Eduardo Stefani

Diplomacy is one of the few areas of knowledge stuffed with passion, contradictions and on mystique. Actually, defining it in this way is a bold step, because in fact it covers a lot of areas, on top of that it is complemented by the personal touch of a diplomat.

Diplomatic missions are loaded with strategy, protection of interests, momentary loss to future gains, glamor, concealing, lies, bluffing and lastly, a sense of loyalty to the nation which transcends any personal aspirations. Maybe this last item is the motive for the sense of devastated impotence felt by a diplomat. A career in diplomacy is exercised by bright people and of a high intellect. How to live with an academic vanity of a politicized intellectual with the mission to meet tasks given by the state, specially when its against his more intimate convictions.

The task to represent a country abroad is noble. The function and recognition are formal and covered in elegance, specially for the diplomats who has the privilege to live single and historical moments with the possibility to leave a legacy.

Before I go any further I offer my sincere apologies to the diplomats who are reading this text, because although I am a lover of subjects related to international relation, I do not have the breath of culture to write about the subject, including assumptions about what would or would not constitute the activity of this noble career.

This passion led me to search literature which could meet my hungry need to understand the world, through the instruments used by all nations and to leave the merely personal vision about what the world would be or would not be. This vision lasts for a short time and dies with the ingenuous ideology exclusively based on a better world, without think about the complex national web of interests which leads us to the actual reality. We are all accomplices of each international action which leads the world to the actual political and economic stage.

During the reading of the bright text entitled “Pomp and Circumstances of a glorious career” from the Brazilian diplomat José Osvaldo de Meira Penna, I had the inspiration to create this space on the Internet to talk about diplomacy. I must leave here my thanks to the gentle Ambassador Meira Penna for the permission to use the title of his text.

The text quotes a Shakespeare work which illustrates the glorious war as an act full of pride, pomp and circumstances. Actually it is a piece of work named Othello and it fits perfectly in contemporary diplomacy.

The other side of the story is more raw and it determines the sovereignty, survival, economic space, conflict solution and the lastly, the existence of a country in the international context.

Welcome with all pomp and circumstance.

[], Eduardo Stefani – 24/10/2007