Can a State Have an Emotion?

This article is published as part of Fridays With MUNPlanet , and its special series dedicated to world politics. The aim of this series is to bring you the analysis of global affairs by the established and upcoming scholars, decision-makers and policy analysts from various world regions. This week, Todd Hall (University of Oxford) discusses emotional diplomacy and states’ use of emotions in international relations. The author argues that emotions do influence foreign policy, they “mix, mingle, and compete with numerous other factors and considerations in any given foreign policy decision-making process, frequently leading to outcomes that in themselves do not appear particularly emotional.” States, Hall concludes, “coordinate state-level behavior in order to officially and explicitly project the image of a particular emotional response on the international stage” in order to “achieve political goals that cannot be realized via traditional means”.

We use the language of emotional states all the time. “Angry China” or “Remorseful Germany” and so on — we frequently describe states as outraged, frustrated, remorseful, even sympathetic. One could try to write this off as some form of sloppy anthropomorphization of states, but still, why is it so common? We see it in headlines, in the speech of policymakers, even in the discussions of academics who should in theory know better. What is more, this language actually seems to capture something about how states act and react on the international stage. But how could this be? States are not people, they are institutional actors.Pondering this question launched the project that eventually became my book, Emotional Diplomacy: Official Emotion on the International Stage.

I initially thought the answer must be that foreign policy is shaped by the collective emotional responses of people within states. My logic was as follows: people who share similar national identities should also share the same emotional reaction when something befalls their state. This shared emotion would then influence foreign policy, resulting in state-level emotional behaviour on the international stage. And voilà, one had an emotional state. I even had a snappy neologism to describe this — ”the emotionalization of state behaviour.”

What I rapidly discovered when researching actual state behavior, however, was a much, much messier reality. Emotions do influence foreign policy, but the process is far from straightforward. Emotions mix, mingle, and compete with numerous other factors and considerations in any given foreign policy decision-making process, frequently leading to outcomes that in themselves do not appear particularly emotional. Moreover, the emotions of those involved are usually quite diverse and variable. Not only do emotions vary widely across policymakers and members of their constituencies, the emotions within individuals also can shift quickly. It was often difficult to pinpoint one specific, commonly shared emotional reaction that had an impact on state behavior. And on top of all this, I ironically found it quite common for the strongest emotions officials exhibited during foreign policy-making processes to be directed not at external events or actors, but rather one another. The hypothesis that there existed common, uniform emotional responses that bubbled up to “emotionalize” state behavior appeared unsustainable.

At the same time, I also encountered evidence of intentional policies by state actors — leaders, officials, diplomats, and others — to display a particular emotional stance or demeanor in their official interactions with other states. The appearance of states acting emotional was therefore not an illusion; but far from being a reflection of collective emotional responses, it was a deliberate policy choice. And yet this only raised a further question: namely, why would state actors intentionally seek to project the image of particular emotions with their words and deeds?

You can read the full article on MUNPlanet.

Cover Image: “My God, help me to survive this deadly love” (1990), a graffiti painting on the Berlin Wall, by Dmitri Vrubel, depicting Leonid Brezhnev (Soviet Union) and Erich Honecker (German Democratic Republic) in their famous “fraternal embrace” in 1979. Image source: bp blogpost.