The Gift and the Generative Relational Foundations of Diplomacy: A Preliminary Discussion Paper

States perform acts the available accounts of cooperation cannot price: the apology, the state visit, the disaster relief dispatched to a rival. Realism reads these as interest in disguise, rationalist institutionalism as reputational investment, the theory of soft power as influence purchased cheaply. All three are accounts of exchange, and none explains the observation that such acts fail when performed transactionally, and that the parties can tell. That the gift creates relation beyond exchange is inherited here from Mauss and not claimed. What is claimed is a mechanism. Mauss explains the bond by obligation, and obligation presupposes an order that binds; the received symbolic account explains it by transmission, and transmission presupposes a shared code. The society of states supplies neither, and both accounts fail in the case for which Mauss himself most conspicuously invoked his. The constitutive act lies where neither looks, in the reading of the recipient that precedes the giving and determines its form, so that the wrong gift demonstrates that the relation was never entered. A gift, on the account offered, provides a position at which the recipient's excess can register, and a criterion of four conditions distinguishes the gift that opens a circulation from the gift that installs a hierarchy. Diplomacy is chosen because it is the case in which the gift must operate without a shared code and without a third position from which the parties could be characterized, which is the configuration this programme holds incapable of generating normative structure. Whether the gift generates that position or merely conceals force is left to the archive.