Decoding the vocabulary of statecraft.
| Practitioner’s View Nirupama Menon Rao is a former Indian diplomat who served as Foreign Secretary (2009–2011), India’s first woman High Commissioner to Sri Lanka and Ambassador to China, and Ambassador to the United States (2011–2013). | Scholar’s View Stephen R. Nagy is a professor at the International Christian University, a senior fellow and China project lead at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) and a CGO fellow at the Japan Institute for International Affairs (JIIA). |
| Démarche | |
| A démarche is one of diplomacy’s oldest instruments, but also one of its most delicate. Its purpose is to carry an unwelcome truth across the table without either gilding it or throwing it like a brick. The diplomat’s task is to make a hard message hearable, not to make it unrecognisable. Too much embellishment and the truth disappears into flattery; too much sharpness and the message becomes the offence. The ancient Chinese Taoist text Zhuangzi understood the danger perfectly: once trust is lost, even truth loses its persuasive force. The art, then, lies in tact in the delivery and fidelity in the message. | Démarches remain a useful but limited tool: they signal resolve, register objection, and create a diplomatic paper trail without escalating to sanctions or expulsion. For middle powers like Canada or Japan, their value lies less in changing Beijing’s behaviour than in demonstrating principled consistency to domestic audiences and allies alike. They also play a role in creating the scaffolding for adaptive middle power diplomacy that Japan and Canada excel at, connecting different kinds of political systems and developmental levels for diplomatic cooperation. |
