‘Tired of Waking Up on the Floor’ the Temptations and Horror of Cold War Multilateral Diplomacy

This article discusses non-conventional diplomatic tools. It does so by focussing on the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) and the Multilateral Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) talks and suggests that individuals and individual creativity to make use of non-conventional tools, in combination with attention to working conditions, impact the outcome. CSCE ventured in entirely new territory and promoted such novel concepts as the indivisibility of security, and the free flow of individuals, information, and ideas. As such it appealed to negotiatiors’ creativity; by contrast, MBFR was about reducing conventional forces in the given constellation of a divided Europe – it treated this division as a fact of life; as such it may have offered far less opportunities for individual diplomats’ creativity to fully blossom. Taken together a discussion of these tools also contribute to the structure – agency debate: they provide additional evidence that individual diplomats – though often simply seen as tools of their respective governments and merely acting within a certain constellation – and close attention to the conditions they have to work in, do matter, even when, of course, it is governments, not diplomats, that will have to sanction the results they achieve.