The Europeanization of Ottoman Diplomacy: The Conversion from Unilateralism ta Reciprocity in The Nineteenth Century

Year 1961, Volume: 25 Issue: 99, 455 - 466, 20.07.1961

J. C. Hurewıtz

Abstract

Continuous diplomacy, invented in Renaissance Italy to gratify the demands of the city-state system that had come into being in the peninsula, diffused in the sixteenth century through central and western Europe, where the emerging nation-states were forging a continentwide state system. Originally the rules were framed in accord with ethical principles of a generalized Christianity. But in the course of time the techniques of permanent diplomacy became wholly de-Christianized and de-Europeanized, as has most of the apparatus of modern statecraft. The rules of resident diplomacy became the rules of common sense and in this respect resembled the technology of the West in its exportability to the non-West. Continuous diplomacy, in fact, became part of the indispensable paraphernalia of government. The process in the earlier period was one of assimilation to the European system. But as the number of non-European lands adhering to that system and adopting its code and instruments for the conduct of interstate relations multiplied, they gradually modified the character of the system itself, so that it grew progressively less European and more global

Keywords

Ottoman, Renaissance, Italy, western Europe