms and perpetuates that hierarchy, to herown loss as well as to the loss of women who embody other femininities.This, however, is an analytical point that would be contested by the woman-first-diplomat-next. I was talking to a group of women in the academy aboutthese things during French classes. It is nice to be a woman, said Ginny,women have more to play on (mer spille p). This as she tilted her head toone side and slightly back, showed all her upper teeth and let her lowershoulder swing discreetly back. In the short run, perhaps Ginny is right. Inthe long run, probably not.

There are costs to being a diplomat-first-woman-next as well, however, forby making male diplomats your circle of recognition and insisting that as a

diplomat, you are just the same as the boys, means to accept playing andbeing umpired on terms that are masculine, and so not your own. There isan inevitable glitch between a male diplomats masculinity and a womansimpersonation of masculinity which puts the diplomat-first-woman-next at adisadvantage.

Since the late 1970s, there has existed a third femininity in the MFA.Where dress, hair and make-up are concerned, these women are much moreunderstated than the woman-first-diplomat-next, but they tend to be moredressed up than the diplomat-first-woman-next. Where the former activates

her status as woman on a continual basis and the latter is equally persistentin toning it down, this new femininity activates the status woman on a tac-tical basis, due to situational demands. This femininity relates to wives and

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secretaries on a sister basis, but they privilege relations with other diplo-mats, male or female. There relations are not sister based; gender solidarity

is not deemed of value beyond its instrumental uses. For example, whenasked explicitly whether any of the two hundred female diplomats who hadbeen accepted into the MFA after them had sought their advice on how tobe a woman in the diplomat service, female diplomats nos 3 and 4 answered

with a firm no. The new femininitys circle of recognition is diplomats,regardless of gender. I worked with one such female diplomat for two years.One day, she came beaming back from a course on leadership. I asked whatthe good news was. They gave me a male mentor. I am not interested inthese womens networks, I have women contacts already. What I need aremale contacts. This is the femininity that dominates committee work onequality within the MFA administration as well as in its trade organizations.It is self-consciously instrumental and career oriented. This makes for tensions

with other femininities. For example, Bertha, a diplomat-first-woman-nextwho was about to receive her first ambassadorship, complained to me thatsome of the younger women used the trade unions to boost the number of

women ambassadors. When I retorted that boosting the number of femaleambassadors was a state goal, she readily agreed, but pointed out that this

would happen by itself in due course. This conflict has logic. It is not sur-prising that, upon reaching her goal of becoming an ambassador, this diplo-mat-first-woman-next, who had bided her time and insisted on not fieldingthe issue of gender, would find it awkward to share the honour with others

whom she saw as having reached the same goal on a quota basis.If we compare the three diplomat femininities in the MFA to its three mas-

culinities, one striking feature is the degree to which they are differentlyclassed. Whereas only one of the masculinities, the intellectual one, is many-classed, this goes for all three femininities. The woman-first-diplomat-next,for example, comes in an upper middle, a petite bourgeoise and even a work-ing class variant. For an example of the latter, take Tracy, a woman who

favoured tight pants, large belts, a lot of make up and brightly coloured hair.She hailed from a small countryside community, and used to introduce her-self on the phone by the name of that community. We were talking about her

work as a supervisor in the academy, and she said: Many of these new onesare so clever, some of them have doctoral degrees and things. What I thinkis important for them to learn is to be nice and kind (god og snill).

We may now ask the same question of the MFAs three femininities thatwe asked of its masculinities, namely, what is the hierarchical order betweenthem? Since the difference between the woman-first-diplomat-next and the

diplomat-first-woman-next turns on the question of on what grounds femalediplomats should first and foremost be judged as women or as diplomats this difference is undecidable on its own terms. The scripts invite recognition

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from different groups on different terms. The new femininity aims to combinethe advantages of the other two femininities and cut the costs. A dialectician

would argue that it is a synthesis of the other two femininities, a third wavefeminist would perhaps see it as a destabilisation of the universal category ofwoman. At the beginning of its life cycle, this new femininity had the marksof a troublemaking script, but the demands fielded were met, and so itspelled success rather than trouble for those who made this script their own.It is a subject position that fits very well the concept of the person held outby neo-liberal discourse in which Norwegian diplomacy is embedded. Small

wonder that it seems to be gaining ground at the cost of the other two, andcomes across as increasingly dominant.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we may ask how the six gendered scripts map onto the two hier-archically ordered hero scripts for being a diplomat the script of the spectac-ular hero the mediator and the script of the everyday hero thebureaucrat. Where the script of the mediating hero is concerned, only three ofthe six seem to fit. The upwardly mobile male script seems too derivatively rigid,the woman-first-diplomat-second script too professionally unfocused and thediplomat-first-woman-next script too self-effacing. That leaves the scripts oftraditional civil servant masculinity, intellectual masculinity and new femininity.

To conclude, the traditional civil servant masculinity script has the unbeat-able advantage of being the only gendered diplomatic script to be fully com-patible with both hero scripts. Like the hero jazz musician, the traditionalcivil servant can keep up the basic beat on an everyday basis, and then soarabove the others when room opens up for a solo. Intellectual masculinity andnew femininity have greater difficulty combining the steady beat of theeveryday with the effortless solo. Being too oppositional, intellectual mas-culinity has problems keeping up the beat. Being too tactical, the new femi-

ninity has problems with the timing. To stay in the jazz lingo, since she is notable to take for granted the continuation of the music in the way that thetraditional civil servant male is, she is not loose in the same way, whichmeans that trying a solo will be more risky and the chances of failing if doingso will be higher. Not being certain of the support of the rest of the band, itmay also be problematic effortlessly to fall back into her post-solo everydayrhythm. On this score, the new femininity resembles subordinate masculin-ity. Consider the case of Bjorn, a diplomat who had seemingly done every-thing right. He was getting out of the subordinate habitus by marrying up,

always dressing sharply, handling himself with comportment and establishinga deserved reputation as an incisive analyst. When he was appointed to amajor station where diplomatic uniforms were still in use, he decided to don

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the traditional Norwegian uniform with ostrich feathered cap and saber forhis audience with the royal head. The uniform had not been in general use

for generations. The incident found its way to the press, and the other malesof the organization seized the opportunity to take Bjorn down to his station.But I always found his judgement to be sound, I piped up in his defence toGeorge, who worked in the administration. Ostrich feathers! How smart isthat! (Strutsefjr! Hvor smart er deta!), he fumed back. Coming home,Bjorn, who was widely expected to be the new permanent undersecretary,ended up in the doldrums. Victor summed it up: If you lose your reputa-tion in the MFA, youre finished. Bjorns attempt to soar above the bandmisfired badly.

Since gender is relational, the entry of women diplomats above the thresh-old of tokenism was certain to bring about changes in all the organizationsgendered scripts. The gendered scripts of intellectual masculinity and newfemininity have destabilized traditional diplomatic gender hierarchies fordecades, and are still not empty of reconfigurational potential. So far, how-ever, traditional civil servant masculinity rules the roost.

I have made the case for the importance of the gendered and classed bodyin understanding the different life chances of Norwegian diplomats. Sincediplomacy is a key locus of global politics, it follows that the body is ofimportance to global politics overall. In order to specify its importance, thediscipline should produce more empirical work on the body.

Notes

1 I should like to thank Ulla Gudmundson, Cecilie Basberg Neumann