A luxury travel agency? The diplomatic career and the value of postings in the late nineteenth century

Abstract

This article examines the hierarchy of diplomatic postings within the Belgian diplomatic corps in the decades preceding the First World War. Moving beyond a view that ranks postings solely according to the political weight of states, it argues that Belgian diplomats (who came largely from aristocratic backgrounds) valued their assignments for the cultural and social capital they could accrue in particular locations. The corps’ fairly egalitarian career structure, organized around seniority, ensured that the significant financial and temporal investments required of diplomats were ultimately rewarded with the prestige attached to top postings, such as minister plenipotentiary at a leading legation. Because there existed a transnational consensus among diplomats about the hierarchy of capitals, and because the international elite sought to maintain social homogeneity, postings to prestigious sites tended to concentrate individuals already endowed with high levels of cultural, social, and economic capital, reinforcing a Matthew effect. The article thus offers a static portrait of these dynamics before 1914, while pointing to avenues for future research on how the upheavals of the world wars reshaped diplomatic culture. The decline of monarchies, rise of multilateral institutions, democratization of recruitment, and erosion of courtly culture ultimately transformed diplomacy from an aristocratic fraternity into the global meritocratic elite it presents today.